Try to Tell the Story

by David Thomson

  My dad never took me to a fight. I asked, and he said, “One day, perhaps.” I suspect it was Mum's embargo: it was enough that I knew fighters’ records and collected pictures of them. No need to expose me to the real blood, the broken teeth, and the kind of people who ran the fight game. But my father played that side of it for all he could. He said that “Jack”—Jack Solomons, the leading fight promoter in London—had his eye on me as a “crowd-pleaser” and that he was looking for the right fight for me. Jack never materialized (he was from that distant world that had the King and Uncle Joe), but one day Archie Kempster actually appeared, after years of talk and announcement. There he was, in a camel-hair coat and a cigarette holder!

  “So what d'you think, Arch?” asked my dad. “Do you think Jack could use this boy?” For a moment they were my Fagin and Bill Sikes, and I have wondered in the years since—what if I had shown real promise at any sport? I didn't, so I was safe. I was competent at some games, but not marked by real class. But if I had, would my father have seized upon it and been my manager, my Jack?

  “I daresay he could,” said Archie, and I never saw him again. So there it goes, a common regret: I might have been a contender but for my full weight of innocence and maternal protection.

  For decades I have had a novel in my head in which a very raw youth has the powers of a chess champion. Sensing money it it, his father takes over the boy's career. His growing up is blocked by hours and years in chess study, until the boy—sixteen or seventeen now—goes away to some remote place for a Masters confrontation. This was based on the Spassky and Bobby Fischer meeting in Reykjavík in 1972. Waiting, waiting for the Fischer character's decision to play, the boy is introduced to life by an Icelandic chamber maid (Charlize Theron with an accent?). He loses the championship but he breaks free from his father and the hopelessly neurotic head he finds on Fischer's shoulders. Is there a Jack yet in publishing who might like that?

  11

  THERE WAS NOTHING anyone could do about it, but in the years after the war there were bomb sites all over London that were places for boys to play. I suppose, in theory, someone owned these houses. Often there were fences put up round the houses, stout fences, with padlocks at the gates and very clear warnings as to how the buildings were unsafe and the authorities took no responsibility for anyone breaking in. But the truth is that some of these houses stayed like that for years. No one could find their heirs, or those unlucky beneficiaries couldn't find the money for repairs. The government had people to house and so it put up what we called “prefabs,” which were long huts bolted together in sections, and some of them erected in places where there had been ruined houses. There were prefabs in our area that lasted until the 1970s. Families put there in 1945 must have died there and left the emergency boxes to their children. There was a joke about how the government was sticking with the prefabs because if there was another war they'd have saved money! We did mock our government, even though I realize now that the Attlee Labour government that came in in 1945 was probably the most important Britain has ever had.

  But something was up. It was all very well, me being pushed forward in the crowds so that Mr. Churchill could smile at me, but at the end of that summer there was a general election and Labour beat the Tories up and down. It was a landslide. Grannie told me this was the treacherous ingratitude of the British public, and a shocking thing. Yet it had to come from the dreadful job Tory-type officers had done in the war, and before that, through the thirties, the impact of the Depression, which had hit the lower classes hardest of all. The soldiers coming back from the war had had enough of the old ways, even if Winnie had been a champion. Shyly, timidly, a lot of English people longed for something new. Two extraordinary wars had been fought in thirty years, and in a way one generation carried them both. The damage was everywhere to be seen, and somehow the patient herd of Britons waited to discover their reward or recompense. I suppose when it came it was to make Britain a modern country—tough, cynical, greedy, a version of wartime's black-market attitude—and it was the last thing many Britons wanted.

  In summer, of course, we played on the streets. There was very little traffic. Kids roamed around the neighborhood without much fear, except for those bombed houses, where, sooner or later, the fence developed a hole and the word went around that we could get in. Our parents said we weren't to do it, and, naturally, we told them we wouldn't. And it was scary. But at one house I knew it was like this. You could get through the fence, and then there was a basement window that was out. With that, you were in the building, and you could study the hole that was in the middle of it and went three storeys high. A bomb had come in through the roof and blown out several floors. You could see the night sky, and we got ourselves torches so that we could find things like this: there was a desk in a corner in one room and there was a letter that had been in the process of being written and stopped in the middle. And in the time since no one had thought to take it away or post it or burn it. I heard stories about meals still on the table, but I never saw that, and I can't believe the rats would have allowed it. For Samuel Whiskers was there before us boys, and sometimes there were older kids who even reckoned to have lived in the house for a while. You climbed stairs at your peril. There were staircases that swayed like broken bridges and stopped in midair—like the staircase in Kidnapped The living rooms were exposed to the night air, but sometimes suggested that the residents had just left for a moment, like stage sets waiting for the next act. But a stage where the curtain comes up, and the lights shine, but no one exits or enters. Imagine how closely you begin to look at that stage.

