beer were offered, plus lemonade and, of course, water. Sam had a sherry; I stuck to beer. In the course of meeting several sets of fellow parents, I lost sight of both Will and Sam and was surprised when a small, wiry, and very energetic gray-haired woman buttonholed me. I guessed she was Miss Allardyce herself.
She was wearing a woolen three-piece with a set of expensive-looking pearls at her neck. Were we paying too much in fees, I wondered.
“You must be Mr. Ross,” she virtually shouted at me, fixing me with the sort of stare a teacher reserves for a miscreant child.
I hadn’t a clue what she was talking about and was about to deny it when I saw movement off to my left as Sam’s head jerked round in my direction. She had heard Miss Allardyce and knew what she meant before I did. Sam came toward us.
“Er … yes,” I muttered eventually. “That’s right.” It had been so long since we had used Sam’s maiden name that I had all but forgotten it.
Sam joined us.
“He’s a bright boy, your Will,” Miss Allardyce said. “I can see the family resemblance,” she added, looking at me. “He’s a natural leader, you know. The army would suit him very well as a career.”
“Don’t you think it’s a little early?” I said as forcefully as I could without sounding rude. “He’s only three and a bit.”
“Yes, but you can always encourage the little ones. They never forget what they learn early on.” And she was gone; there were other parents to meet.
Sam looked at me. “I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I should have warned you. When I brought him here, to register, I never thought… I thought it might burden you if I used your name.”
“You’d better make up your mind soon,” I replied sourly. “His name is going to mean a lot to him before long. You’d better decide what it is.” And I walked off.
But not far. There was a commotion in the front garden. The children were crowding by the fence, with some of the parents standing not far off. It soon became clear what they were looking at. Some grenadiers were marching in the road, the scarlet stripes down their gray trousers very vivid in the sunshine. As they drew abreast of the school, and with a stylish flourish, the sergeant major at the front of the men suddenly barked out, “Eyes right!”
As one, the soldiers turned their heads to acknowledge the schoolchildren.
Some of the boys, impressed by this, uncertainly saluted back to the men. Will was one of them.
“Eyes front!” The grenadiers marched on and out of sight.
I turned. Sam was standing behind Will. She looked at me, mouthed that she was going home, and pulled down Will’s arm, the one that was saluting, so that she could lead him away.
Dearest Hal,
News of an “incident.” An incident that would make a good report in my new “career” as a journalist (I still haven’t told Alan).
We were working well behind the lines the other day, in a lull in the fighting, taking the opportunity to clean our kit and do other maintenance jobs, when a Frenchman appeared. He was in his thirties and told us he was a doctor from the nearby village of A. How he had evaded our security system I don’t know, but he had. He was in a state. He said that his wife had just given birth a short while before and that she had hemorrhaged and lost a lot of blood—could we help? He had obviously heard something about blood transfusion and our unit, but at that moment the military police turned up, together with the local commanding officer. They arrested the doctor—or at least they tried to. As they moved toward him, to take hold of him, he pulled out a gun—a pistol. Standoff. In no time at all, there we were in a small tableau: the doctor pointing his gun at Alan, and the military police, three of them, pointing their guns at the Frenchman.
The commanding officer said we couldn’t let him have any blood—it was reserved for military use. The doctor replied that we were in France and that we were all fighting to preserve France and the French way of life, that we were guests in his country, and allies. However, I am making it sound all rather more polite than it actually was—the exchange was very heated. Alan let it go on for a while, until the argument