Shuttlecock

[9]

Did I mention, by the way, a little while back, something about taking my kids out on the common at weekends to play healthy games with bats and frisbees? It doesn’t really happen, of course. You will have gathered that my relations with Martin and Peter aren’t exactly harmonious. Not that we don’t go out on the common. But that picture — the exuberant father, the frisky children — it’s quite wrong. I have to half drag them along, for a start. I get out my old cricket bat (my cricket bat, you notice, from distant school-days — Martin and Peter have never expressed the slightest interest in cricket); or I find the plastic football or the bright red frisbee I bought Peter for his last birthday (a marvellous invention, the sort of thing you’d expect two young boys to play with endlessly and tire out their Dad), and I say: ‘Right! We’re going to the common. No arguments!’

And what happens? I work up vain enthusiasm. They stubbornly refuse to enter the spirit of the game. They look bored. They want to know what the time is. There is something on television. They moan about being made to run and they argue about who should fetch the ball when, in a spasm of frustration, I take an excessive, but not unpleasing swipe with the bat, which sends it into the distance. They fail to be impressed by or to seek to emulate my expertise with the frisbee (I am very good at the under-hand boomerang shot). They look upon me as some sort of demented PT instructor. All this simply isn’t natural. And I have to confess another thing. Once, last summer (this is only one of a number of similar instances), when Martin was being particularly troublesome, pretending not to have found one of those knocked-for-six balls, which, when I walked over to him, he suddenly ‘spotted’ at his feet in the long grass beneath a tree, I had this sudden urge, as he stooped to pick it up, to raise my bat and bring it down, hard, like a club, on the back of his head. I could have done it, I really could.

So we go less and less to the common. Now I wouldn’t mind if it was just I who was the obstacle — if Martin and Peter went off to the common to play by themselves — but they don’t do this either. And these days it seems that I too, for some inexplicable reason, for some spiteful reason, because what I really want to do is precisely the opposite, am choosing to stay indoors when we could go out.

Today, for instance, is Saturday, the very last day in April. The weather’s still fine and warm. It’s been exceptionally fine all week. Everything’s grown so much in only a few days: the chestnuts on the common, the May trees, the sycamores — but enough of that. Marian slips an arm around me while she makes a morning cup of coffee. I still haven’t told her, incidentally, about my promotion.

‘Darling, why don’t we go out somewhere today after lunch — even before lunch? A picnic? We’ve done the shopping; there’s nothing to stop us. It’s the first decent Saturday of the year.’

And almost immediately, because it’s Marian who’s said it, not me, and even though the very same idea has been crossing my mind since breakfast, I say: ‘I don’t know. I’ve got things to do.’

‘What things?’

‘Oh, odd jobs. This and that.’

Lies, of course. There’s nothing I have to do. Though I suddenly see what I can do, what I will do.

‘Well, tomorrow,’ Marian says forbearingly. ‘If it’s still nice.’

‘I’m going to see Dad tomorrow.’

Marian looks peevish. This is a sore point. Because I insist on my visits to Dad, we lose days together.

‘I thought we might go to Richmond and walk along the river.’

I know why she has said this. It is one of my favourite short outings. There’s a pub on the river bank with seats outside where children can sit. Then you can walk along the towpath, upstream, past Ham House, as far as Teddington Lock if you want.

‘It’d be nice,’ she adds, and gives me a little solicitous look. I know what it means. It means that for some while now she’s been noticing there’s something on my mind, I’m wound up about something. She daren’t ask directly what it is, of course. She knows better than that. But her wisdom tells her what might be a remedy for it: relaxation; air; the sun on the water; dipping willows. You see, Marian is really a very good woman.

‘No.’ I shake my head. ‘But it’s all right — you go.’

Now this is a sharp move. It means that Marian must either say, ‘Well, I’m not going if you’re not coming,’ and then we bicker and have a scene; or she really must go without me and run the risk of seeming to neglect me. In the end she plumps (just as I would too) for bold assertion.

‘Okay. I will. I’ll enjoy it too.’

But now there’s an atmosphere of hostility.

‘I’ll take the car then?’ she adds.

‘No you won’t.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because you won’t take the car, that’s why.’ (I want the car for my own reasons.)

‘Well, how do we get to Richmond?’

‘You can take a bus. You’ve heard about buses? A number 37, all the way. I’ll even give you the fare.’

‘Thanks.’

She plonks a cup of coffee down in front of me. We might as well have had an all-out scene. But she can still change her mind.

‘Won’t you come?’ she says after a sullen, coffee-sipping pause. The first sign of real weakness.

‘No!’ I say adamantly.

I go into the living-room, shutting the kitchen door. The boys are lolling about, reading comics. The television is still in the living-room. The boys could switch it on — there are Saturday morning programmes for kids — but they daren’t. They know I’d hit them.

