Twenty Five Million Ghosts
Steve Aitchsmith
Copyright © 2017 S. A. Smith writing as Steve Aitchsmith
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.
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For the missing.
Contents
Dad’s war
Albert’s Wars
Findlay’s Wars
Letter from my mother
The Journal of John ‘Jack’ Adams
In Flanders fields as poppies blew,
tomorrow’s fathers failed and grew
the nature of this flimsy world
beyond old certainty and held
this history to be a place
where those who gave today in haste
are not forgotten but forged as
distant sacrifice to a new
styled life. Here survived souls remain,
seek solace, understanding, strain
to see or feel the missing sons
who are spent, yet prowl familiar
in their silent watch. Keep some faith
with the fallen we still recall,
loss borne and held eternally
in Flanders fields where now peaceful
ploughs enduring emptiness yield.
We in melancholy loss and
they, rewarded by memory,
keep some cloaked life that blurs the day
and obscures the view of this realm
unimagined. None died thinking
bright futures, as they lay stinking,
sure they died for mundane reasons:
family, friends, do the right thing –
we welcome these vague gallant ghosts,
shadows who cannot be today;
they broke the chain of creation.
We feel them and mourn more than them;
The present that will never be,
we see their seed continue now
in our sad and empty spaces.
John ‘Jack’ Adams
The ants began the aggressive expansion of their territory, thereby invading mine, in May. At first they were not a major problem, just one or two marauding about the conservatory in that purposeful yet random way they have, their light black bodies highlighting them against the white uPVC and making them easy to spot.
By June they had developed their incursion into a scavenging line intermittently raiding in an organised and energetic column. There were two columns really; one line in, do whatever it is that ants do when they forage, then another line out. It was an impressive display of order and precision, like a marching army. Brave and disciplined, too; no matter how many I squashed they just kept coming, immune to the horror of the splattered remains of their nest mates. Ants really are quite formidable.
This house near Brighton, slightly tumbledown, isolated and surrounded by woodland, is my final retreat. Final retreat or last stand, however you might want to regard it. Some people, and I’m one of them, have a need to obtain respite in occasional quiet sanctuary from the world that confuses them and provokes them into resigned despair at the general foolishness.
I’m not a real recluse, my wife usually works away during the week and my daughter stays at her university much of the time. At weekends when they are with me, I can pretend to be a standard family man. Monday to Friday I’m Mr Crusoe in a dilapidated old woodman’s cottage and free to exist in the last defensible camp I plan to inhabit.
I don’t feel as old as I am on paper. I’ve always said that chronologically I’m sixty something but inside, in my head, I’m twenty-two. I’m lucky enough to have my health and fitness, I look younger than my age – I like to say about thirty but everyone else says a young fifty, what do they know? I can still run a good distance and I’m as strong as ever. So far I’m not really experiencing any joint pains, except in my back but that’s a penalty for being tall. In fact, the only dark clouds over this not unpleasant way of life are an endowment mortgage that will fall short, with no real idea of how I will pay it without borrowing again, the occasional concern over what might happen with the woodland and a mother terminally ill with bowel cancer in a London hospice.
I don’t own the woodland. It extends to a few hundred acres that apparently don’t have an owner. I’ve had a few enquiries from some fat gut ripping, profit hunting developers. The forestry commission don’t have it and the last capitalist lackey that enquired, seeking to confirm Joni Mitchell’s prophesy, told me that it may be Crown land set aside for future national use, whatever that might mean.
I don’t need to worry about money, I have a decent though not great income from investments and residual Government payments for past services. Commitment to uniformed public service and a weather eye on the FTSE pays dividends. I say that I became financially secure by playing footsie with the state.
My parents were surprised when at the age of twenty I left a secure job in insurance to join the military. After a couple of uneventful tours of Ireland and some small foreign adventures which were not very adventurous, I sidestepped into a small joint services hush hush unit that basically went around the globe stealing other people’s information.
Later, as technology improved, the stealing could be done electronically from the UK thus saving on transport costs. It’s the sort of stuff that Britain pretends it doesn’t do but nonetheless still has to be done. I never really got involved in the blood and guts stuff. My life has involved the occasional unpleasant rough and tumble but that has more to do with being brought up in the East End than with any uniformed service.
On the plus side, the army, and later the police, spent a small fortune providing me with university courses and over a period of years I accidently collected a shed load of letters after my name. After a couple of years of sneaky and barely legal intelligence gathering, I moved into policing and then teaching and eventually made my final tactical retreat to this secluded home that many people would consider lacks the basic heating, water and sewage essential for habitability but which I enjoy.
