For the rest of the summer they were barely apart. They flew to Detroit and drove to the small town of Kalamazoo where Laura had a cousin called Cathy, who was at university. She had stayed on to do an extra course during the summer. She hated the place, with its stick-like telegraph poles on the bare streets, the campus on the hill with its bogus Tyrolean bar and big impersonal supermarket, closed for the vacation. Pietro spent an hour or so in a record shop on the main drag while Laura and her cousin talked family matters. He thought the place had an agreeable air.
One thing he couldn’t puzzle out – one thing he could never puzzle out – was what the place meant. What was Kalamazoo? Why live there? He looked hard at the wooden porches on the weatherboard houses and thought of the subatomic particles that made them. At some stage they had taken on a physical form, at some early organic stage in the life of the tree, prefigured by their life as seed or sap. It took an element of human will, though, to cut and saw and plane and build.
What worried Pietro was that he couldn’t see at what point the geographical position of a place on the earth’s surface influenced the character of the human activity that took place on it. Could you really say that it was only human beings who chose, by cutting trees and making bricks, to force something unnatural on a wilderness? The human will itself, which was the decisive factor, could hardly be called inorganic. It wasn’t enough, he thought, to say that people built cities on the estuaries of rivers, or towns on trade routes or villages in the most secluded spots. Some relation, more than that of climate or finance, existed between a site and a people.
Meanwhile, he liked this middle America, the butt of satire and derision. He had been momentarily put out when he once heard Harry talking about what he called James Dean America – ‘all that drive-in diner and cherry-pie bullshit’. But he believed that what excited him about the country was more than nostalgia for 1950s film sets. Places like Duluth and Milwaukee were to him not just placid but inspiring. He supposed this was partly because he was moved by the thought of a migrant people inventing a nation and then imposing it on the mind of the world. In the ancient city of Rome they had been taught through books and films to accept the myth of small-time Milwaukee, a mockable, low-rolling town, not just for now, but as if the character and tradition of the place were as old as those of the Palatine Hill. This was a heroic feat of imaginative enforcement.
Yet he liked the places, too, not for some sort of mythic quality, but because they were calm and self-assured in their industrial or residential identity. It did not occur to him that his appreciation of them was coloured by his emotional condition. When he took the wheel of the hire car, he felt they couldn’t come at him fast enough: Rockford, Madison, La Crosse, and on up to the airport at the twin towns of Minneapolis-St Paul.
MONS
BELGIUM 1914
THERE WERE TWO reasons Pietro dreaded going to see his grandfather in Nottingham. The first was Bobby, a woolly-coated terrier who lay in front of the fire letting off staccato noises, the loudest of which made him stand up and sniff in an accusing way, as though someone else were responsible. The other reason was the old man’s conversation, which ran along lines which were familiar and uninteresting to a sixteen-year-old boy. Later, when his grandfather was dead, he wished he had listened harder. At the time, the stories seemed all part of the atmosphere of dog and sealed windows and stifling gas fire.
‘And where is it this year?’ said old Russell, settling ominously back in his chair.’
‘Ibiza,’ said Pietro.
‘And where’s that then?’
‘It’s in the Mediterranean.’ It sounded promising enough, with cheap food and wine and young English people. Girls.
‘Everyone goes abroad these days, don’t they?’
‘I suppose so. It’s become cheaper, hasn’t it? And the weather. It always seems to rain in England.’
Pietro expected a homily on the virtues of the English seaside. He had been instructed by his father to spend the afternoon with the old man but was to be allowed out to go to the cinema on his own in the evening.
What his grandfather was in fact saying was, ‘Those places we went to every now and again on the east coast, like Skegness, they were bloody terrible. You were always so cold. I couldn’t wait to go abroad. That’s why I joined up in the first place on the seven and five. It was the only way you could afford it, if someone else was paying.’