I clap my hands, like an animal-trainer. ‘Right, you’re going out this afternoon, for a walk by the river at Richmond.’

They give me slow, uninterested looks.

‘It’s all right, I’m not coming. I’ve got things to do. You’re going with Mum — it’s her idea — on the bus.’ And almost immediately their eyes, which only a second before had been full of reluctance, begin to show enthusiasm — and relief. This hurts me. Believe me, it does. You see, when I said I didn’t mind if it was just I who was the obstacle, that was a lie. What is it that Marian’s got that I haven’t got? Why do the kids have no axe to grind with Marian?

‘Will we go to the pub?’ Peter asks.

‘No. You’re not going till after lunch. But there’s a café. I expect you’ll get an ice-cream or a drink. If you’re good.’

Martin looks up at me resentfully. I fancy that out of the corner of one eye he is glancing slyly towards the television then back to me. That is the difference between Martin and Peter. Peter is the one who got the shaking last Monday, but he has almost forgotten it. Martin is growing up (he will be eleven soon): he bears grudges.

I fish in my pocket. ‘Martin, come here.’ I pull out four pound notes and when Martin gets up I hold them out to him.

‘These are for you. When you get on the bus, you pay for the fares. Don’t let Mum pay for anything, understand? And, if there’s any change, I want it back.’

‘Yes Dad.’

I look into his shifting, sharp little face. He is probably already thinking of ways to pocket the money, or at least hold onto the change. I wonder whether Marian will stand for it, whether it’ll make her feel uncomfortable, or whether she’ll insist on paying with her own money. And what will Martin do if Marian tells him to keep hold of the money? I look at him. He has cunning, grey-blue eyes under his mop of sandy hair. He’s clever enough to understand all this, and to see that I’m testing him.

‘Right, put it somewhere safe.’

Later, after lunch, when Marian and the boys have gone, I get down the copy of Dad’s book from the shelf in the living-room and start to read it. I read from either of the two copies indiscriminately, picking up whichever is to hand, but naturally the one I value more is the one inscribed by Dad himself. I keep this in our bedroom. That is, usually. For as I sit down now to read the copy from the living-room I discover that at some time or other I have got the two muddled up. The one I have opened has Dad’s words in it. ‘… From your loving Father. September 1957.’

I sit down in the armchair by the french windows. The afternoon sun has crept round to shine slant-wise across the garden, and its rays fall obliquely on the glass. The sky is cloudless. I could, of course, sit outside. I look at my watch. It has just turned two. I have about three hours. I could put up a deck-chair on the grass. But I want to feel, though of course it isn’t the case at all, that I have been deliberately left behind and forbidden to go out. I want to feel they have gone and left me like some wicked child being punished or some unwanted kill-joy. But what I really want is to read Dad’s book.

Dad is in Caen. Caen — ‘that testing ground of the future allied advance’. It is six weeks before D-day. He is collecting information on troop movements, supply shipments and on the defences of Caen itself, all of which may be of vital importance in the forthcoming invasion. There is a factory in the town which has been turned over to the production of spare parts for divisions on the coast. The details and timing of shipments from the factory have to be known so that effective sabotage can be carried out. This information can only be obtained by gaining access to the supply schedules of the divisions themselves, or more feasibly — but no less hazardously — by secretly examining documents in the office of the factory supervisor.

… I myself volunteered to carry out this task. I knew the lay-out of the factory as well as the others, and the risk was not as great as for Jules and Émile who, after all, would have to stay in Caen and did not have an intelligence network to ferry them out of the area. I learnt how to crack a safe of the type in the patron’s office from an old Lyonnais called Maurice, who had been a petty crook in his younger days but was now putting his criminal expertise to patriotic use.

We were fortunate in that the factory was an old, rambling building, slackly guarded, and that the managerial offices, empty at night, occupied an annexe away from the factory itself, across a yard, and abutting other assorted, mostly disused buildings not belonging to the factory complex. They could be approached independently by a roof-top route. The Germans had foolishly expended most of their resources for guarding the factory — sentries, dogs, searchlights — on the factory itself and little on the offices — though it was here that, in the long term, most damage could be done.

Gaining access to the office was to prove a relatively easy part of the operation; but the circumstances of the roof-top route were such that, though an excellent means of approach, it would make an arduous and risky exit. In order to escape from the factory I would have to descend from the office by a back staircase, cross part of the factory yard and scale a section of the rear factory wall where it turned a convenient corner screening me from the main area of the yard and, so I hoped, the sentries. I was provided with a rope. Jules and Émile were to be waiting, in hiding, near the other side of the wall. When they saw the rope flung over, they were to use it to haul me up the inner side of the wall and, reaching the top, I was to descend on the other side by the simple means of jumping into a sort of cradle formed by their arms — not the most reliable method, but a quick one and one we had practised several times before.

