HOMEWARD BOUND

It was I who killed my father.


The Luftwaffe strafed his nerve-ends on the beaches of Dunkerque. And I left him for dead.

The sepia photos of 1939: Reg, my father’s clean-cut khaki dapperness; round-open, winningly warm eyes that I knew to be pale green; the forage-cap sitting jauntily on the waves of very short hair; his enlisted smile is generous, confident, trusting.

Compared with the demob photo of ’42: a heaviness shadows the brow; a grin lop-sided with knowledge of unspeakable horrors and possibly a survivor’s sense of guilt; a stiffness of manner supported by the walking stick; the hair flattened slick.

And Agnes, my mother, a blushing rose, auburn hair with a pronounced wave curled back from the forehead, such a modest smile. Flawed by a readiness to think ill of no-one; self-effacement that often mounted to self-reproach. With the curtness of his post-war bitterness, my father blighted her with the nickname Mumpsie, a left-over from a feverish attack of mumps.

Father number one, the pre-war dad that I scarcely met and Agnes had expected to marry, was apparently a good mixer and cheerfully cavalier, not afraid to dress up in silk and taffeta as Cinderella for Ralph Reader’s Gang Show or vamp out a piano rag unsighted. The centre of attention, my mother said, the life and soul of the party, all the girls fell for him etc. Stripped of his prefectship at grammar school for escorting home the dewy-eyed schoolgirl who would become his wartime bride.

No, I could never have killed the prototype. Only occasionally did I recognise his ghost in flashes at family twenty-firsts and weddings, where he’d be quick-stepping with another man’s wife, bestowing on his glowering son an outrageous wink as he sashayed by, buttocks slightly protruding, tongue curled against his sensual lips, or he’d be energetically blagging to pipe-smoking nobs of no little intelligence about his lorry loaded with cigarettes and perfumes weaving through the machine-gun fire of a low-flying Messerschmitt harrying him along the road to Dunkerque. Seldom would he waste words on me, except ‘Don’t!’ Even when badgered to read to his ‘little nipper’, he would speed up towards the ending on a level, flat intonation, finally gabbling breathless nonsense to be done with it.

Back in those gas-lit, ration-booked forties, life was a rain-swept Saturday afternoon at the Odeon, where we Tommies’d march alongside Richard Todd, Kenneth More, Jack Hawkins et al, busting dams, tunnelling out of Colditz or building Japanese bridges with stiff upper lips, yet still finding an empty hangar to fall head over Virginia McKenna. In that ghastly, dimmed underground world we blew everything sky-high, but in reality Dad must have been pounded with shell shock again and again, for his teeth were always tussling with nails and quicks. About the war, he’d tell me san fairy ann.

‘Be careful ‘ow you go up/down them stairs, or you’ll break your neck/back/arm/leg!’

His injunctions didn’t stop me having nightmares about the platoon of Nazis mounting a midnight assault on our garden fence or, much worse, suffering a Nazi dentist extract my teeth with weird instruments of torture down in an underground public toilet in London Road. My father’s other wartime story was his long, freezing night on duty at Catterick barracks when he had raging jaw’s ache. The dentist, or ‘fang farrier’ he called it, pulling a tooth out with no anaesthetic. Let that be a warning to you, son!

In 1948 we became the proud first-owners of a television set (an 18-inch Murphy) in our street of leaky, tin and asbestos-riven prefabs thrown up by German POWs. Any snowy shape that flickered, from Hoppy to Muffin the Mule, riveted my father, emplaced with one leg tucked under his posterior as he tongue-lashed a 6d bar of Tiffin like a five-year old. There were occasions when my adolescent self wanted to kick that sedentary lump to tease a response other than ‘Eh?’ ‘Do what?’ ‘Don’t talk daft!’ Inexorably, I learnt how to bait him, but he soaked up sarcasm in the same way he coped with German flak on an issue of six bullets – by retreating into his own shell.

‘Put them scissors down, or you’ll have your eye out before you’re finished. I’m only tellin’ you for your own good. Christ Almighty!’

As he brooded behind this barricade of inertia and grim pessimism, I dreaded that I too would coarsen into a square-eyed, uncommunicative slob. In desperation, I entrenched myself behind books, fired off Latin conjugations, Spanish vocab to be learnt, French conversational one-liners, chanted meaningless geometry axioms. I cowed him into grudging respect, pride, and even more layers of silence.

‘You won’t ‘arf do yourself a mischief liftin’ them weights. You mark my words, you’ll snap your bloody spine in two. All right, you can laugh.’

