THE WINDOW
I can still tell this story now, if I
choose my age-group. In a little
while, it will only be the adults who understand me. That terribly mixed group, my contemporaries, will start
shrinking in a conical way, down to a fine, sharp point. Then there will have to be footnotes. Then surmises and strange, wilful
interpretations. Everyday assumptions,
so normal that no one ever bothered to explain them, become obscure and arcane
mysteries.
It was back in the days when your future
was decided by a set of people that you never met, who never even met each other,
except for the real high-ups.
Information was gathered, sorted, dispatched, judgements were passed,
decisions were taken, individual ones and ones on principle, lots of
official-looking envelopes and the occasional drowsy meeting, and then you
learnt, at last, the results of the anonymous inquisition into your
abilities. I'm talking about A- and
O-levels.
It's a long chain, and I was at both
ends; I put the knowledge in at the beginning, and I found how much had come
out at the end - literally - or rather literally and numerically, because I go
back to the days of numbers and percentages - and then again, not always
literally: I actually marked the things at the very start of my career, when
the leather elbow patches on the Harris tweed jacket really did hide holes,
before the hi-fi, the house, the telly, the wife, the kids and the video. I got into trouble with the P.T. master for
marking during the staff cricket match - I was still young enough to be afraid
of games masters - as you get older, you learn to look a vaulting horse in the
mouth without trembling, though I have retained a perfectly rational fear of
fat men in smelly jogging-suits - he said I should have been watching the pitch
of the ball and preparing myself mentally - I knew that Dawkins was going to
york me right between the legs at box height, because I'd overheard him telling
Hawkins the previous day - I'd been
flippant about his essay on sexuality in King Lear - called it 'King Leer',
because I knew he'd cribbed it all out of Partridge's book on Shakespeare's
bawdy which had been one of my first
orders for the library when I arrived, despite Mrs Browning's raised
eyebrows - and one of my Great Mistakes: it disappeared within a week and
turned up three years later in the prefects' room when a particularly thorough
cleaner brought it back to me in her dustpan, copiously illustrated and with
its binding completely gone. Well, you
live and learn - but not necessarily in that order. I found out that fast bowlers have feelings and that sarcasm is
the last refuge of a schoolmaster: it's always going to hurt you more than it
amuses me. I also got into trouble
with the examining board as well as the P.T. master: the scripts on the bottom
were covered with linseed oil - I'd borrowed somebody else's bat and they were
keen - (I hadn't yet started using the stuff as embrocation for ageing putty) -
and the scripts on the top were spattered with rain, because the zip on the bag
had never been the same since I tried carrying a crate of Guinness in it at
college (that's another story, and one which I'm not telling, as far as I
know). But at least my capacity for
fatherhood was preserved by the downpour, and the scripts in the middle only
had ringmarks on them - genuinely coffee, as it happened.
Later on, I advanced up the scale and got
beyond all that - for a while. When
Jan had her job, she'd be outside the school on the last day of term in the red
MG (you couldn't see the Elastoplast we'd used to waterproof the cracks in the
hood), headscarf flapping in the wind, a couple of suitcases strapped on the
back (the boot just about held a spare pair of underpants), I'd come racing out
an inch or two ahead of the pupils, vault in without opening the door (real Le
Mans start stuff), and away we'd roar.
Jan's headscarf flapped and cracked all the way down to Narbonne and
Perpignan, Toulouse and Montpellier.
We didn't go into Spain, because we didn't approve of Franco, but we sat
in cafés near the border and drank red wine and speculated on which of the
people at the other tables were émigrés, or smugglers, or belonged to ETA. Then, when it was getting time for the
grape harvest, and the Parisian accents were thinning in the hotels, I'd take
over the wheel for the long drive home, on the slow roads and the side-roads,
with the little hotels that had been set up and furnished in the Second Empire
and seemed unaware of anything that had happened since, apart, perhaps, from
who had won the Tour de France: a row of yellowing newspaper photographs
filling a frame behind the bar.
