BRIAN ALDISS

Walcot

HarperVoyager

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpervoyagerbooks.co.uk

This ebook first published in Great Britain by HarperVoyager in 2015

Copyright © Brian Aldiss 2009

First published in Great Britain by Goldmark 2009

Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2015

Cover photographs © Shutterstock.com

Brian Aldiss asserts the moral right to

be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 978-0-00-748226-9

Ebook Edition © December 2015 ISBN: 978-0-00-748227-6

Version: 2015-10-19

Dedication

To Ronnie

with remembrance of Ruth

with regards as always

Epigraph

God forbid that we should give out a dream of our own imagination for a pattern of the world.

– Francis Bacon

Novum Organum

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

Introduction

PART ONE

Chapter 1: Barefoot

Chapter 2: An Adult Breath

Chapter 3: Almost Drowned

Chapter 4: An Absolute Slave

Chapter 5: ‘Bloody Cripples!’

Chapter 6: Earth Sciences

Chapter 7: The New Widow

Chapter 8: Kendal, of All Places

Chapter 9: A Good Old Row

Chapter 10: A Slight Change of Plan

Chapter 11: Carnage on the Road

Chapter 12: ‘War or no War …’

Chapter 13: ‘We’re Okay Here …’

Chapter 14: Over the Boundary

Chapter 15: Le Forgel

Chapter 16: A Lesson in Aristotle

Chapter 17: The Wehrmacht Pays a Visit

PART TWO

Chapter 1: What a Wild Man

Chapter 2: Hoarded Biscuits

Chapter 3: Christmas at Gracefield

Chapter 4: ‘Please Not to Shoot Us’

Chapter 5: Endless Carnage

Chapter 6: Kiss Whom You Like

Chapter 7: Leaving Home

Chapter 8: Old Children

Chapter 9: Ex-Army Furniture

Chapter 10: A Man About Town

Chapter 11: A Break in Torremolinos

Chapter 12: The Disastrous Party

Chapter 13: On the Grand Canal

Chapter 14: Elizabeth Sips Her Wine

Chapter 15: ‘I Must Love Abby’

Chapter 16: A Modernizing Government

Chapter 17: In the Alley

Chapter 18: Blood on the Ice

PART THREE

Chapter 1: A New Line of Thought

Chapter 2: Guernica

Chapter 3: One of the Poor

Chapter 4: ‘We Don’t Want no Trouble’

Chapter 5: Some Family Conversation

Chapter 6: Over Jurassic Sand

Chapter 7: Another Invitation

Chapter 8: Supper at Sandy Bassett

Chapter 9: Tolstoy Unread

Chapter 10: Violet in Her Bath

Chapter 11: Flight to Austin, Texas

Chapter 12: The Future of the World

Chapter 13: An Arrival From Venice

Chapter 14: The Known Unknowns

Chapter 15: The Sacrifice

Chapter 16: A Fuller Understanding

Notes

About the Author

Also by Brian Aldiss

About the Publisher

Introduction

‘You are free men, whatever that means.’ So says Steve Fielding to some German soldiers, whose lives he spares during the closing events of a world war, in the freezing cold Ardennes. But Steve, as we learn in this complex unfolding of a life, is himself not a free man.

We find him first of all as a child, playing alone on a Norfolk beach – the beach that gives this complex tale its title.

Already, like a tide, doubt enters his life. Is he in danger? High on the dunes, a woman, almost a stranger, looks to see if Steve is safe.

So the question arises, to be solved if possible: do Steve’s parents wish to get rid of him? In love, in war or peace – or in an uncertain interlude between the two – the uncertainty continues to tease.

As this delightful and complex story unfolds, the reader meets new astonishments and some strange old events.

Questions remain, but now there’s beloved Verity – and a cheetah – and of course the sort of unexpected we all expect to meet.

A long and intriguing story unfolds before us.

Brian W. Aldiss

Oxford, 2015

PART ONE

1
Barefoot

At high tide, the sea lapped close to the dunes, leaving little sand to be seen. The remaining sand above the high tide mark was as fine as sifted salt. Spikes of marram grass grew from it like quills from a porcupine. No stones were visible. The small waves, white and grey, seethed against their limits. How lonely it was, this wild coastline.

When the tides began their retreat, they revealed first a line of pebbles, grey and black. The pebbles gleamed like jewels until the sun dried them, when they became as grey and inert as if they had grown rapidly old and died. Occasionally among the stones lay a small, dead crab, its up-turned belly the respectable white of death.

The pulse of the sea appeared to quicken; its faltering waves had left the slopes of the beach and were now retreating over level territory. Venturing down to follow this august daily event, you found your feet sinking into the wet sand, and so you kept moving. The sand squelched with every step you took, turned pale, went dark. Went slurp.

Stretches newly revealed were bare, immaculate, except perhaps for that baby crab, soft to the touch as you bent down to it. What caused it to die? Did crabs become ill?

Everything about you shone with a joyous newness.

The small ripples of waves as they rolled back towards their mother sea were transparent, and consequently looked as golden as the sand beneath them. They were so beautiful it was essential to pat them with bare feet, to jump up and down in them, splashing.

So you followed this grand revanche, as if you, too, were determined to get back into the real sea. You were hopping about in a world of ceaseless movement; these waves, or very similar waves, would never stop, would still be rolling back and forth in their interplay with the beach for eternity, or until you grew up, whichever time was the nearer. You felt very close to eternity because everything here was marvellous, and in this year before the nineteen-thirties had dawned, you had the entire beach all to yourself.

Look to left, look to right. Along the great expanses of beach, not a single person was to be seen.

All through that slumbrous summer you were there, playing on the sands. And in those bygone summers the sun shone always overhead, undeterred by cloud. The sun was there when you arrived on the dunes in the morning, pausing and taking in the whole wonderful spectacle, and when you departed in the late afternoon; at that time, the red ball of it was only just beginning to slope down towards those dunes.

The retreating waves swirled about a fishing boat. It was Mr North’s boat, anchored on the sand. Mr North, rowing strongly, went out in it at night, when you were in bed asleep, with your arms about your golliwog. The sea eroded a bowl in the sand round the stern of the boat before retreating further, to leave the craft high and dry, a perch for the odd seagull.

At last the wavelets left the dunes as far away as possible. Their strength exhausted, they sank back into the embrace of the sea. The sea made little fuss as it swallowed them. This was the enchanted, the bronze, the salty and sublime, the interminable and august month of August, when everything is in compliance. The blue morning sky overhead was occasionally flecked with ribs of thin cloud, into which the sun was as yet still climbing.

Every day was calm and hot, in both reality and memory.

Very distant were the dunes, shallow as the breasts of an adolescent girl. They were perhaps half a mile from the lip of the sea. The sea was perceived as friendly, luxurious, playful, puppyish. You wore only a bathing costume and a round, grey, felt hat. You were completely solitary. You were able to exercise your imagination, free from interference. One year, you had a small wooden boat, which went exploring and survived many hazards.

On that stretch of fresh sand, firmer now, baked to the brown of the crust of one of your mother’s pies, what adventures could be had! This was a newly discovered land, yours alone. It was the beginning of the world on which as yet no plant could grow, no animal would tread.

And there were rivers on this new-found land, miniature Amazons which wound towards the sea, sometimes deep, sometimes shallow, delta-like. They carved cliffs an inch high in the damp sand as they went. A spade, a wooden spade, could deflect some of their tributaries.

The sea, in its munificence, had also left behind, to punctuate this generous plain of sand, pools of various shapes and sizes. The sun glinted on them, spilling diamonds and daggers. You could lie in these pools; they were warm baths, more luxurious than any man-made bath. Little fishes were trapped here. Shrimps would come and tickle your toes. Sometimes you splashed, but never made much noise. You were in a secret, far-away land, where it was polite to be silent. You were encompassed, though, by a great shell of sound, sung by the sea in its conversation with itself; this was the resonant music of your happiness – though you were frequently unaware of it, or even of the fact that you were happy.

To either side of you the beaches stretched hazily into the distance, to Happisburgh in one direction, to Bacton in the other. No one was to be seen, even as far as all the way to where the view dissolved into vibrations of heat, nor was any ship to be spotted out to sea. Nothing lay between you and this unveiled nature, which would last for only a few hours, until the tide came rushing back to reclaim its territories, spilling over itself in rude haste.

You arrived barefoot on the beach. You had with you a rubber pail and a little paper Union Jack on a stick, a wooden spade and a bun wrapped in greaseproof paper in case you became hungry during the hours you are alone here.

Your mother baked the bun. You meant to repay her generosity by taking her back swarms of shrimps in your pail. She would throw the shrimps into boiling water and you would eat them together, on brown bread and butter, for tea. You were always distressed to see the shrimps go into the boiling water, although your mother told you that they died instantly. The idea of dying instantly held no appeal to a small boy only four years old. You did not know what it meant.

You spent days alone on the sands last summer, when you were only three. Your mother remained in the bungalow and read romantic novels by Norah Lofts, borrowed from the library. Norah Lofts and Ethel Mannin; of the two, she preferred Norah Lofts.

You stayed with her in a bungalow named ‘Omega’, which belonged to the family. You believed Omega to be the name of a flower, even when you were told it meant ‘The End of Things’. The bungalow was built, in a way, at the end of things. The country seemed to you utterly remote. It was rare for anything but a farm cart to pass along the road at the foot of Omega’s garden. The bungalow stood at one side of a pathway dignified by the name of Archibald Lane. When you walked up Archibald Lane towards the sea, you had a cornfield on your right. In those distant days, cornfields were gay, with red poppies and blue cornflowers, the seeds of which went into the bread to make it tastier.

At the top of the lane, just before the dunes, stood two old railway carriages, joined together to make one long carriage. Here lived the North family: a mother, a father and two quite big boys with sandy-coloured hair. They all had freckles. Your mother mistrusted people who lived in old railway carriages, but you were fascinated by them. You enjoyed being in the carriages, sometimes running from end to end in your excitement. Mrs North and her boys were kind to you. She sometimes sat you down and gave you a cold sausage to eat. Mrs North was freckled and pretty. Her eyes were blue. She wore an old blue apron. The North family were remarkably cheerful. You laughed a lot when you were together. Mr North was a fisherman; his was the boat high and dry on the sands. He slept in the day, when tides were low.

Sometimes when you were alone on the beaches for all the hours of the day, especially when the tide came racing in, you might turn and see Mrs North standing on the dunes, watching for you, shielding her blue eyes with a brown hand. You would wave. She would wave back.

You were busy. You were building a splendid castle on the edge of one of the warm pools. You were kneeling, determined to get the towers just right, when the water started to lap about your knees. You ignored it. You knew what it implied, but you are concentrating on getting the castle to look its best before the invading tide washed it all away.

The castle was completed. You stood up. Waves were racing across the acres of sand, covering them. You watched them, fascinated by the speed of the race. Soon the waters were dashing against the walls of your castle. It began to crumble. A tower fell into the flood. You removed the paper flag from the still surviving tower and put it in your pail with the shrimps. You collected up your spade. It was time to move to safety; but you wanted to watch the destruction of the splendid castle. It was a pity your mother was not there to see and admire it, but the beaches did not interest her.

The castle succumbed slowly. You knew you had better go; it was not so easy. You floundered through a pool now flooded by the new waters, then there was a deep gully to negotiate before you could reach the safe, dry slope of the higher beach. The gully looked deep and menacing now. You waded in. The current was fierce; it carried you sideways. You held pail and spade high. There was an unexpected pool underfoot. You staggered and went under. In your unwanted ducking, the shrimps were reprieved from the pot and the paper flag was washed away. You could see it go, but you were too frightened to do more than struggle for the safety of the shore. The rank water you swallowed in your ducking made you cough and splutter.

Once you were on the dry sand, you were cross with yourself for being frightened. Some way out to sea now, you could see a safe stretch of sand. But it was inaccessible, separated from the shore by a waste of water which heaved and tumbled in a hostile manner.

Would you say that this was the period of your life when you felt yourself to be closest to Nature?

Those sun-drenched, soul-drenched days alone? You believe I was in touch with all that was grand yet transitory. But who can speak for a lad only three years, four years old, when one’s psyche is not yet developed?

What did you think about, there on the sands all day? Did you feel you were being encompassed by a great soul?

I doubt I was even aware of time – only of time as local, affecting the comings and goings of the sea at Walcot, and the possible arrival of teatime.

So you were sent to play on the beach?

I believe that was the case. Yes.

The sea and the time bound to destroy the finest castle you might build?

Of course. It was in the nature of things.

You sat and watched as the tide raced in. Well, you would be back again tomorrow, when that new world, ever fresh, would be revealed once more. Tomorrow, the little pools, the arcane rippling and ribbing of the sand, would be there anew; only you would be there to appreciate them. And there was still a whole week before the holiday had to end.

You looked up at the mackerel sky and it was then that there was a disturbance in the thin cloud, and a golden bird came speeding down. When it stood before you you could see that it was in fact vaguely human in form, seeming youthful, despite its long beard. You observed that it had no genitals.

It spoke. ‘Have you been good today?’

You did not know what exactly to answer. It was obvious to you that opportunities for being ‘bad’ were strictly limited when you were alone on the beaches.

‘Are you a Christian?’ it asked.

You were forced to go to Church every Sunday. You had been given a little book into which you could stick a pretty stamp to mark each attendance. You recited the rhyme printed in the blank spaces.

Every stamp cries Duty done!

Every blank cries Shame!

Finish what you have begun

In the Saviour’s Name.

The golden thing seems satisfied with this response. ‘Do you say your prayers?’

You would have preferred it to have asked if you had enjoyed the day, but it had only tedious questions, such as those the local vicar might ask.

‘Yes,’ you said.

‘Do you wish to get to Heaven?’ it asked.

Again it was difficult to know what to answer. The day had been like heaven, with nobody to order you about, or be miserable at you.

‘Not yet,’ you said. ‘Not while we’re enjoying Walcot.’

The golden thing stood there. It finally said, ‘Your time will come.’ And then it zoomed back into the sky. You watched it until it vanished.

You decided to run home. You told your mother, ‘Mummy, I just saw God.’

Your mummy said you must not tell lies.

‘Perhaps it was just an angel. It was all gold.’

Your mummy frowned and asked if you had caught any shrimps.

‘Does God have a weewee, mummy?’ you asked.

Your mummy threw a Norah Lofts at you. ‘Don’t be so rude, you little so-and-so!’

The Norah Lofts missed you. You silently thanked God that Mummy never had a good aim.

2
An Adult Breath

Your mother liked being in Omega. She decorated it according to her own tastes. The living room was fairly dark; it had only one small window which looked towards the cornfields. It had hip-high wooden panelling painted a deep brown, thus adding to the darkness of the room. To offset this, your mother had scattered orange cushions about on the chairs and settee. She also had, stationed at strategic points, a number of gleaming copper jugs which she polished regularly. And there was a fine brass lamp with a frosted white shade and a clear glass chimney which she lit at dusk. The lamp shed its cosy light over part of the room. There was no electricity available within several miles of Omega.

The walls above the wooden panelling were painted white, and here your mother had hung a number of reproductions of paintings of flowers in bowls and vases. The paintings were glazed and bound in passe-partout. They most typically showed pink and white roses in a deep blue bowl, standing on a well-polished table. A petal had fallen and reflected its colour on table and bowl. Always a fallen petal, its hint of imperfection emphasizing the perfection of the picture.

Your mother was more than usually torpid and framed no flower pictures that night. She was a tall woman, heavy of body, heavy of face. She did her pale hair in a bun, bound tightly to the back of her head, like a supplementary brain. She was given to long skirts of woven material. She had within her the seed of a future child who was destined to take your place; but of this impending event you were not told. It was, as yet, your mother’s secret.

She kept news of her early pregnancy, too, from her visitor. She was a secretive woman and did not entirely trust her visitor, whom she considered superficial. This visitor was younger and more vivacious than your mother. You knew her as your Auntie Violet. ‘No shrinking violet, she!’ your mother was apt to exclaim. ‘Comes from Grantham, of all places,’ she said, appalled.

Auntie Violet was sharp and pale of face, with beautiful arched eyebrows and a permanent wave in her hair which, despite its permanence, was frequently renewed. She had a neat upturned little nose, which you mentally labelled pert. She generally wore strings of beads which rattled across a generous bosom. Her flesh was pale and clear. She smelled delicious. Her clothes were bright, worn with belts which drooped over the upper reaches of her behind. Her shoes, at least at this moment, were bright red. You were fascinated by this flitting figure who drove to Omega in her own open-top tourer. Auntie Violet was married to your mother’s younger brother, Bertie Wilberforce.

Auntie Violet smoked cigarettes in a long amber holder. Her lips were red. She had another endearing trait: she liked small boys and, in particular, she liked giving you treats. She had brought you a wooden glider. You ran outside to fly it; it flew well and meant many excursions between the crisp stalks of the cornfield to retrieve it.

While you were flying your glider, your mother and your aunt had a quarrel. Somehow you perceived this as you returned to Omega. Auntie Violet stood smoking on the verandah, looking statuesque. She made a decision and said to you, ‘I do not neglect my children. I love my children. And I love you, Stevie dear.’ She bent and kissed you on the forehead. You were puzzled by this sudden display. You entered the bungalow to see your mother standing with her arms akimbo – always a bad sign.

While you were accustomed to your mother’s moods, there was another worry on your mind. Auntie Violet was staying overnight. Omega contained only two bedrooms and the spare bed was in your room. You would have Auntie Violet sleeping in the bedroom with you. You were unsure how you should behave in this situation. You knelt and said your prayers by your bedside every night, as your mother had taught you; somehow, instinct told you now that Auntie Violet did not kneel by her bedside to say her prayers. It might be advisable to skip prayers this evening. And you hoped that God would be understanding, although he did not seem to have been particularly understanding in the past. He seemed, like your mother, to be a bit moody.

Several years later, when your auntie was thinking of committing suicide, she told you a remarkable story, which was to haunt much of your life. She said that for an hour or two she and your mother were not talking to each other. She looked hard at you and said that she was in your bedroom until the storm blew over, when the phone rang in the main room. Your mother had picked up the phone. Auntie Violet had listened to the conversation, and concluded that it was your father, your cold and distant father, who was on the other end of the line.

According to Violet, your mother said, ‘Yes, high tide was at about a quarter-to-four today … no, no, he came back as usual … we hope for better things tomorrow … it is likely to be windier, so the sea should be choppier … I can’t do anything more, sorry … No, he doesn’t mind being alone there … no, no one … if he was you know, it would of course be a regrettable accident … Don’t worry. As you say, hope for the best. I don’t want to discuss it … Good-bye.’

That is what your Auntie Violet told you she overheard your mother saying.

Your Auntie Violet was alarmed by the deductions she drew from this one-sided conversation. She believed it meant you were in grave danger. She did not know what to do and so she did nothing.

You were called for supper. Your mother instructed you to behave as Valerie would have behaved. You sat quietly at the table and ate your mackerel, mashed potato and mange touts. Your mother and Auntie Violet drank white wine from South Africa. They made polite conversation. The brass lamp with the frosted white shade shed a comfortable glow over the woven tablecloth.

You had been taught not to hum with pleasure as you ate.

The dessert was pineapple slices and cream. You luxuriated in the taste of pineapple, although it sometimes made your lips rough. You lingered over it. The meal being finished, your mother made Violet and herself some tea. She unfortunately brought up the case of the golden thing she said you pretended to have seen on the beach.

‘I didn’t pretend. I did see it,’ you said.

‘There’s no such creature as this golden thing,’ your mother responded.

‘Perhaps he really did see something if he says so,’ remarked Auntie Violet, casting a smile in your direction.

‘You’ll just have to go back tomorrow and perhaps you’ll see it again,’ your mother said, rather snappishly. After a short while she suggested you go to bed.

As you lay in bed, you could hear the murmur of their voices in the next room. At last, the bedroom door quietly opened. You closed your eyes and pretended to sleep. Your Auntie Violet entered, carrying a candle in a blue metal holder with a broad rim, with which you were familiar. The candle flame flickered in the draught of her entry.

Your auntie set the candle down on the bedside table you shared between you. She looked over at you. You feigned sleep.

She undressed. Her fragrance came to you. There was a moment when she removed her panties, letting them slide to the ground, and you saw the smooth arc of her back shining in the candlelight, and the innocence of her buttocks. Something within you was obscurely touched. Then her nightdress slipped over her head.

As she climbed into bed, the springs of the bed squeaked. Her head was on the pillow. You imagined she was staring towards you, and squeezed your eyes more tightly shut.

‘Stephen,’ she called in a whisper.

In a minute, she called your name again. ‘Stevie.’

You sighed and turned over. It was very realistic. Then you sat up, to ask if she’d called you.

She said she knew you weren’t asleep. She invited you to go over to her bed and have a cuddle.

