by Ian McDonald
A cursory search turned up nothing, but I hadn’t expected much. Photoreconnaissance was a classified area, and however romantic I found the idea of Ben flying out over the desert in the nose of a Blenheim light bomber, he was much more likely to have served in Interpretation. Or something more intriguing; Intelligence covered more esoteric and romantic disciplines, all spiced with the clandestine and therefore quite irresistible to me.
The poetry book sold before I was even through my first coffee. It made a decent price. I lingered until Michaela stockaded me in upturned chairs, and dragged back to the flat. Police were arriving as I was departing. Two squad cars and a van with grids over the windows, to shut down a noisy dub party.
Flat, I say. Two rooms with shared kitchen and bathroom back of Littlebury Street. One room filled floor to ceiling with books, the other filling, pushing me deeper into the corner by the window. I slept among the tombstones of ancient wars. Mea culpa, mea maxima culpa: I broke the rule to never use what you push. I loathed my rooms; I gave them as little time as I could. Rona my landlady wanted me out—she could get six hardworking Somali boys in my two rooms—but was too lazy to pursue it with anything approaching zeal. She claimed she was worried about the health and safety implications of my stacks collapsing and burying me. I knew she feared the weight of books was slowly warping her ceiling joists. She pushed the rent up religiously; I scraped and traded and paid. I dreaded having to carry several thousand books, double-rowed, down four flights of stairs. She dreaded having to help me.
I have become fixed in my customary vices. I work and read into the early morning; I sleep long and rise late. Book dealing is a business best conducted from your own bed. In the deep three o’clock, four o’clock, there is something old and feral and rather beautiful about Clapham. The wind seems to blow from a direction not marked on any compass; new, fresh, music carries far on it, imbued with a lonely splendor I never hear in the flat, tinny light.
I worked into the morning, diving deeper into regimental histories and the more obsessive corners of amateur military history. Mysteries you were, Tom and Ben. Leads turned blind; avenues of inquiry ran into blank walls, like a city lost in the dunes. Finally, as the dawn crept up the sky and the clatter and boom of commuter trains ousted the night musics, I posted the whole thing to Facebook—a dozen bibliophile and war history groups—and rolled into my bed.
I woke with my face in full, painful sunshine, Rona telling me the man had come about the wiring, and the ping of an answer in my notifications. Out on East Anglia Desert Rats Facebook Page, someone had recognized Tom and Ben.
* * *
Thorn Hildreth. A name to savor, a name that invited speculation, especially out in West Pinchbeck. Incest and line dancing, Tall Lionel had declared of the flatlands of Lincolnshire, before adding, motor sport. And, latterly, Brexit.
Whoever Thorn might be, her great-grandfather had bequeathed her an attic of wartime memories: the Reverend Anson Hildreth’s diaries of his chaplaincy in 1940s Egypt. Her comment had shone through a bottomless scroll of toucheds and weeping nows and so beautifuls and heart emoticons attached to my post of Tom’s letter to Ben. She knew these names. She recalled a passage, a photograph. Might I like to come to see the relevant parts of the archive?
Might I like to? Not, did I want to?
I’m a man much charmed by quaint turns of speech.
Fenland
Thorn picked me up from Spalding Station in a decaying Volvo station wagon that smelled of damp, dog and stale patchouli. Moss grew along the window seals. I could watch moving road through a hole in the footwell. I knew from her profile that she was of an age with me, though her piercings and tattoos were alarmingly alien. She was shorter than my imagining, stocky in her skinny jeans, a T-shirt that carried the legend Fenlands Lioness and a biker jacket. Patchouli failed to mask the feral perfume of someone who spent much time with animals.
“Thorn. The thirtieth letter of the Icelandic alphabet,” I said. She did not take my conversational bait.
“That’s Moulton Mill,” she said, nodding across the flat, unhedged fields to the white-capped brick tower. The sails had been furled for winter.
“The tallest windmill in Britain,” I said.
“Working mill,” Thorn said. “The tallest mill is probably—”
“Bixley,” I said. “Truncated from eleven floors to seven.”
