Warlight

by Michael Ondaatje

In 1945 our parents went away and left us in the care of two men who may have been criminals.

great opening sentence

Unilever office in Asia, a

Mombasa,

No one knows who the truth bearer is. People are not who or where we think they are. And there is someone who

Bird’s Nest, located on the roof of the Grosvenor House Hotel.

“the Berkshire Unit,”

I should have known then.

the English Channel from a place in Bedfordshire called Chicksands Priory, her ears

“It’s a nightingale floor,” our grandmother told us. “It warns us of thieves in the night.” Rachel and I always leapt onto it whenever we could.

“Come here, Stitch. Come here, Wren,” she would murmur, her personal nicknames for us. I suspect that was the time Rachel and I felt we had a real mother.

At assembly the next morning he made an outraged speech about the despicable act he had stumbled upon, going on to claim that even during the four years he had fought in the war he had never witnessed anything so obscene.

“This is Mr. Norman Marshall. He used to be the best welterweight north of the river, known as ‘The Pimlico Darter.’ You may have heard of him?”

produce into neighbourhoods south of the river.

The roof of the Grosvenor House Hotel, I’ve since discovered, had simply been the best location for clear transmission of radio broadcasts to Allied troops behind enemy lines in Europe. It was where The Moth had first worked with our mother. We

was our mother’s steamer trunk. Not in Singapore at all,

Criterion.

The city still felt wounded, uncertain of itself. It allowed one to be rule-less.

Everything had already happened. Hadn’t it?

advice. “What’s the most undetectable drug to give a racing dog?”

At the end of that short break I carefully studied my reflection in the school bathroom mirror to see if I had changed or learned anything, then returned to mathematics and the geography of Brazil.

The Pimlico Darter, crouching in the modest square of a boxing ring, and we believed, unfairly, that at some point he may have spent a few months of his life in the similarly restricted nine by six feet of a prison cell.

mother had never gone to the Far East at all but had dutifully returned to those prison gates to carry out her postponed sentence for some criminal act or other.

“quim”

They did not in any way resemble a normal family, not even a beached Swiss Family Robinson. The

Dulwich Picture Gallery, forcing him to inhale fumes of burning wood combined with a sleep-inducing coal. The uniformed man had his hands held behind his chair as this was happening, and it took a while before his head fell forward, calm as a sleeping bee, so we could walk out of the gallery with two or three watercolours,

though the idea of The Darter’s nearby presence on those nights did not give us a sense of security.

Here was someone who had never heard of people eating only vegetables or opening a door for a woman so she might enter a building ahead of him.

Suddenly he seemed like the headwaiter who could only brush away the broken glass.

glance. The idea of a woman mailing a postcard as part of a promise to two children far away indicated an expansiveness as well as aloneness, a hidden need in her. It signalled two very different states. Though perhaps not. What did that boy know….

What had our mother assumed would happen to us in her absence?

whether Rachel’s later theatrical life was formed by those

They replaced family life yet I could remain at a distance, which is my flaw.

other. In youth we are not so much embarrassed by the reality of our situation as fearful others might discover and judge it.

life. But now, these years later, there is a

separateness towards the other, and we fend for ourselves.

like my brothers

Somewhere in the paths of my life I lost that drawing, though I had meant to save it.

I used to lie in bed repeating all the declensions of the river in order to memorize and so remember them.

“Absolutely safe,” The Darter answered loudly, looking towards the two of us, offering a false smile and suggesting complete security with an offhand wave. The question of legality never surfaced.

him. Then a near collision with a quartet of rowers who were left buffeting in our wash. We heard their yells and witnessed The Darter’s wave towards them as if it were fate, not anyone’s fault. That

His ancestors were generations of lightermen and thus he had a river body that showed an accent only on land.

“Breast your cards, Nathaniel,” he’d say, “always breast your cards.” What

hold your cards close to your vest

The dogs we had were wastrels with no recorded past, either kidnapped from a château or saved from a meat factory to be given a second chance. They were as anonymous as roosters.

That first magical summer of my life we smuggled more than forty-five dogs a week at the height of the racing season, collecting

We passed industrial buildings, their lights muted, faint as stars, as if we were in a time capsule of the war years when blackouts and curfews had been in effect, when there was just warlight and only blind barges were allowed to move along this stretch of river. I

Earl of Wiltshire has accidentally asphyxiated himself by tying a rope round his neck then tying the other end to a large lawn roller while half naked….”

One was the man who had followed Agnes and me onto the bus weeks earlier.

“I must give you some Sherlock Holmes,” he said. “I think you will like him.”

“I was certainly surprised to find you there, Holmes.” “But not more so than I to find you.” “I came to find a friend.” “And I to find an enemy.”

The Darter insisted it was bad luck to talk or whistle or even sigh under any bridge.

Moth…You return to that earlier time armed with the present, and no matter how dark that world was, you do not leave it unlit.