That fish-hook indentation on his brow grew more knotty as he signed in at the Labour Exchange, joining queues of hundreds of other sullen men in raincoats puffing on acrid Woodbines or Turf ciggies, between stints on waterlogged building sites guarded by old rugged-up night-watchmen beating their arms and stamping their boots round a flaming brazier that not long since were bombed-out craters. That stern, ugly etching became the brand mark of a face that had once, I gathered from my mother, effused warmth and easy-going laughter and willingness to take on some challenge that allowed for personal expressiveness. Would my forehead become disfigured too?

‘Christ, what do you wanna watch that pansy rubbish for? Sod it! John Wayne’s on the other doofer!’

It was imperative to punish him for his vulgarity, his apathy, his defeatism. Even my gran conceded, ‘E’s a naughty boy. I’ll put salt on ‘is tail. ‘E never used to swear afore ‘e went into the ruddy army. I don’t like it any more ’n you.’ So whenever he bought me a present, I would frown and turn up my nose at its wrong colour, size, style, price-range, utter inappropriateness.

‘What, ain’t that no good neither?’ He’d look helplessly, as if taken short, then almost pleadingly at my mother, resenting that we might be conspiring together.

‘It’s lovely,’ she’d stall, ever conciliatory. ‘It’s just that – she’d clear her throat at awkward moments – ‘well, we can always change it.’

‘Bugger it! Can’t I do nothing right?’

And he couldn’t. Save at the end. Disgust for my father hardened into downright hostility. At twenty, I fell in love with a delectable but religiously virtuous blonde school-captain. One Saturday leave-taking, Susan was glowingly effervescent – when her s’s would linger on her palate as a sensual lisp – so much so that my father, in a childishly soppy voice, declared, ‘She’s me favourite’ and gladeyed her legs while inadvertently rubbing his stomach with the flat palm of his hand. I felt nauseous at both his lust and clown-faced imbecility. That night I did not sleep a wink, but churned over and over the material with which to bury him.

At first light, he was busying in the bathroom. Although certain to give offence, I resolved to make him suffer the agony he had inflicted on me. I slunk in as he was dry-poking his ears.

‘Come on then, boy, let’s get crackin’. We’ve got to be on the first green at eight.’

‘I’m not coming.’

‘What’s up with you then? Ain’t you well?’

‘It’s not that.’ The whole episode was sickening.

‘Well, what’s gone and upset you now? ‘Ave you got jaws-ache?’

‘I hate the way you gawk at Susannah's legs.’ It was out at last.

He flung down the towel. ‘You little sod!’ he flared, pointing his finger at my nose. ‘I’ll give you such a poke. Christ, I can’t do nothin’ in this bleedin’ place! I might as well live in the outhouse.’

Worming back to bed, I closed my ears to the brute rampaging through the house and garage. He didn’t show his grey, shut face till almost supper-time.

‘Do you know where your father’s got to?’ My mother appeared more worried than bewildered.

‘Why don’t you leave the old grump?’

If only she had heeded my advice then, she would have been spared the obscenity of his flirtations with teeny-bopper office girls he’d entice with lifts. Then quite suddenly he took off with some platinum blonde housewife who cracked risqué jokes and didn’t share my mother’s inhibitions.

‘Look, boy, you’re a man of the world. Don’t you think I’m entitled to a bit of ‘appiness in my life?’

‘Did you let mum know you were leaving for good?’

‘Course, I did. Anyway, I’m off now, mate.’

When my mother arrived home from the office and coo-ooed, she seemed as pleased as I was.

‘The old man’s done his flit at last,’ I said. Now we can breathe easy again.’

‘Oh, no. No-o-o!’ she keened. ‘He hasn’t has he? Oh, Reg, no!’ Her face clouded and squeezed like the Idris lemon advertisement, still unsure of whether I was joking.

‘He’s gone for good this time, thank God!’

My mother shuddered into wave upon wave of sobbing, which was much more than I had bargained for. ‘If he’d deserted me at forty-five,’ she howled, ‘I might have been able to cope. But what can I do at fifty-five?’

Rendered speechless with a growing sense of guilt, despising my own meanness, I put my arms around her.

She was crying so much she all but fainted. ‘I’m sorry I’ve failed you, love,’ she gurgled.

‘No, you haven’t failed, mum, honest you haven’t.’ I couldn’t grasp the reason for her apology.

After six months of my mother’s hysterical outbursts and her long, sad face creased with anxiety for my missing father, even going so far as to employ a private detective, who ran up a ridiculous bill in exchange for an address in Southampton, and pretending that she didn’t know how to change a light bulb or how to use the TV controls, I realized it was time to reconstitute my identity twelve thousand miles away. I’d been behaving like the spoilt brat of a teenager I was twenty years before.