On reflection, I probably did more physical fighting when policing than I ever did in the army. London policing can be a bit more hands-on and bundle around than is generally thought. Teaching can, at times, be more like policing than many would be comfortable with. That might be why there’s a surprising amount of movement between the two. A lot of teachers become police officers and more police than you might imagine become teachers.
So I live like this, part defensive isolationist, part content family man, part retiree, part woodm
an and part world weary ex-services patsy. I am the quintessential grey ghost, observing and noticing things while hiding behind the twin disguises of cynicism and anonymity. My income, made up from a small military pension, a huge police pension and a tiny teaching pension that together augment investment, keeps me solvent.
Now, of course, I have my new war to fight, I’ve solemnly declared hostilities against the ants. One of them actually bit me the other day so they will die. Destruction to the ants, that’s what I say.
Despite my determined assault with chemical weapons, the ants proved resilient. I bought and spread about some powder, the packet of which claimed that the ants would take the sweet but poisonous deception to their nest and then all die horribly, just as they deserve. Certainly the powder disappeared so I assume it was taken. There was no observable resulting depopulation, if anything they seemed to increase in number.
My new war notwithstanding, I left the scene of battle so that I could journey to Hackney, the location of the hospice. My mother and the redoubtable Dave Thompson would expect me and I wouldn’t like to disappoint them. My mother is dying and this matter of fact approach is my defence mechanism. I need to see her for my own peace of mind but I know that I’ll appear to others as just the dutiful son managing the passing of the old generation while maintaining his own progress forward.
Dave is an interesting man and I always enjoy meeting him. Or ‘hem’ as he would insist. Not long after I first met hem I asked hem about hem’s regular use of the word hem.
“It’s a gender neutral pronoun,” hem said in hem’s soft Irish brogue, a voice that always managed to sound both caring and fiercely defiant of the world in general. “English doesn’t really support the language of inclusiveness; language reflects culture, like the Eskimos having sumptingteen different words for snow, and the culture from which English originates is like most European cultures in its exclusiveness. So I’ve borrowed the word hem from some Polynesian language or other. It’s used when the gender of the person referred to is irrelevant. So hem is the bus driver but he or she is my father or mother.”
I’ve tried to use it but gave up because of the need to explain it to people, so I returned to the inherently sexist pronouns most of us are more used to.
Dave is always, in my opinion, challenging the world around him and this was just another example. The thing is, like most things that Dave says, it actually makes sense after you decipher his words and think about it for a while. It often takes some careful thought because when he’s explaining things he tends to talk as if he’s reading an academic essay.
I suppose it’s why what we now call the LGBT community half-inched some words from the language to describe itself, like ‘gay’ which until quite recently had a much wider usage. The existing language failed to support the concept and so words had to be created, imported or usurped. It might even be why I sometimes resort to colloquialisms from my childhood when they explain what I mean but I don’t really want to use a pejorative slang term, like pinched, that suggests something unacceptable.
I voiced this idea to him once and received his usual thought provoking individualistic reply.
“Community is it, well… maybe,” he said. “We usually give communities a geographic location. At the same time, we have to consider the Jewish diaspora which is also a community but without a specific location – Israel is more of a safe haven than a place for all Jews. So yeah, I suppose they are a community if they want to be. But would every gay person identify hemself as part of a community? I don’t know. I do know that’s it’s OK to appropriate for new usage any word from the English language if it can be placed in new contexts for alternative use generally, it’s the flexibility of English that gives it such strength as a global language. I also know that communities develop to protect those within them but also tend to exclude others, so we’re back to exclusion again aren’t we? Oh, and yeah, you use colloquialisms, even though what you said is not a colloquialism, because it’s easy. It’s just lazy and stops you properly reasoning out your thought, you’re better than that.”
That’s Dave for you. He infuriates me with his constant questioning and refusal to take anything at face value and I love him for it.
The fact is that he is the most intelligent and thoughtful man I’ve ever met. He’s as hard as they come from his early life spent boxing and drinking before he found his way into the Roman Catholic priesthood. It’s an unlikely transition but then again maybe not for a man who is as comfortable in a punch up as he is in a high level academic debate. Strictly speaking he’s Doctor Dave (of philosophy, not theology, interestingly) but doesn’t like the title.
