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A sudden change of heart

he sea murmured onto the beach. Beneath me, the elephant walked on over soft and silent sand. The further we went along the beach away from the hotel, away from the distant cries of the swimmers in the sea, the quieter everything became. I was loving the gentle rock and roll of the ride. I closed my eyes and breathed in the peace around me. This was a million miles from everything that had happened, from everything that had brought me here.

It was as I was riding up there on the elephant, swaying in the sun, that Dad’s elephant joke came into my mind. Usually I can’t remember jokes, but I always remembered this one, maybe because Dad told it so often. I knew it word for word, just as he’d tell it.

“You know the one about the elephant and the bananas, Will?” he’d begin, and without waiting for an answer, off he’d go. “A man and a boy were sitting opposite one another in this railway carriage – they were travelling between Salisbury and London. On his lap, the man had a huge paper bag full of bananas. But soon enough, the boy noticed that something very strange was going on here. The man wasn’t eating the bananas. Instead, every few minutes, he’d just stand up, open the window, and throw one of them out. Of course, the boy couldn’t understand what he was doing this for. He kept trying to puzzle it out. So in the end, he just had to ask.

“’Scuse me,” he says, “but could you tell me why you’re throwing all those bananas out of the window?”

“To keep the elephants away,” replies the man. “Cos elephants is very dangerous, y’know.”

“But there aren’t any elephants around here anyway,” says the boy.

“Course there aren’t,” the man tells him, throwing yet another banana out of the window. “But that’s only cos of my bananas. If I didn’t keep doing this, there’d be millions of them out there, squillions. And elephants is very dangerous, y’know.”

I loved that joke, mostly because when Dad was telling it, he’d always be heaving with laughter before he could ever finish it, and I loved to hear Dad’s laugh. Whenever he was home it was his laugh that filled the house, brought it alive again.

I didn’t want to think about that, because I knew where it would lead, and I didn’t want to go there. So I tried to make myself think of a train journey instead, a train journey when Dad hadn’t been there. I wanted to keep Dad out of the picture. I didn’t want to have to remember, not now, not again. But memories of the train journey with Mum came tumbling out, out of my control and out of sequence, as memories often are, because memories will always become other memories, I suppose – they cannot help themselves.

I always wanted train journeys to go on for ever, and especially this one. I liked trains, the rattle and the rhythm of them. I loved to press my forehead against the cold of the glass, and trace a single raindrop with my finger as it found its way down across the window. I’d be gazing out at the countryside rushing by, at cows and horses scattering away over the fields, at clouds of starlings whirling in the wind, at a formation of geese flying high into the evening sun.

And I’d be on the lookout for wild animals, for foxes or rabbits, or even a deer. A glimpse of just one of these was a marvel to me, the highlight of any train journey, because they hardly ever ran away. They’d just gaze back at me from out there in their wild world, interested perhaps, but quite unconcerned. It was as if they were trying to tell me: we don’t mind you being here, just so long as you’re passing through, just so long as you leave us alone. I had always longed to be part of their world. For me that momentary glimpse was never enough, always too quickly over.

On this train journey though I had seen no foxes, no deer, not even a rabbit, and that was because I hadn’t been looking for them. My mind was elsewhere. I didn’t want it to be, but it was. Everything out there was nothing but a blur of grey skies and green fields, interrupted with monotonous regularity by endless passing telegraph poles. None of it was of any interest to me. I wanted this train journey to go on forever, not because I was enjoying it one bit, but simply because I did not want to go where I was going. I did not want to arrive.

I glanced up at Mum sitting beside me, but she did not look back at me. I could see she was lost deep in her thoughts, and I knew well enough what they had to be, that they were much the same as mine, and that it was better not to interrupt them. I regretted again that I’d yelled at her at breakfast that morning. I shouldn’t have done it, but it had been the shock of it, the suddenness. She’d just said it, right out of the blue, without any warning at all. “We’re going back home, Will, as soon as I’ve packed the cases. Grandma says she’ll drive us to the station.”

I tried arguing, but she wouldn’t listen. So that was when I yelled at her, and did a runner to the hay-barn, climbing up the stack to the very top. I sat sulking there, till Grandpa came and found me, and fetched me down. Mum was very upset, he told me, and we shouldn’t be upsetting her, not after everything that had happened. He was right of course. I hadn’t meant to do it, but I’d been so looking forward to staying for Christmas down on the farm with Grandpa and Grandma. It was the house where Dad had grown up, the place we’d always been for every single Christmas of my life, whether Dad was home on leave or not.

But if I’m honest, that wasn’t the only reason I’d shouted at her. The truth was that I was dreading everything about going home, and what’s more I knew Mum felt the same, which was why it was a complete mystery to me that she was suddenly so anxious to leave. And there was something else I couldn’t understand. Before she’d come out with it at breakfast that morning she’d never even discussed it. She’d just told me. It wasn’t like her. Mum always talked things over with me, always.