Although you wished to go, you protested that you wanted to get to sleep.

She laughed softly and told you not to be shy. Again she invited you across that narrow space between your beds.

You felt yourself blushing as you obeyed. She opened up the bed and you climbed in. She put her arms around you and hugged you. She blew out the candle. You were in darkness together, the two of you, with her fragrance and her body heat.

She kissed your neck. You felt her tender warmth and found it more beautiful than you could possibly imagine. Without knowing how you could dare to do it, you wriggled about and put your arms round her neck.

‘That’s more like it,’ she said. Her breath was adult, with flavours of nicotine and toothpaste.

You had no idea what to do next, although you felt something was required. She kissed you on your cheek, then lay there with her head on the pillow, her dark hair overflowing, and her lips against your cheek. You filled with happiness, only to find how like terror happiness is.

You blurted out that you loved her.

‘Good, my little darling,’ she said in a whisper. ‘And I love you.’

Slowly and gently, she fell asleep. You struggled to sleep for her warmth and beauty. But eventually you did sleep.

The next day, your bright and loving young auntie drove away from Omega. You stood with your mother and waved her goodbye. Because you were so young and dominated by your mother, you were unable to put your feelings into words; they swam in you like fish that never reached the surface. For that reason perhaps, you could never name them.

In the same way, this grave and joyful event became confused with the idea of the gold thing which came down from the sky, both events being seen as in someway ‘golden’. As time went by and you did not see anything more descending from heaven, you began questioning the truth of the experience, prompted perhaps by your mother’s disbelief. But you never doubted the truth of climbing into your auntie’s bed and being encompassed by her warmth and goodness. Indeed, in your adult life, whether consciously or not, you frequently sought to relive that transcendental experience in the beds of other women. It was only in those years of your childhood, when you were soon replaced by the baby girl to whom your mother shortly gave birth, that you sometimes wondered if your auntie had behaved out of a spirit of mischief, rather than a spirit of what you generally regarded as compassion.

Of course, as a four-year-old you were not clear about this matter. You never considered, as your aunt had done, that your parents had hoped to be rid of you by ‘accidental’ drowning. Only during Violet’s disquisition did you discover – and great was your dismay upon hearing it – that those long summer days of contentment, playing in solitude on the beaches of Walcot, were intended to be your last: for what caring parent would permit a small child to remain all alone for so long, in circumstances which by their very nature held danger for the unwary?

In your innocence, such thoughts did not occur to you. However, on one occasion they came close. You were playing in one of the warm pools that dotted the great beaches. Shrimps and little fish were floating by you. You tried to trap one fish with an idle hand. It stung your finger with unexpected intensity. The pain shot up your arm. You could not bear it. You needed your mother’s comfort.

Abandoning pail and spade, you ran back, nursing your hand, husbanding your tears, over the dunes, down Archibald Lane, to Omega. You ran inside, for the door was never locked.

Your mother had gone. No one was there. The bungalow was empty.

Mary’s mother, Granny Wilberforce, had been staying for two days. They had gone. Father had driven them off for a jaunt somewhere. The familiar car was not in the driveway. They had abandoned you to the sands and the tides.

You lay stunned on the sofa, waiting for their return. After an hour you grew ashamed, ashamed of yourself, ashamed of your parents. You crept away, back onto the beaches, so that their neglect was hidden from them.

Here’s an instance of your concealing your pain, isn’t it?

Why do you draw my attention to it?

Because it becomes a lifelong habit. A habit that makes some people find you difficult to understand. Do you see that now?

I never felt my parents troubled to understand their son. That was certainly a pain I strove to hide.

Tell me why.

I suppose I didn’t … didn’t want them to feel bad … Because … they already felt bad enough.

3
Almost Drowned

Quite late in your life there fell into your hands a leather-bound copy of the Holy Bible, which, you were told, had been owned by your paternal grandmother. This Bible had been a present from your grandfather to Elizabeth Harper when he was courting her. Later he would win Miss Harper’s hand in marriage. A label inserted in the preliminary pages of the Bible read, ‘From S.M.F. to Miss Elizabeth Harper as a token of his love’. And there was a date, May 1891.

The formality of this message enclosed within the pages of a Bible convinced you of the solemnity of a Victorian courtship. Possibly it also spoke of something slightly stiff in the character of your grandfather.

The evidence of your father’s courtship of your mother was hardly more substantial, obscured as it was by the advent of war. Even before the Victorian Age was over, the nations of Europe were arming themselves against one other. In another August, an August graver than the one we have been discussing, war broke out after a shot was fired in Sarajevo. One by one, the nations were drawn towards the flame. Soon, all of Europe was at war. And your father was of an age to volunteer to fight. So the story went that young Martin Fielding became a pilot in the Royal Flying Corps, which at a later date became the Royal Air Force. He flew in Sopwith Camels, first of all on the Western Front and then in Mesopotamia. He shot down three German planes and became an air ace, with his picture in the Daily Graphic.

When Martin’s plane crashed he was injured and spent some months in a hospital in Cairo – ‘Cairo of all places’, as your mother was frequently to say thereafter. In 1918, with the war ending, he was brought home on a troopship. The troopship moored a mile outside Southampton harbour, the troops fretting over the delay about getting ashore. It is here that Martin emerges from being ‘Mentioned in Despatches’ and becomes part of the folklore of your family. Martin dived off the troopship and swam ashore, in his impatience to meet again Miss Mary Wilberforce, to whom he was engaged. Another reason for his rebellious act was that he had become politicized by his wartime experiences. He had experienced the great division between men and officers and became a Socialist.

Mary Wilberforce lived in a sleepy cathedral town outside London. It was her younger brother, Bertie, who was later to marry your Aunt Violet; her older brother, Ernest, was killed in the Battle of the Somme. You can understand that all over Europe, people were scuttling everywhere, trying to pick up the threads of their lives, hoping to restore a normality that had vanished and would never return to the world.

Mary Wilberforce married Martin Fielding in May of 1919. Many marriages must have taken place in that year, as people strove to put the horrors of the war behind them and reconstruct their lives. You may ask why, if Martin was in such a hurry to get ashore and claim his ladylove, the marriage was delayed for almost a year. Certainly Martin, your father, had been injured in the war, but the wound had healed sufficiently to enable him to swim that mile from ship to shore. It seems not unlikely that he was suffering from some other type of malady, possibly picked up during his weeks of recuperation in the city of Cairo.

Although your father had to give up flying, he did not lose his love of aviation. In 1924, the year you were born, Imperial Airways undertook a commercial programme of flights across the world. Martin worked for Imperial before moving to Vickers Aviation, where Bertie Wilberforce was also employed. Bertie was a pilot. Bertie flew a Vickers ‘Victoria’, a troop-carrying plane, to Kabul in Afghanistan in 1929, rescuing six hundred people threatened by revolution there.

Martin was active in trade unionism, determined to obtain better pay and conditions for the workers. He made himself unpopular and moved to another company on the South Coast. The family went with him.

Omega was to be sold.

‘We have to make sacrifices now and again,’ said Martin, consolingly, to his weepy wife.

The last summer spent at Walcot was during the nineteen-thirties, when war clouds were gathering and the voice of the dictator of Germany was growing louder and shriller. You had a small, lively sister, Sonia, by that time. Your mother accompanied Sonia and you down to the beach. Your father was also there, during one of his increasingly rare visits. Politics taking up more of his time, he was a candidate to become Socialist Member of Parliament for the New Forest constituency on the south coast, following the death of Bernie Hale, the previous incumbent.

While Sonia and you played on the newly revealed stretch of beach, your parents sat nearby on deck chairs. Both were fully dressed; your father, you remember, wore highly polished brown shoes. They always kept anxious eyes on Sonia who, in consequence, was nervous, and did not like to splash in the deeper pools. You were absorbed some distance away, chasing a small crab with your shrimping net. The intense murmuring silences of the sea were broken by Sonia’s shrieks and your father’s shouts at you. You caught the crab in your net before turning.

Sonia was lying on her back a few feet away, her hair in a shallow pool. She was crying in terror. Your father was ordering you to go to her aid. You popped the crab in your rubber pail and then ran over to her. While helping her to her feet, you could not understand why she had not got up of her own accord.

Your father was furious with you. ‘Why didn’t you hurry? Sonia could have drowned!’

‘No, she couldn’t. Her face was not in the water.’

He clenched his fist. ‘She almost drowned.’

‘No, she didn’t, dad, really.’

‘Don’t you argue with me, boy!’

‘I’m just saying her face –’

‘She was helpless. You didn’t care one bit, you little wretch.’

‘I rescued her, didn’t I?’

‘Go back to the bungalow at once! Get off the beach! Go away!’

After tipping your crab back into the warm pool, you made your way up the beach.

‘Come back, Stevie!’ called Sonia. ‘I’m all right! Really I am!’

You did not turn your head. You made your way down Archibald Lane without a tear. You went into Omega and settled down to read a book. You never in your childhood saw the beaches of Walcot again.

4
An Absolute Slave

Of course there were other Wilberforces, other Fieldings.

You recall various splurges with some of them, and with other friends of yours – indeed, splurges too with strangers. Splurges when you were half-boy, half-adult, ending up in Indian restaurants, swilling down glasses of Kingfisher lager, showing off, laughing ‘fit to bust’.

You remember going off to pee one time, almost falling down the steep steps to Avernus, into the reeking, hot basement, realizing you were drunk, staggering, running your dirty hand over the dirty walls to steady yourself. Alien territory, sopping towels lying exhausted on the floor, doors marked successively STAFF, PRIVATE, LADIES, KEEP OUT. A fellow rushing by, throwing out a look of contempt as you were already unzipping, ready for the outpouring. GENTS, it said. And you smelt the urine/disinfectant smell like soup spilt on an oilcloth table cover. You tossed away in disgust from between your lips the half-puffed fag. It fell on the red-tiled floor. You directed a first splash at it to put it out, laughing weakly, then directing all your energy to the hard squirt into the china bowl, in which sodden things lay. You used your penis like a hose, amused to direct it to splash right up the wall. It writhed in your fingers, glad as a puppy for its master’s touch.

You did not know then that a time would come when you would climb unsteadily down those same stairs, to that same urinal, this time going slowly, hobbling even, the frayed remnant of what you cherished proudly long ago already leaking into your trousers in anticipation and then, when you make it to the sordid bowl, unable to produce anything but an irregular drip. You would lean your arm against the wall and your head against your arm and you would spit into the yellow trail below. You would not be miserable exactly. You would just know that you had run out of spark and spunk and steam, and would be sort of semi-glad of it. But all this awaits you in the future.

You and all your pals.

Early in life you saw what old age and its captivities meant. You were fortunate, in that respect, to escape.

You mean I will not become a prisoner in my old age?

That is not my meaning exactly.

What do you mean?

Let us continue with your timelife story.

You worry me. What do you mean?

No, you do not worry. That’s just a figure of speech. You will become old but never reach extreme old age.

You had a girlfriend at this period, as young as you but with plenty of female assurance. Her name was Gale Roberts, a rather cinematic name which bestowed glamour on her. Her mother was a big, hearty woman, who liked to praise things in general. She called you ‘sensible’. When she despatched you and Gale to visit her Uncle Norman and his wife, Tamsin, she described their tragedy in enthusiastic terms.

‘She’s totally incapacitated, poor darling thing! She bears her misfortune so nobly. And my brother – well, Norman’s such a sweetie-pie! Of course, an absolute slave to Tammy, an absolute slave, he does everything, but everything for her. As you’ll see, my dear.’

The visit proved a memorable one.

Tamsin Roberts had ‘broken her back’, as the phrase had it, when crossing a road in France and encountering a slow-moving vehicle. She suffered complex fractures of several vertebrae. Both Robertses were in their early fifties; to you they seemed vastly old. They lived in a small terraced house, the upper floor of which they let out.

When you rang the bell, Norman peeped out before nodding and letting you both in.

‘Just doing a spot of cleaning,’ he said with a laugh that affected at once to laugh at himself and to explain the floral apron he was wearing. Norman was a small, dry man with a sandy moustache and a large red nose. He clutched a yellow duster.

Tamsin was confined to an armchair in what had been their dining room, where she could gaze out at the small garden. Now she got her meals on a tray. Her husband, Gale’s uncle, looked after her, doing everything for her; dressing her, undressing her, shopping and cooking for her.

Somehow they remained cheerful. The radio was always on. They kept two cats, Mike and Snippets, both tabbies. The cats hung about in picturesque positions on items of furniture, the one on the piano, the other on a side table. When they moved, they moved carefully about the little crowded room, full of its small tables, its china figures and its potted plants.

Gale presented the Roberts with a cake her mother had baked. They chatted of small things. Tamsin spoke in a flat voice, but appeared cheerful enough. Norman said he pushed her up the street and back in her wheelchair every day, when all the neighbours came out to speak to them.

‘What a lot they are,’ said Tamsin, looking slightly humorous as she referred to the neighbours.

As you and Gale were about to leave, Norman ushered you out, saying, ‘Careful how you go. Mind the ironing board. I’ve just got to iron one of Tammy’s nighties. I’ll just shut the kitchen door. We love the cats so much; we don’t want them to escape. We never let them go outside.’

So off the two of you went, carefree and skipping up the street, Gale swinging her mother’s wicker shopping basket. You were getting to the stage when you might dare to kiss Gale.

‘So what do you make of that pair of old crocks?’ Gale asked.

‘Your uncle’s very good with Tamsin. Life can’t be much fun for him.’

Gale sat down on a low wall, adjusting her dress so that first you saw a lot of thigh and then none. ‘I reckon uncle enjoys being prison warden.’ She spoke carelessly.

‘Prison warden? How do you make that out?’ You stood in front of her, your trousers all but touching her knees. ‘I thought he was her slave. Isn’t that the general idea?’

She tossed a lock of dark hair from her eyes. It immediately fell back into its original position, its lowest strands to rest on her rosy cheek. ‘You heard what he said – about the cats, I mean. He loves the cats but is afraid they may escape. So they are stuck for ever in the house. Could be he feels the same about her.’

‘You mean he feels Tamsin might escape?’

‘Maybe he used to. You can see how insecure he is. He’s glad she is stuck in that chair, unable to get away from him.’

Such a concept had not occurred to you. The novelty, the secrecy of it, thrilled you in some way. ‘But what does she feel?’

Gale sighed and looked up at you with a contemplative air. ‘Work it out for yourself. Could be she likes being a prisoner. She was always a bit valetudinarian, even when she was young – like her mum.’

‘So you’re saying they get on okay?’

‘I’m saying it may not be the way it looks, with them both being miserable. Just could be it even suits them.’

‘But you can’t ask them –’

She reached out and touched your hand. ‘Of course you can’t ask them, silly!’

‘What a bugger that you can’t ask them straight out.’

But your mind was not really on that mystery of human relationships; it centred more on Gale’s pretty, moist lips. You leant forward, clutched her shoulders and kissed her.

The world turned to gold dust about you.

You often wondered what sort of person Valerie had been in her short life. After the visit to the Roberts’ house, you found reason to wonder about yourself. You had gone on this rather boring – as you initially saw it – visit to an invalid, simply to be near Gale. You were well aware of the life of the senses, even if, at that early age, you stood as yet high and dry on its shores. You were also aware of another life, one that might hinder or distract you from the sensual oceans represented by the tepid lake of Gale Roberts, and that was one to which she herself had directed your attention: the life of human motivation, so cunning, so unfathomable.

For which way had it been in the invalid’s semi-detached home? Was old Norman the slave or the captor? Was she the dominatrix or the prisoner? Only slowly, as you sat upstairs in your bedroom, gazing blankly at the painting of birds quietly despoiling a wheat harvest, did it occur to you that both interpretations, such was the complexity of the human psyche, could be simultaneously viable.

Yet never did it occur to you that there were parallels here with your own unresolved dilemma; the Walcot problem.

5
‘Bloody Cripples!’

When Martin joined Short’s, another aviation company, the family followed him to Southampton, where Short Brothers was based. You saw little of your father. Politics kept him busy.

You remember an occasion when he had been addressing a small group of men on a street corner. He came home and told you that a policeman had appeared and said to him, gently but firmly, ‘Move along there, there’s a good lad.’

Your father had asked why he should move along. The bobby had replied, ‘Because I say so, sir, if you don’t mind.’

Your father was furious at this demonstration of power.

Looking back, you regret the disappearance of this kind of policing.

Your early existence was trapped between the two world wars, your later one by the Cold War. Your father provided constant reminders of the first war. The injury to his leg pained him continually; the broken bone had been badly set in the first place, and had to be re-broken and re-set. Throughout your boyhood, he was in and out of hospital. The aggravation increased his bitterness and his silence.

‘Does your poor leg hurt very much, Daddy?’ you asked him on one occasion, perhaps trying to curry favour.

‘We all have to make sacrifices,’ he said. It had become a favourite expression.

‘Do you have to sacrifice us?’ Sonia asked. As the spoilt one, she dared to criticize.

In fact, Martin had been lucky. He had survived the prolonged Battle of the Somme, a battle in which a million men had died – Germans, French and British – owing to a well-timed attack of pneumonia.

Your home was not generously provided with books. You remember one book in particular from those early days; it was bound in half-leather and consisted of twelve volumes: The Daily Telegraph History of the Great War. Through an absorbed study of those volumes, you gained an insight into the various hells through which your father had suffered and through which humankind put one another.

One painting reproduced in that book almost destroyed you with pity. The scene was in France; the ruins of a French town could be discerned mistily in the distance. In the foreground lay a wounded horse. It had to be left behind by the troops. The troops could be seen in the background, beckoning to a figure in the middle ground to hurry up and join them. But the figure in the middle ground lingered. His hand was raised in sad farewell to his horse. He it was who provided the caption to the picture: ‘Farewell, old friend!’

You were inconsolable. You cried and cried until your mother became angry and left you to weep. The argument that this was ‘only a painting’ carried no weight with you, for you felt certain it was a representation of something that could have happened, where the innocent suffered along with the wicked.

Surely at that time, one of your admirable qualities was born and fortified: compassion.

For the first thirteen months of the family’s removal to Southampton, you all stayed in a rented flat. Your father and mother could not find a house on which they could get a mortgage that they liked enough to buy. You were allotted a small room in the attic, where you were probably better situated than were the other members of the family. Sonia had a small room overlooking a banana importer’s yard. The wallpaper was violently colourful and featured the endlessly reduplicated image of an animal with big ears driving a little red car. To this Sonia took strident objection.

‘I hate it! I hate it! Take it away. It’s horrid.’

‘You’ll soon get used to it, darling,’ Mary had said, wearily. ‘This was a child’s room and, after all, you are a child, you know.’

Sonia screamed in response to this apparent injustice. ‘I am not that kind of a child. I am a child hunchback! A famous child hunchback! I’m special. I can’t sleep with this horrid thing hanging on the wall.’

‘Valerie would love that wallpaper! Please don’t be troublesome, dear.’

‘It’s not me. It’s the wallpaper.’

But Sonia had to put up with it. And there in that flat you spent a confined Christmas. Before you had your presents, Mary insisted on crimping Sonia’s hair. Protest as Sonia might, the tongs, the crimping paper, were brought to bear, and soon her chestnut locks were covered with waves like a sea of frozen gravy. The scorching smell still lingered round her head even when you sat down to dinner later that day.

Wished upon you was a girl of twelve, bigger than you and even more sulky, a girl of twelve with pigtails, by name Joan Pie. Martin had joined the local trade union. One of his docker friends had been struck by a falling girder. He was lying in hospital after a shoulder operation and his wife was ill, so Martin had generously volunteered to have Joan Pie come to stay with you all over Christmas and Boxing Day.

‘I don’t want to sit next to her,’ Sonia said, after one second’s inspection of the visitor. ‘She’s a pig.’

‘Ooh, snooty!’ said Joan Pie, and poked her tongue out at Sonia.

‘Behave yourselves,’ Mary ordered. But from then on, you two youngsters had conceived a hatred of this intruder into your uncomfortable quarters. You and Sonia were immediately united against her.

You asked your sister at the dinner table if she had ever heard of such a funny name as Pie. ‘Fly is silly too,’ Sonia said in a judicious manner. She asked the visitor, ‘Do you know anyone called Fly, Pie?’

‘Stop that, or I’ll make you get down,’ said Martin from his side of the table.

Now Mary was slicing and serving the Christmas pudding, doing it with slow care. You watched the operation like a hawk, alert for injustice.

Your plate with a slice of pudding was set down before you. Next, Joan Pie was served. Then Sonia. Suddenly, your mother exclaimed. Leaning forward, she rapidly switched your plate with Sonia’s.

You were angry at once. ‘Why did you do that?’

Mary waved her hands about. ‘I gave you the wrong plates, that’s all. Nothing else. Have some custard, Stevie.’

‘How were they wrong?’

‘Just be grateful for what you’ve got,’ Martin said, sternly.

