Carry Me

by Peter Behrens

  I had no idea what she meant, but the phrase back into the bog has stayed with me.

  By this time I had pretty much lost sight of my father as a person. He was a ghost.

  Buck had convinced himself time would go by faster if the two of them didn’t have to measure their lives from week to week, one visit to the next. Also it would be much cheaper, living at Sligo. Eilín wouldn’t need to work as a waitress in a tea shop. Good food was plentiful in Ireland.

  Twenty minutes together, only fingertips touching across a battered table in a visiting room with dozens of strangers doing exactly the same thing: such “visits” must have made it clear to my parents that the war was prying them apart, turning them into strangers. Years later she told me Buck spent three visits in a row talking about nothing but birds. No real intimacy was possible, so he’d given up trying. He’d reached a point where nothing outside the barbed wire had any weight for him. This was a symptom of what he called barbed-wire disease, and it made her furious, then ashamed of herself. It wasn’t his fault. He was trapped in a crepuscular world of wheezing, snoring, complaining German and Austrian men. Given his sailor’s sensitivity to sky, weather, breezes—the wide-open blue—he’d become obsessed with the careless, glamorous, wide-open lives of English birds.

  I hated the jeering teachers at school and dreamed of drowning Albert Willspeed in the pond at Hampstead Heath. I might have tried if I’d ever come across him there. What should I do when he screamed and begged for help? Would I pull him out? I would never let an animal, even a duck, drown in the pond without attempting rescue. If I rescued scrawny, bleak little Albert I’d be a hero. Even though I’d pushed him in. Perhaps I’d win a Royal Life Saving medal.

  Eilín finally realized that our proximity (the boardinghouse was less than a mile from Ally Pally), rather than being a comfort, was torturing my father. He had dreams—nightmares—in which time was stopped. He told her during the worst periods he found himself noting and measuring each passing minute.

  Barbed-wire disease.

  So Eilín at last agreed we’d leave London for Ireland.

  There’d be ham and fresh milk and potatoes in Ireland. We could collect the stipend there. Eilín hated our semi-communal life in the boardinghouse, hated sitting at the tea table with a dozen lodgers. There was a sickly Welsh preacher, Reverend Mr. Powell, always maneuvering to sit next to her. He had yellowed fingers and wore a ruby ring.

  I took my tea downstairs with the others, but Eilín often carried a tray up to her room. No one else was permitted to do that; the housekeeper had a dread of crumbs and of mice—mice were an obsession in north London lodging houses. But the cook was fond of my mother so she was allowed to take her meals upstairs and alone.

  In my mind Ireland was mixed up with the Isle of Wight. At first I was under the impression we were going home to Sanssouci, but as our time for departure grew nearer my confusion dissipated and it became clear “Ireland” was something quite different. However, I liked islands in principle. Ireland sounded a long way from Albert Willspeed, and that was good enough for me.

  Going to Sligo would be like going to sleep until the war was over: that was what my parents hoped.

  “The Irish aren’t as angry,” Eilín assured me, “they don’t hate the Hun.”

  “We’re not Huns.”

  “No one is, really. It’s only what they say. You’ll have a fresh start at school and a pony to ride.”

  The first payment of the stipend was delayed, so we were very low on funds during our last weeks in London. Wages and tips from Alan’s Tea Rooms plus a few bob from the Quakers were all we had to live on. We used to count our money on a white chenille bedspread in our room. She never had paper notes, only coins—shillings, half sovereigns, the occasional crown. We washed the hoard by dumping the coins into a jug, pouring scalding water on them, adding a dollop of ammonia cleaning fluid, and stirring. We’d drain the water, then dump the mass of coins on a towel to dry. London money was filthy, she said. She preferred that I did the counting; she didn’t like doing it.

  What we had wasn’t enough to pay our fare for Ireland, so most of our household goods and my father’s handmade shoes had to go off to the pawnbroker, an elderly German Jew whose anarchist son was interned at Ally Pally. Eilín pawned her wedding band. Then we had enough for two tickets on the Irish boat-train.

  Before we left London there was the zeppelin raid.

