Out of the Blackout

by Robert Barnard

  At that time of year there was not much to be done around Sir Henry Beesley’s estate, otherwise Simon might have helped his father there, as he always had done during his summer holidays from school. There was as yet no great pressure of college work either. Simon took long, brisk winter walks, and on these walks his mind refused to stay empty for long. Simon struggled to remember.

  He had told Micky that he remembered ‘or at least I tell myself that I do.’ And that was the problem, wasn’t it? We say we remember things, but after a time just the saying it has created a static picture in our mind that stands in for the real memory. But surely that wasn’t so in this case? He had almost never talked about his train journey from Paddington to Yeasdon, had surely not thought about it for years, not since the early days. Yet there the memory had been: sitting on the train as it pulled into the station, his heart thumping, the faces of the reception committee standing on the platform, some sense of an ordeal, a challenge, ahead.

  Then what else could he remember from that time?

  He was conscious that for the first months at Yeasdon he had had a nagging feeling of guilt at deceiving the Cutheridges. Could a child that young feel guilt? Perhaps that was his first dawning of a moral awareness. Foolish, of course, to feel guilty now. What was done was surely done on orders, or at least under influence too strong for a mere child to resist. And he had half understood that the Cutheridges had wanted to be deceived. But looking back he could feel kinship with that guilty child—ingratiating himself, deceiving, suffering guilt.

  He was conscious too that at the time there were many things he could have told the Cutheridges, could have told Mr Thurston and all the people who tried to find out who he was, but had deliberately not told them. Why had he kept silent? There was some strong influence—he did not know of what kind—from his former life telling him to: telling him not to reveal who he was, where he came from, how he had come to be on that train. But he felt there was another reason too: from the first moment he had loved the Cutheridges, had wanted to be with them, had opted for them rather than what he had left. He had loved them even as he deceived them.

  What was it he could have told them, had he wished?

  Simon was sitting on a tree stump on the edge of a little coppice. He was wearing a heavy sweater that his mother had knitted for him under a tweed sports jacket, but nevertheless he shivered. He gazed ahead of him, across the rolling fields towards Yeasdon. No—that was not the way to bring it back. He shut his eyes. At once he saw the door in Paddington—brown, with a split in the panel on the bottom left side, with the two steps up to it, and the sooty flowers to either side. Was this a memory of 1941, or of his experience earlier that year? Of 1941, surely. The door was brown, the panel was not seen from above.

  What pictures came to him from behind that door?

  He had no doubt that his mind had retained, for months or years after his arrival in Yeasdon, imprints of the reality behind that door, pictures of his first five years. Were they now entirely faded? He frowned. A figure. A large female figure in black . . . A man . . . something vaguely inimical about him, something hostile clinging to that vague impression . . . other shapes, mere outlines . . . all of them in the background, none of them attaining definition.

  Nothing more. Nothing of any solidity at all. No faces topping the figures. Nothing.

  ‘I am Simon Cutheridge,’ he said to himself on his walk home. ‘you are also a boy who once lived at 17, Farrow Street,’ said that irritating voice, in counterpoint inside his head. ‘He isn’t Simon Cutheridge. He isn’t Simon Thorn either. Don’t you even want to know his name?’

  Simon’s best friend in Yeasdon was Micky Malone. Many people in the village found this odd. Micky had never had the slightest interest in anything academic. He could read well enough, but his writing was atrocious. He had always had a passion for bikes and cars, and had been destined as sure as God made apples to be a garage mechanic, which was what he now was. Micky was genial, a humorist, and dubiously honest. He was stocky and pug-faced, where Simon had a sort of adolescent elegance and a long face that was not handsome, but gave promise of distinction. Micky was direct and outgoing, where Simon used politeness and manner as a guard. The boys from Yeasdon who had passed the eleven-plus had gone on to the Buckridge Grammar School, and had kept themselves rather aloof from those who had failed it and had gone on to the little secondary school in Yeasdon. Yet, in spite of all this, Simon’s best friend had been Micky Malone, idling away the years before he could leave school at fourteen, grasping joyously at the opportunities for easy pleasures in the years since then.

  Presumably the reason was that Micky had also been an evacuee. All the other children—some very soon, some at the end of the war—had gone home, but not Micky or Simon. After Micky had come to Yeasdon his mother had paid him one visit, in 1943. She wore her hair in a headscarf, swore like a trooper, and within ten minutes of her arrival demanded to know where the bookmaker’s was. When the war ended nothing was heard of her. Micky’s adoptive mother hoped she’d gone off with a Yank, though that seemed rather a poor return for helping us to save the free world. Anyway, Micky stayed on, and was welcome to, for he’d been part of the family from the first hour. He never, though, became entirely Yeasdon: there was always something indefinably cockney settled there as a bedrock under the veneer of West Country ways. Even his speech retained traces of its East End flavour. He was a cockney at heart, the Yeasdon people said, especially when he had just pulled a fast one on them.

