Warlight

by Michael Ondaatje

  He had assumed he would always be independent and gateless. He felt he knew the intricacies of women. He may have even told me earlier that his numerous suspect professions were to affirm his independence and lack of innocence to others. So now, as he simultaneously attempted to calm her, to make her understand the less innocent, less truthful world, he needed in some way to bring her out from her focused self-defeating self. Were there many conversations before he suggested marriage? He knew she needed to be aware of what he really did, before she could make a decision. It must have shocked her—not because he might be taking advantage of her but because of something more surprising. He was offering a safe path out of the closing world she was in.

  She moved with him into a small flat. There was no money for anything larger. No, I suspect they did not think of me. Or judge me or dismiss me. That is my sentiment from a distance. They were in a busy life, where each farthing mattered, where every tube of toothpaste was bought at a specific price. What was happening to them was the real story, while I still existed only in the maze of my mother’s life.

  They were married in a church. Agnes/Sophie wished for a church. A clutch of associates were there, along with her parents and her estate-agent brother—one girl from work, a couple of “lifters” he used on jobs, The Forger of Letchworth who was his best man, as well as the merchant who owned the barge. Agnes had insisted on him. The parents, then, and six or seven others.

  She needed to find another job. Her co-workers at the restaurant were unaware she was expecting a child. She bought newspapers and looked through the classifieds. Through a contact of The Darter’s from that earlier time, she found work at Waltham Abbey, which was reemerging now during the post-war years as a research centre. It was where she’d once been happy. She knew its history, had read all those pamphlets on our borrowed barge as we moved silently beneath loud birdcalls or rose slowly within the locks of those canals dug during the previous century to connect the abbey’s source of weapons to the arsenals along the Thames at Woolwich and Purfleet. Her bus took her past Holloway Prison, along Seven Sisters Road, and let her off at the grounds of the abbey. She was back in that same rural landscape where she had once been with The Darter and me. Her life had become circular.

  She worked at one of the long tables in the airless, cavern-like rooms in East Wing A, two hundred women focusing only on what was in front of them, never pausing. No one spoke; they sat on stools too far away from one another for conversation. Apart from the noise made by the movement of their hands, there was silence. What was this like for Agnes, so used to laughter and argument while she worked? She missed the chaos of those kitchens, unable to talk, get up and look from a window, tethered instead to the speed of an unhesitating conveyor belt. They changed locations on alternate days. One day in the East Wing, the next day the West, always wearing protective goggles, measuring the ounces of explosive on a scale, spooning it into the containers that slid by. Grains of it were caught under her fingernails, disappeared into her pockets, into her hair. It was worse in the West Wing, where they worked with the yellow crystals of tetryl, packing it into a pill form. The stickiness from the explosive crystals remained on their hands and turned them yellow. Those who worked with tetryl were known as “the canaries.”

  Lunch hours allowed conversation but the cafeteria was another enclosed space. She took her packed lunch and walked south to the woods she remembered, ate her sandwich by the riverbank. She lay on her back, exposing her belly to the sunlight, she and the baby alone in this universe. She listened for a bird or the movement from a bush stirred by wind, some alarm of life. She walked back to the West Wing, yellow hands in her pockets.

  She did not know what really took place in the strangely shaped structures she passed, where steps disappeared underground into climatic chambers built to test new weapons in desert heat or arctic conditions. There was barely evidence of human activity. On a hill in the distance was the Great Nitrator, in which nitroglycerine had been made for over two centuries. Beside it, underground, were its immense wash pools.

  Accessing the old files in the Archives had given me knowledge of the half-buried buildings that Agnes would have walked beside when pregnant with Pearl. I knew now what all those buildings and landmarks at Waltham Abbey had been used for. Knew that even the seemingly innocent forest pool into which Agnes at the age of seventeen had leapt, was where underwater cameras had been set up to measure the power and effect of explosives that would later bomb the Ruhr Valley dams in Germany. That forty-foot-deep pool, where Barnes Wallis and A. R. Collins tested their bouncing bomb, was where she had surfaced, shivering and breathless, then climbed onto the deck of the mussel boat and shared a rolled cigarette with The Darter.

  * * *

  —

  At six in the evening she walks out from the gates of Waltham Abbey and catches a bus back to the city. She leans her head against the window, her eyes gazing over the Tottenham Marshes, her face darkening as the bus passes under the bridge at St. Ann’s Road.

  Norman Marshall is there in the flat when she returns—her pregnant body exhausted as she passes him without letting him touch her.

  “I feel filthy. Let me wash first.”

  She hunches over the sink and pours water from a bowl onto her head to remove the gunpowder grains from her hair, then frantically scrubs her hands and arms up to the elbows. The gum-like filling used to pack cartridges into boxes and the tetryl have attached themselves to her like tree resin. Again and again Agnes washes her arms and as much of the skin on her body as she can reach.

