‘I’ll just wait for my calling-up papers,’ he answered. ‘Then I’ll get in the Sherwood Foresters.’
‘If I get called up I’ll go in the navy,’ I put in, when he did not offer an anecdote about his father’s exploits in the last war.
‘The army’s the only thing to join, Alan,’ he said with deep conviction, standing up and taking out his pipe.
He suddenly smiled, his dejection gone. ‘I’ll tell you what, after dinner we’ll get the gang together and go over New Bridge for manoeuvres. I’ve got to get you all into shape now there’s a war on. We’ll do a bit o’ training. P’raps we’ll meet some o’ the Sodom lot.’
As we marched along that afternoon Frankie outlined his plan for our future. When we were about sixteen, he said, if the war was still on — it was bound to be because the Germans were tough, his old man told him so, though they wouldn’t win in the end because their officers always sent the men over the top first — he’d take us down to the recruiting depot in town and enlist us together, all at the same time. In that way he — Frankie — would be our platoon commander.
It was a wonderful idea. All hands were thrust into the air.
The field was clear over New Bridge. We stood in a line along the parapet and saw without comment the newest proof of the city’s advance. The grazing lands and allotments were now cut off from the main spread of the countryside by a boulevard sprouting from Sodom’s new houses, with cars and Corporation double-deckers already running along it.
There was no sign of the Sodom lot, so Frankie ordered three of us to disappear into the gullies and hollows for the rest of the gang to track down. The next item on the training programme was target practice, a tin can set on a tree trunk until it was knocked over with stones from fifty yards. After fencing lessons and wrestling matches six of the Sodom gang appeared on the railway line, and at the end of a quick brutal skirmish they were held fast as prisoners. Frankie wished neither to keep them nor harm them, and let them go after making them swear an oath of allegiance to the Sherwood Foresters.
At seven o’clock we were formed up in double file to be marched back. Someone grumbled that it was a late hour to get home to tea, and for once Frankie succumbed to what I clearly remembered seeing as insubordination. He listened to the complaint and decided to cut our journey short by leading us across the branch-line that ran into the colliery. The factories and squalid streets on the hill had turned a sombre ochred colour, as if a storm would burst during the night, and the clouds above the city were pink, giving an unreal impression of profound silence so that we felt exposed, as if the railwayman in the distant signal box could see us and hear every word we spoke.
One by one we climbed the wire fence, Frankie crouching in the bushes and telling us when he thought the path was clear. He sent us over one at a time, and we leapt the six tracks yet kept our backs bent, as if we were passing a machine-gun post. Between the last line and the fence stood an obstacle in the form of a grounded railway carriage that served as a repair and tool-storage shed. Frankie had assured us that no one was in it, but when we were all across, the others already rushing through the field and up on to the lane, I turned around and saw a railwayman come out of the door and stop Frankie just as he was making for the fence.
I didn’t hear any distinct words, only the muffled sound of arguing. I kept down between the osiers and watched the railwayman poking his finger at Frankie’s chest as if he were giving him some really strong advice. Then Frankie began to wave his hands in the air, as though he could not tolerate being stopped in this way, with his whole gang looking on from the field, as he thought.
Then, in one vivid second, I saw Frankie snatch a pint bottle from his jacket pocket and hit the railwayman over the head with it. In the exaggerated silence I heard the crash, and a cry of shock, rage, and pain from the man. Frankie then turned and ran in my direction, leaping like a zebra over the fence. When he drew level and saw me he cried wildly:
‘Run, Alan, run. He asked for it. He asked for it.’
And we ran.
The next day my brothers, sisters and myself were loaded into Corporation buses and transported to Worksop. We were evacuated, our few belongings thrust into paper carrier-bags, away from the expected bombs, along with most other children of the city. In one fatal blow Frankie’s gang was taken away from him, and Frankie himself was carried off to the police station for hitting the railwayman on the head with a bottle. He was also charged with trespassing.
It may have been that the beginning of the war coincided with the end of Frankie’s so-called adolescence, though ever after traces of it frequently appeared in his behaviour. For instance he would still tramp from one end of the city to the other, even through smokescreen and blackout, in the hope of finding some cinema that showed a good cowboy film.
I didn’t meet Frankie again for two years. One day I saw a man pushing a handcart up the old street in which we did not live anymore. The man was Frankie, and the handcart was loaded with bundles of wood, the sort of kindling that housewives spread over a crumpled-up Evening Post before making a morning fire. We couldn’t find much to talk about, and Frankie seemed condescending in his attitude to me, as though ashamed to be seen talking to one so much younger than himself. This was not obvious in any plain way, yet I felt it and, being thirteen, resented it. Times had definitely altered. We just weren’t pals any more. I tried to break once again into the atmosphere of old times by saying:
‘Did you try to get into the army then, Frankie?’
I realize now that it was an indiscreet thing to say, and might have hurt him. I did not notice it then, yet I remembered his sensitivity as he answered:
‘What do you mean? I am in the army. I joined up a year ago. The Old Man’s back in the army as well — sergeant-major — and I’m in ’is cumpny.’
The conversation quickly ended. Frankie pushed his barrow to the next entry, and began unloading his bundles of wood.
I didn’t meet him for more than ten years. In that time I too had done my ‘sodjerin’, in Malaya, and I had forgotten the childish games we used to play with Frankie Buller, and the pitched battles with the Sodom lot over New Bridge.
I didn’t live in the same city any more. I suppose it could be said that I had risen from the ranks. I had become a writer of sorts, having for some indescribable reason, after the evacuation and during the later bombs, taken to reading books.
I went back home to visit my family, and on my way through the streets about six o’clock one winter’s evening, I heard someone call out:
‘Alan!’
I recognized the voice instantly. I turned and saw Frankie standing before a cinema billboard, trying to read it. He was about thirty-five now, no longer the javelin-wielding colossus he once appeared, but nearer my own height, thinner, an unmistakable air of meekness in his face, almost respectable in his cap and black topcoat with white muffler tucked neatly inside. I noticed the green medal-ribbon on the lapel of his coat, and that confirmed what I had heard about him from time to time during the last ten years. From being the sergeant-major of our gang he had become a private soldier in the Home Guard, a runner indeed in his father’s company. With tin-hat on his sweating low-browed head Frankie had stalked with messages through country whose every blade of grass he knew.