I looked on it as a good omen, just before we started filming, when a package arrived through the post. One of my uncles had unearthed a whole mass of material about his uncle, my great-uncle, Sandy. For the first time I saw a photograph of him, learned a little of his life before and after the war. He was a teetotaller and by coincidence I had written the part of the sergeant in my film as a teetotaller also.
The fact that he had fought and been injured at the Somme was also a curious benediction on our enterprise, it seemed, and Mouquet Farm, where he had been wounded, was in the same sector of the battle front where I had placed my notional platoon. Great-uncle Sandy looked very much like my late father (after whom he had been named) and, as we worked on through the film, if there was any ghostly presence haunting our trenches (and they were spookily evocative, especially in the early morning before the lights were switched on), I imagined it as being that of Sergeant Alexander Boyd, DCM.
I look at his face, as I have looked at countless other faces of soldiers of the Great War, and wonder what kind of a person he was and what his experience must have been like. We say, casually, that life in the trenches of the Western Front must have been “unimaginable” but the challenge of art, surely, is to try to imagine it, to set the imagination free and to try to bring that bizarre, terrifying, boring, filthy world to life.
In the citation that accompanied uncle Sandy’s DCM it says, “when all the officers became casualties, he took charge, and extricated his company with great skill. He set a fine example of coolness and determination.” The bland vocabulary of military bureaucracy is literally meaningless. A padre wrote from a military hospital to Sandy’s mother. “I visited your dear boy this afternoon. He has several wounds, but none of them of a severe character. The doctors and nurses have good hopes of his recovery.”
Again, a dead wall of decorum and cliché. From what little I know of him and the ups and downs of his postwar life, he seems to have been a doggedly principled, determined, simple sort of person. There are passionate letters after his death to his mother from a woman who loved him and bore his child saying what a kind and good man he was. What stories lie there? The imagination starts working again, questions form, possible answers spring to mind.
Who was this young Scotsman who left his native country to travel across the globe only to be sent back to Europe to fight in the meadows of northern France? Close to home, but so far away. And a brother serving too, perhaps not far off. The questions form, but I think I’ll leave them unanswered; I’ve done my own time in the trenches, now, in a novel and a film, and I don’t think I’ll be going back there again.
1999
Oxford
Saturday afternoon. Summer. Oxford, 1980. In Bonn Square — a patch of grass with a few trees that faces the Westgate shopping centre — there is a war memorial commemorating some remote colonial campaign at the tail end of the nineteenth century. On one side of the stunted obelisk there is an inscription: “Killed by mutineers in Uganda, Brevet Major A. B. Thruston.” Beneath it, on the three steps at the base of the obelisk, loll a pride of fourteen-year-old skinheads, boys and girls, their cap-sleeved T-shirts revealing pale arms bruised with self-inflicted tattoos (biro ink and a safety pin). Three of them, like aged barflies, raise inflated plastic bags to their noses and leisurely inhale the fumes from the glue that congeals in the bottom. One fat boy, his face unnaturally red and shiny from the chemicals, rolls his eyes in simulated gourmet delight. You can practically see the damage being wreaked on his numb fist of a brain.
A few yards away around the maw of the shopping centre a group of sandalled young Christians sing modish hymns to the beat of a guitar and tambourine. Bearded, glossy-haired Iranian students chatter and gesticulate. Shirt-sleeved coppers stroll through the harassed mobs in Queen Street and Cornmarket. Three hundred French and Italian schoolkids assemble noisily at the foot of Carfax Tower. Coaches clog the bus station and bulk in every side street. The pavements are dark and sticky from the residue of ice-cream cones and abandoned lollies; waxpaper wrappers and polyurethane hamburger cartons form brittle drifts in shop doorways. Every step seems to connect with an empty Coke can. The city reels in a hot, jammed stupor, stunned by the heat and the perspiring shifting populace thronging its streets.
And yet … And yet the colleges somehow preserve their peace, effortlessly — it seems — maintaining a world that Brevet Major A. B. Thruston would have no difficulty in recognizing. The college lawns are cropped like cricket squares, unbadged by weed or daisy; someone practising the piano in an upstairs music room runs off an appropriate arpeggio. Everywhere there is new, spanking clean sandstone. The colleges receive their regular face lift like placid Palm Beach crones. The rechis-elled cornices and gargoyles are suddenly in sharp focus again, as if a lens has been twitched by an alert projectionist.
It is all, in fact, unsettlingly like an elaborate show. On my first visit to New York, within fifteen minutes of my arrival, I passed Woody Allen and Diane Keaton sauntering and chuckling down Park Avenue as if doing a retake for Annie Hall. I found this curiously sinister because it’s exactly what the mythology of Manhattan makes you inclined to expect — before you get there. Oxford imposes a similar doubt. The University buildings, the colleges, are so close to their imagined forms that I felt I was being inveigled into some unwitting cameo role in a monstrous cinematic project. It affects everybody in this way, as the undergraduates so readily demonstrate with their arch self-consciousness and Brideshead Revisited pretensions. These antics — the braying voices, the paraded neuroses — are harmless irritants on the whole, but the perfection of the backdrop now seems to me to be Oxford’s greatest attraction and — for its inhabitants in the University — its most insidious and damaging influence.
I came to Oxford five years ago to write a PhD thesis on Shelley. I had just got married and we lived in a large but inconveniently designed college flat on the Woodstock Road. It was inconvenient because the occupants of the upstairs flat could only reach their front door via our hall so we — perforce — got to know them quite well. Our neighbours over the next three years were a taciturn ginger-bearded chemist and his clog-wearing wife and, after them, a couple of timid American organ scholars. This couple, whose demeanour gave new resonance to the epithet “mild-mannered,” treated their flat with all the respect of H-block inmates and managed in the course of a year to wreak more damage on their abode than the most anarchic squat. As the rubbish began to tumble off the landing and creep down the stairs we began to feel like participants in a J. G. Ballard novel and hastily moved out.
We now live half a mile up the road — in a flat above a dentist’s with no noise and no neighbours — but still in north Oxford. The houses around are large, Victorian and brick. Their walls are freighted with ivy and wisteria, the gardens are long and capacious, there are lots of trees. There is a smug air of self-satisfaction about this particular suburb, as if we all sense our luck in being able to live here. It used to be a kind of dons’ ghetto and most of the houses, some of them enormous, were built in the last half of the last century when the colleges first allowed their Fellows to marry. The larger houses in north Oxford hover around £100,000 and today’s Fellows, if they can afford a house at all — in many respects Oxford is more expensive than most districts in London — live in tiny terraced boxes in west Oxford — Jericho, Hinksey — or off the Cowley or Iffley roads to the south. West Oxford is undergoing radical class-surgery as its incredulous lower-income-group inhabitants sell-out for sums that must have seemed beyond their wildest dreams to the young academics, University Press editors and the “new” middle-class professionals: designers of every shape and hue, folk-art manufacturers (original wooden toys, pine-furniture restorers, personalized roller-blind creators, etc.), management consultants and the like. Every third house these days has the obligatory skip parked outside as interior walls are battered out, old fireplaces revealed and basements are renovated. Now, tiny two-up, two-downs fetch prices in the mid twenty-thousands. The walls are so thin you can hear your neighbour cleaning his teeth.