Granta 125: After the War
Page 21
‘He writes about Private Godley in his diary as a good member of the section so he would have known him well. Did I tell you the government is launching its World War I centenary at St Symphorien cemetery in 2014? Maybe you can go to it.’
‘I think I’m busy that day.’
We ascend in a tiny elevator staffed by a large seated man. The officers in the gallery of the House of Commons, who I presume came from the armed services in some form, wear a white bow tie and a strange metal buckle at the stomach. ‘I’m afraid the damage is done,’ says an old comrade of my father. ‘We’re going to lose 2RRF.’ He is right: though today’s protest gets good coverage, the government disbands the battalion anyway. My father takes it stoically, as he later does the news that the Mons Hall at Sandhurst is being renamed the King Hamad Hall because the king of Bahrain has paid for it to be refurbished, the British government being short of funds.
I slide into a tiered wooden row beside my father, briefly forming part of a collage of men, as they crane forward, holding their walking sticks and black berets with the red-and-white plume. During the debate, man after man, and two women, stand up from the green benches below us to say how much they admire the regiment, and how proud they are of the United Kingdom’s sailors, soldiers and airmen. Some of the speakers know an extraordinary amount about the history of the Royal Fusiliers, and one refers to them winning six VCs before breakfast at Gallipoli. Nobody minds when the veterans in the gallery cheer and clap, though it is against the rules. The old soldiers enjoy the ritual praise, but they know power does not rest with these MPs.
This is not my world, but I know its codes, its rhetoric, its assumptions. I want to leave, but I stay, letting the speeches run over me.
In this antiquated setting, my mind is full of what I have forgotten. I don’t want to underestimate the peculiarity at home when I was growing up. In my teens, my sister was living in Kenya; my elder brother was a drug smuggler serving time at Her Majesty’s Pleasure in Wandsworth; my three younger siblings were, if not feral, raising themselves. My younger brother slept for weeks on end in an airing cupboard and wore, day and night, a dark felt cloche hat that had once belonged to the Hon. Mrs Maud French. My middle sister’s pony lived in the kitchen. In the spare room upstairs, the ceiling had declined until it dissolved completely. Another part of the house was rented by a man with white hair in a plait which reached his waist, who had made a harpsichord out of wood that he found in a skip and duck quills picked from the park. My father went on with his shooting, raising pheasants in a pheasant pen up at the camp. My mother was having what she later referred to as a nervous breakthrough and was incapacitated by back pain. Her bed was moved into the library, the room where Uncle Maurice hung and which had a cracked wall through which you could peer into a slime-ridden passage outdoors.
She was far from being a natural army wife: she could never remember which regiment my father was in; when someone offered her a drink at a drinks party, she could request a cup of tea; at one stage, she wore trainers she had coloured in with a felt-tip pen; if she was asked a factual question, like which road to take to Bath, she might say, ‘How much?’ We put on plays, using a raised area by the stairs as our believable stage. When my mother was well, she painted and careered through the streets of Warminster in a pony and trap. The library was furnished with Irish books about hunting that nobody would ever read again, as well as De Imitatione Christi, The Martyrology of Donegal and a complete edition of Butler’s Lives of the Saints. You could tear the thin pages from the back of a missal and skin up a joint. You could do pretty much what you wanted because nobody knew what was going on. The house was its own fiction, disconnected from the town around it. Anybody might appear. Dave, a short-haired hippy who had once been Mick Jagger’s gardener, said to my mother in his stoned, inveigling accent: ‘What you should do, if you want more attention, is cut the face out of the portrait of this man, this one here in the red coat who found a war to die in, and stand on a little stepladder behind the picture, and stick your neck through the hole.’ My mother laughed and burst into tears but was less annoyed than she was by yet another visit from Brigadier Dunderdale, who had taken it upon himself to minister to the afflicted of this garrison town. ‘I haven’t asked him to come, the bugger just turns up,’ she said as his stooped, commendable form passed by the French windows. One time Brigadier Dunderdale bumbled in to say he had brought her copies of Country Life and asked, ‘Any better this week?’ My mother bawled him right out of the house, rising from her sickbed like a cripple raised by a televangelist. I loved her for that.