Meanwhile, back in those buildings that
smelt of sweaty gym-shoes and crusted inkwells and that funny dark-brown
sawdust the cleaners threw on the floor and swept up again, in order to get the
last obstinate pencil-shaving out of the corner, the responsible members of
staff were gathering to transcribe the grades from illegible computer
print-outs on to the self-addressed postcards, thinking With that
handwriting - how did the markers ever read the scripts, let alone make
sense of them? and Didn't deserve it! and Bad luck! Whatever came
over them? and Thank God!/What a pity! I won't have any of her
essays to mark again!
And by the time Jan and I had drunk the last
of the bottles of red wine that we'd smuggled past the Customs in the boot
(who'd ever think to look there?
In those days, drugs were things you took when you were ill), the
results were forgotten in the preparations for the new term. Somebody told me what had happened, and I
was duly gratified, surprised or annoyed, but too self-absorbed to be
personally involved: I was the sailor at the front of the ship - I threw the
line with the lead on into the sea, and pulled it up. It told me how deep the waters were - sometimes I was right and
sometimes I was wrong, and sometimes there were the marks of very sharp teeth
on the weight, and sometimes the line was bitten through, and only a scrap of
string was left in my hand. But at
least I wasn't down there with it.
(You'll have to forgive the elaborate
images. A deep love of The Ancient
Mariner isn't the best preparation for teaching Communication Skills, and
sometimes it shows.)
Have you ever been involved in country
dancing when you didn't know how? You
wait your turn with your partner further down the line, diddling in and out and
honouring the couples either side, and always with an eye on what's happening
at the head, because you know you'll have to do it pretty soon. Some of the couples still haven't learnt
before they get there, and you register their mistakes with satisfaction,
because that's one folly you won't commit. That's how you learn to grow older, and how you learn to send
out the O- and A-level results.
The responsible members of staff come
into school in different cars or on bicycles, sometimes even with dropped
handlebars. The ones who normally wear
suits turn up in especially tasteless and flamboyant Hawaian shirts - the kind
of thing the lighting cameraman would have forbidden Elvis to wear because it
played hell with the tonal values of the makeup. They all park particularly badly, because it doesn't matter:
there's no one else to consider. They
turn on the radio in the staff room, far too loud; they don't pay for their
coffee, not even the treasurer; they certainly don't wash up the cups or rinse
out the percolator; somebody else can get rid of the smell of mould in the
filter at the start of term. They're
like schoolkids the first day after they've broken up. There's a cameraderie you'll never find
during term-time; if you asked the older ones, they'd tell you it was like this
during the Blitz, down in the shelters or the Underground: united by a sense of
common purpose and shared inconvenience.
Are we downhearted? No!
It was a taste I began to acquire at the
point when our taste for French red wine had to be severely curtailed, though
we could have brought back crates and crates and crates of it in the estate
car, if it hadn't been full of carry-cots, push-chairs, nappy-liners and pink
plastic potties, one of which once got wedged under the indicator leads and
made it look as though we were trying to turn right all the way round the North
Circular (the North Circular! there was a road! God rot it!). But they didn't grow much red wine near the
caravan site at Littlestone; Kentish frogs kept their legs firmly on, and the
snails just left their trails up the towels we put out to dry and forgot about
and found twice as wet the following morning.
Jan's headscarf still flapped
and cracked in the bitterly cold wind that blew across the dunes, but it wasn't
really the same.
Having the kids made me feel grown-up, I
suppose, so I thought it was time to take on some of the other responsibilities
that went with that state. That was a
good rationalisation, anyway. I didn't
stay away from the caravan site for long, just a couple of days, and I only
went to the pub one night, and even then I wasn't alone with the new art
teacher in her self-designed, screen-printed, off-the-everywhere summer
dress. I got up very early in the
morning, watched the sun rise over Dover and Folkestone way, had a good breath
of the dawn-wind from Dungeness (no radiation in it then), pushed the car
gently as far away from the van as I could and started it up for the drive to
London on empty roads. It was
magical. I was free. The spiders' webs in the hedgerows
glittered with dew. I wound down the
windows and pretended the sign said Arles and not Ashford. I always got a stiff neck from the draught,
but I still wound the windows down. I
told myself it kept me awake. After the second day, I had a swift half
with the deputy head (so I could avoid the rush-hour - what other reason?) and
drove back to Petite Pierre in the gloaming.
