The King of Ithaca

The letter said, “I’m not as pretty as I used to be.” Underneath was written the time his train would arrive. 

In those days you could hear a train arrive in town. The locomotive’s whistle, and its shove-shove-shove, sound across the valley. Cars were a rarity enough that we could sit in the street on hot days, stirring at stray pools of tarmac with sticks broken from the elderflower bush on the corner. 

James is seven years old and has been preparing for this day all his life. Now he can no longer wait and sets off at a canter along the street, the flats of his leather school sandals slapping the brick of the sidewalk. “Dad! It’s dad’s train!” The railway station is a mile away so I don’t know what he thinks he’s doing.

“Jimmy,” I call after him on that Spring afternoon. “We’re to wait here! The taxi cab will bring dad.”

The little ones, Billy and Robbie, sit in stifled confusion on the front step, itchy Sunday shirts pestering their necks. I am happy to be in the sharp folds of my smart summer dress, as violet as this morning’s sky, the short sleeves crisp and adult. Billy trundles a small wooden horse between his feet, a toy that dad had originally crafted for James from bits of leftover wood at the building site. It overcomes little indents and tufts of weeds in between the bricks, but it stops sometimes, jarred against one of the more stubborn patches of growth. When this happens, the whinnying sound Billy makes rises in his throat, a little louder with every shove of the toy. Sometimes it takes six shunts or seven, Billy’s horse impression fuller and throatier until it is the only sound we can hear. 

“Billy!” I hiss at him. “Hush now.” But as I say it the horse suddenly progresses along the pavement and his horse sounds return to a whisper. He looks up at me. 

They remember nothing of their father. Robbie was born in the final year before the war. The Czechoslovakia child, he was the last, best hope for peace. Looking back now, I wonder if there were a thousand children like him, or a million—their conception executed in furious action, countless parents rubbing together in the night time of so many countries back in 1938, that fevered final season of love. Desperately did they aim to stave off the tanks and trucks and rumbling divisions that were to march across Europe. 

And Billy is the war child, bred of it, dressed in it, fed the barren starch of it. He knows nothing else but adults with their constant worries, and curtains that are guarded and drawn tight. Like Robbie, he refers to the man we await today as father, not dad. Having known powdered egg and whale meat all his life, he is the easiest to feed for he knows nothing else. Sweets and treats are merely myths imparted to him by me and James, simultaneously abstract and real, a pantheon of chocolate bars and chewy candies of which he has only ever heard tell. As we regale him with these tales, recounted by the fireside, curtains pulled firmly as the first lamps of evening are lit, I think beyond these nights and imagine how it will be for him when he understands. There is more than war. Mum tells me that it will be over in a number of weeks. Then there will be sweets and oranges and bananas, for which I long, not to feed to myself, but to give to my little brother, to cram into him, to pour him hot chocolate, and to force feed him biscuits and cakes and cream puffs and sweet buns. It’s over, Billy, I will whisper, it’s all over, and I will push more chocolate bars and walnuts and peppermint candy canes into his hungry little mouth.

I am ten years old: half peace and half war.  “Mum!” I shout over the little boys’ heads and up into the house. “We heard the train!” Our home is tiny and can barely contain us—two rooms upstairs and two down. “Workers’ cottages” they optimistically label these row houses. The tin bath by the stove in the kitchen, the outhouse in the yard. Only dad is strong enough to latch the coal hatch door properly, and he has been away since 1942. 

There is a harlequin pattern of tape crisscrossing the window panes to stop the glass flying should a bomb drop nearby. Once—when had that been? Last year? The year before?—Mum heard a clattering outside and went to see. Along the rooftops of the houses opposite, as merry as a performing horse, danced a Messerschmidt 109, rattling the terracotta tiles with cannon fire. Horrified, she realized all four of us were upstairs that morning, bouncing on our beds. “Get down here NOW!” screamed that quiet women. But the plane flew on, to impart different deaths to different children.

James, cut short by my shout, turns now and runs back toward us. From the bottom of the hill we hear the gentle trap-trap-trap of the milk cart horse. We pay it no attention as it trundles past us. Nor to the posse of Spitfires that immediately afterward shudders the skies with its gallop, France-ward in its flight. We have seen a thousand flurries of planes this year, seen them chase the Nazis down, seen them burst open in flight, spill their flaming passenger into the blue night, seen them hit each other and fail with florid trails across the robin’s egg of a July sky.

The train whistles again. It is going to pull out. Dad will be on the platform, helped down from the carriage by the porter or the station–master. All we know is that he was in Italy when it happened. He has made his way back on hospital boats through multiple stations of the injured, places that mean nothing but news stories on the wireless: man pitted against armour–clad man, clashes of steel swords and high–prowed war ships, monstrous sieges and flames in the night. Names romantic and fearful: Syracuse, Tunis, Cairo, Gibraltar, Casablanca; then a year in a hospital in Glasgow; and finally to nearby Brighton. The blindness from the blast lasted only six weeks; he is recuperated sufficiently to hobble on crutches, his last letter said. He has a cage of ironmongery to heal the shattered leg, but he can move on his own now. His chest wound is also better.

