by Graham Swift
[8]
During the war my Dad was a spy. He used to be dropped into occupied France and liaise with resistance fighters, keep watch on German installations and help to blow them up. He wrote a book about his exploits, in the fifties, and for a few years his name was well-known, he was one of the war-heroes. He isn’t so well-known now – his book’s long been out of print – but if you mention his name to people of a certain age, it still rings a dim bell, they know who you mean. Dad was involved in a succession of daring operations in France, which reached their height in the intense period between D-day and the Allied invasion of Germany. It was during this period that he was captured by and subsequently escaped from the Gestapo.
I read Dad’s book when it first came out, when I could scarcely have been eleven. It was called Shuttlecock: The Story of a Secret Agent. ‘Shuttlecock’ was Dad’s code-name during his final operations in France. I remember that I did not know this word and dared not ask Dad what it meant, and for some time I believed it was a special word invented solely for Father, until one day I found out what a shuttlecock really was: a thing you take swipes at and knock about, like a golf ball. Now I think of it, Dad must have got the idea for writing his book during that same period when I had my hamster. You remember in the early and mid-fifties, when the actual after-effects of the war were fading, rationing was ending, there was a whole spate of war books and war films. He was already sitting up, late at night, in the spare-room-cum-study of our house at Wimbledon, making notes and rough drafts, by the time Sammy died. Perhaps when I next see Dad at the hospital I will say to him: You started Shuttlecock because of me, didn’t you? Because you and I seemed to be getting on fine.
But the irony of it was I fell away from Dad after I read his book. I’d already been falling away from him after Sammy was chucked into the boiler, but the book clinched it. Oh, it wasn’t that I didn’t find the book extraordinary, amazing – terrific stuff – that I didn’t admire Dad. But, having a hero for a father – even having a father who isn’t a hero but who works in a plush office and plays golf on Sundays with a little retinue of worshippers – all this is bad news if you’re an only son.
It wasn’t that I reverted to how things were before – to flying into fits and biting Dad’s hands. But this sullen hostility, this mutual evasion and distrust grew up between us. I gave up being his caddy, for a start (one of those Sunday mornings, Dad at the foot of the stairs: ‘Are you coming or not?’ Silence – mine. And then the front door slamming and Dad’s car revving extra hard outside.) And this was just at the time when Dad was starting to teach me how to use his driver. I made it pretty clear that I didn’t care two hoots (I cared, in fact, a good many hoots) about his being a famous spy – even though at certain functions and social gatherings I had to wear (along with Mother, of course, who did it sincerely) a grudging mask of idolatry. When his book came out and reflected glory shone upon me at school I made a point of not bathing in it and of acting as if I found the whole business a bore. So, he blew up ammunition trains? He escaped from the SS? So? And the result of all this, of course, as time wore on, was that Dad gave me up. He ceased to be interested in me as I ceased to be interested in him. When I left school my future had already stopped being a concern of his. When I started in my present job – naturally, I resisted all pressure to become an engineer and to seek an opening in his firm – his reaction was unbridled scorn: ‘Police work, eh? Police work!’ And even when I got married, got a house of my own, had children – his grandchildren – he did not unfreeze. He fell back on his life with Mum, and on his work – where, of course, he was still as sprightly and as popular as ever. One particular bone of contention: he has never shown any affection for Marian – not even the attentions due to a daughter-in-law; which I’ve always resented, because if there was ever any feud, it was between Dad and me only. But Marian and Dad have never been friends; and this became more marked after Mother’s death.
When I come home on the Tube in the evening, scanning the rows of faces, reading the adverts for deodorants, hair-transplants and staff agencies, I think it strange that my father was a spy, that he knew adventure, danger, did all those heroic things. I think it even stranger that that same hero is now a human vegetable. His past exploits perhaps mean nothing to him; it’s as if it was never he who carried them out. Certainly, he can no longer talk about them.
And maybe that’s why I’ve taken up his book again. There are two copies of it in our house. One has my name in it and ‘From your loving Father’ in Dad’s writing – bold and slanting – and the date, September 1957. Ever since Dad went into his silence I’ve been poring over it. I must have read it a dozen times, and each time I read it, it seems to get not more familiar but more elusive and remote. There are a thousand questions I want to ask, about things that aren’t actually stated in the book. About how Dad felt at the time, about what was going on inside him. Because Dad doesn’t write about his feelings; he describes events, and where his feelings come into it he conveys them in a bluff, almost light-hearted way, as in some made-up adventure story; so that sometimes this book which is all fact seems to me like fiction, like something that never really took place. What really happened, Dad, at Auxonne? At Combe-les-Dames? What was it like to blow up railways? To hide in a water tank, in four feet of water, all night, while the Gestapo hunted you? To be in constant danger? What was it like when German-hired Cossacks captured one of your comrades and burnt him alive? What was it like, what was it really like?
