The '44 Vintage

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He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored. —Battle Hymn of the American Republic

I. How Corporal Butler was saved by his boots

The toes on Corporal Butler's left foot were bright purple.

He remembered, as he almost unfailingly did when he peeled his sock off, that purple was the chosen colour of kings and emperors in the olden days: he had read in a history book somewhere that "to assume the purple" was for them the very act of putting on their power and glory.

The trouble was that whatever it had meant in those old palaces and courts it told a very different tale in the Mill Street elementary school and in King Edward's Grammar School: there it was a mark of shame indelibly painted on dirty boys who had dirty diseases.

Dirty boys from dirty families, publicly disgraced by the disfiguring patches of colour on their faces and on the shaven areas of their heads and condemned to sit by themselves in a leper-group at the back of the class. For it was common knowledge that where purple was to be seen there were also probably fleas and nits and bedbugs lurking unseen, eager to crawl across the intervening desk spaces onto clean boys from respectable families.

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