I never saw or communicated with my father again.



The wandering son returns home for a holiday. Partly because he is a little curious as to why his family should miss him and whether he is even pleased at reunion; partly because of his yearning for country lanes winding between high hedgerows and to run his hands over slabs of ghost-grey castle wall and gorge a ploughman’s lunch in a timber-framed pub with inglenook fireplace.

Australia has annealed him, blown away the sullenness with her mild-mannered winters, rejuvenated him in bronze on squeaky, white sands; Australia has made him less thrifty, more professionally competent by the lack of colleagues’ diligence, more broad-minded, even experimental in alternative values to life. In sum, he returns home prospering, feeling good within himself and with his creature comforts.

The slate-to-orange housing estate was knocked into row upon row on squelchy meadows of plumed rushes and whispering wheat. Its genteel parsimony springs up in dishcloth-sized lawns bordered by proud tulips, bluebell transplants and clumps of forget-me-nots. An impression of crimping meanness is offset by up-and-over garage doors of bright lavender, plum or banana.

The house appears unaltered since his flight to Australia a dozen years before: a few more Book Club hardbacks; new grandmotherly pink, floral wallpaper; and fenestiere curtains. The standard British draught and grumbling doors and showerless bathrooms make the home-comer shrink with embarrassment and petulance. Most disappointing of all, his mother is more gushing and tubby-waisted, her pouching eyes squinting with myopia.

But he warms to the distinctive fragrance of his own bedroom; lanolin and plush pile and freshly laundered bedding and Johnson’s furniture polish. It is like a recess in his mother’s heart, a shrine of remembrance: the dominating wardrobe hoards a quarter-century of clothes, love letters frozen in fantasy, baggy-shorted football annuals, dry, pictureless school magazines, untouched pen sets from untouching Christmasses; the hallowed book-cases of yellowing green & white or blue & white-covered Penguins; the silky blue counterpane, when he was expecting the variegated patchwork-panelled Canadian War Relief blanket.

Little seems changed in this landmark of his own petty history. If he has ‘grown as a person’ since migration, the house stubbornly preserves in its vibrations, its familiar hues and textures, certain habits of feeling, a cast of attitudes, powerlines of language and innuendo, currents of intonation that belonged to past selves. When he walks through that front door, he walks back in time, back into the house’s memory-waves of a previous persona, back into a darker era haunted by malignant echoes still lurking in the cornices, ready to descend like flitting nasties in ghost-train tunnels.

His new-found sense of balance and inner peace is all too easily washed away like a sandcastle breached by more enduring elements. As he puts on his old, musty sweaters and frayed jeans, he assumes those well-worn cynical, laconic attitudes that dogged both father and son.

The wettest May since whenever confines him to the house. The eternal drizzle on the panes and buffets of wind running the alleyways between the semi-detacheds, in addition to contact with a family he has left behind, press him back into his own mists. The double-coffin bedroom obliges him to sit on the floor and stare at the knots on the wardrobe. Just as he used to.

Returning to England means stepping back into one’s past, stepping back into a backward-stepping outlook. Photograph albums, like souvenir programmes from The Haymarket or Stratford, are cultural touchstones, evidence of being part of an observable historical evolution. He contemplates the albums for clues, memories.

The sepia photographs of 1939: my father enlisted, his clean-cut dapperness . . .



Darling, I hope you won’t mind, my mother had written, but a certain gentleman friend has taken up board and lodging at home. I know he’s not everybody’s cup of tea; in fact, you may be a little surprised when you meet him. He’s not what you’d have expected.

I hadn’t expected anyone. But there he was at Storrington Station in a music-hall comedian’s tartan jacket and I pinched myself to be amicable for my mother’s sake. Lesser by two inches, eight years and whole stacks of cultural awareness than she, bald with greyish tufts sticking up the side of his squirrel head, wreathed in a broad, dentured grin and hopping up and down with anxiety to ingratiate. He hailed from a lang toon near Perth and his thick, burring accent was revved by bursts of sudden intensity.

‘Ah’ve been laid off, laik. Did yah mah not tell yah?’

‘From the building-site at Watford. Yes, I’m sorry to hear it.’

‘Ah am trying, laik. Ah’m sticking on with it, but it’s bloodie nigh near impossible for a chippie round ‘ere. Yah know what ah mean? It’s hard for us boays in our fifties. But ah’m telling yah, ah can make just as much money on the dole, laik. Cos ah tell the Social Security people ah’m just a boarder and huv tae pay rent. Git me?’

