Inventory

by Darran Anderson

  Time is the spreading of ink on a page wet with rain.

  No letters between them survive. At least not to my knowledge. Paper was not yet cheap, but if words were exchanged, they do not remain. After reading, maybe they were discarded, or perhaps cherished and found later and then thrown away by someone else, shorn of context and meaning. One person’s precious object, divested of memory, is another’s junk. Yet there’s always the possibility of a letter’s existence out there, hidden in the city, in some obscure vault or lost somewhere along the way, by the postal services that brought messages back from an expanding front. There must have been moments when Needles thought, “Please, God. Let him survive and come back to me,” and then in terrible retrospect, “Be careful what you wish for.”

  Sundial

  Beneath the Derry Walls, below the picturesque, oddly pastoral St. Augustine’s Church, where the birds always sang, built on the site of the original church of Derry’s patron saint, Columba, there were streets that have now disappeared. My grandfather and grandmother had actually grown up in the same part of Derry before their marriage, before even their courtship, a place almost entirely gone now, on the steep slope leading down to the Bogside, where the housing looked like it was sculpted from the earth, under a blanket of low-hanging soot. In surviving photographs it seems a Dickensian rookery with an industrialized charcoal city in the background. In time, pictures of it are more remote from us than NASA shots of the Martian landscape. Part of the rift between then and now, them and us, is the fact that these images came before the invention of color photography. The blurry black-and-whites seem older even than paintings that came before them. This is, of course, an illusion. The camera always lies. Outside the lens, life cascaded on in every direction and every hue. The world was not black-and-white. It still isn’t.

  Joseph and Margaret (before she received her nickname) were neighbors on Walker’s Square, in the triumphalist shadow of Walker’s Pillar, which moved like a sundial with the changing light of the day. Governor Walker was the hero of the Siege of Derry, the great victory of Protestantism over Catholicism, when the rebels had held out against a tyrannical British king (the history of the North is basically an exercise in ignoring the huge complexities, nuances, and contradictions). Much of Walker’s greatness was the result of his knack for self-publicizing in a book that wrote out other heroes like Major Henry Baker and Colonel John Mitchelburne, and the really daring, gun-toting figures like Captain Adam Murray, who died in obscurity and penury. The pen was, in the long term, mightier than the sword. And he who could rewrite history owned history. The governor was a curious case. A self-aggrandizing preacher who was not much loved or followed, but who gained, as often happens in Ireland, a colossal projected authority in death that had eluded him in life. When King Billy, the bisexual Dutch monarch so beloved by puritan Unionism, heard of Walker’s death at the Battle of the Boyne, shot while comforting the dying Duke of Schomberg, he is supposed to have said, “Fool that he was, what brought him there?” The dead, however, become everything they, and we, could have been. They have their uses and assume grandeur in proportion to the function they offer the living. So they raised a pillar in Walker’s name to tower over the superstitious papist peasants kept outside the city gates.

  They built the pillar with a spiral staircase within: 105 steps to the top, one for every long, brutal day of the Siege. The statue brandished a Bible and a sword, which supposedly fell when Catholic emancipation was achieved. The truth was, it blew down in a storm, given that the statue was exposed at its height to not only a multitude of sunsets but the winds funneling off the Donegal mountains from the Atlantic. Every statement is a challenge. One night an anonymous figure climbed the pillar and tied an Irish tricolor to the top of the statue. On another occasion, someone launched a half brick at it and knocked its finger off. Eventually it was toppled, mimicking the fall of Nelson’s Pillar in Dublin. The IRA planted explosives, and in the dead of night there was an enormous explosion and it collapsed. Only the plinth remained, and empty cubes of once-inhabited air above it. It existed now as a different symbol. A monument of a disappearance.