Pietro glanced at the clock on the mantelpiece. It was a quarter past three. The other side of the river, at Trent Bridge, the test match was midway through the afternoon session. They would have tea at five in the hot little house, supervised by a friendly neighbour. He let his mind drift into neutral, as for a divinity lesson at school, and settled back to let his grandfather talk. He was not yet eighty; he had a full head of hair and no physical disability, but to Pietro he seemed to have lived in an era he had mentally filed under ‘history’. His conversation always looked to the past, and what he said therefore went unregarded.
‘. . . so of course it was a big excitement when you got the telegram, or when you heard in the pub or whatever you were doing. I packed up the shop there and then and told Watkins he’d have to look after it while I was away. And you can’t say we weren’t well looked after then, either. They gave you a warrant if I remember rightly in the post office, just a little ticket sort of thing, and you took that to the station and they gave you a free ride to your headquarters. It was full of reservists when we got there and some of the regulars didn’t like it at all. But they had to put up with it, because without us there wouldn’t have been an army at all.
‘It was a lovely summer, too. There was a bank holiday just about this time and some people were annoyed because they cancelled all the trains so they could move the troops, but most people didn’t give a damn. It was better than a holiday really, there was such an air of celebration about the whole place. I must say some of the reservists weren’t quite as fit as they should have been. Chap in our unit ran a pub and he’d got so fat they couldn’t find the trousers to go on him. There was a bit of a scrum for food as well, but it was all pretty good-natured. Belgium was where we were going, though some of the men didn’t know where Belgium was. Somehow we got down to Southampton. My God, there were crowds there. The number of trains coming in, the people come to see us off, the docks were swarming with them. I watched some cavalry people trying to get their horses on board. The animals hated it, being winched up in the air like that. Some of them had heart attacks, some of them kicked their way out of the slings they were in.
‘We had a good party on board, too. Some fellow had got some wine and they didn’t fuss about smoking. Later on they changed the orders about tobacco, because officially you weren’t supposed to smoke when you were on duty. But they changed that temporarily. They didn’t know it would go on for four years, though.
‘We felt proud of the way we could just sail across like that too. Tom Swarbrick said it was because we had the whole Channel cleared and they didn’t dare come near us. It was wonderful when we arrived. Boulogne. It was the first time most of us had been to Europe, and I thought it was the best thing that had ever happened. There were banners out, there was a band on the quay. Most of the chaps in my unit, they couldn’t believe their luck. We had to listen to a speech by the mayor. I couldn’t understand a word, but there was a young captain with us – only about twenty, but he was very well educated, was killed on the Somme, poor fellow – and he translated. The mayor was saying how pleased he was to have the gallant British troops arrive, how amazed he was by the speed with which we’d got there and so on.
‘I think we were all a bit amazed, to tell the truth, but what we were surprised at was that we were on the same side as the French! It was the first time, and it took a bit of getting used to. There were plenty of men in our unit who said they’d rather be fighting against them, but I just thought it was a job and it didn’t make much odds who the enemy were. We’d all had a message from the
commander-in-chief, or some bigwig anyway, saying we weren’t to fraternise with French women, if you see what I mean. That was easier said than done, because they were pretty friendly, I can tell you.’
He paused for a moment, and Pietro, who had been half listening, as though to a radio playing in another room, blinked and thought of a question. ‘It must have been terrible,’ he said. ‘Did you –’
‘Terrible? It wasn’t terrible at all. We were having the time of our lives. The marching was a bit tough, I suppose. I hadn’t worn boots for two or three years, and these places in France they all seemed to have cobbled streets. It was hard on the feet and that’s where the regulars scored over us. But we didn’t make a big fuss. Every little place you went through there would be crowds of French people cheering you on and the girls asking for souvenirs. They wanted your cap badge or your buttons or something like that. By the time we got to Amiens there were chaps in our unit could barely keep their uniforms done up, they just had bits of twine instead of buttons.
