Cont'd …

“They still have Bob-a-Job Week?” I ask, genuinely surprised.

“Why most certainly,” says Mother, “it keeps old crocks like me alive. That and the mobile lending library.”

“Oh, what are you reading at the moment?” I ask.

“Something by Graham Greene,” says Mother.

“Any good?” I ask, never having read a book by Graham Greene.

“You wouldn’t like it,” says Mother.

“How do you know?” I ask.

Mother just shakes her head. “Come and see my petunias,” she says. I’m so hopeless with petunias.

I often wonder what would have happened had Father not gone into the RAF at the beginning of the War. I suppose that everything that followed would have been different, but how different it is impossible to estimate. I can’t think of him without the black shadow of those bombing raids falling on my mind and covering everything with impenetrable darkness. I used to think of him as a hero, plain and simple.

It’s difficult to sustain such a notion of him now, although I have never for a second doubted that his actions were heroic. He was twenty when the War broke out -- so much younger than I am now -- and working as some kind of clerk in some sort of legal office in the City. The War gave him a chance to escape from a job he hated, and he leapt at the opportunity as only a man can who has nothing to lose. I say ‘nothing to lose’ because I believe that but for the War you would never have married each other.

No, I have thought about it a lot, Mother, I have pieced things together over the years, and I am quite convinced of it. The courtship was growing stale by 1939. Had not the War catapulted everyone into each other’s arms, you would never have got married and I would never have existed.

As it was, marriage seemed the only absolute in a time of complete uncertainty; and Father’s stiffness, his laconicism, his air of untouchability must have suited a steel-blue RAF uniform. You got married in the spring of 1940 with daffodils singing all around. Father smiled like a man who was genuinely happy (the wedding photographs are quite atypical in this respect) and your dress got filled with red, white and blue confetti.

Thirty-six hours later he was up in a Lancaster dropping bombs on -- France, I suppose, or northern Germany. You had a superstitious fear that as long as he was dropping bombs on the Germans, no German bombs could fall on you here in London. And indeed, that unexploded bomb fell on a night when Father had to turn back over France with a failure in one propeller -- a measure of how close you both came to death during those years. Father baled out over the White Cliffs of Dover and you spent the next day watching a bomb squad tread your vegetable-patch to pieces.

But you both survived. Long enough, I think, to realize that the marriage had been a mistake.

Mother has made salmon and cucumber sandwiches, sausage rolls and a Madeira cake. We sit out on the lawn in deckchairs, brushing the first wasps of summer from our plates as we eat. They gather on the rims of our lemonade-glasses, fall in, drown. These dreadful summer afternoons in north-east London. They have a special quality. It has something to do with the smallness of the sky above your head. All you can see is a square of blue delimited by rooftops and the tops of fruit trees, and every now and then this tiny square becomes a harsh white lid of noise as a jet plane slides past overhead, flying low enough to send the chimney-pots tumbling down into the flower-beds.

Conversation has to cease for a period of up to thirty seconds as a plane goes past.

“And how’s Peggy?” asks Mother in the wake of one of these pauses. I could well wish that the aeroplane were still going by, but I know that there’s no escaping the subject; sooner or later we will have to talk about my Broken Marriage.

Page 4

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