She looked at me. I had passed her test of geekdom.
Thorn pointed out every windmill, stump and post and tower along the Doverhirne Drain into West Pinchbeck. I had hoped she would let me study the documents in situ; then when I smelled the car I hoped not to see the inside of her house; was alarmed as we headed past scattered fen-side hamlets into puritan flatness, then relieved when we turned into the car park of the New Bridge Inn beside a pumping station. She heaved two plastic boxes out of the back of the car and led me into the snug. The carpets smelled of overused vacuum cleaner bags. The Polish woman at the bar knew Thorn and brought decent IPAs. Thorn spread her material on the table.
Photographs, letters, diaries and notebooks.
“Greygram was a padre with the Royal Army Chaplains’ Department,” she said.
“Greygram?”
“Great-grandfather.”
“Is that a Fens word?”
“No, it’s our word.”
The Fens raise strange children. The Hildreths traced back to fourteenth-century Berkshire but set roots in the silt lands in the elbow of the Wash in the midseventeenth century. They crowned their lives with stern, elemental Anglo-Saxon names. Reverend Anson’s son Leland, Thorn’s grandfather, eschewed his father’s quiet Anglicanism and joined Raymond Buckland in Nottingham in the early sixties to explore Anglo-Saxon paganism. When Buckland settled permanently in the USA, Leland Hildreth took the tenets of Seax-Wica and further antiqued them by burying them deep and dark in Fenland culture. His Hilderwic paganism attracted a few notoriety seekers and the attention of the local press, but there weren’t enough true devotees for it to cohere and the papers lost interest when they discovered there was no nudity. Hilderwic collapsed in mutual adulteries and backbitings. Pagans are worse than Protestants for denominationalism. Toland, Thorn’s father, moved to Peterborough, where he worked in motorbike repair. Thorn detested Toland’s girlfriend—she had split Thorn from her mother—and had moved back into the Hildreth manse in West Pinchbeck, where she cared for the ailing Leland, four dogs, three cats, a pony, a donkey, an attic full of the military archives of Rev Anson and the founder and collected theology of Hilderwic paganism.
“Greygram always felt guilty that he never fought in the First World War,” Thorn said over the second pint. “The day after war was declared, he signed up. My gram never forgave him. Greygram abandoned him; Granna Hild and Grunc Adric left my greygranna Maudie to run the parish. She did the rounds on a bike, visiting his parishioners. They survived on food parcels from the De Eresby estate, while he swanned around Cairo and Alexandria with a peaked cap and a swagger stick. He broke an ankle in a car crash in 1943 and it never reset properly. Came back on a stick and insisted everyone treat him like a war hero. He never once thanked my greygranna for everything she did. Some people had a fucking cushy war. I sometimes think Leland started the whole Hilderwic thing just to piss Greygram off.”
“He kept the archive.”
“Would have been too much effort to throw it out. Not a great man for effort, Gram. Someone has to hold on to it all.”
And here were two more pints. Small, fierce Thorn opened up the diaries—beautiful, fragrant things bound in a leather as soft as an infant’s instep.
“This is from March 1941. Greygram had just been transferred to Cairo and attached to the Ninth Heavy Anti-Aircraft Regiment.”
“The Londonderries.”
She took a sip of the ale. It left an adorable moustache on her upper lip. I yearned to wipe it away.
“This is his introduction to the Heliopolis Club.”
As a diaris
t, the Reverend Anson was a fine sermonizer. The bibliophile learns to check her contemporary sensibilities when reading old books—particularly personal or private accounts—but I found the Reverend Anson’s Anglican indignation at the Cairenes patronizing and tiring. He must have been a dreary preacher. The entry concluded with his naked gloating at being unanimously voted into wartime Cairo’s elite sporting club. Tennis tomorrow! I must have my batman press my whites. Hoorah, Rev Hildreth!
“For a man of the cloth he’s a fearsome snob,” I ventured.
“He’s a shit in a surplice,” Thorn said with venom. “And worse, as you’ll find out. I think this is what you’re looking for.”
