My mother was brought home to London to work as soon as she reached fourteen, the minimum school-leaving age at the time. Her mother had let out rooms to lodgers—places to live were becoming fewer and fewer in London due to the bombings—so Mum had to sleep on two dining chairs pushed together. In preparation for her homecoming, my grandmother had secured a job for my mother. She was told she had to start work the very next day at the laundry, which was so sad, because Mum cherished her education, loved learning, and at the age of twelve had won a full scholarship to a prestigious private girls’ school that her parents would not allow her to attend. As the story goes, there was only one scholarship place available, and the teacher’s daughter was the “runner up”—so the teacher persuaded my grandparents not to send my mother, underlining that with ten children, they could ill afford the uniform or the books.
Going to work at the laundry broke my mother’s heart, but she enrolled in evening classes instead, because she had no intention of staying put in a laundry. “Night school,” as it was known, had been popular in British towns and cities since the Industrial Revolution, and many institutions had been purpose-built for the continuing education of adults. Those classes held the promise of advancement for ordinary working people, and without doubt my mother had set her sights on advancement.
As much as the experience of evacuation was terrible, I believe it was the bombings that affected my mother—and so many people—more than they would ever admit. After all, this was life with a “Keep Calm and Carry On” attitude. You just got on with it. If a bomb dropped on the house and you were in it, then under it, and were lucky enough to be pulled alive from the rubble—as was my mother—you just brushed yourself down and carried on. My mother told me about the beautiful Hungarian embroidered blouse she had saved money and clothing coupons to buy. She brought it home, and as she was ironing out the creases, she looked out the window and waved to the little girl who lived opposite, the one who had a crush on Uncle Charlie. She was playing hopscotch in the street. Mum finished ironing her new blouse, and the last thing she remembered was laying it across the top of the piano before reaching to fold the ironing board. Then the street outside the house was hit by a bomb. She remembered not being able to breathe because her ears and nose were plugged with dust. She could not open her eyes. Then she felt rubble being pulled away, and a big policeman leaning over her. “Don’t worry, love, you’ll be all right,” he said, as he took off his greatcoat and wrapped it around her, then picked her up and began carrying her toward the church, where survivors had begun to gather. And as she was being carried away and rubbed the dust from her eyes, she saw two things: The strips of material from her blouse, shredded by shards of wood from the piano, blowing away in the wind, and the air raid precautions men with sacks, collecting the remains of the little girl who had been playing hopscotch outside the house opposite. “Don’t look, love,” said the policeman. “Keep your eyes closed.” When he handed her over to the Women’s Voluntary Services at the church, she realized the blast had ripped away every stitch of clothing she was wearing. She never knew that policeman’s name, but she could remember his number, which was on the shoulder of his greatcoat.
When I was a child, long after my parents’ war, I would lie in bed at night terrified that bombers would come and we would all be dead by morning. I would often hear a light aircraft in the dark distance—I have no idea where it came from or where it was going, for we lived in a rural area—but as it came closer, my fear grew, and I would roll out of bed and crawl underneath. No one ever asked why I would emerge from under the bed when called to get ready for school. Perhaps they thought I was just being a kid.
“So, can you tell me about any other times you’ve felt this kind of fear?”
At sixty-three years of age, I had finally decided to do something about fears that would come out of nowhere to paralyze me when I was riding my horse. Yes, I’d had my share of accidents, but I’d been riding again as soon as I could get back in the saddle, and I was training in the equestrian sport of dressage four or five times a week. But this new, paralyzing fear was something else. It had started in a small way after my mother died, and was escalating fast. First I’d be aware of every rustle in the bushes that might startle Calvin, my big Dutch Warmblood—but Cal is a good lad, nothing much upsets him. Then the fear of cantering emerged and soon I was close to tears every time my trainer asked me for something more, or to try something new. That was when I went to see the sports psychologist who, I was told, was great at getting people back on track, no matter what their sport. And I love riding.
