The Day Gone By Page 46

  Another, and by no means minor, weight to bear was the sudden ripping away of group morale. For two years I had worn a red beret and Airborne Forces had been my life and my raison d’être. I had had friends of distinction - far above my own worth and status, I who had never even fired a gun at any enemy - among whom it was fulfilment and an honour to live. Esprit de corps, where it is really felt, is an all-embracing thing. (When you actually prefer to wear uniform on leave, you’re obviously far gone.) Now, in a moment, all this had been whisked away. I had never expected to feel demobilization as a loss, but I did so now all right. Night after night I would sit alone in my room, remembering C Platoon or the swimming with Doug. Campbell in Singapore, and feel sick at heart with the loss of companionship and of all that the Airborne Forces had conferred. One night in a pub., when I had mildly ventured some minor criticism, the barmaid replied ‘We make the rules here, not you.’ (In those difficult times people were often short-tempered.) I thought, I bet you wouldn’t have said that to an airborne soldier.

  During January and February my poor father lingered on. He was plainly dying, for he grew weaker day by day. One feature of his illness I found particularly distressing: his legs itched unbearably and he could not control himself from scratching and tearing at them until they were lacerated and bleeding. Sometimes he knew who we were and could talk a little, but he had almost no energy and spent more and more time in a kind of half-sleeping coma.

  It was on 18 March that my sister, who was at home with my mother, telephoned me at Oxford and said ‘Richard, I think you’d better come home: tonight.’ It’s not far from Oxford to Newbury. I arrived during the evening. My mother, kind and self-possessed as always, was in complete command of herself but plainly very tired. So was my sister. I knelt by my father’s bed, so as to get my head close to his, and said ‘Daddy, it’s Richard: Richard’s here.’ He opened his eyes and gave the ghost of a smile and a nod. I like to think he knew who it was, but quite possibly he didn’t.

  I sat up with him that night, while the others got some sort of rest in their beds. During the small hours his breathing became - or seemed to me to become - intermittent. My feeling was that this could not continue long, but still I was reluctant to disturb my mother and sister for fear I might be mistaken. At quarter past five, however, I called them and they came into the room. My father died a little before quarter to six. He simply ceased to breathe.

  My mother, the trained nurse who had first met Doctor Jarge in Edwardian Somerset, did all that was necessary with composure. I was troubled by the sightless gaze of my father’s fixed, open eyes. I remember there came into my head a line from Macbeth:‘Thou hast no speculation in those eyes.’ My mother closed them with pieces of moistened cotton-wool. Seeing that I couldn’t be of much use, I walked out into the early morning garden, where from a silver birch the thrush was singing ‘Marguerite!’ Marguerite!’

  This was a very bad, empty time; as bad as I can remember, lonely and with little comfort. Small things - deprivations of the ordinary material of daily life - affect us, or most of us, I suppose, more than we care to admit: things like the gas pressure being too low to be of any real use; power cuts; the impossibility of getting a pair of shoes of the right size. (‘Don’t know when we’ll be getting any more in, sir.’) Having to make do with things that don’t match, or having to mend something with the wrong-coloured wool. We ought not to allow discomforts and frustrations like these to affect our frame of mind: but they do. They make a bad accompaniment to consuming, underlying grief.

  It was against this background that I lived at home during that vacation, doing what I could to comfort my mother and continuing to read for the History Schools; there was nothing else to do -anyway, we had very little money - and there seemed to be nothing worth doing. The death of my father, my life-long companion and the spiritual duct through which the whole nature and quality of my personal, individual life had come to me, had left me darkling. It should have been a time to turn to friends; but where were they?

  I had no idea what sort of a life I wanted to make for myself and whenever I tried to think about it nothing occurred to me. All that came into my mind were matters of the past - a past that could yield no comfort, since its power had depended, really, on time - the age I had been and the people, my father and others, who had been round me - rather than on the places and events themselves. For example, the Bluebell Wood was still there, a few hundred yards away, and the bluebells, primroses and dog’s mercury were shooting and would soon be in bloom, but they seemed to have little to give me now; rather, they merely turned my head over my shoulder, to remind me of all that was lost - not only a parent and friends, but a whole course of life.

