Snowleg by Nicholas Shakespeare Read Free Book Online Page A

circulated the dormitory, he had no vivid picture of the place or of its people. Germany, so he understood from his grandfather, was somewhere to escape from as soon as you humanly could, a blank region on the map over which his concentration skidded to the warm blue Mediterranean. East Germany was a greater blur. He had barely considered it.
    â€œHithersay?” repeated the testy voice.
    Peter sat up. “ Sum ,” he called. I am. But now who was he?
    That night, he attended evensong in Chantry, and singing the Nunc Dimittis he had a sense of what it must feel like to be excommunicated. The service drove home how English everyone was at school. He studied Tweed in the front row, tie tight-knotted, dressed in a new herringbone jacket of the same grey-green as the medieval glass. His voice bellowing for the Lord to let His Servant depart in peace. And all at once understood Tweed’s eagerness to fit in.
    Among his friends at St Cross, the one Peter admired most was Brodie, a shambolic extrovert two years older, who spent his every spare moment with a split-cane rod on the Itchen. Brodie had, for all his bumptiousness, a side that was gentle and considerate, and Peter trusted him.
    On the following Wednesday he and Brodie were taking a short cut through the War Cloisters when Peter found himself reading for the first time the words from The Pilgrim’s Progress carved into a stone plaque. “ THEN SAID HE MY SWORD I GIVE TO HIM THAT SHALL SUCCEED ME IN MY PILGRIMAGE AND MY COURAGE AND SKILL TO HIM THAT CAN GET IT .” On pale columns the colour of his breath in the cold were plaques dedicated to fallen old boys in two world wars. A separate plaque was inscribed with two German names. “Members of the college who also died for their country. Here in equal honour.” The words provoked in Peter a feeling of such despondency that he couldn’t think straight. He blurted out his story.
    â€œWell, you know the first thing you’ve got to do?” said Brodie in his sympathetic but firm voice.
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œLearn German.”
    â€œYou’re joking?”
    â€œSeriously, Hithers.”
    His French master queried him, surprised by the request, and Peter explained.
    One afternoon Leadley clicked his heels in the tub-room. “Heil Hithersay!” He snapped out his arm and started to goose-step across the white tiles. “A Hun – and a Prussian at that!” Suddenly, he had the preoccupied smile of a baby filling its nappy. “Oh, I think I’m going to fart. Schnell, schnell!” He cocked his leg and something plopped out. Peter stared in mystified fascination at a mole-coloured turd.
    Leadley’s instinctive slur wounded him. Peter didn’t know what it was to be German, hadn’t a clue, but Leadley had firm ideas: the Germans were an aberrant race with no culture, strange food and an ugly syntax.
    â€œGermans are our enemies,” declared Leadley, casting aside the Hurricane comic, the two of them alone in the dormitory.
    â€œDon’t be a prick. The Russians are.”
    â€œYou’re wrong, Hithersay,” and leaped up on the metal-framed bed and aimed his arm. “And unless you admit you’re a filthy Bosch, I’ll shoot you.”
    The drama of Leadley’s turd took precedence over the novelty of Peter’s German ancestry, but not for long. By the end of term everyone at St Cross knew. Thereafter his Germanness became a badge. It defined and labelled him and he couldn’t escape it, not even in the Australian outback. In English they were reading Voss by the Australian Nobel-prize winner Patrick White. “‘Uggh!’ said Mary Hayley. ‘Germans!’”
    Initially, Peter tried to pretend away his new identity as something to be suppressed and fought against. At the same time, it tallied with a feeling he had inside him of being odd and incomplete. He had often wished to be someone else. Now he