Dream On

by Dai Smith

At almost the very end of the war, in mid-February, 1945 to be exact, he’d caught a troop train dockside in Dover and stood in its steam-fugged corridor for hours, along with hundreds of other temporary escapees on a long weekend’s leave from the British Army, then paused at the Rhine before its last thrust. He’d had to change trains twice to cross through the west of England and into Wales. All so eerily familiar and quiescent. He would remember how, when he left the train at the general station the sudden cold stung his cheeks. Soldiers, tough and young as they were, pulled up the collars of their greatcoats, their kitbags and slung rifles nestling closer to their shoulderblades as they hunched up inside their uniforms.

  It was towards the end of a Saturday afternoon. The sky was a deep purple, low and livid in the retreating light. He pushed and was jostled in a crowd of civilians and soldiers milling out of the station towards the parked bull-nosed buses, separately liveried out in the metallic colours of their various urban district councils: cobalt blue and clotted cream, coffee and white, emerald green and ochre, and the blocked-in red of his own valley’s fleet. Queues, dressed in the wartime drab of worn cloth and darned wool, stood and stamped, and grew anxious. It felt, he said, as if something more than a storm was about to break over them. The intense cold, the temperature dropping minute by minute, actually seemed a shield against the coming storm. Too cold to snow was what he heard muttered all around as the buses opened their doors and filled up. And so it was. But not too cold for the hail which instantly rattled onto the roof of the departing bus as a sudden downpour of rain turned to ice and fell as spherical rocks. Beyond the canopied shelter of the bus stops the roads were carpeted in white grit by the downfall, and the gutters were alternatively clogged with hailstones and a-swirl with twists of running water.

  At the outskirts of the city, where the hopeful suburbs of the 1930s had begun and then halted, the sky, darker still now, was riven with the jag of forked lightning which followed, metronomically insistent, on the drumbeats of thunder rolling down from the hills to the north. It was still an hour away from official blackout time when all lights had to be dimmed for the wartime evening, but the home patch to which he had returned was already shrouded by a lowering pall of inky black clouds which scudded across the horizon now that the hailstorm had passed. The clouds were never still for an instant, whether bunched or in skeins, and the darkness they brought was too deep for night itself.

  What traffic there was – a few private cars and a bus or two – thinned after a few miles as the road moved into the bottom of the valley. His bus edged forwards with just a pencil line of light from a slit in its headlamps to show the centre line of the meandering road. Nothing was coming down the valley. No people walked on the streets. Shops had closed. After the jokers had exhausted their banter about frogs and locusts, the passengers had fallen silent, one or two leaving at the deserted bus stops in the emptied townships through which they were passing. Then the wind rose again and seemed to rush through and around them and the sky, swept clear of cloud, lightened again, but with the sudden alarm of a flashbulb, a glare that lit every corner, and the rain and the hail spluttered in one last gout as if it had been caught and then dropped from an awning before, as if by a magician’s unseen trick on a fully illuminated stage, all was driven away by snow. This snow fell on them not as a soft, downy flutter of flakes but as an avalanche of unstoppable whiteness in a blizzard which, in an instant again, blanked everything out so that the bus, blind and isolated in its road, had to stop, its windows, front, back and sides, caked over in thick inches of ice particles which froze in granulated sheets on the panes and the door.

  The bus had been halted in the centre of the small, second settlement in the one, long continuous street that was the valley. The storm of snow and ice and howling wind that made it pile and drift lasted more than half of a bitingly cold hour before it stopped with the unexpected suddenness with which it had begun. Two or three together had to push and shove at the door of the single-decker motor coach before it would open sufficiently against its wall of white. The bus could not move on, and as it turned out no traffic would be on the move again until Monday morning had come and gone. People considered where they might stay, who knew of friends, whether they could walk, and how far. He did not, however, ask or wait. He stepped down from the bus, sinking into the snow, adjusting his kitbag over his left shoulder and pulling his beret tight over his forehead, checking the weighted heft of his weapon by pulling its sling of canvas webbing tighter, and setting off, in a wet stumble over the clumps and crevasses which hid and transformed the world he had known.