His hours passed away simply. After my mother had clucked over him with a cup of tea in bed, which once a fortnight he’d upset over the sheets, ‘Jeezus Chr-r-rist, Aggie, ah thought the bed were as smooth as a granny-stoan!’ he’d galumph out of his mound of covers as soon as she chased after her bus, and moon over the football pools, Spot the Ball and the Mail crossword, or lick away at his five-pound bags of used stamps.

There was a chalk and cheese difference between Willie and my father, but two similarities struck home: a tendency to burst into a room, seismically, as if hating the existence of door-handles; then the obsessive leaning towards TV, which would suspend him in horizontal hold till the early hours, when he’d clatter through the washing-up with all the fury of a Halloween witch.

Dictionaries and reference books were introduced to him discreetly as a result of my mother’s weakness for the Sunday Express crossword. Its mystique would absorb the best part of their day, mainly due to his delusion that he had jumped on the correct answer, together with my mother’s reluctance to disenchant him.

On my first night back I awoke with jet-lagged sore throat and blundered downstairs to mix a drink. My mother had piled up a makeshift bed on the settee, but evidently wasn’t sleeping there. Creaking stairs betrayed her dawn descent before she climbed aboard the makeshift bed, from which she intended to bid a not so innocent good morning.

As much as I scorned such hypocrisy, I was tempted to laugh at the farcicality of her ruse and her simpering to a grubby-fingered labourer. At least, she had managed to overcome her fear of neighbourly gossip, if not the apprehension that I might be morally disgusted. I allowed her to keep up these shenanigans for several nights.

Willie, whooshing palais de danse ditties through his lips as if unadulterated silence were unbearable, worked at drawing me out. ‘Would yah like a nip of whisky down the pub, laik?’ His beady eyes and dentures gleamed at the prospect.

‘Oh no, no.’ I was surprised that my mother hopped in so quickly to save me, pulling her raging-toothache face with sucked-in cheeks. ‘Thanks awfully, but he doesn’t drink.’ Which wasn’t strictly gospel, but she was loath to expose all of Willie’s limitations in one scattergun hit.

‘Aye, ah fancy a wee drop o’ the crater, ah’m that right druthy. Dinna think ah’d git the boay pished, Aggie? A man was ance hanged for leavin’ his drink, yah know. Did yah not know that?’

‘Err no,’ said my mother, on the verge of giggling or clearing her throat to cover the non-sequitur.

‘That John Beacher -, Beacherman has died. Ah saw it i’ my paper.’

‘Betjeman,’ my mother slowly enunciated, as if guiding a retarded child. She dared not risk a peep at my countenance during such interactions.

‘John Betcher - Naw, ah cannae say it. Och thingmie . . . err Betcher - Ah, cannae say it, Aggie.’

All of which skirling compounded my revulsion and estrangement. But not to be shaken off, Willie showed with a pinch of pride his entry form for a local tiebreaker.

Write in no more than a dozen words a suitable slogan to acknowledge Minter’s fiftieth anniversary.

‘What do yah think of that then, laddie?’

WHEN THEY PUT THEM ON DISPLAY, THEY CATCH YOUR EYES AND AYES

‘Not too bad,’ I replied, though my tone and calculated hesitation intimated the opposite.

‘It’s not bad, is it? Thought of it myself, laik. Know what ah mean?’

‘The second half is catchy.’

‘Och aye, isn’t it? It’s catchy, right enough.’

‘The first half is somewhat . . . vague.’

‘Yah think so?’ rasped Willie, sufficiently crestfallen to snatch the coupon away and stumble over it aloud three times.

‘Grammatically, it’s up the spout. What’s the subject of your sentence?’

‘Och, cr-r-rikey! Yah’ve got me there. Ah don’t know nothing aboot grammar. They didna learn us that. Ah left school . . . Ah left school when ah were thirteen. In those days you could bloodie walk straight intae a job. Yah know what ah mean? Aye, ah got a job graiping potatoes.’

‘Okay, forget grammar. But I get no picture in my head. These words don’t do any work. There’s no snappy impact.’

‘Ah see what yah mean. Ah see that. Do yah not think it’s that very guid, laik?’

And as I knelt by the coffee-table, patiently expounding why his slogan had as much punch as a sprig of Highland ling, well, I did momentarily feel touched by his vulnerability, even though my explanations proved as prickly as pine-needles.

‘Aye, yah a right radgie gadgie.’ The tone of his voice suddenly sounded sharp and menacing. His beady eyes of smoking chestnut were staring narrowly over the top of his glasses. ‘Know what ah mean?’ Growling, he dared my defiance.

