by Graham Swift
There might be several interpretations of this event. One might be, judging from the criterion of self-preservation, that it was an act of unqualified stupidity. Another, which was the verdict of the army, upheld by eye-witnesses and by the C.O., who, though technically no witness, had every reason to take a highly commendatory view, was that it was an act of unquestionable heroism, meriting nothing less than a Victoria Cross.
I can – just about – imagine a third version, in which my father is less the agent of his own volition than the puppet of conditioned reflexes and received ideas. Remember this is 1918 and the world is only just aware of how it has slid into the twentieth century. He sees the grenade fall and wishes it did not pose him its terrible moral choice. But given that it does, a whole set of notions that have been drummed into his twenty years counters the instinct in his stomach to bolt for cover – duty, training, his brothers’ names on the Roll of Honour, the shame of appearing cowardly, even some half-remembered image, drawn in his case not from Hollywood but perhaps from some ink-blotched school-book (he sees himself as one of the three Horatii or as Ajax bestriding the body of Patroclus), and he finds himself running like an automaton towards the grenade.
But I did not believe this version. My father, who was by this time Captain Beech, had been too long at the front – a miraculously unscathed fifteen months – to be duped in this way. And, besides, since that night at Hyfield, I have known differently.
And I have never told anyone. Even when he died and the press were making hay – Death of a Hero, and variations on that theme – I never breathed a word.
Everyone has their picture of the Great War. Somewhere in the picture is a horrific collision of the antiquated and the modern. A cavalry charge into the teeth of machine-guns. It was not the first or last, if it was the biggest of such collisions, but only the terrible prototype, perhaps, of further collisions that would go on happening, in even more polarized and grotesque forms. As when the latest in military science flattens overnight the fabric of ancient cities or consumes in balls of sticky fire the thatch and daub of a South-east Asian village. Or when the modern photo-explorer sets out to ‘capture on film’ (before he disappears!) the remote tribesman who can still be found living in pre-Bronze Age conditions. (And the tribesman says, No thanks: the camera will steal his reality.)
One picture of the Great War is of two countries, England and France, separated, physically, by a distance so small that the sounds of warfare could carry from one to the other, yet separated, mentally, by a gulf as big as that from the earth to the moon. You think of a traffic, in one direction, of unsuspecting men, and a traffic, in the other, of cruel telegrams. But you forget that sometimes the traffic was reversed and that telegrams now and then brought to the men at the front the news of ordinary, domestic calamity.
He lost his arm on March 30th, 1918. I was born on the 27th. What I never knew was that he knew before. On a March afternoon, about to go up to the line, he hears that his wife has died, giving birth to a son. And the morning after he receives this news, a grenade falls into his path, which the highest principles of valour, at least, demand he pick up.
He said it was a common thing – it happened all the time. The grenades sometimes took ten seconds to explode and they were usually thrown too soon. He said he never deserved to get the V.C. and he would never have got it it he hadn’t lost his arm.
No camera, of course, was present to record exactly what happened. To show, for example, how long he held on to the grenade after picking it up, how far he ran with it (but why should he have done that?) along the trench, or how soon after leaving his hand it exploded. But what no camera could show and what he himself could not tell was whether there had been some instant of teetering, agonized indecision – when the intention was defeated, when he stepped out of the picture and the picture changed, and with a bang, instead of being scattered into nothingness, the whole pattern of his future life clamped around him.
A change of roles. Richard, the eldest and heir-apparent to the family business. Edward, the budding scholar, the family indulgence. Robert, the – ?
He said he was that stock, stage figure – the nincompoop youngest son. Except that in those days they really used to exist. He said he never minded being a nincompoop youngest son, that was fine by him. Sandhurst was full of nincompoop youngest sons who had ‘What-shall-we-do-with-him?’ stamped all over them. Some of them got ambitious and became insufferable, and some of them never even knew they were nincompoops.
What she had liked about him was that he did know, and didn’t mind – he was a wise nincompoop. And he would never have guessed that a nincompoop could turn out to be so lucky – or become so serious.