  Early of an evening, I used to drop in at the pub.; The Bell at Wash Common, a few hundred yards up the road. In those days it was just a plain village beer house, with a few regulars and a landlord, Jim Spencer, who was a well-known popular local character. The people I had always known — among whom I had grown up - and the down-to-earth, diurnal talk (‘Goin’ t’ave a drop o’ rain, then?’), like bird-song, were palliative. By reciprocating conversation about nothing, your emotions could be lost, diluted, in the common pool of humanity. I remember how, much later, when the Nuremberg trials were drawing to a close, Jim Spencer, with every confidence, bet me two pints that General Goering would not be hanged. ‘They’ll never’ang ’e,’ he announced to the tap-room with the greatest assurance. After Goering had been sentenced, I suggested to Jim that he might now pay up, but he remained firm. ‘They won’t never ’ang ’e!’ And, as we know, they didn’t: I lost my two pints. Jim’s uncanny prescience was quite the talk of the village. (‘Reckon it must ‘a bin old Jim sent ’im that lot, then.’)

  One evening that April, a little before the summer term at Oxford was due to begin, I strolled back home from The Bell to find my mother preparing our meagre, rationed supper.

  ‘Oh, Dicky,’ she said. ‘Mrs Acland came round a little while ago.’

  Mr and Mrs Acland lived next door. Although I had seen almost nothing of them since coming home, they were, I had learned, good neighbours. I remembered them vaguely from before the war. At the time when I was called up they had had two little girls, Elizabeth and Penelope, aged about eleven and nine, and my mother had told me that a third girl, Judith, had been born in the middle of the war. Mr Acland had not long been demobilized from the R.A.F. During my embarkation leave the year before, my father had told me - and such spontaneous praise on his part was unusual — that Mrs Acland was an unusually nice, kind-hearted woman. ‘She drops round: she always has some little excuse or other, but it’s really to keep an eye on Mother and to see whether we’re all right. We’re lucky she’s there.’

  ‘Oh, did she look in?’ I replied to my mother. ‘Anything special?’

  ‘Apparently Elizabeth’s doing some extra Latin for university entrance,’ said my mother. ‘Mrs Acland thought perhaps John might be able to give her a bit of help. I explained that John wasn’t at home, but I thought your Latin was good enough for you to give her a hand. I said I’d tell you when you came in.’

  ‘All right,’ I answered. ‘I’ll pop over for a minute and see what I can do.’

  In the course of the war, my mother and Mrs Acland had worn a little path through their respective gardens between each other’s back doors, dropping in with the sort of gifts that people in the days of rationing were only too glad to receive — an egg or two, a few spoonsful of coffee, a morsel of cheese, half a bread-and-butter pudding ‘which really needed finishing up’. They would read to each other from their family letters, too; stuff for conversation about husband or children away in the services. I took this path now, through the gap in the hedge, past the wooden summer-house and so to Mrs Acland’s back door. It opened directly on the kitchen and she, like my mother, was busy preparing supper. I explained that I had come instead of John.

  ‘Oh, that’s kind of you, Richard. Well, Elizabeth’s in the dining-room
if you’d like to go and see her.’

  I went across the passage and through the dining-room door, which was ajar.

  Sitting at the table, with two or three books spread out in front of her, was a girl who looked perhaps sixteen or seventeen, somewhere between a grown child and a young woman. She looked up at me with a warm smile and no least trace of self-consciousness.