I don’t call him Father either, I’m not RC, and he seems happier with just ‘Dave’ or sometimes ‘oi you’. He’s the perfect counter balance to the rarefied atmosphere that can surround clergy of any denomination. He’s also a reassuring character in a church reeling from global revelations of child abuse.
While the church hierarchy purports to protect the vulnerable and support the offenders in their weakness, Dave just says, “prosecute them, cut their bollocks off and kick them out.” Dave struggles with the ‘turn the other cheek’ part of his faith.
The train journey to London from my hidey-hole is languorous and presents little of great interest. There is some pretty countryside on the first leg towards Victoria and some unusual buildings but the view quickly gives way to modern box housing and the landscaping of an overcrowded network of roads, services and airport.
As the train rumbles into London itself, the housing becomes older and more care worn although a bright and tall new world, often gleaming and shiny or adorned with squares and streaks in primary colours, is sprouting its oddly shaped towers amongst them, like a group of boisterous dandies disturbing the exhausted old architecture.
The easy transfer to the underground delivers one into the sardine world of the commuter, tourist or urban wanderer moving and standing in confined spaces with shoulder to shoulder crowds. Trying not to press against anybody is a complete skill set in itself.
To reach Hackney I find it’s best to abandon the tube at Whitechapel and move onto the bus network. I’ve watched this area evolve throughout my whole life. The underlying villainy of the predominately white working class East End in which I grew up gave way, in Whitechapel and some other areas, to an incoming Islamic culture that currently dominates the area, complete with street traders, Muslim proselytisers and often eastern attire.
The significant but shy Jewish community that existed alongside us seems to have remained with the new Whitechapel and moves around the current culture with a little visible friction but more or less smoothly. However, whereas the Jewish groups largely assimilated with the previous majority group, in public at least, that does not seem to be the case now.
I wonder if it ever occurs to the Jewish people here that they were resident in this area first. When Oliver Cromwell, in need of profitable industry and the skills that go with it, reversed the expulsion of Jews enacted by Edward 1 in 1290, returning Jews settled close to the walls of London in this then rural undeveloped area. The working English were attracted by the opportunities this created and joined them soon afterwards. Longshanks created the vacuum that centuries later allowed Jewish and English workers to rush in.
London social norms change within just a few miles, it’s the only place I know where one might walk all day and move through half a dozen or more different cultures. There is one common and rarely commented on thing about these places, it is something barely noticeable and apparent only in its absence. There is a whole strata of human society that has become disappearingly rare, everywhere; it is the very old, the vulnerable old.
When I was young, the confused, weak and vulnerable elders were common. It was expected that we small kids would help them as and when required. We would carry their bags, run their errands and visit them in their homes to
suffer stewed tea, stale biscuits, life threatening poor hygiene and fascinating tales of yore.
They were an often confused and cantankerous bunch, at the same time they were made interesting by their exciting stories and advice. On the not infrequent occasions that they wandered into roads, forgot about ovens and fires or just got lost, this was not seen as an issue and they were just helped or assisted by whoever was at hand at the time.
As the journey draws into Hackney itself, the vocal and confident Islamism of the Whitechapel Road gives way to a black and white ethnicity of the centuries old Anglo Celt culture amalgamated with Caribbean arrivals just decades ago. The two groups were surprisingly compatible and the older people rub along together, with a little of the old racism sometimes erupting. The younger people seem to have merged into a newer mixed culture developed from the older two, it’s an interesting place.
Unlike in parts of south London, where much of the young white population copied the accents of the Empire Windrush newcomers, or at least a London version of it, in the east the black population largely adopted the traditional cockney voice of those already there. I like Hackney. Recently arty types of all ethnicities have begun a colonisation of the area and this lively and eccentric group only add to the area’s vibrancy with their gentrifying and amusingly fashioned presence. I’ve seen this bunch sporting Victorian waistcoats, coloured hair, rag doll make up, Edwardian beards and more. Wonderful. It has to be said they can be a tad insular, sticking to their own people but still a welcome subculture.
I hear that many local housing estates are plagued by gangs and drugs but they’re really not apparent unless you search for them. I hope the new black/white artists develop into a local culture that washes over the nihilism and pointlessness of the gangs. London is nothing if not constantly dynamic.
Moving amongst all of this are the ubiquitous homeless and dispossessed. There’s something disturbing about a society that so readily accepts the helpless and hopeless throng that sleeps rough and begs its sometimes aggressive way among them. Not old enough to fall into the hidden world of the geriatric ghetto homes and in need of too much help to actually contribute, they are simply ignored and left to fade into the social background.
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