  We boys passed on stories that people were killed in these bombed houses. After all, there might be unexploded bombs in the debris, shells buried but waiting. All over Britain there were mines and bombs like that, just waiting to be touched, to say nothing of the floor, which might creak and then fall through. There was one film, The Yellow Balloon, where a boy thinks he's caused the death of another kid on a bomb site, and another, Hunted, where Jon Whiteley is a boy who meets a man (Dirk Bogarde) hiding in a bombed house on the run.

  You must not think that after a great war, life and the forms filled out for it all—the paperwork—slip back into place. After the war there were deserters and people who had gone into hiding for one reason or another. Or there would be just one person left from a family trying to find purpose again. From 1940 to 1945, the number of illegitimate births in Britain nearly trebled. People were slipping away. Bomb sites were places for them to hide and wait. And so they may have come into competition for the brief security. There was, as never before, a black market (which you didn't have to regard as crime, even if frightening people ran it), for the sale of nylons, a bottle of whiskey, or a bit more meat than the ration book allowed. Or fresh papers—there were people who had gone off the record-keeping system. I know a man who in 1945 or thereabouts started to live with another woman and got the papers for it—it was my dad. Do you think Harry Lime only lived in Vienna, or was less dangerous at home? I read recently that in Germany in the years after the war there were two million violent deaths. In arguments for a meal or a place to be. In the settling of scores, like wives killing husbands. These things happened, and the chaotic Germany gave a pass on them. The paperwork never caught up.

  The number was nowhere near as large in Britain, because we had won, poor suckers, and because, after all, we were British, thank you very much, and we don't do that sort of thing, do we? But lives went away. My dad came back every Friday evening, but he might not have done. (His brother moved to Canada. His father died in his own bath.) And I wonder what my mum would have done, eventually. Would she have made a report and said she thought perhaps he lived near St. Albans? But there were double and triple lives then, the sport of war—or a liberty that war permitted—that was out of control.

  Murders were talked about as if they were social events. I didn't know it then, but it was a great age of British writing—Graham Greene, Patrick Hamilton, Jul
ian Maclaren-Ross—about brittle, broken people on the edges of society. And before that, the painter Walter Sickert had done extraordinary paintings of Camden murder mysteries: white bodies in rooms as dark as brown ale, in love or in the act of killing. They were the pictures that led to Bacon and Freud and Alfred Hitchcock, and they were a sure sign of the violence that wars had fostered in British people.

  I was in a bombed house once in broad daylight, and it took me several minutes before I realized there was a man sitting hunched in an armchair. He didn't look at me, or move. He was totally indifferent to the fact that neither the house nor the chair was his. He didn't pounce on me. But a voice spoke.

  “Whatyer, matey? Whatyer got?”

  “Nothing,” I said. (Don't talk to strangers, they said, but sometimes strangers were so ready to be friendly.)

  “No good to me,” he said. “You got a cup o’ tea?”

  “No,” I said.

  “A dripping sandwich?”

  “No,” I said.

  He sighed, and made one last try. “A good cigar?”

  Is it Pip and Magwitch? If I had had a Mars bar as a piece of cold pie for him, could I have inherited one day? I moved on, disappointed with myself. But the strange thing was how this man and I didn't have to fight for the room he was sitting in. We didn't have to go as far as murder.

  “Where've you been, then?” It was Sally, studying me.

  “I was at the chip shop,” I said.

  “You were not,” she said. “Look at you—dust on your sleeve, in your hair. You were in the houses, weren't you?”

  “Don't tell Mum,” I said.

  “Don't you worry about Mum yet,” she said. “You worry about me.”

  “Whatyergoingtodo?”

  “Smack your face, smarty-pants, that's what I'll do. Have you been told about the houses?”

  “Yes.”

  “What were you told? Were you told, nod your head and say, ‘Yes, silly,’ and then go exploring in them? Were you?”

  “Yes, Sally.”

  “Silly sod!” she said bitterly. “You don't deserve the caring. And you know what?”

  “What?”

  “No one cares if I go in the houses. No one cares about me.”

  “Do you go in the houses?” I asked. I knew she was brave.

  “Worse,” she said.

  “You shouldn't go,” I said. “Really, you shouldn't.”

  “You going to stop me?”

  “Yes,” I said. “I will.”

  “My hero,” she said, and I knew she was being sour, but she wanted it.

  You see, it was crazy, and it was just Grannie saying that Hitler might have been on Tooting Bec Common, but it wasn't ridiculous. Once in a while, they found a body on the Common. It would usually be a woman, and I gathered that women worked the Common. There was danger all around, and sometimes the greatest danger was just understanding what the grown-ups were talking about. It was as if the whole country was going to need time to get over the war. Those prefabs lasted much longer than the bomb sites. And Britain was a dodgy place until the late 1950s. People used to make jokes, with the rationing and all the shortages. “Good job we only won the war!” they said. “If we'd been triumphant, we'd be in the gutter now.” And a few years after the war you'd hear people reminisce about the Dunkirk spirit—how, after Dunkirk, everyone had rallied round, doing their best to get along with everyone else so they'd have some sticks to beat Jerry with! But that spirit was gone by 1945, and the bombed houses were the emblem of an official life that had started up, and Dad was close enough to it to leave me wondering whether it wasn't the officialdom he had left as much as Mum and me. You see, I don't know that he'd ever really worked it out. Long after I was gone and Mum was dead, he'd come back sometimes and sit in his chair like that man in the house who only wanted a cup of tea. And I don't know why he did that if he didn't nurse some part of him that regarded the place as “home.”