It was never that late. The
lights were still on in the caravan. I
could hear our offspring crying and his mother trying to sing and cajole and
wheedle him to sleep. I used to sit in
the car a little longer than necessary, watching the sea go dark, and then
start glinting with the stray beams from the Dungeness light. I was teaching the Victorians in those
years, and I used to sit looking at the sea until I'd recited Dover Beach
right through correctly; then I'd go in and recite it to Baby, until he went to
sleep. If Matthew Arnold didn't work,
I tried Tennyson; The Princess was a sure-fire soporific.
You read in all the books - especially
the ones on human psychology that you have to mug up for the PGCE - that
creativity is a great human need. It
all depends what you create. In
my family we used the verb intransitively to mean 'going on about something',
'stirring up trouble', 'belly-aching', 'grizzling'. Jan's twice-weekly pottery classes brought me closer to the kids,
and closer to murder, than I ever wanted to get. But the sudden need for extra shelves and my recently released
desire to knock holes in things combined to open up the world of DIY to me. At first it was a self-destructive urge,
fingers, thumbs, plaster-dust in the eye, only one direct hit on a ring-main -
nothing irreparable (I actually liked the pots, and the shelves stayed up,
though a little more up at one end than the other). Then I moved into the stage of folie de grandeur. The children needed desks, the children
needed bunk beds - very well, I, Hepplewhite and Le Corbusier in one person,
would contrive them out of conti-board and plastic joints; but I needed space
in which to work! Perhaps I wanted to
fool myself that I could shape my own destiny with a circular saw. I wanted to construct the world I lived in
- without having recourse to simple delusions or a psychotic episode. The new Head of Department was five years
younger and didn't believe in literature or grammar - at least he'd never read
the one and he couldn't use the other.
In those days, when the very first home computers were still shooting
down alien spaceships, he was processing words on his - probably because he
needed the spell-checker. Give me an
old-fashioned dictionary every time: the plot may be hard to follow, but I love
the style.
So I would wave bye-bye to the family for
a week or so, and be picked up from the railway station, hiding my sticking
plasters. Even when little Sandra so
unexpectedly came on the scene, there was no change: the two boys were old
enough to give Jan the help she needed.
As she drove away, I noticed that she kept the car windows resolutely
shut; she'd long since given up wearing a head-scarf. One summer (I'd just changed from The Victorians to The
War-Poets) I pointed out how close the ferry-ports were, but she felt the boys
would prefer doigts de poisson to cuisses de grenouille and it'd
be hard to sterilise the teats in red wine.
It didn't take long for me to exhaust the
possibilities for major reconstruction in our Victorian semi: RSJ's and moorish
arches were not our style and not our price range either, so I turned to
renovation and refurbishment. I
started stripping the woodwork back to the bare wood: the way it had been in
the past (quite untrue, of course - the Victorians were great ones for layers
of thick, lead-based paints: a baby that sucked the bannisters got the
equivalent of four years on the hard shoulder of the M25). It was miserable work, but deeply satisfying
in the end: the sort of pleasure you get from squeezing blackheads and picking
scabs, except that the result was genuinely unblemished, and made you feel you
really had removed the later accretions and got down to basics. Jan was dubious at first - it wasn't as
bright a finish as the old brilliant white - but she soon saw reason when she
realized that the grubby handprints didn't show up as badly, and that the
varnish didn't chip off in great white lumps when Toby, the dog on wheels, ran
into it five times in a row.
After I'd done the doors and the
skirting and the staircase, I turned my attention the following summer to the
windows. The noise I made with the
spokeshave on the moulding reminded me of little Sandra's most recent assaults
on the English language; but it's always easier to endure shrill sounds if
you're making them yourself. Sopranos,
violinists, children and cats know this well.
