Maybe that’s another reason why Charlotte loved to retell that tale. It was not just an ode to kismet. It was also an act of mourning, a nostalgic elegy for something more terrible than death: living absence.
Nobody survives war intact, Diane. It is no accident that spelt backwards it is ‘raw’. War strips the skin off society, leaving the muscles, sinews, tendons and organs exposed. Its effects are irreversible because all who live through it are changed forever. Our story, Diane, yours and mine, is the story of war. We owe our existence to a wave of euphoria that swept the land because the guns had fallen silent at last. But we grew up to learn that a war never ends. The guns echo in the chamber of the mind forever.
Charlotte’s war was, on the surface at least, easier than Henry’s. She did not end up questioning her God, her country and her everything under a bleeding dawn sky in France. She continued to help out on the Herts Advertiser, even writing some articles after the male journalists left to fight. I found one after she died. It was among a handful of papers she kept in a tin biscuit box on the top of a cupboard in the kitchen. I imagine she kept it because it had her byline – a rarity then – and also because the subject intrigued her. The article told how a young man was approached by three ladies outside St Albans town hall on a Saturday morning. They stuck a white feather into his lapel and the ringleader shouted: “You coward! Why won’t you enlist?” A crowd gathered and the young man was within a whisker of being beaten when someone recognised him as a medical volunteer. He had been unable to join the regular army because he was short-sighted and although he was a volunteer, he did not wear a uniform. Apparently, he was regularly taken to task by “upstanding women of the community, fired with a passionate, if occasionally over-enthusiastic, determination to support the war effort”. The words in italics are Charlotte’s and I like to think she meant them critically. As I said, she had a horror of what we would now call ‘mob mentality’.
I hope I have breathed some life into Charlotte Baker for you, Diane. What can I tell you about my father? Henry Rose was not much of a talker by the time I came into his life. The man who steadied Charlotte’s elbow in Sally Betts’ garden in 1914 was not the man who became my father in 1920. We can never be who we were, even yesterday, but war speeds up this natural metamorphosis.
Charlotte used to say that when Henry made it back from the war in mid-1919, he had ‘lost his sparkle’. It was perhaps the only way she could describe the cataclysmic change without bursting into tears. But it fell far short. A diligent application of Brasso would not make Henry new again. He was entirely diminished.
I always thought my father was like a man living underwater: he moved through the days like those early divers with their oversized metal helmets and deadweight shoes. It wasn’t just his ponderous motions but also the fact that he seemed to be constantly rediscovering a new world. Despite it all, he was not a grim man: he smiled, he laughed with me and later, much later, with you. You won’t remember this but he used to tickle your stomach with the wiry, unkempt beard that replaced his pencil-thin moustache after the war. I can still see him kneeling on the soft, cream rug that I used to lay you on, pushing his head slowly towards your tummy until you were writhing with delight. You must have been about 10 months old. The June sun was pouring through the windows and Charlotte was sitting on the sofa, a cup of the rancid brew we jokingly called coffee in her hand. Robert was there as well, of course, sitting in a rocking chair by the fire, smiling that empty smile of his, eyes fixed in the middle distance, scanning a perilous horizon that existed only in his mind. It was the summer of 1947 and we were all survivors, but by the end of that year, that same room was quiet, the chairs were empty and nobody was tickling your face any more, or if they were, I could not know it. Fifty years ago now. Imagine that, Diane. I remember it like yesterday but it was the ancient past, wasn’t it?
CHAPTER 4
I’m sorry. I have digressed. That will happen at my age. But insofar as anything can have a beginning, there you have it: a beginning to my story and your story and everything that leads us here to this moment.
After that first meeting in Sally Betts’ garden, Charlotte and Henry saw each other regularly and their love grew as steadily as anything could grow in the unsettling paralysis that marked the end of 1914. Britain was at war, but still mostly in name only. Henry knew his days in St Albans were numbered, and maybe he feared a more definitive ending than that, but he did not know exactly when he would be ordered overseas. After the searing heat of summer, autumn brought heavy rainstorms. As the days shortened and the mud thickened in the training fields at Bernards Heath, where soldiers jabbed their bayonets into sacks of straw, Charlotte and Henry did their best to disregard the dull detonations drifting across the Channel. What a feat. To imagine a future when all around you the world is imploding. I thought I knew what that was like, given my own wartime experience, but it was not the same. By the time our war came, we had fewer illusions about what man could be asked to endure and what cruelty he could bring himself to inflict. I believe we were in some ways resigned to what was coming but also reassured that we would survive. We had seen our parents come through and so we had faith that the war would end, eventually. I’m not sure Charlotte and Henry had that luxury. The scale of suffering was unimaginable. The possibility of an end equally so. The idea of survival must have seemed like a ludicrous fancy. The first time is always different.