  For me it started with a great noise in the streets—cheering that woke me up. I rolled out of bed and stumbled to the window. My mother was up a moment later, reaching for her woolen wrap, dazed and groggy—she worked so hard and slept so little and had to share her bed with me, a restless sleeper who thrashed and kicked most of the night.

  I stood at the window clutching my ship Lilith and watching the fire in the sky. A British fighter had shot up the zep with incendiary bullets, and the airship was an enormous bag of fire, wafting from side to side and dripping fire in clots, like melted wax dripping from a candle. As soon as I realized it was a zep, I knew that all the crewmen aboard her would die; that was why we stared at the thing with such fascination. Then men began leaping from the ship, tiny bright specks, like glowing embers spat from a fire. Dots of orange death, plummeting to the ground.

  The memory of that zeppelin night handles like a dream, and if my mother hadn’t spoken of it up until the hour of her own death, I might believe that it was a dream. But it really happened, and we watched it. That particular zep came to its end in a farmer’s field at Potters Bar, Hertfordshire. By then all the crewmen had jumped to their deaths.

  Burning aviators, clots of fire. The reeking night jar in our bedroom in Muswell Hill. Children skipping round me in a school yard, shouting taunts. My ship Lilith. London’s winter cold and dark. The smell of ground sliced open in Regent’s Park, my father’s pale prisoner’s face, his white hands on a table in the visiting hall. There it is. That was my war.

  1938

  At last we turned up her little street. We were exhausted from cold rain, from dancing, from Kansas City jubilation, from the long ride on the rackety late-night U-Bahn, and the long walk from Uhlandstrasse in a downpour. We were jumpy from doubts, fears, dreams of America, the prospect of ourselves as parents.

  As we hurried up the street I could see a heap on the sidewalk in front of her building. For a moment, I thought there’d been a car smash, then I recognized a typewriter perched haphazardly on top of a Bauhaus writing table.

  All her goods, clothes, belongings, had been dumped on the sidewalk. She didn’t own much, but it still made a good-sized pile. Everything sodden.

  “The paintings—”

  “Don’t bother!” she said. “The paintings are gone, I’m sure.”

  They were. Had they been destroyed as degenerate art, or had someone grabbed them on the sly, knowing they’d bring a good price in Amsterdam or Paris?

  Her belongings heaped on the sidewalk in the rain—it was gruesome. Like staring at a bloody car wreck.

  “Your job: find us a hotel room.” She dragged out a leather suitcase from the pile and began throwing some wet clothes into it. “Tomorrow we’ll go to Frankfurt. I’ll go to America. I don’t care about these fucking idiot things. My pile of shit! Except the paintings and they’re not here. No, of course they are not. Well, forget them, forget them, what they are is what they’ve become. The loss is best managed by not talking about it.”

  She filled the suitcase and clipped it shut.

  I saw my knapsack in the pile and extracted it.

  “What about the rest—”

  “Let them have it! If I could set the whole heap on fire, I would.”

  She’d lived in that building ten years. What had her neighbors, taking their poodles for evening promenades, thought when they saw her heap of things? Probably they’d scampered back up to their flats and locked and chained their doors.

  All the cash in my wallet I spent on a cab to Unter den Linden and a room at the Hotel Adl
on. I never had stayed in such a grand establishment before, but no one at the front desk asked if we were married, or if she was Jewish, and our room had a bathroom en suite. Karin bathed in the tub, and we fell asleep in the soft enormous bed.

  IRISH SEA

  Holograph letter. Eilín McDermott Lange to Heinrich Lange (“Buck”), addressed Capt H Lange, Alexandra Palace Camp, London N10, postmarked Sligo, 15 May 1916. Lange Family Archive. 12 C-05-1916. Special Collections, McGill Library, McGill University, Montreal.

  May 12th

  STRANDHILL, SLIGO

  Mein Liebster,

  We are settled in the red house with father.

  On the boat coming across Billy and I both were sick. I went out on deck and smelled the ground of Ireland. At Kingstown quay he had raging fever. Not knowing what else to do I begged a drayman to take us to the Loreto’s where they might have a bed for him. The nuns bless them took us both in my old teacher Mother Power nursed him a week and it was scarlet fever but he is completely recovered. I did not write before as I wanted to wait until I could say your son is perfectly well: and now he is.

