by Adam Thorpe
Then war. As thick as the black smoke from the train. This war was just as bad, and even bigger, than the one you knew, Mother. Although I wasn’t yet eighteen, I volunteered for the Observer Corps, pretending I was born in 1921. (Anyway, they couldn’t have cared less, they just nodded me gratefully in.) To avoid being an officer, and in obeisance to my youthful socialism, I also pretended I hadn’t been to public school. I reckoned that I wouldn’t kill people in the Observer Corps and that it wouldn’t be too much like the loathsome OTC at Randle, but I would still manage to annoy Uncle Edward. He didn’t seem to care less either way. And I did become an officer, in the end.
Rachael and I wrote to each other every week. At least, I wrote every week. She was up in Coventry and I was down in London, sharing a circle of sandbags on Parliament Hill with a short-sighted milkman. His spectacles were so thick, he had to take them off when observing because the binoculars kept striking their lenses. And I was one-eyed, though my scratch medical passed me. Things were very chaotic, Mother, in those early days of the war. It was like putting on a huge play at the biggest theatre in London without any rehearsals or very much money. An inspired, improvised frenzy. Our dogged rivals, throbbing along in their straight, Teutonic lines, simply couldn’t cope.
Then Rachael came down to London just when I was moved up to Derbyshire for a whole star-gazing winter on a seachlight battery. I’d watched the searchlights skimming the heavens over London, skimming them free of silver splinters with a pillar of light equal to some hundreds of millions of candles, and thought: that’s for me. Rachael had a secretarial job in His Majesty’s Stationery Office in Kingsway, which she would always call (deliberately I presume, at the top of the letter) His Majesty’s Stationary Office. She would usually pen her letters, though. Sometimes mine were a trembly scrawl from the cold that froze us up on Mam Tor, as that first winter was rather a hard one, something of a Fimbulwinter. (I did wonder, at times, whether it wasn’t the one.) There were periods when no fresh supplies came through and we fell back on iron rations, but there was never a missing mail. The motorcycle emerged from a blizzard, once. Letters were more important than food, you see.
We never actually declared our love. But it was there. I started to read Proust in English, but the lack of action was too familiar; I preferred to devour the sixpenny dreadfuls that the troop officer had stocked up on. I recognised some of your favourites, Mother: The Love Pirate, Unconventional Molly, Passions of Straw. Strange, to find them here, not warped or blotched with damp and squashed beasties – I’d imagined yours as unique! I began to improve my French with a ‘Teach Yourself’ course, dreaming of moving to Paris one day with Rachael. I would read her Proust in the original while she dabbed and scraped ordinary life on to canvas. A garret above an echoing cour, the sweetness of love and life, of ordinary days of peace. And what would I do? Oh, vague ideas of being a writer. Sitting at a café table and writing short novels with long long sentences. All my ideas were vague.
I was well known, on the station, for murmuring Rachael’s name as I scanned the empty skies. When Venus rose, showing her motley, teasing me with her restless red and blue glitter, I wanted to shout my sweetheart’s name, but only ever murmured it. Then one day I saw the big white letters on the searchlight’s drum, the paint dribbling obscenely down the metal: they spelled RACHEL, of course. It was the searchlight’s new name, its mis-spelling like something crippled. The others made filthy innuendos whenever it was my turn to polish Rachel’s huge black drum or wipe the glass eye free of bird’s-muck (the only enemy fire). But I also had the notion that if we were attacked, and the searchlight wrecked, the real Rachael would suddenly collapse, stark dead.
Such superstitious nonsense. Either one’s brain mossed over with this sort of thing or one became overwrought and mistook Orion’s Belt for a trio of Dorniers. Also, I had continual mouldering thoughts of Rachael dancing with Spitfire pilots in fleece-lined brown-leather flying suits. All I had were my words. They seemed so feeble. (But of course words aren’t!) Each time I spotted her round hand in my name on the envelope, I was as glad as when I saw yours in my name at school, Mother, on the letter bench. Your handwriting was similar to hers.