Henry was finally sent to France in March 1915 and he stayed in the parallel universe that was Western Europe until after the war ended in 1918. Neither he nor Charlotte ever said a word about their reunion. I only know she went to meet him off the ship – I think it was in Portsmouth – because the moment was captured by a photographer and that print sits on a bookshelf in my home today. It is not a typical image of victory. None of the flag-waving fugue, none of the hysterical euphoria I was to experience in 1945. Just two young people with the haunted eyes and hunched shoulders of the middle-aged, facing the camera solemnly. They do not ask for the viewer’s pity and they will not accept questions. They will not shrink from your gaze but they will give no more than what you see. Whatever was left of their hope and joy was concentrated in their interlocked fingers, half-hidden by Charlotte’s long tweed coat. That white-knuckled naked need is almost too painful to look upon. It is worse than the emptiness in their faces. Or maybe it breaks my heart because my man came back like that too and his trembling fingers with broken, dirty nails held on too tightly to my own. The man in that photo of my parents had been stripped of the cockiness that first caught Charlotte’s eye. You can read neither relief nor despair in his face. It is as though he left the top layer – the moving, malleable surface – in the mud by the Somme as he lay there, beseeching the sky for one more minute, dreading each unbearable second, until a minute was gone and then he needed one more. As though his Shroud of Turin was a layer of mud where he left not only the imprint of his features, but something of their acuity so that now his face was just another war mask, identical to all the others flowing back across the Channel to an England that didn’t know what to do with all these broken men.
Of what Henry endured, Diane, you will have read. There are no secrets now but I believe neither poetry nor prose captured the reality. Henry fought at the Somme, if you can call what happened there fighting. He laid mines and then scurried back to take cover at Vimy Ridge, he pushed through Belgium and at some point ended up back in France, before one day making his way home.
It’s a cliché as all truths, especially uncomfortable ones, are but Henry rarely spoke of the war. Very few of the men who came back did. It was as though they believed that if they refused to bear witness, the horror could not live. Through their silence, they denied it oxygen. How else to deal with a period that exposed all that was base and cruel and savage in our psyche? The only answer for many of these men was silence. There was another reason too for your grandfather’s quietude but I will get to that later.
Life carried on,
as it must. Charlotte and Henry married in 1919 and I was born on a June day in 1920 in St Albans. At first we lived in Charlotte’s parents’ house but after Henry got a job in a solicitors’ office, we moved into a cosy two-bedroom house a little further along Hatfield Road. That is where I grew up.
So there you go, Diane, we are both post-war children. That is something we have in common. Both born from our species’ incongruous, indestructible hope. What funny beasts we humans are. No matter how many times we disappoint ourselves, we persist in peddling the notion of ‘happily ever after’. We persist in our quest for happiness. We insist on believing it is possible.
From the fairy tales we tell our children through to the notion that when we die we are going somewhere better, we nurture these fantasies despite all evidence to the contrary. It is as though hope is engraved into our DNA, like a pattern through a stick of Brighton rock. We cannot separate it from our souls no matter how many times we fall, no matter how many villages we bomb, how many babies we slaughter, how many innocents we incinerate, no matter how many hatreds big and small we allow to colour our lives. It’s not even that we are bad and constantly striving to be better. We know we can never change but we persist in believing that one day, miraculously, we will be better. That hope is our salvation and its eternal disappointment lies at the root of all our agonies.
To this day, Diane, I have been blessed with a meticulous memory. Or maybe blessed is the wrong word. I like my words to be precise and ‘blessed’ only tells half the story. It is also an unusual choice for an agnostic but for my personal lexicon, I have remade such words in my own image, stripping them of their religious import so that only their secular meaning remains. In any case, my memories are a blessing and a curse. When I wake now at 4 a.m., which I do almost every day, I am soothed and haunted by the past. These are not vague recollections. No shady figures, unexplained lacunae or forgotten sequences for me. I remember who did and said what and when. I remember whole conversations and more importantly, I remember what was not said. That is the worst kind of clarity but I am used to it now and wonder what it will be like when the fog descends. We shall see, I suppose.
I remember exactly how you looked on our last day together, the way your eyes widened as I held you out, how you twisted towards me as the lady from the adoption agency took you.
My earliest memory from our home in Hatfield Road is being in Charlotte’s arms, aged around three, looking out into the back garden where my father was on his knees, weeding our tiny vegetable patch. His head was bent and his back was to us so that with the sun beyond him, his truncated silhouette looked like a headless Roman statue, a former hero who had fallen out of favour and had his stone head removed. That image has stayed with me perhaps because I always knew my father was not whole.
Charlotte was whispering in my ear.
“Look, darling. Daddy is planting carrots so that we can eat our own carrots. We love carrots, don’t we? Won’t that be wonderful? We can pick them together when they are ready. Would you like that, darling?”
I said I would. Charlotte’s face was radiant in the sunshine; she had filled out again after the war, her cheeks were round, her eyes sparkling and I remember she was wearing the cream eye-shadow that always drew admiring looks. But at the corners of her mouth, there was a brittleness. That fragile determination was etched into the features of many of the women I knew as a child. The faces of the men who had fought were also friable but in a different way: broken vases glued back together. The women’s faces were cracked vases, hairline fractures holding together. Just.