‘Yes, be grateful for what you’ve got,’ echoed Joan Pie, giving Martin a silly look, seeking his approval.

‘You’ve got a bigger piece of pudding now, Stephen, so be quiet,’ said Mary. ‘Valerie would never complain as you do.’

You subsided. The Bird’s custard circulated in its little boat. You all ate in silence. Christmas pudding, dark, reluctant to crumble, heavy as mud, comprising many unknown things, bizarrely pleasing and quelling to the taste buds, a thing of the Stone Age. Eaten once a year like a human sacrifice.

Sonia gave a shriek and plunged her fingers into the sodden mass on her plate.

‘Look! I’ve got it!’ She waved a little bright object, to which a squashed currant adhered. ‘A sixpence! I’ve found a sixpence.’

You burst into tears. Well, you were only eight.

Only eight, but a bit of a baby.

You perceived that you had been swindled. It was a case of naked favouritism – And a reminder to me that I had been born into an unjust world.

No, the world has its invariable laws. It is human society which has established injustice.

Don’t tell me any more. I don’t want to remember –

It is necessary to remember, and to proceed.

After the meal, you had indoor fireworks. You and your sister loved indoor fireworks. There were paper mazes to which Martin applied his glowing cigarette end at the position marked ‘Start’, at which a spark went racing across the blank spaces to a destination it celebrated with quite a loud crack. There were sparklers you could hold and wave in dazzling patterns. There were folded papers that burnt into pretty ferns. There were flimsy paper cylinders to which you applied a lighted match and, as the paper burned down, magically rose and ascended to the ceiling. And there were snakes.

How you both loved the snakes.

By this time, you were in a better mood to enjoy the snakes. To comfort you, Sonia had whispered that she would share the sixpence, giving you half. Still grieving over the injustice, you had responded grumpily that it was your sixpence.

‘It’s not yours, it’s mine, ’cos I’ve got it,’ said Sonia, with some logic. ‘So for that I’ll only give you twopence.’

‘That’s not fair!’

‘And if you don’t shut up, you’ll only get a penny, so there.’

The snakes came in two kinds. One form of snake emerged from a volcano. The volcano was very small and encased in green ‘silver paper’. It stood on a circular cardboard base. When the peak of the volcano was lit, little green flecks, closely resembling grass, poured from it, covering the base. Finally, the snake emerged, writhing realistically as it came. It was thin but, with what seemed like evil intent, it crossed the grass as if to attack. Then, mercifully, it froze.

Sonia and you were enraptured. But Joan Pie said, contemptuously, ‘It didn’t do much.’

‘It would have bitten you if it could,’ you told her.

‘Stephen!’ Martin said, reprovingly. ‘You be nice to Joan or you’ll go up to your room.’

The other kind of snake was bigger and more terrifying. That was why you liked it better than the grass snake.

This snake, possibly a python, was concealed in a small, black top hat. This Christmas, Martin had discovered a cardboard box full of the little top hats, left over from the previous year by the last tenant of the flat. You clapped your hands with excitement at the sight of so many hats.

‘How Valerie would have loved them,’ Mary exclaimed wistfully.

Your father set one of them on the table near the grass snake, struck a match and tried to light it. The hat would not burn. Martin burnt his finger instead, and swore.

‘Try another match, daddy,’ shouted Sonia, full of anticipation.

He struck another one, but it also failed to ignite the hat, and again he burnt his finger.

‘Don’t be daft, Martin,’ Mary said. ‘You can see they’re old and damp. You’ll only burn yourself.’

Perhaps he was annoyed to be called daft. He took the box of top hats and flung it onto the coal fire, which heated his end of the room. You and Sonia groaned your disappointment. Joan Pie stuck her tongue out at you both, enjoying your dismay. But the box caught fire. The next minute, a dozen huge black pythons came uncoiling out of the fire and across the hearth to the carpet. What a sight! Sonia gave a yelp of delight. Joan Pie ran from the room, howling with fear.

What a sight! What a triumph!

Your father seemed always to be standing, holding forth in those days, despite his bad leg. He was a big man, generally to be seen in a tight-fitting Aertex shirt. He had a broad face and steely eyes. His lips were generally compressed, as if with anger against the injustices of the world.

You remembered an occasion when your parents had been having what you thought of as ‘a cold row’. Few words were spoken during their cold rows, but there was plenty of body language, of glaring of eyes and turning of backs. Your father had said, ill-advisedly, that his Socialist principles had been formed because he was shocked to find families like his wife’s in penury.

‘The Wilberforces’ lot was much more humble than the Fieldings’,’ he said.

‘I wouldn’t say that,’ Mary protested, stiff of face. She liked to think she came from ‘respectable stock’. ‘We weren’t too badly off. When I was fifteen Dad had an indoor lavvy tacked on.’

A recital of your antecedents made you dizzy. It seemed to you that these dead people all became middle-aged shortly after their thirtieth birthdays, that they died in their fifties or sixties, and that they were poor in ways forgotten in the more prosperous present – your present.

‘Take your mother’s family,’ Martin said, directing his words at you and glaring through you into the past. ‘Zachariah Frost was grandfather to your grandfather. Where he came from, heaven knows, but his parents must have been extremely poor, since the story has come down that they had to remove Zachariah from school because they were unable to provide the halfpenny a week required to keep him there.

‘A ha’penny! Think of that, Stephen!’ He shot a corrective glance at you, huddled in an armchair with a comic.

You thought of it. You knew ha’pennies. They had the last king’s head on one side of them and a sailing ship on the other. Those coins were often worn thin with usage, having passed through innumerable pockets.

‘Zachariah became a cobbler,’ Martin continued. ‘He married one Jane Wilberforce. They lived in a small house in Brick Street, Newbury. Although she was a scraggy little thing, by all accounts, they produced two girls and two boys. The kids were brought up on jam butties. They were all Baptists – Buttie Baptists – and went to chapel every Sunday.’

‘They were always religious,’ Mary said, defensively. She was making a cloth cover in which to keep the week’s Radio Times.

‘One of those girls died aged three. A common fate in those days. Rickets, probably.’

‘We used to have soap flakes called Ricketts,’ your mother exclaimed, unable not to enjoy talk of the old days, despite the offence she had taken. Your father ignored her remark.

‘Then the other girl, Hettie, her name was, she ran off with a foreigner and went to the Continent and was never heard of again.’

‘I ’spec she wanted to escape the family,’ said Sonia.

‘Getting above herself, more like,’ said Mary. ‘The Continent! Of all places! Fancy!’

Father remarked in an aside that Paris must have been better than Portsmouth.

‘One of Zachariah’s boys was known as “Flash Harry”. They say in the family that Flash Harry seduced the vicar’s daughter. In any case, he went to fight the Boers and died in some horrible spot of Africa.

‘The other Frost brother got a job in Utterson’s, the hardware merchant. His name was Ernie, Ernie Frost. You picture him and his like in rough black suits, wearing caps when out on the street, where most of the lads like him spent much of their spare time.’

‘Why was that?’ you asked. You failed to see the attraction of streets.

He shrugged. ‘Where else could they go in those days? Besides, the houses were so pokey –’

Ernie had the urge to improve himself. He rejected his surname, Frost, on the grounds that it was unappealing. He changed his name by deed poll to his mother’s maiden name of Wilberforce. It was a rejection of all that cobbling and grubbing for the last farthing.

‘Next, Ernie took up the banjo. He hired himself out to sing and play at parties. He had no wish to live forever in the back streets with a shared thunderbox. He had a daguerreotype taken of himself in a straw boater, strumming the banjo. Your mother can show it you. He must have been quite a lad, young Ernie. Leaving Utterson’s at the age of nineteen, he became the delivery man for Ross, the big Newbury grocer. He worked hard and was reliable. Pretty soon, he was driving about in a pony and trap, delivering the groceries to the better houses of the district.

‘That was how he met the young lady who played the organ at the Baptist chapel in Brink, just outside Newbury. Her name was Sarah Ream. She was a shy lass, though not without spirit, and she couldn’t resist Ernie’s charm and jollity. He coaxed Sarah to play piano accompaniment while he strummed the banjo and sang.’

‘Oh, and they say that my mother never went near the chapel again,’ Mary interposed, caught somewhere between shame and pride.

‘Anyhow, Ernie and Sarah became a duo, quite stylish! The duo became quite fashionable. He wrote a song entitled I Stand and Play My Banjo in the Strand. It was printed as sheet music, and was very popular for a time.’

Your father sang, looking genial.

‘The girls all fall for me

They ask me home for tea,

They think I’m grand.

They didn’t ought to risk it

’Cos they know I take the biscuit

When I stand and play me banjo in the Strand,

Hey ho! I stand and play me banjo in the Strand.’

Sonia clapped the performance. Mary looked pleased and said she loved that old song.

‘Ernie and Sarah got married and went to live in 33, Park Road. Although Ernie had no “background”, as people used to say, his ease of manner served him well. With the help of local Baptists, he soon acquired four houses in Park Road. He became a man of substance and was appointed secretary of the local Baptist Church. He was never afraid of work, was Ernie. Sarah became director of the local Waifs and Strays House –’

So there you were, the fatal family four of you, in the cramped room. A light fitting hung centrally overhead, like the God in which you all more or less believed at that period. It was the only light in the room. On a side table stood the wireless, the only wireless in the house. A coal fire burned in the grate. On the mat in front of the grate lay a rug, and on that rug centrally stood your father, holding forth, as fathers did in those days, before they were deposed.

‘Sarah and Ernie produced five children: first of all three boys, and then two girls, of which your dear Mother was the last to be born.’

Martin cast Mary an affectionate, if patronizing, glance as he mentioned her. The cold row was over.

‘You can imagine that Ernie’s increasing prosperity was shared by many of the lower classes at that time. Only four of your generations ago, Steve, listen to this, most people in England lived the sort of life Zachariah Frost lived; ill-educated, hand-to-mouth, having too many kids, dying young. Change since then has been incalculable, mainly thanks to the rise of Socialism.’

Socialism always backed science.

‘These three Frost, or Wilberforce, sons formed an architectural partnership. Things were looking up. The town itself was expanding. The partnership built many of the rows of houses in which a new generation of engineers and artisans and other workers lived. It’s all in the records. The sons all married young. They needed wives for social purposes. You’ll remember your Uncle Jeremy and Auntie Flo’s little house, with its cheerful geranium window boxes?’

You did remember it. Uncle Jeremy’s house was full of heavy furniture. The rooms smelt of mothballs. Sombre engravings of Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow and similar improving subjects hung on the walls in heavy frames. Jeremy and Flo employed a little servant girl called Ann.

When you were taken visiting to the house, you used to run off to see Ann. She lived in the gloomy rear of the house until called. Ann was nice to you. Ann would even do a cute little dance for you. Ann was of obscure origin, probably illegitimate. She was quick and ardent, always smiling. What secret sorrows were hers you never knew. Nor did her employers enquire. Many feelings natural to earlier generations were necessarily repressed in the name of progress. When Ann finally climbed, late at night, to her tiny cabin in the attic, no one knew or thought to know what eternities of hope or disappointment she underwent there.

‘Then the war came,’ Martin went on, although this was on another occasion, just after your pet rabbit died. ‘1914. I’ll never forget the date. August 1914. It was royalty brought the war about. The blinking Crowned Heads of Europe! The war gradually ground into action, swallowing up young men all over Europe and far beyond. Among those cast into the maw of this monster were the three brothers of the architectural partnership; your uncles, poor buggers.’

‘Martin!’ exclaimed Mary, reprovingly.

‘I said beggars. Off they bravely went – Bertie, Jeremy and Ernest, Sarah shedding motherly tears as she waved them off on the train.’

‘My poor mother! What she went through!’

‘Two of the lads were captured by the Germans and spent most of the war in an Oflag. The third one, Ernie – a handsome youth of twenty-one – stopped a bullet at Passchendaele and died on the spot.’

‘It was the Somme, of all places,’ said Mary. ‘I ought to know. He got shot in the Somme offensive. August 1916.’

‘The Somme,’ cried Sonia, bored with talk of war. ‘That was where I got my hunchback.’ She was sitting huddled in an armchair with Gyp, our Airedale, sprawling on her lap. Suddenly she threw Gyp off. ‘I’m going to have an operation to get it removed.’

‘Do stop that nonsense,’ your mother scolded her. ‘Valerie would never say anything like that.’

The dog sat and scratched himself, staring at Sonia with a look of amazement. Everyone was amazed by Sonia.

Martin pressed grimly on with his account.

‘They say Ernie fell face down in the mud, was trampled over, got buried in it – never to play his banjo in the Strand again. Sarah, his widow, never remarried, poor lass.’

‘She set up a teashop with a lady companion. It stood on what’s now the Southampton Road,’ said Mary. ‘Valerie and I often used to go there in the old days.’

‘The other two brothers, Bert and Jeremy, returned unharmed at the end of the war. Jeremy rejoined his Flo – her folks were no one much – and Bertie married Violet from Grantham, a member of the smart Parkins family. The Parkinses manufactured the latest thing in lawnmowers for the upwardly mobile generations. Violet is a bit of a goer – I’d say out of Bertie’s class.’

‘Don’t say that,’ Mary exclaimed. ‘I wouldn’t trust Violet further than I could throw her!’

Contemplating the idea of anyone throwing any aunties anywhere, Sonia burst into laughter. Her mother hushed her.

‘Any road, at Violet’s prompting, Bertie ceased to pursue his architectural career. He became instead a stunt pilot. Violet thought that was much more glamorous. He flew with Sir Alan Cobham’s Air Display, touring the country and delighting audiences with his daring. Jeremy remained with the architectural business, sole owner. Bedazzled by his young wife, skittish Flo, he began to neglect his work. Gradually the business went downhill. Bertie finally gave up his flying and joined the sinking business. He and Jeremy built that little Baptist chapel down Greenacres Road.’

You imagined that old Zachariah Frost was a refugee from some starving stretch of the country, where life for the poor was even harder than life in the towns. Sonia drew a picture of him in crayon: a terrible old man with a big, hook nose and a hump on his back. Martin snatched up the paper and was furious at what he saw.

‘You should show some respect, girl!’

Sonia jumped up, stamping her foot. She grabbed the paper back.

‘It’s me! It’s not him! It’s me, dressed up. Mind your own business.’

You would never have dared speak to your father like that. It would have provoked a beating.

‘We’ve never had hunchbacks in our family,’ Martin said. He enjoyed telling you and your sister about the family history. You listened more passively than Sonia. But you, like her, were obsessed with your appearance. Shutting yourself in your north-facing bedroom, you would stare at your face in the looking glass. Eyes of an indeterminate colour. But were you not rather aristocratic, by and large? Possibly lantern-jawed? What was a lantern jaw? Did it shine like a lantern? Lantern-jawed. You spent hours practising being lantern-jawed, walking round the room being lantern-jawed.

And still your father did his best to educate you in family history.

‘We Fieldings became more prosperous earlier than did the Frosts,’ Martin said. ‘In the parish records, William Fielding comes into the picture with dates attached. Born in the eighteen-forties. His wife Isabelle – Isabelle Doughty, she was – was from the superior Norfolk family of Doughtys. Isabelle bore William seven children, no less. William himself was one of nine children, two of whom were daughters. Two of William’s brothers died at sea.’

‘We still have a record somewhere of the death of one of the brothers, James. James Fielding was Chief Petty Officer of the ship Montgomery. He died of a fever off the Grand Banks, aged twenty-five. A fine young man. His body was committed to the deep.’

Your father spoke these last words in a deep voice, as if to convey the depth of the ocean involved.

‘What are the Grand Banks actually, Daddy?’ you asked.

‘Not the same as Barclay’s Bank.’ Perhaps he thought he had made a joke. ‘No, the Grand Banks are off Newfoundland, and covered permanently in fog.’

‘Did they push him over the side when he was dead?’ Sonia asked. It was the first time she had shown any real interest in the account.

‘His coffin was lowered over the side with all due reverence.’ Martin gave his Aertex shirt a tug, as if to demonstrate.

‘It may have been these deaths that persuaded William to settle in Swaffham and open a chemist’s shop instead of going to sea. One of his sons, my dad, your grandfather, Sydney Fielding, established a similar business in Horncastle. He combined a dentistry with his pharmacy. In Horncastle were born all of Sydney and Elizabeth’s children, one of them being none other than me, your father.’

Your mother was quite a bit younger than your father.

You feared him. He would beat you with a slipper even when you were small – say, two years old. After the beating, when your feelings were hurt as well as your behind, he would make you shake hands with him and declare that you were still friends. This you always did, fearing another beating if you didn’t, but you never ever felt he was your friend.

‘Never,’ you swore under your breath, accentuating the word by becoming momentarily lantern-jawed.

When your father was not angry, he was morose. You remember watching him staring moodily out of your front window at the street. A little band of wounded ex-servicemen was playing there, with trumpet, tambourine and penny whistle. A cap lay on the pavement at their feet. The old soldiers could muster only five eyes and four legs between the three of them. You would often stand and look at them with a kind of puzzled sympathy, until they told you to clear off. Your father regarded them icily through the window. He had no patience for those who did not, or could not, work.

‘Bloody cripples,’ he said, catching you staring at him. He had to fight against being a cripple himself, with his painful leg. Such disabled soldiers fell outside his socialist sympathies for the working man.

‘Work’s the saviour, young feller-m’-lad,’ he told you. He often called you ‘young feller-m’-lad’, as if he could not quite remember your name. Perhaps he thought that a new breed of men would have to appear before wars ceased; men without the savagery that begot wars. You know he sometimes spoke to your mother of how the world could be redeemed. How God should send his Son down again, pretty promptly, and alter everything; yet his words were empty of any real sense of belief.

And Mary would sniff and say that these were awful times they were living in.

‘It’s the end of the British Empire,’ Martin would respond. ‘India has let us down. Remember when the present king held his durbar in Delhi? What a show that was. Those times are gone for ever.’

‘Good old King George and Queen Mary,’ your mother exclaimed.

‘I’ve nothing against him, but what’s he ever done for the poor? Look at the miners.’

And Mary would say, rather despairingly, ‘Martin, couldn’t we just talk about happy things?’

‘Like what?’ your father would ask.

She would gesture. ‘Oh, can’t we ever laugh? I long for humour the way you long for a pork chop.’

‘You’re too superficial, that’s the trouble with you, dear.’

Your little sister, detecting something frosty in the air, perhaps another cold row brewing, would bang heartily on a tin tray with a spoon, while shrieking at the top of her voice her favourite swear word, ‘Shuggerybees!’

You often wondered where Sonia got her high spirits from.

You were barely in your teens when you bought a book for twopence off a market stall. It was called The Old Red Sandstone. You were attracted by the title –

I don’t remember it.

Yes, you do. Your father approved, because the book was written by a working man who became a geologist, a rare achievement in early Victorian times. What fascinated you were such dramatic passages as, ‘At this period in our history some terrible catastrophe involved the sudden destruction of the fish of an area at least a hundred miles from boundary to boundary, perhaps far more. It exhibits unequivocally the marks of violent death …’

Yes, I was thrilled by it, and by the idea of geology. Better than any fairy tale!

It was to play a part in your later life.

I don’t think so.

We shall see, shan’t we?

6
Earth Sciences

Before you were sent away to school – possibly the very reason why you were sent away to school – your remarkable sister Sonia had arrived in the world. Although she could never compare with Valerie, the perfect daughter, she immediately occupied your parents’ attention. Your mother doted on her, absorbing all her, somewhat fickle, attention.

Your father, meanwhile, disliked displays of emotion. Perhaps his war injury reinforced his withdrawn character. Ignoring socialist principles, he sent you away to a nearby public school as soon as possible.

One consolation in this form of exile was the weekly arrival of your favourite magazine, Modern Boy. In the pages of Modern Boy you followed the adventures of ‘Captain Castern of the South Seas’. Captain Mike Castern sailed a ketch about the Pacific Ocean. He had a crew of Kanakas, who would say of a dead man – and someone, generally wicked, died every week – things such as, ‘Dat man he go big sky blong Jesus.’

At school, you developed an eccentric habit. There were certain senior boys whose looks were so peculiar in your eyes that you christened them with sentences from books you had been reading. That fellow with the swollen red face, suffering from some variant of acne rosacea, you dubbed, ‘Morning dawned, red and angry’. Another fellow was ‘The burly janitor replied’. Another was a thin fellow with a downcast air; he was christened, ‘He watched it drain away without regret’. Another lumbering fellow was ‘One excellence I crave’; but he left school early.

A curious protocol about these phrases dictated that you had to utter them obsessively to yourself whenever you caught sight of the boy to whom they referred. Often – for instance when the whole school was filing into the school chapel – the phrases had to be mumbled quickly, one after the other. The habit served to distance yourself from the other boys. You had contracted a splinter of isolation from your father.

