But he was only a boy, a young boy, and finally I stopped mocking his passion for the Cadet Corps. At least it was a passion for something other than swotting, and I reflected cynically that it was a terribly healthy outdoor one, what with all the marching and those blessed camps. He talked a great deal about it. It was touching to see him coming up against the Fascist spirit, which certain members of the corps so clearly manifested: the rights and wrongs of behaviour were fascinating to him. He found the shouting and bullying objectionable and had to learn to accept both as an essential part of army life. He also had to accept that he was an odd man out. The swots at Dulwich very decidedly did not flock into the CCF. On the whole, it was the athletic, hearty sporting types or else the dimwits, not that anyone at that school could possibly be called dim, but everything is relative. Daniel did not enjoy being associated with those at the bottom of the form or those renowned for how many heads they had broken in rugby matches. I often wondered how he stood up to it at all. He was physically immature until he was seventeen, small, slight, in no way, I should have thought, able to defend himself. Nor would I have thought he could get by as a popular fellow. Would Daniel have been popular? I doubt it. He was quiet and shy and his own man. Yet he never made any reference to suffering ill treatment of any kind and I am sure evidence of it, if it had existed, would have surfaced in some way. Perhaps he earned an affectionate place in school and in the CCF for his brains. He wore his learning lightly, never flaunted it, and had a certain dry wit which may have endeared him to the rest. At any rate, he seems to have been accepted.
I remember when Daniel was very young, five or six, the worries of the world at large began to sit heavily upon his shoulders. He would pick up references to every sort of disaster – famines, pestilence, air crashes, wars in obscure parts of the world – and ask about them. Anything that appeared on television, before or after some children’s programme he was allowed to watch, would enthral hm, if it showed clips of weary survivors from some catastrophe or victims of another. He would cry for them, literally, until we all took to watching vigilantly for such news flashes, when we would censor them. In the street, cripples and deformed people were the object of his interest and compassion (if that is not too ridiculous an emotion to attribute to a child). ‘Will they get better?’ he would ask me and when I said no, as often I was bound to, it was useless to add ‘but they are not in pain’. The pain was irrelevant. What mattered was the existence of visible suffering of another sort. Once we were served in a shop by a pretty girl with only one arm and three little stumps of fingers coming from her other shoulder, instead of another arm. Daniel stood and sobbed and the girl, who at first had smiled, began to become upset herself. I rushed him out of the shop, cuddled him and carried him home with me, trying to explain to him about Thalidomide and that crying like that made it hard for those he was crying for. I told him he made himself a burden to them: the thought of a small boy crying at the sight of her deformity was what had upset that girl, not her deformity. But he was only five or six and I dreaded becoming too sophisticated in my arguments. ‘But it’s so sad,’ he kept wailing. I had never come across anything like it. Then there was poverty. Daniel grew up knowing nothing about it. He lived then, remember, in pretty Surrey-with-a-fringe-on-top. Everything was green grass and affluence. Poverty belonged to India and was foreign and not much was seen on television at children’s viewing times. But as he grew up his naturally sensitive eyes were opened. He travelled across London often to me or to his aunts, and he was observant. Heaven knows, the streets of London, the London which Daniel became familiar with, are hardly Dickensian. There is no real squalor, no shivering barefooted children clad in rags or the like. But there are the meths drinkers under Charing Cross Bridge and there are occasional tramps, and that was enough. The reality of any kind of poverty was another worry. He would look, too, at the blocks of council flats and the dreary back streets through which his bus often trundled on the way to and from the more salubrious areas to which he was accustomed, and he fantasized living there and got depressed. Emily once called him a little prig in one exasperated moment, but it was not priggishness. Daniel cared. When more spectacularly terrible conditions were revealed to him, like the atrocities at Soweto, he did not sleep for weeks. And once he was at Dulwich the contrast between his world and the world of others became doubly hideous to him.
