Let me try this for an opening.
There’s a boy, standing on a railway track. He’s a little boy—he looks eight or nine years old at the very most—and he’s rather small and slight for his age. He is standing with his hands held straight down by his sides, and his feet are clamped firmly together. Seen from behind, he seems to be staring directly ahead at something, but we shall see in a moment that his eyes are in fact screwed tightly shut. He has oddly muscular shoulders, clumsily cropped hair, and is almost naked; he’s wearing a pair of worn linen underpants—nothing else—and just the one hastily laced-up leather shoe, on his right foot. He’s as brown as a berry, all over. The railway track stretches away in front of him in a long straight line, and its rails are hazed with the mist of a fine English mid-September morning as they disappear into the distance.
As if it had been ruled across a map, this track more or less exactly bisects the brown and over-grazed field it runs through, and immediately beyond the scrubby blackthorn hedge on this field’s southern side, divided from it only by a half-dry ditch of dead reeds, is a beach, a great slow curve of shingle that looks as though it reaches along the shore for at least a mile in both directions, east towards the yellowing cliffs of Seaford and west (behind the boy) towards the mouth of the river at Newhaven. There seems to be no sand at all on this beach—all you can see are black and dark grey flints, going on forever, with barely a pale stone amongst them. Almost exactly halfway along their two-mile curve the stones rise to their highest point, and there on the crest of the shingle is perched a strange and lost-looking collection of white-painted concrete and timber huts, each of them lifted above the stones by a squat brick base. These huts look as if they might be a hospital, or perhaps a school—a sanatorium, even—but it’s hard to say for sure; there are no signs up anywhere, and it looks as if there is no-one about to ask, this morning. All of the windows are shuttered closed, and across the stones beneath them the English Channel stretches away to France as flat and cold as a well-sharpened knife. There are no boats about to give scale to its horizon, and no gulls either. There is hardly any wind, and no waves to speak of. A soft swell lifts and clatters the grey stones right down at the water’s edge—and because the wind is so light, and because there seems to be nobody about, the whole scene is very quiet. Not even the reeds in that half-dried ditch are whispering. It is so quiet, in fact, that you can hear the little boy is not crying.
His chin is up, his shoulders are pushed back as far as they’ll go, and his eyes are as tightly closed as those apparently-abandoned windows (you can see that, now). His mouth is clamped shut too—and now, as if he was getting ready for something, the boy spreads his legs and crosses his fists in the small of his back. Near-naked as he is, he seems to be standing ‘at ease’, sticking his elbows out to the sides and pushing his bony little chest forward as if he were expecting a medal. Or perhaps as if he was trying to meet some dreadful blow half-way—as if his infant breast-bone was the breast-bone of some defiant and easily-smashed little bird, one of those softly-feathered species that explode in the air when the shot or hawk hits them... Whatever he’s doing, his feet are now spread slightly too far apart for comfort, and because of the way he’s standing I’m sure that you can now see what you may not have noticed at first, which is that there is something not quite right about this little boy’s legs. The left one is quite a bit shorter than the right and thin enough to make his foot look several bones too large; the left foot itself is turned markedly inward, as if his ankle had been attached in not quite the right place. He’s holding this left heel—the naked one—a good two inches clear of the weeping tar of the railway sleeper, as if he’d just trodden on a nail. The foot is shaking slightly. He still isn’t crying. There still isn’t a train.
And now there is.
And now, the shouting starts.
A Mr Bridges, who in the calm, sunlit autumn of 1939 was living alone in the cottage which then stood next to the tracks at Bishopstone Halt (an unmanned concrete platform on the Hastings to Lewes branch line which had recently been constructed in case it should ever be necessary to get troops to the beach in a hurry) has spotted the tiny figure through his kitchen window. Fortunately, Mr Bridges has a clock above his sink, and he doesn’t need to waste any time calculating in order to know that the next train is due past his window in less than three minutes; they run so close that they rattle his china, and their noise divides his solitary day into such regular parcels of time that he always knows when the next one is on its way. He also knows that this particular train isn’t scheduled to slow down or stop. First, he shouts and bangs on his kitchen window; then he wipes his hands on his dishcloth and runs out of his front door, shouting as he goes.