With tight-lipped efficiency, I began whisking away his pollutant ash-trays and opening windows to release the smoke, or closing them when he spluttered in cooking steam. After he sought my approval for the ornamental bricks he’d moulded, I stole into the garage and, whilst they were still as moist as cheesecake biscuit, staved in one side, subsequently advising him in his puzzlement and dejection that he should have mixed less water and more sand, or more water and less cement. Just when he stretched out on the settee with his scabby slippers, I pronounced all television programmes to be escapist pap reduced to the lowest common denominator. As he was smothering his bangers and mash in ketchup, I fulminated against the dangers of stuffing carbohydrates and excessive red meat.

‘Ah can buy a bag of stamps, laik . . . a bag of stamps . . . wi’ a stamp of every country in the world for one pound.’

‘Why would you want to, though?’

‘Eh?’

‘Why bother?’

‘It’s interesting, isn’t it? Laik yah learn a lot aboot other countries.’

‘Such as?’

‘Well, did yah know there were a hundred and eleven countries in the world? Right? A hundred and eleven. Did yah not know that?’

‘Go on.’

But I slipped away from him, lest he tried to crank himself up for a polysyllabic conversation. In fact, the whole incongruous ménage a trois grew tense. Doors were always closing between us. He may even have twigged my silent withdrawal, for whenever I settled into a good novel on the lawn by the irises, there he was, shuffling to and fro with saw-horse and tool-box to creosote the back fence, launching a tarry odour the length of the close. When I put out the pitta bread to thaw, he planked down his hammer and pliers on the island bar to bang up some wall units. When I mentioned the Sibelius concert on BBC2 he replied, ‘Och, we cannae miss ‘The Twa Ronnies’, can we, Aggie?’ When I warned that beef casserole was impossibly boring without curry, he spluttered in protest that he wanted ‘Nothing fancy, laik: hamburgers were guid enough for jocks, specially aht that price.’

‘Dinna bother wi’ him, Aggie, he’s just a daftie,’ I heard his voice grating up through the floorboards to my room. ‘Ah know what ah’d do wi’ that boay. Ah’d skelp ‘is erse!’

But when mum was at work, the old warrior was ready for ‘a stoushie’. ‘Yah mah’s going doolally huving yah heir. Yah know that, dinna yah?’

‘When are you going round to the allotment, Willie?’

‘What yah havering aboot?’

‘We need you to graipe some tatas for this broad, bricht nicht.’

‘Naw, ah’m not going to the plottie and dinna think ah skive. Stoap actin laik a big jesse. Huv yah seen mah glasses?’

‘I last saw them on the back of your head. Try the bar.’

‘Git away and bile yah owen heid.’

Immediately my mother trudged in from the office, weighed down by two bags of groceries, I confronted her: ‘How the hell can you put up with a man who doesn’t lend a hand with the shopping, who wakes you up with his door-slamming at one and two in the morning, who switches on your light and hums ‘Coming Through the Rye’ as if he were a demented bagpipe? You never stood up to my father and now you’re letting this Pict invader ride roughshod over you. Did he have to wrench off the fucking door-handles?’

‘Don’t speak like that, darling, please,’ she said quickly but breathy soft. ‘That sort of language reminds me of your father.’

‘Bloody Willy bloody well does. Laik.’

‘I’m sorry, darling.’ Her eyes moistened, fixing on me as though I were the one suffering. ‘I’m sorry I can’t maintain your high standards. I know Willie’s got a few rough edges . . .’ She broke off to dab away some tears with a hankie as sobs caught in her throat . . . ‘but he does make me laugh now and then. And he means well. Really he does.’

‘But you’re bending over backwards to please him all the time. That bloody TV set is blaring out every evening. Nowadays you don’t read a book or go for walks across the Downs, you just wait on him hand and foot.’

‘Everyone tells me I’m a failure,’ she gurgled. ‘My husband used to drum it into me, and after he walked out so did my mother-in-law. Now it seems I can’t do anything right by you either. I don’t understand it. What’s wrong with me? I pay my bills on time, I don’t do anyone any harm –‘

‘Oh, I’m sorry, mum. It’s just that I hate to see you slaving away for someone so unworthy of you.’ Immediately I noticed the irony. My mother had made so many sacrifices for me over many years, even though I’d been champing away at her smothering until I felt obliged to leave home.

‘Perhaps someone uncomplicated is what the doctor ordered. Willie, for all his faults, doesn’t c-c-carry on at me.’

‘Of course, he doesn’t! He’s got it made!’

‘He’s spent forty years tramping about in all weathers, getting his hands mucky on dirty building sites.’

‘You should’ve seen him tramping about on your kitchen table with those dirty old clodhoppers of his when he was nailing up the wall units. And is it too much to ask him to refrain from leaving his teeth on the bathroom ledge?’