  No one followed him. He picked his way along the road, choosing lines of least resistance, or on the pavements wherever the snow had blown into mounds in shop doorways or into side alleys. It was a slow march, scarcely a progress, more a crouched inching forward to sideways steps. His heavy woollen trousers were soon soaked to the thigh, and chafed his legs with their scratchy, sodden fibres. The snow melted to ice water where it seeped into his nailed and toe-capped boots, and stayed frozen in the thickness of his socks. He wore no gloves, so switched one numbed hand then the other into the sidepockets of his coat. His face turned a glacial pink in a hissing wind and icy splinters crystallised amongst his eyelashes and pricked his eyebrows when he blinked. He tried not to think, just to move on.

  He knew he was trudging past remembered places and the familiar markers of his growing up, and that beneath his feet were coal seams he had once worked, and the main headings that had led him to the coal face. He knew this by a trace of memory and by a sense of what should be there, for under their ghastly burial mounds of snow they might never have existed in any previous form. It was as if all had been made anew, or at least that was the illusion as his boots dinted the virginal white world with their hobnailed tread. Even as he walked a lesser, finer snow filled in the footprints he was leaving behind him through a night as pitch dark as any day he had ever spent underground.

  With nothing to see as distinguishing marks he felt as empty as the snow-filled streets. He found thoughts of the war from which he had come, and to which he would yet return, impossible to deny. He thought of it involuntarily. It came in instances and images, and through unexpected lurches of fear in the pit of his stomach and the dryness of his throat. It was of Italy mostly, where the winters had been wet, billeting under canvas bone-chilling, and living was a daily passage through mud and blood. In Sicily, months before all that and the halting of the army at the Cassino bottleneck, there had been sunshine and quick advances, and lemons amongst the olive groves. And in the oak trees there were hidden killers, left behind to pick them off as the Nazis crossed the straits to the mainland, sharp shooting snipers whose deadliness came from nowhere more threatening than thick-leaved branches bending in the breeze that blew off the sea to cool them. He thought of how the anger had built because of a perception, absurd but tellingly so, of the unfairness of such individualised killing. He thought of what they had done to a sniper they had isolated in a small copse to the side of the road on which they had recently marched. The German had shot two of them before they doubled back and surrounded him. He threw down his rifle and half-stood, half-crouched, on a broad branch. He held up both hands, and said something they chose to ignore. They lined him up in the sights of their own guns until Tommy Cross, the battalion’s flame-thrower, came to the front. No one spoke. Tommy began at the bottom of the trunk and sent his liquid flames up it, like a molten river running the wrong way, until he burned to a charred cinder the treetop assassin. He’d cheered Tommy on along with the rest of them. The thought of it now was not of regret but of disgust. There was bile rising into the back of his mouth. He stooped to pick up a mouthful of snow and felt its coldness rinse his gums. He spat it out.

  Tiredness dulled him again. He forced one foot to lift in front of the other. He did not want to stop. To rest. To knock at any door whose pulled curtains hinted at a light, at a coal fire banked up in a back kitchen. He brushed the fallen,
heaped snow off a signpost. Two miles more to go, and three hours gone already since he’d left the bus. At the post he turned left and more steeply up the cwm which would take him to the house and terrace at its cul-de-sac end. He walked in the middle of the road, leaning his body into a high snow bank, and stumbled at its crest against some kind of barrier. He reached out to feel it. Planks of wood, a few barrels, an old chest of drawers, all yanked together in a line, hidden by snow and nightfall. Behind the barricade he glimpsed a pinprick of torchlight. He heard a voice, at once sonorous and officious:

  “Halt! Who goes there?”

  He told the boy he had recognised the voice. Baritone in the choir and bombastic everywhere else. It was Ikey Isaacs, self-appointed Home Guard for this patch of ground and inveterate reminiscer of his service in the previous war.

  “Halt!” said Ikey. “Halt, or I’ll shoot!”

