The Wisdom of Crocodiles

by Paul Hoffman

  My mum and I returned home at the end of the week. A few days later I came back from a school football match as she was sitting down to watch the six o’clock news. As the first item came up the newscaster adopted that po-faced expression and doomy voice, which always indicated that someone somewhere was about to have their world turned upside down. One of the two planes based in Pisa had gone into the side of a hill and everyone on board had been killed. The details were sketchy. My mother ran to the phone and called the base at Abingdon. Someone she knew answered it, which seemed to calm her. He had no details but promised to ring as soon as he had news. Ten minutes later the phone rang. She snatched it up.

  It was Jane Briggs. Her husband had been in the other Hercules. It must have been a strange conversation, with each one longing for the other’s husband to be dead. They talked briefly then cleared the lines and sat and waited. Having been afraid for him each time he jumped, I felt a curious mixture of unease and, I suppose, disbelief. It was impossible to think of him not existing. He was too confident to die. Two hours later, after some agonising false alarms, the phone rang. She picked it up. ‘Yes?’ She looked at me: ‘He’s alive.’

  I was rather excited by the thought of my first funeral, but after six in less than a week I’d had enough. The weather was bad that month, wet as well as cold, though now I think about it, I can’t remember any funeral I’ve ever been to where it hasn’t rained. The thing about military funerals is that the men are nearly always young. The burials have run into a kind of blur of men in full-dress uniform and women in their early thirties weeping and the grave, which always surprises in the same way, the lines being so sharp and the hole so deep. I remember that cutting morning wind which seems to blow in graveyards everywhere. And, most of all, the private soldier playing the last post. You will have heard it, I suppose, in films or on television played by someone who’s a master of his instrument, purified by engineers in studios. Needless to say, standing in a graveyard in the cold and wet, blown by a teenager on the verge of competence with the notes flattened by the damp air and nervous breath control, the bugle produced a cracked sound which seemed to hang painfully about the young widows and sad men in uniform. I’ve not heard anything like it since. The squadron leader always read the same words in a dull monotone. Six times I heard it:

  They shall grow not old

  As we that are left grow old.

  Age shall not wither them

  Nor the years condemn.

  There was one odd thing about the final burial. The dead man was another Irishman. His brother came across from Dublin in a uniform that most assumed was of the Irish Army. But I could see my father looking at him from time to time and there was a strange expression on his face, a kind of mild disdain. Later he told me why. The uniform was that of the IRA, illegal in his native country but not in England. It was as smart or smarter than any of the others at the funeral, with, if I remember rightly, badges of striking yellow and red. I could be wrong – it was a long time ago. Now whenever I see the balaclavas and the nailed baseball bats, I think of him with his carefully pressed best dress uniform, his upright bearing and the awkward look of a defiant adolescent who realised there might be a scene. But even though some of the others there knew what he was wearing, no one took it seriously. In 1968, all that was in the past.

  For my father, and the others like him, the sandpit that they landed in was only a step away from mucking about with buckets and spades. These were men who still knew how to play. But because it was a military sport the Cold War had been fought out in parachuting long before it reached athletics or any other sport. The Americans and Russians were professionals. What they did was turn this play into work. What they did was turn it into war. It was only a few months after the Cuban Missile Crisis when we got to Germany for the Sixth World Parachuting Championship. The terror about Cuba was so great, so much a part of the air everyone breathed, that even children went to bed and lay awake dreading the end of the world, knowing that it could really happen, and at any time. All that’s vanished now, even for the people who were there, as if suddenly every true believer woke up one day and all of them stopped believing in hell.

  Even though things had calmed down by the time we arrived in Germany, the tensions were obvious even to a child. Competitors from the Eastern bloc were not allowed to speak to anyone from the West, and as I wandered about the enormous complex I was often eyed suspiciously by squat Russian apparatchiks with no necks. The championship was being held in Leitkerk, a small town set on the edge of the Black Forest. On one side it was empty and flat, on the other the rising hills were covered in trees of the deep dark green from which the forest gets its name. As night fell and the temperature dropped, the dirt-grey mist seeped down the conifers like a slow avalanche. It was in this most obscure of German towns, in this most obscure of recreations, that the idea of playfulness in sport would die. Not immediately, of course, but this was where the terminal disease began. This was where the virus took a hold.

  The competition began with the team event, and after two days, with the Americans still to come, everyone in the Irish team was beside themselves at having split the favourites by taking second place behind the Russians. The team event involved all four jumping at the same time and attempting to hit a small red disc about six inches in diameter. This was at the centre of a sandpit divided by a large cross of white cloth. A top parachutist could expect to hit the red disc – a dead centre it was called – about four or five times a year. In the team event the distances of each member from the disc were added up and divided by four. The worst jump of the team from the three allowed could be discarded and the final score was based on the average of the two that remained.