The little boy doesn’t move. He doesn’t even seem to hear.
As Mr Bridges runs, the oncoming train is still so far away from the two of them that it doesn’t seem to be moving at all—east of Bishopstone Halt, the track runs dead straight towards Seaford for nearly a mile, and the blurred dot of the engine is barely visible at the vanishing point of the converging rails. It seems to shake slightly, even to hover in the distance, but not to be getting any closer. Mr Bridges knows that this is just an illusion. He knows that pretty soon the rails will begin to sing, the dot to swell, and before you know where you are it will be upon them. That’s why he keeps shouting as he runs, shouting at the top of his voice and cursing his middle-aged legs for not moving as fast as he needs them to in this emergency. The spacing of the tarred sleepers forces him to clip his stride, which makes him swear even more—they are placed exactly just too close together to let him break into a full run, but he knows that if he misses one and hits the clinker then a turned ankle will more than likely bring him down. Best as he can, he half lopes and half hobbles towards the boy—and, of course, straight towards the train. The dot hovers, and shakes, and begins to swell.
And now, right on cue, the rails begin their dreadful song; that strange, silvered, high-pitched music that can seem sinister at the best of times, and which now makes Mr Bridges want to vomit as he hears it change key and grow louder. He sees that the little boy—still thirty sleepers away, and with his legs still locked and spread—can also apparently hear or sense this change of key, because as the train approaches the child stretches his puny arms up and out to make himself into its target, and his angry little fists seem to clench themselves into even tighter balls. The pain is starting to tear at Mr Bridges’ sides now. His breath is drowned out by the rails. And now comes the whistle—
Cut.
And now the boy is in his arms—under him, in fact; pinned down under him in the wet and stinking grass by the side of the track, because some instinct has made this middle-aged man cover the boy’s body with his own as the train flashes by in a thunder of light and dark less than four feet from his head, wheel after wheel, rim on rail, metal on metal, less than four feet away from his wet, astonished and staring face (tears of relief, are they, or is that just sweat?) with his ragged breath still tearing at his chest and the pain in his side so sharp now that he thinks he must have broken a rib. Did he really scoop up and then throw down this intransigent bundle of flesh so hard? And then, when the train has passed, and the rails have spun out their song into its final dying whisper and the dot is getting smaller now and going away in the other direction, around a bend and away into the September haze as it heads for Southease and Beddingham and Lewes—and eventually, Brighton—Mr Bridges gasps his breath back into his aching chest and gathers himself. He gets up, and looks down at the miserable and bare-skinned creature lying half crushed in the broken grass between his feet, and he yanks the child upright with one big strong hand. He’s furious. With the other hand, he starts to slap the child, first on the back of the boy’s knees and then right across his sunburnt face, making a furious attempt to get him to open his eyes, or to speak—or something. Anything. And also to relieve his own feelings, I shouldn’t wonder—yes, that’s it; it is a mixture of shock and anger that is making Mr Bridges treat this little boy, who he doesn’t even know, so badly, making him shout at the boy—making him bend right down so that their two very different faces are almost nose to nose, the red, wet, angry one and the screwed-shut, frightened and frightening one, making Mr Bridges roar right in the little boy’s face between those great rib-tearing breaths of his, shout at him—what the bloody, fucking, what the bloody fucking hell, and what if I hadn’t been in my kitchen, eh? Eh? You little fucking. Well you can speak, can’t you? Fuck.
No waves. No people. No boats.
Empty water.
Shuttered windows. Screwed-shut eyes in a burnt-brown face.
No wind.
And still no tears. None.
Not yet
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