Bunting, by Carol Rennison
An original short story extract set in the twentieth century.
By eleven o’clock on the Saturday the whole of Tennyson Close was strung with bunting, red, white and blue, criss-crossing from bedroom window to bedroom window so that the street looked like the inside of a tent. Somebody had painted WELCOME HOME KEV on a bedsheet and hung it from the Armstrongs’ drainpipe. The H had run in the rain on Thursday and nobody had had time to do it again.
Lisa was thirteen and had been up since six helping her mam butter bread. There were trestle tables down the middle of the road, borrowed from the Methodist hall, and on them there were sausage rolls, and pineapple and cheese on sticks stuck into a grapefruit wrapped in foil, and a cake from the Co-op with a flag in the icing. A man from the Echo had come with a camera. Mrs Lowther from number twelve had been crying on and off since breakfast, though her own lads were both at home and in perfect health.
When the taxi turned into the Close everybody cheered, and somebody started up a car horn, and the Fenwick twins let off party poppers. Kevin got out in his uniform. He was thinner than Lisa remembered, and his face had gone hard at the edges, and he looked at the bunting as if he had never seen bunting before.
Mam got to him first. She held on to him for so long that the man from the Echo said ‘Lovely, lovely, now if we could just have one of the whole family,’ and they all stood in front of the bedsheet while he took it. Lisa stood next to her brother and felt his arm against hers, rigid as a broom handle.
‘All right, our kid?’ she whispered.
‘Champion,’ he said, and smiled for the camera, and kept smiling after the camera had gone.
For an hour he did everything right. He shook hands with Mr Armstrong. He let Mrs Lowther kiss him. He ate a sausage roll and said it was the best thing he had tasted in months, and everybody laughed. But when Darren Fenwick let off the last of the party poppers behind him, Kevin’s whole body jerked as if the ground had moved, and the paper plate in his hand folded in half. He laughed, too, a second too late. Then he said he needed the toilet and went into the house, and he did not come out again.
Lisa found him in the end, not in the house but at the allotments behind the railway line, in Grandad’s shed. Grandad was sitting on an upturned bucket and Kevin was sitting on another one, still in his uniform jacket, and neither of them was saying anything. There was a flask of tea on the potting bench between them. The radio was off. Through the open door, faintly, she could hear somebody in the Close singing ‘Rule, Britannia’ off-key.
Grandad had been in Burma. That was all anybody knew about it, because it was all he had ever said.
‘Mam’ll be looking for him,’ Lisa said.
Grandad poured tea into the lid of the flask and passed it to Kevin, who held it in both hands without drinking. ‘Go back to the party, pet,’ Grandad said. ‘Tell your mam he’s with me. Tell her he’s fine.’
Lisa went back slowly along the cinder path. Behind her, she heard Grandad say something, low, and then she heard her brother’s voice for the first time that day sound like his own. She did not turn round. In the Close the bunting was still up, snapping in the wind, and the man from the Echo was packing away his camera, and her mam was asking everybody whether they had seen Kevin, because there was still the cake to cut.
“The writer presents Kevin’s homecoming as a joyful celebration.”
To what extent do you agree with this view?
You should write about:
You must refer to the language used in the text to support your answer.