She passed me another soft tan notebook. The hand was small and slanted, written at speed in the way of a man who wrote much, but clear and legible.
May 25th, 1941
Something simply must be done about the greens. The boys hand-water them every night, but all that results from that is arcs of verdure that describe the range of their watering cans while the remainder is tufts of desiccated grass or bare dust. Getting a decent lie is impossible. To hazard a putt on those abominations is more like seaside fun-golf than the noble and ancient game.
Stayed over at the club again last night. After the big storm two nights ago the Italians have resumed raids—not bound for us this time, though the Eyties are not beyond dumping their load prematurely if they think the target is too hot, and skedaddling for home. The Canal Zone again, dropping mines. We did what we usually did, blacked out and retired to the bar and, when the electricity went down, which it inevitably does during the raids, drank by candlelight. An agreeable evening, until the AA batteries on Zamalek opened up and Cowan felt compelled to ask me, “Are those your boys?” He knew as well as I that the Paddies were stationed at Sidi Bishr. He never misses an opportunity to jibe when I am not with my unit, though I have made pains to explain that, as Ministers of Christ, we enjoy a peripatetic brief. I do not care for Cowan. He is quick to criticise, loath to praise; he finds a worm in every rose: the very model of a cynic. I took my drink out onto the cricket pitch where Carmichael and Peters joined me and we sat in the balmy night air, watching the explosions of the ack-ack rounds and the play of the searchlight beams against the sky. Cairo is a smoky, dusty hole, but in the blackout it catches something of the starry magnificence of the skies at Abu Simbel. I had hoped that storm would have dropped a goodly plump of rain on our poor, suffering greens, but it was some uncanny Egyptian thing, roiling clouds and hot winds, strange illuminations and dry lightning. Nary a spit of rain.
Towards midnight Tom roared in on an Enfield—Lord knows where he had commandeered it, let alone how he had navigated Cairo in a blackout. He had a pillion passenger, a sallow, dark-haired lad, rather sloppy in his dress, I thought. His insignia—a sphinx and the motto Vigilant—was not familiar to me. Photoreconnaissance, Cowan later informed me. RAF. That explained the general slovenliness. Tom pulled off his riding gloves, banged the dust out of them and bellowed for a gin and tonic. The pillion passenger introduced himself as Ben Seligman. He carried no baggage but a single book: some rum, arty thing about time.
“Ben’s down from Malta,” Tom declared, slinging an arm around the chap. “Flew in this night. My oldest, dearest friend. I haven’t seen him in . . . Christ knows. Sorry, Padre.”
I have never seen a fellow so gay as Tom with his old friend. He ordered champagne for everyone—Royal Engineers are well paid, certainly better than chaplains, but not so wealthy as to splash champagne with pharaonic excess. As he and Ben were soon to head down the Delta, he proposed an excursion to the pyramids, which we, rendered amiable by much champagne, did not refuse, though I detest the venal aggression of the hawkers. They retired early—Tom had booked rooms. The guns opened up again; the Eyeties were returning from the Canal Zone.
“A reader,” Carmichael said with distaste, knocking the dottle from his pipe against the leg of the deck chair, where it fell in glowing red twists. He was an avid sportsman; even I hovered on the edge of the dangerously intellectual to him. “Poetry.”
“A Son of Shem,” Peters said.
I said, “I do hope Tom isn’t thinking of proposing him for the club.”
“Tom said they were going down to Alex.”
“Good,” I said. “I should so hate to have to blackball him.”
The searchlights sprang to life again and for a brief instant we saw the silhouette of a Sparviero caught between the beams. Then the guns spoke again and the night filled with explosions. By the time we had all agreed that a nightcap really should be the thing, the all clear was sounding.
“I sold a copy of a poetry book titled Time Was,” I said. In my time in the heat and dust of wartime Cairo, Lincolnshire had grown cold and dark. Condensation beaded the snug window, breaking the light from the car park into lager-colored pearls. “The letter was inside it. Ben must have given it to Tom in Alexandria.”
“Look.”
