straightening up, squaring his shoulders, and pouring a half-pint
of whisky down his throat. 'You'll be saying next it didn't begin
properly, either.'
'When did it begin, then?'
4
'September, 1939, of course, when Britain went to war
against Germany over Poland,' Jock and I said together, with
minor variations.
Johnny shook his head. He had been a teacher in civvy street,
and liked to lecture. 'Wrong. I'm talking about when the World
War began Р the one we're still involved with, not the little local
European war starring Adolf Hitler. The World War began in
1931, when Japan invaded China. The poor old Chinks have
been at it ever since. That was when Japanese aggression
started.'
It was at this point that I spotted the winged shitbag, cutting a
swathe through the lesser phyla of its kind.
'Ah, but the real war started in '39,' said Jock.
'If so, then it ended in 1940,' said Johnny. 'After the fall of
France in the summer of 1940, all of Europe was at peace,
unified by Hitler. Nothing else was going on, except the British
buggering about on the fringes. The Yanks were reading their
comic books. The Russians were frigging around doing nothing
in particular. It was only later that the yellow-bellies got things
stirred up again.'
Johnny gave his high-pitched laugh and scratched his arse.
Some of us had heard his weird version of history before.
'Whatever you say, VE and VJ days finished the war, all the
separate bits of it,' I said.
'Balls. There are wars going on everywhere still, in China,
everywhere. What about Spain? What about here? What about
Indo-China?'
'Yes, but they aren't real wars. They're not called wars.'
'Horry's right, and you're wrong as usual, Mercer,' Ferguson
said. 'They're just local conflicts.'
Mercer was not discomposed. 'Speaking for myself, I prefer a
war like a good book Р it's got to have a beginning, a middle
and an end.' He laughed and tottered off in search of a drink.
'The feller's no' heard of armistices,' Jock Ferguson said, and
also stomped off Р leaving me exposed to the drunken mercies
5
of Sgt Wally Scubber, shell-shocked survivor of the Arakan and
