“Then, one morning, I wake up and there’s this huge destroyer right there alongside us and men looking down over the side and waving and shouting. I thought I was still in my dream, but I wasn’t. Only three of us out of that whole lifeboat survived. They patched me up as best they could, and shipped me home. The next thing I knew I was in this hospital, down in Sussex it was, East Grinstead. That’s where they put the pieces of me together again, like a sort of jigsaw puzzle, but the pieces were skin and bone and flesh. The trouble was, there were some pieces of my jigsaw missing, so they had a bit of a job, which is why I still look a bit of a mess. But I wasn’t the worst in that hospital, not by a long shot.
“Dr McIndoe, he was called. Wonderful man he was, a genius. It was him that did it, put us back together, and I’m not just talking about the operations. He was a magician in the operating theatre, all right. But it’s what he did afterwards for us. He made us feel right again inside, like we mattered, like we weren’t monster men. It was a hospital full of men like me, but mostly air-force boys. We were all together, every one of us patched up in one way or another, so it didn’t matter what we looked like even when we went out and about. Everyone treated us right: nurses and doctors, everyone. Annie came to see me when she could. Right away I saw she didn’t look at me the same, didn’t speak to me like I was normal, like the nurses did. She still loved me, I think, but all she saw was a monster man.
“After a while, when the war was over, I left the hospital and came home to Annie, home to Scilly. My dream had come true, I thought. But of course it hadn’t. I soon found that out. Annie tried – tried her best. I tried too. We had a baby – your mother, Michael – but Annie still wasn’t looking at me. I drank too much, said things I shouldn’t have said. She did too, told me I should stop feeling sorry for myself, that I wasn’t the man she’d married any more. Then we just stopped talking to one another. One day I came back home from a day’s fishing and she’d left, just like that, taking my little girl, your mother, with her. She’d had enough. I don’t blame her, not any more. No one wants a monster for a husband. No one wants half a man, and that’s what I was, Michael, half a man. That’s what I still am. But I blamed her then. I hated her. Every day it’s all I could think of, how much I hated her.
“I lived with that hate inside me most of my life. Hate, anger, call it what you will. It’s like a cancer. It eats away at you. She wouldn’t let me see my little girl, even when she was older. I never forgave her for that. She said I drank too much, which was true – said I’d frighten her too much. Maybe she was right. Maybe she was right.”
It wasn’t the moment to say anything, so I didn’t. We fell into our silence again.
We unloaded the catch, moored the boat and walked together back home up the hill. We cooked the mackerel and sat eating it, still in silence. I was silent because I was reliving his story in my head. But I had one thing I needed to say.
“She wasn’t right,” I told him. “Annie should have let you see your own daughter. Everyone has a right to see their own child.”
“Maybe,” he replied. “But the truth is, I think I do frighten your mother a little, even now. So Annie was right, in her way. Your mother came to see me for the first time after she’d left school, when she wasn’t a little girl any more; practically grown up, she was. She came without ever asking her mother, to find out who her father was, she said; because she hadn’t ever known me, not properly. She was kind to me. She’s always been kind to me ever since. But even now she can’t look me in the eye like you do. She writes letters, keeps in touch, calls me Dad, lets me visit, does her best by me, always has. And I’m grateful, don’t get me wrong. But every time I came to you for Christmas when you were little, I longed for her just to look at me. She wants to, but she can’t. And she’s angry too, like I was. She can’t forgive her mother for what she did either, for taking her away from her dad. She hasn’t spoken to her mother now in over twenty years. Time’s come to forgive and forget; that’s what I think.”
So now I knew the whole story for the first time. We relapsed after that into our usual, quiet ways for the rest of the holidays. But by the time I left I think I was closer to him than I have ever been to anyone else in my life.
I went back a year later, this time with my mother to visit him in hospital. He was already too ill to get out of bed. He said he was a lucky man because he could see the sea from his bed. He died the second night we were there. He’d left a letter for me on the mantelpiece in his cottage.
Dear Michael,
See they bury me at sea. I want to be with Jim and the others. I want Annie there, and I want your mother there too. I want you all there together. I want things put right. Thanks for looking at me like you did.
Love,
Grandpa
A few days later Annie came over to Scilly for the funeral. She held hands with my mother as Grandpa’s ashes were scattered out beyond Scilly Rock. We were lucky. We had a fine day for it. The gannets were flying, and everyone was together, just as Grandpa had wanted. So he was right about gannets. Grandpa was right about a lot of things. But he wasn’t half a man.
i was there with horses too
I was in my local pub, the Duke of York, in Iddesleigh in deepest Devon. It was twenty-five years ago now. “Are you writing another book, Michael?” said the old man sitting opposite me by the fire, cradling his pint. I told him I had come across an old painting of a cavalry charge in the First World War. The British cavalry were charging up a hill towards the German position, one or two horses already caught up in the barbed wire. I was trying, I told him, to write a story of the First World War as seen through the eyes of a horse. “I was there in 1916,” the old man told me, his eyes filling with tears. “I was there with horses too.” He talked on for hours about the horse he’d loved and left behind at the end of the war, how the old horse had been sold off to the French butchers for meat. Afterwards I went back home, sat down and wrote my first novel about the First World War, War Horse.
