Into the Blizzard (21 page)

I tried to imagine that history while staring at the present, and this building, which housed the Newfoundland wounded during and after the war, seemed a good place to start. Wandsworth went into disrepair after the war, and was about to be torn down in the 1950s, but then received a heritage designation and was sold for one pound. Now, here it was again before me, with fresh apartments and artistic studios, a drama school, and workshops for designers and artists and craftsmen.

During the war, Londoners were asked to be quiet around hospitals such as Wandsworth, and traffic was
redirected to help keep the noise down. There were, by the end of the war, over two hundred hospitals in London that held the wounded. War, in one sense, was not over. And Wandsworth had not begun with this war, either: it had been built on subscription as an orphanage for the daughters of soldiers and marines who had fought in the Crimean War. But during the First World War it soon filled up with soldiers and extensions were built: huts made of corrugated iron and painted with asbestos. Then further extensions were added, and satellite hospitals sprang up several miles away. The system of hospitals became as confusing as the knitting together of trenches at the front. The huts at Wandsworth became known as “bungalow town.” The main hospital building could normally hold only two hundred patients, but now that number was extended to five hundred. By the end of the war, two thousand wounded soldiers were sheltered at Wandsworth.

Francis Derwent Wood, a sculptor, did voluntary work here. He established the Masks for Facial Disfigurement Department—informally known as the “tin noses shop.” This was for faces too badly destroyed for a rubber prosthetic. A cast was made of the face, and a lightweight mask of silvered copper was sculpted to resemble a portrait of the patient before his injury. The mask was painted to match the patient’s colouring. My work begins, Wood said, where the work of the surgeon is completed. Twenty
thousand soldiers were treated in this way. The masks were uncomfortable, but they did help the soldiers adapt to life back in civilization. They helped the families, too, adapt to the veterans.

Derwent Wood also sculpted “Canada’s Golgotha,” a three-foot-tall crucified Canadian solider at Ypres. The Germans protested this image, and some say it affected how the allies treated Germany at Versailles.

A Newfoundland soldier named
Alexander Parsons was one of the soldiers treated here at Wandsworth. His father was Edward Parsons, an MHA from Harbour Grace. Alexander was a chauffeur and, after enlisting, he had been shipped over to England on the
Florizel.
He trained in Salisbury and landed in Gallipoli in September 1915. There he contracted scabies and pleurisy. And it was because of his pleurisy that he was removed in April 1916 and brought back to England.

His brother, who was a captain in the Royal Army Medical Corps, wrote to the authorities to ask if Alexander Parsons could receive a commission as an officer—he had received a stripe in the field and might get better treatment that way. A tart note came back from the hospital staff stating they made no distinction in their treatment between officers and other ranks. A sea trip, however, would be considered beneficial, wrote the medical officer. The brother replied that he was willing, at his own expense,
to accompany Alexander and, gratuitously, three other Newfoundlanders suffering from “tubercule of the lung,” on their passage back to Newfoundland. (There was no indication from the hospital that Parsons had tuberculosis. His ailment, pleurisy with effusion, was from exposure.)

And so Alexander Parsons returned to Quebec upon the troopship
Grampian
on 26 June 1916. Five days before the start of the Battle of the Somme.

Once discharged, in 1917, Alexander re-enlisted with the RAF, where he used his skills as a motor mechanic for the remainder of the war. Then he moved to Toronto to live along the east bank of the Don River in a Tudor Revival house—a house I’ve stood outside—before returning to Newfoundland where, in 1921, he was reimbursed for the customs duties on some woodworking machinery. In those years, and years since, Alexander Parsons and his family ran a cabinetmaking enterprise as well as a caretaking business. There is mention of a photography shop.

That combination of “photography shop” and the surname Parsons made me pause and think. There was a Newfoundland photographer, Simeon Parsons, who had been, like Alexander, from Harbour Grace. I looked at the records and found that when Simeon Parsons moved to St John’s he gave his carpentry business to his brother, Edward. And Alexander was Edward’s son. Simeon Parsons is the man who took the photograph of the caribou
standing on the cliff edge—the image that became the emblem of the Newfoundland Regiment in which his nephew served.

