Free After Alice by Karen Hofmann Page B

taken. How old were you?”
    â€œNine,” Sidonie says.
    â€œWe’d been going a couple of years by then. So Alice and Masao and I’d have been twelve, Graham about fourteen, when we started it.”
    â€œAlice had probably been made to take me along,” Sidonie says.
    They had marched up Rainbow Hill and all over Spion Kopje, which must have been miles. Sidonie’s legs would ache, but she never complained: to complain was to be a poor soldier, to endanger the unit.
    It was called a hiking club to placate and lull the parents, though children normally ran around the hills unsupervised all summer, anyway. But it was a paramilitary operation. They were drilled, gave complete allegiance to Hugh. Not to Graham, who was older, who invented everything, who imbedded the jokes, but Hugh, who worked out the practical details and chivvied them along.
    There was a tree fort, built in a thick copse of poplar that had sprung up where a piece of pine forest had been logged out, then left to sit. Hugh had drawn the plans to scale, pages of them. They’d all been commissioned to borrow or steal lumber scraps, saws, hammers, spikes.
    Hugh had trained them in elaborate combat schemes: they were divided up — diplomatically — into armies with historical names: the Danes and Geats and Jutes, she remembers, at one time. Hugh had said (but that must have been later, when more children had joined or been conscripted, and Hugh was the oldest left) that the war was just an exercise in politics: the Germans and Japanese were obviously on the same side as the British. Hard working; good at fighting and keeping order and inventing things appreciative of culture. It was the Polacks and Bohunks, lazy and incompetent and shifty, who were the real enemy.
    Revisionist Hugh.
    Graham, perhaps because he was older, had treated it all ironically. There had been no sign, then, of the illness that had ambushed him in his later teens. No lapses in judgment, no blurring of fantasy and reality. Had there?
    Names: Hugh was Major Sinclair; Graham was also a major, but had to be called The Sandman. What were the others? Richard, she thinks, was Lieutenant Clare, though there was some dispute over that, wasn’t there? He wanted to be a major too. So he was allowed to keep his own name, though the rule was that one must assume a nom de guerre .
    Walt was Sergeant Jones: Graham named him. Masao was Lieutenant Smith.
    Masao, the orphaned nephew of the von Täler’s foreman, the only dark face in the group.
    Alice was Lady Pomona Vere de Vere. Graham’s idea again.
    Sidonie was called May Day. She had not, then, seen the joke. Mayday. M’aidez . Graham had said she was a heroic Japanese double agent. The others had been apt to leave her behind sometimes — to run on and leave her crying, her short, fat legs unable to keep up. Once they had tied her to a tree to stop her from either following them or tattling to their mothers.
    It was Hugh who noticed Sidonie missing, after Alice and Masao and Richard Clare had captured her and tied her up; Hugh who had found her. She had untied herself, though. He had offered to carry her on his back, but she had refused, had stalked resolutely behind him.
    Hugh says that he does not remember that. He says, “In those days, we children had our own parallel world, didn’t we? Apart from the adult world. Not created by adults. And we wandered pretty freely.”
    Yes.
    They were, as children, permitted to wander the countryside pretty freely. It was theirs — by virtue of their fathers’ ownership of the orchards, by virtue of their having tramped all over it, following Hugh.
    Hugh says, “Remember Mussolini?”
    Yes.
    Mussolini, who lived in a tumble of rough slate blocks on the south face of Spion Kopje. (Spion Kopje: they didn’t know how to spell it, and called it Spine Cop, or Spy Cop. A South African name, clearly; one of the first managers for the