It’s odd that all the time I could have asked him these things, I never did – as if I was never concerned to know the whole truth. And now, when the answers won’t come, I want to ask floods of questions. Why is this? It’s because for the first time I realize that Dad is in that book. He’s in there somewhere. It’s not some other man, in those pages, with a code-name, Shuttlecock. It’s a former consultant engineer, a golf player, a widower, the victim of a mental breakdown. I want to put the two together. Or – put it another way – the book is Dad. It’s more Dad than that empty effigy I sit beside at the hospital. When I pick it up I still possess Dad, I hold him, even though he’s gone away into unbreakable silence. At weekends when Marian talks to her plants I bury myself in Dad’s book.
‘Chapter Six: With the Maquis Again’.
[9]
Did I mention, by the way, a little while back, something about taking my kids out on the common at weekends to play healthy games with bats and frisbees? It doesn’t really happen, of course. You will have gathered that my relations with Martin and Peter aren’t exactly harmonious. Not that we don’t go out on the common. But that picture – the exuberant father, the frisky children – it’s quite wrong. I have to half drag them along, for a start. I get out my old cricket bat (my cricket bat, you notice, from distant school-days – Martin and Peter have never expressed the slightest interest in cricket); or I find the plastic football or the bright red frisbee I bought Peter for his last birthday (a marvellous invention, the sort of thing you’d expect two young boys to play with endlessly and tire out their Dad), and I say: ‘Right! We’re going to the common. No arguments!’
And what happens? I work up vain enthusiasm. They stubbornly refuse to enter the spirit of the game. They look bored. They want to know what the time is. There is something on television. They moan about being made to run and they argue about who should fetch the ball when, in a spasm of frustration, I take an excessive, but not unpleasing swipe with the bat, which sends it into the distance. They fail to be impressed by or to seek to emulate my expertise with the frisbee (I am very good at the under-hand boomerang shot). They look upon me as some sort of demented PT instructor. All this simply isn’t natural. And I have to confess another thing. Once, last summer (this is only one of a number of similar instances), when Martin was being particularly troublesome, pretending not to have found one of those knocked-for-six balls, which, when I walked over to him, he suddenly ‘spotted’ at his feet in the long grass beneath a tree, I had
this sudden urge, as he stooped to pick it up, to raise my bat and bring it down, hard, like a club, on the back of his head. I could have done it, I really could.
So we go less and less to the common. Now I wouldn’t mind if it was just I who was the obstacle – if Martin and Peter went off to the common to play by themselves – but they don’t do this either. And these days it seems that I too, for some inexplicable reason, for some spiteful reason, because what I really want to do is precisely the opposite, am choosing to stay indoors when we could go out.
Today, for instance, is Saturday, the very last day in April. The weather’s still fine and warm. It’s been exceptionally fine all week. Everything’s grown so much in only a few days: the chestnuts on the common, the May trees, the sycamores – but enough of that. Marian slips an arm around me while she makes a morning cup of coffee. I still haven’t told her, incidentally, about my promotion.
‘Darling, why don’t we go out somewhere today after lunch – even before lunch? A picnic? We’ve done the shopping; there’s nothing to stop us. It’s the first decent Saturday of the year.’
And almost immediately, because it’s Marian who’s said it, not me, and even though the very same idea has been crossing my mind since breakfast, I say: ‘I don’t know. I’ve got things to do.’
‘What things?’
‘Oh, odd jobs. This and that.’
Lies, of course. There’s nothing I have to do. Though I suddenly see what I can do, what I will do.
‘Well, tomorrow,’ Marian says forbearingly. ‘If it’s still nice.’
‘I’m going to see Dad tomorrow.’
Marian looks peevish. This is a sore point. Because I insist on my visits to Dad, we lose days together.
‘I thought we might go to Richmond and walk along the river.’
I know why she has said this. It is one of my favourite short outings. There’s a pub on the river bank with seats outside where children can sit. Then you can walk along the towpath, upstream, past Ham House, as far as Teddington Lock if you want.
‘It’d be nice,’ she adds, and gives me a little solicitous look. I know what it means. It means that for some while now she’s been noticing there’s something on my mind, I’m wound up about something. She daren’t ask directly what it is, of course. She knows better than that. But her wisdom tells her what might be a remedy for it: relaxation; air; the sun on the water; dipping willows. You see, Marian is really a very good woman.
‘No.’ I shake my head. ‘But it’s all right – you go.’
Now this is a sharp move. It means that Marian must either say, ‘Well, I’m not going if you’re not coming,’ and then we bicker and have a scene; or she really must go without me and run the risk of seeming to neglect me. In the end she plumps (just as I would too) for bold assertion.
‘Okay. I will. I’ll enjoy it too.’
But now there’s an atmosphere of hostility.
‘I’ll take the car then?’ she adds.
‘No you won’t.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because you won’t take the car, that’s why.’ (I want the car for my own reasons.)
‘Well, how do we get to Richmond?’
‘You can take a bus. You’ve heard about buses? A number 37, all the way. I’ll even give you the fare.’
‘Thanks.’
She plonks a cup of coffee down in front of me. We might as well have had an all-out scene. But she can still change her mind.
‘Won’t you come?’ she says after a sullen, coffee-sipping pause. The first sign of real weakness.
