saturday afternoon war stories

The war of all against all

Before the war we used to go into town every Saturday, riding the bus through the tiny villages that perched on hillsides or nestled in valleys. One by one we picked up my gang of friends, Maisy and Bill from St Squires roundabout, Ellen from Christmere st hardy, Raymond from Lower Squirl and Tomm from Ballards Loft. I was always the first on, jumping on the bus while it still shuddered and hummed in its roost at the bus station in Karrl, where the world was washed clean and still half asleep and the Saturday bus driver cursed and smoked in the front seat. He'd never go till the clock struck the hour, and I always had that same excitement and tension as each stop approached, would they be there waiting for me? Would they have forgotten, or worse taken an earlier bus. I imagined them all meeting up without out me, to wander the parade of shops in the crescent coast town with the Saturday herds and where I knew I could never possibly find them. Though it was surely true that we only ever went to the same sacred circuit of shops; the skateboard palace, the record emporium, the alternative clothes market and the second hand bookmongers. There where the smell of bookflesh was sweeter than the fast food factory next door where we would always break our fast.
But we always find each other on that Saturday bus route, each and every Saturday from age fourteen to seventeen, never mind whether we went during the week to Marsden Upper Grammer school or the Technical College next door. The crescent city Saturday was sacred, and we watched the world slowly change, the record shops turn to CD shops, the alternative clothes market turn through fashions that we all still slavishly bought. There came, then went, the first day we ventured into the Auld Castle pub, where elder siblings before us had been christened as underage drinkers. Later we took the early evening bus that took us to the darkened crescent city and the long chain of nightspots that adorned the sea front, where bands that we knew and had drummers that could drive played gigs to their friends and not many others.
Then the war came, with the suddenness of a power cut. The attitude of our parents changed overnight, we went from pampered darlings whose only purpose was to do well at school and not embarrass the family to proud defenders of our home island. We were the ones who would be fighting the enemy and for the honour of our people. We were the ones who were pulled out of college, put through army manoeuvres and sent to the front on the old wooden seaside trains that shuddered along the iron lines, propped up above the sea on old oak struts.
We fought the war in trenches, men and women alike. We fought the war in the hills above the villages, kids with rifles and bayonets, fighting other kids from other places with the same. I lost more friends that I could ever express, and strode over bodies that were younger than I. The war changed things, to the point where both sides realised they were fighting for no other reason than they had been told to by their parents. The war ended because we stopped fighting, greatcoat clad boys meeting on the hilltops, shaking hands and putting down rifles, looking at each other and marvelling that only a few years before they had played each other in football tournaments. An armistice was signed, against the wishes of our parents, and of the Government. But there was nothing they could do, we had become killers at their behest, and we would have had no qualms against using our skills on them.
We went back to the homes that had borne us, to try and fit ourselves back into the lives that had been interrupted by a year of war. But the pieces of ourselves would not fit into those old dimensions, and we stuck out with our hard edges and brutal frontiers. Army boots crushing down tiny flowers, rifles propped up under window sills.
I once tried to take the bus across the island as I had before, to see which of my friends still lived. I found Bill and Maisy both long gone, Ellen who was a ruin of her former self, pieces missing from body and mind. Raymond and Tomm were both new people, though not quite sure what those people were. The three of us roamed the island after that, living in the caves as we had done during the fighting. We would sometimes visit the Crescent coast city, old men in big boots, shaved heats and too big coats, to look at the shops we had once lived for, and marvel at the innocence of those that still could, knowing there was no place for us in this society.