  It could be madness—I never ruled that out—but it could be that he had a theory about the way he had been driven out, and had been a wanderer ever afterwards. Now, you may say that that's pretty far-fetched and just an example of how desperate I was—am—to retain his love, to explain him. Fair point. But it's a sign too of how when someone does a mad thing they leave you trying to explain it.

  I asked my mum once why there were bombed houses so long after the war, because I knew there was a housing shortage, too. Reg and Trill lived in a tiny caravan for a while at the bottom of someone's garden, just to have a place. And Mum said she didn't know. It was “all wrong,” she said, except that the houses made people remember the war. And in Europe, she said—Britain wasn't quite Europe then—”There are refugees all over the place, people living in camps who've lost their countries. So many people were lost in the war.”

  I asked, “Killed?” and she said not just that, but people whose stories had stopped, who found that the whole dream had broken in pieces. Had she loved him, and wanted him to stay? Then imagine that he'd never really been resolved to go away. It's the only thing that fits with bloody coming back. So I'm dreaming?

  12

  “ALL ROADS LEAD TO the ground,” said Dad. He would usually say that around lunch-time on a Saturday He'd spend the late morning at the stamp shop adding a few delicacies from the Seychelles and Montenegro to his collection, and I would often be there with him turning the stamps into a geography lesson. “Montenegro, alas, is no longer with us, gone the way of Bosnia-Herzegovina.”

  Then as the morning ended, he'd announce the program for the afternoon. And if I was lucky, we were headed for the Bridge, where Chelsea played. We would take the 49 bus and hop off it as it came to the north end of the Bat-tersea Bridge and turned right onto Cheyne Walk. Already, we were in a scurry of people walking the extra distance to Stamford Bridge. That's when he told me to be brisk because “All roads lead to the ground!” The river was gray. The mist was sepia. The air was scathing, and if you blew your nose there was grime in the phlegm. This was London, the center of it all, the Smoke, and the Flower Show, but the air was worse than in Streatham, and there was a smell on the raw breeze like that of blood. The expectation of the English soccer ground is more pungent than anything I know.

  We had played soccer in the kitchen, and in the road outside the house, with just a tennis ball. It was the game, and you could get a feel for nineteenth-century London in a football ground surrounded by cheap, terraced housing just thrust down in the dense city Dad had told me of a great game at the Bridge—it must have been 1946—when the Dynamo Moscow team came to Britain to play a few exhibition matches. It was as a thank you for the wartime alliance, even if that was going south fast. And it had marked the return of big games.

  Except that the afternoon of this game there was a fog, what we called a pea-souper. That was a generous description, since pea soup was very good stuff and had a real green color to it. The pea-soup fog was yellow and brown. I suppose it was the sulphur, but it might just as well have been the shit. It was vile, and it was killing some of us. In the house next door to ours there was a man who coughed his guts out for half an hour every morning of his life before he could do anything else. He died, of course, in his fifties, some kind of bronchitis.

  The Dynamo game was a big event, and the people at the Bridge said, “We've got to play it.” There was a sell-out crowd and a rare sense of post-war fraternity. But from the middle of the pitch you couldn't see the goals. Special occasion, they decided. And then they let more people in. No one has ever explained it, but Chelsea had a running track and a dog track round the pitch then, and they let people sit on the ground. Stamford Bridge was supposed to hold 65,000. But they reckoned that 80,000 were there, seeing the ghosts glide through the smog, but not seeing the whole thing. Dad had been there (he claimed), and he said it was tremendously exciting, with Tommy Lawton lifting the Chelsea side to a narrow victory. And there were pictures in the paper of all the players—very awkward— giving bunches of flowers t
o each other before the game. Well, I had no way of knowing why I could not have been there, and I knew that Tommy Lawton was a great player, the one Dad often imitated in our games. So at last I got taken to see Chelsea.

  The crowds were like nothing I had seen before. And in the crush getting into the ground Dad had to protect me and hold on to me. It was all men, and all in dark formal clothing—there were so few leisure clothes in those days. And there was a deep, stewed smell in the crowd that I'm sure was unwashed clothes, never mind about the men, the fags, and the matches. It was only when public smoking stopped that you realized how many people had smelled like death for years. And the crowd surged and fluctuated and there were often cries of “Hold on!” and “Wotch it, mate!” though the language as I recall was absolutely clean—the one thing that got washed. Sometimes a boy felt himself lifted off his own feet in those crowds and carried in the surge of motion.