After all, hadn’t she been the one, who only a few weeks before had insisted that it was a good idea to go to stay with Grandpa and Grandma, to get away from home, and the memories, and the ghosts? Hadn’t Mum explained to me that she thought we should be with Grandpa and Grandma at this time anyway, because after all, weren’t we all going through the same thing, and wouldn’t it be good for us to do it together? So why this sudden change of heart?

I gazed blankly out of the train window, trying to work it all out. I thought then it might have been because she had just had enough of Grandma. And it was true that Grandma was never the easiest person in the world to get on with. She did like to organise, to try and tell everyone what to do, what not to do, and what to think even. With Grandma everything had to be just so, and that could be a bit irksome at times, and annoying. But as Mum was forever telling me, that was just how Grandma was and we had to put up with it, like Grandpa did.

No, we couldn’t be leaving because of Grandma. It didn’t make any sense. But if it wasn’t Grandma, what was it then? It certainly wasn’t Grandpa, and it certainly wasn’t the farm. For Mum and for me, for all of us, it had always been just about the best place in the whole world, and my idea of heaven. I loved being there, whatever the weather. I was up before breakfast with Grandpa, milking the cows, and feeding the calves, and then opening up the hens and geese on the way back to the house for breakfast. Afterwards, it was out on the tractor, with Grandpa again – and driving it sometimes too, when we were far enough away from the farmhouse for Grandma not to be able to spot us. We’d be checking the sheep together, counting the lambs, or mending fences when we had to. We’d be doing whatever it was that needed doing, and doing it together.

And Grandpa was like a walking encyclopedia of nature. He knew all the bird songs, all the plants. He even had a weekly nature column in the local newspaper, so he knew what he was talking about, and I loved to hear him talking about it too. Grandma said one afternoon when Grandpa and I came in for our tea: “Happy as Larry out on the farm, aren’t you, Will? Give you half a chance, and I reckon you’d be sleeping in your wellies. You’re just like your Grandpa.”

She was right about that. For a start Grandpa never said a lot, and nor did I. We knew each other so well that maybe we just didn’t need to. Grandpa never mentioned anything about what had happened, except once, when we were down in the milking parlour together, washing down after milking. “Got something to say to you, Will,” he began. “What I think is this, and I’ve thought a lot about it. In fact these last weeks, I’ve thought about precious little else. When you’ve cut yourself, what you do is you make sure the wound is clean, and you put a plaster on it, don’t you? Then you give it time to heal – if you understand what I’m saying. You don’t keep taking the plaster off and looking at it, because if you do, you’ll just be reminded of how much it hurts. And you don’t keep asking yourself why it had to happen to you in the first place either, because that won’t make it better. Sometimes – and I know it’s not what some people think these days – but sometimes when you’re hurting, I think the less said the better. So you and me, Will, we’ll say no more about it, unless you want to, that is.”

But I didn’t want to, and so between us, nothing was ever said about it again. And in fact, Grandma hardly spoke of it either, not in front of me anyway. It became like an unspoken pact between all of us, to say nothing, and I was glad of it. I knew well enough that they were doing it for me, to spare me the pain. They were trying their very best to take my mind off it.

But the trouble was that it was always there, in the back of our minds, despite all that Grandma and Grandpa were doing to keep everyone busy and happy. And we were happy, as happy as it was possible to be, under the circumstances anyway. But as each evening came to an end, and the time came for me to go upstairs to bed, I always began to dread the night ahead of me. One look at Mum’s face told me we were sharing the same dread.

Whether I kept my bedside light on or off made no difference. Lying there in my bed everything would come flooding back, the ache inside me, the pity of it, and worst of all, the awful finality of it. I longed every night for sleep to come, so that I wouldn’t have to remember it all again, so that my mind wouldn’t go over it and churn it all up. But the more I longed for sleep it seemed, the more it was denied me. I’d lie there listening to the murmur of their talk downstairs in the kitchen.

If I tried, I could hear most of what they were saying. I didn’t want to eavesdrop, but sometimes I couldn’t stop myself. I’d hear Mum sobbing again, and Grandma sometimes as well. Soon enough I would find myself crying too, and once I’d started I knew I wouldn’t be able to stop, not until I fell asleep, because everything Mum was saying down there in the kitchen seemed to echo so closely everything I was feeling.

It was her words I was hearing again in my head now, as I rode along the beach on the elephant. Ahead of us a large lizard or iguana skittered away over the sand and disappeared into the shadows of the palm trees. A sea eagle soared out over the sea. There was so much to see, but my memory would not leave me in peace. I was doing all I could to force myself to live for now, to bask in the joy of the moment, in the beauty of this strange paradise, and for a while I could and I did, but not for long. So I determined that if I was going to have to relive anything in my mind, I would will it to be only the good times: driving the tractor with Grandpa, pulling off a newborn lamb and rubbing the warmth of life into her, seeing the fox padding across High Meadow early one morning.