Their short marriage began in April 1917. They honeymooned in Somerset, near Minehead – away from the English Channel. In a country cottage.
He said when he came home on leave he never knew what to tell her. He didn’t know how to tell her. What he used to say was, It was worse for the horses.
He said there was no logic. Richard and Edward being volunteers and getting killed, Richard at Neuve Chapelle and Edward at Loos, while he was still a cadet. And him being a regular officer and surviving.
He came out of the Great War in 1918, minus a wife, minus two brothers and minus an arm. But he had acquired the rank of Major, a Victoria Cross, and a son whom, because of periods of hospitalization, he scarcely saw for the first year of that son’s life, but whom, in any case, or so the son would later surmise, he had no special wish to see at all. He was in his early twenties but he was already a middle-aged man. He was also, since his two brothers were dead, the sole heir to the family business. And, given the nature of that business, and the business of the world in the previous few years, he was also about to be rich.
In 1923, one year after the death of his father, with the intention of adopting the obsolescent, crusty old style of a sort of squire without a manor, he bought Hyfield House, a Queen Anne building in Surrey, with its own driveway, gardens, orchard and paddock. No one saw through this pose to a former youthful nincompoop. Absence of a limb and the possession of a false one had conferred on him a mysterious solidity and integrity. He never remarried. He sent his son to boarding school. He engaged in public tasks. He did charitable works. He was referred to, respectfully, as ‘the Major’ by the local people, who would see him gliding by in his chauffeur-driven car. But he walked, every Sunday, to the church where his grave would be.
He said: ‘Do you know what my father said to me, just before he died? He said, “I’m proud of you, Bob.” And do you know what he meant by that? He meant I was a damn good mascot. I was the best bloody advertisement BMC ever had. He might have thought once I was a fool and a liability, but now – everything else apart – I was a walking asset. I’d be damn good for business.’
Every so often, I look through Dad’s arms. Did you know that? He left them to me. Never threw one away. I live in this cottage in Wiltshire with a stash of nine artificial arms. All there. Except one, of course.
When Jenny said, ‘What’s in that big trunk?’, I said, ‘My father.’ I didn’t mean it as a bad joke.
You remember how he made such a thing of it? How it was a big day when he got a new model – when he ‘went electronic’. How he used to talk about ‘going to see his tailor’. And all those tired, old, obvious puns about being in the arms business.
I always wondered which way round it was: was he trying to make his arm like the rest of himself, or the rest of himself like his arm? I never saw the stump. What about you, Sophie? Never ‘helped him in’. You never believed he was a different man once – before Anna, before you. I can’t remember when I first thought: Dad has only one real arm – once he must have had two.
Another woman might have said: Jesus! Either they go or I do. Jenny said, ‘Show me.’
Sometimes I’ve thought there must be some institution, some worthy cause somewhere that would be glad of them, that would know what to do with them. But then
I’ve thought: These are bits of Dad.
They are like a miniature museum of prosthetic technology. (The words we might never have had to learn!) But they are more than that. The earlier ones are shapely, useless bits of sculpture that gradually lose their anthropomorphic wishfulness and their aesthetic pretensions; the later ones look like nothing human, but actually simulate the function of an arm.
They are like an index of the twentieth century.
Sophie
You think it’s a long time to be on a plane? Another six hours. You think they should get you from New York to London in – well, you tell me, how long? One hour? Half an hour? A couple of minutes?
But look at it another way. Only seven hours to fly from New York to London. It takes days to cross the Atlantic Ocean by ship. It used to take weeks. And once they didn’t even know that America was there, on the other side. You’re not impressed? You don’t think it’s so great to be thousands of feet up in the sky in a jumbo jet? You’ve done it before when we flew that time to Miami with Daddy. With Daddy. So what’s new?
