A Childs War by Richard Ballard

to peck the buttons of his leggings. This was frightening at first but became very amusing after a while. In the end George pulled him away, the goose tired of unrewarding pecking, and father and son thought holy thoughts as they looked into Godstow Abbey ruins before going home.
    The way home was very long and very slow. George decided to go ahead as far as he could, at one point hoping that Alex would increase his speed. When he did not he had to go back for him. George exhorted him more than once with variations on, “I thought you were coming for a walk with me, not a sail in line astern!” Alex caught up but was fast asleep in George’s arms by the time they turned the corner into the dairy yard to find the back gate. Alex was wearing both his cap and his father’s bowler, the latter well down over his eyes. He fell asleep again over the apple pie that finished lunch so, since the adults were going to spend the afternoon before the front room fire, Edna laid him on his bed still asleep.
VI
    Christmas was coming. “I feel sorry for the poor buggers in the Midlands,” Edna announced after the Home Service news one dinnertime had reported that industrial centres there were being bombed. Alex was bound to ask who these poverty stricken people might be and was once more unsatisfied with Edna’s answer. Joyce did not help by saying that the other word he asked about meant “souls” in this instance.
    George was home (as it now was) for the best part of a week around Christmas. He had brought things with him about which he was very secretive, and discovered to every one’s amusement (or not, depending on the time of day) that he could still whistle in spite of his full dentures and did so with great determination. One morning Alex found him in the garden with his jacket buttoned up over his thick cardigan, a scarf round his neck and his hat on, completing the picture by wearing one of Edna’s pinafores and sitting on a kitchen chair on an old sheet found for him by Joyce, plucking three diminutive chickens one after the other. The whistling prevented the smaller feathers getting into his mouth as he worked, but they either settled on every feature of his attire with very few actually reaching the sheet beneath him or blew about in the wind before sticking to the rough wood of the fence, the frost-damp rollers of the mangle and the decaying weeds in the flower bed beside it. Afterwards feathers grew in the garden for several days until Graham decided he really must get rid of them before anyone looking over the wall from the dairy yard asked awkward questions about where the birds had come from and how they had been obtained.
    George brought the naked and headless creatures into the kitchen and began the grisly task of removing the giblets. He whistled once more in order to avoid the expected stench and Alex, who had watched the process so far with enormous interest, withdrew when he discovered for the first time what the inside of a chicken smelled like. It reminded him of a morning about a week ago when he had evaded Edna’s demands that he should “do his duty” and to her unexpected amusement, considering her disciplinarian stance in these matters, he had broken wind spectacularly, provoking her to comment, “Good Lord, Alex! It’s as though something had crept up you and died!” Luckily he had forgotten this foul aspect of the preparation of the chicken when he came to eat his Christmas dinner.
    When the great day came, Alex could not remember having had chicken to eat before or having had a taste of a drink that the others called Sauternes. There was a Christmas pudding too: “We aren’t going to let a man with only one ball dictate to us what we eat at Christmas!” Graham said as he emptied the last of a bottle of prewar brandy over it in the dark and Alex imagined the entire German nation unable to play more than one game of football or tennis