A God in Ruins

  “Well, Jimmy had a terrible war,” Ursula said at the time. “I think triviality is as good an antidote as anything.”

  “We all had a terrible war,” Teddy said.

  “Not everyone,” Ursula said. “You did, I know.”

  “So did you.”

  “There was a job to do,” Ursula said. “And we did it.”

  Oh, how he missed his sister. Out of everyone, the legions of the dead, the numberless infinities of souls who had gone before, it was the loss of Ursula that had left him with the sorest heart. She had a stroke, nearly thirty years ago now. A swift death, thank goodness, but she was too young. And now Teddy was too old.

  “Dad?”

  “Yes, sorry, miles away.”

  “The warden—Ann—is explaining the emergency cords.” Oh joy, Teddy thought.

  Thin red cords dangled from the ceiling in every room. “So if you have a fall,” Ann Schofield said, “you can pull on one and summon help.” Teddy didn’t bother asking what would happen if he wasn’t near a cord when he fell. He imagined Ann Schofield waddling at speed towards him along the pink and magnolia corridors, and thought he might prefer to lie where he had dropped and slowly expire with some dignity remaining.

  Ann Schofield referred to the complex as “the Fanning” so that it sounded to Teddy’s ears like a hotel in Mayfair, one he had stayed the night in once with a girl. He couldn’t remember the name of the hotel (Hannings? Channings?) but he was pretty sure the girl had been called Ivy. They had bumped into each other in the blackout, both looking for somewhere to lay their head that night. She had been looking for the Catholic Club in Chester Street and now Teddy couldn’t remember what, if anything, he had been looking for. He had been drunk and she had been fairly tipsy and they had stumbled (literally) across the hotel.

  The present was a rather dim, unfocused place—he supposed that could only get worse—but the past was increasingly bright. He could see the grubby steps of that London hotel, the white portico and the narrow stairway up to the fourth-floor attic bedroom. He could almost taste the beer they had drunk. There was a shelter in the cellar but when the siren sounded they didn’t go down to it, instead they hung out of the window, in the freezing night air, watching the raid, the ack-ack battery in Hyde Park making a frightful racket. He was on leave after returning from training in Canada, a pilot who had not yet been blooded in battle.

  She had been engaged to a sailor. He wondered what had happened to her. What had happened to her sailor.

  He had thought about her once, on an op to Mannheim, as they crossed the heavy belt of searchlights that defended the Ruhr. He had thought how down there on the ground, on enemy soil, there were probably hundreds of Ivys, nice Fräuleins with buck teeth and fiancés on U-boats, manning the German ack-ack, all united in an effort to kill him.

  “Dad? Dad? Really. Pay attention, will you?” Viola rolled her eyes at Ann Schofield, trying to display amusement and affection at the same time, although Teddy doubted that she was feeling either. You’ll be old too, one day, he thought. Thank goodness he wouldn’t be around to see that. And Bertie too, how sad to think that one day she might be an old lady with a walking frame, shuffling along uninspiring corridors. It is the blight man was born for. That was Hopkins, wasn’t it? It is Margaret you mourn for. Those lines had always moved him, he remembered—

  “Dad!”

  It was his own fault, he supposed. He had slipped on a patch of black ice near his house and knew straight away that it was bad. He heard himself howling with the pain, surprised that he could make such a noise, surprised that it was himself making it. He had ended up half sitting, half sprawled on the pavement. He had been shot down in flames during the war, you would think that there wasn’t anything worse that could happen to you. But this felt unbearable.

  Several people, perfect strangers, rushed to his aid. Someone called an ambulance and a lady who told him she was a nurse draped her coat over his shoulders. She crouched down next to him and took his pulse and then gently patted his back, as if he were an infant. “Don’t move,” she said. “I won’t,” he said meekly, rather glad for once to be told what to do. She held his hand while they waited for the ambulance to arrive. Such a simple thing and yet he was overwhelmed with gratitude. “Thank you,” he murmured when he was finally loaded into the ambulance. “You’re welcome,” she said. He had never learned her name. He would have liked to have sent her a card or some flowers perhaps.