I've always been puzzled by the
Victorians' attitude to windows, as if they had a fear of light: they copied
the Gothic mullion, and re-introduced the tiny leaded pane, but without the
sun-trapping bay or the mediaeval solar: the windows miss the views, and they
always face north, so they let in more draught than illumination: great for would-be
consumptive painters. But maybe I
malign them unjustly, and it's the speculative builders who're responsible for
the long thin introspective houses that stretch lightlessly back from the road,
cramming maximum living space into minimum frontage, with windows that
virtually look in on each other and have nothing French about them. Where a Georgian house would have opened on
to a terrace, or a modern one on to a patio (with barbecue corner), the
Victorians had a dour scullery, wash-house with copper, coal-store, or (in more
civilised, later times) an outside loo (also windowless).
Our domicile was no exception. A servants' staircase, narrow and shabby,
rose steeply just inside the back wall to a small landing, from which a door
led into what had been a kitchen when the house was two flats (you can see the
financial logic behind the caravan holidays), and was due to become Sandra's
room in two summers' time (you have to know what you're going to be doing -
otherwise, you might just do what you want, when you want to, and find you
enjoy it - and where would that leave you?)
The door that led in at the bottom from the outside world was glassless,
but a window on the landing let in enough light to stop you from breaking your
neck, and this was the one I had elected to start on - in case it was a
disaster. It was the only window we
had that overlooked the garden, and we never looked out of it. Hardly surprising, since you had to stand
on a ladder or balance on a step six inches wide to do so.
It wasn't what I saw, it was what I heard. I was crammed into the corner for better purchase and safety,
scraping away, when a gentle clicking sound reached my ears, and then laughter
- men's laughter, women's laughter, untroubled, unforced. A summer game, I thought. What summer games do you play? How Soon Before The Chef's Hat Falls Into
The Barbecue? How Much Of That Is Sun-Tan
And How Much Is Gravy-Browning?
Boule? (I find it hard to take
English people playing boule very seriously; it needs the stink of Gauloises
and the reek of cheese and the rasp of red wine - and the little old men in
their Basque berets, who are practising for lobbing bombs into the path of the Guardia
Civil.) I didn't bother to look
up. The whole atmosphere was so
leisurely that it had to be croquet.
Our neighbours, I thought. A
television producer between big houses because of his divorce. All over the lawn like a Dubonnet
commercial without the music. And I'd
have had trouble seeing into his garden anyway.
Then the voices came, and I knew it
couldn't be the neighbours. His new
wife was Californian (none of it was gravy-browning) and her kids sounded as
though she'd won them on a game-show.
This refined English accent was offering lemonade and equally refined
accents were accepting and spilling into small-talk that was far too small for
the people next-door. Curiosity
overcame common-sense, and I traversed to where I could see out of the window. The croquet-players were in our
garden.
If
I'd had more sense, I'd have realized that it couldn't have been ours, because
the plants were all different, the willow-tree simply wasn't there, the roses
had barely got started - but I'm basically brown-thumbed, and Jan does all
that, so I didn't think. I just did a
death-defying-leap without benefit of drum-roll, flew down the stairs, barged
open the door and emerged into a deserted garden. A blue-tit chirruped at me, and a sparrow continued taking a
dust-bath where a corner of the lawn ought to have been. Shamefacedly (though there was nobody to be
ashamed in front of) I slunk back to my work.
But I could still hear the voices.
And when, at last, I looked through the window again, the game was still
in progress.
They were playing with rapt attention,
as though it was really important, as though it wasn't just some survival from
the days of Edwardian graciousness that was indulged in mockingly by the
pretentious and the young fogeys, or played with galumphing good humour by lock
forwards getting over a hangover. They
meant it all: they meant the politeness; they meant the triumph of pegging out;
they meant the foot on their own ball that destined their rival's for somewhere
in the shrubbery or the woody perennials.
They meant the clothes, too, because they were dressed for the
game. The men's blazers were striped
with a boldness that precluded parody - except for the vicar, who, greatly
daring, and obviously a progressive in the line of muscular Christianity, had
shed his black frock coat and was in shirt-sleeves with his black waistcoat.