Success rested on the reported laxity of the guards, and a good measure of luck. These were urgent days, when there was no time for delay or finesse. We could no longer rely on the R A F to ease our work — they were now reluctant to concentrate raids in Normandy for fear of giving away future invasion sites. Every opportunity we failed to take through too much caution might take its toll on the effectiveness of that future invasion.

The night we chose was that of May 2nd. A warm night; patchy clouds; a faint moon. I parted from my comrades and slipped, some minutes later, into the narrow streets which led to my roof-top route. I carried the rope, coiled tightly round my waist, a plan of the factory in my head, and a knife. I remember that as I made my way I had the strange sensation of being no more than an ordinary burglar. My forebodings about what lay ahead were curiously like those of a civilian lawbreaker — as if I feared discovery by the police rather than the enemy. I have sometimes wondered whether this was a feeling peculiar to the undercover agent — without his absolving uniform — the feeling of being less a spy than a criminal. In his role, war and peace-time get confused. Do civilized instincts persist in war, or does civilized life veil the instincts of war? I cannot say. On that May night I had little time for philosophizing.…

And it’s that last passage, along with barely a handful of others like it, which, lately, I’ve been reading and rereading and which I’ve marked already, in both copies, in pencil. Those rare betrayals of feeling; those rare moments of self-scrutiny, of speculation. All so quickly dismissed. ‘I cannot say.’ I stare at the page. I read the words as though, if I read hard enough, other words will appear: Dad will begin to speak.

I glance at my watch. Five to three. People strolling along the river path at Richmond. The first decent Saturday of the year. Marian; and the kids. On the river, passing pleasure boats and launches. A swan, with a bevy of fraught cygnets, riding the wash.

… things had gone so well up to this point that I almost anticipated trouble in the later stages. I descended the rear fire-escape stairs from the corridor adjoining the patron’s office. This brought me out into a cobbled passage-way, between two office blocks, one end blind and the other opening out on to the part of the yard I had to cross — or rather skirt, keeping to whatever shadow I could find. My position was now essentially that of the escaper from a walled prison. I had transferred my coil of rope to my shoulder, in readiness in case things came to a quick dash.

I started forward along the passage-way. I had gone a few paces and was a short distance from the yard when a sentry appeared in the opening, halted, in a stooping, unsoldierly fashion and stood with his back towards me. How he failed to see me, I don’t know. As he turned, he must have looked, even if inadvertently, down the passage-way, and I would not have said that, at that range, the shadows were enough to hide me. I could only freeze, my heart pounding, against the wall. The sentry tugged at his rifle sling, easing it on his shoulder, and then his hands seemed to be busy at his pockets: the unmistakable actions of a man preparing to light a cigarette. It was likely he would choose the concealment of the passage-way in which to smoke: five minutes on tenterhooks.

Experience had taught me that where there is a choice between several possibilities which cannot be calculated exactly, and cold steel, then cold steel is the better choice. At all events, decision is better than hesitation. The sentry might smoke his cigarette and move on, and I might wait for him — though I would still have his presence to contend with. On the other hand, he might turn his head at any moment. If I silenced him, and even if I eventually got out of the factory successfully, our break-in would naturally be discovered, and the Germans, if they had any sense, would switch the schedules of their shipments. But then again, since everything in the office had been left as I found it, there was just a chance they would take the death of the sentry to mean a sabotage attempt on the factory itself, search the premises for explosives, and overlook the information in the patron’s office. Better this chance than my capture and outright failure.

All this must have passed through my brain in seconds. But a simple fact tipped the scales in favour of cold steel. The German was standing, reaching for his cigarette, not inside the passage-way, but just beyond its entrance, in view of the yard. This meant that he must himself be unobserved and that he was presumably confident he would remain so for the length of time it took him to enjoy his illicit cigarette. If I acted at once I could take advantage of the safety he himself had indicated to me.

The stiletto I had acquired at Tarbes was in its sheath inside my trousers against my hip. It could be drawn almost noiselessly, but I took the precaution of waiting for a masking sound — the German striking his match. The match flared. I drew the stiletto. The German’s head bent into his cupped hands, the flame lighting up his helmet and a thin strip of neck above his collar. I moved a step or two forward along the wall. I knew that if the Germans found a dead guard they would take reprisals, and, for want of anyone else, they might shoot one or two of the innocent factory workers. But I could already hear Jules’ and Émile’s laconic response. ‘N’importe’ — my friends would spit — ‘they shouldn’t make parts for the Bodies.’