Yet this was the boy who joined the army. Insanity. He would not even take an army scholarship to University first and then be moulded into shape at Sandhurst. No, it was to be the proper army, in the ranks, at once, as soon as he was eighteen and his ‘A’ Levels were over. He joined up for nine years in September 1981. God knows what that signing-on Sergeant or whoever he was thought: barely eighteen, Dulwich College, astronomical examination results, sensitive type and dying to get into the army. No lust for battle, no bully-boy tendencies, just a quiet, clever lad, very polite and very, very determined. I would like to have seen what kind of report was written, if one was. Did they think he was a masochist? Did some army psychiatrist get trotted out to check he was not unbalanced? Or do the army experience this all the time? Perhaps my Daniel was more run-of-the-mill than I realized. But it is all irrelevant now. He went off for training in October 1981. At least, said his suffering parents (united for once in their disappointment at the waste), there is no war on, it is not as if he will have to fight. We all thought Daniel would become disillusioned and leave the army quite soon, before his contract became binding, or else we thought that he would become the head of an army training unit or something like that. He was brilliant at languages and I thought myself that they would certainly discover this and make use of it. Perhaps it would not be too bad having Daniel as an army interpreter. We all trained ourselves to think like this and stop minding so much. Daniel was not his mother, I reminded myself. He knew what he was about. Give him time and he would sort himself out.
But of course time was exactly what he did not have. As soon as he finished his training Daniel was attached to the 2nd Battalion, the Scots Guards. He reported there for duty at the end of March 1982. Before he did so, he came home and I had him all to myself for one day during this visit. He had grown again. He hardly grew at all until he was seventeen, then he put on a tremendous spurt and in a year shot from five foot seven to six foot. And in the army he had grown broader and heavier and squarer in the face, so that altogether he was transformed. I feasted my eyes on him and openly admired him and felt quite shy of this man, my grandson. I thought he was cheerful and more relaxed. Certainly he smiled more. He talked a lot, about his daily routine and his friends – he seemed to have made several good ones straight away, which surprised me – and about his superiors. He told me how hard the training had been but also how revealing it was about his own abilities. He said the army was not at all how I imagined it and I said I was glad to hear it. Vanessa came to collect him and hung on his arm and said wasn’t he handsome. I refrained from grandmotherly banalities about the possibilities of some girl snapping him up as a prize, but I could not help thinking this. As he left, I felt happier about him than I had done for years. However much I loathed his being a soldier, it seemed to agree with him, and that was the important thing. I knew from my own children that such contentment cannot be faked and should be valued above all else. Daniel was content and I did not cavil at that contentment.
When the Falkland crisis first began to rear its monstrously misshapen head, I hardly noticed. I have always, to my shame, been a lazy reader of the hard news in newspapers. My eye runs lightly over the front page and I always turn to the features and reviews. So I knew nothing of what was happening, and even less of the significance for Daniel, until the middle of April, when the seriousness of the situation first impinged upon my consciousness. That was when I read somewhere that Mrs Thatcher was calling a War Cabinet meeting. War, I thought and wondered where I could have been living not to know we were on the point of war. I began, like most people, to sit up and take notice.
It seemed scarcely credible to me that we had sent a ship laden with troops to defend islands which were eight thousand miles away. I could not believe it and yet it was happening. I had a dreadful argument with Mark over it – he was exceedingly jingoistic in spite of his essentially pacifist outlook – and only stopped attacking him when he suddenly made some reference to hoping Daniel would not be involved. I lost interest at once in the rights and wrongs of this ludicrous war. ‘What do you mean?’ I demanded, in a bad-tempered way I expect, impatient as ever when I thought people were being stupid. Mark shrugged and said war was war, war required soldiers, Daniel was a soldier. I felt an awful weakness at the base of my spine. ‘But he is only eighteen,’ I said. ‘Don’t be so absurd, they wouldn’t send an eighteen year old, just trained. They don’t even send eighteen year olds to Ireland, even I know that.’ Mark hoped I was right.