And then there was the daughter of the
household; in her early twenties, she was clearly idolised by all the young
men, and equally clearly she felt sorry for them in their inarticulate passion
and devotion. She let them all advise
her on how to play, even let them place her hands in the 'correct' position on
the shaft of the mallet - and then ignored everything they said. She was scrupulous in letting each one have
his turn, and scrupulous in sending them to her sister (a dumpy little girl of
sixteen, who clearly had a bad crush on the one with the darkest, waviest hair
and the most impressive moustache). She
didn't really know what to do with the attention, especially as she couldn't really
feel flattered by it. But she was
slowly picking up some charm by watching her elder sister, and her mother, who
had the family's high cheekbones and pointed face and laughing eyes.
I watched. I listened. I wondered
at that white lace dress with the tiny pleats that caught the light and spilt
it again, at the golden hair in all its little curls that bounced with each
toss of the head that wasn't meant as coquetry, but was just like a robin
looking at you on a winter afternoon, to see if you really are going to do some
digging. I'd forgotten what falling in
love was like. When you spend a good
part of each week discussing Romeo and Juliet with nubile
sixteen-year-olds, you have to get a little desensitised, otherwise you could
begin to imagine all kinds of things
which aren't true. But I couldn't take
my eyes off this one, and I couldn't hear enough of her voice.
When I was quite young, I used to imagine
that stories about 'real life' must be boring. After all, one lived it - what was the point of reading about it
as well? I wanted thrills and heroism
and warfare and spies and exploration and space. Then I read Jane Austen.
And I began to pay attention to where people sat at table and what they
chose to talk about. After that,
though, there was college and midnight coffee sessions, and you started
wondering about Mr Darcy's politics.
And then you started paying for having the babies taken off your hands
by 'doing the relatives', and it made me long for King Solomon's Mines and Kim. But when I listened to the
girl in the white lace dress, I actually started to care about Cousin Henry and
Auntie Flo, and Mr Midwick's apprentice's mother, who had such bad pains in her
knees.
I listened all day. They ate out of doors. A starched servant brought the lead crystal
and the Royal Worcester tureens and they had a highly elegant and grossly
uncomfortable picnic on the lawn. Then
they played charades and forfeits, and had tea, with cucumber sandwiches (the
bread cut very thin) and scones and strawberry jam - but there would be
no scones tomorrow because it was cook's day off. I've never been one for soap operas, but I couldn't tear myelf
away from this parade of domestic trivia.
At length, it grew dark, and they all went in, to have dinner with
father, who had had to be at the office all day, even though it was a
Saturday. The young gentlemen were not
invited, I gathered, but an excursion was planned, and cold mutton and beef,
with very hot mustard and pickles and picallili, were mentioned, and Box Hill,
and somebody said they would bring their young brother's kite, and everyone
else said what a capital idea that would be.
And then it was night-time, and I hadn't done a stroke of work all day,
and I didn't feel in the least guilty.
Somehow I had known from the very
beginning that they were ghosts. We
live our lives surrounded by them: there they are, in picture-frames, on
bookshelves, in LP sleeves. They look
at us, they talk to us - and we can't have any influence on them. They live their lives again and again, and
we can't change the expression in their eyes or the tone in their voice,
whatever we do. We, the living, are the
transient, the fleeting, the inconstant and mutable ones; if they noticed us at
all, they might pity us from their certainty.
I watched again the next day, and saw
them having breakfast, and observed the preparations for the picnic; and in the
evening I heard them discussing what it had been like - how even Father had
come, and enjoyed himself, and the vicar, too, had arrived after evensong as an
unusual and especial surprise, and how they all hoped the weather would
continue.
But it didn't. The next day was one that I had to spend in school, sending out
results, so I climbed my ladder between shower and breakfast, to see a damp and
dripping garden. In our garden, the
sun was out and the grass still shrivelling.
So I felt better about my task - but I had to rewrite ten postcards
because I got my finger on the wrong columns in the result sheet. Fortunately, the Deputy Head spotted the
mistake in time and asked me if there was anything wrong - 'at home', as he put
it. (I suppose he thought there
couldn't be anything wrong at school.)
