She stands up in the garden where she has been working and looks into the distance.
By August the blitz had begun, and in one month there were suddenly 2,500 unexploded bombs to be dealt with. Roads were closed, factories deserted. By September the number of live bombs had reached 3,700. One hundred new bomb squads were set up, but there was still no understanding of how the bombs worked. Life expectancy in these units was ten weeks.
The year is 194-. What? For a second I forget. But I know the month and the day. One day after we heard the bombs were dropped in Japan, so it feels like the end of the world. From now on I believe the personal will forever be at war with the public. If we can rationalize this we can rationalize anything.
Beef in my throat, the food has to climb over it and then go down and meet with all their pals in the stomach. Hi sausage. Hi cabbage. Did you see that fuckin boot. Yeah I nearly turned round ’n went back on the plate. Who is this guy we’re in anyway?
The sun comes every day. Save the string. I put it in lines across the room. I watched him creep his body though the grilled windows. When the sun touches the first string wham it is 10 o’clock. It is 2 o’clock when he touches the second. When the shadow of the first string is under the second string it is 4 o’clock. When it reaches the door it will soon be dark.
1859. Some of the causes of insanity were listed as: ill health, loss of property, excessive use of tobacco, dissipation, domestic affliction, epilepsy, masterbation, home-sickness, injury of the head. The largest category was “unknown.
Who lays the crumbs of food that tempt you? Towards a person you never considered. A dream. Then later another series of dreams.
While I have used real names and characters and historical situations I have also used more personal pieces of friends and fathers. There have been some date changes, some characters brought together, and some facts have been expanded or polished to suit the truth of fiction.
We are foolish as teenagers. We say wrong things, do not know how to be modest, or less shy. We judge easily. But the only hope given us, although only in retrospect, is that we change. We learn, we evolve. What I am now was formed by whatever happened to me then, not by what I have achieved, but by how I got here.
It was always raining and cold, and there was no order but for the great maps of art that showed judgement, piety and sacrifice. The Eighth Army came upon river after river of destroyed bridges, and their sapper units clambered down banks on ladders of rope within enemy gunfire and swam or waded across.
A man not of your own blood can break upon your emotions more than someone of your own blood.
He’d been a secretive man for most of his life, and now was disconcerted by the secrets he had kept from himself.
He has come across a love story. This is only a love story. He does not wish for plot and all its consequences. Let me stay in this field with Alice Gull...
Now it seemed to others he had choreographed the arc of his career in order to attempt this one trick on the world.
Our table’s status on the Oronsay continued to be minimal, while those at the Captain’s Table were constantly toasting one another’s significance. That was a small lesson I learned on the journey. What is interesting and important happens mostly in secret, in places where there is no power.
In nearly every house, in nearly every family, there was knowledge of someone’s murder or abduction by one side or another.
But I wanted to erase my name and the place I had come from. By the time the war arrived, after ten years in the desert, it was easy for me to slip across borders, not to belong to anyone, to any nation.
What is that quality in us? Do you think? That makes us cause our own rain and smoke?
The way the terrorists in our time can be made to believe they are eternal if they die for the cause of their ruler.
We were Germans, English, Hungarian, African – all of us insignificant to them. Gradually we became nationless. I came to hate nations. We are deformed by nation-states.