  My grandparents lived within spitting distance of the walls. The curfew bell sounded into the 1960s. Catholics were reminded they had to leave the walled city at 9:00 p.m. and were forbidden to reenter until 9:00 a.m. They were banned from owning property within; even the bishop had to use an intermediary to buy a house for a nunnery on Pump Street. Outside, the ghetto was a destitute but lively place. There were pubs nearby, shebeens really: the Steamship Inn and Willie Devine’s. Larmour’s shop piled junk and antiques up against the masonry of the walls. Performances were given at the Oak’s and Emmet’s Halls, the latter named after the “Great Catholic Emancipator.” The basements of the houses on one terrace all ran into one another—a tunnel without partition. They set up a boxing gym there. I could see it in my mind’s eye under a flickering, swinging light bulb. A montage of films I’d seen, and probably nothing like the real thing. The streets are obliterated now: Nailors Row, Friel’s Terrace, and so on. Not only have all the people and the events that happened there vanished, but so, too, have the very sets and stages of the streets on which they took place. It exists now only in books, photos, memories. Instead there is a grassy incline barreling down to the Bogside. My father regularly cut the grass there for the council; he was on the cover of the local paper doing so, bare-chested, to my mother’s embarrassment and secret pride, under the headline “Make Hay While the Sun Shines,” on the unmarked site of his parents’ young lives. The places where they slept and ate and dreamt are invisible. We tend the soil under which our ancestors lie.

  Medal (Royal Army Medical Corps)

  Needles must have known something of war. Secondhand. Its shadow. There were medals from her father in a drawer somewhere. He was in the Royal Army Medical Corps in the Great War—“the war to end all wars,” as the utopian pessimists put it. A stretcher bearer. He carted men down trenches and across no-man’s-land to behind the lines. Dreading the smell of cut grass, which was the first sign of deadly phosgene gas. Many of those he carried were ruined forever, whether they lived or not. Boys with jaws missing. Horrible fractures. Amputations without ether. Infections. Parts of their young bodies gouged out or shot off or mangled. What was once a face covered with a porcelain mask and a flat, motionless painted eye. Bionic men with legs and arms of wood and hooked wire. “Broken gargoyles” they called them.

  In France a million countrymen had died. Double that number had returned home disabled. They marched at the front of the French victory parade to say, “Here is the cost,” but few, if any, knew what it had been for, and people would subtly or unsubtly turn away in daily life. Afraid of staring too much, they avoided all looks. The government paid off Needles’s father, and his memories and nightmares, at the end with a token sum. His medals for bravery lay in a drawer when my father and his siblings were growing up, and they would play with them and inspect them, holding them up to the light. No one knows where they went.

  Pocket Mirror

  The ink was faded on the forms but still discernible. It was written before he was even a father, let alone a grandfather. “Full name: Joseph XX Anderson. Date of birth: 20th March of 1925. Trade on enlistment: laborer. Next of kin: Sister—Miss Mary Anderson. Address: 33 Walkers Place”—an address that no longer existed—“Londonderry. N Ireland. Religion: RC. Single. Industry group: ZE. Occupational classification: L485. Hometown: Omagh, County Tyrone.”

  Omagh? I wondered if that’s where Joseph had genuinely come from (no one had ever mentioned it previously), if it was a mistake in processing, or if he was covering his tracks from the beginning, trying to set them on the wrong path, give himself a head start. According to the forms, he was transferred immediately by train from Derry to Omagh. They place him there at the beginning of March 1943. He disappeared on March 8. They notice his absence at one minute to midnight, at the nightly head count. He is missing for five days.<
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  The Blitz spirit existed, of course, and crime rocketed, of course. It was a golden age for shysters and opportunists. Ration-book fraud, smuggling, rape, theft, looting. For someone who’d grown up hustling, prowling the edges of the underworld, the allure of safety and perhaps the chance to make a buck or two outweighed valor.

  At that time Convoy SC 121 was struggling across the Atlantic in icy, gale-force winds. It was becoming increasingly dispersed and the crews became worried. The wolf packs of the U-boat fleet prowled toward it. The Guido made a break for it and was torpedoed southeast of Cape Farewell by U-633 (itself rammed and sunk two days later by the SS Scorton). Ten of its crew were taken to the ocean floor. The stragglers Empire Lakeland, Fort Lamy, Leadgate, and Vojvoda Putnik (formerly the Kerry Range) were gradually picked off. The next day the Bonneville, Malantic, and Rosewood followed. The next day the Coulmore, the Nailsea Court, and so on. Hundreds of tonnages with hundreds of sailors lost to the sea. The German submarine U-156 was sunk by depth charges off Barbados. A life raft was dropped for the handful of survivors, who climbed on board. They were never seen again.

