Out of This World

by Graham Swift

  Peter is there before us, parking his yellow 2CV. Peter has the dignified title of Archaeological Consultant to the Southern Counties Commission on Ancient Monuments, and looks like an out-of-work actor. He himself admits that, as a financial proposition, there is not much difference between the aspiring actor and the aspiring archaeologist. But he is stage-struck on the Bronze Age and the Iron Age, on the hidden spectacle of the past. He is convinced that between ST880390 and ST960370 there is a whole network of undiscovered field systems. It depends on the light, the rainfall and the vegetation factor. But one day, from the air, they’ll show.

  This is the fourth of these flights. There will be others through the summer. Jenny doesn’t come up in the plane any more. She was sick that first time she joined us, never having flown in a light aircraft before. But she insists on coming, nonetheless, to the airfield.

  Michael goes to check over the Cessna. We go into the low building under the control tower where there is a small office that Derek, the ground control deputy, lets Jenny use while we are in the air. Derek’s stock response to Jenny’s presence is also a semi-paternal wink. While we circle over England, he will offer her further chapters from his life’s story. Flying Dakotas in Malaya. His grown-up children in Australia. I don’t know what Jenny tells him.

  Jenny unpacks the cameras. Under the table I stroke her thigh. Peter looks studiously at his maps. He is shy and deferential with Jenny. I don’t know if he’d rather she didn’t appear at all for our morning sorties. I am sorry to have brought this disturbance, this distraction into his pure and devoted passion for the Bronze Age.

  Peter pushes the map across and briefs me on our ‘targets’. Under the table Jenny’s hand finds my roaming hand and squeezes it.

  I surfaced again – or rather, took to the air. And didn’t entirely jettison my camera. In the autumn of ’72 I sold a house and photographic studio (unused for six months) in Fulham and, having been used to travelling, as Dad would put it, ‘to the ends of the earth’, bought a cottage in a village, a few miles from Marlborough, with the ludicrously parochial name of Little Stover. (There is no Great Stover. Look on the map, you won’t find it.) A retreat? An escape? An attack of rustic regression? Maybe. But Little Stover, which has no big brother, happens to be only five miles from one of the most centrally placed civil airfields in southern England. In 1973 I converted an attic into a dark-room and office, and (being not without some previous experience) set up shop as an aerial photographer.

  We walk towards the Cessna. Large, still puddles in the tarmac reflect the lightening sky. The air is chilly and Jenny clutches my arm. I told her about Anna. How – So I know one reason why she comes to the airfield. I tell her Michael’s been flying for twenty-five years – five years with me – and never – And I’ve been in more planes and helicopters than I can remember, many of them military aircraft in the middle of war zones, and never – (Save once, out of Pleiku – though I didn’t tell her this – when something like an airborne shunt engine hit our Huey, two, three times, unbelievably and maliciously, and I got the pilot’s expression as he spewed blue language and took what he later called ‘some evasive’ (‘Helicopter Pilot under Ground Fire, Central Highlands, 1966’), and it occurred to me that not for one moment, though my heart was bursting and my stomach was nowhere and my brain was saying, This time, this time – not for one moment was I actually scared.)

  And I have always loved flying. Never (despite such moments) lost the magic of it. That release from the ground. Those cloud-oceans. Those light-shows, coming down at night into strange, spangled cities. If I had not been a photographer, I would have been a pilot. Would have put my name down for the moon.

  And yet in sixty-four years I have never learnt to fly. Sometimes in our airborne jaunts over England – perhaps my present occupation is only an excuse for indulging my love of flying – Michael, against all the rules of common sense and civil aviation, offers me the controls. As if in some kind of challenge (that first time we went up together: suddenly puts me through a stomach-churning show of unannounced aerobatics. To prove what?). Or so he can say afterwards, like some stern father to a feckless son: When are you going to take some proper lessons?

