Everyone Brave is Forgiven

by Chris Cleave

When one thought of the enemy it was with a queer mix of fear and admiration. It was absurd that one could not simply hold up one’s hand and say: “Look here, well done, I think that will do for now.”

“If I were you,” Tom said, “I should stick to reading, writing and arithmetic.” “But what good is it to teach a child to count, if you don’t show him that he counts for something?”

Perhaps this was what love was like after all—not the lurch of going over a humpback bridge, and not the incandescence of fireworks, just the quiet understanding that one should take a kind hand when it was offered, before all light was gone from the sky.

Perhaps it was true, thought Alistair, that Septembers would come again. People would love the crisp cool of the mornings, and it would not remind them of the week war was declared. Perhaps there would be such a generation.