which is why I was happy to be there. I’ve seen too
many things happen in my life.
I had time enough to get used to Saigon before it
fell. Then I caught a bit of Mozambique, a smidgeon of Abyssinia, a soupçon of
the Falklands, a touch of Angola, a surfeit of Afghanistan, a glut of the Gulf,
and the usual assignments to the Lebanon and whichever part of Western Africa
was doing its bit to solve the population explosion through internecine
slaughter with more or less political motivation.
I couldn’t say which one actually tipped me over the
edge. Maybe I was already there – I’d just been a long time falling and
eventually hit the bottom. It certainly woke me up – every morning, screaming,
sometimes three and four times a night. My third wife – was she my third? or my
fourth? I used to keep count once, in the same way that I used to keep count of
the wars I’d covered as a correspondent, but after a while they all blended
together and it didn’t seem to matter any more – my wife at the time, then,
took this behaviour as the last straw rather than the healing crisis. She was
probably right to do so.
By that stage the bottle was hitting me back even
harder than I was hitting it. If my eldest daughter (the one from my first marriage)
hadn’t nearly died from a heroin overdose, I’d probably have gone the same way
as the Duke of Clarence. As it was, I booked us both into the same expensive
clinic for treatment. After three months, she was clean and I was cleaned out.
I rang my agent. Of course I have an agent. With the
press in the state it is, you don’t want to be dependent on one single
newspaper and its hireling editor for your livelihood. Besides, I do have a
style. People will read what I say because of my name.
“No wars,” said my agent.
“Come on,” I said, and listed a dozen I knew of,
even if they seldom made it into the news.
“No one will insure you for a war,” he said.
“The old ones are safer,” I said, “they’ve seen it
all already.”
“That’s the trouble,” he said, “they’ve seen too
much – at least the young still have a reason to stay alive. Besides, it’s a
health issue – somebody tipped them off about your stay in the clinic.”
“OK,” I said, “I can live without a war – just get
me a job. I need the money.”
To tell the truth – and I do, because my living
depends on it – I wasn’t sure I could live without a war. I’d never really had
to. I come from a military family. I won’t bother to go into the details, but
the connection goes back several generations on both sides, and into various
cadet branches. My aunt once claimed our relatives provided most of the
officers at Waterloo. When I cheekily asked on which side, she answered,
“Both.” That impressed me, because the truth-telling is another genetic thing.
That was one reason my father didn’t object too strongly to the journalism,
because he could see I was still being true to the family. In fact, he said he
was glad I’d found something to do, because I was a little too intelligent to
make a good soldier in the field, and far too honest to become a member of the
General Staff.
My agent rang me back the next day (he must have
been needing the money, too).
He said, “I’ve got something that’s right up your
street.” Then he told me what it was.
“Right up my street?” I said. “Right up your back
passage! Counting Brent geese on the coast of Lincolnshire? What’s wrong with
Bill Oddie?”
“Already engaged,” he said.
“Somewhere warmer, no doubt,” I replied. But I took
it. There was nothing and no one to stop me. My daughter had gone back to live
with her mother. The offspring generally stuck with the parent they’d actually
seen. Whatever it was that had attracted women to me – probably the smell of
danger – had worn off with drinking and drying out. If I was going to sit
around alone and wallow in self-pity, I might as well have the appropriate
surroundings and get paid for doing it.
Lincolnshire – who’d live there from choice? A
Viking who liked to nip home for the weekend on a regular basis or was still
sending his washing back to Mum. No one else. There used to be a beautiful
poster that said, “Skegness is so bracing!” Bracing was advertising speak for
bloody cold, and everybody knew – but the English feel guilty about pleasure,
so they evened out the fantasy of ‘holiday’ with the reality of sub-zero
temperatures and flocked there in their thousands. In Boston, Lincolnshire, a
hill-start does not form part of the driving-test because they can’t find one
to do it on. There are hills, though, and odd secret corners where Tennyson developed
his dark and concealed melancholy.
And there are dead airfields all over the place. The
crumbling concrete between the potato-fields was once a runway or a perimeter
track. What looks like a giant barn was once a hangar, and is now probably a
mushroom-farm.
A house came with the job – quite a solid nineteenth
century one, in that greyish-yellow brick they used for all the stations on the
LNER. I rattled around in it like a pea in a drum, but at least it gave me a
view out towards the retreating sea, which sparkled at me from beyond
ever-increasing mudflats.
In some ways, I think I’d rather have had the little
cottage that I could see down towards one of the old sea-walls – they had to
keep on building them further and further out. It was small and snug and
thatched with reeds and blended into the landscape as if it had grown out of
it. And every morning I watched and waited as whoever lived there lit a fire
and the dark smoke of paper and sticks and nutty slack gave way to the slight
heat shimmer of solid coal.
There’s a poem by Brecht which says that it’s human
presence, that thin wisp of smoke, which gives life to the landscape. Without
that, however beautiful it might be, it would be dreary and disconsolate. I see
what he means, but I don’t agree. There’s always movement, even if it’s only
the grasses in the wind. To say nothing of the birds.
I watched them through binoculars, saw them come
flying in, skein after skein, settling on the water, observed them eating the
grass of the salt-marsh, saw them take off again, circle, and choose somewhere
else to land. I counted them all out and I counted them all back.