  During the Christmas vacation Simon and Micky went around a lot, as they always had. Both of them were ardent and undiscriminating cinema-goers (it wasn’t so long since Simon had stopped calling himself a film fan). They went to the Odeon and the ABC in Buckridge once a week; they went for a drink, sometimes in Yeasdon, sometimes further afield; they went to dances, and sometimes on Micky’s afternoon off they did a coffee-bar crawl around Buckridge. It was their last spell of really close friendship: by Easter both of them would have a regular girlfriend. For these five weeks they were so close it was a foregone conclusion that Micky would pretty soon find out what was on Simon’s mind.

  ‘I don’t know why you’re botherin’,’ he said one day, as they sat in the Boccaccio Coffee Lounge and sipped the creamy foam from the tops of their cappucini. ‘It’s the same wiv me, isn’t it? I could go back to ‘Ackney, find out where I come from, find out what happened to me Ma, as if I cared. I wouldn’t be so flamin’ daft. Waste o’ bleedin’ time.’

  ‘It’s not the same,’ insisted Simon. The coffee-machine hissed menacingly in the background like a horror-film snake as he tried to put it into words. ‘First of all, you know you’re Michael Malone. You had a dad called Malone.’

  ‘You seem to know more than I do, mate. I don’t remember no dad.’

  ‘All right, you had a mother called Malone.’

  ‘Right old cow she was, an’ all.’

  ‘But still, you had one. She gave you her name, she came here, people saw her. You came from an actual address in Hackney, you’re on record as having been to one of the schools there.’

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean? I expect you went to one too.’

  ‘OK, but there’s no record of it. I don’t exist on paper before 1941; I have no history before I stepped on to the platform of the station here. I haven’t got parents, not real ones, and I haven’t got a name.’

  ‘You said you were called Simon Thorn.’

  ‘I think I made that up.’

  ‘Cunning little bugger! Couldn’t ha’ been more’n six.’

  ‘I don’t know how old I was. Don’t know how old I am, come to that. We always celebrated the day I got here as my birthday—we said I was five on that day.’

  Simon looked down into the white and brown dregs of his coffee, thinking hard. Micky shifted on his stool in embarrassment: Micky didn’t like having to be serious for any length of time.

  ‘I think,’ said Simon at last, ‘I think I made up
that name because it had been drummed into me that I wasn’t to tell anyone my real name. Or where I came from, or anything about myself. I think I told lies—partly because I’d been told to, but partly because I wanted to stay here, wanted to be accepted by Mum and Dad—by the Cutheridges. I think all those first months after I arrived I was playing a part . . . until the part fitted, became natural: I was the part. And quite soon I forgot all that had gone before.’

  ‘You’d remember yer own name, surely.’

  ‘I don’t, though. I was only five or so. Perhaps if I heard it . . .’

  ‘Do you remember getting on the train in London?’

  ‘No. I found I knew the way from . . . from my home to Paddington. It wasn’t far, but I knew it—just instinctively took the right way. But I don’t remember getting on the train. Do you?’

  ‘I tell you, I don’t remember a thing about that time. I was only five too. And I don’t go grubbing around in my memory—too much going on now, this moment, to bother wi’ bleedin’ past ’istory. I do know you joined the gang last of all.’

  ‘What do you mean? You do remember!’

  ‘No, I don’t. But you remember Nellie Tucker?’

  ‘I think so. Wasn’t she—?’

  ‘One of us. Yeah. Anyway, she came down, must be a couple o’ months ago, to visit old Mrs Potter, who’d looked after her. Proper little London sparrow she is—bit of all right, too. Shop assistant. Anyway, we went out a couple o’ times while she was here. Bit different from these country girls. She—’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘She let me go the whole way, first time of askin’.’

  Micky’s face took on a drooling grin of reminiscence.

  ‘I don’t want all the sexy details. What did she say about me?’

  ‘Oh yes, well—she’s got this marvellous memory, see? Sort of photographic, only not for words, more for pictures, like. Well, naturally we got talkin’ about how we come ‘ere. The evacuation, an’ that. And o’ course we got talkin’ about you. And Nellie’s got this picture in her mind: us all in a group, like, wi’ the teacher checkin’ up on our names. Then the teacher got on the train to sort out which was to go in which compartments, and she’s got this picture o’ you walkin’ up the platform wi’ a satchel over your shoulder, just joinin’ up wi’ the group, and gettin’ on the train with us.’

  Simon sat there, considering. Nellie’s picture called up no memories.

  ‘Case,’ he said. ‘I had a case, not a satchel. I’ve still got it.’

  ‘That’s right. She said you had a case in your hand, and a little satchel over your shoulder.’

  ‘I think she’s wrong. I’d still have had it when I got here, and I know I didn’t.’

  ‘Little kids goin’ to school often did have satchels. Wi’ their names on in indelible ink, case they got lost.’

  There came to Simon, he did not know from where, a sharp image of a leather bag, thrown from a window, sailing through the air, to land on a grassy bank.

  ‘ ’Ere,’ said Micky, who had been thinking, and had got really interested for the first time: ‘perhaps you threw it away when you realized it had your name on it.’

  ‘Perhaps I did,’ said Simon.

  ‘Cunning little bugger!’ said Micky again. He’d never before imagined that Simon might be endowed with that cunning that he saw as his own birthright. ‘You never know, perhaps things will come back to you. They do sometimes, you know.’

