Chapter 3 Part 3 New House, Newborn, New King

Here's how things went like this: Rose is pregnant.David and Dad were eating potato chips by the Thames. The boats were rushing to and fro, and the air was filled with the smell of oil and seaweed. Dad told David the news.It was November 1939, and there were more police than usual on the streets, and people in uniform were everywhere.Sandbags were piled up against the windows, and long strips of barbed wire were coiled like poisonous springs.Anderson bomb shelters are scattered in various gardens, and the park is full of trenches.There seemed to be white posters plastered in every vacant space: reminders about blackouts, orders from the King, and all the country's wartime directives.

Most of the kids David knew had left the city before that, and they clustered at the station with little brown luggage tags pinned to their coats, heading for farms or strange towns.Their departure left the city feeling even more empty, adding to the sense of tense anticipation that seemed to govern the lives of all those left behind.Soon, the bombers will arrive and the city will be hidden by night, making their task even more difficult.Temporary blackouts darken the city, and you might even spot craters on the moon.Heaven is full of stars. On their way to the river, they saw more barrage balloons being inflated in Hyde Park, and once fully inflated they were set aloft and secured with ropes from below.Those ropes can prevent the German bombers from flying too low, that is to say, they can only drop bombs at a relatively high altitude, so that the bombers may not be able to hit the target.

Balloons are shaped like giant bombs.Dad said that was ironic, and David asked what he meant.Dad said it was just funny that the thing that was supposed to protect the city from the bombs was made to look like the bombs.David nodded, feeling strange to him.He thought of the people in the German bombers, the pilots dodging anti-aircraft fire from the ground, a man crouching by a bomb window with the city passing below him, and David wondered if he had thought of houses and buildings before dropping the bombs. people in the factory.Seen from above, London is just a model, with toy-like houses and miniature trees lining its narrow streets.Maybe that's the only way you can drop the bomb: pretend the city isn't real, and when it blows up below, no one gets bombed, no one dies.

David tried to picture himself in a bomber—a British bomber, perhaps a Wellington medium or a Whitley heavy—flying over a German city, bombs ready.Will he throw the ammo down?After all, it is war.The Germans are bad, everyone knows they started the war.It's the same as "war" on the playground: Once you start it, you get blamed, and you don't complain about what happens afterward.David thought he'd drop the ammo, but he wasn't thinking about the possibility of someone down there.There were only factories and shipyards in the dark, and the people who worked in them were far away from where they worked, safe in their beds at home when the bombs fell and exploded.

A thought flashed. "Dad, if the balloons made the Germans miss their targets, they'd drop their bombs, right? I mean, they wanted to hit the factory, right, but they couldn't, so they'd Drop the bomb and hope it hits. They don't go back first because of the balloon and come back the next night." Dad didn't answer for a while. "I don't think they care," Dad said anyway. "They're going to destroy people's spirits and hope. If they can blow up aircraft factories and shipyards along the way, that's great. That's what bullies do, he Soften you before you start killing on the ground."

He sighed. "We need to talk about something, David, something important." They had just returned from their meeting with Dr. Moberly.At this meeting, the doctor asked David if he wanted his mother.Of course I want to.What a stupid question.It didn't take a doctor to tell him he missed his mother and was sad about it.Many times, though, Dr. Mobley had difficulty understanding what he said, partly because he used words that Davy didn't understand, but mostly because his voice was now almost entirely dominated by the humming of the books on his shelf. drowned. The sounds made by the books became more and more distinct.He knew that Dr. Mobery couldn't hear what he heard, or he would go mad working in his office.Sometimes, when Dr. Moberly asked a question that the books agreed with, they would all say "Hmmmmmm..." in unison, like a choir of male voices practicing a single note.If he said something they disagreed with, they would mutter and scold him.

"Crap!" "nonsense!" "This man is an idiot." A book with the title "Jean" stamped in gold on the cover was so angry that it let itself fall off the shelf and onto the carpet, smoking with rage.Dr. Moberly was astonished to see the book fall.David had wanted to tell the doctors what the books said, but decided it was not a good idea to let the doctor know that he had heard them.Hearing of people being sent to mental institutions for "something wrong with their brains," David didn't want to be "sent in."Anyway, he didn't always hear the books talking now, only when he was sad and angry.David tried to keep his composure and try to think of good things, but it was hard sometimes, especially when he was with Dr. Mobley or Rose.

Sitting by the river now, his whole world was about to change. "You're going to have a little brother or a little sister," Dad said, "and Ross is going to have a baby." David stopped eating potato chips.It's not the taste at all.He felt a tightness in his head, and for a moment he thought he was going to roll off the stool and faint again, but he kept himself sitting upright. "Are you going to marry Ross?" he asked. "I hope so," Dad said.David had heard Ross and Papa talking about it, and when Ross came to the house last week, they thought David was asleep, but he was standing on the stairs listening to their conversation.He did that sometimes, but as soon as the conversation was over and he heard the sound of a kiss or Rose's low, throaty laugh, he went to bed.The last time he eavesdropped, Rose talked about "people" and what those "people" said, and that she didn't like what they said.That was the one time they talked about the marriage, but Davy didn't hear much more, because Dad was just leaving the room to put the pot on the stove, and Davy just kept out of the way so as not to be seen on the stairs.He thought Dad was getting a little suspicious, because after a while he went upstairs to check if David was asleep.David pretended to sleep with his eyes closed, which seemed to please Dad, but he was too nervous to go up the stairs again.