We walked out to my father. I was wearing red Mary Janes and Charlotte told me to be careful not to walk in the mud. I held onto her brown felt skirt so I wouldn’t be tempted off the narrow path. I still respected the rules then and, as young as I was, I had already learned to be careful around my father. He would start at the slightest noise, his whole body expanding and then contracting into a hunched rigid shell. Charlotte spoke loudly to me as we walked. She was talking to signal our arrival but my father’s head still whipped up and around too quickly and his heels came down and dug into the ground, his legs braced to run.
“Henry, it’s just us,” Charlotte said in the almost-whisper she reserved for her husband and a few of his battalion friends. I thought of it as her librarian voice. I never heard her shout when Henry was in the house. When he was at work, safe in the cluttered, dim office where he took refuge in piddling by-laws that were stable and unbreakable, she would sometimes roar at me, like a pressure cooker venting steam. Her outbursts were rare and short-lived. She was not a saint but she came damn close. I always loved her but as I grew older, I understood just how much that restraint must have cost her.
“We didn’t mean to startle you,” she said now as his eyes slowly refocused on us.
A robin fluttered onto the top of the fence and punctured the silence with a volley of staccato trills. Henry leapt to his feet and then burst out laughing as the terrified bird darted into the bushes next door.
“Daddy, you scared the pretty bird away. Why, Daddy?”
Henry bent down and picked me up, smoothing my hair with his mud-caked hands.
“Lina, sweetie, I’m so sorry. The robin startled me but it’s all fine now. Let’s sit here quietly and wait for him to come back. I’m sure he will. He’ll want to look for worms for his supper.”
We sat on the grass by the furrowed soil while Charlotte went back inside to get some bread crusts. Sure enough, the robin hopped back onto the fence and then down onto the ground, not three feet from us. It pecked the damp soil frantically, twisting its head quizzically between each bout of poking. I held my breath. The robin stayed for a few minutes and then flew away with half a worm in its beak.
“Did you see that?” Henry said, pulling me onto his knees. “Wasn’t that beautiful?”
I twisted around to smile at him and he kissed my cheek. His eyes were too full and my smile was too bright but that is what the Great War did to people, Diane. It filled us brimful with too much emotion. Even after 1918, the war was still being fought in every home. We sat together on the grass until Charlotte came back, the heels of her boots clacking deliberately on the paving stones as she made her way towards us.
When I was about 13, and hungry as all teenagers are for the macabre, I asked Charlotte what she knew about Henry’s war. It turned out to be not very much.
“He thought letters would worry me,” she said. “Can you believe it? What worried me most, of course, was his silence. Despite the censors and their ridiculous communiqués, we still knew some of what was happening over there. They could not shroud everything in the fog of war, as my father used to say. But it was just like Henry to try to protect me, at least just like the old Henry. He’s never really understood how much I can bear. I also think he didn’t write because really, what good would it do? We just wanted it all to be over. We were desperate to start our lives. And I suppose we hadn’t had enough time together to know how to tell each other about what we were seeing and feeling. Old married couples can do that with a glance. But we were so young and new. What words could Henry use to describe what he had seen, to try to make sense of it all? In the end, he preferred not to try. I do understand. After 1916, I stopped reading the papers and went back to my silly romances. I just couldn’t bear the lies any more, the way words were being used to remake history. I don’t know what I expected to find in those love stories though. They didn’t work for me any more but I kept reading.”
She was sitting on the couch, a cup of tea in her hand and whiskey on her breath. I don’t know how much she drank but drink she did all day, every day. Slowly and carefully and very consistently. She must’ve been doing it for years by the time I was old enough to understand. I noticed the smell first and then the way her eyes glittered above flushed cheeks from about 5pm. Despite this, she was a woman of absolute control. She had to be. Nothing had turned out as it should have and the only way she could manage the brutal disa
ppointment of her life and love was to keep herself on the tightest possible leash.
“What I know about Henry’s war, I know despite him,” she continued. “I would never dare ask him. There are some women who need their men to talk but that’s not really my way. I got my Henry back and I am content with that. There was a time when I thought even that simple thing was the most impossible of dreams. Yes, he’s changed and silent, his hands shake and sometimes he is too scared to sleep so he goes out walking and maybe part of him did die in a way, but I still have him. He’s still in there. I did not choose these terms but I do accept them. What choice do I have? And together we made you. That’s more than enough for a life in these times.”
I do believe Charlotte went to her grave respecting Henry’s need to shroud the war in silence and so she never truly understood what happened to him. That scalds my soul. Secrets are often best left untold but in this case, there would have been healing in the telling. My father underestimated Charlotte’s love and so he carried his shame alone. Her error was to believe that silence could cure. And so, for the rest of their lives, they circled around the truth, loving each other too much to share their pain.
Do you know how Charlotte and Henry died, Diane? I didn’t have time to tell you that one time we met in Brighton. When was it? 1967? You stomped away from me too quickly, your feet slipping awkwardly over the pebbles in your haste to be gone. I too was taken aback by our resemblance but I saw more of Robert in you. The mirror did not frighten me as much. Only you were driven to flee. But then, I did not believe I was meeting a monster. I had less reason to be afraid.
The Reckoning Page 4