I took another step forward. If the sentry should turn round now to throw his match into the passage-way, better he should come face to face with me with my drawn stiletto than catch me at a distance. But he tossed the match casually to his right, scarcely moving his head. As his right hand was engaged, returning the match-box to his pocket, I struck — my left hand covering his mouth, fingers pinching the nose, the blade entering left of the spine: a text-book application of my close combat training. The only thing I had forgotten was the cigarette. My hand rammed most of it into the sentry’s mouth, but I was left with an angry burn in the centre of my palm.…

My Dad. Cold steel. A man’s back.

Marian and the kids are walking through the gardens, opposite the ice rink; round the bend where the river stretches away upstream in a long, straight, tree-fringed view; on, along the towpath by Petersham meadows, where there are always some cows or a pony or two; the boys will walk along the top of the little concrete wall by the towpath, as they always do, and Marian will walk below. Then to the ferry point at River Lane, where the trees begin — the tall chestnuts behind the towpath, in new leaf, and, by the river, alders and willows, dipping and stooping over the water, the wash heaving over the branches, scooting mallards … I can see all this almost more vividly than if I were there myself. And suddenly I clutch Dad’s book closer, protectively, to me, as if Marian, likewise, can see me with it, sitting by the french windows, like a man with a secret no one else must see, with a possession no one else must share.

… Reprisals did take place. We heard that two men from the factory were questioned then arbitrarily shot. But the shipment times were not changed. One shipment — the next scheduled that month — was successfully sabotaged, not by our group but by Lucien’s. Following this, we heard that the factory manager was being ‘investigated’ by the Gestapo.

But it was now time for me to bid adieu to Jules and Émile. My period in the Caen region was coming to an end.…

So Dad slips away (end of Chapter 12), terse and brisk as ever, to his next assignment; to be picked up, in a moonlit field, by an R A F Lysander; to be dropped, four weeks later, into France again. And so he slips away from me; into the realms of action and iron nerves; into the silence of a man on a hospital bench. That one moment of reflection, of perplexity. What was it like, Dad? What was it like to be brave and strong?

At the end of River Lane there are usually parked cars; an ice-cream van. Marian will stop here. Will Martin pay? I am saying these things as if somehow the statement of them is something more than the reality. Like Dad’s book — like these jottings of mine, which are fast turning into a book too. The smell of the river: a mixture of mud, oil and sodden timber. Why aren’t I there? Martin and Peter lick their ice-creams. Marian licks hers. Or perhaps she doesn’t have one. She has this thing about keeping her figure — I approve of it — though she isn’t in the least overweight. The kids go down to the river’s edge, where the water laps at the slipway. Some dinghies are pulled up. Marian stays up on the bank, watching them. But she isn’t really thinking of them, I know. As she stands on the bank, her eyes dim and a half-guilty, half-mystified look crosses her face. She is thinking of me.

On, further; along the towpath, bushes and trees now on either side. The sun flickering through the willow stems. The boys walking ahead, looking for large sticks to brandish, Marian walking behind, a little abstractedly. Into the grounds of Ham House. Across the trim lawns; tulips and gravel walks (now there is a similarity I have never thought of — the grounds of Ham House and the grounds of Dad’s mental hospital). They say the first occupant of Ham House — a cabinet minister of Charles II — was half mad. Once we took the boys to look round the inside of the house; they were bored, and afterwards I lectured them on the importance of a sense of history (you see, I am not only cowardly, but pompous too)…. Into the gardens at the back of the house where the tea shop is. And there, while she watches the sparrows peck at crumbs, the same anxious look will cross her face.

All of this touches me more than if I were really there to see it happen.

Four-fifteen. Dad leaps from a Halifax bomber into the Haute-Saône.

Have I mentioned yet how Marian and the kids behave on the subject of Dad? They are quite heartless about him. They forget about him. Marian once skipped half-heartedly through Dad’s book; but the kids have never read it. They don’t visit him; they don’t think of him as my father so much as a peculiar object I go and see on certain Wednesdays and Sundays. (I took the boys to visit Dad once: I said, ‘Martin and Peter, Dad, your grandsons,’ but Dad didn’t move an eyelid and the boys giggled, and afterwards they started to talk about ‘Grandpa Loony’ — as opposed to Grandpa Lenny, who is Marian’s father, and, of course, perfectly compos mentis.) When I come back from visiting Dad, Marian never says, ‘How is he?’ or ‘Any better?’ She blames me for going in the first place. She blames me for repeatedly going on these pointless trips. She blames Dad for being a liability and she blames me for Dad’s being blameworthy. And she communicates this blame to the kids. I have even noticed that she sometimes fails to upbraid them when they talk about ‘Grandpa Loony’. I know what they are all thinking when I go off to see Dad every Wednesday or Sunday: they are thinking I go there just to get away from them.

Four-fifteen. I don’t have much time. I return Dad’s book to the shelf. I disconnect the television, carry it out to our car, and drive to the rental shop.