Monday 12th – The canals – Ivan’s summer and autumn (1940) and winter/spring (1941)

There’s hardly a cloud in the August afternoon sky. Lying on his back, Ivan tries to track the little white dots that seem to race across the surface of his eyes. When he closes his eyes, the lids glow bright pink against the sunlight, and the little white dots turn black. If he screws his eyes shut really tight, little stars and geometric patterns of light seem to spark in the darkness inside his head. Michael, Ivan’s new best friend, has what the doctors and grown ups call a ‘lazy eye’. Ivan thinks that this makes Michael somehow disreputable, and therefore a much more desirable friend to have.

It’s the left eye. Michael is lying to Ivan’s right on the grassy slope of the canal embankment, and Ivan turns his head, slowly, slowly, cranking his neck round as if the muscles were a geared machine, until he can just look over his bottom lids and see the side of Michael’s face. Michael has his eyes open, Ivan can see. Ivan holds his head in position, feeling the strain at the base of his neck. The thin, whippy grass stems re-erect themselves and tickle the back of his neck.

Marta is at Mrs [L]’s for her piano lesson. This time last year, Ivan would have felt miserable and lost when deprived of Marta’s company and guidance. Now, though, he welcomes the freedom, the opportunity to do what he wants to do, and to play with his friend. Michael understands him better than Marta does, and Michael seems more grown up than Ivan’s sister, too, even though Marta is four years older than the two boys. And Michael smells the same as Ivan, too: the smell of hair, cotton shirts, sweat, and the inside of hot shoes. Whereas Marta usually smells sweet and milky, an alien kind of smell that Ivan finds increasingly sickly and off-putting. It’s as if the Marta he used to know is being reworked, repainted in different colours that make her more artificial and distant. He finds that he doesn’t tell her so much these days. And when she knocks timidly and pushes his door open and asks if he wants to play, he more frequently finds that he wants to wrinkle his nose and say “no”. But he still says “yes,” and follows her up the corridor to the playroom, where he feels a resentful anger – vaguely targeted at Marta, but actually more generalised against the stupidity of the world – seething inside him like the hollow echo of a departing wave.

Michael says “Do you know where this canal goes?”

Ivan pushes himself up on his elbows, then raises himself into the fully sitting position. “No. Where? Do you?”

“My dad told me. The White Sea. Do you know where that is?”

“No.”

“Russia. The far north. It’s thousands of miles.”

“Mm. That’s a long way away.”

“And this canal goes all the way there. All the way to the sea that freezes right over in the winter.”

Ivan turns sideways towards Michael and picks at some grass stems.

Michael says, “And do you know where else?”

“Where else what?”

“Where this canal goes.”

“No, I don’t.”

“Kazakhstan.”

Ivan nods, says, “Mmm.”

“You don’t know where Kazakhstan is, do you?”

“No.”

“In the middle east. Where it’s all desert and mountains, and the sun shines like this all the time, the whole year. It never rains.”

“Mmm.”

“Think what it would be like to travel all that way on a boat, on this canal, from here. We could stow away and do that, today. Thousands of miles north, and thousands of miles south. All from where we are now. My dad said. And my mum said ‘what’s stopping you?’”

“Are you going to move away, then?” (He feels his heart beat faster as he says this, alarmed by the possibility that his friend might leave before he’s got to know him better.)

Michael is silent for a while. The blue sky ghosts in reflection across the surface of the opaque canal water.

Michael says, less assuredly than he was speaking before, and with sadness, “I think we might. I think my dad wants to go west. He says that’s where the money is.”
“ ‘Where the money is’?”


“Yes. I think we used to live in the west before. Before the war.”
“And there’s some money there?”

“I think so. I think there must be. Dad says the east will never be rich.”

Ivan’s grass stem pulling has cleared a little patch of dried earth. He digs a finger into a small crevice and wiggles it wider and deeper, feeling the old worm casts and chalky soil crumble, dry against his skin. He wonders how far he’d have to dig before he reached a live thing.

“How come the canal water doesn’t all dry up in the summer?” says Michael.

“Dunno.”

[continue, pick up the thing about the bargee who gives them presents all through the summer, and how Ivan and Michael eventually fall out after they exhaust their shallow joint interests…cf. Freddie L and Perry S at junior school, as our tastes changed…and still that sense of infinite possibility, and their child’s ignorance/distance from the fears and thoughts that must dominate the adults’ thinking…]

[Next…PICKING UP JAN AND MECHELEN AGAIN…]
Jan feels nervous and jumpy still, aware that he is a comparative child amongst these grown up men who have fought their way across the continent for the motherland, west and east, in all seasons, while he sat in his office in the middle east, pushing paper and manipulating numbers. It makes him feel as if there is a great void inside him, as if he’s hollow. When the grizzled veterans speak to him, he fears that he will open his mouth in reply and only silent air will come out, revealing his vacancy and emptiness. His insubstantiality.
The void stretches out behind him too, a vast space of uncertainty and […]. A chance remark or question from one of the experienced soldiers opens up that whole reservoir of doubt and lets it flood into his heart, brain, and mouth, and he finds himself gulping air and stuttering.

(c. 1050 words)