  It was I who felt self-conscious, for she was very beautiful indeed. Her beauty struck me all the more powerfully because I could not have expected it. She had brown hair, perfect, regular features and a firm young figure. But informing these physical qualities was something more difficult to describe. I can only call it the grace of innocence. It was plain that she herself had no least idea how outstandingly beautiful she was, or what power this beauty conferred. Seeing her for the first time against the background of that commonplace room, I had for a moment the fancy that her face possessed a gently luminescent quality, like that of a wave in the tropical oceans. I stood silent, gazing at her in astonishment, and it was she who spoke first.

  ‘Hallo!’ she said, ‘You’re Richard, aren’t you? Mother said it might be you coming over, because your brother’s away.’

  Her beauty disconcerted and constrained me. I know now that this is common enough: young men thus confronted often feel this kind of self-consciousness. The poet Walter de la Mare once said to Sir Russell Braine of a lady whom he had met, ‘She was so beautiful that it was embarrassing to look at her. Isn’t that strange?’

  This same embarrassment was a little heightened now on account of Elizabeth’s youthful inexperience. Not that she was gauche -indeed, she already possessed, as it seemed, a distinct style of her own - but she had had little practice in talking to young men and wasn’t altogether sure how to deal with them. She had no need to worry. Her mere appearance set her apart from and beyond convention. She looked as though she had come to transcend the workaday world and set it right once and for all, she who knew nothing of grief, or of loss or regret.

  ‘They said you were having a spot of trouble with your Latin,’ I answered. ‘I thought I’d come and see whether I could help.’

  ‘It’s the ablative absolutes,’ she said, laughing a little by way of suggesting her own stupidity. ‘I think if I could just get the hang of it - you know, how it’s supposed to work -’

  ‘Oh, well, that shouldn’t be difficult. Would you like me to sit down here?’

  ‘Oh, sorry, I ought to have thought. Yes, do.’

  I drew a chair up to hers. She smelt of youth and freshness. Sitting side-by-side with her, I felt tense and excited. It is easy, with hindsight, to attribute marvels, yet in all seriousness I believe I had the inkling, even then, that a great blessing — a promise - was being extended to me; and that this was to prove no single or casual encounter.

  ‘Well,’ I said, pulling the open exercise book across between us, ‘let’s start by making one up and I’ll try to explain. “All these things having been narrated, Caesar decided nevertheless to press on.” That’s the sort of stuff you’re apt to get. Now, “Omnibus narratis”, you see, is what’s called a subordinate clause -’

  C Platoon, 250 Light Company R.A.S.C. (Airborne) in 1944

  No. 1 Section Corporal Bater

  No. 2 Section Corporal Pickering

  No. 3 Section Corporal Hollis

  No. 4 Section Corporal Rawlings

  No. 5 Section Corporal West

  No. 6 Section Corporal Simmons

  No. 7 Section Corporal Herdman

  1 Cecil Sharp, No. 341. Captain Lewis, 1909.

  2 * ‘Popeye the Sailorman’ was the hero of a pre-war strip-cartoon (published in this country by the Daily Mirror), who acquired enormous physical strength by the internal application of canned spinach. He was accompanied by a female, named Olive Oyl, of dubious charm but indisputable fidelity. He had a friend, a smoothly self-possessed scrounger and rascal named J. Wellington Wimpy, who lived on hamburgers for which he never paid. This is why hamburgers became popularly known as ‘Wimpys’. It is also why Wellington bombers became known as ‘Wimpys’.

  Popeye had another loyal follower called the Jeep, a little creature about the size of a cat, which could presage the future, if asked, by sticking up his behind to indicate ‘yes’ and squeaking ‘Jeep, jeep’. This is why, later on in the war, when the American troops began arriving in numbers, their light, open-sided vehicles became known as ‘jeeps’.

  Popeye suffered intermittently from the hostile attentions of ‘goons’, whom he always thrashed, of course: these were great, clumping, stupid, malicious creatures, rather like Norwegian trolls. This is why German soldiers were called ‘goons’.

  * Fifth columnist. During the Spanish Civil War, the Fascist General Franco said that he had four columns advancing on Madrid and a fifth column inside the city. The term became proverbial for a spy or traitor.