Fixing Hitler

Fiction Editor, Gaynor

We love this sensitive wartime story, told through the eyes of a child

- Celia Bryce

Tommy has made himself disappear. It’s his dad’s idea. He says life’s tough for a boy in a house full of women. Best to keep your head down, he says, play invisible. Says it all the time. At least, he used to. Not so much now. But Tommy does it all the same.

“That way, me lad, you’ll avoid an awful lot of trouble,” his dad would say, with a wink, a smile. “It’s easier to walk on thin ice than to be the only boy.”

His mam, laughing softly, would ruffle Tommy’s hair, tell him not to listen to such daft talk, “and mind you keep away from ice...”

Then there’d be a look between his dad and him, as if there were secrets only they could know. Which made something inside Tommy seem to glow.

Since the war started there are no winks or smiles, not so much in the way of laughing, and his mam’s voice sounds as if she’s swallowed something sharp. And in that sharp voice she gives Tommy jobs to do, such as filling the coal scuttle, letting the cat in, or out, and going to the corner shop for her messages. Never ending, it is.

“And stop trailing in all that mud, Tommy.” He’s always trailing in mud.

So here he is under the table, too big really but managing all the same to sit among the legs of it, behind the folds of the thick cloth with the tassels. It keeps him out of trouble, as his dad says, and, magically, messages get done without him, the coal scuttle’s filled, the cat’s let in and out.

He drives his car along the table’s ridges and ledges, around its legs and feet. He turns his car into a war plane, a bomber, flies it into corners, makes it silently swoop and dive and knock Hitler on the head. If his dad isn’t going to bother, then he’ll have to – though he knows that nobody can fix Hitler if his dad doesn’t do it.