My mother collapsed onto a chair. ‘I know it’s difficult for you,’ she reasoned at her fingers, ‘but all we ask is a little peace. I haven’t got that much longer. Then the house will be yours.’

‘It’s no good, mum. I’ll soon be leaving for Australia. It hasn’t worked out, has it?

‘Don’t be like that, love,’ she implored, with heavy, red eyes, her streaming face swelling up. ‘You’re all I’ve got. You don’t have to go. This will always be your home. For as long as you like.’

‘Not while wee Willie’s here!’

I slammed out of the kitchen, but heard her trembly voice raised after me: ‘But you’re never here!’ It was the first time since I was about ten when she slapped my face for inadvertently using the ‘c’ word that my mother had spoken harshly to me. ‘When will you learn the art of forgiveness?’ she sang out shrilly.

They were insufferable together, what with his grunting and growling and her cooing like a turtle-dove at his every whim. It was evident that my mother had moved far away, even though she would hover behind me to plant a goodnight kiss on the back of my head. They had succeeded in driving me back to my real home, a house where memories and pasts did not linger. ‘Ah’m fair tricket, Aggie’, ‘Would you like your porridge oats now, darling?’ ‘Aye, I would that, luv. Just a wheen.’ He would give an ear-splitting grin and those dark brown eyes would light up. ‘Just a tickie.’

Feeling the knot tightening in my forehead, I stomped up to my room, slumped on the floor and stared long and hard at the snaky grains of my fawn-coloured wardrobe that had been hauled up through the second storey window of our first home when I was five and terribly innocent.

Slowly but surely I recalled the framed photograph of Cinderella that I had gradually come to recognise as my father. It used to hang in my grandparents’ dining room above the sideboard that accommodated the canteen of silver-plated cutlery, cruets, lace table cloths, the dart board and red box of green-flighted darts, the crib board that occupied my father and grandfather whole nights at Christmas, Lotto cards and wooden counters, Whittaker’s Almanac and the encased Singer sewing machine and skeins of variegated wools and crochet hooks and darning needles. The photograph, if I recollect correctly, in muted colours against a dark ground. That pantomime Cinderella slowly etched herself, a sensitive face with blush and wig of wavy black hair, an easy but unselfconscious smile looking straight at the beholder, seated with elegant poise, in pale blue silk and taffeta and pale blue silk slippers. A photograph now lost, more likely trashed heavy-handed - my father obliterated as much of the past as he could when we and Gran moved into the one house together.

And then it came back to me, his drum kit in the front room or parlour that I’d never heard him play, funny that, next to the piano and a xylophone with bold wooden pegs, evidence that my pre-war father, my dad, was someone I could have respected or at least been able to talk to and sympathise with. Although he was an extrovert and his son an introvert, he had actually possessed back then a sensitive or artistic side that was impatient with intellectual rigour but was spontaneous, game for physical action, fun-loving, fascinated by women but who would treat them with respect.

At least, that was my impression.

Whereas his irascible attitude towards his son was derived from an acute awareness of danger and hurt and the very real possibility of instant death. These fears, shared to a lesser degree by my mother, led to their over-zealous protectiveness. I couldn’t blame them for that, as much as it irked me, for that was the zeitgeist of the forties and early fifties. Besides, behind the icy crust of my reserve, I had done him some base injustice in my mind.

There was one other detail I can recall of my dad’s wartime adventure at Dunkerque. As his unit clambered into the relief launch, he happened to be the last in line. Was that due to a generosity of spirit? Or pure chance? He’d just got one leg over the side - I never knew which one and never asked - when a rowing boat just that instant blown up fell crashing down on top of his pals. They were all killed save him, though he suffered a bad leg wound and an extreme case of nerves. My grandmother and mother both kept their lips sealed about the true state of his mental health. ‘’E done ‘is bit,’ Gran would have said, with a dry spit of defiance at the grate.



Soon as we ‘eard the Belgian army had surrendered we drove a bit smartish from Contrai, where we’d set up a signal station, to Poperinge what was knockin’ on the French border. That’s when we come under ‘eavy attack from sorties of Jerry dive-bombers, Junkers 87. Christ, their piercing whine put the fear of God up you! Whenever you slowed down at major cross-roads, what with the jam of military traffic and stream of Belgian refugees, you was all tensed up waitin’ for that whinin’ din to pierce your lugs, cos that was the most likely place Jerry would attack. I was shook up good ‘n’ proper by the blast of one of them bombs. The force of the explosion flung a couple of reffos right across the road. I stopped the lorry, much to the fury of a bloomin’ bully of a sergeant urgin’ and cursin’ our troop vehicles on with arms wavin’ like a windmill gone berserk. But one of them Belgies was stone dead and the other bloke what was moanin’ and writhin’ had his leg blown off. His trousers were a mess of blood and . . . Poor bugger was blinded. ‘There’s nuffin’ you can do, you bloody fool!’ The sergeant was brandishin’ a pistol and screamin’ apoplectic. ‘Get back in that bleedin’ truck on the double and drive on, bugger you! Else you’ll be cut off by the balls by them bleedin’ panzers what are closin’ in faster than you can say Betty Grable!’


