Into the Blizzard by Michael Winter Read Free Book Online

Salisbury as though on leave. I passed the Poultry Cross, which dates from 1335. During the day, rowdies and the homeless gather here, sheltered by the crosses on each of the four sides of the gazebo, drinking canned beer. But no one was around now, at dusk.
    On my way to the youth hostel where I was staying, I crossed a park and a football escaped from two boys so I kicked it back to them. Cheers, one said. Then the ball arrived again, intentionally, so I returned it once more with a nice arc. Cheers! And they sent it back a third time. I was quite a ways past them now, and had to concentrateand kick the ball hard. It was a return to admire. The Newfoundlanders had kicked a soccer ball around just like this while training in England—Frank Lind had been surprised with a ball landing at his feet, as I had. For a moment he’d thought that the Germans had arrived and it was a bomb.
    A ludicrous fourth ball rolled in front of me—I was far across the park and could barely see the boys. I would not have known where it had come from without the previous experience. So I laid into it, into the wind, and it curved in the air, the wind got under it, and it dropped right at one boy’s feet. I had registered my shellfire.
    Cheers!
    It was a remarkable kick and the boys knew it, and I pretended it was nothing, that I have that sort of kick stored in me. It made me think of the football played at Christmas during that first year of the war. Perhaps that game had begun because of an escaped ball. Perhaps, instead of being self-contained and orderly, we should spill over and be excessive and administer to the errors of others and shout out silliness. But there are cases, too, of soldiers attempting to be convivial with the other side, and being shot in the wide vulnerable open.
THE MODERN WORLD I’M WALKING THROUGH
    On Milford Street I found, closed, a shop that sold Barbour clothing. Barbour is from South Shields, where my mother was born. During the First World War, Barbour supplied military clothing and coats for motorcycle riders. My father wore a Barbour coat when we were fishing or hunting in the woods. Both my parents had been children in the north of England during the Second World War. My mother was evacuated, but my father remembers the early evenings when the Luftwaffe came over to bomb the shipyards. The glint of their wings. But the British had camouflaged the shipyards and outlined decoy facilities further inland and south. And so the Luftwaffe bombed Sunderland.
    The shop with the Barbour clothing opened at nine in the morning. Next door was a window display of little army figures and cowboys & Indians, just like the small figures I had as a child. We had driven across Canada, a family of five, from Newfoundland to British Columbia, towing a pop-up camper trailer, looking for a better place to live. We drew treasure maps and crumpled the papers and held them out the open window when it rained. In Victoria, British Columbia, our last stop before turning around, my parents had bought us figurines of cowboys, and of Indians with their plastic birchbark canoes and little spears you could remove from their clasped hands. It feltpowerful installing and removing the weapons from their perpetual warring grip. And now, in front of this shop window, I wondered if I should get some for my son. But I had a long way to go, and surely, I thought, I’ll see some like these again.
    I remembered there was a pub I’d liked around this area, but where was it now? I was hungry. As I walked, I admired the residential doorways with bull’s-eye glass for light. It was early glass, which meant these doors had been here a hundred years ago, experiencing the vibration of war. It was as if the street was providing me with the shops on my mind. Or perhaps, because the shops were closed and I could not find the pub that I wanted to eat in, they were somehow stymying my desire. The sun was now behind the trees.
    I mention these things because it