mission control, the plugs unplugged during the nights, the fans come on, the fucking electricity is all over the place. it feels very strange to wake up in the night all groggy and exhausted, sit up in bed wiping sleep from your eyes all discombobulated and disorientated, slowly looking at the flickering lights and seeing the fan spinning around when you know you turned it off. i haul myself down below where the fan tv is making a racket. i turn it off, funny i don't remember watching any tv at all. 

but it's my books that give the game away, on the rug a pile of sven hassel books in a complete circle. the impossible kid!

i do recall being his age now, devouring those old war books. the german renegades serving out a sentence in a penal regiment, forced to fight on various fronts yet viciously anti nazi, i loved the characters he wrote about, the legionare, tiny, porta, the old man and sven himself. they fought to stay alive, survive the hellish fronts they were sent to, the environment was their enemy, the deserts the terrible cold of the move towards moscow, the atmosphere of tank combat and one another. these books were stridently anti war yet incredibly entertaining for a young boy. 

i pick the books up and gather them in sequence, place them on my shelf. maybe i'll read them again soon after the impossible kid perhaps.