We still had to keep one eye out for grub, cos you had to fend for yourselves. We got a couple of tins of Lyles syrup and packets of army biscuits from a NAAFI lorry, breadsticks and fresh milk from a village street market and eggs we collected in our tin hats from a chicken hutch. We was still a convoy then, armoured cars, staff cars, Bren-gun carriers, motor bikes, lorries carryin’ our wounded boys starin’ out the back, and the sappers behind us blowin’ up bridges. When we drove in jerks under cover of dark, it was the bloomin’ frogs that caused the racket and added extra eerie tension as you strained like billy-o to listen for a Jerry dispatch rider with his machine-gunner in the sidecar or even their dreaded armoured division chasin’ behind us.


Approachin’ the border, word was we’d lost our CO, but we was caught up in the traffic, bumper to bumper at times, specially just after an air strike or artillery barrage. We found ourselves headin’ north-west for Bergues, about five miles due south of Dunkerque. That crowded, mud-caked road was littered with the burnt-out hulks of armoured cars and crippled tanks, torched passenger cars riddled with bullet holes, windscreens jagged. I couldn’t take my eyes off of them soldier boys lyin’ dead on the road-side, their legs jack-knifed under ‘em, but some only had stumps in the tatters of their muddied khaki, their dark-stained faces buzzed by flies. They lay in the slurry of churned-up mud and animal droppin’s that felt like your own guts churnin’ over. I don’t mind tellin’ you, I for one certainly got the wind-up when I saw those poor bastards lyin’ there. I lit a fag to calm me nerves, but I was truly knackered and gettin’ the skitters. Was there no end to all this horror and violence? I must’ve been thinkin’ like a conchie, deservin’ of the three feathers. It put me in mind of when I was a nipper of about four or five and one day our rooster went for me and dad took the axe to it, while mum pressed my face into her pinny. I still hear the squawks of that proud old buzzard bein’ hacked to death.


Jerry up! Leg it! On the double! Alley! Alley! The Hun’s dive-bombers, like silver bullets they was, were growin’ bigger, their gull-shaped wings, the whine of Jericho’s trumpet, pilots throwin’ their dive lever and closin’ fast. Every Tommy rushed to find cover in among the hedges and chestnut trees or dive into a ditch behind a poplar. All hell was breakin’ out with tracer streaks and whinin’ and our own moanin’ and shriekin’. Then you’d cautiously lift your napper from the ditch when the Stukas had wailed over and rub your bo-peepers cos there’d be an old farmer still dodderin’ along behind a horse plough, grippin’ the handles rigid as if nothin’ else mattered, even though he must’ve seen a farm house and outbuildings smoulderin’ away on the ridge half a mile distant. P’raps they belonged to the old boy and he too was in shock.


Our boys were sloggin’ on, carryin’ their rifles, in some cases their heavy greatcoats, in among stragglin’ columns of army vehicles, refugees, the Frenchies what was called poilu, as well as us Tommies. At Bergues, what was a walled city, fort an’ all, we took a terrible shellin’ from Jerry gunners. You’d see these bloody great cobblestones uprooted right out the ground. There was only one way through, the Wipers gate, and exitin’ by the only bridge still standin’. It was a huge relief to get out and across the canal in one piece. And get to realize that the bodies hangin’ in the trees were dead snipers.


We was stopped by military police, what told us to get our arses to Dunkerque in a bleedin’ hurry, it was every man for himself. Further along the road we was stopped again and ordered to ditch our lorries and make for the beaches at La Panne, east of Dunkerque. I grabbed a couple of packets of fags from the back, some of the other Sigs did the same. One bright spark even wanted to snatch some perfume for his sweetheart. It seemed a cryin’ shame to dump so much equipment for Jerry to turn against us, even tanks in good working nick and ammo trucks.


Striking out north on foot, yelling our lungs out with filthy variations on ‘Hitler has only got one ball’, our mob gradually breaks up, some chaps preferring to follow back lanes, others headed off cross country, stragglers kept ploddin’ along at their own pace as best they could. We all knew where Dunkerque was cos of the huge clouds of smoke billowin’ up from the oil tanks on fire. By this time I was not the only pongo lookin’ like a scran bag.