But instead, all that came to my mind was everything I had overheard Mum saying down in the kitchen only a few nights before. Her words still fell just as heavily on my heart, as when I’d first heard them.

“Why did he have to go and leave us? What am I supposed to tell Will, Grandma? I mean, how can you tell a nine-year-old? How can you explain the stupidity of it? And all the while I have to put a brave face on it, when what I really want to do is scream. I know he was your son, Grandma. I know I shouldn’t say it, and I know I shouldn’t feel it. But I do feel it. I love your son. Since the first day I set eyes on him I loved him. But I’m so angry with him that sometimes I find myself almost hating him. Isn’t that terrible? Isn’t it? Back home, I have to pretend to everyone all the time, that it was all in a good cause, that I’m proud of him, and I’m brave, that I’m coping. Well I am proud of him, but I’m not coping, and I’m not brave, and it wasn’t a good cause. Tell me why. Will someone tell me why? Why did he have to go? Why did it have to be him?”

When they came up to bed later, and Mum came in to kiss me goodnight as usual, I pretended to be asleep. I was crying silent tears, and when she’d gone out again, they kept on coming. All night long they kept coming. That night, I felt I would drown in sadness.

I knew that if I went on remembering like this I would only be making myself live through the same pain all over again. I wrenched my mind away from where it was taking me. From now on I would recall only the marvellous times, the magical moments that I knew would lift my spirits, that would banish all grieving, that would make me smile. I thought it was working too. I could almost feel Mum’s arm come round me and hold me, and the coolness of her hand as she smoothed my hair above my ear. But then I remembered her doing it just like that back at home, on the last day the three of us had been together.

I could see it all in my head now, just as it had happened: Dad going off down the path in his uniform, Mum there beside me, watching him go, her arm round my shoulder, her hand smoothing my hair. After we’d waved him off, we stood there on the doorstep in our dressing gowns, watching the milk float come humming down the road.

“Don’t worry, Will,” she’d told me. “Dad’s been out there twice before. He’ll be fine. He’ll be back home before you can say Jack Robinson, you’ll see.”

“Jack Robinson,” I’d said. When I looked up at her moments later, I saw I’d made her smile through her tears, and I knew I’d said just the right thing.

Every moment of the afternoon a month or so later was so deeply etched in my memory. Despite all my best efforts not to, I lived it again now riding up on the elephant thousands of miles away from home, from where it had all happened. A rainy Sunday it had been. We were flopped on the sofa in front of the television, watching Shrek 2, for about the tenth time. It was my favourite film – Dad had given me the DVD for my birthday a couple of months before. We were enjoying it just as much as ever, anticipating every wacky moment, every hilarious gag. The doorbell rang.

“Oh, for goodness’ sake, who’s that?” Mum said. She pressed the pause button, got up wearily from the sofa, and went to see who it was. I wasn’t a bit interested in who it was, I just wanted to go on watching Shrek. There were hushed voices in the hallway. I heard footsteps going along the passage into the kitchen. The door closed. Whoever the visitors were, Mum obviously wasn’t coming back into the sitting-room for a while. So I pressed the play button and settled down again to watch. Only when the film finished, an hour or so later, did it occur to me that it was a little strange that Mum still hadn’t come back – I knew she loved Shrek almost as much as I did. That’s why I went to find her.

She was sitting alone at the kitchen table, her head lowered, her hands cupped round a mug of tea. She didn’t look up when I came in, and she didn’t speak for a while either. I could see then that something must be wrong. “Who was it?” I asked her. “At the door. Who was it?”

“Come and sit down, Will,” she said, her voice so soft and far away that I could hardly hear her. When she looked up I could see that her eyes were red with crying. “It’s your Daddy, Will. I told you where he went, didn’t I? We found Iraq on the map, found where he was, didn’t we? Well, there was a bomb by the side of the road, and he was in a Land Rover …” She reached out across the table and took my hands in hers. “He’s dead, Will.”

We sat there in silence for a few moments. I went to sit on her lap, because I knew that was what she needed, what I needed too. We didn’t cry. We just held on to each other tight, as tight as we could. It felt to me as if we were both trying somehow to squeeze the pain out of one another. Later that night we lay side by side on my bed, holding hands. Neither of us had spoken, not a word, for a long time. Then I asked her the one question that had kept coming into my mind again and again all night long.

“Why, Mum? Why did he have to go to the war?”

It was a while before she replied. “Because he’s a soldier, Will,” she told me. “When countries fight wars, it’s the soldiers who do the fighting. It’s always been like that. It’s what soldiers have to do.”

“I know that, Mum. Dad told me,” I said. “But what was the war for?”

She didn’t answer me.