Making an Elephant

by Graham Swift

  He wears a white shirt and shorts, held up by a thickly emphatic belt, and sandals without socks. His hair is the thatch that I too had when I was small and is pale like mine was, though while his became black and groomable, mine merely darkened. His face hovers between a frown and a smile.

  The duck pond is still there. If you walk past it, then up and over the steep hill on the other side of the park, then—another hidden surprise—down a path through a thick oak wood, you come eventually to Dulwich College (the wood is Dulwich Wood), my school for six years.

  Here my father took me to be interviewed one day when I was not much older than he was in that photograph, after I’d gone through the dubious selection process known as the eleven-plus. A scholarship boy, a child of the 1950s and now, just, the 1960s. I had the feeling, as never before, of being summoned by grownupness.

  My father had taken the day off work but wore his best suit and his hair was Brylcreemed. He may have thought he was under assessment himself. I sat with him, mute with nerves, outside the headmaster’s study, waiting to be called. I was scrubbed and brushed, my own hair somehow plastered down, and absolutely aware that this was one of those moments when you had unconditionally to ‘be on your best behaviour’.

  Years later, as an unexemplary sixth-former, I would be hauled in and lengthily harangued by the same headmaster for letting the school down, even for being part of the process by which—I only quote—‘the country was going to the dogs’. (I’d gone through a door marked ‘No Entrance’.)

  Shackleton, the man who’d lived just over the hill but had escaped to the ends of the earth, was Dulwich’s most illustrious former pupil. The school preserved the famous open boat, the James Caird, in which he’d made his heroic rescue journey from the Antarctic to South Georgia. It stood, forlornly beached, in a sort of cage outside the sports block and wasn’t so devotedly looked after. Dust, leaves and random litter used to blow through the wire grille at the front and collect inside its gunwales. Stuck to its side, next to an area of clearly patched-up woodwork, was a rather graceless label saying ‘Hole Made by Ice’.

  There, on my pilgrimage day, was Shackleton’s house, with its blue plaque, on Westwood Hill. There was my father’s old front garden, with its rotting cars.

  The suburbs can be very strange. If you turn back from Wells Park and continue the climb out of Sydenham you get to a broad ridge and the site of the Crystal Palace. Over the other side of the ridge, in the former grounds of the Palace, there used to be, and perhaps still are, some vast—and vastly inaccurate—stone replicas of dinosaurs, rearing up among the rhododendrons. For some reason this whole area—Sydenham, Dulwich, Norwood—was once favoured by rich Victorian tea merchants, and much of the surviving evidence of wealthy idiosyncrasy, the crumbling Italianate mansions among the trees, owes itself to that banal British institution, the cup of tea. One of the merchants, Horniman, endowed an eccentric museum: musical instruments, tribal masks and (living) tropical fish and amphibia. A favourite place, naturally, of my grandfather’s, with his curator’s yen for the exotic.

  Memories of the original Palace, particularly of the night in 1936 when it spectacularly burnt down, were part of my parents’ and their parents’ lore. Tome it was just a bare plateau where in the 1950s they built the TV mast—symbol of a new age as the Palace had been of an old—which still towers over south London. ‘Crystal Palace’, the name, remained, robbed of its wondrous resonance: a location, a bus terminus, a middling football team. But when I was small, coming back in our car on winter evenings from visits to my grandparents—by now we lived in South Croydon—it still had a fairy-tale aura. Driving along the broad hilltop beside the site of the Palace was like driving along a vast shelf, from which, on the opposite side, you could look down towards central London, London proper: a sea of lights, a black bowl of jewels.

  The car would have been our first, a Vauxhall Wyvern, curvaceous and thickly chromed. To my father it was not just a coveted emblem of mobility, upward and general, but, with his instinct for things mechanical that I’ve never inherited, an object of ceaseless devotion. He drove it with a coaxing sensitivity as if it were a sentient being.

  No doubt that view from the Palace would seem commonplace now. London itself, the inner core, was unknown to me then. I know it now, but I still have a sense of it—elusive, glamorous, a dark phosphorescent lake—that comes from those journeys, sitting behind my dad in the marvel of our car.

