Snowleg by Nicholas Shakespeare Read Free Book Online Page B

was.
    â€œPrepare to die Schweinehunde!” yelled Leadley one night, and from his vantage point on the coarse blue blanket he sprayed Peter’s stomach with a double-fisted rat-a-tat-tat.
    Soon a fresh set of faces stared from his toyes wall. He replaced Steve McQueen with a portrait of Bach. He took down Camilla Rickards, the “I’m backing Britain” sticker, the House of Lords poster. The only survivors were a tanned half-naked model with a sandy elbow, and Sir Bedevere.

CHAPTER FIVE
    T HE NOTION THAT HIS mother would tell a difficult story straight was, of course, absurd. First time round, in her choppy and defensive way, she had given a watered-down version. At the start of the summer holidays, to fill in the shadows, he walked up Tisbury High Street and pressed a bell saying “Milo Potter”.
    Peter enjoyed a close relationship with his grandfather. Unlike Rosalind, who had always been tricky with him. She hated his smell. Screamed if he tried to kiss her. Ran out of the room as soon as he embarked on one of his six war stories. “I can stand the blood and guts – but it BORES me.”
    But with Peter something happened: Milo Potter lost his accusatory tone. All the warmth he couldn’t offer his daughter or granddaughter, with both of whom he shared a temperament, he concentrated on his grandson.
    Consequently, Peter was the one his mother would take on visits. Peter never minded listening to him. It pleased his mother and it pleased the person he listened to. Old people, he learned early on, liked to talk.
    He once heard his mother enthuse to the vicar: “Peter’s wonderful with my father. He never complains when he repeats himself.” Nor when his grandfather farted as he sat down in his wing-back chair. Or mislaid his teeth. Or soiled himself after a morning at the Black Dog pub.
    Peter’s shyness helped. It was a kind of shyness, after all, not to want to hear your own voice. But it was more than shyness that made him draw out a crusty old man about his experiences with the Royal Army Medical Corps in the Adriatic or, after 1945, as a general practitioner in Clitheroe. It took Peter off from himself. Relieved the unease that sometimes he felt when he looked in the mirror.
    His mother remarked that his eyes gave him warmth. Hers were pale green, the colour of her favourite herbal tea. Peter’s on the other hand were dark and slightly slanted, the irises as black as his ropy hair, and photographed well. His skin was dark, too, a shade of oloroso that marked him out from others at school as well as from his parents and sister – and which his grandfather attributed with a knowing chuckle to a French sailor in the family. Peter took it for one of his stories.
    Like anyone who has fought in a war, his grandfather was full of stories. Alone with his grandson, he told Peter about the places he had seen. The train station in Trieste. The enemy flag he had captured from a castle. His adventures.
    Milo Potter. Terse, tricky, a good hater of Germans and a lover of pale ale and the dark chocolate he kept in his freezer. Who shared his daughter’s stubbornness, but not her hope that Peter would grow up to be a medical man like him. “I don’t know why your mother wants you to become a doctor.” Or rather he did know, but wasn’t telling. “Just because doctors cure people, it doesn’t mean they’re good. Don’t be fooled into thinking that .”
    At his grandfather’s flat the curtains were drawn in the living room, which stank of stale breath and urine. Peter walked into the small kitchen and called in a loud cheerful voice, “I’ll get you a beer.”
    His grandfather had returned to his chair. He sat in his favourite woollen sleeping cap, knitted for him 62 years before by the Baptist women of the Shepherd’s Bush Tabernacle. Peter handed him the glass and kissed him on the cheek, slipping something onto his