Monday 9th – Ivan and Marta Spring/Summer 1941

Up in the woods, Ivan scrapes the point of a stick through the dirt at his feet, banking up the fine earth into little ramparts, and dragging rhythmic figures of eight into dynamic existence. This rhythm and aimless repetition makes him think of last summer, when he’d play these sort of games with his new friend Michael: they’d make drawings in the earth with sticks, or gather stems of long grass which they’d arrange into repeating patterns on the bare edges of harvested fields; alternatively they’d build things out of mud and waste wood down by the canal, or dig out trench systems for Ivan’s lead soldiers before bombarding their miniature battlefield with small stones and missiles made of canal-water-wetted mud.
In his memory, that summer consisted of a long, long string of sunny days, but in actuality the time he spent with Michael only amounted to a few weeks – primarily the long summer vacation from school. But they’d compressed a whole friendship into that space: shy first meetings, intense enjoyment, consolidation, over-familiarity, boredom, irritation, falling out, reconciliation and – finally – Michael’s departure with his family for the west.
They’d met by the canal. Ivan had been sitting in the long grass with one of Marta’s guiltily borrowed books - Eva Learns to Ride or somesuch classic of girls’ literature – when the glint of sunlight on metal had drawn his attention to the towpath. And there was Michael: thin and weedy, dark-skinned and frizzy-haired, in his blue and white hooped shirt and his long cotton shorts, squinting as the sunlight flashed on the bent metal frames of his cheap glasses. Michael was looking up at the sky, his face almost horizontal. When he heard Ivan whispering his way through the long grass and lowered his gaze, Ivan could that here was an intelligent boy of strong character: someone stronger than himself, someone whom he would have to look up to and take note of.
“Watcha,” said Michael.
“Hello,” said Ivan.
And that was that.
[…]
The two of them are lying back on the grass slope above the canal locks. Ivan picks at his teeth with a splintered matchstick, probing for fibrous debris from his lunchtime apple. Every now and then he holds the tip of his toothpick up to the light and looks at the sliver of sunlit fruit waste before licking it off and eating it.
Michael starts whistling through his teeth: Ivan doesn’t like the way the air scrapes across the sharp edges of tooth enamel – that scratchy, tuneless sound is purposeless and irritating, and incapable of sustaining a proper tune. When papa whistles along to his gramophone recordings he blows his cheeks in and out and forms the notes with clarity and precision, and shifts his body and arms so as to create the best possible [body shape] for sound production; his whistling is serious and musical, whereas Michael’s is childish, designed to annoy and [to invite the request to justify it/stop it]. Ivan doesn’t say anything, though – he doesn’t want to alienate his new friend. Sometimes, though, he wishes that Marta were with them. She’s always good at starting something off or thinking up some new game from scratch, whereas the two boys are often full of lassitude and indirection.
Michael starts and sits up. A second later, Ivan smells what Michael has caught a sniff of: the rich whiff of oily-burning barge fuel. As soon as he smells the smell he can hear the steady putter of the barge engine, and see the haze of blue smoke beyond the embankment, furling out of the barge’s chimney and rolling along the grass.
Michael says, “Let’s have a bet on what it’s carrying. Three shillings.” Michael usually wins these bets, but Ivan doesn’t want to refuse and look like a sissy girl.
“All right. Three shillings. You’re on.”
Ivan closes his eyes and tries to picture the barge and its cargo. There’ll be a bargee at the tiller, a big fella in a sleeveless leather jerkin, a dirty shirt and an oil-blackened leather cap, and with skin that’s burned deep red-brown by the summer’s sun and the months of exposure to all weathers.