The Summer I Passed My GCSEs
Originally published in The Bull Magazine, 2026
My uncle died on Friday. It’s Monday now. He was hit by a Shahed missile strike. He wasn’t even at the front, he’d left Kharkiv the day before. He was in his hometown, in Lviv.
I woke up this morning, Monday, to a news bulletin saying Trump halted 20 thousand anti-Shahed missiles from being sent to Ukraine, a deal promised during the Biden administration. He says it’s not America’s fight, which I guess is true in some way, although that’s not a phrase you hear America saying very often. It’s also just not how you expect the self-declared leader of the Free World to act to an ally being attacked.
I always wake up to the news headlines. I’ve got a few news apps on my phone, just to have a bit of a different perspective. Al Jazeera, BBC, the Economist, the KyivIndependent, whatever really. It means I get a barrage of spam first thing, the results of the world turning while I sleep. It’s usually Ukraine and Gaza battling with the sports section for supremacy. So Saturday morning I woke up to the usual, except my exam grades had come out, and my uncle was dead. Putin threatens fierce retaliation to Operation Spiderweb. 89 people killed in 24 hours in Gaza. Two As in science, B in maths. 47 babies starved to death overnight by Israeli siege. Mudryk tests positive for doping, ruled out for Chelsea. C in French, A* in History. Kate Middleton looks stunning in army-chic outfit on visit to Ukrainian front. Usyk beats Fury. Tucked away in the rows and rows of news was a notification that Shahed missiles had struck Lviv.
In another part of my phone, the categories are all separated, the WhatsApps below the emails, the emails below the news, was a message from my father. I knew without needing him to tell me someone had died, it was just a matter of who.
I was supposed to see my uncle today. I got to Lviv late last night. Since the war Dad, myself, and other volunteers have been driving across to Ukraine every two or three months, in second-hand ambulances or pickup trucks, full of supplies for the war effort. Last time I took a picture of my uncle, just back from the front, in the warehouse where we store the supplies, and my uncle warned me not to allow geolocation to track the photo. Now I am sure that it was me that killed him, me and my fucking Snapchat that allowed the Russians to know where he was hiding, building his detonators and his drones and his pipe bombs, packing the wheelchairs and painkillers and bandages into boxes to be brought to people who needed them.
We drive together but Dad has to get out at the border, he was born in Lviv so if he goes in he’ll get conscripted. I was born in London, by Greenwich, so I’m fine, I just make sure to speak English with the guards. The age of conscription is twenty-five anyway, I’m not seventeen yet. I’ve years.
They bombed Rivne last night and I woke up to the sound of it, either the explosion itself, or fighter jets scrambling to stop the missiles, breaking the sound barrier overhead. Either way, I didn’t get any sleep. I can hear people moving around outside. I’m in the shelter below the building, the sirens went off last night so we all came down. Everyone but me is up already. It’s cold and smells of damp. I’m scrolling through Instagram, I’m not ready to get out of bed yet. I’m always surprised the internet still works here. There was a house party at home last night, in Deptford. Instagram is blowing up. Central Cee pumping out of my little phone speakers. I’m sad I missed it, although I wasn’t invited. It’s all over everyone’s stories. There’s Dave, kissing Sofia.
Dave was my best mate before the war. He still is I guess, but we’ve drifted a bit. He doesn’t get it, not that that’s his fault, he’s just English, his people aren’t being bombed. I miss out on a lot, house parties or whatever, because I’m doing these trips or I’m out here, helping however I can. Even when I’m home I don’t go out much, and I’ve sort of stopped being invited. Listening to school drama, who’s cheating on who, it’s just such bullshit now. Dave and I used to play CoD: Warzone together online, during Covid, but I don’t really play these days. It’s not because of this. It’s not some PTSD shit or whatever, I just don’t like playing anymore. I’ve grown up.
I wonder if Dave slept with Sofia. I guess I do care about gossip, a bit. I’m a virgin. I’m sixteen. I did my GCSE’s six weeks ago. I spent two months last summer building detonators that I would then fix to drones and send to the front. We’d be sent videos of the drones hitting tanks and bunkers and Russian positions. Watching them hone in on some unsuspecting Russian soldier, getting closer and closer until the video goes to static. It’s fucked, obviously, but I’ve got cousins my age who were born in Lviv and they are on the front, so it could be worse. War is war, and I’m doing my part. But then, I have to go home and try to slot back into my normal life again, as a boy from London who has to study for his Maths AQA Paper II, not as a Ukrainian whose uncle just got blown up by a Shahed missile.
I can hear footsteps in the corridor. Soon there will be a heavy thud on the bunker door and I will have to get up, to go to drive into the war and deliver supplies, or to hide in a room somewhere building bombs to kill Russians while my friends go to Malta to celebrate passing their GCSEs. I close my eyes and hope that knock never comes.
