This setback propelled him on. Physical weakness was transformed into a rage to win. He found within himself the breath the doctors had refused. He ran like the wind, in a state of grace. The arena at Olympia rose to applaud him. He was no longer a man but an angel, a winged demigod fallen to earth. He was Ariel. But England is not Crete, and our labyrinths are gardens.
The world reveres his masterful skills but he invents illnesses as a way of avoiding them.
The force that launched him onto the paths of glory turns against him and wreaks havoc.
I know very little about the Ramplings. About my father’s grandmother, who took him when he was seven. About his father, who died in Basra. About his stepfather who gave him away. No one talked. It was a time when you didn’t ask questions. Later, when I began to ask people about the family, no one seemed to remember. It was as if nothing had happened, no farewells, no smiles, no sorrows, no songs. And yet the images keep flowing past, soft or hard-edged, jostling me, and I end up loving them – and the people they depict – more than the spoken word.
I love what I read.
Everything ends up surprising me.
I am ready for the world of language and words.
Two brothers look at one another. Their eyes take in the same image. Discomfort flickers back and forth, transmitted by their gaze.
They look down, embarrassed by their discomfort.
The Royal Air Force demands the ultimate sacrifice of a blind courage that knows no limits. The Royal Air Force, in all its majesty, takes the brother who is prepared to give his life in this way. The ultimate sacrifice of a glorious death consigns my father to the shadows.
Group Captain Kenneth Johnson Rampling was shot down over Frankfurt in his Lancaster in 1944.
I remember us singing and laughing. The eggs would get all mixed up with the strawberry jam and the ham. My father would join in, in a voice more used to booming God Save the Queen. Our little car would rock from side to side and I’d imagine it was our nursery, or a horse drawn carriage, or a Lancaster bomber plunging towards the dunes that stretched out before the sea.
When we arrived at Fontainebleau in France, everything seemed exotic: the school, the clothes, the food, the houses, the colours.
We lived on a quiet street at the edge of the forest. A house of grey stone in the midst of incredible trees. My room was in a small, pink tower. Sarah’s looked onto the garden. We spent hours in the forest with our dog Tinka. It was pure freedom. Everything was changing. It was the beginning of our revolution.
My father’s batman would come every morning to attend to him, and then he would set off to the Allied Forces’ headquarters. This was a whole world unto itself, with its school, shops, swimming pool, social life. It seems remote today that world, half black-and-white, half colour, encapsulated in the phrase: the postwar years.
My parents were nonconformists, in their own way. Even though we were Protestant, they enrolled us in a Catholic school, le College Jeanne d’Arc. We didn’t understand a thing. Not a word. Quite apart from the decimal system, which was a complete mystery to us with our pounds, shillings and pence.
No one spoke English. My father would listen to records every morning as he shaved, repeating endlessly, ‘Bonjour Paul, comment allez-vous? Paul, as-tu garé la voiture?’
And this mysterious Paul would never deign to reply.
In the summer we would go down south to La Croix-Valmer. A retired English colonel ran a very beautiful campsite overlooking the sea.
My parents trust us and leave us free to do we want because we respect their rules. We spend wonderful days with boys and girls of our age in the shade of the pine trees or on the beach, caught up in a sunlit dream. At night we lie by the fire, sing songs, talk in whispers. Such happiness feels as if it will never end.
Sarah is fourteen and I watch her smile subtly change, that opaque, slightly distracted smile of hers. The innocence, the not knowing, how do we recapture that? What name shall we give it? All childhood is bathed in light.
There should be a list of happy days. To preserve them, cherish them, and then of course not believe them. How many diaries does one need not to remember?
I’m coming, Sarah. I want to tell our story. I want to be with you.
When you turned twenty-one, our parents gave you your first big trip abroad. With a girlfriend, you left London for America. You went to New York and then your tour of the continent took you to Acapulco, that spectacular strip of land pinned between the ocean and the mountains.
This is where you met Carlos. A handsome, older man. A rich Argentinian cattle rancher, a man of experience. And there you did something very strange, Sarah. Without saying anything to anyone, a week after meeting him, you married him.
I read about it in a newspaper in London. My mother was frantic. She couldn’t bear the thought of Sarah being so far away.
Sarah would come back with Carlos from time to time. Gradually we sensed that this separation from her language, her country, her culture, her family, was starting to weigh on her.
Three years after they married, my mother is at her sewing machine. Her body suddenly gives way. She goes completely limp and slumps forward onto the table.
She pulls herself together as best she can and manages to drive to the nearby golf course where my father is working.
A few hours later, the phone rings at home: at the very moment my mother had collapsed, Sarah had died in Argentina.
The voice of suffering is an innocent voice. It leaves no room for certainties. It leaves no room for vanity. It leaves no room for others.
I was making a film for television at the time. I was playing a young woman from the 1900s, a spirited girl throwing off the shackles of convention. She embodied the sense of life coursing through me.
When I get to my parents’ house, I see my father push open the little garden gate and come towards me. He announces in a loud voice: ‘Your sister is dead.’ That was how I found out. ‘Go and see your mother.’ Which I did, leaving him lost and alone in the middle of the garden.
My mother is in an armchair in the living room. I kneel in front of her. She takes my hand and holds onto me as if she will never let me go, as if she is going to take me with her. I struggle and gently try to pull away. She holds fast, she is hurting me. Suddenly she releases her grip and falls into unconsciousness.
For many years afterwards she is inconsolable. With Sarah, everything went out of her life.
A stubborn refusal to be tamed. A relentless quest. A primal solitude. An unyielding struggle.
Absurd sometimes. Excessive. Wilful. Since forever inflamed.
For the Ramplings, there was no body, no funeral. Sarah had disappeared. When the phone rang that evening, she had already been buried. Because of the heat, we were told.