Thorn slid a photograph across the table. A group of six soldiers posed in front of the Sphinx, lolling in Sidi Barrani shorts, open-necked shirts, socks around their ankles. Gleeful with the fragile happy-go-lucky energy of young people in wartime: all but one tall man at the end of the line, a pace distant from the others, as if to mark a vital social distinction, sober of face, dressed in pressed long pants, a clerical collar visible at the neckline of his shirt.
At the other end of the line, a grinning man in dark glasses leaned on the shoulder of his neighbor. His skin was pale, untouched by Ra.
“That must be Ben,” I said. “Seligman?” And the man on whom he leaned: “Tom?”
“The names are on the back,” Thorn said.
Ben Seligman, Tom Chappell, Norman Carmichael, Brian Cowan, James Caterham, Rev Hildreth. Penciled in a neat, Anglican hand.
Thorn laid out two more photographs; the same actors: with camels, with the Great Pyramid, astride tiny donkeys. I ran my fingers along the scalloped edges of the prints, a tactile pleasure of old photographs I have always loved.
“That’s them,” Thorn said. “I’m sure of it. But . . .”
I have never been able to resist the word “but.” It’s the ragged edge of the photograph, the texture of a provenance disturbing the flat perfection of a book.
“There is a . . . ,” Thorn began.
“Mystery?” I finished.
“I checked the service records of everyone in photoreconnaissance in the western desert. There is no record of anyone by the name of Ben Seligman, either PRU or ISLD.”
I shivered. It could have been the big fen country night had taken a step closer to me. Most of it was delight. This was what every dealer, every bibliophile, craved: a story outside the book.
“Do you think he was a spy or something?”
Thorn nodded.
Then I said very carefully, “Do you mind if I show these to someone?”
She drew back, frowned, and my heart turned over. I feared I had taken a liberty too far. I had appropriated her family history.
“Who?”
“Someone I know in the Imperial War Museum in London. She’s in the photographic archive.”
“She?”
“Shahrzad.”
Thorn looked dubious.
“She has a gift.”
“A what?”
“A talent.”
Thorn’s eyes widened. For a moment I worried I had asked too much, pushed too far.
“I won’t let you take any of the archive.”
“Can I photograph a few things?”
She nodded.
“Don’t share them.”
“Only Shahrzad.”
As I closed the camera app I noticed the time. I had twenty minutes until I was stranded in rural Fenlandia. Thorn drove me to the station. She should not have been driving. She should not have been anywhere near a car. She blasted along the straight fen-country roads, headlights blazing, horn blaring when she took the narrow bridges. I made the train as the gate
was closing. I was still drunk as the train pulled into King’s Cross, haunted by a momentary glimpse into a mystery seventy-five years old and the lingering perfume of patchouli.
Shingle Street
Under a sky the color of judgment I pushed the bike hard up Shingle Street, throttles open, threatening the stones to spill me, to strip the meat from my bones as I rolled and skidded over the pebbles.
You man you man, go away, get out of my heart leave me alone.
When I came up here when I was a boy and we met before the tower, E.L. sometimes put his hands over my eyes.
“What are you experiencing?”
“Nothing.”
“Really? What are you feeling?”
A giggle.
“Silly. Your hands.”
More.
The smell of salt, stones recently wet by rain. The movement of air over my skin, how it changed moment by moment, the stir of the hairs on my bare legs. The cry of gulls, voice beyond voice all the way to the horizon. The rolling knock of pebbles. The sound of my breathing. The particular smell of soap from your hand.
If you want to write, you must write experience. What it is to be that thing. There is everything in a moment.
My experience? Love, as suddenly it leaves me gasping for breath, so sharp it is a spear run through my belly.
I leave the Ariel on its side in the marram grass and trudge down to the tide line to pick up stones and fling them as hard and far out to sea as I can. I could do it for a thousand years and Shingle Street would not be a stone lessened. The sea would roll them in again, tide by tide, storm by storm.
I kick the bike back to life and race up the beach, roaring at the emptied houses.
* * *
Now I understand. This is what poetry is for. This is why it exists. No gods, no muses, no inspiration, only the need to find words, syntax, structure and meter for feelings that do not go into words.