I did not leave Mam Tor for three months, but I can’t say that it was all that miserable up there. My astronomical knowledge improved, as did my muscles. Rifle drill, gas drill, predictor bearing and angle drill, until they were drilled into our sleep. Every metal item, from the grandest ragbolt to the catch on the Lewis gun, lubricated and cleaned to perfection. Silhouette identification, messing fatigues, site cooking, guard duty, the laying-out of kits and bedding and the digging of ditches – but still the days weren’t filled high enough, so we mended crumbling drystone walls. The locals didn’t thank us, for we never saw one local on that blasted heath – not even a king and his fool.
What else? Well, we descended once a week to the village three miles away with our pockets full of pennies to make phone-calls from the tiny grocer’s. I would phone Rachael, of course. It didn’t always work, the chat was quite often interrupted by the operator telling us not to hog the line, didn’t we know there was a war on? We carried soap and towels down with us for the bath in the cavernous vicarage, and treasured our sixpences for the pint in the village pub – an old crookbacked lady’s front room. She also had a wireless set, which cheered things up. A Lance-Bombardier not much older than me fell in love with the postmistress, a widow with six children, so he spent his leisure hours carving little planes out of matchwood. In March I crushed a finger under a keystone, and was invalided out for a month. Thus was my early war, Mother. Not much like Father’s, I suppose.
But at least I now sported an eye-patch. Although my eyeball hadn’t yet started to rot.
I was going to skip it, but I believe you might want to know how I got my eye-patch, Mother, as you were always very concerned for my bad eye.
Well, our station consisted of a single searchlight, as was normal that first winter of the war. Mam Tor was a steep-sided hump with broad views over more of the same bare moorland. Very few trees. A single-track metalled road hugged the bottom; from certain angles, in the wet, from further along the peak, the side of Mam Tor looked like a face. She had a sharp nose and a great, guffawing mouth. From where I would look at her, a gorse twig gave her a hand – a claw, really. More like a claw on a shrivelled arm. I’d take a walk on my time off and talk to her, sitting on a flat slab of granite and keeping the twig in the right sight line.
Then I started to speak to her. Perfectly normal. People speak to flowers, to trees. When she began to reply to me in a kind of nursery-rhyme gibber, with the wind shivering the shock of sheep-wool she held in her claws, I approached my troop officer and told him all about it. He nodded, puffed a little on his pipe, and asked me to show him the face. We walked to the flat rock and I showed him the correct viewing position. He squinted, grunted, closed one eye, and after a few moments started to grin like a little boy. ‘Remarkable,’ he said. ‘And how do you see it without closing yours, Arkwright?’
‘Sir?’
‘You see it with both eyes open. The twig goes double, in my case. It’s too close up.’
‘I have only one eye, sir. One that works.’
He was so surprised, he dropped his pipe in the tussocks. He apologised and we began of course to talk about Africa, about hearing voices, about curses and spells and whether there was a spiritual entity in Nature. He was quite a bit older than me, and had a bad strawberry mark across his face which he liked to pretend was the result of the early blitz on the Firth of Forth: I reckoned that this was a birth-mark and it had made him the reflective man he was. He’d been something in a borough council, wasn’t married, and was northern enough to call the underbrush ‘scrog’ and his mother ‘Ma’.
Well, Mother, it was through this man that I went into theatre, I suppose. He knocked his pipe on the rock and suggested that on my day off, instead of wandering over the moor, I organise a concert party. There wer
e a round dozen of us on this site, and the loneliness and routine boredom had caused quite a few quarrels already. We weren’t slipshod, so he couldn’t be distributing ginger – but this wheeze creased two birds with one shot: the crow of my dottiness, and the vulture of tedium.
Dottiness is dangerous in the Forces, of course. Especially in wartime. Quite unacceptable, in fact. But wars make one dotty. Now there’s a conundrum. You must have come across some very bad cases, Mother, in the sanny. Chaps rendered quite bonkers, trembling all over. All that noise. It’s the saddest, most dangerous thing.
I’m feeling slightly too tired to carry on for now.
Keep well, dear Ma,
Hugh
Rain. Mist right up to the hotel’s gates. But the hawkers stay put along the drive. Definitely a day for the fire. Even the hibiscus droops.
