Warth Lane, by Brenda Haworth
An original short story extract set in the twentieth century.
It was my mother’s idea, and she announced it at tea on the first Sunday in December, the way she announced most things, with the teapot in her hand so that nobody could argue without risking a scald. There was a camp at Warth Lane with four hundred German prisoners still in it, eighteen months after the end of the war, and families in the parish were invited to have one of them for Christmas dinner.
‘I’ve put our name down,’ she said.
My father put his knife and fork together on his plate, very precisely, and got up and went out to the yard. We heard the coal shed door, and then nothing. My brother Harry had been killed at Arnhem two years before. His chair was still at the end of the table, and nobody sat in it, though nobody had ever said that nobody should.
My father did not mention the German again, not once in three weeks. Neither did my mother. It sat in the house between them like a stranger already.
He came on Christmas Day at twelve, walked up from the camp by a corporal who went off to his own dinner and said he would be back at five. His name was Karl. He was about twenty, very thin, with a patch on the elbow of his brown battledress, and he had brought a present wrapped in a page of an old newspaper: a wooden horse, carved with a penknife, no longer than my hand. He gave it to my mother and bowed, and she went quite pink.
My father shook hands with him because my mother was watching. Then he sat down at the head of the table and carved the chicken, and said grace, and said nothing else at all.
My mother talked enough for everybody. He said ‘Thank you, very good’ to everything, and ate everything, slowly, as if he were memorising it. When he had finished his pudding he took a photograph from his pocket and showed it round: a woman in a headscarf standing in front of a ruined wall. ‘Mother,’ he said. ‘Hamburg.’ My mother held it for a long time.
It was then that I saw my mother had laid his place at the end of the table, in Harry’s chair. I do not know whether she did it on purpose. I do not think my father had noticed until that moment. He looked at Karl sitting there, and at the photograph, and his face did not change, but he put his napkin down and went out to the yard again, and this time he did not come back while Karl was there.
At five the corporal knocked. It had begun to snow. Karl thanked my mother again at the door and went down the path.
I was clearing the table when I saw them through the scullery window. He was holding something, and when he reached the gate he held it out, and I saw it was Harry’s scarf, the striped one Harry had worn to every match at Turf Moor since he was twelve. Karl did not seem to understand at first. My father did not explain. He put the scarf round Karl’s neck himself, roughly, as you would with a child, and then turned and went back into the coal shed and shut the door.
My mother came and stood beside me at the window. We watched the two figures go down the lane in the snow, the corporal and the boy in the claret and blue scarf, until we could not see them. Neither of us said anything about it, then or afterwards. But on Boxing Day, when my father laid the table, he laid it for three, and Harry’s chair went back against the wall with the others.
“The narrator’s father is presented as a man who cannot forgive.”
To what extent do you agree with this view?
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