At last, we trudged over the rise of a sand hill and there’s this bloody great beach with more sand than you’d lay your eyes on at Southend on a Sunday day-trip. The only crabs ‘ere, though, were bivvies in between the dunes propped up with greatcoats and battledresses and sweaty, coarse-haired khaki shirts or simple dug-outs where blokes were scoopin’ out sand with their tin hats. Some lads down on their chinstraps were grabbin’ some kip in their own glory-hole before the evenin’ hate. Most of us had used up our compos of tinned bully beef and hard tack, but we could scrounge somethin’ from the mobile canteens offerin’ tea and cocoa and ruddy long queues or dodge back to the local estaminet, but there was napoo there. Sod all. Me, I just wanted to get me bloody ammo boots off, paddle me sore feet, bathe me hitchy-koo with cool salt water and crash out for an hour or two.


I cast around for me own unit without much luck, but on the other side of the promenade I stumbled across some boys from a Lancs battalion what was cookin’ in a basement of a bombed-out house, the town of Dunkerque having already bin flattened by the whizz-bangs of the Luftwaffe. They was makin’ a stew on a primus stove from a couple o’ tins of McConnachie’s meat and veg. One of the lads went off to a hotel nearby what was deserted to bring back some plates and eatin’ irons. Another collected water from a tap. What a nosh that was! Not ‘alf!


Blimey, the docks were a wretched sight, what with ships disabled or sunk or burnin’ on the horizon, cos of Jerry kites, E-boats, mines, you name it. Some poor blighters drowned tryin’ to swim out to a relief boat with their boots on, still carryin’ packs and tryin’ to hold their rifle barrels above the waves. Several bodies was floatin’ in the water, you could see ‘em.


There was always a buzz about the next offensive, but you learnt not to ask no questions of the officers, just chuck up a salute mechanically to keep the nobs happy. And at bay. They was mainly a grim-looking lot, probably appalled at our slack behaviour and scronky dress at times of hangfire.


On them wide, open beaches exposed somethin’ dreadful, we huddled together in sand dunes to protect ourselves from the constant bombin’ raids and deafenin’ din and machine-gunnin’ from the air. The bombin’ was scary, but while I was holed up their whizz-bangs was mainly blowin’ up blizzards of sand what rained over us, but all that burst of machine gunnin’ from the yellow nose of the Messershmitts was much more dicey. Many Tommies as well as civvies took shelter beneath the mangled rust buckets stranded on the beach, even women and children squeezin’ up tight and screamin’ with fear. Thinkin’ my last moments had come, I reached for my creased photograph of Agnes in her WAAF uniform at High Wycombe. Thank Christ she’d be using her secretary diplomas, not workin’ in a munitions factory, and prayed fervently, out loud in a shaky voice, I didn’t care a damn who heard, that we might meet again soon.


At dawn next day, behind makeshift desks, dockets and rubber stamps, warrant officers or senior NCOs marshalled the lot of us in groups of fifty and marched us down through roped-off lines to the water’s edge, a few with bandaged head wounds and no tin hat, some carryin’ kitbags and rifles. A beach master that called each group in gave us a right old ear-poundin’ about discipline there. I saw one group run out of line and the bloke in charge was promptly shot by the beach master. No messin’ about.

As we were waitin’ for the go-ahead, nerves tight as a drum, a Stuka levelled out whinin’ its horrible whine and flew low at one of the launches. Luckily, our boys didn’t take a direct hit from its solitary shell but were damn near swamped in its wake, buckin’ about and almost tipped into the drink. Gorblimey, couldn’t I just feel the shudder of wind as it flew over us. Could’ve been just fear, I s’pose.


Because of the shallow slope of the beach the embarkin’ drill was to get to a rowin’ boat or whaler first, what we’d wade out to, holdin’ our Lee Enfield and greatcoat above the waves tuggin’ at your waist, what would take us to a launch lyin’ a short distance off-shore. This in turn was goin’ to ferry us out to a larger transport anchored further out, like a steamer or cruiser or destroyer and such like. Thank God for the boys in blue cos we had no air cover whatsoever from the Raff. Even a minesweeper might do the trick and rescue us, but top brass had somehow got hold of ferries and fishin’ boats, and believe it or not some private yachts and pleasure runabouts, what looked a bit out of step under one hell of a bombardment. Christ, it was merciless, but we was grateful for anythin’ that would float us back to dear old Blighty. Yeah, it was gonna take a bleedin’ miracle to get us back across the drink and home.




                                                                                                                                           Michael Small

1984

published Her Natural Life and Other Stories, Tamarillo, 1989

revised July 12 - August 4, 2010