  His father said – wondrous for which farce or tragedy had brought him and Ikey, colliery official, chapel deacon and local councillor, to this – that he croaked back, “Ikey, boy. It’s me. Dai Maddox. From Number 10 Top Row.”

  “Password”, Ikey replied. “Password. Say the Password.”

  He could see Ikey’s bulky figure, his hands fiddling with some sort of outmoded gun, and his moonface, reddened by the cold and wrapped up in a homemade woollen balaclava helmet, looming up above him behind the makeshift wall. He was very tired now.

  “I don’t know the fuckin’ password.”

  “Password or stay where you are.”

  “Christ! Ikey. I’m on leave. On foot, see. No buses, right. I fuckin’ don’t know no fuckin’ password but I fuckin’ know you, you fuckin’ arsehole. Now get out of my fuckin’ way.”

  “No need to be insolent, or foul-mouthed. Rules are rules. The enemy can take advantage in conditions like this. Password comes first.”

  At which point, his father told the boy, he unslung his own oiled and ready rifle, slid the bolt back with a loud click and jumped up, minus discarded kitbag and all friendly inhibitions, onto the middle plank of the barricade. From there he nestled the rifle’s stock into his shoulder and levelled the barrel point blank into the round and incredulous moonface of Ikey Isaacs, Protector of the Rules, and said, “Now move out of the fuckin’ way or I’ll blow you and your fuckin’ password to kingdom fuckin’ come.”

  Ikey sat down with an abrupt and unwanted suddenness, and the stain spread underneath him on the snow. Not the bright crimson stain of shed blood but the tobacco yellow acidity of urine. Ikey had pissed himself. His father shouldered his rifle, retrieved his kitbag and walked on.

  * * * * *

  The point is, he’d tell the boy when their laughter stopped, that was what he thought then some of it had been about. Home, yes. But a kingdom yet to come. Or if not, what had been the point of lives that were otherwise mere existence, and may as well write the obituary on it all from the off. Yes? No. The boy had learned that all the questions asked were rhetorical. The point was, and in the end it was the only point, to keep asking them. Nothing worth having was worth repeating but passing through was not the same as passing over. You could not answer by default. What was singular, as experience, still had to be connected if meaning was to be derived. Or else life itself was just a discard, so throw the bloody thing away. He said that on Monday, after that freak weather weekend, you could see snowdrops rising up beneath the remaining snow.

  His father clung to connection. The boy avoided it as much as he could. Not easy when it was laid before him in such a bewildering variety of ways. The boy had put to one disbelieving side his father’s claims to the wartime friendship, via Italy, of the US Army circus entertainer, Burton Lancaster. The movie star’s backlist of films was catalogued by his father’s memory in days before video recordings. And recounted endlessly to the boredom of the boy who’d scarcely seen them. Then, in 1968 when the boy was ten, his father took him to the new comic Western, Scalphunters, in which Lancaster is fur-trapper Joe Bass and Ossie Davis, through capers and hokum, his erstwhile black slave Joseph Lee, educated and mature to Bass’s “noble savage”. It finished, clumsily but movingly, in a symbolic unity of master and slave, black-and-white, when Lancaster and Davis fist-fight to exhaustion in a mud-hole which cakes their skins to a similarity. They are one. Joe Bass now mounts the horse he has ridden through the movie whilst Joseph Lee has walked behind him, tethered or pulled; but this last time, without looking down, Bass reaches out an arm and pulls Lee, his doppelgänger, up and into the saddle behind him. If it was corny, it was wonderful too. If only for the way his father, in the cool dark of the picture house, gently nudged the boy’s ribs, and said:

  “See. That’s not acting, boy. That’s for real. That’s what I’ve been telling you. That’s to come. That’s Burt, pure Burt. See.”

  And he did. It was registered with him. How to live a life. Or try. From birth. With or without a certificate.

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  The publisher acknowledges the financial support of the Welsh Books Council.

  This ebook edition published in 2013

  First published in 2013

  © Dai Smith

  All rights Reserved

  The right of Dai Smith to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

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