Blast from the Past

22

Polly finally left the peace camp with the gap that Jack had left in her heart and soul still not filled. She was unsettled and restless. She could not return to her old life, the one she had known years before; it had moved on without her. All her friends from that time were already in their second year at university. She saw them occasionally but she no longer had anything in common with them. She knew that deep down they felt sorry for her.

“But what are you going to do after all this?” they asked. “You can’t just be a protester all your life.”

“Yeah, well, maybe I can,” Polly replied, but she knew that it sounded stupid.

Still looking for something and nothing she became a traveller, a member of one of the New Age convoys that roamed the country at the time. Polly liked living on the move. It gave her the impression that she was going somewhere. She started seeing a casual dope dealer called Ziggy who owned a Volkswagen Camper. Polly was fond of Ziggy. He was thirty-six and painfully handsome with deep, piercing blue eyes. He had a Ph.D. in Ergonomics and was an extremely bright and interesting conversationalist, when he was not stoned. Unfortunately this was only for about fifteen minutes each morning. For the rest of the day Ziggy tended to merely giggle a lot.

It was fun for a while, rejecting hierarchy and property, but it couldn’t last. Slowly but surely Polly began to long for a more structured life, a life where she could watch television without having to stare through the window at Dixons and go to the toilet without taking a spade. She was twenty-one, Mrs Thatcher had just won yet another election, and Polly had not been entirely clean since Duran Duran had been at the top of the charts.

She left Ziggy, which hurt him badly.

“But why, Poll?” he asked. “I thought we had a scene going.”

“It’s the giggling, Ziggy. I just can’t handle the giggling.”

“I’ll giggle less,” he pleaded. “I’ll start smoking hash instead of grass. It’s a much mellower high.”

But it was no use. Polly left the convoy and moved to London, where she virtually became a street person, spending two months standing on the never-ending picket outside the South African Embassy. It was while on the anti-apartheid picket that Polly met an alternative comedian called Dave, whose opening line was “Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. Would you like to see my bollocks?” Dave was nice, but he was, in his own words, “Not into monogamy, right?” In truth, he saw his gigs as no more than a good way of pulling girls. There might have been a time when Polly would have turned a blind eye to such behaviour, but these were the great days of AIDS paranoia so Polly took one last look at Dave’s bollocks and moved on again.

It was around this time that Jack also moved on, leaving his regiment in Germany and returning to the US to take up a post at the Pentagon. He, like Polly (and Bono) hadn’t found what he was looking for either, but, unlike Polly, he had a good idea of what it was and where it might be found. What Jack was looking for was success and, for a soldier without a war to fight, that meant going to Washington. In Washington promotion prospects were, if not good, certainly better than on the Rhine.

It was a frustrating time for an ambitious soldier, although paradoxically the military had never been held higher in the nation’s esteem. Reagan, who had never served in the forces himself, was a soldier’s president. He believed in big defence budgets and plenty of parades. US prestige could not have been greater, the Soviet Union was haemorrhaging in Afghanistan and the corridors of power buzzed with news of the famed Star Wars initiative with which the Pentagon intended to militarize space. Public interest in the army was unprecedented, with gung-ho movies like Rambo and Top Gun filling the cinemas. Things had improved considerably since the dark days of twenty years before when an adolescent Jack had refused to accompany his parents and his brother Harry to see MASH and Catch 22, a terrible, demoralizing time when America had been briefly ashamed of its fighting men.

None the less, for all the celluloid mayhem, real soldiers do actually need real wars in order to be promoted. If the fellow above you does not get shot, then you have to wait twenty years for him to retire and the same goes for the fellow above him. Jack was thirty-six and getting frustrated.

“I’m middle-fucking-aged and still a captain!” he wrote to Harry. “I was one of the youngest captains ever. You remember that? It was in the local paper and everything.”

Harry did indeed remember it. Their father and mother had been furious with embarrassment.

“Not only does he have to be a soldier,” Jack Senior had lamented over his muesli and fat-free organic yogurt. “He has to be a successful soldier. Why didn’t we just bring up a fascist and be done with it! I just hope that none of my students get to hear about this. Every day I bust my ass trying to civilize young people and now my own son is the youngest damn captain in the army!”

