Отрывок из книги
Louis Golding
Published by Good Press, 2021
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Yes, it was all new and frightening and horrible and exciting in the Haxby Road days. But some of you were less excited than others. You felt that all your life stretched ahead of you, to find out things. You had lots of time. Here it was the opposite to that. They had to crowd it all in quickly, these blokes whispering and muttering and roaring in the night. It was urgent. That was it, urgent. Soon, soon, the girl from Tooting would be stone-cold. No, no, not the girl from Tooting. She would be alive and warm; it was the boys and girls from Barnham Sanatorium who would be stone-cold.
They were not only like smutty little school-children. They were also like soldiers in barracks. Yes. Soldiers in barracks. And soon the boys would be going up the line, and some of them would never come back. Get stuck in, boys! Knock back all you can! And when, an hour after Lights Out, here in Barnham Sanatorium, the middle-aged man with a Bible suddenly gave tongue, Jim remembered there had been a Bible-thumper in that laundry in France where they got a couple of hours’ doss on the retreat to St. Nazaire. That other one sang hymns. This one was saying words, clearly out of the Bible.
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