You could always catch my mother or my father with a joke. When she died before she had a chance to get old and someone had to identify her body, a policewoman holding a clipboard asked me what my relationship was to the deceased. The officer was spherical, orbited like Saturn by a belt of objects: torch, pen, radio, handcuffs, telescopic truncheon.
‘She’s my mother.’ The policewoman nodded to the clipboard for the next question. ‘How long have you known the deceased?’ How long had I known the deceased. My mother would have loved that line, if she had been able to hear it, and was not lying dead beside us on a hospital trolley a few miles from Salisbury Plain.
CONTRIBUTORS
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Paul Auster is the author of Winter Journal, Sunset Park, Invisible, The Book of Illusions and The New York Trilogy, among many other works. ‘You Remember the Planes’ is adapted from Report from the Interior, published in November by Faber & Faber in the UK, Henry Holt in the US and McClelland & Stewart in Canada.
Jean-Paul de Dadelsen (1913–1957) was born in Strasbourg, Alsace. He joined the Free French Forces during World War II and was a journalist for the BBC’s French Service after the war. Jonas, from which ‘Opening Invocation’ is taken, was first published in French in 1962.
Aminatta Forna’s most recent novel is The Hired Man. She is a professor of creative writing at Bath Spa University and currently Sterling Brown Distinguished Professor at Williams College, Massachusetts.
Patrick French’s books include India, Liberty or Death, Younghusband and The World Is What It Is, the authorized biography of V.S. Naipaul.
Romesh Gunesekera’s first book of stories, Monkfish Moon, was published by Granta Books in 1992. A new collection, Noontide Toll, is published in 2014.
Marilyn Hacker is the author of twelve books of poems, including Names, and has translated twelve collections of poetry from the French, most recently Rachida Madani’s Tales of a Severed Head.
Dave Heath was born in 1931. His work is included in the National Galleries of Canada and the US, the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Art Institute of Chicago.
Lindsey Hilsum is International Editor of Channel 4 News. She is the author of Sandstorm: Libya in the Time of Revolution. In 1994, she was the only English-speaking foreign correspondent in Rwanda when the genocide began.
Justin Jin’s work has been published in the Sunday Times Magazine, Der Spiegel and Geo. ‘Zone of Absolute Discomfort’ won a Magnum Foundation grant and an award at the 2013 Pictures of the Year International. His website is www.justinjin.com.
A.L. Kennedy is the author of six novels, six story collections and two books of non-fiction. ‘Late in Life’ is taken from her collection All the Rage, forthcoming from Jonathan Cape in 2014 in the UK, Amazon / Houghton Mifflin in the US and Anansi in Canada.
Hari Kunzru is a novelist based in New York. His novella, Memory Palace, formed the basis of a recent exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.
Yiyun Li is the author of A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, The Vagrants and Gold Boy, Emerald Girl. Her new novel, Kinder Than Solitude, is forthcoming in 2014.
Thomas McGuane lives in Montana. His latest book is the novel Driving on the Rim.
Ange Mlinko’s latest collection of poems is Marvelous Things Overheard. A recipient of the Poetry Foundation’s Randall Jarrell Award for Criticism, she teaches creative writing at the Univ
ersity of Houston.
Herta Müller was born in Rumania in 1953 and emigrated to Berlin in 1987, where she now lives. In 2009, she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. ‘Always the Same Snow and Always the Same Uncle’ was first published in German in Der König verneigt sich und tötet in 2003.
Geoffrey Mulligan is a publisher and editor. His translations include Magic Hoffmann by Jakob Arjouni.
Rowan Ricardo Phillips is the author of The Ground: Poems. He is the recipient of the 2013 PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award.
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