Polly by Jeff Smith

was an enormous explosion and all that was leftwas a hole in the ground. Anyway, John was assumed dead, along with all the other blokes who were never found, but a couple of days later he wandered in from the desert. He didn’t know who he was, what he had done, or where he had been. He was eventually invalided home but was always a bit vacant, and had to be told what to do next. If they were going out he had to be told to put his shoes on because otherwise he would carry on wearing his slippers. He became a bit of a joke among people who had not known him before the war. But honestly, when he went off into the army he was the finest man who ever walked God’s earth; the man who came back was nothing like the man who went out. It was heartbreaking.
    Looking back, most of my friends and relatives who were in the forces seemed to end up in the desert and then Italy. Eddy, my friend’s husband, was captured in the desert and spent the rest of the war as a PoW. On his first day home after the war he sat at the kitchen table, looked at the wall opposite, and said that if there was another war he would go again, he would fight if he had to, but he would never be taken prisoner again. He never said another word about his experiences. My brother-in-law Bert never said anything either, not until almost his last words that is. In the late 1980s he spent his last days in a local hospice and by the end wasn’t really conscious. As far as we could tell, he didn’t know what was going on around him and barely spoke. However, one day a priest went in to see him. Bert didn’t look at him or even open his eyes, but must have sensed the priest and was quite rude.
    â€˜You can go away,’ he said, ‘I’ll never get to heaven. I killed a man in the war and I never even knew his name.’ He had never said anything about any such incident, and we have no idea what happened, but it must have been preying on his mind all those years. He had never got over it.
    My brother Bob went all through the desert and then on into Italy. In fact, every year at Christmas I still have to weep when the news on TV reports that the Pope has given his blessing to the ‘City and the World’ – and especially when television shows the picture of the crowds in St Peter’s Square. You see, I listened to the live radio broadcast from Rome on Christmas Day 1944. I cannot remember who the reporter was or anything like that, but he was talking about the vast crowd of mainly servicemen crowding the square with their eyes glued to the balcony of the Vatican (or wherever it was that the Pope appears). Then he turned his attention to ‘a lone RASC driver, sitting on the running board of his lorry parked just beyond the edge of the crowd and enjoying a cigarette.’ After the war Bob told us how on Christmas Day there really wasn’t very much to do so he volunteered to drive the Catholics fromhis unit into Rome to see the Pope, and how he watched it all sitting on the running board of his lorry. So that must have been him. It sent a shiver up my spine then, and it still does every year.
    I said that I remembered the day the war broke out. I also remember the day the war ended, or at least, the day it ended in Europe – VE Day. We had, by then, been bombed out of Keogh Road and they moved us into a half-house about half a mile away in Earlham Grove. We had the ground floor and another family lived upstairs. Anyway, on VE Day I was at home on my own, apart from the kids that is. Somehow you felt that you had to do something, but there was nothing to do. I couldn’t think of anything better than to stand at the front gate and find somebody to talk to. Even then, the street was pretty well empty. It was very long and right up at the far end I could see a young woman coming along. I stood there and watched her, thinking of all the wonderful things I could say and how happy we would be. Eventually she got within