‘The officers were good, though. They let us have beer to drink, if you had the money. I remember sitting by a big corn field. It was harvest time and one or two men had said they’d help. It was hot work, I can tell you, and I don’t know what they got in return, though I can have a pretty good guess, knowing Tom Swarbrick, who was a handsome fellow. There was a big lorry pulled in across the road from the Army and Navy stores, and I’d seen another one from Selfridges. They’d all come to help transport the kit, but it made it feel like a big outing.
‘It was so hot that night that we didn’t bother with the bivvy. We slept out under the stars. I was with Swarbrick and Simpson and a chap called Reynolds and we all agreed this was the best thing we’d seen yet. We had a smoke and plenty of tea to drink and apart from a few blisters we were as happy as sandboys.
‘Then it must have been the next day I think we got on the train. That wasn’t quite so good. Some bright spark had had the idea that if you could transport all the kit and all the horses in animal trucks, you could do the same with the men. The officers were allowed in proper carriages, first class I shouldn’t wonder, but we all went standing up in these cattle wagons. It was pretty ripe in there, I don’t mind telling you. But we didn’t care, because we thought we were just going to give these Germans a lesson. Our spirits were that high. And the journey wasn’t all that long anyway. We got a bit of a rest the other end, then we had a talk from the company commander. He said we had to get a move on then. We were to go up to the left flank of the French and so stretch their line out. They were already fighting, you see. We had to head for this place in Belgium pretty sharpish. What we didn’t know was the Germans had made the same plan, like a rendezvous.
‘It was a nice town when we got there. We sat in the square and the rations were dished out to us. You just got a tin, didn’t know what was in it. I had a tin of herring and some bread. I should think it had been in the stores since the Crimea but we were so hungry it didn’t matter. Then the people from the town, they started giving us bunches of fruit, then someone else came along with some loaves still hot from the baker’s, and cheese and bits of ham. All we needed was some beer, and lo and behold a barkeeper said we could have a big jug of that too. We ate all this stuff just sitting on the cobbles in the shade. You didn’t want to sit in the sun, not after marching with all that kit.’
Pietro, who found his interest had lifted a little at the mention of food, said, ‘So you quite liked the town then?’
‘Oh yes, it was grand.’
‘But what about the . . . you know, the battlefield? That must have been awful.’
‘Not really. It was like I was used to it, to tell the truth. You’ve seen the mines round here, haven’t you? It was like that.’
‘But what about the trenches?’
‘We didn’t have trenches there, not like the ones we had later on. No, we tried to dig a bit, but we were fighting in a town really, in a what do you call it, a built-up area. The artillery couldn’t get their field of fire because the place was full of slagheaps. If it wasn’t slagheaps, it was railway cuttings and little villages all along the side of the canal. And in the morning you could see all the miners clocking on for work, just like a shift in one of the Nottingham coalfields. They waved at us as they went into the pits. Funny people, the Belgians. The first thing we heard was that a cavalry officer had met some Germans on the road and had gone chasing after them with his section. He’d run his man through and come back with blood on his sword. You wouldn’t think we’d be killing with machine guns and howitzers in a few months. The French army we’d seen in Amiens were wearing scarlet trousers. They’d just gone off across the fields to the south of us and walked into it.
‘It was hazy in the morning, I remember. Tom Swarbrick said it was going to rain, but it soon cleared. We’d been pushed into a salient north of the town.’
‘What’s a salient?’ said Pietro.
‘A bit that sticks out. I remember that morning. We knew something was coming, but most of us didn’t worry a bit. We knew we’d cop it in the salient if they did attack, but we thought we’d get the better of it. I remember the smell of burning coming off the canal. The engineers had set fire to all the barges in case the Germans used them as bridges to get across. They’d stuck charges on the proper bridges. When the firing began it was a relief. When you’re stuck there under attack you don’t know what’s going on. We didn’t discover till later they’d had six divisions to our two. All morning we just kept firing as we’d been trained. We got off so many rounds they thought we were using machine guns. And then we all had to stop because there was a group of Belgian schoolgirls on the bridge.’