He invited me out for our usual drink, but I refused, because I was
desperate to get back to that other world that I could see through my
window. I've never been a good
deceiver, so he must have thought I was having an affair. It was still raining, though.
I made excuse after excuse, and worked
till the small hours and beyond to make up for the time I spent gazing out at
the back garden that would be mine one day.
At last, the family came back, after an extended visit to my
in-laws. Jan was disappointed at how
little I'd achieved. I told her I'd
try to make up for it in the Christmas holidays, but she knew better than to
believe me. I felt like an adulterer. But all I'd done was look through a window
- and now it was closed. Only till
next summer, I told myself, only till next summer.
Through the year, I sneaked glimpses when
I could. The garden was there, as I
remembered it - their garden then, not our garden now - but it was always
empty, except for occasional washing, or the signs that a gardener had been
working: wheelbarrow, rake, pile of leaves.
I watched the seasons pass.
They had a warm spell in May, when we had a wet period, and I caught a
sight of the family walking in the garden to smell the honeysuckle. But then Jan was calling me to fix the
windscreen wipers, and when I got back, they'd gone.
I lived for late July and early August, for the peace of an empty house, and the chance to look out into another world. Not that my own world was so unpleasant. But it was mine, and I was trapped in it: it was finite, and the other one seemed so endless to me - I've always found it easier to take an interest in things that don't actually involve me. And she was still there. Still unmarried, still playing so indulgently with all those eager young men. It was summer. It was going to last forever.
Maybe the Deputy Head had had a word with
Jan. Anyway, she drove up unexpectedly
to fetch me down to Littlestone - the kids were missing me, she said. She didn't mention her own feelings. I went with her - what else could I do? -
but I came back early; I pleaded work - work of all kinds - work in the house,
work in school, preparations for the GCSE (I hadn't thought what the change
would mean: no excuse to get away) - she didn't try to keep me. We've never been very good at head-on
confrontations; we get too upset that for once we don't want the same thing,
and we haven't the heart to negotiate like civilised people. She probably thought that I was doing the
civilised (or the uncivilised) thing by our neighbour: the television producer
had landed a job in Hollywood and gone off with his secretary from Forest Gate,
leaving his Californian wife pregnant, doubly-mortgaged and even more
browned-off than her complexion.
I tried to make up for my desertion. I tried to take all the good feelings that
I got from looking through that window, and use them in my life for the rest of
the year. As if it was The Holiday,
that gives you strength to carry on.
But the tan wears off, and the rope-soled shoes fall to pieces, and
nobody wears clothes like that in the winter.
And my longing for summer was getting worse. I thought - I thought - what if I climbed out through the
window, dropped gently to the top of the bathroom extension (would it have been
there? yes, the roof-line was right -
there were no other marks, and it
looked the same age as the rest of the house) - and if I were wearing my old
cavalry twills, and a plain shirt - would they accept me? Could I actually escape? Earn a living? Be an inventor? Write
people's poetry and novels before they did?
I hadn't thought any of it through.
Perhaps all I wanted to do was play a game of croquet and place her
hands in the right position on the shaft of the mallet - maybe I only wanted to
see them all close to, and listen to their voices without straining.
It wasn't to be. The day after the family left, I had a
phone-call from Jan saying she'd developed chicken-pox. I went down by train and took a taxi to the
caravan-site and looked after her and the kids. She didn't have it too badly, so I was able to leave her for a
couple of days, to go and help with the results. That's what I told her.
It was true. It was the last
time it would be like this, I told her - for old time's sake - it would be
mostly internal from now on, and there wouldn't be this momentous day when you
suddenly found out The Truth - when They told you what They thought. I had to be there. The last time.