Having written several other novels and short stories about war, some five years ago I was invited to Ypres (“Wipers” to the British Tommy of the First World War) to an international conference of writers who had written on this difficult subject. On visiting the In Flanders Field Museum in Ypres, the most moving museum I have ever been in – you can hardly speak when you come out – I came across a telegram sent to a mother in England in 1916, informing her that her son had been shot for cowardice. I stood there, overwhelmed with sadness, feeling something of the great grief which that mother must have felt on receiving this terrible news, knowing her life and her family’s lives must have been blighted for ever.
I had the good fortune then to meet the museum’s curator, Piet Chielens, and I asked him if he knew how many British soldiers had been executed in the First World War. Over three hundred, he said, some for desertion, some for cowardice, and two for falling asleep at their posts. I read some of the records of their trials, many of which lasted less than half an hour. Half an hour for a man’s life. In all of this I noted a presumption of guilt, not innocence. Often soldiers were unrepresented; often no witnesses were called in their defence. Many were clearly shell-shocked – a trauma already recognized and understood at the time. Many men, officers mostly, suffering from shell shock were sent home for treatment. Not so these unfortunates. Condemned as “worthless men”, three thousand were sentenced to death. Of these over three hundred were shot.
One case I read concerned a young soldier who had fought all through the Battle of the Somme in 1916, witnessed the slaughter and the horror, but one day decided in rest camp that he couldn’t stand the sound of the guns any longer. He walked out, was arrested, court-martialled and condemned to death. Six weeks later he was taken out at dawn and shot. Men from his own company were forced to make up the firing squad. To protest and to honour the man they had been forced to kill, they stood by his grave all day till sunset.
That there was little justice for these
men I have no doubt. That these were political, military tribunals, seeking at the outset to condemn, “pour encourager les autres”, I have no doubt. Knowing this, seeing in my mind’s eye that young man tied to a post one grey dawn in a field near Ypres in 1916, and knowing that successive governments in this country have refused both to acknowledge the injustices they suffered and to pardon them – either would do – I decided to write, needed to write, the story of this young soldier. I called it Private Peaceful, the name of a dead soldier I’d found quite by chance on a grave in Bedford Cemetery, a Commonwealth War Graves cemetery just outside Ypres.
But this next story is about another war, about a private soldier from another country, Argentina, an enemy country at the time the story takes place. I saw him in a photograph. He was lying crumpled amongst rocks on top of a mountain in the Falklands. He may have been an enemy, but he was someone’s son, someone’s brother, someone’s father too perhaps.
for carlos, a letter from your father
I have never forgotten my tenth birthday. All my other childhood birthdays are lost somewhere in the mists of memory, blurred by sameness perhaps: the excitement of anticipation, the brief rapture of opening presents, and then the inevitable disappointment because birthdays, like Christmases, were always so quickly over. Not so my tenth.
It is not only because of the gleaming silver bike my mother gave me that I remember it so well. I tried it out at once, in my pyjamas. In an ecstasy of joy and pride I rode it round and round the block, hoping all my friends would be up early and watching out of their windows, admiring, and seething with envy too. But even my memory of that has diminished over the years. It was when I came home, puffed out and glowing, and sat down for breakfast, that my mother gave me something else too. It is this second gift that I have never forgotten. I can’t honestly remember what happened to my beautiful bike. Either it rusted away at the back of the garage when I grew out of it, or it was thrown away. I don’t know. I do know that I still have this second gift, that I have never grown out of it and I will never throw it away.
She put down beside me on the kitchen table what looked at first like an ordinary birthday card. She didn’t say who it was from but I could see that there was something about this card that troubled her deeply.
“Who’s it from?” I asked her. I wasn’t that interested at first – after all, birthday cards were never as intriguing as presents. She didn’t answer me. I picked up the envelope. There, written in handwriting I did not know, was my answer: For Carlos, a letter from your father.
The envelope had clearly been folded. It was soiled and there was a tear in one corner. The word father was smeared and only just legible. I looked up and saw my mother’s eyes filled with tears. I knew instantly she wanted me to ask no more questions. She simply said, “He wanted me to keep it for you, until your tenth birthday.”
So I opened the card and read.
Dearest Carlos,
I want to wish you first of all a very happy tenth birthday. How I should love to be with you on this special day. Maybe we could have gone riding together as I once did with my father on my birthday. Was it my tenth? I can’t remember. I do remember we rode all day and picnicked on a high hill where the wind breathed through the long grass. I thought I could see for ever from that hill. Or maybe we could have gone to a football match and howled together at the referee and leapt up and down when we scored.
But then maybe you don’t like horses or football. Why should you have grown up like me? You are a different person, but with a little of me inside you, that’s all. I do know that your mother and I would have sung “Happy Birthday” to you and watched your eyes light up when you opened your presents, as you blew out the candles on your cake.
But all I have to give, all I can offer, is this letter, a letter I hope you will never have to read, for if you are reading it now it means that I am not with you, and have never been with you, that I died ten years ago in some stupid, stupid war that killed me and many, many others, and like all wars did no one any good.