  Nowadays I eat at the hour the greyhound does.

  And in the evening, when he feels ready for sleep, he will drift silently to the table where I work, and lower his tired head onto my hand in order to stop me. I know this is for comfort, needing something warm and human for security, a faith in another. He comes to me even with all my separateness and uncertainties. But I too wait for this. As if he might wish to tell me about his haphazard life, a past I do not know. All the unrevealed needfulness that must be in him.

  So I have the dog beside me, who needs my hand. I am in my walled garden that is in every way still the Malakites’ garden, with now and then a surprise of blossoms I was not told about. This is their longer life. When Handel had his breakdown, he was, according to my opera-loving mother, “the ideal man” in that state, honourable, loving the world he could no longer be a part of, even if the world was a place of continual war.

  I have been reading recently an essay by one of my Suffolk neighbours on the Lathyrus maritimus, the sea pea, and how war helped the plant survive. Mines had been placed along our beaches to protect the country from invasion, and this resulted in an abundance of rough green carpets of sea peas with fat and sturdy leaves, thanks to the lack of human traffic. Thus the resurrection of the almost extinct sea pea, “a happy vegetable of peace.” I am attracted to these surprising liaisons, such sutras of cause and effect. As I had once linked a farce, Trouble in Paradise, with the secret transportation of nitroglycerine into the city of London during the war, or seen a girl I knew loosen a ribbon from her hair in order to dive into a forest pool where bouncing bombs had once been conceived and tested. We lived through a time when events that appeared far-flung were neighbours. Just as I still wonder whether Olive Lawrence, who later taught me and my sister to walk fearlessly into a night forest, ever felt her handful of days and nights along the coast of the English Channel was the highlight of her life. Few knew of her work during that period; she did not mention it in her book or on the television documentary I watched as an adult. There were so many like her, who were content in the modesty of their wartime skills. She was not just an ethnographer, Stitch! my mother had spat out scornfully, more willing to tell me of Olive than of what she herself had done.

  Viola? Are you Viola? I used to whisper to myself, slowly discovering who my mother was on the second floor of that building
I worked in.

  * * *

  —

  We order our lives with barely held stories. As if we have been lost in a confusing landscape, gathering what was invisible and unspoken—Rachel, the Wren, and I, a Stitch—sewing it all together in order to survive, incomplete, ignored like the sea pea on those mined beaches during the war.

  The greyhound is next to me. He lowers his heavy bony head onto my hand. As if I were still that fifteen-year-old boy. But where is the sister who offered only that indirect farewell to me with a puppet-like wave, using the small hand of her child? Or the young girl I might one day catch sight of, picking up a playing card on the street, and rush after to ask, Pearl? Are you Pearl? Did your father and mother teach you to do that? For luck?

  Before Sam Malakite gathered me up from White Paint on my last day there, I washed some of Rose’s clothes and dried them outside on the grass; a few I stretched over bushes. Whatever she had been wearing when she was killed had been taken away. I brought out an ironing board and ironed a checkered shirt she was fond of, its collar, the cuffs she always rolled up. The shirt had never witnessed this heat or pressure before. Then the rest of the shirts. I laid a thin cloth over the blue cardigan she wore that disguised her thinness, and pressed the iron onto it lightly, at half heat. I took the cardigan and the shirts to her room and hung them in the cupboard and came downstairs. I walked loudly along the nightingale floor, closed the doors, and left.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  While Warlight is a work of fiction, certain historical facts and locations have been used within its fictional framework.

  In terms of texts and sources I would like to acknowledge research drawn from a number of excellent books: The Secret Listeners by Sinclair McKay, The West End Front by Matthew Sweet, Defend the Realm by Christopher Andrew, and Empire of Secrets by Calder Walton, Dangerous Energy by Wayne D. Cocroft, The Roof-Climber’s Guide to Trinity by Geoffrey Winthrop Young, London’s Lost Rivers by Paul Talling, Jules Pretty’s This Luminous Coast, The Waterways of the Royal Gunpowder Mills by Richard Thomas, and Men of the Tideway by Dick Fagan. Information on the Blitz was drawn from newspaper articles of the time as well as from the archives at the University of South Carolina, and from The People’s War by Angus Calder and Austerity Britain by David Kynaston. Research on unrest in Europe in the aftermath of World War II came from various sources, including Susanne C. Knittel’s The Historical Uncanny: Disability, Ethnicity, and the Politics of Holocaust Memory, Gaia Baracetti’s “Foibe: Nationalism, Revenge and Ideology in Venezia Giulia and Istria, 1943–5” that was published in the Journal of Contemporary History, and David Stafford’s Endgame, 1945: The Missing Final Chapter of World War II. I would like specifically to acknowledge the writer Henry Hemming for his generous, authoritative suggestions regarding intelligence work during the war.