I drove up the night before. I had the setting sun in my eyes most of
the way, and was glad when it went behind clouds. It was a little chilly and I kept the car windows closed. By the time I got to our house, it was
dark. Both gardens were empty and
moonless. One of the kids rang (as I'd
asked) to tell me that everything was still all right. I went to bed very early, and was up at
dawn, watching. I'd not known them to
be up that early, but I certainly heard movements, and then I saw the starched
servant (a different one, as it happened - so things did change)
bringing out a long table, laying it with fine stiff linen and silver. Then the breakfast appeared: chafing dishes
with paraffin burners under them: kidneys, black pudding, mushroom, bacon,
fried eggs, scrambled eggs, kedgeree.
Then came the rows of toast slotted into racks, the curls of butter, the
crystal dishes of lemon and orange marmalade, the milk, the tea, the hot water. The table was ready for its occupants. But I wasn't ready for what I saw.
All those fine young men came out first,
their eyes bright, their hair pomaded, their moustaches assertive; and they
were all in uniform. I felt the ladder
sway under me. Why hadn't I
thought? Why hadn't I done
research? Found out who lived here
then? Found out when then
was? The Boer War, I said to myself,
perhaps it's only that - bad enough, goodness knows, but - no, I knew
better. They were all wearing khaki,
not the jolly, impractical red. I knew
the cut from photographs of young poets who never became old poets. I knew what I should have known all along:
I was looking at dead men. They were
all dead. The summers were gone. The summers that lasted for ever. The summers that were courting and flirting
and picnics and charades and no hurry for marriage. The summers that were croquet and tea on the lawn and cucumber
sandwiches. No one was ever coming
back. She was kissing them all, going
along the row; scrupulously kissing them all, each in an individual way, but
not one more than another. Her sister,
behind, was doing the same - but she was showing who she liked and who she
didn't. I could see her out with the
white feathers before long, taking a fearful pride in the lads who died for
her. She was dry-eyed, whilst the
elder daughter was already crying before she'd reached the end of the line, and
the mother was looking resigned, and the father was speaking, something about
showing the Kaiser - I wanted desperately to interrupt him, to show him
all those sepia-tinted photographs of carnage, of torn-up mud and torn-up
bodies, of shreds of cloth and flesh hanging on the old barbed wire. I wanted to tell him that a dead archduke
in a town where there were more minarets than church steeples shouldn't be
allowed to give work to name-gravers in every village in every shire, that we
shouldn't have to remember them at the rising of the sun and the going down of
the same if we'd never made them go, and that once they'd gone we should have
cut the pride and the profits and had them home again. I wanted to make him listen, I wanted to
make them all listen. I shouted. I screamed. I pounded on the glass of the window. It broke and there was blood halfway up my arm. Through the jagged hole I could see a
willow-tree and an empty garden.
I told Jan how I'd been stripping paint
and the spokeshave had slipped and gone through the window with my arm after
it. 'Over a hundred years old that
glass was, the glazier said - they made it differently then - thinner, much
more brittle - he was amazed it had lasted that long,' I told her. She ran a hand over the elastoplast round
my wrist. 'Scars of battle,' she said. 'That's what happens,' I said, 'when you
try to do it all yourself.' 'I thought
that was the new examination system,' she said. 'Next year,' I smiled, 'next year.'
We did the War Poets again, and the Head
of Department said we ought to do a field trip, couldn't let history and
geography get away with all the claims on the budget, not with financial
devolution coming up - we needed to stake our claim to a realistic level of
expenditure (not exactly Shakespeare, is it?)
So I said, what about a trip round the battlefields of France? Coach over on the Hovercraft, youth
hostels, link up with Modern Languages, Henry V coming round on tour,
European integration, 1992 - and he said okay.
Jan said okay as well - the boys went off
to a field camp somewhere with the Woodland Folk, introduced to it all by the
kids next door, who'd begun to talk South London in self-preservation. That left Sandra, who'd calmed down into
one of those heart-breakingly lovely four-year olds who make you wish you could
tell time to stop just there.
It was blowy on the Hovercraft. Jan put her headscarf on.
We'd never seen so many poppies. The whole of France seemed red. Sandra kept on picking them and bringing
them to us. 'One bunch for Mummy, one
bunch for Daddy.' It made us cry all
the time.