After he left, I remember feeling that, if I believed in premonitions, then I was experiencing one. But I did not and I do not. All I was experiencing was the normal fear and dread everyone recognizes, when someone they love might be in danger. The fear was real, that was all. I struggled all that week to keep at bay that kind of mawkish thinking of which I had always been ashamed – visions of Daniel on a troop ship, Daniel under fire, Daniel dead, Emily weeping, funerals . . . Stop it at once, I ordered myself. When Emily arrived in a state nearing hysteria, I was harsh with her because her outward condition reflected my own inner one. She rang me at the beginning of May to say Daniel’s regiment was being sent to the Falklands. I clung to straws: because the Scots Guards were going, it did not mean that Daniel was necessarily going, especially as he was only eighteen. What a fool I was. This, it seemed, was real war and needed young blood. Daniel was in the contingent of Scots Guards who departed from Southampton on the QE2 on May 12th 1982. He was not even allowed to come and say goodbye, fortunately, I now think. He rang us up, his mother, his father and me. I could hardly speak and was at my brisk and impersonal worst. I repeatedly said, Take care,’ in my haste not to say bitter things, like now he would see what the army was really about. Platitudes were safer. I told him to keep a diary and said I would write to him, which seemed to please him, though he said he would probably be home before my letters got there. As soon as he put the telephone down I began a letter to him, feverishly, impetuously, as I had once done to Oliver. In the morning I tore it up and sat in the sunshine, and wrote another much more suitable one. I was unable to persuade Emily to do the same. Instead, all thoughts of dancing quite forgotten, Emily spent every day devouring the newspapers and sitting transfixed in front of the television. It was the worst possible thing to do. She tortured herself with accounts of the terrible conditions our soldiers were enduring. She read of the freezing cold, of the exposure cases, of the torrential rain, the snow flurries, the nights and days spent lying motionless in sodden sleeping bags, the hours spent slogging over the bleak, rocky hillsides laden with equipment and weapons. She read, she watched and she wept. In vain, I pointed out that Daniel was still living in luxury on the QE2, but she shook her head and gripped her handkerchief tighter and would not be comforted. She said I could not possibly know how she, a mother with a son at war, felt. I, she said, had never known such suffering. From May 27th, after Mrs Thatcher had announced in the Commons that the British Forces had begun their assault, Emily never left my flat.
At the beginning of June, I forget the exact date, HMS Sir Galahad was bombed at Fitzroy, soon after the Scots Guards landed there. Emily was hysterical. When, some two days afterwards, pictures of the Sir Galahad survivors appeared on the television screen, she started screaming and drumming her heels on the floor in a frenzy of distress. As they showed a survivor being rushed away on a stretcher, with his bloody stump of a leg stuck horribly and pathetically in the air, Emily started shouting Daniel’s name over and over again. We were all there, all the family, gathered together in a ritual of fear in my sitting room, all the family sitting stupidly in front of that hateful screen. Rosemary jumped up and turned the television off, but instantly Emily leapt up and turned it back on. ‘You’re a masochist – don’t be so cruel!’ Rosemary shouted, but Emily ignored her. She sat with tears streaming down her face, only an inch or two from the screen upon which flashed a relentless sequence of images of tired and wounded soldiers. Emily could not possibly have recognized anyone. All she could have seen was a jumble of light and shade. After that, she would sleep only on the floor in front of this television set. I placed food in front of her, as if she were a sick dog. I went about my normal day, suffused with pain, and Emily passed hers moaning and shivering on the floor, saying over and over again that she could not bear it.