‘No!’ I say adamantly.
I go into the living-room, shutting the kitchen door. The boys are lolling about, reading comics. The television is still in the living-room. The boys could switch it on – there are Saturday morning programmes for kids – but they daren’t. They know I’d hit them.
I clap my hands, like an animal-trainer. ‘Right, you’re going out this afternoon, for a walk by the river at Richmond.’
They give me slow, uninterested looks.
‘It’s all right, I’m not coming. I’ve got things to do. You’re going with Mum – it’s her idea – on the bus.’ And almost immediately their eyes, which only a second before had been full of reluctance, begin to show enthusiasm – and relief. This hurts me. Believe me, it does. You see, when I said I didn’t mind if it was just I who was the obstacle, that was a lie. What is it that Marian’s got that I haven’t got? Why do the kids have no axe to grind with Marian?
‘Will we go to the pub?’ Peter asks.
‘No. You’re not going till after lunch. But there’s a café. I expect you’ll get an ice-cream or a drink. If you’re good.’
Martin looks up at me resentfully. I fancy that out of the corner of one eye he is glancing slyly towards the television then back to me. That is the difference between Martin and Peter. Peter is the one who got the shaking last Monday, but he has almost forgotten it. Martin is growing up (he will be eleven soon): he bears grudges.
I fish in my pocket. ‘Martin, come here.’ I pull out four pound notes and when Martin gets up I hold them out to him.
‘These are for you. When you get on the bus, you pay for the fares. Don’t let Mum pay for anything, understand? And, if there’s any change, I want it back.’
‘Yes Dad.’
I look into his shifting, sharp little face. He is probably already thinking of ways to pocket the money, or at least hold onto the change. I wonder whether Marian will stand for it, whether it’ll make her feel uncomfortable, or whether she’ll insist on paying with her own money. And what will Martin do if Marian tells him to keep hold of the money? I look at him. He has cunning, grey-blue eyes under his mop of sandy hair. He’s clever enough to understand all this, and to see that I’m testing him.
‘Right, put it somewhere safe.’
Later, after lunch, when Marian and the boys have gone, I get down the copy of Dad’s book from the shelf in the living-room and start to read it. I read from either of the two copies indiscriminately, picking up whichever is to hand, but naturally the one I value more is the one inscribed by Dad himself. I keep this in our bedroom. That is, usually. For as I sit down now to read the copy from the living-room I discover that at some time or other I have got the two muddled up. The one I have opened has Dad’s words in it. ‘… From your loving Father. September 1957.’
I sit down in the armchair by the french windows. The afternoon sun has crept round to shine slant-wise across the garden, and its rays fall obliquely on the glass. The sky is cloudless. I could, of course, sit outside. I look at my watch. It has just turned two. I have about three hours. I could put up a deck-chair on the grass. But I want to feel, though of course it isn’t the case at all, that I have been deliberately left behind and forbidden to go out. I want to feel they have gone and left me like some wicked child being punished or some unwanted kill-joy. But what I really want is to read Dad’s book.
Dad is in Caen. Caen – ‘that testing ground of the future allied advance’. It is six weeks before D-day. He is collecting information on troop movements, supply shipments and on the defences of Caen itself, all of which may be of vital importance in the forthcoming invasion. There is a factory in the town which has been turned over to the production of spare parts for divisions on the coast. The details and timing of shipments from the factory have to be known so that effective sabotage can be carried out. This information can only be obtained by gaining access to the supply schedules of the divisions themselves, or more feasibly – but no less hazardously – by secretly examining documents in the office of the factory supervisor.
… I myself volunteered to carry out this task. I knew the lay-out of the factory as well as the others, and the risk was not as great as for Jules and Émile who, after all, would have to stay in Caen and did not have an intelligence network to ferry them out of the area. I learnt how to crack a safe of the type in the patron’s office from an old Lyonnais called Maurice, who had been a p
etty crook in his younger days but was now putting his criminal expertise to patriotic use.
We were fortunate in that the factory was an old, rambling building, slackly guarded, and that the managerial offices, empty at night, occupied an annexe away from the factory itself, across a yard, and abutting other assorted, mostly disused buildings not belonging to the factory complex. They could be approached independently by a roof-top route. The Germans had foolishly expended most of their resources for guarding the factory – sentries, dogs, searchlights – on the factory itself and little on the offices – though it was here that, in the long term, most damage could be done.
Gaining access to the office was to prove a relatively easy part of the operation; but the circumstances of the roof-top route were such that, though an excellent means of approach, it would make an arduous and risky exit. In order to escape from the factory I would have to descend from the office by a back staircase, cross part of the factory yard and scale a section of the rear factory wall where it turned a convenient corner screening me from the main area of the yard and, so I hoped, the sentries. I was provided with a rope. Jules and Émile were to be waiting, in hiding, near the other side of the wall. When they saw the rope flung over, they were to use it to haul me up the inner side of the wall and, reaching the top, I was to descend on the other side by the simple means of jumping into a sort of cradle formed by their arms – not the most reliable method, but a quick one and one we had practised several times before.
