LITMIR.BIZ

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boys much as she regarded other epidemics. Later she told you, as she stomped past, ‘This time the child has survived. You have a living sister. Last time – dead, I’m sorry to say. Defunct – from something congenital.’

      Here was revealed the reason for your mother having never acquired a great liking for you. There had been an earlier child of your parents’ marriage, a girl, born in the year after their wedding. Had your father been carrying some unacknowledged disease, acquired when he was soldiering in the Great War, from the prostitutes of Cairo? In any event, for whatever malevolent cause, this baby was stillborn, cast up on the desolate shores of non-existence.

      At a later date, when superstition had largely fallen away with the advance of medicine, to deliver a stillborn baby was no disgrace. But then – in that dreadful Then of the nineteen-twenties – Nurse Gill would have whisked the little body away immediately after delivery, hiding the corpse under a cloth – you visualized a tea cloth – possibly without letting the poor, suffering mother see it, or touch it; its fatal limbs, its unformed face with the eyes tightly squeezed closed, never to open.

      No great wonder your mother developed a poisonous fantasy – as all fantasies are, at base, poisonous. Perhaps Mary could never convince herself her child was dead, since she never set eyes on it. In later years, mothers would have been permitted, encouraged, to hold this outcast from their fallible bodies, flesh of their flesh, their dead child, and so to offer it, if only for a minute, the recognition and love it could never return.

      How greatly your mother desired another daughter as substitute for the dead one you could not imagine. Indeed, she poisoned her mind, and the minds of her children, by indulging in a fantasy, the fantasy that this first daughter had lived for six months and been the very image of perfection. The fantasy daughter even had a name. It was called Valerie. This consoling fantasy settled on Mary’s blood like a vampire. No living child could possibly rival, in Mary’s eyes, the virtues of the dead Valerie.

      When you emerged into the world, four years after this still-born girl, you entered a stifling imagined scenario of tragedy. Your mother could find no place for a boy amid the interstices of her dream. As for your father – unable to enter into this suffocating pretence – he was destroyed in a different way; estranged from your mother in a separation which further increased a propensity for loneliness in his nature.

      ‘Valerie never did that,’ she said when you broke a cup. ‘Valerie would never make such a horrid noise,’ she would say if you shouted. ‘Valerie ate her food properly,’ she said when you splashed your soup. At every turn, you were condemned by this unliving, but overwhelming, figment of your mother’s imagination.

      Later in life, you found that your mother had been visiting a psychotherapist in Norwich for some years during the period of your growing up.

       Do you remember weeping?

      I never wept.

      Oh, indeed you did.

      Your parents were at home on that momentous day early in September, and in a bad mood. Your mother was saying she felt cross with Neville Chamberlain. A gloomy silence ensued.

      Martin said, meditatively, that September was the traditional season in which to go to war. In olden times, the peasants had got in the harvest and were free to be sent to fight for the lord of the manor.

      ‘Never mind all that,’ said Mary, irritably.

      ‘It’s a factor.’

      ‘It’s a bally nuisance,’ Mary replied. ‘Going to war with Germany like this. What does Ribbentrop think, I wonder? Valerie would have been terrified. Why can’t we let Hitler get on with it? What he does on the Continent is nothing to do with us, is it?’

      Your father replied, ‘I’ve always said that if Churchill and Lord Vansittart didn’t keep quiet, we would have to go to war again. Typical Tories … It’s a fine muck-up and no mistake.’

      ‘It is a mistake,’ Mary said. Her knitting needles clicked together in anger. ‘War again. We’ve only just got over the last one. People getting killed all over again.’

      ‘But different people this time,’ you said, attempting to console.

      Your parents were talking in the sitting room. Martin Fielding had bought a small mansion, standing in parkland on the outskirts of Southampton, and a car to go with it. The plane manufacturers had promoted him from head of the ‘heavy gang’ to an office job on better pay. He remained head of the trades union chapel. You had seen him come home with several yards of cable under his coat, together with electrical equipment of various kinds. You had heard your mother protest, to which your father had answered, ‘The bosses rob us men, so it’s fair we should take something back.’ And that settled the matter.

      When you had asked Mary if dad was a criminal, she’d told you angrily to be quiet about it.

      ‘Your father’s a Socialist, and Socialists share everything.’

      Your father’s knowledge of the past, as revealed in his remark about the convenience of having wars begin in September, stayed with you for some while. He was knowledgeable, yet in other ways so stupid, so insensitive to others. It seemed a puzzle. How vexing were parents. But then, you considered it ‘aristocratic’ to be puzzled.

      You had only one term at Birmingham University before you received a buff envelope. Inside was an Enlistment Notice saying you were required to present yourself at a nearby barracks for primary training. A postal order for four shillings was also enclosed ‘in respect of advance of service pay’. You were Called Up.

      Geology was forgotten, together with many other things. Your country needed you.

      The men of the family went down to their local pub, The Black Hind, with their friends, and held a council of war. The date was 15th May, 1940, only four days after Winston Churchill had been confirmed as prime minister. You were with your regiment in Catterick, preparing for embarkation overseas. While pints were being ordered, to begin the meeting someone repeated the opening of the Robb Wilton monologue, ‘The day war broke out, my wife said to me, What are you going to do about it?’ But that, in fact, was the subject of their meeting.

      Martin opened proceedings by announcing that he had already joined the Local Defence Volunteers. He advised all those over conscription age to join. Walter Pratchett, a young man working in a solicitor’s office, said he had volunteered for service in the Royal Navy and would be away shortly. Many other men had plans to defend their country against invasion.

      Claude Hillman, generally talkative enough, said nothing. He had been first in the pub and was drinking steadily. Martin asked him what the matter was.

      ‘Quote from a book I read recently,’ Claude growled. ‘“Sir, I have quarrelled with my wife and a man who has quarrelled with his wife is absolved from all duty to his country.”’

      ‘You and Ada again?’ said Martin.

      ‘She was the apple of my eye, really the apple of my eye. Now she’s a crab apple.’

      ‘She’s borne you two children.’

      Claude managed a smile. He tapped on the table with an index finger. ‘Indeed she has, and mortal terrors they are. Her body – excuse me if I speak thus of your dear sister, Martin – her body was wild white winter, once upon a time. Now it has fruited and fallen back to autumn, season of yellow fruitlessness. War provides us with an excuse to get away from the womenfolk.’

      Wally Pratchett was recently married and violently dissented.

      Martin did not look particularly pleased, but other men seized on the topic of womanhood, saying that they hoped women – whom they termed ‘the good old girls’ – would play their part in the conflict. Which is what happened. While the Third Reich ordered its womenfolk to Kindermachen, confining them to the home to make future soldiery, British women went into industry and agriculture and many other jobs, to fill vacancies left by men who had become soldiers, sailors or airmen.

      When

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