Through the same binoculars, I watched the old woman
leave the cottage, walk up to a ribbon of concrete half-hidden under the
foliage of a potato crop, and stare up at the sky. She waited for half an hour
or so, and then went back. She did it twice a day that I could see. Maybe she
did it in the dark as well. I assumed she must be an old woman, though I never
saw her face. She wore a blue and white polka dot headscarf and walked with a
steady determination that gave no clue to her age. But only an old woman would
choose to live out here on her own.
I reckoned she must be mad as well. At the end of the first week, I walked down to exchange a neighbourly greeting. Before I’d crossed the ribbon of concrete, she appeared outside her cottage, holding a gun – a shotgun, as far as I could see – and called out to me that she knew I was a German spy, and I shouldn’t come any closer.
I hadn’t survived all those wars to have my head blown off by an agèd madwoman in the depths of rural Lincolnshire, so I turned back. An old boy in a greasy mac, cycling by on the concrete, God knew where to or where from, looked at me and shook his head with a wry and gap-toothed grin, but never slackened what little pace he had as he pedalled with a contained fury into the teeth of the constant wind.
Her regular movements became part of the routine of my day. I jotted down numbers of geese and occasionally produced a sentence to describe the atmosphere, which I pared away over the next few hours, word by excessive word, until there was nothing left.
Halfway through the second week, I decided to see what it was she was waiting for or looking at. It was well after twilight, and she was staring fixedly southwest as the north-easterly flapped the scarf round her head. I went outside and looked the same way. At first, I could see nothing, and then, out of the growing darkness and the racing scud, shapes emerged that seemed to be passing over me, into the wind, and going out to sea. The binoculars made nothing clearer, but the silhouettes seemed strangely familiar.
To tell the truth, it took me quite a while to work out that they were aeroplanes. Even gliders make a whispering sound. But these were totally silent. Normally, when something passes over you like that, you flinch in anticipation of the noise – even if it’s geese or swans – have you ever heard the racket swans make taking off and beating those enormous wings of theirs? So powerful, stately and majestic – Sibelius gets it just right in the last movement of his fifth symphony.
If I hadn’t recognised the shapes, I might have thought I’d discovered the ultimate stealth warplanes, being tested in Lincolnshire because nothing ever happens there. But when I was a kid, we played cards with a wartime pack that had aeroplane silhouettes on the faces of the cards. Impaired my bridge skills for a good many years – I kept on trying to play the game like a kind of Happy Families. But it meant I knew a Lancaster when it flew straight at me.
And they had to fly straight at me for me to see them. I had to be in a line with the old lady and her cottage and that ribbon of concrete, or else I saw nothing.
The third night, I counted them, just as if they’d been Brent geese. There were twenty. And the following morning, I made sure I was up in time to see the old lady keep her regular watch. They were still flying into the wind, which was still from the northeast, but this time they were descending and they vanished before they reached me. Nonetheless, I was able to count them. There were only nineteen.
For the next three days, the pattern was repeated – as it must have been, I thought, year on year, since the first time. But the fourth morning, she wasn’t there. And I saw nothing. And there was no smoke rising from her cottage.
Given my previous experience, I wondered whether I should approach the place crawling on my belly, but common sense prevailed: she was a sick old lady, who’d probably had a fall or a stroke, not a Frelimo guerrilla trying to tempt me into an ambush. So I walked down to the cottage and promptly tripped over a large stone in the grass, just outside the door. She was clearly unconscious, otherwise she’d have responded to my oaths. The stone had an inscription on it: SAM A faithful friend 27.ii.1951.
The door was neither locked nor bolted. I could see the old woman, smothered in blankets, lying in her bed in front of the empty fireplace, breathing in that mechanical and stertorous way people do after they’ve had a major stroke. I didn’t think it right to intrude. I knew there was nothing I could do, she’d probably be dead before the day was out, without recovering consciousness, so I called the ambulance on my mobile and waited in the doorway for an hour until it arrived.
I looked out to sea, and ignored the cluttered cottage behind me, stuffed with memorabilia and photographs. I didn’t want to know. It was her life, not mine. The less you know about people, the less there is to hurt you. I gave the ambulance crew a false name – I have a set of them ready to hand.
I knew there would be nothing to see that night, but the following morning the clock inside my head woke me at the time I had become used to, so I got up and went out and took up my usual position, expecting nothing. I looked towards the cottage, saw no smoke and no old woman, then I turned my back to the wind and looked out over the potato fields and the half-hidden ribbon of concrete.
Because I didn’t expect her, because I knew she couldn’t be there, I didn’t see her at first. But she was there, on the concrete, the polka-dot headscarf fluttering in the wind. And there was a dog beside her. I realised with a shock that I knew the dog’s name, even if I didn’t know hers. And then I saw the silent shape in the sky, only one this time, and it grew bigger and came closer and landed, if you can say that of something so intangible. A figure got out of it and came towards her, and she didn’t run towards him, she just stood there, with her back to me. Only her arms, that had been held tightly at her sides, began to move out sideways, ever so slightly and ever so slowly.
The black labrador sat beside her, quivering with joy, but too well-disciplined to jump up. I turned away. I’m no voyeur. I do war. I don’t do peace.
Besides, I was jealous. Nobody ever waited sixty years for me.
Finished 19.57 10.xi.2001