by Jonathan Coe
What was waiting for Gracie at the other end of her train journey? I can only imagine. I seem to remember her telling me that she was taken to somewhere in Wales. I can picture a big, draughty room – a church hall, perhaps – and a crowd of children huddled together in the centre, tired after their long train journey, frightened now, the morning’s excitement having long since worn off. They would probably have been asked to line up, and then the grown-ups would have stepped forward, strange, severe-looking women who would have scrutinized the children’s faces and clothes before picking them out one by one, like customers at a Roman slave market. No words would have been spoken. But slowly the crowd of children would have got smaller and smaller, and Gracie would have seen all of her friends disappear, whisked away through the door to the unknown, darkening world outside, even the little boy who made me so jealous and whose name I can’t remember, until she was one of the few left, and then it would have been her turn, at which point an exceptionally forbidding face would have loomed over her, made no less forbidding by its unnatural attempt at a smile, and she would have felt herself gripped by the wrist and led away, out into the unfamiliar dusk.
The last thing I can imagine is Gracie standing in a hallway. The hallway is dark and she has put her suitcase down beside her. The woman has gone upstairs somewhere, on some mysterious errand, and she is left alone. She thinks of this morning, already a fickle, distant memory: how she tried to wave at me, and I never waved back. She thinks back further than that, to the moment when she said goodbye to her parents: her mother’s last, stifling, frantic embrace. She realizes now, with a terrible certainty, that she is not going to see her mother again tonight. She does not realize, yet, that she won’t be seeing either of her parents for weeks, months: a lifetime, in a child’s mind. But even the thought of one night’s separation is enough to make her start crying. She looks up at the sound of footsteps descending the stairs and hopes that this strange, silent woman is going to comfort her and be kind.
Of course, I’ve no idea if it was like that at all. All I know is that Gracie had changed, when I saw her again, towards the end of the war. She told me nothing about her time away from home. As I say, she treated me differently. We never became playmates again. And she spoke, by then, with a terrible stammer. I wonder if she ever lost it.
Number two: a picnic.
A family group. Aunt Ivy, and Uncle Owen, in the background. In the foreground, three children – including me. But I will come to the children later. Let me tell you about Ivy and Owen first of all.
I don’t remember this picnic, and I can’t identify the landscape in which the picture was taken. But it is recognizably Shropshire – I can feel that, just by looking at it. And probably not far from Warden Farm, the house in which they – we – were all living at the time. I certainly don’t remember being taken on many excursions far afield, during those months. Most likely this was taken somewhere near the edge of the grounds, and the fields in the background belonged to Owen himself. It was taken in late autumn or winter because there are no leaves on the trees: they stand out black and skeletal against a sky which time has bleached white. I don’t know why we were having a picnic at this time of year: everybody in the photograph looks cold. I suspect it was one of those sunny but bitterly cold autumn days, because Ivy is wearing sunglasses and yet her hair is being blown out of shape by the wind.
What can I remember about her, from looking at her face in this photograph?
Ivy, you should know first of all, was my mother’s sister. There was not much family resemblance, however. She is smiling here, a good open-mouthed smile: everybody is doing this, in fact, so I would imagine that the picture was taken by Raymond, her elder son, and that he must have been clowning around while he was taking it. Even I seem to be smiling, a little bit. But what Ivy’s smile makes me think of is her laugh: a real smoker’s laugh, rough and throaty. And as soon as I think of her laugh, as if by some process of sensory association, I find myself remembering her smell. Strange how so few of our strongest memories are visual: it’s something I would like to talk to you about, Imogen – one of the many things. Because your memories, I’m sure, are just as strong as mine, just as strong as the memories of any of us who are ‘sighted’, as I believe it’s called – perhaps even stronger.
