Saville by David Storey Read Free Book Online Page A

watched the sky the next day and the next and yet, despite these changes, nothing happened. It wasn’t until the following spring that anything occurred. Then, at the station less than a mile away, soldiers disembarked from long, blacked-out trains and marched up in small groups to the village. They were tired, some were only half-dressed with overcoats thrown over their vests and shirts. Some had no rifles, others carried packs. Whenthey reached the village they sat down on the pavements, smoking, sitting in the coal-dust, scarcely troubling to look around.
    One of them came to stay in the house. He had the only other room, next to the boy’s – a small, cupboard-like space that looked out on to the backs. He was a tall, well-built man like Colin had always imagined soldiers were, towering over his father, standing in front of the fire in his khaki shirt and his rough khaki trousers or, more usually, lying on the bed in his room, staring at the ceiling, smoking, and sometimes singing songs in a light tenor voice.
    He brought his rifle with him. It stood leaning by his room door. In the narrow space between the single bed and the wall he laid out his equipment. All of it was tarnished with salt and all the clothes in his pack were damp when he unrolled it.
    Most of the space in his pack was taken up by three large tins. Two were full of sugar which he gave to his mother, who put them in the cupboard by the fire to dry. The third was full of medals, metal buttons, and money.
    In the evening when the soldier came back from the pub he would sit at the kitchen table and count the money out, arranging it in neat piles, silver and copper-coloured, then laughing, and leaning back and saying, ‘If I was a Jerry I’d be a rich man now.’
    He often sat by the fire, gazing at the blaze, and sometimes he would take the boy on his knee and from his breast pocket, where he kept a wallet, take out a photograph of a woman and three children, pointing at each one with his finger, which was thick and nicotine-stained, and tell him their names and what they were doing when he last saw them. He came from some other part of the country and had an accent which at times Colin found hard to understand. ‘Oh, don’t worry about the way I talk, boy,’ the soldier would say, laughing, looking up at Saville. ‘I come from a place where they go about with nothing on.’
    He would often go for walks with his father and sometimes his father would take him to look at the shelter, unlocking the door and letting him go inside, lighting the lamp, the soldier gazing round, trying the bunks at his father’s insistence, lying sprawled out, his head cradled in his hands.
    ‘It’s as safe as houses,’ his father said.
    ‘More,’ the soldier would say, laughing, ‘if I had a guess.’
    When they went for walks the two men would go off down the street with their hands in their pockets, coming back hours later with a bunch of flowers or chewing a piece of grass. ‘Oh, don’t worry about me,’ the soldier would say if they were late and the meal spoilt. ‘By all rights I should be dead, so anything’ll do for me. Just cough it up.’
    Each morning he went into the street and with the other soldiers marched up and down. Children followed them on the pavements. On Sundays the soldiers walked in groups in the fields or down the road to the station, where they would sit on a wall by the bridge, gazing at the lines and smoking.
    One day the soldier called Colin into his room and from his pack brought out several bullets. There were five of them, fastened together at the base. The cartridges were copper-coloured, the bullets silver. ‘Go on,’ he said. ‘You have them. I’ve a lot more here. He brought out several more, laying them on the bed. ‘You can have the gun as well,’ he said. ‘I don’t want it.’
    He reached across for it by the door, pulled back the bolt and showed him how to slip in the bullets. ‘There now,’ he said. ‘You can