Malouf

“But the war for me had a private and more sinister dimension. Though I knew with one half of me that it belonged to the world of daylight reality, the world of newspaper headlines and apocalyptic announcements from the bottom of the stairs, I also knew, in some other part of my being, that this was only half the truth; there was more to the war than the wavering voices told us, more even than my Aunt Vera knew. When I crawled into bed at night and my father came to put out the light the war took on its real form. Giant staghorns leapt through the papered glare of my bedroom window, and our fernery beyond, with its mossy fish-pond and slatted frames hung with baskets of hare’s foot and maidenhair, sprang up in a shadow around me, an insubstantial jungle there was no way through. I choked Hitler and Mussolini, those historical bogeymen that even adults believed in, burst in upon me bearing their terrible paraphernalia of barbed wire, bayonets, tin helmets, hand grenades; their purpose now having nothing to do with the wall-map and its pins in our spare room, but being, quite simply, to reach up over the foot of my bed or down over the pillow and drag me into the pallid, black-and-white world of newspaper photographs and newsreels—a world without color, like the night itself, in which everyone was a victim, pale, luminous, with flesh already frazzled round the edge, and where being a child with curly hair and apple cheeks that everyone wondered at was no protection at all. The war wasn’t one of those activities that were strictly for grown-ups. The newsreels were full of children no older than myself climbing up gangplanks or being herded into trains. And how else did they get into the war (I couldn’t imagine their parents allowing them to go) unless they had been dragged there, over the pillow and down into the furballed, spider-crawling darkness under their beds?”


June 13, 2000