I stared at Wandsworth, where Alexander Parsons was rescued by his brother and returned to Newfoundland. The building has a redone facade now, just like the men with their reconstructed faces. There is a stage inside, with actors who stride across it in masks.

From Wandsworth, I took a train north for two hours, past Norfolk, and stayed at the Duke’s Head Hotel in King’s Lynn. The exterior of the hotel was a pale blue that reminded me of the Thompson submachine gun my father had made for me out of wood when I was ten. I realize that’s a strange connection to make, but I was succumbing to these sorts of associations now that I was focused on war and weaponry. The gun my father built had a drum magazine, also wood, and was called a trench broom. It was meant for trench warfare but ended up not being used much during the First World War. Gangsters in prohibition-era movies swept these guns along the sides of black sedans. My father painted my tommy gun blue so civilians would know it was not real.

Even Sassoon remembered his childhood gun. At nine, he had a gun that “made a noise but discharged nothing.” He bought percussion caps at the sweet shop.

On the train up, a young man had been listening to songs through earphones. He was, I noted, the age of Tommy Ricketts—another comparison because I was following in the footsteps of Tommy Ricketts. I felt compelled to see the site where the King invested Tommy Ricketts with a Victoria Cross. Ricketts ran across open ground to fetch ammunition and for this he won the VC. The ammunition was for a Lewis gun, not a Tommy gun. A Lewis gun is set on a tripod. My father recalls an old Lewis gun in a field by his school when he was a boy during the Second World War. There’s an awkward nostalgia you have when something old is resurrected in an attempt to help you defend the present—even kids feel it. The Lewis gun was laughed at.

At the hotel I had a shower and a buffet dinner then walked down to the water. I never give up a chance to look at water. I passed a little building with an open door, and a sign that read:

Inside the open front door, I could see that the space had depth like the interior of a tent. There was a loft with
a string of well-lit heavy bags. I took three stairs and entered a small airless gym with red carpeting. In the ring, there were three men and seven boys. One boy was leading with pushups and stretches while instrumental music played from a portable stereo. The youth looked hard. The roof rose taut like an opened umbrella, thick whitewashed beams not far above their heads.

I would have found this set-up attractive when I was a kid. In fact, I did much the same thing as these boys, and in a similar room. I was part of a boxing gym, and we trained and sparred, and then one day our trainer told us about a provincial meet in St John’s. We went there on the provincial bus and we bought real boxing shoes in Howie Meeker’s sporting goods store on Freshwater Road. I ate a fast-food hamburger for the first time. Then we fought the boys from St John’s in the Church Lads’ Brigade Armoury, the same building that had kitted out the Newfoundland Regiment in their blue puttees. I fought a boy named Mike Summers. Our bout was billed the “Battle of the Seasons” and it was three rounds long. Twenty-five years later, my mother sent me a newspaper clipping of a Newfoundland referee who was joining the Olympic boxing team. His name was Mike Summers. And in the story, he relates how he first got into boxing and his fight with a boy named Winter. When asked who won the fight, Summers said, In Newfoundland, winter always wins.

The building we had fought in, the armoury, burned down during a winter in the 1990s—I lived in St John’s then and watched it burn and heard the flankers from the fire land on the roof of the office where I was working late. The entire downtown of St John’s was evacuated. A grocery store next to the armoury caught on fire and the frozen chickens were cooked in their freezers. A string of fish and chips restaurants all had propane tanks in behind their buildings and one after another they exploded and shot high into the sky. But the fire was contained and, afterwards, the Church Lads’ Brigade was rebuilt in stone and a fire station rose out of the ruins of the grocery store’s cooked chickens.

I left the gym and continued walking down to the water, where I came to a signpost:
The opening of the Estuary Cut to The Wash caused this riverbank to form farther west. The common staithe made of coping stones, now inland, used to be the edge of the quay in 1855.
A staithe, I knew, is a landing area for shipping. I was standing on a wharf that had been pushed inland like the layers forming on a pearl. It reminded me of Ephesus, where the sea was now a mile away from where it once was.

