Free A House in Order by Nigel Dennis Page A

shocking in its way: I found myself saying: ‘You thought that you were watching them. But they were watching you.’
    Stupid country people, the real yokels, judge every man by how early he gets up. The idiot who admired my greenhouse work was on guard when I came out of my shed before sunrise: the extra respect he showed in his face made me realize how dreadfully things had changed for me. I no longer had any heart to show off, and his admiration only reminded me that eight hundred pairs of eyes would soon be turned on me from the camp. ‘I’m done, I’m done’ was all I could think: how could I stand all day with my back to them, how could I get my privacy back again? This shock to my future seemed even more dreadful when I saw that it changed all my past too – all those blind figures trudging up the fields in their heavy coats and singing to themselves in the cold and snow, they had sung perhaps for me as they watched me dancing on the ice in my beard and my rags and saw me shaking my purple fists and screaming damnation. Their answer BRAVO !! showed how little they knew me: I had survived by myself with no help from them: COCKY was MACKENZIE’S word, not mine.
    Indignation made me cool down in the end because I made up my mind that they had no rights on me and that the sensible thing to do would be just to carry on,avoiding more than ever any behaviour that would get me into trouble. But I’d no sooner decided this and begun to feel calmer and stronger than I thought of that wretched scrap of paper and felt I must have been stupid with shock to have left it blowing loose for anyone to read. So my whole morning became another agony of imagining horrible things – of ‘the student of character’ sitting in his chair and reading MACKENZIE’S message, of their interrogating me, of everything going back to where it had been at the beginning, with their suspicion growing, their cruelty replacing their smiles, and so on to my glasses being taken off, a last walk down the path, the rifles, etc., but worst of all the brutal treatment they would give me first for having ‘pretended’ to be so harmless. I longed for it to rain and soak the paper, and I even saw the block letters being washed away to nothing in an April shower, but it was a fine day and put me in a sweat while I dreamt of rain. When the guard let me out for my hour and gave me my tools, I had no hope left of finding the paper, but I got it immediately, exactly where I had seen it last – only a tiny, dirty scrap, really, and not at all the bright, white object that I had made it into in my panic. Soon after I had put it in my pocket, the young officer came flying down the path and gave me and my work a grin, which scared me out of my life when I thought what would have happened if he had seen me a moment before, or if he chose to search me now. But I was much too frightened to pull the paper out again, so it went back into the house with me when my hour was up. As soon as dusk came I took it out and tore it to bits with my nails, but doing it so carefully made me notice every letter a second time, so that even when the paper was dust it hung in my mind like a scream. What’s more, the camp kept drawing my eyes, and the more I told myself: ‘You’ve no need to look; why pay any attention; what business is MACKENZIE to you?’, and so on, the more my eyes snatched looks, as if I expected to see 800 looking back at me and wanted to dodge them before they caught my eye. The sun stayed on me after it had left them, and it seemed hours before it set and left me staring at their lights through the dark, knowing that they could see nothing of me.

The Colonel was the first to come down
    The Colonel was the first to come down the verandah steps next morning. He passed without a glance at me and, followed by the adjutant, got into a military car on the gravel road and was driven away. In the next hour or so, nearly all the officers I knew came down the