There was a silence. Tom knew his words were inept and he desperately wracked his brains for something else to say, but he didn’t know what, while all the time the sergeant, whose retirement had been deferred because of the war, kept on shaking his head, and intimidating him by the way he allowed his authority to loom over him.
Tom looked at the sunburnt face of the young Constable whose eyes stared insolently at him from over the Sergeant’s shoulder, and he thought angrily to himself: ‘Why not him? Why isn’t he in the army?... They’ll be takin’ Ben next’.
Then he screwed up his face and looked at the sergeant. Despite the heat he was trembling violently, and when he spoke his voice was as thin and as shrill as a reed: ‘We haven’t clapped eyes on him, sergeant, an’ that’s God’s honest truth!’
Still the silence hung. Nothing stirred. A pile of wet manure steamed hot in the sun, and somewhere at the back of the house a dog barked.
[Days of Hope, Allen, J.]
- submitted by Pearce, M. A.
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