Bad Blood (22 page)

We ‘other ranks' were chronically insubordinate. We didn't want to be part of his outfit, we weren't even sure (except for my mother) that we were on the same side. Sensing this, he was on the lookout for signs of disrespect, edgily insistent on his authority – all the more so since it was under such pressure in his business dealings with customers and employees. In the army, if you'd come up through the ranks, they never sent you back to your old regiment after giving you a commission, you joined a different regiment where your brand-new role as a leader of men wouldn't be questioned. But when my father returned to Hanmer, where his only pre-war command had been in the Boy Scouts, he found himself having to establish who he was almost every day.

At home he was certainly the only grown-up, there was no other court of appeal. The Buck Stopped with Him, was how he saw it. The army years had inserted a ramrod into his personality, along with the shrapnel lodged next to his spine in Normandy. War gave him a vocation, peace took it away, but left its ethos behind. He didn't identify with the officer
class of the peacetime forces, cold-warriors of snobbery who drank gin and tonic in the mess and chatted among themselves. Fitting in and staying on was out of the question. However, he voted Tory in 1945, for he had come to think of himself, quixotically, as hierarchy's champion. He
missed
the war, it was his worst of times, his best of times, the time of his life. It was his university and his Grand Tour, and very nearly the end of him. He was surprised to find himself alive. But in some ways it was as though the big picture was over and life itself had shrunk in prospect. The daily ‘debriefing' rant at Uncle Albert about the Business was therapy for this form of shell-shock and so was telling war stories.

Whenever the shadow of an occasion presented itself – and a cloud passing over the sun
could
do it, a casual remark about the weather – my father would recount his experiences to whoever would listen. Caen, Liège, Du¨sseldorf, Hamburg, Genoa, Trieste, Pola . . . Kayesselleye only resolved itself gradually over the years into the initials K-S-L-I, the King's Shropshire Light Infantry, the regiment he joined a week after the war started in 1939 and left behind when he was commissioned. The foreign names were a familiar litany. Soon he'd be scoring the tablecloth with the wrong side of a knife blade, lining up the pepper and salt and the sauce bottle, and making maps of where he was wounded, where Jerry nearly overran them, where he won his spurs. Arise, Sir John Ridd!

My father was a prisoner of war, although he was never captured. He would retrace over and over again obsessively all his life afterwards the steps by which he'd come through to the end, when so many had not: muddy bootprints across the summer of 1944, tracks in the snow in the winter of 1944–5. He'd get a faraway look in his eye. Sometimes he'd shake his head in a kind of mimic bafflement. The 6th Battalion of the
Royal Welch Fusiliers, to which he'd been posted as part of the July reinforcement wave of the Normandy invasion, lost eighteen officers and two hundred and sixty men (half its officers and a quarter of the other ranks) within forty-eight hours west of Caen. This was when they made him a captain. The next thing he knew he was badly wounded (on 16 August) and shipped back to England. He'd lasted six weeks at the front, a lot of the time in trenches under heavy shelling. His stories weren't about the heroism of killing, but about the resolution, coolness and luck it took not to die. They were tales of survival with honour, which seemed to belong more to the First War than the Second.

There was even a story about going over the top into no man's land, although it was set in Germany. Casualties weren't so heavy when he rejoined the Royal Welch in the Ardennes, but it was there that he did the worst patrol of his life. The Germans had been in a pine forest on the other side of a steep valley, but were they now? He was sent with a sergeant and four men to find out. In between was a slope of virgin snow leading down to the stream at the bottom. The quickest way was to run down the slope: if they were fired on they'd know the answer. ‘So we went over the top of the ridge here . . .' The rucked-up tablecloth turns to snow. They divide up, the sergeant and his two men about five hundred yards to the right, and run zigzagging down the slope in deep, soft snow, feet clogged and sticking; and when they're about three-quarters of the way down the Germans lurking behind the teapot and the sugar bowl open fire, and the sergeant's hit. He lies still, his men scramble back to the top, my father and his two, carried on by their momentum, reach the stream, take breathless cover under a bridge and wait for night, before trudging back. Mission accomplished. It had been done in broad daylight, with no
cover and no snow suits. ‘We were expendable, really,' he'd say without bitterness, drumming his fingers on the table. ‘We were sent out there to see, sitting ducks.' The sergeant survived, he played dead and was taken prisoner. In this story my father, the sergeant and the men were all equal targets. In another story he carried a sub-machine gun when they were advancing through the Reichswald forest, because snipers in the trees picked out the profiles of officers armed only with pistols. In fact, he liked to think of himself as a captain with an NCO's saving sense.

