“I ran off with a milkman, and much good it did me,” Margie always said in reply, but she didn’t mean it, because then they’d look at each other and smile, and sometimes she would yawn and say that she fancied an early night too, and up they’d go to bed, which meant Alfie had to go to bed too and this proved one thing to him: that yawning was contagious.
Despite the disappointing turnout for his birthday party, Alfie tried not to mind too much. He knew that something was going on out there in the real world, something that all the adults were talking about, but it seemed boring and he wasn’t really interested anyway. There’d been talk about it for months; the grown-ups were forever saying that something big was just around the corner, something that was going to affect them all. Sometimes Georgie would tell Margie that it was going to start any day now and they’d have to be ready for it, and sometimes, when she got upset, he said that she had nothing to worry about, that everything would turn out tickety-boo in the end, and that Europe was far too civilized to start a scrap that no one could possibly hope to win.
When the party started, everyone tried to be cheerful and pretend that it was a day just like any other. They played Hot Potato, where everyone sat in a circle and passed a hot potato to the next person and the first to drop it was out. (Kalena won that game.) Old Bill Hemperton set up a game of Penny Pitch in the front parlor, and Alfie came away three farthings the richer. Granny Summerfield handed everyone a clothes peg and placed an empty milk bottle on the floor. Whoever could drop the peg into the bottle from the highest was the winner. (Margie was twice as good as everyone else at this.) But soon the adults stopped talking to the children and huddled together in corners with glum expressions on their faces while Alfie and Kalena listened in to their conversations and tried to understand what they were talking about.
“You’re better off signing up now before they call you,” Old Bill Hemperton said. “It’ll go easier on you in the end, you mark my words.”
“Be quiet, you,” snapped Granny Summerfield, who lived in the house opposite Old Bill at number eleven and had never got along with him because he played his gramophone every morning with the windows open. She was a short, round woman who always wore a hairnet and kept her sleeves rolled up as if she were just about to go to work. “Georgie’s not signing up for anything.”
“Might not have a choice, Mum,” said Georgie, shaking his head.
“Shush—not in front of Alfie,” said Margie, tugging on his arm.
“I’m just saying that this thing could run and run for years. I might have a better chance if I volunteer.”
“No, it’ll all be over by Christmas,” said Mr. Janáček, whose black leather shoes were so shiny that almost everyone had remarked upon them. “That’s what everyone is saying.”
“Shush—not in front of Alfie,” said Margie again, raising her voice now.
“We’re finished, we’re all finished!” cried Granny Summerfield, taking her enormous handkerchief from her pocket and blowing her nose so loudly that Alfie burst out laughing. Margie didn’t find it so funny, though; she started to cry and ran out of the room, and Georgie ran after her.
* * *
More than four years had passed since that day, but Alfie still thought about it all the time. He was nine years old now and hadn’t had any birthday parties in the years in between. But when he was going to sleep at night, he did his best to put together all the things he could remember about his family before they’d changed, because if he remembered them the way they used to be, then there was always the chance that one day they could be that way again.
Georgie and Margie had been very old when they got married—he knew that much. His dad had been almost twenty-one and his mum was only a year younger. Alfie found it hard to imagine what it would be like to be twenty-one years old. He thought that it would be difficult to hear things and that your sight would be a little fuzzy. He thought you wouldn’t be able to get up out of the broken armchair in front of the fireplace without groaning and saying, “Well, that’s me turning in for the night then.” He guessed that the most important things in the world to you would be a nice cup of tea, a comfortable pair of slippers, and a cozy cardigan. Sometimes when he thought about it, he knew that one day he would be twenty-one years old too, but it seemed so far in the future that it was hard to imagine. He’d taken a piece of paper and pen once and written the numbers down, and he realized that it would be 1930 before he was that age. 1930! That was centuries away. All right, maybe not centuries, but that’s the way Alfie thought about it.
Alfie’s fifth birthday party was both a happy and a sad memory. It was happy because he’d received some good presents: a set of eighteen different-colored crayons and a sketchbook from his parents; a secondhand copy of The Life and Most Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe from Mr. Janáček, who said that it would probably be too difficult for him now but that he’d be able to read it one day; a bag of sherbet lemons from Kalena. And he didn’t mind that some of the presents were boring: a pair of socks from Granny Summerfield and a map of Australia from Old Bill Hemperton, who said that someday he might want to go Down Under, and if that day ever came, then this map was sure to come in handy.
“See there?” said Old Bill, pointing at a spot near the top of the map, where the green of the edges turned brown in the center. “That’s where I’m from. A town called Mareeba. Finest little town in all of Australia. Anthills the size of houses. If you ever go there, Alfie, you tell them Old Bill Hemperton sent you, and they’ll treat you like one of their own. I’m a hero back there on account of my connections.”
“What connections?” he asked, but Old Bill only winked and shook his head.
Alfie didn’t know what to make of this, but in the days that followed he pinned the map to his bedroom wall anyway, he wore the socks that Granny Summerfield had given him, he used most of the coloring pencils and all of the sketchbook, he tried to read Robinson Crusoe but struggled with it (although he put it on his shelf to come back to when he was older), and he shared the sherbet lemons with Kalena.
These were the good memories.
The sad ones existed because that was when everything had changed. All the men from Damley Road had gathered outside on the street as the sun went down, their shirtsleeves rolled up, tugging at their braces as they spoke about things they called “duty” and “responsibility,” taking little puffs of their cigarettes before pinching the tips closed again and putting the butts back in their waistcoat pockets for later on. Georgie had got into an argument with his oldest and closest friend, Joe Patience, who lived at number sixteen, about what they called the rights and wrongs of it all. Joe and Georgie had been friends since Georgie and Granny Summerfield moved to Damley Road—Granny Summerfield said that Joe had practically grown up in her kitchen—and had never exchanged a cross word until that afternoon. It was the day when Charlie Slipton, the paper boy from number twenty-one, who’d once thrown a stone at Alfie’s head for no reason whatsoever, had come up and down the street six times with later and later editions of the newspaper, and managed to sell them all without even trying. And it was the day that had ended with Alfie’s mum sitting in the broken armchair in front of the fireplace, sobbing as if the end of the world was upon them.