Shuttlecock

[8]

During the war my Dad was a spy. He used to be dropped into occupied France and liaise with resistance fighters, keep watch on German installations and help to blow them up. He wrote a book about his exploits, in the fifties, and for a few years his name was well-known, he was one of the war-heroes. He isn’t so well-known now — his book’s long been out of print — but if you mention his name to people of a certain age, it still rings a dim bell, they know who you mean. Dad was involved in a succession of daring operations in France, which reached their height in the intense period between D-day and the Allied invasion of Germany. It was during this period that he was captured by and subsequently escaped from the Gestapo.

I read Dad’s book when it first came out, when I could scarcely have been eleven. It was called Shuttlecock: The Story of a Secret Agent. ‘Shuttlecock’ was Dad’s code-name during his final operations in France. I remember that I did not know this word and dared not ask Dad what it meant, and for some time I believed it was a special word invented solely for Father, until one day I found out what a shuttlecock really was: a thing you take swipes at and knock about, like a golf ball. Now I think of it, Dad must have got the idea for writing his book during that same period when I had my hamster. You remember in the early and mid-fifties, when the actual after-effects of the war were fading, rationing was ending, there was a whole spate of war books and war films. He was already sitting up, late at night, in the spare-room-cum-study of our house at Wimbledon, making notes and rough drafts, by the time Sammy died. Perhaps when I next see Dad at the hospital I will say to him: You started Shuttlecock because of me, didn’t you? Because you and I seemed to be getting on fine.

But the irony of it was I fell away from Dad after I read his book. I’d already been falling away from him after Sammy was chucked into the boiler, but the book clinched it. Oh, it wasn’t that I didn’t find the book extraordinary, amazing — terrific stuff — that I didn’t admire Dad. But, having a hero for a father — even having a father who isn’t a hero but who works in a plush office and plays golf on Sundays with a little retinue of worshippers — all this is bad news if you’re an only son.

It wasn’t that I reverted to how things were before — to flying into fits and biting Dad’s hands. But this sullen hostility, this mutual evasion and distrust grew up between us. I gave up being his caddy, for a start (one of those Sunday mornings, Dad at the foot of the stairs: ‘Are you coming or not?’ Silence — mine. And then the front door slamming and Dad’s car revving extra hard outside.) And this was just at the time when Dad was starting to teach me how to use his driver. I made it pretty clear that I didn’t care two hoots (I cared, in fact, a good many hoots) about his being a famous spy — even though at certain functions and social gatherings I had to wear (along with Mother, of course, who did it sincerely) a grudging mask of idolatry. When his book came out and reflected glory shone upon me at school I made a point of not bathing in it and of acting as if I found the whole business a bore. So, he blew up ammunition trains? He escaped from the SS? So? And the result of all this, of course, as time wore on, was that Dad gave me up. He ceased to be interested in me as I ceased to be interested in him. When I left school my future had already stopped being a concern of his. When I started in my present job — naturally, I resisted all pressure to become an engineer and to seek an opening in his firm — his reaction was unbridled scorn: ‘Police work, eh? Police work!’ And even when I got married, got a house of my own, had children — his grandchildren — he did not unfreeze. He fell back on his life with Mum, and on his work — where, of course, he was still as sprightly and as popular as ever. One particular bone of contention: he has never shown any affection for Marian — not even the attentions due to a daughter-in-law; which I’ve always resented, because if there was ever any feud, it was between Dad and me only. But Marian and Dad have never been friends; and this became more marked after Mother’s death.

When I come home on the Tube in the evening, scanning the rows of faces, reading the adverts for deodorants, hair-transplants and staff agencies, I think it strange that my father was a spy, that he knew adventure, danger, did all those heroic things. I think it even stranger that that same hero is now a human vegetable. His past exploits perhaps mean nothing to him; it’s as if it was never he who carried them out. Certainly, he can no longer talk about them.

And maybe that’s why I’ve taken up his book again. There are two copies of it in our house. One has my name in it and ‘From your loving Father’ in Dad’s writing — bold and slanting — and the date, September 1957. Ever since Dad went into his silence I’ve been poring over it. I must have read it a dozen times, and each time I read it, it seems to get not more familiar but more elusive and remote. There are a thousand questions I want to ask, about things that aren’t actually stated in the book. About how Dad felt at the time, about what was going on inside him. Because Dad doesn’t write about his feelings; he describes events, and where his feelings come into it he conveys them in a bluff, almost light-hearted way, as in some made-up adventure story; so that sometimes this book which is all fact seems to me like fiction, like something that never really took place. What really happened, Dad, at Auxonne? At Combe-les-Dames? What was it like to blow up railways? To hide in a water tank, in four feet of water, all night, while the Gestapo hunted you? To be in constant danger? What was it like when German-hired Cossacks captured one of your comrades and burnt him alive? What was it like, what was it really like?

It’s odd that all the time I could have asked him these things, I never did — as if I was never concerned to know the whole truth. And now, when the answers won’t come, I want to ask floods of questions. Why is this? It’s because for the first time I realize that Dad is in that book. He’s in there somewhere. It’s not some other man, in those pages, with a code-name, Shuttlecock. It’s a former consultant engineer, a golf player, a widower, the victim of a mental breakdown. I want to put the two together. Or — put it another way — the book is Dad. It’s more Dad than that empty effigy I sit beside at the hospital. When I pick it up I still possess Dad, I hold him, even though he’s gone away into unbreakable silence. At weekends when Marian talks to her plants I bury myself in Dad’s book.

‘Chapter Six: With the Maquis Again’.