Dear Mother,
I was writing to you about my concert party. I know you love concert parties. I talent-spotted that evening. We had a fellow imitating a courting frog, a tubby homosexual who’d play hymns on his piano accordion, a stammering Geordie with a remarkably rubber face – and myself, with quite a bit of Shakespeare by heart as well as most of Treasure Island.
By the end, after a lot of rehearsal, everybody had something. The short private crouched in half a paraffin drum and spun it very fast, another blew ‘Tiger Rag’ on his tissue-covered comb, a tattoed ex-docker was a crooning Mrs Bagwash in a curtain, the frog told a love story. The troop officer judged the show too ribald for the local villagers; despite our measly spending power they didn’t really like us, believing we attracted bombs. We rigged a curtain up in the mess hut and played to ourselves and a ragged ewe called Piles (after our C-in-C, General Sir Frederick Pile). Piles had taken a liking to our rations and no one arrived out of the buffets of wind to claim her. No one arrived at all, most of the time.
I was so happy, when the curtain fell and Piles bleated and we clapped ourselves. So happy.
We played again whenever anybody appeared out of the mist and snow – signalmen, an electrical engineer, the odd truck driver. I suppose that’s where my public career really began, Mother; up on that lonely moor, not in the beechwood’s hoarse and solitary echoes or later in the flashy lights of London, and certainly not in those bawling performances of the Roman plays at school, where I always seemed to be someone called Perfidius, murdered early. The voice from the laughing face stopped, and I clipped the claw with wire-cutters, just in case.
It was February. The concert parties had lost their glamour. We were preparing a ‘clean’ version for the village, but its ninety inhabitants were not an audience to look forward to. The besotted Lance-Bombardier perfected a speech from Romeo and Juliet and insisted we rig up the wireless in the village hall for a dance after the show, French chalk ready in his mess tin to sprinkle over the floor.
One night, when I was on duty, scanning the clear, coldly glittering sky, the troop officer came up to me with a mug of tea.
‘Arkwright, I need to say something to you.’
‘Listening, sir.’
The sky’s blackness hung above us, a black dome of black iron punctured like a chestnut pan; beyond the tiny holes lay a blazing heaven, burning out all impurities, forging us into steel-eyed angels, winged, in cricketing togs.
‘If you don’t mind me asking, why do you close your blind eye when on watch?’
‘Because it sort of gets in the way, sir. The doping on it isn’t quite sealed.’
‘As long as you don’t get the wrong one, like Nelson did.’
It was the hundredth time I’d heard this joke, but I chuckled dutifully. I sipped my tea and warmed my mittened hands on the mug.
‘A spot of warmth is all one needs, eh, Arkwright? Just a spot. Without that spot, one feels somewhat abandoned. Maybe death’s just having no spot of warmth.’
He held his mug close to his face, looking up at the stars. The steam would soon freeze on his eyebrows, I thought. Now the inside of my chest was warming, too. The letters of the name in white paint glimmered next to me, where the base of the searchlight’s drum sloped. The officer’s steamy breath (his name escapes me, I’m afraid) mingled with the steam from his mug as he spoke. ‘Isn’t it tiring, keeping it closed?’
‘I suppose the side of my face would feel rather pained, sir, if the cold hadn’t prevented me feeling anything whatever in that region.’
He smiled kindly on my youthful pomposity, and then sighed. His breath wreathed into my own. ‘Rather hit-and-miss, our war, isn’t it, Arkwright?’
‘Do you mean I might miss something with this eye, and hit something with that, sir?’
He looked faintly embarrassed.
‘With respect, you’re mistaken, sir. My other eye has perfect vision, and my ears, of course, are unusually acute.’
‘I was thinking of the problem of depth.’
‘I have depth of vision. I don’t know why or how, but I have it.’
The mark on my nape tingled under the harsh collar of my troop shirt. I reckoned my uncanny ability to read depth came from the mark Quiri had burned in. ‘The spots in my bad eye get in the way,’ I added. ‘It’s better to get rid of imperfection completely than let it trouble something perfect, don’t you think, sir?’