"I just want you to know something, David," Dad was telling him, "I love you, and I'll never change, no matter who you live with. I love Mommy too, and I'll always love her, but Being with Rose has helped me a lot these last few months. She's a nice person, David. She likes you. Give her a chance, okay? David didn't respond.He swallowed the chips with difficulty.He'd always wanted a brother or sister, but not like this.He wants to have a brother or sister with his parents.This is not right.These are not real siblings, they were born by Rose, so they can't be the same.

Dad put his arm around David's shoulders. "Okay, do you have anything to say?" he asked. "I want to go home now," David said. Dad put his arm around David once or twice, then let it go, lightly, as if to let a cloud of air go. "Okay," he said sadly, "then let's go home." Six months later, Rose gave birth to a little boy, and David and his father left the house where he had grown up to live with Rose and his new brother, George.Rose lives in a large mansion in the northwest of London, three stories high, with gardens in front and back of the house, surrounded by woods.According to David's father, the house has been passed down through generations of their family and is at least three times the size of David's house.David didn't want to move there at first, but Dad slowly explained the reason to him: it was closer to his new workplace, and because of the war, he would spend more and more time there.If they lived closer to work, he would have more time to see David, and maybe come back for lunch sometime.Dad also told David that the city of London was getting more and more dangerous, and it was safer to be far away from the city.The German planes were coming, and while Baba believed that Hitler would eventually be defeated, things would only get worse until things turned around.

