An Early Childhood: Chapter World War 2

Springing ahead from the 1920s (found elsewhere on this blog), here is an excerpt from An Early Childhood by Paddy Flanagan set in the Second World War.

Well, there I was now, in Compostenela del Salamanca Half Catalytic Army Hospital for the Bewildered, sharing a bed with {[(Frank O’Connor)] due to the shortage of trolleys in the medical health industry. We had been fled across the Pyrenees on a pair of rectum stretchers (sit-down-only type harnesses) after sustaining massive injuries.

I don’t recall how I had been wounded myself, but before my concussion, I had watched {[(Frank O’Connor)] wander across the plains of no-man’s-land into a stockpile of German bracket mines; in the process of recovery, it would take some time and a number of operations before he would be fully compost lemsip, but he had had two sets of brackets removed already, and was in the process of getting his short and curlies taken off.

The meals were the standard fare - Meeting Two Veg, as they said in His Majesty’s Spanglish - a kind

I myself had lost my perspicacity, my “persk capacity”, as they said in the olden days. It’s called perspicacity because people of high intelligence can say “Persk! C’mere a sec! I’m very smart!” How and ever, due to the shock of the whole war, the pair of us, two short story writers of average height, lay in the bed half the night whispering sweet nothings into each other’s ears, only then we’d be also cursing the bejeebers out of each other in the quiet of the cricket-chirping as the monks next door chanted to Santa Maria.

I felt a little bit like Hemingway, except a war late and in a neutral country. Or Orwell, except a war late. And in the right country for the previous war, but the wrong one for this one.

Our doctor was a kind of a half-Spanish half-Native American part-time dance instructor with a cheesy grin whom we nicknamed CornJulio.

In the bed opposite lay a man small in stature with the exception of the fact that he was very big. His chest, larger than a barrel, wasn’t in the least bit sexually attractive. In fact, in my state of shellshock, I was under the misguided impression that his sole purpose was to be intimidating me personally, with his chest. Bern-ard was, of course, being a big healthy looking fella, one of the Yankees. He was suffering from six quick gunshot wounds to his head from a revolver, which had a few times sorted out a problem of migraines that he had had since he was a child, but had brought the pain back with the final bullet on the field of battle.

This great big mountain of a man got on very well indeed with Dr. CornJulio, despite the doctor’s tendencies to have a sweet step in his walk and a glad glint in his eye.

But things got fractious when, on our exercise walk around the yard one morning before we performed our ablutions and had our wormy bandages supplanted, Dr. CornJulio, in his guise as a Native American, accused Barrel-Chested Bern-ard of stealing the lands of his ancestors as a kind of a half-joke while the dawn chorus went off amongst the seagulls with contrapunctal accompaniment from the magpies.

Continued in An Early Childhood Chapter World War 3.