  He grew up and met my mother in Sydenham. Perhaps no great social elevation was involved, since my impression is that my mother’s family, on her mother’s side, had come down in the world. Once immigrants from the far side of Europe, they’d lived prosperously—they were tailors—in Whitechapel, which, as my grandmother kept reminding me, was not all shabby East End. How much the former graciousness was just wishful thinking, I don’t know. I remember being taken to see one of her eight siblings (though quite possibly he was of the previous generation), known to me as ‘Uncle Cotton Reel’: a wizened, pin-eyed man, the incarnation of a Phiz illustration in Dickens, who looked as if he’d spent all his life hunched over needle and thread at the back of some dark, crooked little shop.

  They would have met in the 1930s. They married in 1943. When the war began my father was only seventeen, barely out of school, but he seems to have volunteered pretty promptly, opting not just for the navy but for the Fleet Air Arm, to train as a pilot—a precise and daring choice, which nothing in his obscure family history points to. I have to assume it came from his own gallant volition. At the same time he made a much more mundane commitment. He entered the civil service at the lowest possible age and grade. The understanding was that he would work till his call came, then his job would be held for him till he returned. His civil service and his military service would clock up together.

  It seems both provident and reckless: the simultaneous choosing of aerial danger and earthbound security, and must surely have had about it the feeling of a bet—or of incongruous trust. Till he returned? In 1940 he was selected to become a naval pilot. For a year or more before then he’d been that lowliest of creatures, a messenger-boy.

  Then the extraordinary period began. He was sent to Florida to learn to fly, to the air base at Pensacola on the east–west strip of the Florida coast, close to Alabama. Warmth, sunshine, ease: America hadn’t yet entered the war. At home civilians, including my mother-to-be, were enduring privations and, in London, regular danger. It must have all seemed mockingly upside-down. Back there, rubble, food in short supply; here, watermelons, palms, shimmering heat.

  There is a photo album, together with some boxes of loose photos, from which I get much of my sense of these years. The sections aren’t always extensive, the photos are the small, often unrevealing productions of a cheap camera, but everything is assembled with my father’s characteristic meticulousness—little captions in white ink on the thick black pages—as if from the start he’d made it his purpose, his project, to chronicle this special time of his life. The Florida section contains just a few snaps, all of a holidayish, sightseeing kind. Trips into the heart of the state: the Everglades, Spanish moss, bleached wooden sidewalks like those in cowboy towns, alligators in show pools. Nothing to do with planes.

  But at some point in those months in Florida, perhaps relatively early on, he would have done that terrifying and exultant thing, the thing he’d put his name down for: flown solo for the first time, over the gleam of the Gulf of Mexico, taken off and landed all by himself. I never heard him speak directly of the sheer thrill of flying, of being airborne and alone, the rapture for which the word exaltation seems exactly made. But I can’t believe he didn’t feel it, over and over, as anyone performing that miraculous trick must feel it. Or that the exaltation, the privilege, even the lust didn’t stay in his blood. In fact, I know it did.

  In a still-neutral country they couldn’t wear uniforms, at least off base. After Pearl Harbor that changed. His group came back not only commissioned but wearing of
ficers’ uniforms made with superior American cloth and cut with American style. The naval officer’s uniform wins hands down for handsomeness over all others and, fed with Florida food and still tanned perhaps from Florida sun, they must have made quite a stir.

  Home again, to Sydenham. And after the exaltation—bathos. An officer and a pilot, but for the time being kept from the skies, one of his duties was to attend a course at the Royal Naval College in Greenwich, to be instructed in the niceties of being an officer—and gentleman. Literally, this included how to sit at table, how to manage a knife and fork. Greenwich is only four miles from Sydenham. So for a strange interlude he would have boarded every day not a plane but a 108 bus, to join other novice officers under the famous ceiling in the Painted Hall of Wren’s college building. Perhaps while he waited with me for my interview at Dulwich, which in those days had a sort of officer-and-gentleman atmosphere, all this came back to him.

  I was finally called in, for inspection. He squeezed my arm.

  Table manners, knives and forks—in the middle of a war.