You gave other boys of your own age, with whom you were more closely associated, exotic secret names, known only to yourself. You may recall Pyrodee Nangees, Trevor Birdshit, Fizure, Georgie Suckletrot and Gaspar de Peckubee. And a dull-looking day boy who became simply Fartadoo.

This inventive turn of mind caused you also to form with a friend a secret clique of two, called ‘The Royal Society for the Overthrow of All Masters and the Government’. You and your friend were required to chant fifty times, ‘We the Murderers will Overthrow all stinking rotten Masters – pooh! – and the stinking rotten Gov’ment, too.’ The society flourished only for one term, to die of boredom since you were unable to dream up the means by which to execute your good intentions: although teams of well-trained cobras certainly entered into one of your proposals.

Following the example set by Hugh Miller’s The Old Red Sandstone, you took to reading the strange books with strange titles you found in the library: The Museum of Unconditional Surrender, Confessions of an English Opium Eater, On the Use of the Herb Slac, The Return of the Native (the native what, you wondered), and The End of the Imp, translated from the Russian.

Among the strange books you were reading, cheek-by-jowl with Captain Castern, was one entitled The Miscellaneous Writings of Sir Thomas Browne. This volume contained many curiosities, including a paper on certain fossil remains discovered at Winterton. Winterton was the first place at which Robinson Crusoe was shipwrecked. It lies on the North Norfolk coast, not very far from Walcot.

Browne, a seventeenth-century doctor, said: ‘Upon the same coaste, butt at some miles distance, divers great bones are sayd to have been found, & I have seen one side of a lower jaw containing very large teath petrified, farre exceeding the teeth of the biggest ox. It was found after a great flood neere to the cliff, some thousand loades of earth being broaken down by the rage of the sea.’

Thomas Browne was mystified, as were you, by these great bones. Many years later, in the nineteen-eighties, the fossilized skeleton of a mammoth was found near Weybourne. Browne’s animal was very likely a mammoth too, possibly from the same herd.

Your curiosity moved you to join a schools geological expedition in the summer holidays. A group of boys and masters were taken by ship to La Rochelle, from whence a coach conveyed you all inland to a small village called Beaussais. Outside Beaussais was an extensive dig, where the remains of a Roman villa that had been buried in an earthquake were being excavated. You all stayed in a small hotel just a kilometre away from the site.

The dig had been roped off. Topsoil, on which grass grew, lay in piles outside the ropes. All that had been revealed of the villa so far was a paved pathway with a broken pillar standing at one end of the path. To one side, a radial ditch had been dug, leading nowhere. Your companions were excited. You felt only disappointment; you do not know what you had been expecting. A revelation of some kind?

Your lack of enthusiasm was noticed by one of the masters superintending you. He was not from your school. His face was roughly the shape and colour of a plum. His hair was well-oiled and curly. He wore khaki shorts and heavy boots, with thin, hairy legs showing in the exposed area between them. His name was Mr Loftus.

‘Have you no interest in Roman villas?’ he asked.

You thought, what was another Roman villa? but could not articulate the thought. You hung your head.

‘A mile from here there’s a more interesting site, where a meteorite struck. Would you be interested in looking at that?’

His dark eyes regarded you rather contemptuously.

‘Yes,’ you said, although something in your head warned you to say no.

You went with Mr Loftus, following him up the slope. The ground was broken and stony. No trees grew, only clumps of bracken and furze; it was a landscape scraped bare.

Looking ahead at Mr Loftus’s hairy legs working their way onwards, and Mr Loftus’s boots, clumping along on your eye level, you conceived a hatred for all boots, reflecting that those who had power – the power represented by the boots – could do whatever they liked. You felt it to be your destiny always to be on an eye level with boots, plod, plod, plodding: boots with their studs, with their horseshoe-shaped metal shodding. There was a feeling in your stomach, totally unformed by intellect, that in only a few years – three at most – the world would be full of the clamour of metal-shod marching boots.

All your concerns about bursting into adulthood, a butterfly from a chrysalis – about how your career would go, about how you would earn money, about whether your friends liked you or secretly despised you – all those concerns would be kicked away by the legions of boots that even then were preparing to march in Germany, and out of Germany into neighbouring countries.

I am surprised you know what I thought then. I hardly knew my own thoughts.

They were deep within me.

You are not surprised. Nothing can surprise you here.

Yes, but those unspoken thoughts.

They were recorded. There are no privacies, no surprises here.

You climbed for about an hour before the ground levelled off. Mr Loftus continued to plod on, while you stopped to look at the view. From your vantage point, the country in the main looked flat. To the north, the serpentine bends of the river Niortaise gleamed in the sunshine. More distantly, the higher ground of the Sèvres region was obscured by a heat mist. Only faint noises arose from humanity below, challenged by nearer bird calls, plangent in the thin air. The sight of this beautiful sparse foreign land awoke vibrations within you.

You walked now on bare rock. Mr Loftus stopped at last. The boots were at rest, the knees of the hairy legs companionable together. Mr Loftus mopped his brow with a blue handkerchief. A whisper of breeze was keeping the temperature down in this high place.

‘Here we are,’ he said. He was breathing heavily.

‘This is it,’ he said. ‘Few people know about this.’

He indicated a wide hole in the rock. Cracks meandered in several directions from the crater, like tributaries running into the sea. The interior of the crater was more or less smooth, except where a portion had been cut away. A rusty pick lay beside the cut.

‘Get down in it, lad,’ he said.

You did as you were bid, climbing into the rock. The lip of the crater came above your head, obscuring sight of anything beyond the crater but the blue sky. You recollected that experience much later in life. As you stared at the layered rock, Loftus explained what you were seeing. A thin broken dark band of what resembled rust separated two types of rock.

‘The burn marks where the asteroid struck.’ He squatted, so that his bare knees gleamed, to pick up a fragment and show it you. ‘We call this stuff breccia. A small asteroid came in from space and left this burn signature in the rocks. It struck about forty million years ago, long before France or mankind itself was thought of. See how the stratum above the burn is quite dark. Then comes lighter rock. There, fossils begin. Just a few. I’d guess this darker rock signifies at least five hundred thousand years of ocean which followed the asteroid strike.’

He picked at it and laid a fragment in the palm of his left hand.

‘What are the fossils?’ you asked.

‘Nothing important. Squirrels. A thing like a present-day fox –’

You listened to this matter-of-fact account, and all the while you were staring at the exposed rock face, the grits and stone of which Earth’s crust was composed, which would have meant nothing to ordinary people. Yet, given knowledge – the sort of knowledge you longed to acquire – a terrestrial drama lay before you. It was an enigma which, given knowledge, could meet with understanding. This was an explanation for the terrible catastrophe, the sudden destruction, which had puzzled Hugh Miller. A key turned in your mind.

‘It’s amazing, Sir,’ you said. ‘Everyone ought to know about this place!’

‘It’s not important,’ Mr Loftus said, indifferently. ‘It’s been examined and recorded. Hundreds of such impacts have been recorded all over the world. It goes to demonstrate what geologists already understand, that our planet, throughout the eons, has been constantly bombarded by comets, meteors, asteroids and assorted bits of rock.’

You had never before heard anyone use the phrase ‘our planet’ for the Earth. It seemed to weaken you, to make your legs tremble.

‘All that time,’ you murmured.

‘From time immemorial up to the present day.’

‘But it is important, Sir,’ you insisted weakly.

‘No. Not in itself. It’s been recorded. Rock fragments have been analysed and their iridium content noted. It’s now an item in a ledger in the Paris Institute of Geology.’

‘Coo, I’d like to find something like this myself, Sir! What’s iridium?’

Loftus went on to explain that the metal iridium was rare on the surface of the Earth, but abundant in the meteoritic dust arriving from space. You found it hard to tell from his attitude whether he believed you knew more of such matters than you did, or whether he thought you a complete ignoramus on whom further explanation was wasted.

You were entirely taken up by this connection between ‘our planet’ and the objects which arrived from distant places beyond your most fervid imagining. You were seized by a glimpse of the solar system as a whole. A new light, you felt, was lit in your intellect.

Yes, I think I did feel that.

I’m telling you, you did.

If only that light had not failed throughout many years of my life … Isn’t such knowledge, well, cleansing?

In some cases, yes.

Mr Loftus had pronounced the little crater to be without importance. But for you it was important; it set you on what was eventually to become your future career. You were not much interested in disinterring Roman villas; you wished to concentrate on the drama of battered ‘our planet’ itself, and of the creatures cast up on the beaches of existence upon it – for instance the creatures to be found in the old red sandstone.

As Mr Loftus extended a hand to help you out of the dig, you stammered your gratitude to him for bringing you to this remote spot, which chthonic activity had raised high above the ancient sea bed.

‘You may care,’ said he, in his dry voice, ‘to remember the dictum of Goethe, who says, “Think in order to act, act in order to think.”’

‘Please, Sir, who is Goethe?’

‘Why, he is the great German thinker, boy. Johann Wolfgang Goethe.’

Boy-like, as the two of you descended the hill, you again following the legs and the boots, you managed to assure yourself that you had discovered the importance of thought – of thinking about everything – long before this Goethe fellow came upon the scene.

Also at your school was a cousin of yours, by name Thomas Sidney Wilberforce. You never knew him well and rarely associated with him. Something about him you found disturbing; boy-like, you did not attempt to discover what it was.

Sidney was known to his class as ‘Sad Sid’. He had suffered much as you had done; whereas you had soon grown out of it, Sid never managed to do so. His parents, Jeremy and the skittish Flo, rather like your mother, had not wanted a son. Flo had ill-advisedly set her heart on a girl, a little girl she could dress in frilly petticoats and fancy dresses, to be an image of her own, younger self.

Jeremy, gloomy by nature, became even gloomier at the sight of baby Sidney. He felt he had failed Flo. Indeed, his sense of failure had deepened during the war, when he had done nothing heroic, had never been in action. His war service had been spent on Salisbury Plain, organizing troop movements.

Sidney soon became aware he was unwanted; he drank in that impression with his mother’s milk. He got up to mischief in order to draw attention to himself; the effect was merely to inspire further disapproval. In the market place one day, he happened to see a small girl in a pushchair, clutching a doll. Sidney snatched up the doll and ran off with it.

Now began a painful performance where Sad Sid endeavoured to act the part of a little girl, pretending to make a fuss over the doll, which he christened Dribble. Flo and Jeremy, entirely without understanding, were disgusted by this display. Sidney hated the doll. Dribble became a symbol of his degradation. For that reason, he took it with him everywhere. When laid horizontally, Dribble uttered a faint cry and closed its staring blue eyes with a click.

One day, you were invited over to play with Sidney. You did not wish to go, but Mary and Flo insisted you should be friends with Sid. You were baffled by Dribble. You would not hold it when Sid invited you to. Sidney dropped the doll on a hard floor. Dribble’s china head broke open. The crude mechanism operating the eyes was revealed.

Sidney was appalled by what he had done. His face turned as pale as ashes. You stared down at the broken head in horror, thinking of your sister, Sonia. It was almost as if a murder had been committed: you asked to go home.

There followed a row in the Wilberforce household, about which you heard only remotely. Your parents spoke of it in a whisper. It was Sonia who found out about it and told you. Sonia was quite excited. ‘Naughty!’ she said, eyes gleaming. ‘Shuggerybees!’

Sidney had done what he could to sort out his sexual confusions. He had persuaded a small girl called Rose Brackett to come into the garden shed with him. Sid had kissed Rose and she had pulled her panties down. Sidney had his shorts off, when the shed door opened. Jeremy stood there, forehead drawn in a frown.

‘You dirty little tacker,’ he exclaimed. Grabbing Sidney by the collar of his shirt, he dragged him from the shed – poor Rosie Brackett was quite ignored and ran home crying – dragged him up the garden path and into the house, calling angrily for Flo.

As Jeremy explained briefly what he imagined was taking place – shaking Sidney by the collar meanwhile – he gave the boy the odd cuff. With each cuff, he asked, ‘Where did you get that filthy habit from?’

‘It wasn’t filthy,’ cried Sid. ‘I never even touched her.’

Another cuff.

Flo, in her apron, wrung her hands as she had so often done over her problem son, asking him, glaring down at him, ‘What are we to do with you?’

What they did with him was send him to public school. That meant he would be away from home for most of the year.

One great interferer in family affairs was Claude Hillman. Claude had married your father’s sister Ada, your neat little Aunt Ada. It had been another of those post-war marriages. You had heard Claude say once, when in his cups, ‘Marry in haste, repent in leisure.’ Both of your parents looked askance at Claude; their motto might have been, ‘Judge in haste, disapprove in leisure.’ But you liked lumpish old Uncle Claude, with his forced jollity, as with any jollity, however forced.

On this occasion, you thought he came out well, by saying, ‘Sid only wanted a feel, didn’t he? What’s the harm in that?’

To which your mother had responded, ‘The trouble with you, Claude, is you are mucky-minded.’

He laughed, unoffended. ‘That’s true, m’dear.’

You too could see the attractions of getting Rose Brackett into the garden shed and ‘having a feel’, as Claude put it.

But poor Sidney was in disgrace for some while. Jeremy drove Sidney through the college gates. To Sid’s eyes, the great expanse of parade ground and forbidding buildings, all seemed to swarm with noisy boys, some running mindlessly about, some fighting, some standing still and moving their arms as if in semaphore.

Sidney, being brave, not crying, turned to give his father a farewell embrace. Jeremy became involved with the car’s gears, staring ahead.

‘Well, toodle-oo, old boy! Off you go!’

Sidney went.

Sidney had a troubled and delayed puberty. Puberty did not visit him until he was almost sixteen. He then became briefly known as ‘Flasher Sid’. On his seventeenth birthday, when his parents gave him a pair of boxing gloves as a present, Sidney went to the bottom of their garden and hanged himself without fuss from a branch of an old apple tree.

The suicide caused shock waves all round the family.

‘He was a nice, quiet boy, mind you,’ said your mother.

‘But he was a bit, you know, funny, mum,’ Sonia exclaimed. ‘He asked me once if I wanted to see his willy.’

‘I hope you didn’t say yes,’ said your mother, keen that her daughter should remain unsullied.

‘I did just have a quick look, but I didn’t touch.’

You could see that Sonia was teasing your mother, but Mary was clearly shocked.

‘Valerie wouldn’t have looked, would she?’ you said, teasing in your turn, with a sidelong glance at Sonia.

‘Oh, you’re so jealous of your poor sister,’ Mary exclaimed. ‘It’s a horrible trait in you!’

Uncle Claude Hillman gave your father a wink. ‘The kid was queer, wasn’t he? ’Nuff to make anyone hang themselves.’

Your Auntie Violet had her own slant on the matter, saying to Bertie, ‘Well, plants die from lack of sunlight. The poor kid died from lack of love and understanding, didn’t he? They aren’t exactly elements in which your flipping family specializes, are they, Bert?’

You can understand that at this time your mind was a confusion of ill-digested thoughts. You were of an age when your perceptions were extended, when it seemed to you that every day you climbed a new metaphorical hill. You had anxieties about what was truth, what false. You were keen to bring a possible life as a geologist into line with probity of character. Many connections had to be made, many decisions confronted you.

After leaving school, you went up to Birmingham University to study the new discipline of Earth Sciences. You knew of no other university offering such a course. You were proud to be an early student, and worked hard.

During your first term in Birmingham, your Aunt Violet came to visit you, to see how you were getting on. You were ashamed to take her to your digs, but Violet seemed not to mind. ‘I like the poster,’ she said, admiring the portrait of Che Guevara hanging on your wall. There she stood, perfectly at ease in the scruffy room. Your Aunt Violet was brightly clothed in something beaded and flowing. Gipsy earrings swung from her ears. She wore silk stockings and red, high-heeled shoes. You were overwhelmed by her appearance and hoped all your new friends saw you with this illustrious relation.

She removed, with meticulous care, your soiled shirts and pants from your rickety chair. She pushed aside some paperbacks and scribbled-on pieces of paper, to make a space on the table.

‘I’ve brought you some plonk, Steve, dear,’ she said, setting down on your table a brown paper carrier bag containing a bottle of red wine. ‘I assume you drink?’

‘Of course.’ You did not wish to appear other than adult before this sophisticated aunt. The fact was that you had tasted beer and had not liked it, and the group of young men you mixed with proclaimed themselves Communists and were abstemious (and saw no contradiction in that).

Violet gingerly settled her behind down on your chair, tipped it back, put her feet up on the table edge, showing an extent of shapely leg as she did so, and eased off her high heels, so that they hung loose from her stockinged toes. She asked you what you were getting up to, now that you were free of parental control. You replied, ‘I’m considering disowning my pater. I have already disowned God. My pater has been a bad and repressive influence. I reject his way of life. You know him, auntie, and I am sure you dislike him.’

‘No, I don’t really dislike Martin. I feel a bit sorry for the old blighter.’

‘Feeling sorry for people does no one any good.’ How grown up you were being.

‘And your mother has a bit of a mental problem, as I suppose you know. Well, like poor old Bertie, in a way.’

Bertie was her husband, your mother’s younger brother. But you were uninterested in Violet’s troubles. You spoke instead of your own troubles.

You addressed her as if she were a meeting.

‘You see, auntie, I have reached the conclusion that money should not be inherited. When a person dies, his estate, if there is one, should pass to the government. Within one or two generations, we would see a complete reformation of society. The public exchequers could then finance massive projects in housing and health and education. We might then expect a general moral reformation. Also, women have to be liberated from housework. Their intellects are limited at present.’

Violet gave a little laugh. ‘That’s certainly true of my intellect.’

She added, ‘But who’s going to put up with handing over their property to some government department? Not me, old sport.’

‘Auntie, perhaps you don’t realize,’ you were being ponderously patient, ‘that thirty-one per cent of the inhabitants of Britain live below the poverty line. Thirty-one per cent! That’s disgraceful. That has to be rectified, in the name of justice. And humanity.’

Violet produced a cigarette and threw you one. You went over to get a light from her.

‘Aren’t things just as bad in Russia, where you get your ideas from?’ she said, indifferently.

You then had to lecture her on basic economics. She sat there not listening, her pretty little chin in the air.

You embarrass me by recalling what I said on that occasion. What a prig I was! Do not feel embarrassed. You were attempting to digest recently learned facts and trying on what personality suited you best. We understand that adolescence is a difficult time.

‘Don’t believe what the capitalist press tells you about Russia, auntie. You’re living under an illusion.’ You were bending over your aunt to light a second cigarette. It did not occur to you to offer her a mug of instant coffee.

‘I say, aunt, what beautiful legs you have.’

She looked up, giving you a flirtatious glance. Smiling she said, ‘That’s none of your business.’

‘I wish it was, really.’

Violet removed her feet from the table and tucked them under her skirt. She announced there was something serious she wanted to talk to you about. Then she said, ‘Oh, I can’t. I’m made for the frivolous life. Besides, you’re almost grown up now. You’re safe.’

‘What were you going to tell me, aunt, dear?’

She waved an elegant hand. ‘Doesn’t matter. There’s going to be another war soon. You’ll have to go, darling – serve King and country. Give your old aunt a kiss.’

You put an arm round her neck and kissed her lingeringly. An erection sprang up in your trousers. You knew she saw the effect she had on you.

She said, teasingly, ‘You are a big boy! I’d better go, sweetie.’

She stubbed out her half-smoked cigarette. She put her shoes on. She gave you a straight look, serious but affectionate. ‘Toodle-pip,’ she said. You thought as she left how old-fashioned it was to say ‘Toodle-pip’.

It was going to be a long while before you saw your aunt again. You would then be adult, war-hardened. But first you had to attend a funeral.

7
The New Widow

It was on the first day of April, 1939, that the Spanish Civil War ended. General Franco’s forces had triumphed. ‘Fascists!’ your father had been shouting for some time. But not on that particular day. For on that particular day, he was standing with his mother, Elizabeth Fielding, by the bedside of his father, Sidney Vawes Fielding, in the Southampton hospital.

Old Sidney had been lying in a white-tiled cell, on a raised bed. He had been enjoying a last puff of a cigarette, clutching the cylinder in shaky purple hands. His countenance was the colour of the hospital pillow supporting his head. He suddenly raised that head from the pillow with a startled look, eyes bulging. ‘I mean to say –’, he began, only to fall back again, dead.

He had suffered from gastritis and lung cancer. He was sixty-nine years old.

Elizabeth clutched his cold, gnarled hand with both of her delicate ones. ‘Good-bye, my dear … my faithful husband,’ she said, in her clear, but hesitant tones. This was after she had suffered her stroke.