It was in the woods that he was wounded the second time, carrying ammunition across a clearing (they'd overrun the range of their own guns and had to move their mortars back): a shell landed, two men were hit quite badly, but he was lucky, the piece of shrapnel that went through his teeth necessitated nothing worse than a session with the dentist after they'd delivered the ammunition – ‘penicillin and anti-tetanus jabs and a few days living like a king with Divisional Staff'. By now it's nearly over, although there are some nasty moments in Trieste and Pola where he ends up peacekeeping among warring Yugoslav and Italian factions. Playing policeman isn't to his taste, exactly, but it's part of being a servant of law and order, command is a burden he bears. Although he is not, of course, a blind follower of orders like the abjectly obedient, heel-clicking enemy.

He speculated about this distinction a lot, for Germans, when he actually encountered them, were disconcertingly recognisable – square-set, fair, ruddy-faced, blue-eyed and relieved to be alive. One of his jobs as part of the occupying forces had been to supervise the herding of all adult Germans into the cinema to be shown films of the concentration camps. However, he'd found it hard himself to believe in their reality and to
credit that his ‘opposite numbers' in the Wehrmacht had known what was going on. Like many in the British Army he'd thought the worst reports about wholesale extermination of the Jews were Allied black propaganda, until he saw Bergen-Belsen for himself. But then, he'd reason, perhaps there was in the German character a penchant for abstract and mechanical solutions, something inhuman, fanatical. Whereas the British were in the best sense amateurs, chivalrous and independent-minded . . . Man versus machine. So his stories led him back to the present – getting up, stretching, putting on his overalls – with a renewed confidence in the sanity of home-grown realism. Memory only made him more intransigent. How I yearned to grow up, so that I could muster my own stories and fight him in the reality wars.

Family life drove me back to books and schoolwork with a passion, and gave my wanderings in the fields a guerrilla feel. When I was twelve my father stopped hitting me – not because I learned obedience, not even because I lied better, but for reasons of decency. My adolescent breasts and curves were beginning to give the whole performance a compromising, sexual savour. After all, spanking was a popular motif in 1950s films, a taming-of-the-shrew mating ritual. John Wayne spanked Maureen O'Hara particularly memorably in
The Quiet Man
, but it was happening on all sides. In romantic comedies, costume dramas, Westerns, grown women were being spanked as a form of foreplay. No wonder Dad was embarrassed.

At about the same time Uncle Bill (the socialist realist) sneered sideways at me round the wet end of his Woodbine and remarked that I was turning into the poor man's Brigitte Bardot. Then he made a grab and I shoved him into the frogspawn on the edge of Hunts' pond (we were on a country ramble) and tramped home. The radio was playing a love song,
and I remember thinking disgustedly, so that's what it's about, Uncle Bill's greedy fingers. And so I told on Bill . . . No I didn't. I liked secrets and I kept my own counsel. I wasn't a child, I was definitely growing up. Leering Bill and my virtuous father both registered it in their different ways, even if they didn't have much idea what went on in my head.

Any minute now I would be a teenager. My clock would strike thirteen almost exactly in time with Bill Haley and his Comets, the peremptory thud of that nice noise would rattle around in my head at all hours, like blood beating in my ears. My parents would complain and jeer at my sudden, slavish (and of course tone-deaf) devotion to rock music, but at the same time they were relieved. I was behaving as I was supposed to for once. Rock'n'roll made the separation of generations official, teenagers post-1955 were a tribe apart, they marched to a different rhythm. Being a teenager let me off the hook too, in a way, I wasn't so conscious of my parents' obsessions, I paid them less attention. Their 1950s was a different place.