  He was sent, with his squadron, to South Africa—another long journey to faraway sunshine. The eventual destination was Durban, to join an aircraft carrier returning from the East. The carrier, I think, was the Hermes, and, had he joined it, my father’s war would have been with the Japanese and might have been short. As it turned out, the East was the one part of the world his war didn’t include. His ship-to-be was sunk before it, or he, reached Durban.

  So, in the album, he once again appears in holiday mood—sitting on the rocks on top of Table Mountain, no doubt with a reinforced sense of the goodness of being alive. More palms and casuarinas, the surf of the Cape coast. ‘The Rocks at Hermanus.’ He and his fellow officers wait to board their train to Durban: they stand around, hands in pockets; one of them licks an ice cream. Snaps from the train window. ‘Karoo.’

  So much of my father’s ‘war’ seems, in fact, like an extraordinary slice of fortune, a gift—seeing the world. He might have been on the Hermes. He might have been somewhere amid the havoc of the North Atlantic. Planeless and shipless, his squadron was sent to Kenya, to an airstrip halfway between Mombasa and Nairobi. There they stayed, in the semi-bush, living in tents, flying, training, awaiting further orders, for I’m not sure how long. Africa and its baked interior (he could hardly have envisaged this, opting for a life on aircraft carriers) entered his consciousness. Four years before, he’d been a schoolboy in south London, then the humblest of minions in a government office. Now here he was, in the clear brilliant mornings, flying round Mount Kilimanjaro, watching the great herds fan out from the shadow of his wing.

  Eventually, Mombasa again: a carrier, and all the way back to Europe by the long Cape route. And here was another sort of gift. The carrier was the Illustrious. Most of the carriers my father would later fly from were dumpy little escort vessels, some of them converted merchant ships, with gruff, doggy names like Tracker, Chaser. But the Illustrious was a true fleet carrier, a great ship with a name going back to Nelson’s time. And over the decks of such a carrier, however outranked by non-flying officers, its pilots must have walked like lords, the creatures for whom the whole floating edifice was made.

  Northwards from Cape Town, through tropical waters, bound in fact for the Mediterranean and Malta, and a grand entry into the Grand Harbour of Valetta—a marine band playing, the ship’s company paraded in ‘whites’. By then Malta, battered and scarred, had been freed from its terrible siege, and through its rescued streets a squadron of British naval pilots must have walked, again, like lords. And here was another blue and sun-struck sea for my father: the Med.

  At some point on that voyage north from Cape Town someone took a photo of him. He stands on the flight deck in the middle of a little group of fellow pilots, all of them towered over by the crowding bulks and huge propeller blades of aircraft. Full hot sunshine. My father, in khaki shorts (I think of the boy by the duck pond), is bare to the waist. It’s one of those not-so-typical moments when he’s the centre of attention, so much so that he’s heedless of the camera. Everyone is listening to him, heads bent forward. He has something amusing to tell, it seems, since his face is breaking into a smile. The moment is all his and it seems, too, as if caught in it is all his prime—all the extraordinariness of his being where he is on the deck of a great basking warship in the middle of an ocean, and all the nonchalance, that only youth can give, of occupying the scene as if it were the casualest thing in the world.

  The Illustrious took his squadron to Malta to provide air cover for the landings at Salerno: the only time my father’s war career coincides with one of the names that have gone into the history books. But his war had begun in earnest now, lapsing into a kind of unnoteworthiness and routine, which perhaps is largely what it was. Scapa Flow: convoys to Russia, Murmansk, alternating with convoys to Gibraltar and into the Med again. The long, perilous, icy run into the Arctic and the shorter, southerly, sunnier one. A period stationed on land in Northern Ireland; then, in the last months, in Yeovilton, Somerset: an instructor, a trainer of pilots himself.

  It all sounds, compared with some wars, rather flat—or rather lucky. But I have to remind myself how he was always one of that select and ever-vulnerable few, a fighter pilot, and that there was a constant heroism in what he regularly had to do: to land an aircraft on an absurdly small surface, perhaps pitching in a strong sea or suddenly cloaked by evil weather. In the Arctic, if you ditched you had only seconds—and aircraft frequently ditched, flipping over the end of the stubby decks, missing, as they landed, the crude system of wires and barriers that was supposed to clutch them from the air.