Elizabeth Fielding had a more distinguished look about her than the majority of her clan. It could not be said that this was because of any particular facial feature, although her high forehead and delicate nostrils and lips were attractive. Her pile of white hair, secured by a small black velvet bow, gave her an impressive air. But her distinction lay more in the way she held herself stiffly erect. She had always been a silent sort of person, which had made you, when you were a small boy, fearful of her. The impediment in her speech, a result of the stroke, had hardly made her more garrulous. The family had not been accustomed to taking much notice of Elizabeth. If she resented this attitude, she wisely did not show it. She had, however, begun to show some partiality towards you, as if recognizing in your small person someone whose potentials were also overlooked.

In need of a degree of security, Elizabeth had married Sidney Fielding knowing him to be intellectually her inferior, as well as some years older than she. She tried to conceal this knowledge from Sidney, but such knowledge leaks out in many ways.

Sidney was never entirely satisfied with his wife, finding her often critical. He failed to relish her criticism as a way of advancing his own appreciation of the finer points of life. And so to their children, Martin and his brothers and sisters, that hidden dissatisfaction had a way of working through and shadowing their lives also. As to Martin and Mary’s children, you often held beliefs that cast a shadow over what should have been your contentment, and their acceptance of you.

Various members of the family were summoned for Sidney Fielding’s funeral. So the funeral took place a week after his death, on the day when Mussolini, having annexed Abyssinia, invaded Albania. This fresh sign of the rottenness of Europe was scarcely noticed by the Fielding and Wilberforce families. Or by you, for at fifteen you were enmeshed in the agonies and joys of your first love affair. You were pursuing Gale Roberts, who was proving by turns joky and elusive, affectionate and indifferent. This female behaviour was totally inscrutable to you. What Gale desired from day to day remained baffling; whereas all you desired was to get a hand up her skirt.

This problem had to be shelved on the seventh of April, when you and your sister stood by your parents’ side at your grandfather’s grave. Your heads were bowed. You wished to be sad, but Sonia kept nudging and winking at you, and exclaiming ‘Shuggerybees!’ After the ceremony, the two families, together with friends and spouses, gathered in your father’s house for drinks and refreshments. They were greeted on the doorstep as they arrived by joyous barking from Gyp. Joy Frost, terrified of dogs, ran back to the car for refuge, and took some coaxing before she reappeared on the scene. ‘Shut the confounded dog in the greenhouse,’ demanded Mary. Although you loved Gyp greatly, you did as she ordered, smoothing his noble head before shutting him in.

Emma, the maid, served tea as soon as the guests came in. All were dressed in black, making family likenesses more apparent, the Wilberforces with their sallow complexions, the Fieldings with their aquiline noses, the Frosts with their tendency to be undershot, the Hillmans – or Claude at least – with their flushed faces and broken-veined cheeks.

Your parents’ house gave off a slight greenish tinge. There were thick old green velvet curtains at the downstairs windows, destined to serve as blackout curtains during the war then looming. The furniture was heavy, and some of it shabby. It had been bought on the never-never at Heal’s in London, shortly after Martin and Mary had married. The pictures on the walls of the living room showed Sopwith Camels and other ancient aeroplanes manoeuvring in clear blue skies. Mary had striven to brighten the room with bowls of flowers strategically placed, as advised in the pages of Amateur Gardening, to which she subscribed.

You were forced into the company of Joey and Terry, the two sons of Aunt Ada, your father’s sister. Ada was there, still rather weepy from the graveside, with her husband, Claude Hillman, who was at this time of his life a stockbroker. Claude, your father always said, was ‘a bit of a bounder’.

‘Cheer up, old ducks,’ Claude told Ada. ‘Old Sid’s time was up. He had a good run for his money, didn’t he?’

‘Oh, Claude, truly, “in the midst of life we are in death”.’

He thrust his rubicund face at hers. ‘Rubbish! In the midst of life we are in need of drink. Death’ll have to wait until I’ve got a noggin in me.’

There had been a time a few months earlier when you had gone to play with Joey and Terry. They had stuck their hands in the pockets of their shorts and put their round, sand-coloured heads together. They contemplated you before asking, in no friendly terms, ‘Do you know the system, sport?’

‘What system is that?’ you asked.

Terry had looked at Joey. Joey had looked at Terry. ‘He asks what system,’ they said to each other. Then, to you, ‘Why, mathematics, of course. Do you know what numbers are for?’

‘They’re for counting,’ you said, sulky under such interrogation.

And the two boys had laughed. They showed you a blackboard in their den. On the blackboard, cabbalistic signs mixed with numbers. Some signs were enclosed by chalk squares. Arrows indicated directions. You were impressed that they had various coloured chalks.

‘What’s all this “DOBD” in these red squares?’ you asked.

Terry sniggered behind a grubby hand. ‘Do or Be Done, of course.’

Summoning a protective indifference, you remarked that that was silly.

‘It’s our future. It’s our system. We don’t expect you to understand.’

But you had stayed for lunch in their house. Aunt Ada served cold stuffed veal with small new potatoes, cold, and a salad of crisp, sharp cos lettuce. Ada was a little woman with pale lips, very neat with her hair and clothes. Later on, not very surprisingly, Claude would leave Ada.

To see these two boys now in your own house, rapidly gobbling the snacks, aroused your hostility.

‘Are you two still playing about with your stupid system?’ you asked Joey.

‘Our dad met Bertrand Russell,’ Joey said, proudly.

It seemed unanswerable at the time.

Accompanying Claude and Ada were the Frosts. Joy Frost with pigtails, tied for the occasion with black ribbons, was Claude’s younger sister. Her husband, Freddie Frost, adolescent in appearance, was regarded by the Fieldings as being rather loud. He was being rather loud now, saying cheerfully to Archie over his shoulder, as Emma poured more wine into his glass, ‘Well, there’s another one fallen off the old perch, eh, what?’

He nudged his brother Archie in the ribs in order to encourage him to share in the joke – Archie being always, in Freddie’s judgement, too serious and quiet.

‘Show some respect,’ said Archie. ‘Try the sausage rolls and shut up.’

You heard a good deal of shutting up in those days.

Of these Frosts, Joy at sixteen seemed to suffer the most grief. Her nose had been reddened by constant applications of a small handkerchief during the funeral. She confided now to her Aunt Ada, ‘I’ve never been touched by death before – apart from the odd hamster.’ Ada pressed her niece’s hand. ‘I know, my dear.’ She repeated herself, saying, ‘“In the midst of life we are in death” – including hamsters.’

Meanwhile, Mary was welcoming in her stodgy older brother, Jeremy, who was looking about him for the fount and source of alcohol. ‘Poor old pop, Mary,’ he said heavily, laying a hand on her shoulder. ‘Gone to his eternal rest, as they say. Still, not a bad life, I suppose. He certainly came up in society, didn’t he?’ He gave a short laugh.

‘That’s not a very nice way of putting it.’ But it appeared your mother’s thoughts were elsewhere, for she went on to say that she had heard on the radio that when certain kings could no longer satisfy their wives, they were put to death, or else the crops failed. She believed this was in some African tribe or other.

‘Don’t see what you are on about,’ said Jeremy. ‘We’re no African tribe. Pop wasn’t black, thank goodness.’

His younger brother Jack agreed, but said, sotto voce, ‘No disrespect, please, Jeremy. Not in Mother’s hearing.’ He nodded towards Elizabeth.

‘But I didn’t respect him. He gave me a rotten childhood.’ However, Jeremy had lowered his voice to make this pronouncement. ‘Poor old bugger, all the same.’

Claude was interested in another kind of respect. He grabbed his two sons and addressed them confidentially. ‘You two better behave respectfully to your grandmother. I happen to know that all of Granddad’s money is left to her, so be nice to the old girl.’

‘Will she be rich, dad?’ Joey asked.

‘Stinking rich, my boy. Stinking rich. So watch it!’

‘Will we be rich, dad?’ Terry asked.

Claude closed one eye. ‘You go to work on it, old lad.’

All round the room and into the nearby breakfast room, muttered family conversations went on, the family being semi-glad to be called together.

‘I don’t know Hunstanton,’ Jack Wilberforce proclaimed, as if bestowing a signal honour on the town he named.

Jeremy said, before holding out his glass for a refill as Emma came round with the bottle, ‘I always felt a bit sorry for mum.’

‘He gave Liz a hard time,’ Flo agreed. ‘She had more intelligence than Sidney, that was the problem.’

The lady referred to as Liz was the newly widowed Elizabeth, sitting alone in a corner of the room. Mary and Martin had escorted Elizabeth to a sofa, donkey brown and genuine leather, where she sat poised and elegant in her sweeping black dress. She wore a wide-brimmed black hat with a white rose attached to the brim. Elizabeth was in her late forties; her face, with its sharp features, was utterly pale, utterly composed, as she looked about the room.

Since her stroke, the old lady kept her ebony walking stick to hand; but the sofa suited her well enough because it had a high seat, from which it was easy to rise without assistance.

You went over to speak to her. ‘I’m so sorry, Granny dear. Granddad will be greatly missed.’ You added, ‘By you, most of all.’

‘It is character … istic of your mother,’ she began, ‘to wear a dress which fits – which does not fit, I should say – her. Properly.’

‘Yes, Granny, but –’

She reached out and clutched your hand. ‘Yes, it’s about your granddad sad. But the over war … the Civil War Spanish is over. We must be small mercies. Grateful for –’

She paused, gazing upwards, searching for a word.

‘Small mercies?’ you suggested.

Later in life, you would come greatly to respect your grandmother. Moreover, it grew to be your opinion that Elizabeth was the one scholarly member of the family, apart from Jeremy’s wife, Flo. Your grandmother, in your view and that of others, had not been well treated by her husband Sidney. Sidney had been too busy making money to care properly for his grand wife – or for her intellect.

Elizabeth had suffered her stroke three years earlier. Her intellect had carried her through. Sonia affected to be scared of the speech impediment. As Sonia happened to be passing, you grabbed her arm and made her say hello to her grandmother.

‘Oh, I thought you didn’t want to talk to me, Granny,’ said Sonia, grinning and rocking her body back and forth in an idiotic way.

‘Why should I … why not wish … to talk to you, child?’ asked Elizabeth, scrutinizing Sonia with some interest.

‘I thought perhaps you did not like hunchbacked children, Granny.’ Sonia made an awful grimace as she said this.

‘On the cont … on the contrary. I adore hunchbacks, child. Remind me of your name.’

‘Oh,’ Sonia gazed at the floor. ‘I am sister to the adorable Valerie, who was perfect and not hunchbacked. Little Valerie-Wallerie was the world’s most perfect child.’

You reassured your grandmother, pointing a finger to your temple, working it back and forth as if to drill into your brain. ‘Sonia is a bit touched, Grandma. It runs in the family.’

Elizabeth made no direct reply to this remark, although she flashed at you something that could have been a smile of understanding. She fished in her handbag, took out a cigarette case and extracted a cigarette. When she had lit it and blown a plume of smoke from her nostrils, she said, not looking at you, but gazing rather into the room, where her relations were milling about, ‘Why are your Uncle Bertie and Auntie Violet not here? Why did they not attend Sidney’s funeral?’

‘I’m afraid Mother doesn’t approve of them. Well, at least she doesn’t approve of Auntie Violet. She told Auntie she was not welcome.’

You did not add that you had asked your mother why she did not want Auntie Violet in the house. To which she had replied, loftily, that she was a good judge of character.

‘Violet wears good clothes. Wears well. Them well,’ said Elizabeth, now.

‘Yes, but Mum says they are too expensive.’

The old lady inspected your face. ‘Violet, I recall … Violet criticized your Uncle Jeremy. Jeremy’s of his son, deplorable treatment. Poor Sid. Rightly so, to my mind. It’s as well to speak. Brave to speak, um, out. A necessary adjunct. I say, adjunct of civiliz … our civilization.’

Lamely, you said, ‘We were all upset about Sad Sid.’

‘Suicide. Suicide is … sorry, suicide is always a family … A criticism, I mean to say, of the family.’

‘We are a funny family, I must agree,’ said Sonia. ‘Look at their faces! But our sausage rolls are good. May I get you one, Granny?’

‘No, thank you. Valerie.’

‘No, sorry Granny.’ Sonia vigorously shook her head. ‘I’m Sonia, thanks very much. And I’m alive. Valerie is the one who is not alive.’

‘I see.’ Elizabeth spoke gravely, looking into Sonia’s face. ‘And was not Valerie also hunchbacked?’

‘Oh, heavens no! Valerie was perfect, Granny. Everyone knows that. That was why she died, so they say. Died of perfection, like Jesus on the Cross. In fact, I believe I saw her at your husband’s graveside.’ She pressed her fingers to her lips. ‘Sorry, shouldn’t have mentioned gravesides.’

Elizabeth nodded thoughtfully, but she could not restrain a smile. ‘Well then, Sonia, you should go far in life, and get into a lot of trouble on the way.’

She dismissed the subject. Again the inspection of your face. You liked your grandmother’s intelligence, while finding it alarming at times. Her face still bore traces of a smile.

‘I hope you learnt something. Stephen. From Sad Sid’s death. Unlike your cheeky little sister.’

‘Valerie?’

‘Sonia.’

‘I still feel bad about it, Gran.’

‘Feeling bad is the same. Is not the same as something. Learning something.’ She changed the subject abruptly. She tapped the end of her cigarette on the rim of a brass ashtray, which was secured in the middle of a weighted leather strap so that it hung comfortably over the arm of the sofa on which she was sitting. ‘But that you know.’

She murmured the sentence to herself again, perhaps checking to see that she had got it right. ‘But that you know.’

‘Why should your mother have a say? Have a say over whether or not one attended? Attended.’ She seemed momentarily to be stuck on the word. ‘If her brothers and his wife attended … attended his father’s funeral? Particularly when Sidney had a special. Special affection for Bertie. If you remember, dear, Bertie in his youth. In his youth, he flew … where?’

‘Kabul,’ you said.

‘Oh dear, I must go,’ said Sonia. ‘I’ve just remembered something.’ She slipped away, saying, ‘I just want to see if Gyp has died in the greenhouse.’

‘Yes. Kabul,’ Elizabeth echoed. She watched Sonia’s retreat with a slight smile. ‘It’s in Africa, I believe.’

‘Afghanistan, Granny.’

‘Of course. Quite right.’

You had no answer to her larger question. You knew only that, in the days preceding the funeral, terrible arguments had broken out between your parents. Some weeks earlier, Mary had ventured a few critical remarks regarding Violet to Violet’s husband, Bertie. She told him that Violet was ‘spendthrift’, and had added the damning word ‘gallivanting’. Bertie had become furious, vowing he would not speak to his sister again. Nothing had been said on that occasion about Violet’s criticisms regarding the causes of Sad Sid’s suicide; indeed, the word ‘suicide’ had proved too terrible to utter. In an endeavour to settle the quarrel, Martin had phoned Jack, Mary’s other brother, asking him to intervene. Jack had accused Martin of going behind his sister’s back. So a thunderous family row had developed, about which you knew nothing, walking into frosty silences as into a brick wall. Mary had said, ‘I don’t care who’s died, I won’t have that Violet here, flaunting her new clothes about the place! Neglecting her children! Making eyes at all the men!’ And that ended the matter.

You felt for your grandmother, that calm and elegant lady. Anxious to detach yourself from your parents’ quarrels, you said to her now, ‘I really like Auntie Violet, Gran. She’s ever so kind, you know.’

The remark appeared to make no impression on the new widow. In her halting way of speaking, she replied, ‘People should not be small. Not small-minded. When there’s a war. Particularly. A war. Now Mussolini. After all, on. Coming.’

You expressed agreement.

Elizabeth said, ‘Oh dear, here is my dreadful Bella,’ referring to her younger daughter. You thought she wished to change the subject, but she added, ‘Violet brings a little family. I mean life. Into the family.’

There were pauses between her sentences. She would have said more, had not Joy Frost come to speak to her. You were squatting on your heels to bring your face on a level with your grandmother’s. Putting a hand on your shoulder, Joy conveyed her condolences to Elizabeth. Joy had had her hair done for the occasion and had asked you earlier if you did not think she looked sizzling. You agreed she did look sizzling.

But Elizabeth was pursuing an earlier trail of thought. ‘She has two children. At least two – Violet, I mean to say. A girl, Joyce. And a boy … I’ve forgotten –’

‘Douglas,’ you reminded her. ‘Dougie – the funny boy.’

‘I had every wish, every wish. What? To be fond of them, you silly woman!’

Tears swam to Elizabeth’s eyes. She turned her head away to conceal them, affecting to look out of the window.

‘How they do pass, the years,’ she said abstractedly to thin air. ‘Yes,’ you said – many years before you were able to respond to the statement with a genuine affirmative.

‘Intellect … unfortunately. Unfortunately intellect is no shield. Not against regret. I hope you two grand … two grandchildren,’ she gave you a swift glance, ‘Will properly revere the … What was it? Yes, what I just said. Intellect. My children, my children have proved lacking. Somewhat lacking in that … that region. Department. Mm, yes, department.’

She essayed a smile. Being of an age when it was agreeable to hear adverse comments on your parents, you produced murmurs of reassurance.

Light filtering through your bay window made your grandmother’s face, with its now prominent cheekbones, look as if it were made entirely of bone. In her clear, remote voice, she said, ‘My grandfather had a small orchard. An orchard. An orchard of Laxton’s Superb. Laxton’s Superb. A delicious apple eating. Laxton’s Superb. You don’t see it now. Not now. No longer. Laxton’s Superb, yes.’

She lingered over the name of the apple, apparently luxuriating in it. Reaching out her arm, stiffly, she stubbed out her half-smoked cigarette. ‘I wonder who Mr Laxton was.’

While she had been speaking, her daughter, Belle, characterized by the old lady as the ‘dreadful Bella’, came across the room and sat down on the sofa beside her mother. She folded her hands in her lap and remained there with a vague smile on her face, as if expecting everyone to be content with her presence without her having to make further effort.

You wished to learn more of the family dislike of your favourite aunt. ‘Granny, you were saying about Violet –’

Elizabeth had taken out a tiny lace handkerchief with which she dabbed her eyes. ‘Bertie drinks too much. Far too much. From flying. A leg … a legacy from his flying days. It makes Violet – Oh!’

Her exclamation was long and cool, much like a sigh. You stood up. Mary shrieked in a refined way. On the other side of the room, Claude had told a lewd joke. Ada, stepping back in disapproval, had bumped into Emma. Emma had been bringing in a tray loaded with champagne glasses and a magnum of Moet & Chandon. She made a gallant effort to stave off disaster, but the tray was thrown into flight, crashing to the floor. The poor maid fell to her knees and covered her face with her hands. Joy Frost helped her to her feet, trying to console her, but Emma fled the room. Claude, Ada and Mary all rushed after her.

Elizabeth said, quietly addressing you and ignoring her daughter Belle, ‘Many of the members of this family. Many members are half-mad. Mary, your mother, of course. Jeremy. Bertie. Possibly Violet. And of course … of course my husband … That was.’

She tried to hide her face in the small square of her handkerchief.

‘I’m going to Venice,’ she said, with a brighter tone. ‘I’ve mind … made up my mind. My cats will. Someone will have to. Look afterwards … have to look after my … You know, I just said it. Cats. I’m going to Venice to stay with my friend. My Dorothy friend. You and your hunchbacked sister are welcome to visit. Welcome if you can stand.’ She gave a curt little laugh. ‘Stand the company of old people.’ She looked searchingly at you. Her eyes were red. ‘I plan to be away. For some while. Four or five months away.’

But in five months’ time, Hitler’s Wehrmacht had invaded Poland, and Britain and France had declared war on Germany.

8
Kendal, of All Places

It was the morning of Sunday, 3rd of September, 1939, and your mother was having a weeping fit. She had a mixture of complaints, including the accusation that Elizabeth was cool towards her, that Sonia’s hunchback was ‘beyond a joke’, that your room was always untidy, that Ribbentrop was a nice, handsome man, and that she missed Valerie.

Valerie. Your father groaned at the mention of Valerie’s name.

Your mother had given birth to Sonia, as predicted when you were holidaying in Omega – though not predicted to you. You had been astonished when a little heavy nurse, wearing a starched uniform and a winged and starched head dress, arrived at your house.

‘Is mum ill?’ you asked, looking up past her massive starched battlements to her face.

‘Not unless parturition is an illness,’ she told you sternly, looking down.

You thought that parturition sounded like an illness.

Her name was Nurse Gill. She appeared to regard small boys much as she regarded other epidemics. Later she told you, as she stomped past, ‘This time the child has survived. You have a living sister. Last time – dead, I’m sorry to say. Defunct – from something congenital.’

Here was revealed the reason for your mother having never acquired a great liking for you. There had been an earlier child of your parents’ marriage, a girl, born in the year after their wedding. Had your father been carrying some unacknowledged disease, acquired when he was soldiering in the Great War, from the prostitutes of Cairo? In any event, for whatever malevolent cause, this baby was stillborn, cast up on the desolate shores of non-existence.