Anyway – Ivy’s smell, I believe I was talking about. This is not to say that she was in any way malodorous, nothing like that. It was a strong smell but in many ways an appealing one. I think it was a mixture of whatever perfume she used to wear, and dogs. There were always at least five or six dogs at Warden Farm. Spaniels, mainly. Was I aware of that, before I was sent there? I think I was, I think it was one of the things my father said to me in order to make me feel better about it. ‘They have lots of dogs,’ he would have said. ‘You love dogs.’ Which is true. I’ve always loved dogs, although I’ve never kept one myself. And I adored all the dogs at that farm, and the way the house always seemed to smell of dogs, and the way that Ivy did, as well. It was certainly one of the things I liked about her. Children are rarely fastidious about such matters. They want to feel comfortable around a person, more than anything else.
Uncle Owen drove a green Austin Ruby, in those days. For some reason, my mother and father did not take me to the farmhouse themselves: he came to collect me. It was a Sunday afternoon. He was alone, and I can remember sitting in the front seat, barely tall enough to see out through the windows. A ride in a car, any car, was uncommon. I had certainly never sat in the front of a car before. The reason I am mentioning this now is that this car, too, smelled of dogs. It was a comforting smell. I did not like Uncle Owen. He was a man who made no effort to communicate with children or put them at their ease. He was a great grunter, but not much of a talker. I am confident that he barely said a word to me during that journey. I am thinking that it was late in the afternoon, and as we drove out of Birmingham and past the outskirts of Wolverhampton and into the countryside, the sun was setting and sending splinters of sad, low orange-red light across the treetops and hedgerows. But I think this is something I am now imagining, not a memory at all.
The more I look at Ivy’s face in this photograph, the more it serves to remind me, not of what she used to look like, but of her smell, and the sound of her voice. And when I think of how she greeted me when our car pulled into the farmyard that Sunday afternoon, this is how I remember her: the warm, gravelly voice, stretching out the word ‘Hallo’ to five times its normal length, so that hearing it felt like being pulled out of cold water and having a thick blanket thrown around you; and then her arms enfolding me, swaddling me with that lovely smoky canine scent. That was how she greeted me on the back doorstep and if she had always been that way, for all the time I ended up staying there, then everything might have turned out quite differently.
However, there is no value in such reflections.
Ivy’s hair was reddish. Strawberry blonde might be a better way of putting it. She wasn’t a delicate woman, by any means. In this picture, for instance, her sunglasses are sitting snugly on a nose which is, not to put too fine a point on it, large. There were a lot of large noses on that side of the family; it also has to be said that Ivy was partial to a drink. I shall just offer you that observation, and say no more. She is wearing a rather smart jacket, nicely cut, over a long floral-patterned skirt. In fact one of the striking things about this picture is how well dressed they both look. And how formal. Uncle Owen is wearing a tie, for heaven’s sake! On a picnic! But that is how things were, in the 1940s. Perhaps it is the effect of the tie, but here he looks almost handsome. He was always a big man, thick-set – it was inevitable, as he grew older, that he would run to fat – but there is no coarseness in his features. I remember him as rather a coarse man, but I think that had to do more with his manner than his looks. He has assumed a slightly strange position, crouching rather than sitting down, and this gives him a kind of tense, coiled quality, like a trap about to spring. He is gazing at the camera with enormous
intensity. All I can say about this pose is that it is uncharacteristic.
So much for the adults. Now, apart from myself, the two children at the front of the photograph are Ivy and Owen’s younger son, Digby, and their daughter, Beatrix. They were my first cousins, of course. I should also mention something else about Beatrix, in case you are not aware of it: she was your grandmother.