  We clamber into the cockpit. Jenny passes up the cameras. Gives me a brief, knowing look. Peter has a last-minute word with Michael. He is feeling good today about 880390 and 960370. The engine roars and Jenny steps back and throws a quick and generalized kiss, trying to make the gesture more casual than she means. We taxi down to the runway, turn, and Michael opens the throttle. We speed back in the direction we have come and as we ascend over the apron and the tower, we see her wave, in that stubborn, clumsy way in which people wave when they cannot see if their wave is acknowledged. She is still holding a hand aloft as we bank to head south. And I could almost believe it, could almost be guilty of believing it: the rest of the world doesn’t matter. The world revolves round that tinier and tinier figure, as it revolves round a cottage in a tiny village in Wiltshire, where she has taken up residence. That I am home, home.

  Sophie

  ‘It’s the wrong name, isn’t it? “Harry”. “Harry” sounds like the reliable sort. An uncle, a best man, a loyal old flame.’

  ‘And he’s never written you in ten years?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘If you wrote him, would he write you? Is that how it is?’

  ‘Don’t know. Why don’t you ask him?’

  ‘I wish I could, Sophie. I wish he were right here now, so we could both ask him some questions. Do you wish that?’

  ‘You’ve got nice hands. Neat. Has anyone ever told you that?’

  ‘Supposing he were right here. Right now.’

  ‘For fuck’s sake.’

  ‘You never miss him?’

  ‘I miss Grandad.’

  ‘But your grandfather’s dead, and Harry’s alive.’

  ‘Spot on. You really have a way of cutting through the crap.’

  ‘And Harry wasn’t to blame for your grandfather’s death.’

  ‘No. Not to blame, no.’

  ‘What do you mean, “not to blame”?’

  ‘I mean it wasn’t a case of blame.’

  ‘What then?’

  ‘Like I say, ask him.’

  ‘You think it should have been your father who died somehow, not your grandfather?’

  ‘Fuck.’

  ‘Do you say “fuck” a lot at home, with Joe and the boys? Supposing I did ask him, what would he say?’

  ‘He’d say, What is this, a fucking inquisition?’

  ‘Okay, relax, Sophie. Relax. Touché. Truce. Let’s take our time.’

  ‘At eighty dollars an hour?’

  ‘You want my economy deal? It’s cheap, but there aren’t any guarantees.’

  ‘No, it’s okay. I’ll stick with deluxe. Joe pays.’

  ‘What does Joe think of Harry?’

  ‘I don’t know if Joe thinks of Harry at all. Joe is good at forgetting.’

  ‘He doesn’t forget to pay.’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘Shall we have some coffee? Coffee time is free. So is the coffee.’

  ‘Do you know, when you talk sometimes, you tug your ear?’

  ‘It’s a defence reflex, Sophie. According to the books, tugging your ear, scratching the back of your head, is a disguised defence reflex. You lift your arm to strike your enemy. What do you say?’

  ‘I like it when you smile like that.’

  ‘If he wrote you, would you write him?’

  ‘Don’t know.’

  ‘But you’ve never written him?’

  ‘No. I mean, yes. No.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I mean I write him letters sometimes. In my head. I mean I don’t put them on paper. I don’t send them.’

  ‘What sort of letters?’

  ‘Just letters. Thoughts. You know.’

  ‘Do you think he misses you?’

  ‘Don’t know.’

  ‘But do you
think he ever writes letters in his head, too – to you?’

  ‘Don’t know.’

  Harry

  I still believe he fixed it. Some cunning string-pulling with his contacts in the Air Ministry. Though he never confessed it (so many unconfessed confessions! So many things buried away!). I still believe it was his doing that had me assigned, a fit, young, would-be flier, to a desk in Intelligence.

  And yet he could have acted more ruthlessly, and with less trouble, if he’d wished. Could have foreclosed on my future. Insisted, since, undoubtedly, there was a busy time ahead, that I was needed at his side, and, since armaments were the reserved occupation par excellence, had me exempted from military service.

  Though it’s easy to see now that, in his position, he could hardly have put the duties of a son before those of a citizen. Amongst those heaps of papers he (involuntarily) left me (I never thought he would be the one for such careful documentation, for preserving the evidence) were the typescripts – annotated and underlined with red ink – of the speeches he made when he stood for Parliament in the Thirties. Now, when I read them, fifty years later, those heavy-handed phrases, those chastising and belligerent slogans prick at my eyes: ‘manning the defences’, ‘the sleeping lion’, ‘moral re-armament’ – by which he meant, precisely, material re-armament. That was ’35. The timing was just out. But the stance, the rhetoric (my God, I never went to hear him on the hustings) would be remembered later. Not least in those panegyrics after his death.