At a later date, when superstition had largely fallen away with the advance of medicine, to deliver a stillborn baby was no disgrace. But then – in that dreadful Then of the nineteen-twenties – Nurse Gill would have whisked the little body away immediately after delivery, hiding the corpse under a cloth – you visualized a tea cloth – possibly without letting the poor, suffering mother see it, or touch it; its fatal limbs, its unformed face with the eyes tightly squeezed closed, never to open.

No great wonder your mother developed a poisonous fantasy – as all fantasies are, at base, poisonous. Perhaps Mary could never convince herself her child was dead, since she never set eyes on it. In later years, mothers would have been permitted, encouraged, to hold this outcast from their fallible bodies, flesh of their flesh, their dead child, and so to offer it, if only for a minute, the recognition and love it could never return.

How greatly your mother desired another daughter as substitute for the dead one you could not imagine. Indeed, she poisoned her mind, and the minds of her children, by indulging in a fantasy, the fantasy that this first daughter had lived for six months and been the very image of perfection. The fantasy daughter even had a name. It was called Valerie. This consoling fantasy settled on Mary’s blood like a vampire. No living child could possibly rival, in Mary’s eyes, the virtues of the dead Valerie.

When you emerged into the world, four years after this still-born girl, you entered a stifling imagined scenario of tragedy. Your mother could find no place for a boy amid the interstices of her dream. As for your father – unable to enter into this suffocating pretence – he was destroyed in a different way; estranged from your mother in a separation which further increased a propensity for loneliness in his nature.

‘Valerie never did that,’ she said when you broke a cup. ‘Valerie would never make such a horrid noise,’ she would say if you shouted. ‘Valerie ate her food properly,’ she said when you splashed your soup. At every turn, you were condemned by this unliving, but overwhelming, figment of your mother’s imagination.

Later in life, you found that your mother had been visiting a psychotherapist in Norwich for some years during the period of your growing up.

Do you remember weeping?

I never wept.

Oh, indeed you did.

Your parents were at home on that momentous day early in September, and in a bad mood. Your mother was saying she felt cross with Neville Chamberlain. A gloomy silence ensued.

Martin said, meditatively, that September was the traditional season in which to go to war. In olden times, the peasants had got in the harvest and were free to be sent to fight for the lord of the manor.

‘Never mind all that,’ said Mary, irritably.

‘It’s a factor.’

‘It’s a bally nuisance,’ Mary replied. ‘Going to war with Germany like this. What does Ribbentrop think, I wonder? Valerie would have been terrified. Why can’t we let Hitler get on with it? What he does on the Continent is nothing to do with us, is it?’

Your father replied, ‘I’ve always said that if Churchill and Lord Vansittart didn’t keep quiet, we would have to go to war again. Typical Tories … It’s a fine muck-up and no mistake.’

‘It is a mistake,’ Mary said. Her knitting needles clicked together in anger. ‘War again. We’ve only just got over the last one. People getting killed all over again.’

‘But different people this time,’ you said, attempting to console.

Your parents were talking in the sitting room. Martin Fielding had bought a small mansion, standing in parkland on the outskirts of Southampton, and a car to go with it. The plane manufacturers had promoted him from head of the ‘heavy gang’ to an office job on better pay. He remained head of the trades union chapel. You had seen him come home with several yards of cable under his coat, together with electrical equipment of various kinds. You had heard your mother protest, to which your father had answered, ‘The bosses rob us men, so it’s fair we should take something back.’ And that settled the matter.

When you had asked Mary if dad was a criminal, she’d told you angrily to be quiet about it.

‘Your father’s a Socialist, and Socialists share everything.’

Your father’s knowledge of the past, as revealed in his remark about the convenience of having wars begin in September, stayed with you for some while. He was knowledgeable, yet in other ways so stupid, so insensitive to others. It seemed a puzzle. How vexing were parents. But then, you considered it ‘aristocratic’ to be puzzled.

You had only one term at Birmingham University before you received a buff envelope. Inside was an Enlistment Notice saying you were required to present yourself at a nearby barracks for primary training. A postal order for four shillings was also enclosed ‘in respect of advance of service pay’. You were Called Up.

Geology was forgotten, together with many other things. Your country needed you.

The men of the family went down to their local pub, The Black Hind, with their friends, and held a council of war. The date was 15th May, 1940, only four days after Winston Churchill had been confirmed as prime minister. You were with your regiment in Catterick, preparing for embarkation overseas. While pints were being ordered, to begin the meeting someone repeated the opening of the Robb Wilton monologue, ‘The day war broke out, my wife said to me, What are you going to do about it?’ But that, in fact, was the subject of their meeting.

Martin opened proceedings by announcing that he had already joined the Local Defence Volunteers. He advised all those over conscription age to join. Walter Pratchett, a young man working in a solicitor’s office, said he had volunteered for service in the Royal Navy and would be away shortly. Many other men had plans to defend their country against invasion.

Claude Hillman, generally talkative enough, said nothing. He had been first in the pub and was drinking steadily. Martin asked him what the matter was.

‘Quote from a book I read recently,’ Claude growled. ‘“Sir, I have quarrelled with my wife and a man who has quarrelled with his wife is absolved from all duty to his country.”’

‘You and Ada again?’ said Martin.

‘She was the apple of my eye, really the apple of my eye. Now she’s a crab apple.’

‘She’s borne you two children.’

Claude managed a smile. He tapped on the table with an index finger. ‘Indeed she has, and mortal terrors they are. Her body – excuse me if I speak thus of your dear sister, Martin – her body was wild white winter, once upon a time. Now it has fruited and fallen back to autumn, season of yellow fruitlessness. War provides us with an excuse to get away from the womenfolk.’

Wally Pratchett was recently married and violently dissented.

Martin did not look particularly pleased, but other men seized on the topic of womanhood, saying that they hoped women – whom they termed ‘the good old girls’ – would play their part in the conflict. Which is what happened. While the Third Reich ordered its womenfolk to Kindermachen, confining them to the home to make future soldiery, British women went into industry and agriculture and many other jobs, to fill vacancies left by men who had become soldiers, sailors or airmen.

When time was called in the pub, all had become intensely patriotic. They toasted Winston Churchill and staggered out into the spring daylight.

For a while, the Second World War had made little difference to your family.

After Emma the maid had fled, your parents employed a live-in maid, and a young boy who came in the mornings and did odd jobs. There was also a gardener, while a pony for daughter Sonia was installed in the paddock.

Sonia was afraid of this frisky animal; she insisted that the pony disliked her hump. Sonia went to a local school for girls, but this was holiday time. Her imagined hump was one of the devices by which she brought her mother to heel.

She taught Gyp to bark at the pony.

In any event, she never rode the pony. You established friendly relations with it. It was a three-year-old gelding, which had been christened Beauty. You led Beauty out into the field and let it canter about. After a while, when it was time to take it in again, Beauty would play hard to get, no doubt dreading a return to its prison of the stable. At other times it would come up to you shyly, gently, almost in a maidenly way, to gaze upon you with its large moist eyes. You would fondle it. Its muzzle was soft, although, when it opened its mouth, a set of large teeth were displayed.

Like every kind of animal with which man comes into contact, horses came into captivity. From Mary’s goldfish swimming mindlessly round its bowl, the canary in its cage, to higher mammals like horses and elephants, all animals become prisoners of humans. Only cats have never signed the contract; unlike their domestic rivals, the dogs, cats never submitted to leads or performed tricks, lounging about instead, in a very hands-in-pockets kind of way, and having naps in inconvenient places.

‘Why don’t you like Beauty?’ you asked your sister.

‘Oh, I don’t know. P’raps, yes, p’raps because I’m expected to like her.’

‘It’s a he.’

Poor Beauty was later sold. ‘Valerie would have liked a pony,’ said Mary, with a sigh. ‘Valerie was good to her mother.’

‘Well, I think Valerie was a horrid creep!’ Sonia retorted.

Your two parents were sitting together one night, by a coal fire, for the early September evenings were becoming chilly.

‘I don’t know what Sonia will do,’ said Mary Fielding. ‘These wars are so awful. We’ve been through one of them. Now another.’

She held a small handkerchief to her nose and attempted to shed a tear.

‘Don’t start that,’ Martin warned. ‘Wars are nothing to cry about. Got to be brave.’

‘I was thinking of my poor brother, Ernie. Killed in France, in the early days of the war. I must get a cardigan.’

‘Not France – the Somme. It’s in Germany, woman!’

‘Of all places.’

‘Never mind that, think about what we’re going to do now. This war is going to be worse than the last one, let me tell you that. For one thing, we are near the coast. We must consider what we should do in the case of an invasion.’

‘Oh, Marty, how terrible it would be to have a house full of Nazis! Sonia will be so scared when she hears about it, poor mite.’

‘We’re all equally in the soup. I’d like to know what the heck Hitler thinks he’s doing.’

Mary Fielding rose from her comfortable chair and went to gaze out of the window, as if to make sure that no one in boots was coming up the drive. She said, ‘It’s so horrible to think of war. Once in our lifetimes was surely enough. Sonia will be so upset. You know how delicate her nerves are.’

‘I suppose we could keep it from her.’

They began to discuss what they could do to deceive their daughter that peace still prevailed. The difficult question of the daily newspaper arose. The headlines would always be using the word ‘WAR’. The paper would have to be cancelled for Sonia’s peace of mind; but Martin enjoyed doing the crossword.

‘Surely it’s not much of a sacrifice to give up the crossword,’ said Mary. ‘Not when there’s your child’s sensibilities to consider.’

For a start, they called in Jane, the maid, and made her swear that she would say nothing to Sonia about the war. The maid, familiar with Sonia’s outbursts, duly swore. Her mistress was watching her closely.

‘Jane, you are looking tired. Why is that?’

Jane, whose real name was Henrietta – but all maids coming under the Fielding command were called Emma or Jane by turns – apologized and said there was a lot of work to be done.

‘Nonsense,’ said Mary, severely. ‘After all, you work in a house where we have no mirrors – so, no mirrors to polish. You’re very fortunate.’

‘I do understand about the mirrors, ma’am,’ said Jane, submissively. She knew the mirrors were banished by order of Sonia, so that she would never see her imaginary hump.

Your parents, assisted by the maid, began an elaborate deception. The delicate Sonia was accustomed to listening to the wireless. Martin removed a thermionic valve from their set, so that it no longer worked.

When Sonia begged her father to get the set repaired, he took it and hid it in the garage. As recompense, he bought his daughter a wind-up gramophone covered in red Rexine, and half-a-dozen records, with which he hoped to distract her. He secretly bought himself a new model Ecko wireless, which he concealed in his study, and on which he could listen to the news from the BBC. Sonia played the records. She quickly broke the one she did not like. The one she most enjoyed was called ‘Impressions on a One-string Phone-fiddle’.

She liked to be taken out. Just along the coast was a teashop at which the family frequently stopped to eat cream teas. On one occasion when you had come home for a forty-eight-hour leave before proceeding to OCTU, your mother suggested a visit to the teashop for a special treat. Your mother was friendly, in a condescending way, with the two ladies who ran the teashop. ‘Of course, they’re just old maids,’ she would say of them. ‘Spinsters who could never attract any man to marry them.’ Martin would try, with equal condescension, to explain to his wife that the men who would have liked to marry those ladies when they were young were very probably buried in the mud of the Somme.

So Mary Fielding rang the teashop before you set out. ‘Oh, Miss Atkins. It’s Mrs Fielding here,’ she said in her most refined voice. ‘I wonder if you would kindly assist us. Our dear daughter Sonia is so delicate we are forced to shield her from any knowledge of the hostilities with Nazi Germany. If my husband and I arrived at four o’clock, would you kindly ensure that no mention is made of those hostilities, either by your waitress or by the other customers?’

She listened to Miss Atkins’ response. ‘I quite see my request may raise difficulties, Miss Atkins, but not insuperable ones, I trust. Otherwise Mr Fielding and I may have to decide not to patronize your teashop henceforth. Oh, are you? I am surprised to hear that. Such a lucrative little business you and Miss Everdale have been running. Pack up if you will, but I would judge you will find the Lake District not to your liking at all.’

Mary put the handset down and turned to Martin. ‘I never did! Of all the cheek! Those two spinsters are going to close down next week. They are going to live with a distant niece of Miss Atkins, in Kendal of all places.’

‘It’s cowardice,’ he said. ‘It wouldn’t do if we all buggered off to the Lake District. How will they scratch a living in Kendal, I’d like to know?’

‘Just because the Atkins woman has got an uncle up there.’

You drove to the teashop in the car with Sonia, not without misgivings. A bell on a spring tinkled as you opened the teashop door. A warm, encouraging smell of hot scones met you – the smell of peacetime, never to return. Miss Atkins greeted you all with her usual courtesy. She was rather an ungainly woman, her hair scraped back and tied into a bun with a length of straggling pink ribbon. Her usual attitude in what repose was granted her was to stand with her hands clasped before her; the hands were red from constant washing up. She was wearing the perennial apron over her dress. It showed a picturesque village street, with hills in the background and a notice which read ‘Teas with Hovis’, outside a half-timbered building. A customer wearing a tricorn hat was riding up to the building on a white horse.

‘We are going to have to close down on Saturday week,’ said Miss Atkins, with a sad smile. ‘It is very inconvenient. You would like the usual cream tea, I expect, Mrs Fielding?’

Sonia’s sharp eyes had noticed that bales of barbed wire were being unloaded on the harbour behind the teashop. ‘Is all the barbed wire going to spoil your business, Miss Atkins?’ she asked.

Miss Atkins looked flustered and adjusted the bun at the back of her greying hair. ‘Barbed wire? Oh yes, they are going to do some repair work. They say it will take quite a long time. I’ll get your order.’

‘I heard they plan to extend the harbour,’ said Mary, in an artificially loud voice, staring loftily ahead as if gazing into the future.

A man and his wife were sitting at the next table. Overhearing Mary’s remark, the man turned, licking his thumb, and said, ‘It’s not that, my dear, it’s the new defences –’

‘Oh, quite right, quite right, I had forgotten,’ Mary said. Extending her neck, lowering her head, she hissed across the table at Sonia, ‘Just a typical vulgarian. He shouldn’t be in here. Take no notice.’

‘But what defences does he mean, Mummy?’

‘Didn’t I tell you? A gang of local men have been trying to steal the boats in the harbour … Oh, here comes our tray. Good. I’m terribly peckish, aren’t you?’

‘Can we go afterwards and see them putting up the barbed wire, Mummy?’

‘We may not have time, Sonia, dear,’ said Martin. ‘Work is waiting for me. Pleasure must be sacrificed for duty, you know.’

Sonia looked across the table at you, her lips forming the word ‘Shuggerybees’.

Miss Atkins arranged the spread on the table. Brown pottery teapot under its cosy in front of Mrs Fielding, hot water jug next, then milk jug. Sugar bowl with sugar tongs. Plates before each person. Pretty plates with floral decorations, now destined for Kendal. A dish with a pile of crisp light brown scones, still warm from the oven. A little pot of strawberry jam, with accompanying spoon. A large pot of whipped cream with a Devonshire motto on the outside of the pot, saying ‘Goo Aisy on the Crame!’ in rustic brown lettering.

‘I’m sure we all will have to go easy on the cream in future,’ Miss Atkins found herself murmuring, with another of her stock of sad smiles. ‘Just one of the sacrifices we shall have to make.’

‘Shuggerybees!’ shrieked Sonia. ‘Why does everyone keep on about sacrifices?’

‘Be quiet,’ Martin told her. ‘Remember where you are.’

‘Where am I?’ Sonia asked, looking about in simulated terror. She waved her hands in front of her. ‘Is it all a bad dream?’

‘Yes’, snapped Mary, ignoring her daughter, with a look to Miss Atkins which clearly implied, No Tip Today! ‘We had heard of the terrible cream shortage in Kendal.’

‘And not just in Kendal,’ added Martin loyally.

‘Where else?’ Sonia asked, excitedly. ‘Hunstanton? Are the cows dying?’

‘We export most of our cream to France. And elsewhere,’ said Mary. ‘Perhaps to Sweden.’

‘And Poland,’ you added, helpfully. ‘Because of the inv –’ You stopped just in time, to add instead, ‘the invalids there.’

Miss Atkins looked sad when she said goodbye to you all, standing at the door of the teashop, wringing her hands in her apron – much to Mary’s annoyance.

On the drive home, progress was impeded by an army convoy of five-ton lorries travelling slowly along the road to the port. The troops in the rear vehicle shouted, whistled and gestured rudely at your family.

‘They’re laughing at my hump,’ said Sonia. She waved happily to the men.

‘Rubbish. They’re just rude young men, like all soldiers.’ Thus Martin, feeling uncomfortable about some of the ruder gestures.

‘What are they doing, pa?’

‘Doing? Doing? What do you mean? They’re soldiers being taken somewhere to have a nice summer holiday.’

At last you arrived home. Gyp came out to greet you, wagging his tail. Sonia was still worrying about the soldiers’ vulgar calls.

‘I think I’m the prettiest hunchback in the world, ma. Why isn’t there a beauty contest for hunchbacks?’

‘Because you’d lose,’ you told her, exasperated by her fantasies.

Mary told you both to be quiet and marched into the house, calling for Jane to get you all a pot of tea, despite the cream teas you had recently consumed.

Her daughter followed her, complaining. ‘My hump is really pretty. The nurse told me so. She promised that when I die she will have me stuffed.’

‘Shut up, Sonia. Valerie never had a hump and nor do you. You know mummy sacked that silly nurse.’

‘She said that there were angel wings inside my hump and one day it would break open and then I could fly up to heaven.’ She paused. ‘I bet there’s going to be oodles of blood when it does break open.’ Pulling her little blue coat off and flinging it on the floor, she added, ‘Hope I don’t meet boring Valerie up there in heaven.’

Mary slumped onto her leather sofa and regarded her little daughter. ‘That’s all pure nonsense. Valerie would never have said anything like that. In any case, there’s no place called heaven. Heaven is here in our nice home.’

Sonia sat on the curled arm of a second sofa, this one covered in viridian green satin, put her feet together and clutched her toes, so that her folded legs stuck out like wings to either side, and made a goblin face at her mother.

‘If I haven’t got a hump, then why don’t we have any mirrors in this nice home of ours?’

‘That’s a silly argument. It’s like saying that because we saw one convoy of troops on the road, England is at war.’

‘Ha ha, what’s that got to do with it?’

‘Sonia, I love you dearly, but you are making me cross and you are ruining that sofa.’ Mary pulled her regular, utterly-fed-up face. ‘And pick your nice coat up off the floor.’

Jane entered with a tray of tea, set it down on a side table, opened a gateleg table and moved it to Mary’s side. She set the tray down on the table.

Sonia, who had not moved from her position said, ‘Jane, I’m a hunchback, aren’t I?’

Jane hesitated. Sonia laughed contemptuously. ‘Oh, you can tell me the truth. Ma won’t sack you for it.’

Before the maid could answer, Mary said, ‘Jane, you know very well Miss Sonia is telling fibs.’

Caught in the cross-fire, Jane said, mainly to the child, ‘I’m sure I don’t know what you mean, Miss Sonia.’

As she beat a hasty retreat, Sonia stuck out her tongue at the maid’s back.

‘Your sister Valerie would never behave like that,’ Mary scolded.

‘I hate that Valerie. I’m glad she’s dead! I’d pull her hair if she was still alive.’

Next morning, Mary drove into town to buy groceries, and you and Sonia went with her. They passed the post office, which was newly barricaded behind a wall of sandbags. Sonia asked why this had happened. Her mother told her that the post office was being rebuilt; the sandbags were to stop hundreds of letters from drifting into the road.

Mary parked the car outside Randall’s, the grocer, after dropping you off at the railway station. She ordered Sonia to stay in the car while she shopped. Sonia sat and fidgeted and read her comic. She became aware of a curious object rising in the sky above roof level. It was grey and crumpled. As it rose, it became plumper, gradually achieving a fat sausage shape with plump double tail. With a cable anchoring it to the ground, it turned gently in the breeze.

Sonia regarded it with wonder. Fitful sunshine made the object glow silver. It was frightening and yet beautiful. She climbed from the car and ran into the grocer to tell her mother.

‘There’s no such thing,’ said Mary, indignantly. But the assistant serving her, who wore an apron and a pencil-thin moustache, said, ‘I expect it’s a barrage balloon. The papers said they were going up today.’

‘So there!’ said Sonia. ‘The man is nice to me because he’s sorry I’m a hunchback.’

‘Will you stop it?’ said Mary, angrily. ‘Or I’ll send you back to the hospital again.’

The groceries would be delivered that afternoon. When Sonia and her mother emerged from the grocer’s and were back in the car, heading for home, more barrage balloons became visible. It was evident that the city was now ringed with them. They gleamed, serious and attractive in the sun.

