episodes with the French Resistance girl of the one-track mind (Vive la France!) degenerated into dates. Crawling through darkened forests, sabotaging power lines, setting booby traps and gathering secret munitions drops, Jude’s man still managed to suggest dinner and dancing. So I revolted. I started to get silly as the walls of illusion came tumbling down, exposing the scene for what it was – sex – and Jude either got slaphappy along with me or stalked off in a fury. End of game. The second thing I would do was dry up, a startled and exhausted actor. I dithered and looked spacey and we would have to pause for peanut butter sandwiches. The third ploy was to say quietly, in a fit of uncommon generosity, ‘We should invite Harriet to play, you know. We shouldn’t take her Barbie and not ask her to play.’ End of game. Harriet was only six and extremely hopeless at serious games; even Gus could do better, and he was a baby still, two years old and not ready for war. So finally, in the absence of Jude, it was my fate to learn to play with her.
Explaining any new discipline to Harriet, you had to tether her to reality by introducing minor rules and practicalities, although never too many at once or she was liable to break off in the middle of things and start dancing to an unidentifiable tune of her own. Looking for Harriet, calling her to supper, say, or for school, you were likely to find her skipping around in the garden, a fairy on a happy day out in the ether. Harriet’s fierce whim was for collecting stuffed animals of all sizes, chiefly lambs and bird life, especially chicks, as well as a few bears and rabbits.
I gave her the lowdown on World War II. She needed to know the rugged truth in order to play, although she would dwell on the least vital points.
‘Yes but …’ Then the dancing around began, inducing wide-eyed exasperation in me. If I gave up, she wailed.
‘I want to play! I want to!’
Oh God.
I rehearsed her, but it was no good; before too long, there would be Barbie with her deranged look, handing out minute teacups containing drops of water to my Action Men, surrounded by the beasts of the field.
This was not like playing with Jude. Harriet didn’t really need me at all. I even left her with Talking Man, making out that this was something of a sacrifice, as if he were my favourite man. I watched her for a short while as I edged my way out. She was squeezing Talking Man into some of Barbie’s more loose-fitting garments – Transvestite Man now – and submitting him to minor indignities such as talking to animals, dancing and singing in his flounces, and preparing refreshments for a lot of chicks and little lambs. Meanwhile Barbie preened quietly, looking on from the sidelines, happy in a sort of maniacal way, grateful for the company. My sister even pulled Talking Man’s ring, suffering a jolt of alarm at the blurt of officious speech that issued forth. Harriet was simply not used to gruff commands except in fun, in our dad’s voice, say, the monster one he used when chasing her, stomping around the house with his hair all mussed. She did not like Talking Man’s voice at all. I saw her give him a startled look, then a cold one, as she went about wiping the event from her memory. She was really good at that, breezing on by things she didn’t like.
Jude and I had discovered one use for Talking Man’s urgent monotone. It was easy to induce dementia in him by making incomplete jerks of varying lengths on his vocal cord so that he’d only speak fragments of his stock phrases, which you could interrupt at random until he sounded ready for the white jacket with the long sleeves tied up at the back. This game had limited amusement value and Jude and I indulged in it only when flagging and war-weary and vulnerable to hilarity. I yanked Talking Man’s ring pull in jerks. ‘ATT-’ … ‘-DOWN BE-’ … ‘-HANDS ON-’ etc. We started yelling at each other.
‘Make me a peanut butter sandwich now!’
‘Have you done your homework!’
‘No!’
‘What’s for supper!’
‘Ask Mummy!’
‘Ask her yourself!’
‘Dismissed!’
‘Okay!’
‘Shut up!’
Jude and I are only fifteen months apart, and in spite of ourselves, I guess, we have a twin mentality, which time and distance cannot take away. Those are the facts. Jude likes to say from time to time, ‘You were a mistake. You were not supposed to happen.’
Considering I am not my parents’ last born, I do not take this seriously. I came too soon, okay, I can deal with that. I let him have his fun, though. I let him think I am slightly alarmed, but I am not. I have doubts about many things but I am absolutely sure that I was born out of love, despite my affinity for wartime.
Jude and I were steeped in World War II, although we were born some fifteen years after it ended. Knowing about the war gave me a sense of distinction, as if I, too, had suffered and overcome, emerging with my own badge of courage. I knew it as a black-and-white time, a place of shadows and relentless drizzle and austerity, of necessary violence and amazing resilience, a world in bold focus. I was there and Jude was with me.
Now I am in the room full of clocks where the voice calls out, WAKE UP! MOVE ALONG! HONEY, IT’S TIME!
I look at Action Man in 1999 and connect only with the name; everything else is strange to me. The packaging screams its gaudy colours of fire and blood and tropical locations, having all to do with fantasy and nothing to do with the high stakes and redemption that we played for. Even the man looks different, rubbery and matte-finished, with a sunbed tint and the vain five-o’clock shadow of the gigolo, not of the man suffering sleep deprivation and high anxiety. The men are marketed now under different names, clamorous titles of hollow intensity: ‘THE BOWMAN!’ ‘ROLLER EXTREME!’ ‘AGENT 2000!’ ‘SKY DIVER!’ ‘CRIMEBUSTER!’ ‘OPERATION JUNGLE!’ ‘SURF RESCUE!’ They have special vehicles: GYRO COPTER, and POLAR MISSION TURBO 4x4 fires as you drive! Mission cards are included and a disclaimer is written on the boxes, in more demure print: ‘Action Man™ does not identify with any known living person.’
Picking up these packages in the toy department, pretending to be shopping for a son or nephew, I feel a little scornful and superior. But what do I know about war? I crave the old me. Now I miss things like decision and certainty, beginnings and endings. In grown-up life, there are few demarcations. It is a great battlefield with constantly shifting fronts, that’s how I see it. Where, for instance, do I end and Jude begin? When does childhood end? No one ever said anything.
We were all corralled by our parents into watching a Steinbeck dramatization one evening in extreme youth, probably The Grapes of Wrath, and we lay on the floor in front of the TV stunned, literally, by the Great Depression. Everyone in the drama wandered about wearing skimpy, threadbare clothing and droopy expressions, speaking in defeated monotones, going to sleep on hard floors after a meal of one bulbous parsnip. The mother woke up the children at five in the morning, nudging them into readiness for another cotton-picking day. ‘Honey,’ she said to each one of them, followed by a gloomy pause, ‘it’s time.’ This scene happened at least eight times in the drama. My sister and I were sniggering wrecks by bedtime, hardly able to negotiate the stairs for hilarity. Waking up for school from then on we would say to each other, ‘Honey.’ BIG PAUSE. ‘It’s time.’
1914–1918. 1939–1945. I marvelled at a world at war and I could not fathom anything