‘Arkwright.’
‘Yes, sir?’
‘If I didn’t know you already as an unusually earnest chap with an odd way of phrasing things, I’d say you were ragging me. But I do know you. So carry on, carry on. Who knows? Maybe this’ll be the night for an illumination.’
‘Thank you, sir.’
It wasn’t, of course. We imagined SLs all over the country catching tiny silver splinters in their sights, while we caught bats. Bats are all right out of the light, but not in it. Their crumpled little faces made the Lance-Bombardier scream. In fact, there was very little night bombing in those early months, and we were the norm. We exposed our beam every time we heard anything, sweeping it about in that clumsy manner our night-fighters were to find so annoying, but the target was never hostile, Mother!
The little hall was packed for the show, and we gave it everything. Afterwards, during the dance, we all got drunk, the Lance-Bombardier ended up sobbing on the chalky floor and we lost our way back. I won’t go into details, but no great harm was done. Sometime in the week that followed, returned from his supply run on his motorbike (a BSA, like Father’s in Africa), the troop officer handed over a little packet. I opened it. Inside there was a little purse with a leather thong. When I took it out, it turned into an eye-patch.
‘Less strain, Arkwright, less strain.’
It was a fatherly gesture. I appreciated it. I wore the patch spasmodically at first, thinking I looked silly. It appeared in our final performance for a couple of new chaps, sported by my Blind Pew, and I found that my headaches dissolved behind its shield. My present patch is its grandson, Mother, an exact copy of a copy of that first one, which eventually frayed and became irritating to wear. I’ve lost the eyeball since then, of course.
No enemy plane passed over Mam Tor in all my four months. But a moment’s lapse of concentration would bring them screaming out of the sky, we each knew that. On a clear morning, blue and cold, the murmuring wind was definitely a pack, of Dorniers, flying too high for binoculars. The grass throbbed its far engines, granite boulders on the crests winked their perspex. Everything conspired to cheat you, you see! I was glad to break my finger, in the end – to be looking into the Thames on Waterloo Bridge, waiting for Rachael. Who came down the length of it and kissed me, just like that. A proper kiss. The cold of Mam Tor hardly out of my lips, hers so warm.
Then another kiss in the back of a throbbing bus, then another in the cinema with the newsreel flickering in the corner of my eye: smoking tanks, salutes, so many men. London was a strange place, that April: a lot of dangling gas-masks, not much black-out doping, a few clumsy daylight bombs gingering us up. We expected gas again, Mother, not fire. So the coaly sprawl was still intact, but neurotic
and melancholy. I was neither. I was full of moorland air and Rachael. I was full of a soldier’s confidence. Grassy whispers and starlight were now the noise and dazzle of London, her pubs and night-clubs and cafés, her theatres and cinemas and smoky chattering rooms.
I stayed with Father in Bayswater, sleeping on the couch; he had two tiny rooms reeking of gin and cheap cigars in a boarding house full of high-class prostitutes. I won’t upset you with details, with the decline, the stooped shuffle, the bad nights when he thought I was his friend – the one who died of yellow fever before your time. I think that’s who he thought I was. I assumed so, when he screamed out and crouched in terror, not letting me touch him. But it was a cheap service flat providing breakfast, lunch and tea; even the coal fire was laid for him, so he wasn’t too neglected, Mother. The prostitutes I bumped into in the passageway seemed bubbly and kind-hearted. Times were good, I suppose. I was invited for sherry by one of the younger ones and she’d tell me about her elderly clients – stockbrokers or MPs or businessmen. She never did the military, she said. Her room was full of antique furniture and silver plate. She talked about fetishes, for which she charged double – some clients liked her to wear boots, or a trilby, or a foxfur wrap. I told her in turn about African fetishes – something quite different, I explained. Rachael laughed when I recounted all this, a little drunk, but she didn’t like to come into the house in case someone mistook her for a tenant. We would kiss around the corner and then I would leave her. ‘Back to your whores,’ she would say, laughing. ‘No, back to my daddy,’ I’d reply. I had my obligations, Mother.