David wasn't entirely sure what Dad was doing to support the family now, he knew Dad was good at math, and until a while ago he had been teaching at a very large university.He had recently left university to work for the government, in a farmhouse just outside the city.A temporary military camp was stationed nearby, with soldiers guarding the gates and patrolling the grounds.Usually when David asked about Dad's job, Dad would just say he did some data checking for the government.But on the day they finally moved in with the Roses, Dad seemed to think there was more to talk about with David. "I know you like stories and you like books," Dad said as we followed the moving van out of town. And it's part of my job. You know what? Sometimes a story looks like it's about one thing, but it's really about another thing entirely. There's hidden meaning in the story and it needs to be teased out ." "It's like a Bible story," David said.Every Sunday, the pastor will explain the stories that everyone has read aloud before.David often didn't listen because the priest was so boring, but it was amazing how much the priest saw in what he thought was a very simple story.In fact, the preacher seemed to like to make the stories far more complicated than they were, presumably because it seemed that he was taking too long to tell them.David didn't care much about the church, and he was pissed at God for his mother's business and for Rose and George to come into his life. "But some stories don't have a meaning for everyone," Baba went on, "and they have a meaning for a certain kind of people. So that meaning is carefully hidden, and it can be hidden with words, or with words." Numbers, sometimes both are used, but the purpose is the same: to stop other people from interpreting it, to find it out. It has no meaning unless you know the code. "Look, the Germans use ciphers to send messages, and so do we. Some ciphers are very complex, and some look very simple, even though they're usually the hardest to break. Someone has to try to break the ciphers, and that's my job. I try to To understand the meaning of the stories people wrote that they didn't want me to understand." He turned to face David and put his hands on his shoulders. "I trust you," he said, "don't ever tell anyone about the work I do." He puts a finger to his lips. "Top secret, boy." David imitated his father's movements. "Top secret." He repeated. They move on. David's bedroom was on the top floor of the house, a small room Rose had chosen for him because it was full of books and shelves.David's own books share the shelves with other, older and more eccentric books.He tried to arrange the best places for his books, and finally decided to arrange them according to the size and color of the books, which would look much better.But it also meant that his books had to be mixed in with books that were there long ago, so a book of fairy tales ended up being squeezed in between a book on the history of communism and a book investigating the last battle of one station .David had wanted to read a little about communism, mostly because he had no idea what communism was (just a little, and Dad seemed to think it was a terrible thing).He read three pages, and then lost interest. The "mode of production is owned by the workers" and "capitalist exploitation" almost made him fall asleep.The history of the First World War is a bit better, at least there are many pictures of tanks appropriated from picture magazines, distributed on different pages.There is also a French vocabulary textbook, a book about the Roman Empire, which has many interesting pictures, and seems to be very happy to describe the atrocities committed by the Romans against other peoples and the revenge of other peoples against the Roman Empire. In these books, Davy's Greek mythology was the same size and color as a neighboring volume of poetry, which he sometimes pulled out when he wanted to take Greek mythology.He'll find some poetry not bad if he just gives it a chance.Among them is a poem about the knight—in the poem, he is called "the young master"—and his search for a dark castle and the discovery of its secrets.But that poem doesn't seem to end right, the knight arrives at the castle, it's over, that's all.David wonders what's in the castle, and now that he's at the castle, what's going on?But the poem clearly doesn't think that's important.It made David wonder, what kind of person is it that writes poetry?Anyone knows that the poem becomes interesting only when the knight arrives at the castle, but at this point the poet throws his hand away and goes on to something else.Maybe he meant to come back to it and just forgot, or maybe he just couldn't write such a compelling enough castle monster.David had a vision of the poet, surrounded by little scraps of paper with many thoughts crossed out or scribbled about people and animals. werewolf dragon dragon witch big witch little witch David wanted to draw a portrait of the beast in the collection of poems, but found that he couldn't draw it. It seemed easy but difficult to do, because no matter how he drew it, it didn't look right.So instead he conjured up half-formed animals crouching in the stale corner of his imagination where all the things he dreaded curled up in the dark and slid one on top of the other. As soon as David started putting books in the empty spaces of the shelves, he knew something about the room: the new books looked and sounded terribly uncomfortable among the old ones.They looked menacing and spoke to David in muffled tones.Those old books were packed in cowhide or leather, and some of the knowledge contained in them had long been forgotten, or had become false knowledge because new truths were discovered by the progress of science and exploration.Books containing such old knowledge were never considered to have lost their value.They are not as good as storybooks now, because stories are partly made up and untrue, and these other books were born for something greater, created by men and women, using everything they know and their All knowledge of the world to fill these books.They were misled, and the assumptions they made are now worthless, a fact that the old books can hardly bear. A great book that declared - on the basis of a careful study of the Bible - that the world would end in 1783, had long since gone crazy and refused to believe that today's times were after 1782, because that would It's tantamount to admitting that its content is wrong, that it exists out of sheer curiosity and nothing else.A thin little book about current Martian society -- the author, with a very large telescope, and the naked eye, saw the channels of canals where there were no canals at all -- often blah blah blah blah, blah Below, the gigantic engine is now being secretly built.It's currently sitting in the middle of a row of Braille books, luckily they can't hear what the guy is saying. But David also found that there were books like his, thick illustrated volumes, fairy tales and folk tales, rich in colour.In the early days of the move, David turned his attention to them, lying on a box stool next to his bed, his eyes down—and occasionally up—out at the forest, as if waiting for a story. Wolves, witches, and monsters in the book suddenly appeared from below, because the forest described in the book and the woods around this house were too similar to think that they were not the same. give the impression.Some stories are added with a pen, and the pictures inside are carefully drawn by the person who has no artistic talent.David couldn't find the author's name in the book, and some of the stories were unfamiliar, but they echoed with those he almost understood by heart. In one story, a princess was cursed by a sorcerer and forced to dance at night and sleep during the day, but she died without the help of a prince or wise servant, and her ghost returned to torment the sorcerer, tormenting the sorcerer. He had to jump himself into an abyss and be burned to death by the fire inside.A little girl is threatened by wolves while walking through the forest. As she flees, she encounters a woodsman with an axe.But in this story, the forest man didn't just kill the wolf, and he didn't send the girl home, no.He cut off the wolf's head, and took the girl back to his house - in the thickest and darkest part of the wood, where he left her until she was old enough to marry him.Although she never stopped crying for her parents during all these years of captivity, she became his bride in a wedding ceremony performed by an owl.She also bore his children, and the Woodlanders raised them, and taught them to hunt wolves, and to find those who were lost in the woods.He made them kill the men and take the valuables from their pockets, leaving only the women to him. David read these storybooks day and night, wrapped in a blanket to keep him from catching cold, and Rose's house was never warm.The wind came in through the cracks in the window frame and the cracks in the doors that could not be closed, making the pages of the book rustle, as if rummaging through the books for the knowledge it was eager to know.The front and back of the house were covered in large swaths of ivy, which had broken through the walls in the past few decades, so that vine branches spread from the zenith corner of David's room, or jumped on the window sill.At the beginning, David tried to cut the vines with scissors and discard the stumps, but within a few days, the ivy came back again, seeming to be denser and longer than before, clinging more tenaciously to the wood and lime.Bugs also dig burrows.As a result, the boundary between the natural world and the indoor world becomes blurred.David finds beetles congregating in his closet and centipedes exploring his sock drawer.At night, he heard mice running briskly behind the boards.It was as if the natural world had taken David's room as its own. To make matters worse, when he was asleep, the monster he called "The Twisted Man" often came to his dreams, walking through a forest that looked exactly like the one outside his window.The Twisted Man would step forward to the edge of the woods and gaze out over a wide lawn where stood a house like Rose's.He would talk to David in his dreams.His smile was mocking, and he said something David couldn't understand. "We are waiting," he said. "You are welcome, Your Highness. Hail to the new King!"