“Jackie? Can you tell me about any other times you’ve felt this kind of fear?”
My mind had wandered. It was our third session and I was miles away, wondering if I was throwing good money after bad, though I was feeling the fear, I guess, and trying to avoid it.
“Jackie?”
“Yes? Um, yes, I can.”
Another pause.
“Well?”
“Well? Oh, yes, well . . . tomorrow I have to go to an event where I’m a guest speaker and there will be almost three hundred people there.”
“It’s natural to have some anxiety about that,” he said.
I shook my head. My throat was dry, and I could feel rivulets of sweat rolling down my back. “Oh no, I’m not worried about the speaking—not tomorrow anyway. I’m just terrified of the drive.” I began to pick at the skin around my fingernails—another habit that was getting worse. Sometimes I would pick until I bled. “I’ve been avoiding freeways because I’ve become scared of them, and I’m worried I’ll make a mistake and cause a terrible accident and cars will crash and people will get killed.” I blurted out the words and was left breathless.
He looked at me. “Have you felt like that at any other time?”
I told him about being scared of bombs.
I told him about being afraid I would not be able to keep my brother safe—fine when we were kids, but he’s now pushing sixty, and I’m really getting on his nerves.
I told him about my mother’s stories.
“How old were you when you first heard these stories?”
I shrugged. “About three. Maybe three and a half.”
“And you write about war—in your work.”
“Um, I suppose—well, yes, I do. It’s a theme—people getting through war.”
He nodded. It was a sage sort of nod, a knowing. If he weren’t so tall, I’d say he reminded me of Yoda. “Jackie—you have secondary PTSD.”
I shrugged. Laughed a bit. I thought he was making it up. I’d never heard of it. Then I consulted Dr. Google as soon as I arrived home.
Secondary traumatic stress is the emotional duress that results when an individual hears about the firsthand trauma experiences of another . . . the essential act of listening to trauma stories may take an emotional toll.
I looked away from the screen and considered—not for the first time—a review of one of my novels. It had remained with me because the reviewer had spoken of “the wartime period that continues to haunt her.” That was a review of a novel about the Great War, my grandfather’s war. I’d felt exposed by the reviewer’s words. She had seen inside me. She knew I was haunted. And sixty years is a long time to put up with ghosts.
3
Country Boy
My father, born in South East London, was a city boy who always loved the country. His family were among the great exodus of people who left London in late summer to go to Kent for the picking of hops. This was in the days when London was enveloped in the toxic yellowish green “pea-soupers” that looked as if they could be cut with a knife, hence London’s nickname—“The Smoke.” This killer phenomenon was described as “the noxious blend of smoke and fog” in 1905 by Dr. Henry Antoine Des Voeux, who used the word “smog” at a public health congress held in London—though the Los Angeles Times in 1893 had already attributed the use
of “smog” to a “witty English writer.” He would have to have been witty, to make light of those killer London smogs.
Hops have been grown in Kent, in England’s south eastern corner, since the 1500s. By the nineteenth century the industry had grown so much that the hop-picking season demanded more workers than were available in rural Kent, so each year whole families would come from the poorest areas of south and east London, in particular, to pick hops. Ordinary working people couldn’t afford not to work, so hop-picking provided a few weeks away in the country without losing money. It was their summer holiday. My paternal grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins, all Londoners, came to Kent for the hop-picking, and as a child my father picked hops along with his family. It was not simply a working holiday, but a time when working-class city folk could inhale deep breaths of fresh country air—and my father loved that clean, clear air.
