Try to Tell the Story Read online

  Of course, that is my memory describing them—not me at four and a bit. But there was no escaping the faces of these creatures, or their experience. No one told me they were Jews. I didn't know what a Jew was. No one said the war had been fought to save them, as opposed to saving us. But they were something the Germans had done, or left. And it meant the beginning of an attitude to Germany of which I am not proud. Apart from changing planes in Frankfurt once, I have never been to Germany.

  That's not just or sensible. And even if I can trace the great load of anti-German myth dropped on my childhood, it's hardly useful or merited. I have been treated with kindness and respect by modern Germans. I esteem many works and ideas that come from that country. I am as interested in Vienna around 1900 as in any time or place. And history moves on. History is a blink. No matter our outrage at the events of September 11, 2001, we must be ready to be friends and partners with those people who did it.

  No one spoke to me about Jews or Jewishness. There were two houses on our street that were lived in by Jews. There were the Schencks, who were Dutch jewelers, with premises in central London. They were smart, quiet, rich, and honored. Then there were the Hilsums, a man and a woman, much poorer and shabbier. They were what was called “rag-and-bone” people. They collected scrap and junk, and then every weekend they went off to a street market, Petticoat Lane, with a sack of things to sell. My father spoke of them as “Jew-boys” and “Yids.” They were said to be “dirty,” and he asserted that money was their driving instinct. The Schencks, far wealthier, he left alone, except for a “Good morning.” I do not mean that my father derided the Hilsums to their face, on the street. He was polite enough in public, but in private he was on the Hilsums always. He was an ordinary anti-Semite, I suppose, and he never referred to the people in pyjamas as being Jewish. The war had been a matter of British survival, and people walked past the matter of the Jews and what happened to them as if on the other side of the street.

  The second war had seemed like the first—a continuation of it, even. But I know in 1945, already, I began to see it as the acting out of a new idea, and the idea was Death. It had two great warnings: the people in their pyjamas, and the heat of the sun on the streets of Hiroshima in August 1945. Regular disasters and outrages in war are buried in adjustment and familiarity. But the camps and the Bomb said, See what we can do. They were ominous and they were meant as a message—and they suggested that saying the war was over was hopeful or artificial at best. The war's readiness could continue, and it did. I was moved and daunted by the heights of fear I had missed, like that of Anne Frank hearing footsteps on the stairs. That sort of noise was more frightening than a bomb's blast. Anyway, as wiseacres joked in the days of the V1 and the V2—the flying bombs—”You'll never hear the one that gets you.”

  I suppose I understood that a great many of “our” soldiers were somewhere away, in another country, fighting and winning the war. In the pages of the Daily Express and the Daily Mail—before they were twisted for lighting a fire—Grannie and my mother showed me the overall pattern of battle and the black arrow-thrusts pushing into Europe and converging on Berlin. I had an uncle who was somehow involved in this great effort, and there was the father of my best friend, who lived across the street. I had never seen either of them.

  Because of some strange privilege my father came home on weekends. It was not known where he was at first, but then the word came that he had taken a job with Philco, an American company that made radios. He was a businessman, a company manager. He never made radios himself. But because the radios were installed in military aircraft, it was reserved work. He was not subject to call-up. That was the story.

  Philco was a long way away, somewhere on the far northern side of London. When I was old enough to understand any of this, my mother told me it was too far for a day's journey. And I daresay that was so. London then felt as large as a country. So he came home on weekends, though not every weekend. It was like two weekends in three. If ever I grew old enough to ask where he was, the cause was not his whim, his freedom—whatever he wanted to call it—or his hostility to the idea of a family, but the needs of war.