‘Schoolgirls?’
‘Don’t ask me how they’d got there, but we all had to stop while their mistress took them to safety. I’ll never forget that sight. I used to think about it later in the war, when we’d been stuck underground in mud for weeks on end. I used to think of the way we all stopped firing.’
‘I thought it was supposed to have been a terrible battle.’
‘Well, it got very hot again. We were thirsty all the time and we were under fire for six hours in there.’
‘For six hours? That must have been awful.’
‘It was a bit unexpected.’
Pietro couldn’t reconcile what he’d learned in history lessons with his grandfather’s memory of the war. The old man looked down and poked at the sleeping dog with his foot.
‘To tell you the truth, it did get a bit rough towards the end of the day. The fire was very heavy and we had a job getting out of that salient. In the evening, when we’d pulled back, some of the lads were shaken. We didn’t know the war was going to be like this. At night when we were digging into our new positions, the young captain I told you about, he came round to see us. I remember him saying something like, “Congratulations, gentlemen. You have just shaken hands with the twentieth century.” What was that supposed to mean? We hadn’t a clue what he was talking about, but I did think of it again when we buried him two years later.’
‘So did you lose the battle?’ said Pietro.
‘We withdrew, that’s what it was called. We withdrew to new positions. But we lived to fight again. It was tough getting out of there, holding the bridges while they got the kit out. There were three VCs won on that first day, I think, chaps who hung on under the bridges, wiring them up, covering the retreat. It started to rain again that night. Simpson, I remember, he took his shirt off and let the rain get on his back where he’d got burned when he’d been digging. It made the ground slippery. It was hard to march on when you were carrying all that clobber. The countryside of Belgium looked pretty odd. It was as though it had snowed, there was so much white dust from the shelled houses. And I remember the smell of all those men who hadn’t washed, not to mention the dead bodies in that heat, because there hadn’t been time to bury them. But we weren’t downhearted, not most of us. We’d shown that man for man we could take them on.’
‘And what happened to Simpson?’
‘He was killed at the Somme.’
‘Like the captain?’
‘Yes.’
‘And Reynolds?’
‘The next year.’
‘And your friend, Tom . . .’
‘Swarbrick? Passchendaele, towards the end.’
‘Didn’t any of your friends make it all the way through?’
‘Not really. All the officers in our company were dead by Christmas. I got it in the leg from one of our own shells. Bloody artillery, the Drop ’em Shorts, we called them. I was out for a year and a half. They sent me back again though. To the Somme. I rejoined my old unit and some old man came up and shook my hand. I thought, “Who’s this old bugger calling me by my first name?” And he said, “Don’t you remember your old pal Tom?” It was Tom Swarbrick. He’d been somewhere called the White City. That’s what they called it. They gave these places nicknames from England. I didn’t recognise him.’
NEW YORK
USA 1983
THE SPEECH HAD been the difficult part. What to say about someone he had known for almost twenty years, and then how to say it. He took instructions from Harry. No smut, not too long, try to make it accessible to Americans as well as British, no jokes about being a goy. Then he sat down one Sunday afternoon with the sound of the six-month-old Mary occasionally penetrating the closed door of the sitting room. He could hear Hannah’s solicitous footsteps going to calm the baby and turned his mind back to an earlier age.
Harry had been a good friend to him, that was for sure. He wanted to say so in public. On the other hand, he didn’t want to put himself too much into the story. Tell them what sort of a person Harry was. Anecdotes. Stories that would interest Americans who hadn’t met him but which would not bore English people who had known him all his life. The time they had been to India and Harry had suffered from, of all things, constipation. Something nobler. The time they had raised money for a London charity by swimming hundreds of lengths of an over-chlorinated pool in Highbury. Too self-admiring. Perhaps Harry would best come alive if he talked about his family. But he didn’t like his mother, and his sister had run off with someone unsuitable, possibly even a photographer.