My grandparents and their parents before them came for the hop-picking, so the tradition ran deep in my family. Nan and Grandad kept a separate set of whitewashed furniture to bring to Kent, just enough pieces to make their “hopper hut”—simple shed-like accommodation provided by the farmer—a little more comfy. Special trains were laid on to bring the workers to the country and many came by bus, the head of the family holding a letter in a brown envelope, confirmation from the farmer that they had the promise of work and a roof over their heads. My father told me that when he was a boy, he was never happier than when he saw the oast houses hove into view as the family trudged several miles from the station to the farm, pushing a barrow with their furniture and household belongings secured on top. Hops were dried in an oast house, that distinctive farm building hallmarked by a cone-shaped kiln and a white cowl resembling a witch’s hat, which drew the warm air up through the hops. The oldest known oast is just outside the town where I grew up and dates back to the seventeenth century. Now most oast houses have been converted into upscale homes; the hop gardens that were spread across the land of my growing are no more, for England’s hop industry began to die after the war. Prices were undercut by cheaper European hops, and a growing consumer desire for a milder beer than the English hops would provide.
Of course, the finer points of agricultural economics were not on my mind out in the hop gardens when I was a child—and until I was eleven I was part of that tradition. Instead my memories of hop-picking are of the camaraderie, of people calling out to one another, and of someone starting a song and everyone joining in, so it was as if a rag-tag choir had given full voice across the land, London songs echoing across country fields. In my memories there’s color, laughter and noise, and people shouting that you should see what’s over in the next hop garden—the bines are hanging so heavy with hops they’re touching the ground. I can hear the farmer calling, “Get your hops ready!” as he makes his way along the rows, plunging his wicker basket into each family’s bin, counting out the bushels of hops picked and marking up the workers’ tally books. Before he arrived at the bin, my grandmother and mother would push their hands deep into the mound of hops to fluff them up, which in turn might yield an extra bushel of hops counted on the tally book. I can almost feel my flesh pucker at the biting sting along my bine-scratched arms as I lathered them with soap and water at the end of the day—a hop bine could give you a nasty cut if you weren’t careful. You slept well during the hop-picking season.
Amid the memories, there’s the ever-present fragrance of those spicy hops. I remember, once, reading a novel in which the author—who did not come from Kent or indeed from the United Kingdom, but had set her book in the county—had described the smell of hops as being like beer. I shook my head and put the book aside. Beer may smell like hops, but hops do not smell like beer. Even as a small child, I looked forward to hop-picking season for the spice-laden fragrance in the air, and loved every single morning when I left the house and that peppery atmosphere seemed to envelop me. Chill mornings and warm days heralded hop-picking, a season that could last from mid-August to late September, dependent on the crop. The new school year started halfway through the hop-picking, so for me there was always a sense of moving on and moving up, of untouched exercise books waiting to be filled as I stepped up to the next rung on the ladder to wherever I was going. I remember leaving the house with my mother early one day in September. “It feels like a real hop-picking morning, doesn’t it, Mum?” She laughed and agreed, leaning her head back to take the air. But we were loading the car for my return to college, and by then my mother was a senior government executive working in prisons’ administration, while my father had his own business. Time had marched for all of us, and the hops were long gone.
The truth is, I think my father liked the country for the quiet. He hated loud noises, though would make an exception for a good swing band when he and my mother went dancing, a hobby they took up in their late forties. And oh, could they dance! I was a child when I worked out the reason for my father’s need for quiet, and as if experience is filtered into our cells even before we’re born, I have found that I, too, like to be quiet. My songwriter-musician husband waits until I leave the house before he turns up the amps and starts to play a song he’s been working on. My dislike of loud noises, of sudden unwanted sounds, is rooted in my grandfather’s shell shock, I am sure, for my father had grown up in a quiet house, a house where a man wounded in the Battle of the Somme in 1916 went on with his life despite injuries to his legs, his lungs and to his soul. In his book War Child: Children Caught in Conflict, Martin Parsons, founder of the Research Centre for Evacuee and War Child Studies at the University of Reading, England, suggests that it takes three generations for an experience of war to work its way through the family system. I can believe it.