  That was the easier explanation. So many men were away. So many in uniform. And the war's pressure was so extensive that it was easier to think your father had some unusual, or secret, obligation, something not like those other men, something mysterious and confidential. War so often generates social change—and so the failure of our family, or its collapse, was covered up by the dream of military need. I suppose if I'd been a little older I might have been proud of my father, and wondered if he was a spy. He was thirty-three when I was born, very fit, athletic, and smart-looking. There must have been people who looked at him in a suit or a tweed jacket and flannel trousers and wondered what he was really doing.

  You see, in most of this, I am reconstructing what I thought of Kenneth Douglas Thomson later—as if he were a strange case or puzzle made for me alone. And that was true, I think—who else cared to explain him? But my main sensation was of his strength and confidence—he must have been holding me—and his tweed, his bristled cheek, and the scent of pipe tobacco—he must have been holding me against him, as close as could be. I felt he was mine and I was his, even if I was blind. But I never heard him say he loved me. In all our time together he never made that incriminating statement.

  3

  OF COURSE, MY MOTHER, Mum, was there all the time—not to mention Mummy. If I have made less of her so far than Dad or Grannie it is because they were like spectacular visitors, while Mummy was the weather, or the number of steps from my bedroom door to the bathroom so I could count the way in the dark. Grannie had a cold touch and fierce old perfumes, scents that had turned acid over the years. Dad was the pipe and his rough clothes; he was Wills's Cut Golden Bar tobacco. But my mother was scent itself, or breathing. I was breastfed, I know, and later I asked my mother whether the milk in her breasts was not nervous or afraid sometimes, waiting for the air-raid warning. I wondered whether she had to tell her own milk to be still and calm—I feel something like that sometimes when I write, as if the orderly vision, or its quiet, rhythmic tale, could save me.

  I do not recall my mother's smell or feel so much as I do the passage of breathing. I am guessing that she let me fall asleep on her as an infant in the otherwise empty bed. And since that happened—I know it—I am not very interested in whether books on child rearing approve of it. She had not been educated past sixteen. But she knew what she knew, and she knew “common”—common sense. If a thing felt right she trusted it. So she held on to me, I'm sure. My father—coming home now and then, his status so very uncertain—admonished her. It was one of the few conversations she ever reported to me. He said the close physical rearing would soften me, spoil me, and so forth— and so from this distance I spit in his eye as a softie. And I wonder if he grew jealous, or more lonely, in seeing something he had lost. For the coming back did nothing to stop his losing.

  The other day—here and now, 2007 in San Francisco— I had a massage. As it neared its end, and the masseuse was working on my head and neck, I had a remarkable sense of my mother's presence. I didn't see her, or smell her. It wasn't that she walked into the room and watched or said anything. It was just that I suddenly felt that the air around me and the hands of the masseuse were my mother's lap. There was no spiritualist affirmation, but I think somehow that Katie, the Californian masseuse, had touched me as my deepest memory recalled. And I was surrounded by my mother—as if I were in her womb still. It's not so odd: if the scent of a madeleine in tea can free so much, then surely a touch—a way of being touched—can restore history and that ancient now.

  My mother was a daily routine of which I recall just the big events. Every day we would walk up to Streatham High Road to do the shopping. We had no refrigerator then, so food was purchased nearly every day I was in my pram and then my pushchair, and I was known on the High Road for having a stub of pipe in my mouth—it was one of my father's
pipes, cleaned up for my use, and I think it was judged to be comic or barbarous. But we did the tour of shops and I remember how there was lingering and chatter at the butcher's, my mother laughing at the men's jokes and getting just a little bit over our ration. I daresay many women did that, a touch of flirt for a little lean meat—war makes adventurers of everyone. And while this chat went on I would look into the sides of beef hanging on the walls, many times larger than I was, body caverns with brown meat and yellow fat and flies slow and heavy with their bombs—the beef was hung in the shop during the day. A little touch of the upset—the tummy—was common in those days. We had no Health yet. We took such chances.