  It was an odd sort of return to Ireland. Passing through Dublin we saw Sackville Street in ruins, buildings smashed, the Post Office a wreck, the city smelled of old fires. Billy has had too much war already. I don’t want any more war for him. He still asks about the crew of the zep. Did they die—yes. Did they burn—yes. Did no one help them—don’t know. Is hell like that—don’t know.

  Father is willing to keep us but his law practice is gone slack, none of the big landowners will use him now that he spends most of his time speaking against conscription. At Strandhill the subject of the war to be avoided at all costs or he will go on about the evils, conscripting poor Irishmen for English slaves, etc. The life of this house is entirely organized to his purposes & whims, the household run strictly according to his habits, my sisters are meek housecats, poor things. I may be unable to live in the same house as my Father, there it is. I tell myself, I must, for Billy’s sake, but it may not be possible—my spirit shrivels here. Father feels the same about me, we are oil and water, he won’t admit it. He is Great Britain to my Ireland. He the viceroy, me the seething rebel. Last night I put our situation to him like that (foolish, yes, but after a week of his lectures & commands & whims my head was reeling) and he thought I was making a joke of his republican faith, and insulting the sacred memory of the Fenian martyrs!! besides. I wasn’t any honest rebel but I had a traitor’s heart.

  I said—That’s what the British called those they shot, do you think I ought to be shot? He replied—it was no use talking to me as I couldn’t talk sense.

  And yet. And yet. The poor farmers in this part of the world think of him as their champion. Some of them, anyway. His little housemaid finds him very hard as an employer. He is determined to help the farmers and tenants win back what the ranchers have stolen and they love him for it but don’t pay him hardly anything.

  My sisters are very happy to have us and shower the boy with love & attention.

  It’s hard to think of now but when we were girls we all would go down to Strandhill on a sunny afternoon—father, poor little mother, and the 3 of us. Father would help us build our sandcastles. He’d take off his boots, swing us over tops of waves so our feet could dabble in the fizz. Now he is so hard and locked-up and difficult to know. Speeches and hatred crowd his head, he doesn’t like to feel anything else.

  I asked—When was the last time you were out on the strand?

  He gave me a look as if I were talking nonsense.

  I said—Organize a family party, all of us, take sandwiches and spend the day. You used to say S’hill is the most beautiful place in the world.

  He shook his head as if I were talking Dutch and it was just noise to him.

  I said—Don’t you remember, rolling up your trousers and walking in the surf, we used to look at you so far off, such a tiny figure on the beach, we couldn’t understand how you could ever be so small as that.

  Father—I haven’t time for that now.

  He expects/wants Germany to win the war. He asks if you have organized a protest at A.P.? He says you ought to go on hunger strike. He is all for making martyrs. Don’t you dare. Eat all the food you can, for your son’s sake keep as strong as you can. One day the war will be over and he’ll need his father. You must teach him about the wind, tides, stars, sailing close-hauled, shrouds, stays, tops’ls and all the lore I can’t remember, he will learn to be a man in the world from your gentle ways & your sense of duty & purpose. My father is a patriot but isn’t at home in the world. Thin and stalky—solitary as a heron. He writes ferocious letters to the Sligo Champion and I believe wishes he were at Kilmainham himself waiting to be shot—maybe he is weary of life and won’t admit it. His anger—at the British, redmondites in parliament, cattle ranchers, recruiters, English landlords—is also directed at my sisters and the little maid and myself. Fury is his screen and behind it he hides. The only one he’s mild with is: Billy.

  On Thursday the boy and I did walk all the way to the old strand at Kilaspugrone, and I thought that wild wind would blow me away, old man, or blow me clean, at least, blow the London smut right out of me. Only it was a warm wind, warm and wet. There was two women far away gathering wrack in a cart, but not another soul, it seemed like the green end of the world.

