Day's Nap (part 2)

Several months before the war…

“Annalie,” her father, Winston, had called from the front door, “if I’m not back by evening, your aunt will be back to look after everything.”

Winston was a tall and wiry, middle-aged man who made up for his unmanly stature with his alert dark-eyed gaze and powerful intellect that lured the most illustrious students from around the country. Though his younger daughter, already at the age of five, still did not take much interest in reading alone, Winston did not scold his daughter like many learned fathers would have. Every day, he would sit down beside her as she cradled her doll, opening the picture book, finding joy at every moment she seemed to take interest. He never pushed her to read classics until she howled like other fathers did and he never confiscated the doll to shove a book into her hand.

“There’s no better way to steal away a child’s interest in literature than making it seem like chore,” she had once heard him tell her tutor over tea.

“They don’t like it at first,” the old man stroked his white beard and adjusted his coat before taking another delicate sip from the rim of the cup. “But you’ve got to force it down and then they’ll start to find it interesting.”

“It’s harder like that.”

“Milton was never easy.”

“Not like that but…,” Winston hesitated. “Once a child doesn’t see joy in it after the age of seven, it takes a miracle to turn them around.”

“Rubbish. Any intelligent young person will eventually find their lives entwined those of great authors and their works,” the tutor leant over as Winston’s eyeballs stared at him over the rim of the cup, “You’d better be harsher to that girl because that’s how life will be.”

“She’s five.”

“Better train them when they’re young. If she doesn’t read anything of high merit soon, that girl—“

“Excuse me for being so rude but I would appreciate you calling her by her name; it’s Annalie and you’ve taught her long enough to know that.”

The tutor grumbled, scratching his dark fuzzy beard, as he watched Winston dismiss his gesture of annoyance and lean back with the small tea cup in his large bony hands.

“What are you going to do when you leave?”

Annalie stopped, almost losing grip of the doll. Winston stopped. “Who told you?”

“Never mind that. You’re not going to be here to sugar coat that girl’s—“

“Annalie. Please.”

“… I don’t understand you Winston. You could’ve refused to go to war and yet you choose to throw away your life and lend your beloved daughter to that wasted sister of yours. You know that woman’s drowned in all sorts of self-made misery.”

“Help yourself to my books,” Winston stood up, deflecting the topic. “I’m going to write a letter now.”

“To your wife and older daughter?”

“Yes. Before I’m stuck in the trenches next week.”