When he lowered the drawbridge, he could borrow my innocence and so recall his own, which otherwise — except for those Saturday afternoons — was for ever lost.
All this, at the age of four and a half, or five, as I lay on my stomach and let the water of the Ching flow around my wrists, I knew in my blood. My dark blood.
Those Saturday afternoons were the beginning of an undertaking my father and I shared until he died, and which now I continue alone.
By the time I was ten and until he was seventy, he and I contested one another almost continually. There were truces during which we both abstained, yet they were rare and brief. Everything I did alarmed him about my future. Everything he believed in I wanted to overturn. He was trying to save me — to crawl out on his belly to a crater in no-man’s-land and pull me back to relative safety — and I, with all the arrogance and fear of youth, was trying to show him that it was possible to be what I called free.
The fights were sometimes cruel and bitter and both of us were reckless. He wept more often than I, because the wounds I inflicted opened up older ones, whereas those he inflicted on me provoked the protective indignation that often accompanies youthful revolt. Nevertheless, throughout this long struggle, our mutual undertaking, which began wordlessly with the drawbridge over the Ching and which would never be openly declared, was never lost sight of and persisted. (I’m writing this with a worn pencil whose marks are so faint that I cannot reread the words in the evening light, for what I’m saying, twenty-five years after his death, can still only be said in a whisper.) And it consisted of what, this undertaking? An agreement that he could share with me, as he could share with nobody else, the ghost life of his four years of trench warfare, and that he could do so because I already knew them; they were, in the strictest sense of the term, familiar to me.
We fought about my future with no holds barred and no exchanges possible, yet neither of us forgot for a second during the fight that we shared the secrets of another incommensurable war. By being himself, my father taught me endurance. By being myself, I reminded him that he was not alone.
The Saturday afternoons were very long. Time seemed mercifully to stop. Lying here on the planks of the wide bridge over the Szum and closing my eyes, the sound of the two streams merge, along with the sound of the midges, of the distant dog barking, of the leaves of the tall trees. And in the current of the two streams there is the same indifference.
My father had a pair of wading boots that he wore when he was standing in the water attending to the bridge. The water, deeper than I was tall, came up to the tops of his thighs. My mother came down to the river bank only when the gooseberries were ripe and she wanted to make jam. Otherwise, like pubs, betting-shops and billiard parlours, it was a strictly male area, measuring about ten metres by four.
One Saturday I found a wading boot and stepped in with both feet; it came up to my head, it covered me and I hopped along the bank in it, laughing. My father laughed too. All of me was in one of his boots. And I knew where he had been in other boots. And he knew I knew whilst we laughed together.
On 18th March 1917 he wrote in a letter to his father: I stood a moment wondering whether I ought to take thirty men through such an Inferno; just then my Sergeant came up from the dug-out and shouting into my ear at the top of his voice to make himself heard through the crash of guns and the bursting of the shells, he said, ’Excuse me, Sir, we will go through hell with you, Sir, if you’re thinking of us.’ That settled it. I would go. We start out into the open — we are lucky at first — their machine guns open on us and we jump into a trench — we are up to our waists in water — our ammunition is all wet — but still we plod along — the guns never ceasing for a solitary moment.
We met stragglers coming back — some lost, some wounded, and many lay dead. Not knowing whether we could eventually get through, I shouted to my Sergeant to take charge and push on as fast as possible and I would try to go on in advance and see if the way was clear. My servant came with me and one other man. I then met an artillery officer who had lost his reason; it appeared that he could not get in touch with the infantry and he didn’t know whether his battery was shooting on trenches occupied by ourselves or the Hun. He blew out his brains with his revolver in front of my eyes.
My men got stuck in the clayey trench and it took me one and a half hours to dig them out. My last drop of water was expended on a man who was wounded in ten places.
A woman with a white scarf around her head is approaching the bridge over the Szum, carrying two buckets full of freshly dug potatoes. When just taken from the earth, potatoes glow. They glow like hen’s eggs. The woman is perspiring. I recognise her from my other visits. She is Bogena, who looks after Mirek’s garden and, in exchange, takes the vegetables and flowers she needs. Due to the river, the soil is richer here than in the village proper across the road. And so Bogena keeps chickens in her own garden and cultivates Mirek’s. In the room where I’ll be sleeping, I’ll hear, far away, her cock crowing before it is light.
Scrambling to my feet, I ask whether I can have five or six potatoes. I’m thinking of the soup. Bogena puts down her buckets and takes my hands and pulls them out in front of me. Then she places potatoes in them, one by one, until I can hold no more. I am nearly twice her age yet the way she does this somehow refers to the child in me.
If the river at the bottom of the garden in Gordon Avenue was my father’s happiness, mine was the house next door. It did not have a front door like the others in the road, but a side door, two metres away from the outside wall of our own house. This door was seldom locked. Front doors are by definition locked. I could slip into the house next door whenever I wanted.
The door opened on to a small panelled room with a curved wooden ceiling which must have been added on to the original house, and perhaps once served as a drying room for the washing. Now its shape, its wood, and the fact that there was nothing in it except a bench against the wall and a low table, made it seem like an upturned boat. There was a window — in the stern — which gave on to the back garden where there was a pear tree. In the month of November, the low table in the upturned boat was covered with pears, carefully placed in rows, no two pears touching, by the man of the house.
On the bench was a cushion which slowly over the years became mine. Their kitchen led out of the boat-room and the door was often open, so I sat and heard their voices talking in their language. Sometimes their dog, an Airedale who came up to my shoulder, would be lying on the floor and I would stroke him. He had wiry hair that smelt of a kind of tobacco. I have forgotten his name. If I could remember it, I’d be able to re-enter another room. On other days I looked at the pictures in the papers or books that had been left on the bench. Some of the books were children’s books, yet there was no child in the house. The daughter, tall and with very black hair, was in her teens, finishing her schooling.
The mother noticed when I came in and let me be. Sometimes there was music playing on the wind-up gramophone in the sitting room, where the father, who was out of work, read newspapers. What enticed me to the house next door, whenever I could slip away, was the pleasure of waiting. The pleasure of waiting a long, long while with the certainty that, at the end, I would not be forgotten.
Finally, the mother, with her kerchief tied very high around her head, would bring me, from the kitchen, if it was the afternoon, a saucer with a cinnamon cake on it and a cup of hot chocolate. If it was the morning, a pot of home-made yoghurt. At that time, in the early thirties, yoghurt — except amongst health-food freaks — was entirely unknown in London. She never kissed me. She looked at me kindly from a considerable distance. She treated me as if I had a mission in life which she knew about and prayed that I would fulfil. Perhaps the mission was just to grow up and become a man.