Alan Moore - Jerusalem

The Wellingborough Road felt like a riverbed, with grubby lamb’s-wool vapour rushing down it in a flood of murk, eastwards to Abington, the park, and Weston Favell. The benighted shops and pubs were vole-holes dug into its banks below the waterline, hiding dark merchandise. As Tommy watched, a lone Ford Anglia came darting like a pike out from the grounded cloud then swam away in the direction of town centre, battling upstream against the current of the mist and in the face of Mad Marie’s continuing recital. The Ford Anglia was one car Tommy recognised by what he thought of as its sharp italic tilt, a term he’d picked up from his penmanship at school and which had stuck with him. Its cream and cornflower paintwork vanished in the oyster drifts beneath which Abington Square and Charles Bradlaugh’s statue were submerged, and Tommy was alone again, scuffing his boots against the rolling torrent’s stone and tarmac bed-sands, sucking in the fog through the last half-inch of his Kensitas and blowing it out suavely down his nose.

He knew that thirty-six was late, comparatively, to be starting off a family, but it weren’t too late. Tom had known blokes a good sight older than what he was, siring a first child. But then, with both his younger brothers having kids already, he’d not felt that he could leave it any later. If he wasn’t a grown man and fit to raise a son by now, after the things he’d been through, then he’d never be one. While the war had took their Jack away from him, the whole affair had given Tom a sort of confidence he hadn’t felt before, a sense that if he’d managed to survive all that then Tommy Warren was as good as anybody else. He’d come back home from France with a new twinkle in his eye, a different swagger there in every well-dressed step. Not flashy or expensive, mind you. Just well-dressed.

He could remember his homecoming, pulling into Castle Station on a train packed full of children, matrons, business people, and scores of returning men in uniform like him and Walt and Frank. Standing room only, it had been, all of the way from Euston Station, Tom and his two brothers stuck out in the corridor with getting on two dozen other people, swaying and complaining straight through Leighton Buzzard, Bletchley, Wolverton. As far as Tommy could recall, he’d been stood trading stories with their Walter, which as always was a contest that you couldn’t hope to win. He’d been halfway through telling Walt about the night when all the idiot British officers got pissed and drove a tank over the front gate of the ammo dump that Tom was guarding, so he couldn’t even shoot the overpaid guffawing twits for fear of setting off the shells. It was at that point in his story, just past Wolverton, that a big Yank, a GI who’d got on the train at Watford and was going on to Coventry, had joined them in the crowded, lurching corridor.

Sometimes, the Yanks, they were all right, and you could have a laugh with them, but by and large they got right up Tom’s nose, the way they did with most people he knew. On the front line they’d always used to say that when the Luftwaffe went over, all the English ran, and when the RAF went over, all the Germans ran. When the Americans went over, everybody ran. The cocky buggers had backed Hitler until 1942, then come into the war late and took all the credit, even after they’d walked slap into a Jerry trap and probably delayed the war’s end with their ‘Battle of the Bulge’, or Operation Autumn Mist as Fritz proudly referred to it. The soldiers over here, though, were the worst, or anyway the white ones were. The darkies were as good as gold, you couldn’t meet a nicer bunch of chaps, and Tommy could remember being home on leave and seeing the Black Lion’s landlord slinging out some white GIs when they’d complained about the black ones they were forced to share a ‘barroom’ with. “Them niggers in the back there,” as they’d called them. Some Americans could be right Herberts, and this fellow who’d come up to Tommy and his brothers on the train was one of them.

Right from the get go, he’d been mouthing off about how much more pay the Yanks got than the English, how they’d give them bigger rations, all of that. Walter had nodded sagely and said “Well, that’s only fair, you’ve bigger mouths to feed”, but the GI went on as though he hadn’t noticed that their Walt had made a dig. He’d started telling them, in a low whisper on account of all the ladies that were in the corridor, about how many rubber johnnies his lot had been issued by the US army. Seeing as this chap was stationed over here in England this was just as good as saying they’d been given them to use with English girls, which wasn’t something British chaps were likely to take kindly to. Tommy had seen the look come in his brothers’ eyes, the same as he supposed had been there in his own. Walter had smiled a great big smile, eyes sparkling, which wasn’t usually a reassuring sign, and Frank had just gone quiet with a tight little grin on his lean face, which meant the Yank, big as he was, was looking for a swift punch up the bracket if he didn’t watch himself. It was the Warren boys that he was talking to, who’d made a decent name for themselves liberating their small piece of France, who’d lost their brother, the best-looking out the lot of them, and who’d been given in return a lot of medals that they didn’t want. Taking their dangerous silence for respect or awe, the GI had elected to back up his brag by fishing out the US army-issue tin he kept his condoms in, prising its lid up to reveal perhaps two dozen prophylactics. Tom had wondered idly if Americans wrote chirpy slogans on the sides of rubbers, like they did with bombs. “Here’s looking at ya, Princess Liz!” or something of that nature. Walter had peered down into the open tin and said “I see you’ve a lot left, then.” Frank had ground his teeth and bunched one fist up, ready to kick off, and it was just then that the train had gone over a bump, so that their carriage clanked and rocked.

The johnnies had all shot into the air like sparks out of a Roman candle, falling in a rubber rain on bankers’ shoulders, into schoolboys’ satchels and on ladies’ hats. The Yank had gone as red as Russia, crawling round on all fours gathering them up, apologising to the women while he fished the little packets from between their heels and stuffed them back into his tin. Walter had started singing “When johnnies come marching home again, hurrah” and everybody in the carriage but the Yank had had the best laugh that they’d had since 1939.

Tom risked a burned lip with a last drag on his fag then flipped the ember end of it away into the invisible gutter with its predecessor. That had been a rare old time, back then when they were fresh home from the war. Out every Friday night they’d been, the famous Warren lads all in their suits, but only eldest brother Tommy with the matching handkerchief in his breast pocket. Sauntering from pub to pub, the shunt and jingle of the one-armed bandits strewing fruit and bells before them as they went, the busty landladies’ admiring smirks, war heroes, such a shame about your handsome brother. Free shots from the optics, Walter telling jokes and selling knocked-off nylons, only used once previously, miss, and that were by a nun. Frank leering, Tommy going red and trying not to laugh when they were stepping over brawling lezzies on the Mayorhold, and a head-of-Guinness moon cut free to sail above the Boroughs like a pantomime effect.

That snowy Christmas Eve when Walt had found an apple crate up on the market, harnessed Frank and Tommy to it with some string then jammed his tubby arse inside so they could pull him round town centre like two reindeer towing Father Christmas. “Ho ho ho, you buggers! Mush!” They’d gone into the Grand Hotel and bought a round of drinks, just for the three of them, and they’d been charged more than a pound. With Walt directing, Frank and Tom had gone to either side of the big hotel lounge and started rolling up the huge expensive carpet, asking people to lift up their chairs and tables so that they could roll it under them. The manager or someone had come storming out and asked Walt what the devil they thought they were playing at, to which Walt had replied that they were going to take the carpet, since they’d paid for it. They’d had to make a quick escape, without the rug, but luckily their apple crate was still roped to a lamppost outside the hotel. They’d jingled all the way down Gold Street, faces flushing blue and yellow in the fairy lights, along Marefair, back home to Green Street and their waiting mam. Hitler was dead and everything was ruddy marvellous.