At the corner I found a pub, the Crown and Mitre, and stopped in for a pint of Boathouse Bitter from Cambridge. I took my pint up the stairs into the Vine Room. The pub is laid out like a ship, with nautical tack hanging on the walls. Two men were talking about work. The cigarette is an American powerboat, one said. It does seventy knots.

The Olympic torch is coming through tomorrow, the other said, and I suddenly realized I was dead tired. I had been up since five and I could not listen to Englishmen speak of Americans and the Olympics, of power and competition. I had done my duty to the day.

I headed back to the hotel and washed my clothes in the sink. I had kept my black shirt with the epaulets in reserve to head down to the pub for dinner. Then I looked for the shirt and realized I had left it hanging in the closet in Les Galets. So I wrung out and pulled on my thinnest blue shirt and grimaced with the damp, recalling the many letters from soldiers asking for kit in Scotland to be forwarded to them while they were injured in France and England. And the men in POW camps in Germany, requesting shirts and socks and, if they were in an officers’ camp, a full clean uniform.

The still-damp shirt was giving me a chill, so I ordered an iron and board. I was planning to visit the Queen’s residence in the morning, and didn’t want to go there with a cold.

The morning was warm and muggy so I decided to walk to Sandringham. But after a half-mile on John Kennedy Road I became worried and asked a woman for directions.
Oh yes, she said, this is the direction, but you have to pass through two by-ways.

Is it far? I asked. And she covered her mouth. About twelve miles, she said.

So I returned to where I had started, caught the bus and climbed the stairs to the top deck. The roads we travelled were decked in Union Jacks, and it was wet outside now. I would not have made it on foot. Major routes mixed with little lanes; the top of the bus smashed into low branches. It was a half-hour motor trip.

I jumped off at Sandringham and met two girls selling flags and the
Sun
newspaper for forty pence. I gave them fifty pence and asked where to eat breakfast.

There’s nothing up here, they said. You’re best off down on the High Street.

But I found nothing on High Street, and decided to head straight for the estate. Tommy Ricketts ate a breakfast at Sandringham, I told myself, and so will I. He had been a little nervous and hadn’t eaten much, but it’s rare for me to be off my feed. When I’m nervous I tend to eat more, not less. I found a bacon roll and coffee for five pounds. I guessed Tommy might have eaten something like that—or he may have had tea. Temporary coach signs, blue, were being malleted into the grass. And then I remembered that the Olympic torch was on its way. This is “the Norfolk retreat of Her Majesty the Queen” but she was
in Scotland on this day, on Jubilee business. Wimbledon was on television, and Andy Murray was playing in the final eight.

At Sandringham I took the nature walk. Lovely gardens and big tall trees. A scent in the air that I could not name. I bought nasturtium seeds from the nursery, apparently from the garden of Queen Alexandra. She liked Norfolk as it reminded her of her native Denmark. I doffed my Danish hat to her gardens.

Fifty people, kids mainly, kicked their feet against the wheelchair ramp, waiting for eleven o’clock. There was a bit of rain and a bit of sun. I watched teenagers ignore their teacher who reminded them of their bags: When you turn round, keep an eye on your bag. Remember, don’t touch anything.

An old man told us all: No cell phone rings, please, and no photography.

What low prospects each generation has, to rise up and fix all the damage we’ve done. But that feeling passed and my composure returned, and eleven o’clock chimed out and I merged into the congested entrance and praised myself for not running away. So often I am mere steps or minutes from a great museum—the Prado, for example—when some small thing puts me off. Having to wait to buy a ticket. Or realizing that part of a gallery is off-limits. The effort it takes to finish a job is not easy for me. And so
forgive me, reader, for patting myself on the back for waiting to get into this building.

First, the bathroom study: this is where Prince Charles presents service medals to soldiers from Afghanistan. The Prince is colonel-in-chief of the Royal Dragoon Guards. Sometimes he stands outside on a long red box. Then he dismounts the box and inspects the troops and pins medals on their left breasts. I thought of Sassoon’s important breast. The Prince is very adept at this. He will sometimes come to Toronto and visit our old fort from the War of 1812 and inspect our troops there.