It seemed that all my friends, enemies and neighbours were joining the army in a rush to honour themselves and their country. People I’d never seen in my life emerged from their houses and signed up.
For the first few chaotic weeks it was all people talked about. You could feel the excitement in the air and there was much talk of ‘pummelling the German wimps’. As war fever spread through the town most people assumed that I’d already been down to the office to enlist. When I corrected them and said that, actually, I’d rather focus on my career, there would be an awkward silence and they’d treat me rather more coldly from them on. I felt no guilt at not enrolling, and I didn’t consider myself to be lazy or a coward. I just had no interest in destroying lives when I could be saving them instead.
After a while I started getting dirty looks from a few people – Mrs. Brown at the grocer’s stopped chatting to me when I popped over to get the vegetables, and old Mr. Bedley from down the street would clear his throat and mutter something about ‘the youth of today’ whenever I passed him in his garden. Generally though, I was treated as normal until my father returned. For the past month he’d been working in a London bank. We received a telegram from him when news of the war was announced, and he returned earlier than planned because peoples’ priorities both in London and here had changed.
I knew for a fact that my mother didn’t want me to fight – she’d always encouraged me to follow my dreams, and like many other mothers, she didn’t want her son to go away and maybe never return. My father, however, was a completely different story. He was horrified that I hadn’t signed up and I think he considered me an embarrassment. Being too old to fight himself, he wanted me to live out his dreams; he wanted to be proud of me. Growing up, my brother and I were always wary of our father. He was respectable and honest and he brought us up well, but we didn’t want to get on the wrong side of him. He’d been raised to believe that discipline was essential and he always had a strong sense of morale and patriotism.
The night he returned we had a blazing row. I felt strong enough to defend myself when he confronted me, unlike my mother who kept very quiet through it all. I had a passion for medicine and I wanted to learn as much about it as I could – everything in my life had made sense until the sudden arrival of the war. But he would not give in – how could he go out and face people when everyone knew his son wasn’t helping the country? Well, I heard enough reasons to sign up that night, but my heart just wasn’t in it.
I went for a long walk the next day, thinking things over. Recruitment posters were stuck everywhere and for the first time they all seemed to be directed at me. The most common one was of Lord Kitchener pointing his finger and saying ‘your country needs you!’. Much as I tried to avoid it, his stare and critical finger followed me wherever I went. Other posters showed Germans abusing small children and pouring water away in front of dying soldiers. But the one that stuck in my mind the most featured a man sitting in his armchair with his children on the floor. One of them was reading a book about the war and asking ‘Daddy, what did you do in the war?’. The look on the man’s face haunted me and I began to wonder if I would regret not fighting for Britain in the future. The posters had a point, I didn’t want my future family to be ashamed of me, and it was only going to be for a few months anyway…
