Voice of the Fire by Alan Moore (essential reading txt) 📕

Monica. If you look close up at the photograph you can see a light sort of fuzz upon her legs, so I imagine her as blonde. The sort of girl you might find working at the counter in a Post Office, wearing her hair the way they have it now, all straight on top and curled up round the back. She’d look nice in light blue. Her belly button is the kind that’s more upright than wide, so that it’s like a little keyhole in a peach. She’s got one of the newer long-line corsets on that seem to flatter women with more slender hips, which to my mind seems a wise choice and shows she’s more the thoughtful type who takes a lot of care about her clothes. You can tell just by looking at her skin that she can’t be much more than twenty.

That’s the age, I’ll tell you, when they’re fagged out and fed up with younger lads and start to see the older fellow as romantic. If I could have Monica just hear me do ‘The Cobbler’s Song’ from Chu Chin Chow then I could have her drawers down quick as that. Of all my harem, do you know that sometimes I think I like Monica the best? She doesn’t cost me anything or get me into trouble. I just shoot off in my hanky, close the catalogue and drive away.

I wasn’t always like this, with the women. Ask my Lily and she’ll tell you: when she knew me back before the War it was as much as I could bring myself to do to give a kiss goodnight, I was that shy. It wasn’t until I’d enlisted in the 24th Queen’s Territorials I had the nerve to go up to a girl and ask her out. The uniform, you see. It made a difference, you can laugh now, but it’s true. I’ve heard women go on and on about how terrible it is the way men fight, but once they see the boots and buttons they’re all over you. They wave you off then stay at home and send white feathers to the conshies. Half the fellows in those trenches wouldn’t be there if not for the way their girlfriends look at them when they’re dressed up for war. Deny it if you can.

To be quite honest, Lily was the first girl I’d been out with, although I was getting on for twenty. When she first got me to bed I was that green I lay on top of her with my legs open for a time before I realized what I should be doing. In all honesty it wasn’t that successful. Well, I couldn’t get it in and ended up feeling that sick about myself, and when Lil said it didn’t matter that was worse. We never did it right until about a week after we wed. I mean, we’d rubbed each other off and kissed, but that was all, and when we did finally manage it, it was all over in a flash, though that got better as time passed. All told, though I was no great shakes in bed, I think we were happier then, me and my Lillian. It was a shame that we were never blessed with kids, although I’ve made up for it since.

Four months together, me and Lily had, and by the end of it the How’s-Your-Father, it was smashing. We were that in love, and then, come March in 1915, I was bundled off to France. My God, that was a terror. You don’t know until you’ve been in one. You live in mud and all around there’s lads no older than yourself with half their jaw blown off, and you give up on everything bar doing what you’re told. I’ve seen a horse that had no legs lie shuddering in the muckpit like a bloody seal. I’ve seen men burn.

I’d only been in France two months before I caught the shrapnel at Givenchy. Head and leg. The head was worst, apparently, though Muggins here can’t bring to mind a blessed thing about it. Not the moment that it happened or the morning that I’d had before, and not much after. Gone. Clean as a whistle. First thing I knew afterwards was being halfway through a plate of dinner at the hospital. I lifted up a spoon of stringy mash and looked at it, and I remembered that I was Alf Rouse. It was the most peculiar sensation, I can tell you.

I don’t have the education to explain it but the world seemed different to me after that. I don’t mean that the War had opened up my eyes, like I’ve heard other fellows say. I mean the world seemed different, like as if it was a different world, a stand-in for the real one. How can I explain it? Everything looked wrong. Not wrong, but put together in a hurry as though it could fall apart at any time. The best way I can say it is like when you’re doing art in school, and Miss gives you a sheet of paper first where you can try things out and make a mess, because it’s not the proper picture and it doesn’t matter. When I woke up in that hospital it was like waking up inside the practice scribble, not the picture. Nothing mattered. You could rub it out and start all over. When I think about it, I suppose I’ve pretty much felt that way ever since, though now I’m used to it.

That was the point where I first got my ‘thing’ about the weaker sex. Of course, for one thing there was opportunity, what with the nurses they had over there. You wouldn’t think to look at some of them, but there was more of that went on than you’d suppose. You see, to all intents and purposes they were the only women over there and they could have their pick. You wouldn’t think