Or look at it another way. Seven hours. And yet we’re flying so fast that we’ll actually shorten time. You’ll see. In a little while it’ll be dark, but it won’t stay dark for very long. Not like a normal night. When we land in London it’ll be breakfast-time there, when for us it should still be the middle of the night. And it will all seem strange.
It’s because we’re travelling in one direction but the sun is travelling in another. And the sun is moving slower than we are. Don’t you think that’s wonderful? To be moving faster than the sun? Of course, it’s not that the sun is really moving. The sun isn’t really going anywhere. It’s that the earth – It’s–
When do they show us the movie? Oh, in a little while yet, I guess. When everyone’s settled. First they give us a drink and some food on a tray. But you don’t really want to watch the movie, do you? On planes it’s always a bad movie. And don’t you think it’s weird – to be thousands of feet up in the air and to want to pretend you’re in a movie-house? The real movie is out there, isn’t it? Those clouds – look, we’re above them! A whole ocean sliding underneath us.
You know, a long time ago, they’d have thought what we’re doing now was magic. Impossible! Out of this world! They’d have thought only gods could fly up into the sky. And now we get into these things and stow our luggage and fasten our seat-belts – and say: How about something to keep us amused?!
Let’s not watch the movie, my angels. Let’s not even listen to the music on the head-sets. Don’t neglect your mother. You know, I’m getting the feeling she’s not such a good flier as you are. It’s true, she’s always been a little nervous. Ever since – Let’s just be together, here, above the world. There are more important things than movies. And it’ll be tomorrow sooner than you think. It’ll be tomorrow before it’s even stopped being today. And your mother has only six hours.
Harry
But once everything was black and white. No, I don’t mean simpler, clearer – when were they ever that? I mean, literally: monochrome.
Picture your father, Sophie, walking down Fleet Street on a grey, wet day in the grey post-war year of 1948. He wears the non-colours that are everywhere around him (like a true news photographer, he blends in with his surroundings): grey raincoat, dark suit, dark-grey trilby. The cars that pass him are black and grey. The city buildings are charcoal studies: soot and stone. The wet road and the clock-face over the Daily Telegraph building and the smoke from a train on the Blackfriars line and the grey dome of St Paul’s against a grey sky are all the tones of newsprint and photographs.
And yet his heart is full of colour, his heart is aglow with colour, in that year of your birth. More colour than it will ever have in the days of Kodachrome and technicolour and colour TVs and that mainstay of his future career, the Sunday colour supplement.
If you are happy, why go looking for trouble?
Colour appeared, in shy, unstable tints, in the Forties and Fifties, then blossomed – yellow cars! Pink shirts! Shop-fronts that fluoresced! – in that bright new age in which you grew up. Was all that to do with the perfecting of the three-colour emulsion process – as if the world had glimpsed itself in some new and flattering mirror – or was it to do, like rising hemlines and marijuana and rockets into space, with sheer high spirits? And was it only coincidence that the years that had preceded, the years of world wars and depressions and newsreels and family albums, should be clad, or so it seems in my memory, in sullen shades of grey?
Before there was colour there was black and white. But before there was black and white there was sepia, ochre, tawny, bronze. I was born – just about – in the age of sepia. And it has always seemed to me that before this black-and-white then technicolour century came of age, the world was brown. My father’s world was brown. The brown of leather and horseflesh and mahogany sideboards. The brown of old brown shires and rutted lanes before the spread of tar. Even the first cameras were little brown boxes, glossy and venerable as violins.
My father’s desk was polished oak. And the study was oak panelled, and the spines of Uncle Edward’s books were mostly brown, and even the plaster busts on the mantelpiece – Homer? Cicero? I forget – turning on me their blind eyes that brown afternoon, had acquired a faint, tobaccoey sheen.
The desk was unlocked – for once, negligently unlocked – and when I took from the top left-hand drawer that single sepia photograph, that colour brown, most familiar and companionable of colours, became all at once foreign and strange, the colour of things lost.