  He had broken his hip and needed an operation. The hospital insisted on notifying his “next of kin,” even though Teddy asked them not to. He wanted to crawl away and heal his wounds in peace, like a fox or a dog, but as he came round from the anaesthetic he could hear Viola muttering, “It’s the beginning of the end.”

  You’re nearly eighty,” she said, using her “reasonable” voice. “You can’t go gallivanting around like you used to.”

  “I was on my way to the local shop to buy milk,” Teddy said. “I would hardly call that ‘gallivanting.’ ”

  “Even so. It’s only going to get more difficult for you. I can’t keep rushing over every time you do something silly.”

  Teddy sighed and said, “I didn’t ask you to come over.”

  “Oh, and I wouldn’t?” she said self-righteously. “Not come and help my own father when he’d had an accident?”

  He endured her presence for three days after he was discharged. She fretted the whole time about leaving her cats in order to look after him. Also, she “hated being in this house,” she said. “Look at it, you haven’t done a thing to it for decades. It’s so old-fashioned.”

  “I’m old-fashioned,” Teddy said. “I don’t think that’s a bad thing.”

  “You’re impossible,” Viola said, twirling a strand of her heavily hennaed hair around a finger (an irritating habit he had forgotten about).

  Viola phoned Sunny and told him he would have “to put in some time” looking after his grandfather. Whenever Viola thought about Sunny she was gripped with panic. He’d already made a half-hearted attempt at suicide. He was too apathetic to actually kill himself though. Wasn’t he? What if he did? The panic tightened its grip on her heart. She thought she was going to pass out. She had failed Sunny and had no idea what to do about it.

  Terror made her callous. “It’s not as if you’ve got anything else to do,” she said to him.

  Sunny, for his part, liked the respite of being back in Grandpa Ted’s house. It was the only place he’d ever been happy.

  Teddy slept on the sofa downstairs while Sunny took the pleasant back bedroom upstairs that had once been his mother’s and then had been Bertie’s during the year in which she had lived here. Sunny had lived here too, of course, although not for quite as long, as he had been forced to endure that terrible long summer at Jordan Manor. He wondered if he would ever get over it.

  He liked this little back bedroom. It was where his sister had slept. At some point in the night he had always made his way through to Bertie’s room. His sister had saved him in some fundamental way—warmth and light—but she was gone now. To Oxford, a foreign world. “We’re pinning our hopes on that one!” Viola used to say to her friends, pointing at Bertie. As if it was funny. It didn’t help that they all thought that women were “the superior species” (all that “fish on a bicycle” crap). Sunny was apparently the living proof of this.

  The harsh smell of burning vegetation drifted out of Sunny’s bedroom and down the stairs every night when Teddy was dropping off to sleep. Marijuana, he supposed, although he knew little about it.

  Sunny still lived in Leeds, left behind by Viola when she moved to Whitby. He was currently living in a sordidly unruly flat with several members of his peer group, all too self-centred to qualify as friends.

  He had dropped out of college (Communication Studies—“Oh, the irony,” Viola said), and now didn’t seem to be doing much of anything. The boy was all awkward corners. He didn’t seem to have any of the skills that were necessary to n
egotiate the simple challenges of everyday life. He played guitar in a band, he said, shouting from the kitchen where he was heating up a tin of baked beans for their tea.

  “Good for you!” Teddy shouted back from the living room. He was pretty sure he could smell the baked beans burning.

  They had tinned beans and spaghetti hoops quite often. Fish and chips too, Sunny actually making the effort to go and pick them up from the local chip shop. Otherwise their dinners were delivered from restaurants all over town, indeed all over the world—Indian, Chinese. Pizzas, plenty of those. Teddy hadn’t realized, he thought it was just the women from the WRVS who did meals on wheels. “Eh?” Sunny said.

  “Joke,” Teddy said.

  “Eh?”

  It all cost Teddy a fortune. (Needs must, his mother’s voice said in his brain.) The boy couldn’t cook at all. Viola was a rotten cook too, stodgy dishes made from brown rice and beans. Viola had brought both her children up as vegetarian, Bertie still was, but Sunny now seemed happy to eat anything going. Teddy thought if he could get back on his feet a bit he could teach him some simple dishes—lentil soup, hot-pot, a Madeira cake. The boy just needed a bit of encouragement.