‘Goodness, aren’t they pretty?’ exclaimed Mary. ‘How clever of the city council to rent those things from the army. It’s the mayor’s birthday, Sonia. What a pretty way to celebrate the mayor’s birthday.’

‘I bet Valerie would have been scared. She’d have peed herself.’

‘That’s so unkind, child. Valerie never wet herself. Not like you.’

Sonia never admitted she knew a war was in progress. She allowed her parents to continue their unconvincing deception for many a month, until the pretence ran thin and all concerned were exhausted. All, that is, except for Herr Hitler and Mr Churchill.

It makes me unbearably sad when you bring up that forgotten past again. What is the point of it, unless to make me miserable? Let the dead bury the dead.

Everything is recorded here, sorrowful or joyful.

But why? Why record?

Because it was enacted in the first place.

Then why was it all enacted, that everlasting artistry of circumstance?

‘I expect you’ll do reasonably well in your adult life, Smollett,’ your headmaster said on your final day at school.

‘It’s Dickens, Sir,’ you responded wittily, well aware of the head’s flimsy grasp of names.

He peered at you through his rimless glasses, encompassing his ginger moustache with his lower lip, making that curious sucking noise which was the subject of so many imitations. ‘So sorry, Dickens. I always confuse you with what’s-his-name. He’s also in the First Eleven. But you are bound to do quite well in the great world. Most of our boys do. I remember your father.’ He added, ‘I think.’

He shook your hand with a gentle resigned motion. You thought with some affection about this mild man when you were in the army and word came to you that your school had been evacuated to a place on the edge of Exmoor. You imagined the headmaster making his way across the quad in a heavy downpour. ‘Oh, is it raining, Bronte? I hadn’t noticed.’

You walked into town and caught a train home. Your trunk would arrive later by PLA. You were taking a break on your way to the Officers’ Training Unit in Catterick, Yorkshire. You found your mother sitting in her conservatory, enjoying tea and cigarettes with a friend. She affected to be surprised by your appearance.

‘How strange! And you’re in uniform, Stephen. Good job Sonia isn’t here. I was reliably informed that you were going to Catterick.’

‘I am going to Catterick, Mother. I’m only here overnight. I’ll get the nine-fifteen tomorrow morning, if that’s okay by you.’

‘It’s rather inconvenient. The maid has yet to get your bed ready. And she’s leaving next week, to work in a factory of some kind. We’ve been so busy.’

‘Where’s Sonia, Mother?’

‘I think you know Mrs Thompson?’ She indicated her friend, who was sitting tight, with a teacup poised halfway to her lips, her little finger pointing halfway to heaven. ‘You might say hello to her,’

‘Hello. Where did you say Sonia was, Mother?’

‘Sonia is at RADA. I’ll tell you about it later.’

‘And Valerie?’

‘Don’t try to be funny.’

You retreated to your room and lay down on the unmade bed. You tried to think why Sonia had left school and why she was at RADA, where she might learn how to act but would not learn anything about – well, about all the other subjects of which the world was full.

You suffered the customary dismay at the indifference of your parents. Later, at the evening meal, you learnt that Sonia had been in some kind of trouble at school and had thrown an inkwell at her maths teacher. She had asked to leave school, to learn to act instead. This wish had been granted, although your father grumbled at the expense.

‘I shall be leaving England soon, I expect,’ you said. ‘Soon as I get my pips.’

‘Is that wise?’ your father asked. He was still wearing an Aertex shirt.

‘What do you mean, “Is it wise”? There’s a war on, Pa. I’m going to fight for my sodding country. I have my OTC Certificate. What else am I supposed to do?’

‘But you wanted to go to university and become a geologist, dear,’ said your mother. ‘It’s silly to give all that up, isn’t it?’

You became slightly peevish. ‘It seems your pretence to Sonia that there’s no war going on has affected your thinking. We’ve got to fight the Germans, see? The bloody Third Reich. It’s a matter of priority.’

‘I wish you wouldn’t swear,’ Mary complained. ‘It’s so lower class.’

Ignoring her, ‘That’s all very well,’ said your father. ‘But you have enjoyed an expensive education. You’ll throw all that away in the army. The army’s no place for education.’

‘Not at all. I expect to become an officer.’

Your father pulled a lugubrious face. ‘Officers get shot, you know, old boy. If you must serve, why not serve in the ranks? You’d be safer there.’

‘I intend to become an officer, Father. I want to be able to shout at people.’ By now you were six feet two inches tall and well-developed for your age. Entirely ready to shout at people.

Martin made a gesture of exhaustion, with which you were familiar.

9
A Good Old Row

So it was a fine March day in the year 1940. I was being told of my mother’s psychoanalyst. Butter, sugar and bacon were already rationed, to Mary’s disgust. ‘We’re cutting down on food. We’re slimming. Your father’s getting too fat,’ she said angrily to Sonia, but already what was wearing thin was the pretence she had created for her daughter that there was no war.

Mary’s psychoanalyst was leaving the district and moving to Exeter for safety. Mary went to her for one final session. By this time, she was on informal terms with Wilhelmina Fischer.

‘I shall miss you, but I hardly think I need any more consultations,’ she said, stretching out the final word.

Wilhelmina Fischer sat by an empty grate. She had changed her name and wore pale Lyle stockings under her heavy linen skirt.

‘We all encounter obstacles in facing the realities of life,’ said Wilhelmina Fischer, removing her pince-nez to gesture widely with them. ‘But, après tout, realities are real and fantasies must not become real. The German peoples have fallen victim to an anti-Communist belief in their own powers, largely finding reinforcement in an Aryan myth of Götterdämmerung. It is a destructive myth which –’

‘We’re not like them, thank goodness,’ said Mary hastily.

‘But the British believe in the fantasy of white superiority, which may prove to be equally damaging.’ Wilhelmina shook her heavy head so that her heavy cheeks wobbled.

‘I can’t see how that applies in my case. It’s a generalization.’ Mary realized, as she rose and thrust her right arm into her coat sleeve, that she had never liked Wilhelmina Fischer. Wilhelmina Fischer had contributed considerably to the miseries of the last few years. She made one feel one was mentally disturbed.

The women shook hands and bid one another farewell on the doorstep of the clinic.

‘God speed,’ said Mary, feeling, directly she had pronounced the words, that they were inappropriate.

While Wilhelmina Fischer was moving towards Exeter and extinction, you marched along Park Street, Southampton, towards Number 19, where Uncle Bertie Wilberforce and his family lived. You hoped that your uncle would be away.

Before you presented yourself on your Aunt Violet’s doorstep, a young, chubby boy, of pink complexion, appeared from the back garden, round the side of the house, blowing a tiny silver trumpet of the kind to be found hanging off pre-war Christmas trees. The trumpet emitted a shrill note as the boy marched right up to you. ‘Being carefree,’ he said, addressing your Sam Browne, ‘Being carefree is a thing like a motto, but I don’t know what. I’m always being something. Not a motto, though. Ha ha ha.’

‘Hello, Dougie,’ you said. ‘Is your mother in?’

‘She’s in charge of the Virol. Mistress of Virol! Know what Virol looks like? Like the mess what Lillie Reader made in her nick-nacks when our form were in the gym, swinging on the handlebars. We all laughed except Lillie.’

That silly forgotten scene … As he was speaking, another figure emerged from the back garden, pushing aside the buds of a hazelnut tree. It was your Uncle Claude. He looked somewhat disconcerted to see you standing there, but covered his embarrassment quickly.

‘Morning, Steve! Just came to see how this young rogue was getting on at school. Must be off. Dougie, follow me, you little blighter.’

He grasped the boy’s arm and began to drag him away, promising the child a stick of rock ‘down at the port’.

You were slightly surprised by this encounter, but, after all, it seemed to be no business of yours. You were in any case more concerned with the impression your appearance would make on your dear aunt.

You were smartly dressed in your new khaki uniform, with the pips of a Second Lieutenant on your shoulders. You were fresh out of OCTU. Your hair was slicked down with Brylcreem and you wore a cap. Your shoes were shining. You had a moustache of a kind. When you rang the bell, Violet opened the door after some delay, looking flushed and dishevelled.

‘Golly! Steve, I hardly recognized you in that get-up. Do you want to come in?’

Since she seemed reluctant, you said sharply that that was the general idea. She stood back. You entered the familiar hall. You recognized the heavily-carved hall-stand, with a mirror in its middle and a wooden bear’s head snarling at the crown of it. A child’s fairy cycle was propped against it. Of course, you remembered, Violet had two children, not only the garrulous Douglas, but his more silent sister, Joyce. It would be Douglas’ bike. Thank God Joyce would probably be at school, you thought. There was something more intimate in your mind, which you attempted to keep from consciousness. You had expected that when your aunt saw you spick and span in your officer’s uniform she would fall into your arms. Instead she was giving a little snigger and saying that you were, in her phrase, all done up like a dog’s dinner.

‘Better come into the kitchen,’ she said unceremoniously, leading the way through to the rear of the house. Her face was flushed and unhappy. You felt annoyed because she had not kissed you; you had no concern for her.

You were not best pleased to see your Uncle Bertie there, in his old brown-striped suit, his tie badly knotted. He was leaning against the sink with his arms folded. The kitchen smelt stale and cheerless; you had remembered it as a cosy place. A plate with a half-eaten piece of toast lay on the table.

‘We were having a good old row,’ said Violet, with an imitation of her previous brightness. ‘Do you want a sherry?’ she asked you.

When you hesitated, she added, ‘It’s all we’ve got in this house of parsimony.’

‘Because you’ve guzzled all the gin,’ said her husband. He was regarding his wife with a look that seemed to contain hatred and fear. He then said, ‘I don’t want to come home and find Claude hanging round here again.’

‘Sorry if I’ve come at an awkward moment, Uncle,’ you said, with a tone intended to indicate that sorrow was only skin deep.

‘There are plenty of those round here,’ he responded, without removing his gaze from Violet. ‘Plenty and to bloody spare.’

A large ginger cat, which had possibly fled the room when the row was in full swing, slunk back in, jumped up on a kitchen chair and curled itself into a ball. Violet filled two glasses with a dark sherry and handed one to you. Her hand was shaking. Taking the glass with a frown, you directed a look towards Bertie. ‘You’re not having one?’

‘Can’t afford to drink, my lad. I leave all that to your aunt.’

‘Well, cheers!’

Neither of them made any response. Bertie continued to lean against the sink; he now gazed down at the floor. He seemed to have aged considerably since you last saw him. Violet, too, looked less bright and sassy than she had done. She was wearing no lipstick. She stood now on the far side of the kitchen table, her glass half-raised to her mouth. A clock was inset in one door of the kitchen dresser. It gave a loud tick.

‘So you’re an officer, Steve,’ said Bertie with an attempt at geniality. ‘Going to have a crack at the Boche, eh?’

‘Sooner or later, yes. That’s the general idea. I’ll be in the tank corps.’

Bertie pulled a face, as if dismissing such an odd notion.

‘We were all Socialists in my day. What made you wish to become an officer?’

‘I wanted to be able to shout at people.’ The phrase had become your standard joke. You expected people to laugh at it. You never saw below the surface – that it was no joke, that you felt your parents had mistreated you, that other people did not value you, and that you could get your own back by shouting and bullying.

Your uncle did not laugh. ‘Your father tells me you were at OCTU. Who did you shout at there?’ He shot glances at you before turning his gaze once more to his shoes.

You did not like the question.

‘At an Officer Cadet Training Unit, you learn to control men. That’s the essence of what being an officer means. You have squads of ordinary soldiers you have to drill. Discipline, you know, Uncle, discipline. Necessary in times of war.’

‘Did the, what you call “ordinary soldiers”, enjoy this drill?’

A vivid picture came into your head. You were standing erect at one end of the parade ground. The squad was three hundred yards distant from you at the other end of the parade ground, marching like robots, arms swinging, faultlessly in step, the noise of their progress echoing against the stern surrounding buildings. ‘Straighten up there,’ you bawled. ‘March as if you mean it. Squad. Ri-i-ght. WHEEEEL!’

‘They weren’t there to enjoy it,’ you told your uncle. ‘They were in the army. They were just part of the system.’

‘But you had a good time,’ Bertie insinuated.

‘Oh, leave the poor lad alone!’ shouted Violet. ‘I should hope he did have a good time. Why should he want to be in the bloody ranks? You’re on embarkation leave now, aren’t you, Steve?’

‘How did you know?’

She looked puzzled. ‘Your father told us. We’re still speaking, more-or-less. Off to France, aren’t you?’

‘It’s supposed to be a military secret.’

With feeble sarcasm, Bertie said, ‘Don’t want Adolf Hitler to know where our Second Lieutenant Steve Fielding is, do we? Might lose the war because of it.’

You sipped the sherry, before saying you were sorry to barge in in the middle of an argument, but had no wish to be drawn into it.

‘Your aunt is spending too much money, that’s all,’ said Bertie, pettishly. ‘That’s it and all about it. She doesn’t know there’s a war on. She can’t get it into her head. It’s not an argument, it’s a fact. I’m not made of money.’

‘This stingy nonsense is just because I took Joyce up to London in the hols and bought her a new party dress.’ Violet sighed and gazed up at the ceiling. ‘Not a big deal. In any case, the dress was a bargain.’

‘Bargains, bargains. That’s all you ever think of.’

Turning away from her husband towards you, Violet said, ‘What kind of father grudges his daughter a new party dress?’

‘Yes, and what else? In the middle of a war –’ Bertie was red in the face.

‘We went to see a flick. So what?’

‘Oh, have you seen The Grapes of Wrath?’ you asked her.

‘Oh, we wanted something light. We went to see Bob Hope and Bing Crosby in Road to Singapore. Ever so funny. They make a great comedy pair.’

‘And sat in the best seats, of course,’ sneered Bertie.

‘I’d better be going,’ you said. You were trying to suppress anger and disappointment.

Bertie thrust his hands into his trouser pockets, saying nothing. Violet accompanied you to the front door. She said she was sorry about the way things were. She gave you a fleeting kiss on the cheek and wished you well. Turning back as she was closing the door you saw tears in her eyes.

‘Goodbye, my darling,’ she called. You felt pretty irritated.

10
A Slight Change of Plan

The sea was slightly choppy. A chilly wind blew, driving cloud before it. The landing craft, with their freight of troops, tanks, guns, lorries and other support vehicles, lurched towards the French shore. It was the 20th May. German forces had already made huge incursions into France. In 1940, the war was going the Germans’ way.

This detachment of the Tank Corps, known to some as ‘Montagu’s Marauders’, were to act as reinforcements. After landing, their orders were to move immediately to supplement the defence of Paris. They were about to land on the beaches of Fecamp, a village between Dieppe and Le Havre.

As the ramp of the lead LCT came down, waves surged over it. You stood in the bows, wishing there was some way to stop looking pale. Major Hilary Montagu gripped your elbow, declaiming in a firm voice, ‘A mighty wave Odysseus overbore: Quenching all thought, it swept him to the shore.’

You looked at him in puzzlement. Montagu already had his binoculars to his eyes, and was searching the shore for signs of activity.

‘The Odyssey, old chap. Translated by someone or other. Have you never read The Odyssey? The world’s greatest book. Tut-tut.’

You said nothing. Montagu was your superior officer, recently returned from India, where he had been in command of a company of Gurkhas on the North West Frontier. A lean and civilized man with a sudden temper which made him feared by both men and officers, Montagu had adopted a somewhat fatherly attitude towards you, for which you were grateful, telling yourself you could stand patronizing. You were so young.

At his signal, the vehicle engines started up. The bottom of the LCT grated against shingle.

‘Come on!’ shouted Montagu. ‘Forward the Buffs!’ He jumped into the spray. You followed, the troops behind you. The heaving water came up to your thighs, intent on impeding you. Shingle crunched underfoot. You were too intent on watching for possible opposition ashore to notice the cold of the water.

There was no opposition on the beach, only a French officer awaiting you by a pick-up truck. As you, Captain Travers and two Red Caps directed the traffic from the landing craft into line on the sand, shouting to the soldiers to muster on a road just above the low cliffs, Montagu marched briskly towards the French officer. They saluted each other, then shook hands. They hurried to the pick-up to send out wireless messages to base across the Channel, confirming that you had landed unopposed.

You marshalled the small invading force in order on the road, with scouts out and alert and all Churchills sending out blue exhaust. Two sandy roads divided, with a wood on one side of the main road and a field with cows grazing on the other. Some distance away was a house with a barn beside it, the whole making a disturbingly peaceful picture.

The major, returning from the French pick-up, said to you in an aside, ‘Chap doesn’t speak Urdu, or much English, but it seems we should get a move on. We proceed via Rouen. There’s a straight road from Rouen to Paris, but we may encounter refugees en route.’

‘Move immediately, Sir?’

‘What else? Get on with it, Fielding.’

As you climbed into your tank, a faint siren blast sounded from across the water. Your supply ship was turning, leaving France to make the return journey back to England. At that point you felt isolated. You thought there were perhaps half a million British troops on French soil, many engaged in battles with the Wehrmacht, but none of them were anywhere near your detachment. You prickled with a sense of peril and excitement.

The vehicles rolled. You began the trek south-west on the more important road. Almost immediately, you encountered refugees. Many were on foot, travelling in families, fathers pushing prams loaded with provisions and cooking utensils; some were in cars of ancient vintage, with mattresses tied to the roof; some had carts, farm carts of various sizes, drawn by horses, with bedraggled sons and daughters of farmers who were trudging alongside the turning wheels. This was what the great French nation had been brought down to.

The road you were taking was raised above the level of the surrounding fields to prevent it from flooding. Many refugees had problems getting up on the road from the fields; carts had to be heaved with a united effort, babies and small children had to be carried, grandmothers had to be pushed, cars in some cases to be abandoned. It was a terrible scramble, involving shouting, cursing and screaming. The fear was always that Stukas would fly over and strafe the crowds. Fortunately none appeared; the skies remained clear.

But your progress was painfully slow. Some refugees, travelling on foot, seized the opportunity to climb on the sides of the tanks for a brief respite. You did not have the heart to order them off. Captain Travers had the passengers of his tank turned away.

Your company had landed at dawn. Cloud had blown away, leaving blue skies. Just before one o’clock you arrived at the town of Yvetot, to find much of it in flames following a German bombing raid. A mixed bunch of soldiers and gendarmes was barring entrance to the town.

Major Montagu handed over command to Captain Travers and went on foot to order the mayor to give us permission to pass through. He returned after ninety minutes, during which time the men had ‘brewed up’. One of the men handed you up a mug of tea. Montagu looked grim. The mayor had been injured by a bomb blast and his harried second-in-command had no control over affairs. He claimed that bomb craters had closed the streets and there was no road open to Rouen: you would have to turn back.

The Major had persuaded or forced the man to sign a piece of paper, which he waved at the soldiery on guard. A large blond Frenchman wearing an old-fashioned helmet came forward and bellowed at the gendarmes to let the British tanks through.

Moving slowly along the shattered streets, you all had your first close glimpse of the destruction brought by the war Hitler had wished upon you. It was a still day. Smoke lay like layers of mist, generated by buildings reduced to smouldering wrecks. A car burned quietly, its driver hanging dead from its open door.

The hospital had suffered a direct hit. Injured persons were lying under blankets in the grounds, with unharmed people thronging about, nursing the dying, weeping, or trying to administer medicines or water to the wounded. A young boy was crawling on hands and knees towards the church, dragging a bloody leg.

The church and its grounds were crowded with frightened people; nuns went among them, smiling and gentle, to soothe or to pray. Two men in uniform were dragging a corpse towards the cemetery. When they saw your vehicles, they stopped and stood rigidly to attention, saluting your unit until every tank had passed.

All shops were closed. A once cheerful main street was completely dead. A queue had formed outside the shutters of a boulangerie. There were no signs of looting.

The number of bomb craters had been exaggerated. Your tanks experienced greater difficulty negotiating the rubble of collapsed houses strewn across the thoroughfare. It took two hours before you had picked your way through Yvetot, and were on the road to Rouen – or ‘the road to ruin’, as the troops put it.

What were you thinking at the time? Do you remember?

I hardly thought. Oh, I suppose I was relieved in a way to see the devastation, the suffering. I told myself that this was how it had always been, that this was simply part of the tragic human condition. Or maybe I thought all that later, when there was time to think, when I was in prison.

Were you aware that this was a peak moment in your life?

No – for once I was totally preoccupied by the present.

You were not more than a kilometre down the road, and were passing through a grove of poplars lining each side of the road, when three Stukas came roaring overhead. The bombs they dropped whistled as they fell, to add to the terror of the attack.

No order was needed for you to dive for cover under or beside your vehicles. Hapless refugees fled to either side of the road among the tall trees, to crouch in ditches. Fortunately, the bombs did little damage, exploding in nearby fields.

‘Stay where you are,’ Montagu shouted. ‘The blighters are liable to come back.’