  We would lie on the short grass of the airfield during the endless pauses between the minutes of action, drinking incredibly cold Coca-Cola from those curvaceous bottles. Half-dozing, we’d wait for the drop. It is the sounds of parachuting that I think of now when I recall those days. The distant drone of aero engines slowly made its presence felt in waves, like sleep advancing on a tired child, gradually becoming a single, droning note. Searching the sky with shaded eyes, the soldiers, women, kids looked like the models for an inspirational piece of Soviet social realism. Fingers would point skywards when someone saw the plane. Then figures would fall: one, two, three, four. Then seconds later, the silence of the engines, cut before the men had jumped but oddly delayed by the slowness of the speed of sound to match the eye. Ten seconds would pass, then the parachutes would open, and, if conditions were right and the sleeve on the parachute deployed too soon, the canopy would crack like a wet towel flicked against a boy’s damp skin. The coloured canopies, different for each team, produced an endless variety of electric nylon blues and greens and golds and blacks and whites, turning and swooping in the blue air. They’d line themselves up, like geese in flight, and from a distance they’d look slow and calm, but as they came in to land you’d see how fast they fell, calling aloud to get the order of landing right. Then came the swift approach; giant in size they crashed into the pit, their legs outstretched, desperately trying to reach the mark with the crump of the sand as they hit, one, two, three, four, like hawks failing to retrieve a dive. Then came the judges with tapes and it was done. Back to another drink of Coke and the long and pleasantly boring wait.

  The following day it was the Americans’ turn to jump. Between the time they opened and the time they landed, some three and a half minutes later, it became obvious that not only was the competition already over but that the world had changed. For the style competition, because where you landed was immaterial, they had used the same single blank gore parachute that everyone used: a half globe of nylon with a panel missing, more or less depending on little more than guesswork, steered by two lines which when pulled distorted the way the air passed through the chute and allowed it to be steered with haphazard accuracy. The basic technology had barely changed in thirty years. All the competitors had gathered to see if the Americ
ans could come up with something and at the last moment overtake the Russians. We watched as their chutes opened two thousand feet above our heads, and the numerous ways that nations have of expressing astonishment rippled across the crowd.

  Instead of a parachute, they were suspended beneath what looked like hundreds of holes linked together by red and blue cloth with two panels on each side like earmuffs on a hat. They didn’t turn but banked like aeroplanes, and instead of a rapid constant fall they seemed to be able to travel at will almost parallel to the ground beneath. One broke off and, impossibly, headed back into the wind that should have been driving him inescapably forward. Each new unprecedented trick brought gasps of wonder, as the Americans had known it would. They’d saved the best, or worst, till last. As they approached we could see that they were not so much hanging from this extraordinary construction as sitting in the harness like pilots in a plane. The reserve chutes, much smaller than a normal one, had been taken from their chests, where they were supposed to be, and put behind their necks as if on piggy back. They came in to land. Instead of simply riding the combination of gravity and air, they mastered it. They circled the pit above the open-mouthed watchers and seemed able to decide exactly when to come to earth. Then one by one, without effort, with none of that desperate, crashing stuff of reaching a foot towards the mark before their arse hit jarring sand at twenty miles an hour, they softly, accurately touched the ground and walked themselves to a stop. Two dead centres, and with the other two so close that even added together they were half the distance of the nearest Soviet. It was as if Achilles had produced a Gatling gun on the plains of Troy.

  My father looked on entranced.

  As for me, I learnt a history lesson there, that there are moments when what comes after is utterly different from what went before. In a Bavarian field, among men who played with forces more fundamental than fire, I watched Americans with flashy parachutes designed by computers meant to guide atomic missiles to Moscow or Peking exempt themselves from the whole business of slowly developing opposable thumbs and longer necks for reaching taller trees, and the endless hit-and-miss of mutant genes. For ever afterwards it gave me the sense that things could change no matter how fixed they seemed: technology could make redundant not just a skill, not just a life, but an entire world. It could do this in a couple of minutes. It could keep doing it. And my father wanted one.

  Towards the end of a long day the wives and girlfriends would gather in groups to watch the last jump before the sun went down, waiting for husbands and lovers to return. They’d laugh, mocking their men while eyeing them with what I now realise was desire. The men would walk towards them, in fours or alone, their voices carrying through the still air, holding their parachutes cupped in front of them, spilling around their chests in red, white and blue, like women carrying too much washing made from brightly coloured silk. Then the men and women would split into couples and head towards their tents. Voices drifted into the gathering dark, the men teasing and the women laughing, waiting for something to happen. On the last night I simply watched them leave and turned back to watch the sun go down. As the air cooled, the hair stood up on my exposed arms as, behind me, the grey fog poured slowly through the trees. I waited for a long time, mournful, I don’t know why, until I heard my mother’s voice behind me.