When this photograph was taken, she would have been eleven. She is sitting upright, almost as though she has just sat on something uncomfortable. Her back is rigid. Bea’s posture was always good: she always carried herself well. She is wearing a cardigan, which, if my memory serves me correctly, was pale green. From the way it hangs on her body, you can see that her breasts are just starting to develop. Her hair is black, and quite short, but windswept: two strands hang over her eyes, one of them falling almost down to her mouth. Quite a fashionable cut, even by today’s standards, I would have thought. Her smile is broader than anyone else’s. Funnily enough, I never think of her smiling, but, looking through all of these photographs, I realize that she smiled all the time; when she was young, anyway. And it was like her mother’s smile, too – never far from an out-and-out laugh. Perhaps it is because many of the older photographs I have found of her capture her in social situations. Beatrix came alive when there were a lot of other people around: with friends, at parties – any occasion when drink was flowing and the everyday cares of the world could be forgotten. Whenever she was alone with me, she was a different person: insecure, ill at ease, afraid of the world. I do not think that this is just an effect I have on people. I think that this was her true self emerging. Fundamentally I believe that she disliked herself and that to be left alone, with only her own self for company, was the very thing that she feared the most. But I realize that I am projecting, now, a lot of things that I learned about Beatrix subsequently on to her character as an eleven-year-old girl, and I must not allow myself to race forward like this.
Sitting next to her is her brother Digby. It is not important that you know very much about Digby. Like Raymond, the elder brother, he took little notice of me. This was upsetting at first, but later on, when Beatrix and I became close, it suited us quite well. He looks younger here than his thirteen years. Perhaps because he is wearing shorts. He is squatting, rather than sitting, and his calf muscles seem extremely well developed, I must say. He was a vigorous, athletic boy. There was a tennis court in the far reaches of the grounds and he and Raymond would often play there. They were both good players. They led charmed, perhaps spoiled lives. The war barely touched them. Living on a farm meant that the family was not affected by rationing; in fact they made a good profit, selling their surplus on the black market. The closest they ever came to the fighting was when a German bomber shed its load at random on a flight back from Wales and blasted a crater in one of the corn fields, about a mile from the farm. That happened while I was there. I can remember hearing the explosion, being woken up in the middle of the night and running to the bedroom window along with Beatrix. We could see the fire burning through the trees, and the next morning we were allowed to go with the boys to look at the crater. I am wandering from the point again…
The only person left to describe, now, is myself. My eight-year-old self. No need to look too closely at what I’m wearing: I can remember exactly. I think I only had about three changes of clothes with me for the whole time I stayed at Warden Farm. Here I am wearing my faithful old thick brown woollen jumper, knitted for me by my mother. She was an enthusiastic – one might almost say obsessive – knitter. Sometimes she did it the usual way, by hand, but she also had a knitting machine – a simply gigantic, baffling contraption made up of cogs and levers and pistons which took up most of our dining table at home. (I’m surprised it never collapsed under the weight.) This was the machine she would use, for two or three hours every night, knitting woollens for the troops. ‘Comforts’, she called them. The brown jumper I wore was just a by-product of all this activity, but I was devoted to it. It was the same brown, almost exactly, as the rough corduroy trousers I am also wearing in this picture. The ensemble is completed by a polo-necked shirt, which was a lovely autumnal golden colour. The colour of leaves on the turn.
Shropshire itself was golden. That was the thing I noticed about it at once, when I woke up on the first morning of my evacuation and drew back the curtains. I looked out across the beautiful manicured green of the front lawn, like the green baize of the table in the billiard room, and after that all I could see were fields of blazing gold, beneath a rich blue sky. Shropshire blue, Shropshire gold. It may seem like an odd thing to say but the whole colour of the county had changed in the last few months. There was a reason for this. (There is a reason for everything, in case you haven’t learned it yet, in your short life. In fact, the story I am trying to tell you will demonstrate as much – if I tell it properly.) The reason being, in this case, that the government had recently been telling farmers to grow as much corn as possible. ‘Food is a munition of war,’ they were told, ‘and the farm should be treated as a munitions factory.’ And so, where once there had been green, now there was gold. I looked out of the window that morning, and for a moment, a brief moment, my heart soared and the terrible knowledge that had been crushing me for the last few hours – the knowledge that I had been banished from my parents’ house, sent into an undeserved and inexplicable exile – was lifted from me. I turned to share this moment with my cousin Beatrix, who slept in the attic bedroom with me, but her bed was empty and the bedclothes were dishevelled. She was always an early riser, always downstairs before me. Such was her appetite for breakfast and, more than that, for life itself.