  Right-hand man! My right-hand man, he would say. A dubious and all too blatant joke from a man with only one arm. I’ll never know what the real motive was. Some absurd, implausible, residual dream? That it might all come right and good – Beech and Son, the two of us in tandem, the greater glory of B M C. For which he was prepared to wait and pay and bribe. My expensive and lengthy upbringing (Winchester, Oxford): a long-term investment in my filial conscience.

  Or just a punishment? Just a kind of revenge?

  ‘… You appear, Beech, to be a highly educated young man. It seems what we could most use from you are your brains …’

  ‘… And we understand, Beech, that you are interested in photography …’

  He laughed when I told him I had opted for the R.A.F. The rough, gravelly laugh of the former infantry officer. He laughed even more scoffingly (triumphantly?) when he learnt the result of my Board – that I was made of too precious stuff, so it seemed, to be flung into the skies. He never ceased to remind me that if, after all, mine was to be a non-combatant’s role, I might as well have chosen to come in with him. That though, no doubt, I would have been worked off my feet, I would have been better off and better rewarded than in some ‘wretched hut’ in Lincolnshire. Perhaps – I can’t recall it now – there was the tiniest, barely detectable flaw in this mockery, the tiniest, stubborn note of gratitude. I don’t think I wanted to be a hero, a charioteer of the skies. My father was a hero. I didn’t worship my father. But I had wanted to fly.

  And yet I saw the war from the air. Since the officers of the Commissioning Board, in their obtuse or ironic wisdom, took literally my professed interest in photography. And the ‘hut’ in Lincolnshire – in reality a small country house not unreminiscent of Hyfield – was given over to the analysis of aerial photographs.

  I looked down with a privilege no pilot ever had on target after target. Before and after. I became routinely familiar with the geography of western Europe. At first a motley geography of steel works, dockyards, power stations, refineries, railways, then a geography (rapidly altering, diminishing) of cities. Hamburg, Bremen, Cologne, Essen, Düsseldorf, Berlin … I learnt to distinguish the marks of destruction – the massive ruptures of 4,000-pounders from the blisters of 1,000-pounders and the mere pock-marks of 250-pound clusters – and to translate these two-dimensional images, which were the records of three-dimensional facts, into one-dimensional formulae – tonnage dropped as against acreage devastated, acreage destroyed as against acreage attacked (the tallies never included ‘people’, ‘homes’) – while someone in the hierarchical clouds above me refined these figures into the ethereal concept known as ‘the progress of operations’.

  And as operations progressed, the statistics grew larger, the images more other-worldly, more crater-ridden, more lunar.

  Frank Irving came to ‘the Manor’, as we called it, in the summer of ’44. I was delegated to show him the ropes. He and I were two of the youngest on a staff dominated by men over forty. When I think of Frank, even now, I still think of Lincolnshire in the war. Of the broad, grassy Lincolnshire countryside, of draughty Lincolnshire pubs, and the strange stigma and exclusion of being junior Intelligence officers in a region littered with airfields and serving airmen. I think of the saloon bar of the Crown Hotel in Grantham, where there is a dearth of female company, let alone unattached female company, and where Frank, on his fifth pint and in fluent voice, is announcing the voluptuous procession that is shortly to enter through the amazed hotel portals: Hayworth, Lake, Grable, Lamour …

  He arrived with a limp in his left leg (two fractures and a damaged tendon), the result of a motor-cycle accident that occurred before he had even begun his pilot’s training. The story he told the Ladies of Lincolnshire (for we had our moments) was that he was shot down in his Spit back in ’42 – hence the wretched desk job. While the story he conferred on me was a legendary and invisible head wound. Marvellous what these surgeons can do now. My friend Harry here – you won’t believe it: totally blind in one eye.

  False pretences. Of more than one kind? Did I intend it from the very beginning?

  That summer, during fine weather, as the bombings intensified, we would sometimes be attached to the airfields themselves, working at all hours to monitor the raids and keep the crews effectively briefed. One hot July afternoon we were watching the tenders lumbering out to fill the bellies of the Lancs, and I said to him: ‘Do you know who makes those bombs?’