  On land, the Czechs and Soviets were slowing the Wehrmacht at Sokolovo, while 7,240 Jews were transported from Yugoslavia to the extermination camp at Treblinka. The Kraków Ghetto was declared officially liquidated. On March 13, 1943, at the Nazi Werwolf bunker command network in Ukraine, Major-General Henning von Tresckow asked a colleague accompanying Adolf Hitler to take a case back to Berlin with them. It contained two bottles of Cointreau, which, he explained, he’d lost in a bet with another general. Inside was a plastic time bomb, designed to explode midflight, killing the dictator. The Condor plane took off and the fuse wore down, but, due to the temperature in the cargo hold, the bomb failed to detonate. On that same day, at 12:30 p.m., Joseph was apprehended in Derry. He was punished by being locked up, was forfeited five days’ pay, and was ordered to pay back the cost of his now-missing kit, which he had cashed in or lost along the way.

  Joseph returned to his regiment, resumed his training. They didn’t let him forget what he’d done, and for a few weeks trained an eye on him. He kept his head down for a month. At one minute to midnight, the time of roll call, on April 22, as the Germans burned the Warsaw Ghetto to the ground, he was found to have vanished again. The roads and railways between Omagh and Derry, and his old haunts in both, were searched, to no avail. He was declared a deserter on May 13, 1943, the day the Axis forces in North Africa surrendered. It was not until June 15, 1943—perhaps when he’d gotten complacent, thinking he’d escaped them for good—that he was arrested by military police in Derry. Two weeks later he was sentenced to eighty-four days’ detention and forfeited fifty-four days’ pay. The sentence was suspended so that he could continue serving, to be reviewed on September 30, provided he changed his ways.

  At one minute to midnight on August 1, the day of the execution of the Martyrs of Nowogródek, Joseph vanished again. He was found five days later, forfeited five days’ pay, and earned himself six months’ detention at the prison barracks at Carrickfergus. It was a place where those who’d committed acts tantamount to treason were kept. They held German prisoners in the nearby Sunnylands and Italians at Sullatober Mill. Joseph’s record was repeatedly marked “Struck off strength,” signifying being kicked out of regiments and sent to others. He would not have received a pleasant welcome. “Close arrest” was another recurring term, assuming imprisonment with continual surveillance. His sentence was annotated “IHL”—imprisonment with hard labor. They sent him to a psychiatrist, for medical tests, and then on to the place where they would break him.

  In ’44 Joseph was shipped to England. Chorley detention camp. He’d have been imprisoned with a mixed bunch. Everyone had fucked up in a different way. Nervous shell-shocked wrecks. Explosive hotheads. Spivs. Paratroopers who’d frozen in flight. Conscientious objectors. They worked outside in all weathers. The guards were sadists. It had to appear worse than war. A disincentive. There were beatings. Denials of access to water. Isolation cells. Humiliations occurred on the parade ground for the others to see. One lad was battered around the ground by two commanding officers. When he complained of being unable to breathe, they throttled him and laid into him with their fists. They gave him a savage beating, which he did not long survive. They got a manslaughter charge. The judge began, “I am extremely sorry to have to sentence two men with the records you two have…”

  Joseph outlived the war. The price for that would prove to be a heavy one. He was placed back in the army, supposedly reformed. He had leave in 1946, went back to Ulster, and did not return once more. He was marked AWOL on July 14. He was apprehended by police in a night bust, 3:55 a.m. on July 31. What did he do in those days and nights of clandestine freedom? Did he hide completely or in clear sight? Why did he not just cross over the border to the Irish Free State (as it was then called), go on the run, as many had and would, and construct a new identity? What brought him back to Derry, again and again, a small place where he’d easily be seen, where people would talk? Perhaps it was her? Perhaps this was a love story, after all.