Dying, Carlos, as you know, comes to each of us. Strangely, I am not afraid, not as much as I have been. I think maybe that love has conquered my fear. I am filled with so much love for you, and such a sadness too, a sadness I pray you will never have to know. It is the thought of losing you before I even get to know you that saddens me so. If I die in this terrible place then we shall never meet, not properly, father to son. We shall never talk. For a father to be parted from his son is always a terrible thing, yet if it has to be, then in a way I would rather it was now, this way, this soon. To have known you, to have watched you grow and then to have lost you, must surely be even worse. Or am I just telling myself that?
You will know me a little, I suppose, perhaps from photographs. And your mother may well have told you something about me, of my childhood, how I grew up on the farm in Patagonia and was riding horses almost before I could walk. Maybe she told you of our first meeting when her car had a puncture and I was riding by and stopped to change her tyre for her. I am quite good at tinkering with motors – you have to be on a farm. But I took a lot longer to change that tyre than I needed to – if you know what I mean. By the time I had finished I knew I loved her and wanted to spend my whole life with her. Later I learnt that she went home afterwards and told her sister that she’d met this young man on the road who had nice eyes, and a nice horse, but who talked too much and was hopeless at changing tyres. Anyway, much against the wishes of our families, who all said we were far too young, we got married six months later.
For a short while life seemed so sweet, so perfect. Then came my conscription papers and separation and the long weeks of military training. But I didn’t mind that much because it was something we all had to do, and because I knew it would soon be over. I had so much to look forward to, most of all the birth of you. All the talk in the barracks was of war. I think we talked ourselves into this war – perhaps it is always like that.
I came home to see you just once, and now, only a few weeks later, I find myself sitting here in the Malvinas, high in the rocky hills above Stanley Town. Night is coming on and I am waiting for battle.
As I write this I am so cold I cannot feel my feet. I can hardly hold the pencil I am writing with. The British are coming. They know where we are. They have been bombarding us all day. We cannot see them, but we know they are out there somewhere. We expect them to attack tonight. All of us know in our hearts, though we do not say it, that this will be the last battle. In battle men die. I do not want to think of that, but it is difficult not to. The officers say we can win, that if we can only hang on, reinforcements will soon be here. But we all know better. They have to say that, don’t they?
I can see you now in my head as you were, three long months ago, on the morning I left home. When I looked down upon you that last time, cradled in your mother’s arms, I remember I tried to picture you as a grown boy. I couldn’t then, and I still can’t. For me you are that sleeping child, yawning toothlessly, fists clenched, frowning through your milk-soaked dreams. But grow up you will, grow up you have, and now that you are old enough I want to tell you myself how I came to be here, fighting a war in this dreadful place, how I died so far from home. I want to speak to you directly. At least you will know me a little because you can hear my voice in my writing. It is true that I am writing to you also because it helps me – if I think of you I do not think of the battle ahead. I have already written to your mother. She will have read her letter ten years ago now. This is your letter, Carlos, our hello you might call it, and our goodbye.
As I write this I am so cold I cannot feel my feet.
I had not thought it would end like this. Like all my comrades I believed what we were told, what we saw on the television, what we read in the papers. The Malvinas belonged to Argentina, and that much is true. They had been stolen from us, they said. We would restore the honour of Argentina and take them back. Our flag would fly again over Stanley. It would be easy, they told
us. We would attack in force, overwhelm the British garrison in a few hours. There would be very little shooting. The Malvinas would be ours again, Argentinian, and then we could all go home. I was excited – we all were excited and proud too, proud that we were the ones chosen to do this for our country. It was all going to be so simple.
And it began well. We came ashore in our landing craft. No one fired a shot at us. As we marched into Stanley we saw our flag already flying high over the town. The British marines in their green berets sat huddled by the roadside dejected, defeated. The war was over almost before it had begun. Or so we thought. We had won. The Malvinas were ours again. How the people back home would be cheering, I thought. What heroes we would be when we returned. How we laughed and sang and drank that first night. We did not feel the cold in the wind, not then.
In those early days on the Malvinas, in that first flush of victory, the islands seemed to us like a paradise, a paradise regained. Our paradise. Argentinian.
Yet here I sit only a month or two later and we know that we are about to lose the last battle. The ships did not come. The supplies did not come. Instead the British came, their planes first, then their ships, then their soldiers. We did what we could, Carlos, but we were raw conscripts, poorly fed, poorly equipped, badly led, and we were up against determined fighters. From the moment they sank the great battleship Belgrano, the pride of our navy, we knew it could only end one way. I lost my cousin in that ship. I saw men die, good men, my friends, men with wives and mothers and children.
I grew up fast in the terrible weeks that followed. I learnt what I should already have understood, that in wars people really do kill one another. I did not hate those I have killed and those who try to kill me do not hate me either. We are like puppets doing a dance of death, our masters pulling the strings, watched by the world on television. What they don’t know is that the puppets are made of flesh, not wood. War, Carlos, has only one result: suffering.
Singing for Mrs Pettigrew: A Story Maker's Journey Page 15