‘Comrade’. The Captain had asked him whether his life would be safe when they got back to England. After my father had reassured him they’d shaken hands and toasted the future with rum – but the ship’s postal election votes were still mysteriously lost in transit. At the time they’d all laughed at their officers’ ludicrous fears of mass purges and seizures of assets: ‘But now,’ he said, ‘I wish we’d done just that.’
As my father had observed, his ward was like a convention of Delius impersonators, copying the James Gunn portrait of the dying composer – right down to the tartan blanket over the knees, the fleshless left hand gripping an arm-rest, the right pointing to the floor. Even Mr Siddiqui – wrapped in the pearly aura of death – somehow pulled it off. In the next bay was a kid of no more than twenty, spending his last days reading Coleridge. Impossibly attenuated, his extremities jumbly-green and blue, he lay among propped-open copies of Biographia Literaria, the poems, the letters, volume one of Holmes’ Life – he would never read the second. He hadn’t been amused by my father’s rendition of The Ancient Mariner or my tale of chickening-out of following the mountain-mad poet’s series of ledge-jumps down Broad Stand. With heavy emphasis he slowly dragged his bed curtains across, breath singing in his throat like an Aeolian harp.
I gave my father the latest bulletin on Halifax Town – kicked out of the league to the hospice of the Vauxhall Conference – and told him how the cheating kraut Klinsmann had signed for Spurs and, after a series of spectacular goals followed by ironic swallow-dive celebrations, become a national hero. He looked reproachful, as if such jokes were out of order at this time. We sat in silence. There wasn’t much I could do for him – just bring in whisky, swap watches, lend him my Walkman and Jelly Roll Morton tapes. I could give him no handy hints for the afterlife unless, God help us, ‘The Divine Comedy’, ‘The Human Age’ or ‘Hellzapoppin’ proved to be reliable guides. Stephen Crane wrote of ‘the impulse of the living to try to read in dying eyes the answer to The Question,’ but I didn’t have any questions, not even lower-case ones.
He flapped his hand towards an unopened jiffy-bag on his table. I prised out the staples with his fish-knife. A video cassette fell out, followed by a postcard of the Bismarck on fire, with the message, ‘Hope this cheers you up and reminds you of those good times – STAN.’ They’d been boy sailors together on HMS Ganges – ‘and he hasn’t changed,’ my father always said. Stan’s spare time was spent at reunions, the Navy was all he ever talked about – my father pitied, despised him: ‘The war’s never ended for him, like those Japs they keep finding in the jungle.’ Now he just rolled his eyes and sighed. I’d known little about his own war: as a child I’d found, worn and lost his medal ribbons…once he’d casually mentioned that the shrapnel roaming his body had first passed through that of his best pal.
I held up the video. Songs that Won the War: on its cover searchlights over a blitzed London picked out the enormous grinning face of Vera Lynn about to snap up a passing Heinkel. He rolled his eyes again, spoke faintly. I put my ear to his mouth, then rocked back deafened as he near-shouted, ‘Put it on!’ I wheeled the TV over: static electricity crackled as I dusted the screen – like a cat, it knew I didn’t like it. I’d dumped mine, though when I went to my ex-wife’s to babysit I’d take along my Buster Keaton videos.
A perfect English sky was invaded by an anvil-headed stormcloud, from which issued the voice of Neville Chamberlain: men and women broke off from pipe-tamping or knitting to present resolute profiles. Then Vera Lynn appeared, sitting in an empty theatre – ‘the girl they left behind.’ ‘The girl we were running away from,’ said my father. She smiled thinly: ‘We are a nation of backbone and spirit, so that when we were forced into war in 1939 there was no fear in our hearts.’ ‘No, we just crapped ourselves,’ said my father. It cut to her singing fifty years earlier – looking older, if anything – her awkward hands rinsing and stacking invisible washing-up, in what looked like the garden set of L’Age D’Or. ‘Johnny will go to sleep in his own little room again…Tomorrow, just you wait and see.’ ‘Well I’ve waited,’ said my father, ‘and I’ve seen.’
A cruiser slid out of Pompey Harbour: most of the crew were waving to the crowd – parents, wives, children – but as the camera jerked away I glimpsed a sizeable number to starboard greeting the open sea. I think that’s the side my father would have chosen: our family holidays were always littoral – he’d sneak out hours before breakfast, as if to meet a lover…Then the whale-like calls of signalling ships segued into the voice of Our Gracie. ‘We’re all together now…’: she approached the audience, transfixed as by the lights of an oncoming lorry, like someone trying to coax out from under the sofa the last puppy to be drowned. ‘Whadda we care?’: she did a little dance, as if shooing chickens, reminding me of Mrs Thatcher.
Forgotten songs, forgotten singers. George Formby, his cod’s head emerging from the best-cut suit I’d ever seen, strummed and gurned in front of a curtain seemingly painted with tantric demons. Flotsam and Jetsam sang how London Could Take It, a majolica vase perched on the piano presumably demonstrating the ineffectiveness of The Blitz. Churchill appeared among bombed ruins, in a romper suit, sucking at his cigar, a behemoth baby. ‘We weren’t fighting for him,’ said my father, ‘we remembered Tonypandy and the British Gazette. We were fighting for the peace – jobs, education’ – he shrugged – ‘a health service. A better society, before Thatcher told us there was no such thing.’ The video had certainly livened him up, though not in the way Stan might have intended.
Flanagan and Allen sang ‘Rabbit Run’ over the celebrated film of a Spitfire tracking a German bomber, while below, on a Cotmanish field, a lurcher chased down a rabbit: for a few dizzying seconds animals and machines moved from left to right in perfect synchronization…Then the anaesthetic washes of ‘String of Pearls’: the Glenn Miller Orchestra was bombing Pearl Harbor. America’s entry into the war involved a great improvement in musical quality – Dinah Shore languorously exploring ‘The Last Time I Saw Paris’ – and colour film – the Andrews Sisters exploding in their crimson dresses. ‘I always fancied that middle one,’ said my father, ‘the double-jointed one that could scat.’ In comparison with this released New World energy the Home Front looked drab and costive, the stock fading to saffron, the confused crowds at railway termini half-obscured by London particulars or dragon clouds of smoke from their perpetual Woodies and Cappies.
Then a ribald fanfare sounded: into a mob of sailors, milling about below decks, there descended an enormous chin – Tommy Trinder, in uniform, kitbag on shoulder, head cocked, was coming down the rope and chain ladder. Having surveyed the scene with a nod of satisfaction, he began to sing:
Of all the lives a man can lead
There’s none that’s like a sailor’s
It’s very much more exciting
Than a tinker’s or a tailor’s
He leaves his home sweet home
It seems he loves to roam…
He got lost in the bustle, kept approaching the wrong berth and being pushed away. His grin got wider. He approved someone’s pin-up with a raised thumb, then attached himself to a passing close harmony trio, a cerberus of raffish cockney grifters:
…All over the place
Wherever the sea may happen to be
A sailor is found knocking around
He’s all over the place!
Trinder moved in an absurd yet hieratic glide, like something obscurely sinister in a Kenneth Anger movie, his profile like the elongated eye of Horus gripped in the vice of brow and cheekbone:
The
