Public Library and Other Stories Read Free Page B

significantly different, across even as little as the couple of miles between two places. And so many of those dialects have just gone. Died out.
    Well girl that’s life in’t it? my father says.
    He says it in his northern English accent still even though he himself is dead; I should make it clear here that my father’s been dead for five years. We don’t tend to talk much (not nearly as much as I do with my mother, who’s been dead for a quarter of a century). I think this might be because my father, in his eighties when he went, left the world very cleanly, like a man who goes out one summer morning in just his shirt sleeves knowing he won’t be needing a jacket that day.
    I open my computer and get the page up where if you click on the links you can hear some of these recorded men. I play a couple of the prodigal son readings, the Aberdonian man and the man from somewhere in Yorkshire. The air round them cracks and hisses as loud as the dead men’s voices, as if it’s speaking too.
    So I want to write this piece about the first war, I tell my father.
    Silence.
    And I want it to be about voice, not image, because everything’s image these days and I have a feeling we’re getting further and further away from human voices, and I was quite interested in maybe doing something about those recordings. But it looks like I can’t find out much else about them unless I go to the British Library, I say.
    Silence (because he thinks I’m being lazy, I can tell, and because he thinks what I’m about to do next is really lazy too).
    I do it anyway. I type the words First World War into an online search and go to Images, to see what comes up at random.
Austrians executing Serbs 1917. JPG. Description: English: World War I execution squad. Original caption: ‘Austria’s Atrocities. Blindfolded and in a kneeling position, patriotic Jugo-Slavs in Serbia near the Austrian lines were arranged in a semi-circle and ruthlessly shot at a command.’ Photo by Underwood and Underwood. (War Dept.)
EXACT DATE SHOT UNKNOWN NARA FILE: 165-WW-
179A-8 WAR &
CONFLICT BOOK
no. 691 (Released to Public)
. There’s a row of uniformed men standing in a kind of choreographed curve, a bit like a curve of dancers in a Busby Berkeley number. They’re holding their rifles three feet, maybe less, away from another curved row of men facing them, kneeling, blindfolded, white things
over their eyes, their arms bound behind their backs. The odd thing is, the men with the rifles are all standing between two railway tracks, also curving, and they stretch away out of the picture, men and rails like it might be for miles.
    It resembles the famous Goya picture. But it also looks modern because of those tracks.
    There’s a white cloud of dust near the centre of the photo because some of these kneeling men are actually in the process of being shot as the photo’s being taken
(
EXACT DATE SHOT
)
. And then there are the pointed spikes hammered in the ground in front of every one of the kneeling prisoners. So that when you topple the spike will go through you too, in case you’re not dead enough after the bullet.
    Was never a one for musicals, me, my father says.
    What? I say.
    Never did like, ah, what’s his name, either. Weasly little man.
    Astaire, I say.
    Aye, him, he says.
    You’re completely wrong, I say. Fred Astaire was a superb dancer. (This is an argument we’ve had many times.) One of the best dancers of the twentieth century.
    My father ignores me and starts singing about caravans and gypsies again
. I’ll be your vagabond
, he sings.
Just for tonight.
    I look at the line of men with the rifles aimed. It’s just another random image. I’m looking at it and I’m feeling nothing. If I look at it much longer something in my brain will close over and may never open again.
    Anyway, you know all about it already, my father says. You don’t need me. You did it years ago, at the High School.
    Did what? I say.
    First World War, he says.
    So I did,