  It transpired that Sunny had a provisional driving licence. Teddy tried not to show surprise, he was so used to Viola telling him about Sunny’s incompetence and general lack of initiative. “Right, then,” Teddy said, “my car’s just sitting in the garage feeling neglected, let’s take her for a spin. Viola’s old L-plates are in there somewhere.” Viola had been very resistant to instruction.

  “Really?” Sunny said doubtfully. “Mum won’t get in the car with me any more. She says she wants to die of old age.” Teddy didn’t think that getting in a car with Sunny in the driving seat could measure up to flying night after dark night into the heart of an enemy whose only desire was to kill him and said, “You’ll never learn if you don’t do it, come on.” Someone had to have some confidence in the boy, Teddy thought. They packed the wheelchair that the NHS had loaned him into the boot of the car and set off.

  They ended up in Harrogate, a town Teddy was fond of. He had gone there often, both during the war and since. They parked the car in the town centre, although it took a very long time to slot it into a space as Sunny didn’t seem to understand the difference between left and right, backwards and forwards. He wasn’t a bad driver though—slow and hesitant, but his nerves grew stronger when he realized that Teddy, unlike Viola, wasn’t going to shout at him all the time. “Practice makes perfect,” Teddy said encouragingly.

  They had a nice lunch in Bettys and then went into the Valley Gardens. Here and there the first shoots of spring were making a reassuring reappearance in the damp earth. Sunny tended to push the wheelchair a little too fast and Teddy rather wished that they could swap places for a while so that Sunny could experience how uncomfortable it was when you went over bumps and kerbs, but on the whole Teddy was rather pleased with how this outing was going. “Do you know what I’d like to do before we go back?” he said as they did a (somewhat alarming) U-turn and headed back towards town.

  A cemetery?” Sunny said. He’d never been in a cemetery, it turned out. He hadn’t been to his father’s funeral and he didn’t know anyone else who had died.

  “Stonefall,” Teddy told him. “Commonwealth War Graves Commission. It’s mainly Canadians buried here. A few of the Aussies and Kiwis, a handful of Americans and Brits.”

  “Oh,” Sunny said. It was hard to engage the boy’s interest.

  An acreage of the dead. Neat rows of white gravestones—hard pillows for their green beds. Crews buried next to each other, kept together in the next life as they had been in this one. Pilots, engineers, navigators, wireless operators, gunners, bomb-aimers. Twenty years old, twenty-one, nineteen. Sunny’s age. Teddy had known a boy who had lied magnificently about his age and had been the qualified pilot of a Halifax by the age of eighteen. Dead by the time he was nineteen. Could Sunny have done what he did? What they all did? Thank goodness he didn’t have to.

  “They were just boys,” Teddy said to Sunny. But they had seemed like men, had done the job of men. They had grown younger as Teddy had grown older. They’d sacrificed their lives so that Sunny could live his—did he understand that? Teddy supposed you shouldn’t expect gratitude. Sacrifice, by its nature, was predicated on giving, not receiving. “ ‘Sacrifice,’ ” he remembered Sylvie saying, “is a word that makes people feel noble about slaughter.”

  “These aren’t the crews of aircraft that were shot down over enemy territory,” Teddy said to Sunny. “These are just” (just!) “the ones who died on training flights—over eight thousand altogether.” (Here comes the history lesson, he heard Viola say.) “Or quite a few of these boys will have been killed when they crash-landed on return, or died later in Harrogate hospital from wounds they received on a raid.” But Sunny had ambled off along the rows of the dead. Shoulders up, head down, he never seemed to really look at anything. Perhaps he didn’t want to see.

  “At least they have a grave, that’s something, I suppose,” Teddy said, continuing to talk to Sunny even though he was apparently out of earshot. It was a trick he learned when Sunny was little. He might not look as if he was listening but he had the hearing of a dog and Teddy had always hoped that he would absorb knowledge, more by osmosis than an intellectual process. “Over twenty thousand bomber crew don’t have a grave,” he said. “There’s a memorial at Runnymede.” For the ones who had no stone pillow to rest their heads on, whose names were written on water, scorched into the earth, atomized into the air. Legion.