But we have also been prepared by Mum, as she read from his letter: I was injured in the face, Love. I’m not as pretty as I used to be. We don’t know what that means. We’ve seen the ones they call the “guinea pigs,” the pilots who made it out of their burning planes but may have wished they hadn’t—noses, lips, eyelids no longer as distinct as once they were. We have seen men come back with jaws blown off, noses or eyes left on the bitter beaches of Dieppe or the salty meadows of Carthage. We don’t know what Dad will have wrong with him, but we know it is something. 

I stare down the empty street. After knowing for weeks that this day would come but never picturing him, I suddenly imagine a man with Dad’s vest and trousers, his brilliantined hair, dark as a pit pony, but his face skewed, blurred, ripped and pink, mysteriously obscured.

I’m not as pretty as I used to be. Silly Daddy: Men aren’t pretty. But then I understand. This is that same blithe understatement I hear them use all the time. Since the war has started I have heard men who have lost a leg say, “My dancing days might be over.” And a man blinded by gas in the last war might say, “Read that to me, love. I don’t have my glasses.”  

I turn away from my little brothers. Dad’s letter—breezy, quietly funny, all chuckles and silliness—was patching over a broken face, like he’d nicked himself in the front of that winter mirror and was dabbing at it with a little patch of toilet tissue. What did it matter to the little boys? They never knew him when he was strong and handsome. 

Out comes Mum now, almost as short as me. She wears her “Sunday best” although we haven’t bothered with church, not since the war began. I glance around at her. Billy and Robbie stand up, they hold hands, and then Billy takes Mum’s hand. I don’t go over to them. It will be minutes now, just minutes, until the taxi cab turns up the road and to our front door. There has never been a taxi call at our house before. Who would we know with that kind of money? And then I know I won’t be there to greet it.  As much as I want him back, I don’t want to see him.

“Sally? Where are you going now?” I hear my Mum’s voice but I don’t listen to it. I walk down the street, the herringbone of bricks dissolving to a blur under my scuffed Mary-Janes. I don’t have to go far; Auntie’s house, identical to ours, is just twenty yards down the street. By the time I reach the front door, which is open to the summer’s breeze, I have broken into a run. I push my way straight through to the kitchen. She is making a pie. 

“Is he here?” Auntie Edith drops the pot on the table and rubs flour from her hands. “Is the taxi here?”

Then she sees it is something else. “What is it?” First she is scared—too many people have walked through the door with the ultimate news in the past six years for us all not to feel that sickness whenever anyone enters our house. Then she understands: this is nothing more than a child, over-wrought, utterly exhausted by five years of dealing with this mess, this war of men. So instead of speaking more, she holds my head in her apron as I cry.

There is nothing more essential and nutritious than the breaths you take as you sob into the apron skirts of your favourite aunt when you are ten years old. In a minute I can speak again, and in two I can elaborate. She sits me on a stool and gives me a plum to eat. She disappears into the street for a moment. I hear her call to her sister, “I’ve got Sal in here. She won’t be a minute.” In the intervening silence I imagine she has signaled my upset in that invisible language these sisters have.  

“He’s still your Dad, Sal. And he needs you to be brave. You are the bravest girl I know, doing all these years without him. Now you can be brave one more time.” Auntie makes it sound so easy, like putting one foot in front of the other. Then she is holding my hand, and we are walking back along the brickwork. 

“Are you alright, Sal?” asks Mum. The boys are oblivious. 

“She’s great,” says Edith, and she squeezes my hand as she looks down at me. And then we hear the laboured shift of a gear box negotiating from first to second gear. A car is coming up the hill. When we hear the gears shift again we know the moment the cab will turn the corner and appear. I can see it now as I saw it in that moment, and as I did then, I wonder always: Where did this man go? What did he see? Tied to the mast with resin in his ears, this lowly brick layer—my father, transported and transformed, in Carthage, Pompeii, under the smoldering slopes of Vesuvius, to the very gates of Rome. He, and ten million more, the no-ones who destroy the Cyclops. My father, in the land of the Lotus-Eaters.

Now he is there, out of the taxi, hobbling across the street and into our clasp. He is returned to Albion. His leg is in its scaffolds, but his arms are already hoisting me up so I can look and at him and kiss him on that wounded face which is so much prettier than before. 

Andrew Riddles is originally from Britain and moved to Canada in 2003. He has worked at Carleton University for fifteen years, during which time he has won two prizes in the CU Writing Competition. As well as writing, his hobbies include singing opera, getting tattooed, and travelling at every opportunity he can find, with Japan, Syria, and Armenia among the highlights.