Staring at the Sun Read Online Free Page A

home; Courage—well, Courage was going up in aeroplanes. She would doubtless understand the other words in time.
    Jean was seventeen when the war began, and the event made her feel relieved. Things had all been taken out of her hands; she no longer needed to feel guilty. For the preceding few years her father had taken the full weight of various political crises firmly on hisshoulders; that was his duty, after all, as Head of the Household. He would read the news to them from the Daily Express , with pauses after each paragraph, and explain the bulletins on the wireless. It often felt to Jean as if her father owned a small family business which was being threatened by a gang of foreigners with outlandish names, illegal business methods and cutthroat pricing. Her mother knew all the right responses; she knew the different noises to make when names like Benes, Daladier and Litvinov came up, and when it was best to throw up her hands in confusion and let Father explain it to her again from the beginning. Jean tried to be interested, but it sounded to her like a story which had begun a long time ago, even before she was born, and which she would never completely master. At first she used to keep silent at the names of those sinister foreign businessmen with their lorry-loads of stolen digestive biscuits and poached pheasants; but even silence wasn’t safe—it suggested lack of proper concern—so she would occasionally ask questions. The trouble was, how could you know what questions to ask? It seemed to her that you were in a position to ask a really correct question only if you already knew the answer, and what was the point in that? Once, coming out of a bored reverie, she had asked Father about this new woman prime minister of Austria called Ann Schluss. That had been a mistake.
    War, of course, was men’s business. Men conducted it, and men—tapping out their pipes like headmasters—explained it. What had women done in the Great War? Given out white feathers, stoned dachshunds, gone out to nurse in France. First they sent men off to fight, then they patched them up. Was it likely to be any different this time? Probably not.
    Even so, Jean felt obscurely that her inability to understand the European crisis was partly responsible for its continuation. She felt guilty about Munich. She felt guilt about the Sudetenland. She felt guilty about the Nazi-Soviet Nonaggression Pact. If only she could remember whether you could trust the French or not. Was Poland more important than Czechoslovakia? And what was this about Palestine? Palestine was in the desert and the Jews wantedto go there. Well, at least this confirmed what Uncle Leslie had said about Jews: that they didn’t like golf anyway. Nobody who liked golf would choose to go and live in the desert. It would be like playing out of the bunker all the time. Perhaps the golf courses out there had fairways made of sand and bunkers made of grass.
    So when the war began, Jean was relieved. It was all Hitler’s fault: it was nothing to do with her. And at least it meant that something was happening. The war counted as another Incident: this was how she viewed it at first. The men were called up, Mother joined the WVS, and Jean was finally allowed to cut off the broad yellow-brown plait which had run down her back for so many years. Her father mourned its loss, but was persuaded that the saving on soap and water when Jean washed her hair would significantly help the war effort. Sentimentally, he asked for the plait when it was cut and kept it on a shelf in his potting shed for several weeks, until his wife threw it out.
    There had been secret discussions among the Serjeants about whether Jean should get a job; but with Mother joining the WVS it was thought she would be better off keeping house. “Good practice, girl,” said her father with a wink. Good practice: not that she felt in any way up to whatever it was she was practicing for. When she looked at her parents, she was