  And so we came home from the shops. We lunched. We took a walk on the Common—it was so big, it was years before I had the map of it secure in my head. We came home, had high tea, and listened to the radio—to Children's Hour, the News, and things like Dick Barton-Special Agent, before I was ready to sleep. Always the words at the close of day, in a voice like my mother's—that could slip from South London to country. But a nice, soft voice like fur in the dark.

  “Are you asleep yet, then?” another voice asked. Who was that? I must have imagined it, a voice in the story, my older sister perhaps?

  No, I had no brothers or sisters, but I did talk to my mother about the possibility and sometimes there was a dreamy openness, a wondering in her voice. As if to say, well, maybe there was still a chance. What was she dreaming of for herself—another trick? Another man? But I wanted an older sister—the whole sister feeling was based on someone more knowing than I could ever be. And my mother went through Life Studies in a way that explained how the provision of an older sister now was out of the question. “But people keep imaginary friends,” she said— and I knew she must have the habit herself.

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “Well,” she said, “someone to talk to. Someone they see. But only them.”

  It was not so long afterward that my mother and I saw a film called Harvey—it is the one in which James Stewart has a friend, a white rabbit, that no one else sees. I was delighted, not just by Stewart and his friend, but at the evidence of my mother being correct (always). And the private pact worked very tidily. No one saw or heard Harvey except the hero. In all the magic of films, this device seemed rather down the list. I loved its ordinariness, and I have always believed that in the dark special effects should be as natural and calm as possible.

  “If I had had a sister,” I persevered, “what would you have called her?”

  “Oh, Sally,” my mother said. “If you had been a girl you would have been Sally.”

  “Sally,” I said, and I only repeated it a thousand times.

  “That's right, Sally,” she said—she said it, Sally said it—proud of the name but teasing me, too, for having come near it. My mother was sitting on the bed reading to me in just a low lamplight from the bedside table. And there she was—Sally—in the doorway, watching us. A grown-up kid—ten or eleven. She was a silhouette against the light from the hall, and she leaned against the doorpost. She seemed to me very grown-up.

  “She's there,” I told my mum.

  And Mum said, “Oh yes, I bet she is.” And then there was just Sally's bells of laughter—butcher laughter, it seemed to me—and I was asleep.

  My mother had this fabulous thing, and she gave it to me as a toy.

  “You're a liar,” said Sally. “You make stuff up.”

  “I'm not,” I said. “I don't.”

  It was a flying helmet, and it was leather on the outside and fur inside. My mother said it was American. I could put my head inside and inhale the faraway smell of strawberries. I played with it. I don't know how long, a year or a week—and then it had to go back. Sally said so. Not that I ever considered my mother as being under orders, or anything like that. Not that I had any way of knowing how anything as exotic as an American flying helmet could come in and out of our lives. “You think they grow on trees?” asked Sally. She had a kind way of needling me. It was her tone, and one that picked up on the way I would believe anything. I talk to my own children that way. I was her chump, and the charm of it amazed her. I smiled privately, for I loved the way Sally would give me dreamy tongue-lashings. So wicked, so fond and “funny as phone calls.” Where did that come from? Had she been seeing pictures already?

  But I was amazed and shaken that the helmet—that beautiful thing—had to go away. I nearly lived in it while I could. I wanted to know about the strawberries.

  “What strawberries?” said my mum. And she lifted the helmet away from me and sniffed it herself.

  “Hair cream, more likely,” she said. “I can't catch strawberry.” And I never touched it again—out of reach, out of existence, I suppose. Well, what do you think it was all about? There were Americans all over the place-Yanks, they were called—and it stands to reason they noticed anyone as lovely as my mummy.

  “Charming!” said Sally.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, how are you such an idiot?”

  “Am not!”

  We fought and argued a lot like that, but Mum never came to the rescue or noticed Sally. And Sally, I daresay, wouldn't have been so cheeky if she'd known Mum was listening. But I did ask my mother why a flier—even an American flier—would like to have fur next to his skin.