Indeed the planes did come back. They wheeled and returned from the north-west, flying low down the road, machine guns blazing. Many refugees were hit; several were killed. Some did not die outright; screams of pain and terror rang out long after the planes had gone.

You heard a dog yelping terribly with pain. Suddenly it was silenced.

You had First Aid kits with you, and administered what help you could to the injured. A peasant woman, herself with a badly damaged shoulder, sat nursing a dead child. Over and over, in a choking voice, she cried, ‘Putain de bordel de merde! Putain de bordel de merde!’ You let her drink from your water bottle.

A ragged hound was lapping up blood on the road. You kicked it aside. The scene was one of chaos, of splinters, of ruined limbs. A horse lay struggling in its death agonies, entangled in reins. It had broken a wheel of the cart to which it was attached. One of your troop, a young soldier called Palfrey, put his rifle to the horse’s head and shot it. He helped three men to cut the horse free and drag its body and the ruined cart to the side of the road. An adolescent girl, seemingly unharmed, was leaning against a tree, covering her face, weeping.

Your wireless operator called to the major. An RT message awaited him. Montagu beckoned you to follow him. You stood by the wireless truck while he spoke intermittently in an incomprehensible language, all the while watching the chaos nearby. He finally pronounced an English ‘Out’, and returned the handset to the operator. He locked his hands behind his back and spoke quietly to his two officers, Captain Travers and you.

‘I thank God that a comrade of mine is in the Southampton HQ. We once took a holiday in Ootie together. We can bolo in clear Urdu to each other. Security is maintained – I doubt many Huns bolo Urdu.

‘The news in whatever language is extremely poor, gentlemen. Advanced German Panzer columns have overwhelmed Amiens and Abbeville, on the River Somme. In case you don’t know, those cities are not too far distant from here; about sixty miles.’

He nodded towards the north-east.

‘Now the Panzers are heading this way. We aren’t making the progress we had anticipated. The Germans are making the progress we did not anticipate. We are in some danger of being cut off. The Prime Minister of France, Paul Reynaud, is talking of giving up the struggle.’

‘I always said the French were a bunch of cowards,’ said Travers. He was a wiry man with a lean, hard face, handsome in its way. You had always found him reserved and unfriendly. ‘I’ll wager they lose their nerve.’

Montagu frowned, but let the remark pass. ‘If France packs it in, we shall have a few problems on our hands. Indeed, we have some already.’ The nod of his head was directed towards your men, who were standing in front of their vehicles, rifles pointed at a group of ten or more men and a woman, who were attempting to take possession of the two supply lorries.

One of the soldiers fired his rifle in the air, low over the heads of the advancing group.

The major removed his hands from behind his back and marched briskly to where his men stood. He addressed the French mob in English. He told them that you were a detachment going to help defend their capital city, that their actions threatened to upset military plans, and that the Boche were closing in rapidly on their position.

‘In other words, clear off, the lot of you!’

Whether the refugees understood what he said was doubtful. But his firm, reasonable and authoritative voice had its effect. The mob slunk away and returned to help their wounded comrades.

‘Danke schön,’ said Montagu calmly, turning back to you officers. ‘Now then, I have received orders for a slight change of plan. Somewhere to the west of here lies the city of Rennes, in Brittany. About one hundred and seventy miles away as the crow flies. There’s a firm in Rennes called Colomar, part British-owned. Their HQ is on the Place de Bretagne, a main square, thik hai?’

‘What’s all this to do with us, Major?’ Travers asked.

Montagu continued as if he had not heard the question.

‘Colomar currently hold three-million-pounds-worth, sterling, of industrial diamonds. We don’t want this haul to fall into German hands. You, Fielding, what are industrial diamonds used for?’

You replied, ‘They are essential for the manufacturing of machine tools, and tools necessary for making armaments.’

‘Full marks. The way the war is going, we do not want these diamonds falling into German hands, for obvious reasons. Our orders are for one of us to press on immediately to Rennes, take charge of the diamond stock, and to transport it to Saint Nazaire, a port on the south coast of Brittany at the mouth of the River Loire. I gather there may be some difficulty in persuading the company to hand the diamonds over. However, we are armed and they are not. A persuasive point.’

He stood there sturdily in the middle of the road, looking at you.

‘Rennes is a long way from home. Why is it up to us, for God’s sake?’ asked Travers.

‘Because we are on the spot, Captain. We happen to be British troops farther to the south than other units.’ He spoke briskly, before turning to you.

‘Fielding, you are young and brave, I am delegating you the task of taking one of the vehicles and collecting the diamonds from Colomar.’

You asked why there was this sudden change of plans.

‘Better ask the fornicating Germans that.’ Montagu continued with his instructions.

‘You will drive with the diamonds, going like the clappers, to St Nazaire in the south, where a Royal Naval ship will deliver you and the valuables back to Britain.’

You were horrified. ‘Why me, Sir?’

As you asked the question, you remembered the OCTU report in a stray roster you had caught sight of. There lay a summary of your qualities: ‘6ft 2ins. Good-looking, good accent. Knows how to handle knife and fork. Officer material.’ Nothing was said there about a capacity to collect diamonds from a distant French city.

‘Why not Captain Travers, Sir?’

Montagu gave a low growl.

‘Captain Travers has a poor opinion of our French allies and does not speak French. You do speak French, Lieutenant. You are young and foolhardy. You will do well.’

‘But, Sir … well, I can’t deal in diamonds, Sir. I’m a Socialist.’

In a quiet voice, Montagu said, ‘Don’t be a bloody fool, Fielding. There are larger issues at stake than your political conscience. The whole continent of Europe totters on the very brink of falling to Hitler’s armies. Britain will then stand alone. We need those industrial diamonds and so do the Huns. We must secure them. Take one of the gharies and two volunteers and a Bren gun and off you go. Jaldhi!’

‘Not my tank, Sir?’

‘The ghari is much faster. Stop arguing and go, will you?’

‘What’s the name of the ship I have to rendezvous with, Sir?’

‘You’ll find out when you get there. Starting from now!’

You stood poised to move. But there was a further question, born of the danger you were all in.

‘What about you, Sir?’

Montagu gave you a rictus that passed for a smile. ‘The rest of us will continue on to “Gay Paris” as ordered. The way you are going, away from the immediate combat, should be less dangerous. If you get a move on.’

You found yourself reluctant to leave the presence of this forceful officer. ‘Hope you make it, Sir.’

Montagu put his hands behind his back and stuck his chin in the air. ‘I rely on the motto of the Montagus, forged on the Khyber Pass, Numquam wappas – Never backwards!’

11
Carnage on the Road

The vehicle Major Montagu referred to as a ghari was a five-ton lorry. Among the few supplies loaded into the back of it sat Private Furbank, manning the Bren gun. Private Pete Palfrey was driving the ghari. You swung yourself up into the front seat beside him.

You were entering the hilly country to the south of Bernay, where no refugees filled the roads – where indeed it seemed there were no inhabitants. Signs of human occupation were few – a barn here, an old tractor there, a dilapidated house with a picket fence. Apple trees lined the road, in full blossom, turning hedges white and pink. But not a man with a spade, not a woman hanging out washing, not a child leading a dog along. It was as if the tribes of mankind, having finally got things going, had themselves gone.

Here the spring had come, in contrast to the carnage you had witnessed in Yvetot, the season announced in the trumpets of daffodils by roadsides, and not only there. Cuckoos called from nearby hills. Other birds sang, warbling from tree to tree. The spring enfolded them with its calming presence.

And it rained. It was but a shower. You kept on driving.

Dusk was falling by the time you reached a tiny village on a crossroads, by name Monnai.

‘Stop here,’ you told Palfrey. He drew up at the side of the little street, where the houses crouched against the pavement, looking as if they had closed for the duration of the war.

Furbank came round to the window and asked where you all were.

You responded with an order. ‘You two go and find if there’s somewhere we can eat. Keep your rifles ready for trouble.’

Palfrey said, ‘We don’t speak the local lingo, Sir.’

‘Use gestures,’ you replied. ‘Go!’

You were feeling shocked beyond words. You could not rid your mind of the images of carnage on the road, of bodies stripped of clothing and skin, blood-red and glistening, like something in a butcher’s window. The horror of it would not leave you. Yet you feared it would one day leave you. It was your new knowledge – knowledge that in fact you had known all along – that scared you; that there were madmen loose in the world, that people were meat. You were disgusted with … well, with everything, including yourself. You vowed you would be a vegetarian from now on. Nevertheless, you were feeling hungry.

Furbank and Palfrey came back with a big, red-faced man, his face fringed by a line of beard. He wore a striped sweater and a pair of old corduroy trousers.

You opened the ghari door to him. He put out a beefy hand in welcome. You shook it. He said he understood you were English. You agreed, in your graduate French. He declared that he knew only two words of English, ‘coffee’ and ‘wine’. He laughed at his own shortcomings. You followed suit. He said that if you and your men would do him the honour, he and his wife would like to give you some supper.

You were grateful and accepted.

He asked you what your vehicle was called. You answered ‘Ghari’, for you had taken to Major Montagu’s Urdu for ‘lorry’. The Frenchman said he now knew three words of English. ‘Ghari!’ he said. You had to drive the ghari off the road to his orchard.

The man’s wife was a kindly woman who, directly she saw your pallor, brought you and your companions glasses of calvados. You felt slightly better. She provided you with a good solid meal and a rich red local wine to go with it. You were given cushions on which to lay your heads in the ghari; you already had blankets. You were parked in the man’s orchard, surrounded by blossom. After that generous meal, you all slept well. Your sleep was mercifully dreamless.

The French couple were up even earlier than you in the morning. They gave you croissants and cups of strong coffee for breakfast. You thanked them for their kindness. You would come and see them and repay their hospitality when the war was over.

They stood and waved in the road until you were a good quarter kilometre away. You feared for them when les Boches arrived.

You made good time. Sometimes the roads seemed almost deserted, apart from the odd farm cart; at other times they were busy and you had to pull over to the right-hand side of the road. At one point, on a road lined thickly with trees, you encountered a considerable body of French motorized troops, heading towards the north-east. The commander of the troop was suspicious. He halted the column and came to inspect you.

You climbed slowly from the ghari and saluted him. He was a tall man with a withered face and a black military moustache. He returned your salute and asked who the devil you were. You replied in French that you were a British detachment on a mission to Rennes. He told you you were going the wrong way to meet the Boche.

You explained your mission. He said that the Germans would never get as far as Rennes. But there was a whisper of doubt in his voice. You exchanged a few remarks about the enemy, and you stressed the fact that the British were fighting alongside their allies. He became more cordial. His name was Capitaine Philippe de la Tour, commander of a Breton battalion advancing to engage the enemy. He offered you a Gaulois. You stood together in the road, smoking. He remarked on how young you were. He was thirty-two.

The trees branching overhead were still. Everyone waited for you. Except the Boche.

The capitaine was friendly and curious. He inspected the interior of the five-tonner. Finally, he asked if there was anything he could do to assist you. You mentioned petrol. He had two men bring up two full jerry cans to stow in the rear of the ghari. He enquired if you had French money. You were forced to admit you had none. He tut-tutted and summoned his paymaster, who was made to pay out five hundred francs, which he did with a bad grace.

You were most grateful. You shook hands. The capitaine embraced you, for you were comrades-in-arms. You saluted smartly before he turned away and marched briskly back to his vehicle. It seemed as if your heart rose to your throat and almost choked you.

That night, you were somewhere near Fougères. You did not know where anywhere was, or how far it was, for all signposts had been removed – an indication that someone, if not the capitaine, must believe the Germans might get this far. The countryside was broken and wooded. You pulled into a firebreak between tall beeches. You ate Army iron rations and settled down to sleep on the boards of the ghari.

The sound of distant explosions roused you from sleep. You climbed out quietly, so as not to awaken Palfrey and Furbank, to see what was to be seen. The trees cut off all distant vision. They stirred uneasily in an increasingly strong breeze. Planes were flying overhead. A town further along the road was getting strafed, presumably Fougères. You were sleepy and climbed back to your blanket.

Suddenly Palfrey was shaking you.

‘Wake up, Sir! There’s a dogfight going on. Wake up!’

You were cold and heavy. Only gradually did you become properly alert. The roar of aero engines brought you to your senses. You climbed out after Palfrey. Furbank was standing with his back against the ghari, looking up at the dull dawn sky. His face was grey and drawn, as if he had aged twenty years overnight.

One flickering searchlight was probing the air. A number of planes were manoeuvring, spurting paths of tracer. Slow French fighters were taking on the speedier Messerschmitts. From the ground, it all looked harmless.

You watched in fascination as a plane was hit. It began to spiral earthwards, with a tail of flame.

‘It’s one of ours,’ you said, almost to yourself.

The burning plane flattened out, as if the pilot were recovering control. Still it flew lower and lower.

‘Look out!’ yelled Furbank.

The plane crashed through the tops of nearby trees at great speed, flaming, flaming, as it rushed towards where you stood.

Did you run? Who could remember in that moment of extreme terror? – All you recall is that gigantic fiery thing, like vengeance itself, disintegrating as it sped through saplings, smashing into your lorry, spewing flame and metal all about.

You were hit by a fragment of metal. You went down. Terrible noise. Then the crackle and crash of everything burning.

Into the silence and blackness came strange dreams, incoherent, confused and confusing. Gradually you realized you were recovering consciousness. You could not move.

There was a roof overhead. You were lying in a hut of some kind. You thought you were at home. You could hear the sound of water. You believed you were a boy again, back at Walcot.

You passed out.

When consciousness closes down, all manner of other senses occupy the darkened stage of your mind. These are, in many cases, deeply rooted myth figures, inherited from a long phylogeny, the roots of which precede the human. If only you could examine them! But the net of consciousness is not there to effect a capture.

Slowly the dark tide receded. You sprawled on the very shores of awareness, taking in little or nothing.

You found that someone – and this was real – was lifting your head in order to give you a drink. It was not always water he presented you with. Sometimes it was milk.

You became more able to take in your surroundings. It was not unlike a baby being born. You were conscious of pain. You struggled to sit up. You were alone in something much like a cowshed, covered with an old army greatcoat. Beyond the open shed door lay woodland, where sunshine was visible in slices amid the dense foliage.

When you made an attempt to get to your feet, you groaned with the pain. In response, a figure appeared in the doorway, an unkempt figure in ragged khaki uniform.

‘Christ, I thought you’d never come fucking round,’ it said, in tones of relief.

You seemed to recognize the man but could not recall his name. He came and squatted by you.

‘I wouldn’t try to get up. You’ve got a nasty gash in your leg.’

You lay back, exhausted. You managed to gasp a question, asking how long you had been unconscious.

‘It’s been ten or more days, I reckon.’ He gave a laugh. ‘I started carving notches in a tree. If you’d have died, I’d have been stuck here alone. I’ve not a fucking clue where we are.’

When you apologized and said you had forgotten his name, he told you he was Pete Palfrey. ‘You’re Steve Fielding. We don’t have no ranks, you savvy. Not here in this bloody forest.’

You had no wish to dispute the matter with him.

Memory was returning. ‘A bomb hit our ghari! My God!’

‘Only it weren’t a bomb. It were a bloody French fighter plane, full of fuel. A Morane 445.’

You were astonished by his knowledge.

‘We done aircraft recognition at school. Moranes were never a match for the Messerschmitts.’

‘Moraine? A funny thing to call an aircraft. A moraine is a heap of debris left by a retreating glacier.’

He made nothing of that. ‘Well, it’s just a heap of debris now.’

Pete Palfrey was a little younger than you, with a lad’s slenderness. His unshaven whiskery state made him look older. He had attended a grammar school in Leeds.

‘How’s the ghari?’

‘The ghari, as you call it, were blown into little bits.’

‘And Private Furbank?’

‘Him likewise, poor sod! His name were Gary too.’ He paused meditatively. ‘I heard as he was a bit of a one for Navy Cake.’

He added that when you were able to walk, you two could go and inspect the remains of the crash. They were not far away.

You learnt to hobble about with an improvised crutch. Your surroundings narrowed your consciousness. You marvelled at the resourcefulness of Palfrey. He had reconnoitred the area and had discovered a nearby farmhouse. Careful observation confirmed that it had been deserted. The back door was unlocked, had, in fact, no lock on it. The occupants had left in a hurry, leaving utensils and clothes and various other belongings behind. Palfrey had carried a mattress out to the cattle shed for you to lie on.

Two cows had been left in a field. Palfrey had milked them.

Desperate for food, he had found some flour and had baked a kind of bun, flavoured with sultanas from a pottery jar. He had found an old wireless in a downstairs room, and listened in, but could not get an English-speaking station.

You stood in a small clearing. You asked him if there was a bicycle at the house; he could cycle into Fougères and get help. He had thought of that, he said dismissively. There was no bike. Nor did he intend to leave you.

As you were talking, a heavy bird fluttered overhead, battering its way through light twigs. You exclaimed in surprise.

‘What the hell is that?’

‘It’s a feral hen,’ Palfrey said. He dug into his pocket and produced some grains of corn which he scattered on the path. The hen landed and pecked at the grain. It was a gaunt bird, clucking to itself, darting swift, suspicious glances here and there as it ate.

When you raised your crutch to kill it, Palfrey stopped you.

‘Don’t be a daft bugger! These chickens lay eggs. We need eggs. I’m hoping to get them to settle here, to save me having to traipse up to the house where they roost all the time. Someone might spot us.’

It appeared that a number of hens had been left behind when the farm was evacuated. Left to run free, they had regrown their wings and rediscovered the art of flight. They were not your only source of food. Palfrey had made a catapult, which he used with deadly accuracy to stun and then kill squirrels and, on one occasion, a rabbit. These morsels you cooked on spits over small fires. Palfrey was expert at skinning the animals, and at building fires.

Your admiration for his resourcefulness grew. You thought of a play in which you had acted in the days of the Sixth Form, entitled The Admirable Crichton, written by a then popular playwright. The play concerned a wealthy family who had a butler named Crichton; the butler went with the family on a cruise, to serve them as usual. When the family were shipwrecked, the butler proved himself the superior man and saved the family from starvation. You had known the play well, for you had played the role of the admirable Crichton yourself. Sonia had come to see you acting. Now here was Private Palfrey, rejoicing in a similar role. While you had lain unconscious, this city lad had learnt the arts of survival in the wilds.

Slowly your leg healed, at least in part, for it continued to trouble you. You followed Palfrey along a faint woodland path and came to a place where the trees were blackened by fire. They surrounded the burnt-out remains of the crashed plane and your lorry. Both machines were skeletal. A dog was chewing something. It threw you a guilty glance over one shoulder and slunk away into the undergrowth.

The two of you stood there, silenced by the grim spectacle. Of Gary Furbank and the French pilot there was no sign. They had either been consumed in the fire or feral dogs had devoured their remains.

‘Seen enough?’ Palfrey asked, with a sneer.

But you rooted about to see what could be retrieved. Not everything had been consumed by the blaze. You found a box of ammunition, still sealed, miraculously intact, overturned in rough grass. You insisted that Palfrey and you dragged it back to your lair.

There was still, you considered, a war to be fought.

12
‘War or No War …’

There was some mercy in the restriction of your awareness to your immediate circumstances. You never thought of your home. I will tell you briefly of something going on there. Are you prepared?

Yes.

Mary Fielding was having the room she called her lounge redecorated. Two decorators in overalls were hanging the new wallpaper. She stood watching them. She had moved her goldfish into the kitchen for safety.

‘War or no war, we’ve got to have the place looking smart,’ she said. ‘People may call.’ The men agreed. They had voted for Martin Fielding in the previous by-election.

Mary was restless. She looked out into the garden. Unable to think of anything else to say, she retreated and went into the kitchen. Martin had left the house early for a meeting at work. Theirs was hardly a marriage, she told herself. Steve was gone. Of course, there was Sonia … but Sonia was away at acting school. The home was so dull without Sonia.

She retreated to Valerie, the ghost eternally at her side. Valerie would have stayed with her, would have found her interesting. Valerie. She would be quite a big girl by now. She wore little frilly dresses, with frilly petticoats beneath. She had ribbons in her hair. She was always smiling and happy – as good as gold.

Mary acknowledged to herself now that Valerie was dead, had never lived, was a fantasy; yet it was a fantasy that consoled her, as far as she could be consoled. Not just dead even, but had never had life, except in the shelter of her womb. Perhaps, after all, Valerie was better out of it, out of the world.

She went back to watch the men working. Valerie followed, meek, but faint.

Someone was ringing the front door bell.

As Mary left the room, the older decorator straightened up and eased his back. He worked with his son. This youth was a poor droopy thing with a bad case of acne. He was due to be called up; he had a verruca, which might save him from the infantry. When he was gone, the old man would be alone. But perhaps interior decorating would not be needed any more in wartime.

Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.

Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».

Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.

Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.