On June 12th, the 5th Brigade, Daniel’s brigade, moved into position. On the 13th, they fought a battle, the battle of Tumbledown. On the 14th, Argentina surrendered at Port Stanley. But for the Butler family it was too late. Daniel was killed on Wireless Ridge, the day before his nineteenth birthday. Our family was devastated. I cannot —
*
Yes, they were. We were. As usual, when Mother has real tragedy to record, she does not exaggerate nor does she display, thank God, any ghoulish tendencies. She doesn’t go on to describe at all the hell of Daniel’s death, just that stark announcement, for which I am grateful. And her rage was our rage, rage more than grief for a long, long time. Blind fury with the government, personal hatred for Mrs Thatcher with her own dear son safely piddling about in civvies, terrible anger towards every flag flying anywhere in patriotic support of Our Boys in the Falklands. I actually went to a debate in the House of Commons and had to be forcibly ejected from the Strangers’ Gallery for screaming abuse during a speech about these ‘regrettable deaths’ being necessary. It was a relief, my screaming I mean. The release was wonderful. I enjoyed being manhandled and kicking and yelling all the way down the stairs, enjoyed the hard grip of the three men it took to get me out. I didn’t in the least want them to be understanding afterwards, which they were. I would have liked them to despise me, not pity me. They offered me tea, but I rushed on to the pavement outside and sat and cried in the middle of the traffic. It didn’t do any good, it was no release in the long run. Nor did it help to go to St Paul’s in July, the day of the Thanksgiving Service – how dared they give thanks – and stand outside catcalling all the dignitaries who went in. It took me ages to reach the stage of acceptance. Mother got there first. Emily said it wasn’t surprising, she was ‘only’ Daniel’s grandmother, but then I was ‘only’ his aunt and I was in pieces. I think Emily was so obsessed with her own suffering that she acknowledged no other. She had the pitiful arrogance of those whose pain is so great they cannot conceive anyone else can know what they mean. Emily was at the centre of a maelstrom of sorrow whose ripples spread out to touch every facet of her life – nothing else existed. She shut herself up, in a dark room, and the smell of despair curdled my stomach when I walked in. Mother said to leave her. It was necessary, she said, that Emily should embrace her grief like this, there was no other way, nobody could help her. In the end, she would achieve her own personal catharsis. She spouted some poem at me about ‘Tired out we are, my heart and I’, and said that was Emily, tired out emotionally. Mother was wise, but she was wrong about Emily. Em didn’t achieve anything as poetic as catharsis. She simply exhausted herself, that was all. Then she crawled out, bitter and crippled, and found herself an unfortunate survivor. The only thing that helped, marginally, the only thing that restored her to any kind of sanity, was going on that awful trip the guilty government arranged for the relatives of the dead, to the Falklands I mean.
Why the hell I went with her I do not know. The mere thought of it appalled me, it was a horrible, revolting idea. I’m not sure how it all began, but I think Em and Mark got a letter from some army official saying that they would be entitled to go, if they wished. They definitely got a letter asking if they’d like Daniel’s body brought back. Whether the two were connected, or even whether it was an either/or situation, te
rrible thought, I can’t recall. But Em latched on to the trip at once. Mark would have nothing to do with it. I think he was disgusted by Emily wanting even to consider it, but then he was pretty disgusted with her disintegration, anyway, especially because of the way it affected poor Vanessa. As far as he was concerned, Mark would have settled for a decent burial and monument. He wouldn’t have been satisfied with nothing of this kind, or if his son’s body was left to rot on some hillside, but then that wasn’t likely to happen. The army wanted some ceremony too, so Mark would not in any circumstances have gone, with or without Em, and the only other serious candidate for the depressing post as Em’s companion was Mother. If Em had asked her, she would have gone, hating every minute and violently opposed to it, but she would have gone. Luckily she wasn’t put to the test. Em didn’t ask her, or Celia, the obvious choice surely, she asked me. I thought I hadn’t heard aright. I only just stopped myself in time from saying she must be crazy, why me, I wouldn’t even consider it and neither should she. The enormity of her request so paralysed me that I found myself nodding acquiescence like a dumb idiot. And that was that. It was by far the weirdest trip of my life, positively macabre. There were 535 of us, flown out in two British Airways jets. Most of us were women, a lot of them dressed like Em in a collection of black, fiercely funereal garments. Em even had a black veil – she said she didn’t want to look at the others or to be looked at by them. It was extremely embarrassing and also hideously funny, in its own terrible way. There were a surprising number of children, even babies, on the trip and naturally to them, or at least to the younger ones, it was all exciting and thrilling. They couldn’t contain their own high spirits and, anyway, why should they have done so? We played games on board the Cunard liner (to which we transferred after our appalling seventeen-hour flight to Montevideo in Uruguay). There was a sort of Bank Holiday atmosphere as children ran shrieking round the decks, enjoying it all. Emily hated them. Other people smiled sadly but indulgently. Not Emily. She shut herself up in our cabin and only came out when the Falklands came into sight.
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