  I informed the boy I was going to remove my clothes to bathe in the sea and if my being naked made him uneasy he must walk a way down the strand toward the wrackers and not look back but I was his mother and this was the seashore where I’d bathed as a girl, these were my waves, and it was natural I should do so again.

  He looked solemn, and said—But you should have brought your dipper.

  —Well I haven’t.

  Then he said, he wasn’t afraid, far from it, he would go in as well, only he wouldn’t take off his clothes.

  I said—The sea here is different than what you are accustomed to on our Isle—quite wild and big.

  I can see, he said—but I’ll be safe enough—you won’t let anything happen to me.

  He removed shoes and socks, his jumper and vest and walked down to the water’s edge and began spinning stones into the backchat of waves just as my sisters and I used to do. I left my clothes under a few sticks and ran—straight into the waves.

  The boy came in straight after me, throwing himself across the wave-tops, very bold…both of us screaming…for joy—I think. Feeling clean. Only wanting you.

  I have twice gone out to Wychwood to your mother. The house is a ruin as you said it would be, very damp. She says there is plenty of room but most rooms are ruined—I don’t know that your mother really sees what terrible condition the house is in. As far as I can tell she has no income whatsoever except very small rents from the few tenants that are willing to pay it. Her maid earns a few shillings selling eggs on market day and says that a few of the former tenants will leave bacon, apples, potatoes, milk, etc. at the ‘big house’ not out of any sense of obligation but out of pity. Many tenants in this part of the country have stopped paying the rent. If they do, the Sinn Feiners might cause trouble for them.

  Your mother rides out every morning on her old hunter, ‘Clip.’ My father warns that a ‘Shinner’ might shoot her from behind a hedge one morning.

  I must go to the post office to see if the stipend has come through.

  There is war-work and wages at the mills in Derry so I may go up there, but I would have the Boy stay on here with my father & sisters, I don’t want him in a dirty town like Derry, poor wee soul.

  Ich liebe Dich,

  E

  I remember smoky cups of tea on the train from Euston Station and passageways crowded with soldiers in khaki. Windows in our third-class carriage were unwashed and blurred the countryside with a dirty, ugly fog. But while the train hammered across England and Wales, I was absorbed by what was flowing on the other side of the glass: not the countryside nor the towns, but the railway system itself. T
he ribbons of steel rail on graded track bed. The elegant cuts, brickwork tunnels, stalwart iron bridges. The grassy, sinuous elegance of embankments and the perfection of level grade fascinated me. It was as if the great work had been done by gifted aliens. To carve a railway line through such rolling and various country, through the hearts of densely clustered cities and towns, and to keep the network alive and almost breathing seemed to me so wonderful as to be nearly overpowering. I experienced euphoria on that journey across England and Wales. As it turned out, I was also incubating scarlet fever, which may have had something to do with my exalted mental state.

  The British railways struck me as one great thing. Before leaving London I could not have imagined such a thing. Then I experienced it as though it were one enormous, fantastic clockwork toy, or perhaps a powerful animal, alive and uncaged, sprawling across hundreds of miles of England and Wales.

  It amazed me that people had built and could sustain such complexity. It made me feel deliriously proud of being human.

  Some of this was fever coming on, also the emotional release I felt as we sped farther and farther from the narrowness and terror of Muswell Hill, my unpleasant schoolmates, and my barren, beaten-raw identity as Herm the Germ.

  In Ireland they would have to find something else to call me.

  Eilín in those days wore her chestnut hair in a chignon that left the slender stalk of her neck exposed. We kept to ourselves on the train. She spoke to strangers only when she had to.

  At Holyhead we boarded the steamer for Dublin. My maiden sea voyage, unless I count the little Isle of Wight steamer from Ryde to Southampton.

  Crossing the Irish Sea with my mother does not compare with Buck’s voyage in utero round the Horn, does it? Still, you must give us some credit for boldness. Or give it to her, anyway. Eilín, twenty-six, traveling with a seven-year-old son, and I doubt she had six extra shillings in her purse. We were sailing for Ireland to live out the war, if ever it would end. She had written her father asking for refuge and heard nothing back. After her mother’s funeral she’d quit his house vowing never to return.