To be honest, most people would not have known about the shell shock—Grandad was a good man, a man who loved his family, who cherished his grandchildren, and who worked hard. He was kind and gentle. But I witnessed the effects of his trauma, and it’s something I will never forget, though I have wondered what my father might have seen in the years of his growing.
My father was born in 1926, ten years after my grandfather was wounded as he ran from a trench across no-man’s land toward the enemy. He was cut down by machine-gun fire and had already sustained gas damage to his lungs. Grandad had first enlisted in 1914, and when most of his battalion was wiped out during the First Battle of Ypres—at what the soldiers called “Plugstreet Wood”—he was required to reenlist with a new regiment. In the interim period, he was on stretcher-bearer duty.
My grandfather was a costermonger by trade, a man who sold fruit and vegetables from a horse-drawn cart. This was in the days when a man had to fight for his turf, and as a young man my grandfather had a reputation as a spry featherweight with a demon of a one-two punch. Before I started school he taught me how to protect my eyes in a fight, while landing a left hook on the chin of my aggressor. I’m still wondering why he thought I might get into a fight, because I hate any form of conflict. When I was twenty-one and working for an airline, I’d tagged along with a gaggle of aircrew to a bar and in conversation one of the pilots happened to mention that his grandfather had been a costermonger. “Mine too,” I said, and I told a story about one of Grandad’s horses. “Oh, your grandad must have been a successful man—he had horses. My grandfather only had a push-barrow,” said the pilot. I was at once very proud, perhaps even more so because I understood Grandad’s struggle.
The damage to my grandfather’s lungs was so invasive that at least once each year—usually in winter—he suffered congestion severe enough for the doctor to send him away to the coast. The ambulance would come and take him to a place where other gas-damaged “old soldiers” from the Great War who fought to breathe could regain some semblance of health. My father and his brother would struggle to keep the business going, boys trying to do a man’s work. But the horse and cart had to be sold, and the family survived on the meagre soldier’s pension my grandfather received from 1924 onward—eight years aft
er his wounding and six years after the Armistice—following an assessment of his disability. The boys earned money before and after school with paper rounds, running errands and delivering messages for shopkeepers. Then my grandfather would come home from the seaside, procure a barrow and start his business again, pushing the barrow miles to Covent Garden market in the early hours to stock up with produce, before returning to Camberwell to complete his rounds. Soon there would be money enough to buy another horse, so the barrow was sold to buy a cart, and life would tick along until he could barely breathe again. The basic subsistence offered by his war pension didn’t amount to much, but Grandad managed to keep his family clothed and fed.
There’s a story about my grandfather that my dad loved to tell—I think because it said something about his father’s spirit. One of Grandad’s customers, a well-to-do lady who lived in a mansion in a wealthier part of the area, asked Grandad if he would be so kind as to move some furniture to her daughter’s house when he’d finished his round. He agreed—it was extra money, after all. Moving the furniture meant the horse had to walk at a steady pace up an incline, but when they reached the top, my grandfather was stopped by a policeman who questioned where he was going with such fine furniture—the unspoken message being, “And you, a simple costermonger—it’s probably all been stolen.” The policeman insisted my grandfather return to the woman’s home, so he could check Grandad’s story. The woman was furious with the policeman, informing him that of course Mr. Winspear was acting on her behalf. So the policeman told Grandad he was free to go on with the delivery, but then he saw him unhitching the horse. “What do you think you’re doing?” asked the constable. “You’ll block the street.” My grandfather turned to the policeman and said, “My horse went all the way up that hill once, and all the way back down again because of you—so I’m going to take him up there without a load, while you put your mind to how you’re going to bring my cart up to meet us.” It was sometime later that my grandfather, resting with his horse—who had enjoyed a drink from a trough and a nosebag of oats—saw a cluster of policemen hauling his cart and its load up the hill. Telling that story, I wonder about a time when there were troughs of water in London for horses to take their fill.
This Time Next Year We'll Be Laughing Page 3