And for the moment I was still lodged there, in pre-teen limbo, loitering resentfully inside their lives, looking on. My mother would take me along with her to meetings of the Women's Institute in Hanmer parish hall, where large ladies (true to Hanmer tradition, one was actually called Mrs Large, another Mrs Cheers) organised charity draws, staged cake-decorating contests, and politely listened to visiting speakers spreading the word of Constance Spry on flower-arranging and managing without help in the house. The WI song was William Blake's ‘Jerusalem', whose words ever after for me conjured up that rickety village hall with its splintering floorboards and
jagged lines of folding chairs, where the old blackout curtains doubled as draught excluders: a temporary shrine to the matronly spirit presiding over whist drives and garden fêtes for five miles around.

Bring me my bow of burning gold. Bring me my arrows of desire
sang the WI, dreaming of stainless-steel spatulas and electric whisks. Their tweeds smelled of damp and camphor, their jowls trembled under a coating of powder, their lipstick ran up into the cracks under their moustaches and their blue eyes watered from the fumes of the coke stove. They never took off their hats (felt, feathers) even when they shed their jackets to pass round tea and sandwiches. Most of them were older than my mother, or seemed so. They were substantial people of a kind we never saw except at church – better-off farmers' wives, wives and widows of professional men and their spinster sisters, interested in cards, gossip and competitive baking. My mother could contribute nothing under any of these heads: she didn't socialise, she was no good at all at cooking, or eating for that matter, so seemed entirely out of place. But she wasn't: she had her established role, her part to play, for the WI had a drama group which put on a play a year, plus a variety of entertainments which toured the other local branches, and in all of these she starred. This was where
her
arrows of desire were aimed. Her performing talent made up for her lack of local ties and her shortcomings with batter and marzipan. She was volatile, shape-shifting. Even her voice was foreign, she had kept her South Wales accent and its lilts and trills – let alone her sheer swiftness of delivery – sounded dramatic in themselves compared with the slower burr of Hanmer speech.

The solid WI matrons all petted her, but I regarded her amateur-dramatic doings with a revulsion that made me writhe and seethe. Every time she got on the stage – or even when
she was learning her lines at home – I'd feel so angry it made me sick. It must have been partly vicarious embarrassment at seeing her habitual timidity and lack of confidence (wasn't I horribly shy myself?) transformed in this public exhibition. Or rather
not quite
transformed, for the particular awfulness of amateur acting is that you can always see through the disguise to the actual person underneath. My mother's acting seemed to me like a monstrous display of bad faith, she was pretending to be outgoing and self-possessed when ‘really' she was helpless. Or, even worse, on the stage she was revealing the way she
always
pretended, for the helplessness she put on in real life was an act too . . . Her performances scared and repelled me, although I could see that she was much the best local actress and everyone else was applauding. Secretly, she was
doing this to me
, exposing
my
shyness as she indecently revealed her own frustrated longings for a more glamorous life.

And over the years it got worse, for the drama group gradually admitted the impossibility of roping in men to play men and the unsatisfactoriness of the Mrs Larges in drag, and concentrated on all-woman playlets, dialogues and monologues. Although some time in the early 1950s, perhaps in the patriotic afterglow of the coronation, they'd put on No≑l Coward's
This Happy Breed
, later my mother was able to shine with Joyce Grenfell-style soliloquies – virtuoso tragicomic acts of self-exposure all
about
embarrassment, embarrassment squared. I raged.
Bring me my chariot of fire . . .

I sang ‘Jerusalem' silently and inwardly, taking its words away from the WI, wiping off the throaty voices, putting the letters back in the book and replacing the book on its shelf in the library in my head. Another great offence involved in acting was that it turned words into so much breath and spittle, and made them mix in company, whereas I wanted to savour them
in solitude. When we built Jerusalem in England's green and pleasant land it would be, so far as I was concerned, a city of separate towers where you could retreat to commune in private, probably at night, with imaginary friends who'd step out from between the covers. Impersonating characters on the stage was a cruel assault on the whole race of unreal people.