Voices in Time by Hugh Maclennan

Author:Hugh Maclennan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: MQUP
Published: 2011-07-26T16:00:00+00:00

THREE

This is what troubles me now I am no longer young, now I am living in another country on the western side of the ocean and I see that this new country has suddenly become nervous with discontent and does not know why. It troubles me that fear is different from discontent and that there is something in discontented people that makes them crave fear just as it makes people crave sex or the bottle. Fear – a distant fear and not the terror of bombardment or torture – a distant fear is very exciting. In those days in the war it heightened my sense of everything. It made the city and the cathedral, the music and the spring flowers when finally spring came, seem more poignantly lovely than they have ever seemed since. We were always saying how much we longed for peace, but the suffering and the hunger had to go beyond bearing before people began to talk of giving up. And when that happened the whole country turned hideous.

I remember the horrid look on the face of another schoolboy when he told me my father was sure to die and that it would serve him right for the coward that he was. We got into a fight immediately and the boy was stronger than me and made my nose and mouth bleed pretty badly. All these boys whose fathers and big brothers were in the army were now cursing the navy because their parents told them the sailors skulked in harbor while the soldiers fought and died. What this boy meant was something I had been dreading anyway, that when the war was hopelessly lost the navy would be ordered to save its honor by sailing out to certain death against overwhelming odds, for the English who had been too strong for them from the beginning of the war were now reinforced by the Americans. By this time the politicians and the newspapers were talking about fighting to the last drop of blood. By this time also I was old enough to have a pretty clear idea of what happens to a warship when the shells explode inside it. I became insomniac with visions of my father lying wounded on a steel deck frying to death when the deck turned white-hot from the fires. But that last drop of blood – I used to wonder how they measured it out, how they were sure there was any left in the body, did they squeeze it out like the last gob in a toothpaste tube or what did they do?

“Quatsch!” said my grandfather when I asked him to explain. “Quatsch – like everything else they tell you.”

Mother was seldom home after breakfast, if you could call the tiny roll and the cup of ersatz coffee a breakfast. She went to the hospital where she nursed wounded soldiers and often it was midnight before she returned. She looked terribly tired and thin like everyone else, and being slim anyway,

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