  All that and, of course, an enemy. Among the loose photos are several of a U-boat, on the surface, under air attack, taken close enough so that you can see a single brave figure on its deck, handling its spindly gun, firing back. It’s all blurred, ill-composed and without drama, nothing like how such a scene would be recreated for a film. It has the strange, grey quality of the incidental, the inconsequential: the little man, in the middle of nowhere, his little gun, its little whiff of smoke. But it’s war, and the little man may be about to die.

  Another index of those years, along with the photos: my father’s pilot’s logbook. It’s mostly full of tedious, repetitious entries, seemingly written in half-code. It records his shifts round the globe, the changes of ship or squadron. At intervals there are appraisals from senior officers: so many marks according to a laid-down scale, as if the war is really a progress through some second school. ‘A competent pilot.’ Seven out of ten … But you turn a page and read, in the usual neat hand: ‘One Focke-Wulf 190 shot down in sea in flames.’ I can’t help wondering what was going through my father’s head as he wrote that.

  The son, of course, has the obvious thought. In the one-to-one of aerial combat the odds can’t have been so complicated. That time, it was the other plane, the other man. But it might have been him. I wouldn’t be here to know.

  With some of his comrades, it was them. The one who went missing north of Norway. The one who crashed into a mountainside in Ireland—when I was small, we used to see that one’s widow. Her son, named after his father, once came to stay, to be shown the sights of London. I can’t remember at the time really putting two and two together, really understanding. He had no father. Killed in the war. If not in action, just a mountainside.

  But my father survived. Enemy fire, accidents, all the possible disasters of sea and air. No wounds, no obvious scars. Several leftovers: his leather flying jacket, some canvas parachute-bags, turned into innocent domestic articles. Memories, certainly, mostly undivulged. Photographs. His special time came to its end. He never harped on it or went to squadron reunions. I’ll never know how much it stayed inside him.

  Not long before his death, when I got word that he was badly ill, I was in Australia—a bit of the world he’d never see. I broke off my trip to come home (part of me, I think, already knew), flying from Sydney airport, over
the harbour, on a brilliant golden August afternoon: one of the great take-offs. But what you see, looking down from a jumbo jet, can hardly match the glory of the solo pilot, knowing all the poise, all the power and achievement, is his. The landscape of central Australia, like some rippled red-brown sea, seemed never to end.

  He flew, mostly, a heavy, thick-nosed American fighter, the Grumman Wildcat, known in the British navy as the Martlet. It has none of the fearsome grace of the famous fighter planes. It looks quite hard to get off the ground. His most favoured individual aircraft, ‘P for Peter’, decided how my older brother would be christened. He had, of course, as I do, the aerobatic surname.

  The war, or the Fleet Air Arm, didn’t give him up easily. By some quirk, his formal demobilization failed to arrive till long after others like him had received theirs. Though he was back in Sydenham he was still officially a naval officer and—one very useful side-effect—still drawing an officer’s pay, considerably more than his civilian earnings would have been. It was a tricky dilemma whether to spend the money or save it, in case the Admiralty wanted it back. Word eventually came through, and he wore his naval uniform for the last time in June 1946, to visit my mother who had just given birth to his first son. It had quite an effect, my mother says, on the nurses. On that same June day the Derby was run for the first time since the start of the war and a horse called Airborne won. The pun could hardly be richer. My father, with all that navy pay, never placed the bet.

  In the same nursing home, three years later, I was born. Then we moved to a new house in South Croydon where my memories really begin.

  He went back, six years older, to the job he’d left. An ex-naval officer, his uniform consigned to mothballs, now a clerical officer in the civil service: not a high-flier by any means—as if for six years he’d put on fancy dress. But he was in one piece and in employment. His providence, or bet, had paid off. And these were the days—the war only reinforced it—when you didn’t look to your work for anything so colourful as excitement or fulfilment; you looked to it for safety. That was the deal. You’d had your thrills.