  He looked puzzled.

  I said, ‘My father.’

  He looked puzzled still.

  ‘You’ve heard of Beech Munitions? Robert Beech? BMC? Cannon balls by appointment …’

  I think what he said then, and what he’d say still, though in a hundred subtle ways, was: ‘Somebody has to make them.’ But his eyes lost their puzzled look and after that day they acquired an ever-alert expression. Some weeks later when we both had three-day passes I asked him if he’d like to visit Hyfield. And I might have guessed that his eyes would become even more alert as we drove through the gates. As I might have known (had I wished it?) that Dad, tired and irascible as he was looking, would take a shine to him, would be the soul of affability, would take advantage of the situation to knock volleys into the air I had no way of returning.

  ‘Now Harry will tell you … Now when Harry takes over …’

  I pretended to be nonplussed.

  That must have been in the early autumn of ’44, after the liberation of Paris and before they sent me on that sudden photography course. They had decided by then that the war would be over before long and it was thus a historical phenomenon worthy of documentation. And my gauche enthusiasm back in ’39 must have stuck on my file. I was sent to London where I was taught the parts and use of a camera in much the same manner as rifle drill. Then I was sent back to Lincolnshire, with equipment, a special pass and papers that would oblige senior and fellow officers to give me assistance, and told to get some pictures.

  As if they might have said: You know, atmosphere, action, human drama stuff. Editor’s desk by midnight.

  So I went round the bases. And up (oh, just a few hellish times) at night with the crews. I flew. Saw. The whole works. Flak and tracer and vomit and kerosene and rear-gunners turned to meat. The photos on the desks, under the lamps and magnifiers, came alive and polychrome (so I could turn them into photos again), and I watched the light-show of Dresden burning, far below, in the dark.

  Half my pictures, of course, they buried. You aren’t supposed to se
e, let alone put on visual record, those things.

  A photographer is neither there nor not there, neither in nor out of the thing. If you’re in the thing it’s terrible, but there aren’t any questions, you do what you have to do and you don’t even have time to look. But what I’d say is that someone has to look. Someone has to be in it and step back too. Someone has to be a witness.

  Sophie

  ‘Let’s go back, Sophie, shall we? As far back as we can. Tell me about your earliest memories.’

  ‘But that isn’t a fair question.’

  ‘How come?’

  ‘Because how do you know, when you go back that far, that it’s really memory? Not what you were told later, or what you’ve invented. Or just sheer fantasy.’

  ‘Okay. Tell me your fantasy.’

  ‘If you tell me yours.’

  ‘You first.’

  ‘Oh – you know – that everything was just fine, of course. That everything in the garden was lovely. Hasn’t it got to be that way? So we can believe we come from Paradise? Then it gets fucked later. You’re not going to tell me that the first thing people are going to remember, even if it is the first thing they remember, is the first Bad Time they ever had?

  ‘You see, I had this wonderful Mummy and Daddy. Straight from a fairy tale. He was English, she was Greek. She was beautiful and he was handsome. And they’d met long ago, in Germany, and fallen in love, and got married all in a rush, and he brought her back with him to live in London.

  ‘Shouldn’t that be the most beautiful story there is? The story of how your mother met your father. The story of how you came to be. You know that line in the song? “Your Daddy’s rich and your Momma’s good-looking. So hush little baby …” Save that Harry wasn’t rich. He was – but this is Harry’s version, not mine – disinherited. Isn’t that a great old word, Doctor K – “disinherited”? And Grandad, according to him, was just being kind because of Mum and me.

  ‘Okay, so he used to go off now and then, I never knew why, for a week at a time maybe. But I always thought that was a necessary process. Like he was some faithful knight-errant. He’d always come back to Mum. They’d kiss. And one day we’d all settle down together at Hyfield. That was what Mum wanted. I know. She loved the place. And I think that for a while Harry even wanted it too. He took me up to where he worked once, in Fleet Street. I couldn’t have been more than four – how’s this for a first memory? There was this big room with men and telephones, and another down below with machines rolling and thumping. I guess I cried. He held me tight. And he said something like: Everything from all over the world comes here.