Read Life: An Exploded Diagram for Free Online Page B

newspapers and newsreels. Then everything got insanely hectic, and he found himself in France, a corporal, meaninglessly bossing people around and being slapped on the back by elderly Frenchmen. On May 30, 1940, he lost control of his bowels on the beach at Dunkirk when German dive-bombers howled down and sand admixed with body parts exploded all around him. He was ashamed, so when he’d blundered into the sea, he struggled out of his soiled pants and trousers before being hauled, bare-arsed and half drowned — he was a poor swimmer — into a gaily painted launch from the Isle of Wight called the Anne-Marie.
    He was rewarded for his gallantry by a week’s home leave.
    There was nowhere at home for him to sleep, so he stayed around the corner in Palmerston Street, at his mate Jacko Jackson’s house. Jacko had joined the merchant navy six months earlier, and his bed was spare. The city was blacked out at night; George, awakened by the sirens, stood at the window watching the thin fingers of searchlights groping for German bombers. He would not go to the shelters; he had a great fear of being crowded into confined spaces. (Which meant he was not ideally suited to marriage, as Ruth would later discover.) In the half-light of dawn, the street would fill with women, head scarves knotted on their foreheads, their arms folded beneath their bosoms, clattering garrulously to the factories. On the penultimate night of his leave, he inexplicably got into a fight at a pub called the Hounds in Hand. He was in Jacko’s bed, sopping the blood from his mouth with a thin towel, when Jacko’s sister Muriel came into the room to see if he was all right. To make sure that he was, she got into the bed with him.
    “When this is all over,” she said, before it was all over, “I’ll be waiting for you, George.”
    Whether she was or not, he never troubled to find out.
    By Christmas 1940, he was in North Africa, promoted to sergeant, in charge of a tank support unit and suffering from dysentery. He was to spend a good deal of his war squatting in tented latrines, smoking. The habit of lingering in the lavatory remained with him for the rest of his life, although usually he was in search of solitude rather than relief.

O N CLEM ACKROYD’S third birthday, he got his first car and met his father. These two momentous things — especially the car — ensured that the day remained his earliest memory.
    He awoke to see his mother looking down at him.
    “Happy birthday, Clem,” she said, then lifted him from the bed. Gusty rain prickled the window. Ruth held his little penis while he sleepily peed into the enameled chamber pot.
    Down in the kitchen, his grandmother was busy at the stove. Ruth settled him into the tall chair and pushed it up to the table. Then Win brought him his favorite breakfast, a fried egg on a slice of bread and margarine. She cut it up into pieces that he could eat with a spoon.
    “If thas hot, blow on it,” she said.
    He watched the yellow juice of the yolk slither over the margarine and leach into the bread.
    Ruth tested a cup of warmed milk with her little finger.
    “Eat that up, Clem, an then we’ll open yer presents.”
    Win had knitted him a sleeveless jumper, brown and yellow stripes, with the wool from an unraveled prewar cardigan. His mother helped him into it. Even over his pajama top, it was itchy. He looked like a giant wasp with a human head and arms. Then Ruth put a parcel in front of him, a shoe box wrapped in stiff brown paper. She helped him tear away at it and lift the lid.
    The box was half full of little metal soldiers. Ancient wars had peeled the uniforms from some of them. Others had been disarmed; they made threatening gestures with tiny empty hands that had once held swords or muskets. Hidden within this ragtag army was a pink sugar mouse with a string tail. Clem held it uncomprehendingly, so Ruth moistened its nose with her lips and put it to his mouth.
    From the lane, Willy Page tooted, and