  “Well,” she said, “it's like an ice well up in those planes. And fur feels so cosy, doesn't it? So I expect it feels nice if they're afraid.”

  “Are they afraid?”

  “They might be. I would be. Wouldn't you?” Only a woman could refer to this possibility so openly.

  I considered the matter gravely. It seemed to me hardly worth having wars if people got afraid. But then my mother was up and into her wardrobe. And from out of the back she found a fox fur. It was a length of fox, with beads for the animal's eyes. And she had worn it once as a young girl, she said. It was mine now, for dressing up. And for some time thereafter I was Foxy the American flier, likely to stun a German with a swinging blow from the head of my fox, and my mum was up for every show.

  “You'll go far,” said Sally in her knowing way, and she was right. For in a year or two I was wondering whether the great Foxy, our strawberry boy (there wasn't a doubt about it—he had gathered strawberries for someone in that helmet), had been my father or a potential father. I found him a few years later, as Gregory Peck in Twelve O'Clock High, and then again years later as Yossarian in Catch-22. And when Yossarian is your dream dad, you're in trouble. When I read that book on the London Tube going to work, I had to get off the train because of the feeling of claustrophobia. If the train stopped in a tunnel, and Yossarian was caught in the cockpit with death, I became desperate. This panic came from nowhere. I wouldn't blame Joseph Heller, just his ability to convey the hell of being in an aircraft in 1944. And my life began to change because of not being able to breathe.

  “Oh, it makes a difference,” said Sally.

  4

  HERE IS A REAL WAR STORY, and one that tells you about my mother. According to the history books, it was in the summer of 1944 that the V2 bombs began to come. The V2 was a German flying bomb, and it was set to fly for a certain distance. You could hear its drone in the sky. Then the drone cut out. That meant that the rocket and its bomb were falling. That's why you never heard the explosion that got you. It was German and cunning, and altogether nasty. People called them “doodlebugs,” and they seemed to come whenever some Jerry had the whim to press a button.

  Well, the V2 was the one thing that gave my mother second thoughts about staying in Streatham.

  From early on in the war, there had been talk of “evacuating” children to safer parts of the countryside. And it happened—though not to us. Inasmuch as my mother had herself been left by her husband (to look after his son and his mother), I think she was reluctant to quit 10 Thirlmere Road.

  But the V2s did make her wonder. I don't know how it happened. I think the mother of my friend across the stre
et heard of a farm we could all go to. It was a farm in Nottinghamshire, and the mother of my friend, Connie— Auntie Connie, I called her—was very encouraging about it. “That's where Robin Hood was from,” she said. Well, we got on the train and went.

  It was summer and it was a farm with woods and meadows if not quite Sherwood Forest. I know this from a snapshot of me and my friend—Bryan—mounted on a big farm horse, a punch horse. The farmer is standing nearby as if to diminish our evident fear of falling off. And there are many trees in the background.

  Somehow or other, we were staying with this farmer and his family. I can remember nothing about them or the place. Apart from the sense of many bad-tempered animals, all of whom we were encouraged to be friends with. I preferred to pursue my imaginary friendship with Sally, because the imagined already meant far more to me than to many people. But Sally had refused to make the trip. She got left behind, along with Grannie and Miss Jane Davis, though I cannot recall Sally ever being in the same space or scenario as those two. Sally already gave intimations of some kind of nightlife in the city. Her age fluctuated. She could be only a year or two older than me, and then she could be a real teenager, with a tongue and a mind of her own.

  We had large lavish breakfasts at the farm—many eggs, or far more eggs than we were used to. We got duck eggs, too, all in blue-green shells. This meant being brave enough to enter the chicken “run” or “hutch,” a place of dire smells, angry beaks, and a beady eye set on white shins. If you think about it—and I did—a chicken and an egg are implausibly related. It is a good place to start on the incongruities of life: compare the hostility in the face of a chicken with the smooth bounty in a spoonful of fresh scrambled egg.