  I would like to thank Claudio Magris whose essay, “Itaca e oltre,” on the turmoil of post-war Europe is briefly quoted. I have drawn from “A Piece of Chalk,” an essay by T. H. Huxley, as well as Robert Gathorne-Hardy’s essay on the sea pea—“Capriccio: Lathyrus Maritimus.” The lines on the pearl are by Richard Porson (1759–1808). I have included a couplet from A. E. Housman’s “From the wash…,” two stanzas from Thomas Hardy’s The Dynasts, a line from García Lorca’s poem “Sevilla,” as well as an idea and a line from Marguerite Duras’s Practicalities. Thanks also to James Salter’s Burning the Days for two remarks, John Berger in his commemorating of Orlando Letelier, C. D. Wright, and Paul Krassner’s remark about relatives. I have drawn from letters sent by Dorothy Loftus about wartime Southwold in 1940, used courtesy of Simon Loftus, as well as from an article by Helen Didd on the preparations for D-Day that appeared in The Guardian. I also drew from a New York Times “The Rural Life” article by Verlyn Klinkenborg called “The Roar of the Night,” which quotes Robert Thaxter Edes on crickets. Numerous sources on greyhound racing included archival articles from the Greyhound Star, A Bit of a Flutter by Mark Clapson, and Norman Baker’s “Going to the Dogs—Hostility to Greyhound Racing in Britain,” published in the Journal of Sport History. A few lyrics that appear briefly are by Cole Porter and Ira Gershwin, while two lines by Howard Dietz were moved to a slightly earlier period without permission. A remark by Robert Bresson made during a filmed interview is the epigraph to this book.

  Many thanks to Simon Beaufoy, who introduced me to John and Evelyn McCann and Jay Fitzsimmons while I was researching canals and tides and life on barges, as well as other river information; they were invaluable guides. Also Vicky Holmes for making available river archives during the war at The Museum of London Docklands, West India Quay. Thanks also to the London Metropolitan Archives, and to those who worked at Waltham Abbey and the Gunpowder Mills when I was there in April 2013, especially Michael Seymour and Ian MacFarlane.

  * * *

  I want to thank everyone who helped and welcomed me whenever I was in Suffolk during my research—especially Liz Calder and Louis Baum, Irene Loftus, John and Genevieve Christie, and the remarkable Caroline and Gathorne Gathorne-Hardy. Special thanks to Simon Loftus, who spent many days guiding me through The Saints and its complex and intricate history as well as sharing his encyclopaedic knowledge of the region.

  Thanks to Susie Schlesinger and her tin house, guarded during the years of this writing by Bellamy, the fabled ox; Skip Dickinson, who many years ago took me to a greyhound museum in Abilene; and Mike Elcock for his long-ago letter about a “couturier”; to David Thomson, Jason Logan, David Young, Griffin Ondaatje, Lesley Barber, Zbyszek Solecki (whose father may have bought a dog from The Darter), Duncan Kenworthy, Peter Martinelli, Michael Morris, and Coles and Manning for a borrowed idea. Thanks also to The Point Reyes Light, and to Jet Fuel.

  I’m grateful to Jess Lacher for her research, and Esta Spalding for her perceptive suggestions to do with the structuring of this book. Also to my friends Ellen Levine and Steven Barclay and Tulin Valeri, who have supported me in so many ways during the years.

  Thank you to Katherine Hourigan and Lydia Buechler, who guided this book so carefully and graciously through production at Knopf, as well as to Carol Carson, Anna Jardine, Pei Loi Koay, Lorraine Hyland, and Leslie Levine. Also to David Milner in England, and Martha Kanya-Forstner at McClelland & Stewart in Toronto; as well as Kimberlee Hesas, Scott Richardson, and Jared Bland. Many thanks to Robin Robertson, my editor at Cape. As well as Sonny Mehta at Knopf.

  My heartfelt thanks to Louise Dennys, my editor in Canada, who has worked with me on this book since first seeing it in manuscript two years ago, and has been its invaluable supporter at every stage.

  I would like to thank and acknowledge the community of friends and writers in Toronto that I have been close to all these years.

  Above all, my thanks and love to Linda from the red river shore.

  A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Michael Ondaatje is the author of six previous novels, a memoir, a nonfiction book on film, and several books of poetry. His novel The English Patient won the Booker Prize; Anil’s Ghost won the Irish Times International Fiction Prize, the Giller Prize, and the Prix Médicis. Born in Sri Lanka, Michael Ondaatje lives in Toronto.

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