  ‘What are you up to?’ she said gently.

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘It’s cold. It’s time to come in.’

  I stood up and we began to walk back, close but not touching.

  ‘Can we afford it?’

  ‘What? Oh, the parachute . . . we’ll have to see.’

  ‘Will he start winning again if he gets it?’

  She seemed taken aback by this and didn’t answer for a moment. Then, ‘I don’t know, maybe. I don’t know. Perhaps you should ask your father.’

  ‘No, it’s all right.’

  The next day, as we walked to the prize-giving, Eichorn, the new world champion, came over to my father. ‘Harper tells me you gonna buy a Para-Commander.’

  ‘Yes, that’s right. Someone’s bringing it back from the States next month.’

  The American nodded. ‘I’ll get Harper to send you an invite to the US championship nex’ July. You bring yo’ PC an’ I’ll whip yo’ ass.’

  My father laughed.

  ‘You take care, y’hear. That PC is some ’chute but it can be real mean sometimes. You saw what happen to Hampton. He mayn’t be good as you are but he’s still damn good.’

  They talked on for a few minutes more then shook hands and parted with it clear that they were going to take each other on the following year. But Eichorn never made it. The new technology blurred the distinction between the inspired and the merely excellent. Though still the best, he was no longer indispensable. He was a helicopter pilot by training and a few months afterwards he had to stop competition parachuting for his first tour of duty in Vietnam. Later we heard he’d gone missing somewhere near Saigon during the Tet Offensive.

  As soon as we got back to England my parents went to Barclays Bank to get a loan to buy the Para-Commander. They needed £250 to buy the whole rig, because its complexity required an entirely new system of expensive harnesses for it to be operated safely. They’d only had a bank account for six months, but they weren’t naive enough to tell the bank manager – who had to approve every loan by personal interview – what they wanted the money for; they told him it was for a car. But it was not an interview so much as an interrogation. My mother’s subsequent fury at the humiliation never entirely died down. The manager seemed to regard their application as a moral affront. ‘He looked down his nose at me, the creep,’ she said that night. ‘ “Can you really afford the repayments, Mrs McCarthy?” ’ she said, imitating the supercilious tone, the disdain. ‘ “How dare you ask for such an amount, you common, working-class Irish person?” ’ He had not actually said this, it was understood, but this was what he had meant. He had calculated the repayments and their outgoings as if my mother were an idiot incapable of doing simple arithmetic. She was immensely proud of the way she handled the family accounts, and this was a grievous mortification. Worse was to come. The loan was refused.

  That night my mother and father sat at the kitchen table trying to come up with the money. My father wanted to defy gravity, my mother the financial system as it puzzled its way into a new world by trying to hold onto the past with its corsets and squeezes and controls, not realising that money, too, was loosening its stays. Cash, as well, was about to torch its foundation garments. And the heat would be white, and very hot. And it would burn.

  The special harness and reserve of the Para-Commander were well outside their reach but my mother scrounged through the various small savings schemes of which she was a member to find the £120 or so that they needed for the parachute alone. This was a phenomenal sum for them to find but slowly she trawled everything we had at home with a determination that made it seem unthinkable that she would fail. She buckled herself into her accounts. But more than just her pride was driving her: her desire for my father depended on feeding the visions he had. In the end it was for my father and what he meant to her that she amassed the money for the parachute from post office accounts, bits put by, the folded tenner in my father’s wallet kept for emergencies and the policies taken out on us as babies for the funerals if we died. For the first time I was made aware of the heroic side of money, that my mother was a champion and that she fought for my father with what she had in her purse. Neither my brother nor I, even now, can understand how she gave the impression of having an endless supply of cash. It was difficult to understand because we had very little money. Much of my adult life has been spent with people who are good with money, both in the larger and the domestic sense, and some are tight and some are not. But while she had an exact knowledge of every penny – where it had come from, where it was, and where it was going – she used what she had so carefully hoarded to spoil us, her husband and – this, I suppose, is central – h
erself. There was always more, somehow, than you expected. We inhabited, all of us, a world pregnant with treats, even if it was only a cream turnover or a second bottle of Coke. It was more specific than generosity. I suppose the word I’m looking for is love.

  A few weeks later, after a training exercise in California, my father brought the canopy back with him. He mastered the PC quickly and had an extraordinary ability to play off its sometimes outrageous capacity to forgive with its sudden and terrifying intolerance of the slightest mistake when used without the special equipment denied us by the manager of Barclays Bank. Even in clumsy hands it could perform wonders, but at other times using it in a way entirely suitable for other parachutes could produce a sudden and total collapse of the canopy.