At the time Jack had been delighted at his father’s discomfort, but as the years went by and he felt himself sinking into career doldrums Jack felt less inclined to crow.

“The youngest captain, Harry!” Jack wrote from Washington. “That was what I was for a couple of years, and by hell did I rub Pa’s face in it? Then for a while I was a youngish captain, now I’m just a reasonable age to be a captain. It won’t be long before I’m an old captain. Then like thousands of other captains I’m going to have to decide whether to retire and strike out in civilian life, fifteen years behind all the other guys (with you and Dad laughing in my face), or stay on and face the possibility of a very sad career indeed. Jesus, when Napoleon was my age he’d conquered the world once and was thinking about making a comeback! When Alexander the Great was my age he was dead! I know I’m a good soldier, Harry, but there’s no way of showing it. On parade I just look the same as all the other guys. You remember Schultz? The geek nerd I told you about before? He’s in Washington too and he has equal seniority with me!! Equal!! I mean, he’s a decent guy and all that, but Jesus! He has the strategic instincts of a lemming!”

Harry was in no doubt what Jack should do. He told him to cut his losses and get out.

“Never,” Jack wrote back. “The army is my life and I will never give it up, no matter how badly it treats me.”

The truth was that Jack had already cut his losses. He had given up Polly in pursuit of military glory and whether he found that glory or not, he could never get back what he had lost.

As for Polly, she was in a much worse position than Jack. As the eighties turned into the nineties she was without a proper home, without possessions, without qualifications or security of any kind, and she was lonely.

She went to live in a squat in Acton, a sad house with boarded-up windows that had been repossessed by the council because they were widening the A40 to Oxford. It was occupied mainly by the warriors of Class War, a loose collective of malcontents made up principally of Oxbridge graduates who wanted to destroy the state, probably because unlike most of their friends they had failed to get high-ranking jobs at the BBC.

At twenty-five Polly knew that her life was twisting downwards, out of control, but she did not know how to stop it. All her old friends were young professionals with incomes. Polly no longer saw them, but her mother, of course, kept her informed about their huge successes. Most of Polly’s more recent friends were either stoned, in prison or chained to lumps of concrete in tunnels underneath the roadworks on Twyford Down. The new decade had also brought with it the threat of war in the Middle East, which was most depressing for Polly, since if there was one meaningful thing she had tried to do over the previous eight years it was fight for peace.

By a strange twist of fate it was because of Saddam Hussein that Polly came to see Jack again, if only for a moment and only on the television, but it was a painful shock none the less. It was in January 1991 and Polly and friends were lying around their squat on their damp mattresses watching the military build-up in the Gulf through the window of their tiny black and white portable television screen. John Major had just been speaking about the need to stand up to aggression and tinpot despots wherever they reared their heads.

“Ha!” said Polly earnestly. “If Kuwait dug potatoes instead of oil we wouldn’t give a toss about them. We didn’t mind about tinpot despots in Chile and Nicaragua, did we? And why? Because they were our tinpot despots, weren’t they?”

Polly was just working herself up into a fair state of righteous anger when it happened. Suddenly, Jack was in the room. Standing in front of a tank, now a full colonel, and giving it as his opinion that Saddam’s men were lions led by donkeys.

“We don’t want to have to kill these soldiers,” Jack said from within the tiny TV, “but let the butcher of Baghdad be under no illusions that we will kill them, and we will kill them quickly and efficiently.”

Polly felt like she had been kicked. It was so unexpected and over so soon. While her companions continued to argue with the talking heads on television she retreated to the kitchen, all the anger and hurt welling up inside her once again.

And the love.

He still looked beautiful to her. Achingly so. Even in one of those awful Wehrmacht-style helmets that the Americans had taken to wearing at that time. He looked so commanding and so confident, so strong, forceful and fit. All of a sudden Polly found that she did not just miss Jack, she was jealous of him. Jack knew what he wanted, he knew where he was going, he always had and he was still on the winning side. Polly wiped the silverfish off the breadboard and started to cry.