She is standing in front of some porch or verandah, in a long dress with a tight waist. And though the photographer was plainly no professional (but I knew that), you must give him his due. She is clutching in one hand a wide-brimmed summer hat which would have cast her face into deep shade were it on her head. The photographer has told her to take off the hat, and she has only just removed it. Her hair is slightly disarranged. She is trying to hold a pose, but it is clear that – because the photographer has not given her time or because of something he has said – it has slipped. Her eyes are wide in happy surprise, her lips are just parted.
Fact or phantom? Truth or mirage? I used to believe – to profess, in my professional days – that a photo is truth positive, fact incarnate and incontrovertible. And yet: explain to me that glimpse into unreality.
How can it be? How can it be that an instant which occurs once and once only, remains permanently visible? How could it be that a woman whom I had never known or seen before – though I had no doubt who she was – could be staring up at me from the brown surface of a piece of paper?
From a time before I existed. From a time before, perhaps, she had even thought of me and when she was undoubtedly ignorant of what I would mean to her.
I was nine years old. It was half-term. November 1927. Through the window – when I dared risk being seen myself – I could see him standing in a corner of the orchard, talking to the gardener (Davis?) who was prodding with a rake a sullenly burning heap of leaves. He is not yet thirty, but he has the bearing of a gruff, grizzled dignitary. He would surely have thrashed me – a fierce, left-handed thrashing – if he had known I had seen that photograph. Just as he would have chastised himself if he had known he had forgotten to lock his desk. As he had never forgotten, not for a single day in nine years, to lock up himself.
I put the photograph carefully back in the drawer, not daring to pry further. There was no way I could ask to look at it again without disclosing I had looked already. No way of knowing if that drawer would ever be left unlocked again.
Why locked away? Till I was fifteen years old and summoned the nerve to ask him, he never told me where she was buried.
The leaves on the trees in the orchard, like the leaves on the bonfire, were brown, and even the thick, reluctant smoke, trailing across a background of brown woodland, had an amber tinge to it. So that that scene, framed in the study window, was almost, itself, like an old, lost phot
ograph. My father, caught unawares, as if I had him squarely in my sights. Talking to the gardener. Stepping back to avoid coils of autumnal smoke.
That Christmas I asked for a camera. Four years later he bought me one.
When I was ten years old, the following autumn, he took me on an aeroplane for a weekend in France. We could have gone by the traditional method, train and boat, but I know now that trains, which always evoke for me mournful journeys to and from boarding school, must have evoked for him even more mournful journeys – out of Waterloo to Southampton, and then again on the French side. Entrainings. Detrainings. Pass and warrant. So, in 1928, apart from reasons of ostentation and novelty, we flew. From Croydon to a military airfield somewhere north of Paris, in a specially chartered Armstrong-Whitworth Argosy, a monstrous, vibrant biplane, with an open cockpit, three engines, fifteen or so other passengers and a cabin interior which would now seem both absurdly plush and prehistoric.
Perhaps that aeroplane trip was only a bribe for my good behaviour in the days that immediately followed. We were there to mark the ten-year-old Armistice, and somehow a public truce had to descend on our own ten-year enmity. I had to play the dutiful and admiring son of my good soldier father. The bribe must have been effective. The Armistice meant nothing to me. And being in a foreign country for the first time was nothing to being several thousand feet up in the air, from where, in fact, one country looked much like another and the demarcations of maps and atlases seemed suddenly a sham.
I wish I could remember more of those three days in France: a turreted, mansarded French hotel; an old French matron, with a distinct moustache, who must have been employed to look after the children of wealthier guests; many men, like my father, wearing dark coats and medals; an occasion in a big square before a cathedral, with bugles and rain; drives to some inexplicable places in the middle of muddy fields (there was much talk about mud – ‘the mud’). And a sense, yes, in spite of myself, that he was pleased with me, and I, in return, was perversely proud of him, that in that strange, ceremonial and rigid atmosphere he was actually unfreezing and making some sort of bid to be like a man I might know. Had I been older I might have thought: Is it possible, is it possible, then? That he means to come out of mourning?