  On August 10, Joseph was shipped to northwest Europe. On the twenty-ninth of that month, he was ordered to make good the sum of nineteen pounds for the loss, by neglect, of his kit. On September 19, he was found guilty of going AWOL again for over a fortnight, forfeited seventeen days’ pay—the time he’d absented himself on the continent—and was sentenced to one year’s imprisonment with hard labor.

  “Was he a coward?” I wondered. Perhaps. Perhaps he was terrified of things he’d heard about. That the conflict would swallow him up. Yet cowardice didn’t seem to ring entirely true. The military prisons were places of great shame and fear. Joseph could have kept his head down in the army, tried to get through it all alongside his comrades. The path he took, though, was willfully intransigent. Continually bashing his head against his own army, continually escaping, continually caught, never changing. It seemed not the act of a coward, but that of an inveterate dissident or a maniac. Had he fought and lived, he’d likely have been out in ’45, but he was stubborn, stubborn as a mule, fighting perhaps himself.

  At the beginning of 1948, Joseph is listed as a member of the British Army of the Rhine, an occupation force of Germany. He was based at Sennelager, Paderborn, North Rhine–Westphalia. There’s still a British base there. It was called the Theatre Barracks because it had one at its center, altered into an Army Kinema Corporation cinema for newsreels and flicks for the troops. On R&R, they’d sneak off to local pubs like the Pupasch and Danni’s Bar on Danziger Strasse. After less than a month there, Joseph is “tried in the field” and charged with “whilst on active service, disobeying a lawful command given by his superior officer, in that he at Theatre Barracks, Sennelager, did not leave the dining hall when ordered to do so by LSM Day.” He was found not guilty. “Military conduct—very bad. Testimonial—not assessed.” Charge 2 was simply that “he was drunk,” of which he was found guilty and sentenced to six months’ imprisonment with hard labor, to be followed by being discharged with ignominy. He was sent to His Majesty’s Prison Shepton Mallet. The “glasshouse.” Infamous for its hangings of soldiers who’d committed rapes and murders, most of them black kids in dubious convictions. One took twenty-two minutes to die. The last execution by firing squad took place in the courtyard, one Benjamin Pyegate, who’d stabbed another soldier in the throat during a brawl. The gallows were still there as a warning. Brutal places. Sadistic guards. Atrocious food. Poor hygiene in earlier years caused diseases to run riot. It was the oldest-surviving prison in the country. Ominous. Stone so thick they kept precious books there during war, protected against bombs: the Domesday Book, Magna Carta, the Victory logbook, the Olive Branch Petition. Just a few years after Joseph’s stay, the Kray twins had served out their time here, after a spell in the Tower of London for the same crimes of AWOL and ill discipline.

  The deserter’s tale is one that goes largely untold. Personal, familial, and so
cietal shame have a silencing effect, even today. Who wants to read of the cowards, the weak, the self-righteous, the mutinous? Except that there were one hundred thousand deserters in the British Army alone. An awful lot of secrets to keep.

  During the First World War, Joseph might have received the death sentence: two hundred thousand soldiers in the British Army were court-martialed for various offenses. More than three hundred were shot at dawn for desertion or simply freezing in action; twenty-two of them were Irish.

  Joseph came back to haunt his own life. Perhaps he was already damaged, and the war made sure of it. Perhaps my grandmother was being nostalgic when she said he went away a gentleman and came back a monster, but perhaps she was being honest. There was no chance of him getting a job in anything to do with the state, or with anyone who knew his history. He was a marked man. He would no longer have the anxiety of being uncovered by the military police and forced back, but in its place came a shame that was inescapable, that rumbled always in the background, that seemed to exist within the slightest glance from others. It turned the victory celebrations to ashes in the mouth. The temptation would have been to nurse your grievances, like a devil locked in frost, and then to silence them with drink and false tyrannical certainty. He wasn’t the same person as the one who’d left; and the person he was now, the person others saw, he could not evade. Joseph had ruined his own name and his own face, and he could do nothing but continue to wear them.