Public Library and Other Stories Read Online Free

I say. I’d forgotten.
    Do you remember the nightmares you had? he says.
    No, I say.
    With the giant man made of mud in them, the man much bigger than the earth?
    No, I say.
    It’s when you were anti-nuclear, he says. Remember? There was all the nuclear stuff leaking on to the beach in Caithness. Oh, you were very up in arms. And you were doing the war, same time.
    I don’t. I don’t remember that at all.
    What I remember is that we were taught history by a small, sharp man who was really clever, we knew he’d got a first at a university, and he kept making a joke none of us understood,
Lloyd George knew my father
he kept saying, and we all laughed when he did though we’d no idea why. That year was First World War, Irish Famine and
Russian Revolution; next year was Irish Home Rule and Italian and German Unifications, and the books we studied were full of grainy photographs of piles of corpses whatever the subject.
    One day a small girl came in and gave Mr MacDonald a slip of paper saying Please sir, she’s wanted at the office, and he announced to the class the name of one of our classmates: Carolyn Stead. We all looked at each other and the whisper went round the class: Carolyn’s dead! Carolyn’s dead!
    Ha ha! my father says.
    We thought we were hilarious, with our books open at pages like the one with the moustachioed soldiers black as miners relaxing in their open-necked uniforms round the cooking pot in the mud that glistened in petrified sea-waves above their heads. Mr MacDonald had been telling us about how men would be having their soup or stew and would dip the serving spoon in and out would come a horse hoof or a boot with a foot still in it. We learned about the arms race. We learned about dreadnoughts. Meanwhile some German exchange students arrived, from a girls’ school in Augsburg.
    Oh they were right nice girls, the German girls, my father says.
    I remember not liking my exchange student at all. She had a coat made of rabbit hair that moulted over everything it touched and a habit of picking her nose. But I don’t tell him that. I tell him,
instead, something I was too ashamed to say to him or my mother out loud at the time, about how one of the nights we were walking home from school with our exchange partners a bunch of boys followed us shouting the word Nazi and doing Hitler salutes. The Augsburg girls were nonplussed. They were all in terrible shock anyway, because the TV series called Holocaust had aired in Germany for the first time just before they came. I remember them trying to talk about it. All they could do was open their mouths and their eyes wide and shake their heads.
    My father’d been in that war, in the Navy. He never spoke about it either though sometimes he still had nightmares,
leave your father, he had a bad night
, our mother would say (she’d been in it too, joined the WAAF in 1945 as soon as she was old enough). My brothers and sisters and I knew that his own father had been in the First World War, had been gassed, had survived, had come back ill and had died young, which was why our father had had to leave school at thirteen.
    He was a nice man, poor man
, he said once when I asked him about his father.
He wasn’t well. His lungs were bad
. When he died himself, in 2009, my brother unearthed a lot of old photographs in his house. One is of thirty men all standing, sitting and lying on patchy grass round a set of WWI tents. Some are in dark uniform, the others are in thick
white trousers and jackets and one man’s got a Red Cross badge on both his arms. They’re all arranged round a sign saying SHAVING AND CUTTING TENT next to a man in a chair, his head tipped back and his chin covered in foam. There’s a list of names on the back. The man on the grass third from the left is apparently my grandfather.
    We’d never even seen a picture of him till then. One day in the 1950s, after she’d been married to my father for several years, a stranger knocked at the door and my