  Teddy had been to see the memorial, shortly after it was unveiled in ’53 by the young Queen. “Why don’t I come with you?” Nancy had said. “We can make a weekend of it. Stay in Windsor or go up to London.” It was a pilgrimage, not a holiday, he tried to explain, and when he did go on his own, Nancy had been sparing in her farewells. He had “shut her out” from his war, she said, which he found ironic for someone whose own war had been so clandestine and who on the rare occasions when they had met during it had spent a good deal of time urging him to forget the hostilities so that they could enjoy their time together. He was sorry now. Why shouldn’t they have made a weekend of it?

  “ ‘Safe in their Alabaster Chambers,’ ” he said to Sunny, when he sauntered back.

  “Eh?” Sunny said.

  “ ‘Untouched by morning and untouched by noon, sleep the meek members of the Resurrection, rafter of satin and roof of stone.’ Emily Dickinson. It was your mother, funnily enough, who introduced me to her. She was a poet,” he added when Sunny looked puzzled, as if he was mentally riffling through a list of Viola’s acquaintances to find an Emily Dickinson. “Dead. American,” Teddy added. “Quite morbid, you might like her. ‘I heard a fly buzz when I died.’ ” Sunny perked up.

  “I’ll walk for a little bit,” Teddy said. Sunny helped him heave himself out of the wheelchair and gave him his arm so they could hobble slowly along the ranks of the dead.

  He would have liked to have talked to his grandson about these men. How they were betrayed by that wily fox, Churchill, who never even mentioned them in his Victory Day speech, how they were given neither medal nor memorial, how Harris was pilloried for a policy he hadn’t devised, although God knows he had carried it out with wretched zeal towards the end. But what good would it do? (Here comes the history lesson.)

  “So…” Sunny said, scuffing the toe of his boot against a gravestone. The boots were ugly, unpolished things that looked as if they belonged on the feet of a paratrooper. “So did you see, like, really bad things?”

  “Bad things?”

  Sunny shrugged. “Grisly.” He shrugged again. “Awful.”

  Teddy didn’t really understand the attraction of the dark side for the young these days. Perhaps because they had never experienced it. They had been brought up without shadows and seemed determined to create their own. Sunny had confessed yesterday that he’d “quite like” to be a vampire.

&n
bsp; “Ghoulish,” he added, as if Teddy might not have understood “grisly” and “awful.” Teddy thought about the Canadian flight instructor who had been stripped of his flesh and of everything “awful” that had happened afterwards. Good luck to you then. A propeller flying through the air. What was that WAAF’s name? Hilda? Yes, Hilda. She was tall with a round face, plump features. Often drove them out to dispersal. She had been a good pal of Stella’s. Stella was an R/T girl whose plummy drawl provided a welcome voice for exhausted crews returning from ops. He had liked Stella, thought that there might be something between them, but there never was.

  Hilda was the cheerful sort. “Good luck, boys!” He could see her saying it now. Always hungry. If they came back with any rations left over they gave them to Hilda. Sandwiches, sweets, anything. Teddy laughed. It seemed such an odd thing to be remembered for.

  “Grandpa?”

  It had been just before the end, before Nuremberg. He had been out at dispersal, talking to one of the fitters about F-Fox, his aircraft at the time. They had watched together as another aircraft approached, a very late returner from the previous night’s op. It looked wounded, certainly looked like it was heading for a shaky landing. And there was Hilda, cycling sedately along the perimeter path. It was a huge airfield, everyone cycled. Even Teddy had an old boneshaker of a bike, although as a wing commander he had access to an RAF car as well. He had wondered what Hilda was doing out there. He would never know the answer to that. The damaged kite roared towards the runway, but Hilda barely gave it a glance. She caught sight of Teddy and waved. She never saw the propeller coming off, one of the blades breaking free, shearing through the air with astonishing speed, a huge sycamore seed spinning and spinning so fast that there was no time for Teddy or his fitter to react. No time to yell, “Watch out!” She didn’t see it coming, that was something, Teddy supposed. It was just bad luck, a case of inches and seconds. “Shame she was so tall,” the fitter said afterwards, practical to a fault.