Actually, I am allowing my imagination to run away with me again. Whether I looked across, on that first morning, and saw Bea’s empty bed, I really cannot say. It happened that way many mornings. Whether that was one of them is another matter. I can see that this photograph has done its work and further memories, more general memories of those few months, are starting to come back to me. Time to move on.
Number three: the caravan.
I have not yet described Warden Farm – the house itself – in any detail, but I think I will talk about the caravan first. It was one of the first things that Beatrix showed me in the garden, and it quickly became the place where we would retreat and hide together. You could say that everything started from there.
Aunt Ivy gave me this photograph herself, I remember, at the end of my time living at her house. It was one of her few real acts of kindness. Beneath her warm and welcoming exterior, she turned out to be a rather distant, unapproachable woman. She and her husband had built for themselves an active and comfortable life, which revolved mainly around hunting and shooting and all the associated social activities which came with them. She was a busy organizer of hunt balls, tennis-club suppers and the like. Also, she doted on her two sons, athletic and sturdy boys – good-natured, too, but not very well endowed in the brains department, it seems to me in retrospect. None of these things, at any rate, made her inclined to expend much of her attention on me – the unwanted guest, the evacuee – or indeed on her daughter, Beatrix. Therein lay the seeds of the problem. Neglected and resentful, Beatrix seized upon me as soon as I arrived, knowing that in me she had found someone in an even more vulnerable position than her own, someone it would be easy to enlist as her devoted follower. She showed me kindness and she showed me attention: these things were enough to win my loyalty, and indeed I have never forgotten them even to this day, however selfish her motives might have been at the time.
The house was large, and full of places we might have made our own: unvisited, secret places. But in Beatrix’s mind – though I did not understand this until later – it was ‘their’ place, it belonged to the family by whom she felt so rejected, and so she chose somewhere else, somewhere quite separate, as the place where she and I should pursue our friendship. That was why we spent so much of our time, during those early days and weeks, in the caravan.
> Let me see, now. The caravan itself is half-obscured, in this picture, by overhanging trees. It had been placed, for some reason, in one of the most remote corners of the grounds, and left there for many years. This photograph captures it just as I remember it: eerie, neglected, the woodwork starting to rot and the metalwork corroding into rust. It was tiny, as this image confirms. The shape, I think, is referred to as ‘teardrop’: that is to say, the rear end is rounded, describing a small, elegant curve, while the front seems to have been chopped off, and is entirely flat. It’s a curious shape: in effect, the caravan looks as though it is only half there. The trees hanging over its roof and trailing fingers down the walls are some kind of birch, I believe. The caravan had been placed on the outskirts of a wood: in fact the dividing line between this wood – presumably common land – and the furthest reaches of Uncle Owen’s property was difficult to determine. A more modern caravan might have had a picture window at the front; this one, I see, had only two small windows, very high up, and a similar window at the side. No surprise, then, that it was always dark inside. The door was solid and dark, and made of wood, like the whole of the bottom half of the caravan – even the towbar. That’s an odd feature, isn’t it? – but I’m sure that I am right. It rested on four wooden legs, and always sat closer to the ground than it should have done, because both the tyres were flat. The windows were filthy, too, and the whole thing gave the appearance of having been abandoned and fallen into irreversible decay. But to a child, of course, that simply made it all the more attractive. I can only imagine that Ivy and Owen had bought it many years ago – in the 1920s, perhaps, when they were first married – and had stopped using it as soon as they had children. Inside there were only two bunks, so it would have been quite useless for family holidays.