  ‘I know. I think something just did. But it’s more likely the opposite will happen, isn’t it?’

  ‘What? You’ll forget?’

  ‘Yes. And think I remember things I don’t really remember. What I ought to do is write down everything I remember now. And if anything comes back to you—’

  ‘It won’t mate. I live in the present. Why don’t you try it?’

  Simon did write down what he remembered, in a stiff-backed exercise book which he was to keep and add to for many years. He tried to be scrupulously honest, marking specially the things he was dubious about. When, on the last day of the vacation, he read over all he had written, he saw clearly that it didn’t amount to much.

  By then he had something else to occupy his mind. Early in January Tom Cutheridge received a blow on the head from the hoof of an estate horse. He lay dangerously ill in Buckridge Hospital for ten days, and Simon and his mother waited and watched and comforted each other. In those days, before Tom was out of danger, Simon was closer to his mother than he had ever been. I belong to them, he thought; only to them. Thinking it over, his concern over his lost, forgotten first years took the shape of a sort of disloyalty. As he sat by the bed, or in the dreary hospital waiting-room, it became something he was ashamed of. Having felt guilty of funking the challenge of 17 Farrow Street, Simon now felt guilty about even wanting to know the truth about his origins.

  Perhaps that over-developed capacity for guilt was in itself a clue to his past.

  CHAPTER 4

  Though Simon Cutheridge went often enough through Paddington Station in the years that followed, he did not return to the Paddington area, or to the house that he knew had once been his home, until the spring of 1964. This was shortly after the break-up of his marriage.

  The marriage had been one of these modern affairs where the two partners believe they know everything there is to know about the other before they get to the altar or the Registrar’s desk, and find out soon after that they don’t. Simon had met Ruth, his wife, in his last year at Oxford, had lived with her off and on during his Research Studentship at Leeds. Then they had got married, and things had begun almost at once to go wrong. The baby girl that was born did not perform that miracle of cementing the marriage which is so often expected of babies. When she died of pneumonia at ten months the marriage headed rapidly for collapse. The random acrimony and the flare-ups into full-scale rows were now unalleviated by any warmth of reconciliation. ‘You’re just not here half the time,’ Ruth had said, during one of the bitterest of their rows. ‘Perhaps it’s because you don’t know who you are.’ Both of them soon realized it could only end one way. Simon took the Tom Lehrer records and the Beechams, Ruth—the Beatles and the Karajans, and they split up without regrets, and almost without rancour. I was spoilt by the Cutheridges, thought Simon wearily. I’ll never think relationships are easy again.

  In spite of the ease and friendliness of the break, and in spite of the insouciance with which liberated young people at the time were supposed to regard a marriage break-up, it was a shattering experience for Simon. It somehow seemed a betrayal of all those years of warmth and fortressed domesticity at Yeasdon. His first instinct was to get away from the town, the job he associated with his marriage, and the friends who had watched it empty itself of meaning month by month. He applied for a position on the staff of the London Zoo.

  The governors and officials at the Zoo were cautious, conservative and thorough: new members of their scientific staff were not engaged lightly. Four of the best applicants had their fares paid to London, with two nights at a hotel, so that they could be seen, sized up, and interviewed to the point of grilling. Their suitability (though this was never put into words) had to be established from a social and personal point of view, as well as from a scientific one. On the afternoon of the second day Simon was given a strong hint that the job was his if he wanted it.

  The first thing he did was to ring his mother and father.

  ‘I’ll be able to get down more now,’ he said.

  ‘It’s about time something good happened to you,’ said his mother. ‘Perhaps you’re in for a lucky spell now.’

  Simon had thought of the move to London more in the light of a clean break than as the beginning of a run of luck. But his mother—was it the remnant of some peasant superstition?—believed that luck, good and bad, went in cycles, and nothing in Simon’s life so far had contradicted that belief. When he had rung off, he had to decide what to do with his evening.

  He could hardly celebrate in any
obvious fashion, even had he a mind to. He was in the same hotel as the three other applicants interviewed, and the broad hint had been given him under a vow of discretion. Keeping up a false front over drinks or dinner would be no fun at all. Simon decided to shower and change, and then give the others the slip, leave the hotel, and find what his mother would call a ‘show’ to go to.

  His hotel was a modest but respectable one on the fringes of Bloomsbury, and when he left it he directed himself towards the theatres. An evening paper told him that The Sound of Music was still spreading cow-bells and schmaltz over Cambridge Circus, but there was Edith Evans in Hay Fever at the National, and an interesting new play called Entertaining Mr Sloane at the Arts. He’d find something, just by walking.

  But he never reached the theatres at all. He was idling along New Oxford Street when, above the traffic noise, he heard raised voices. He halted in his tracks, looked down a murky passageway, and saw that he was near one of those dingy, down-at-heel blocks of municipal flats that still cling on in parts of central London, hiding shamefacedly behind the plate-glass shop-fronts like poor relations at a posh wedding. Suddenly, into the meagre courtyard at the end of the passage, there burst first a screaming woman, then, following her, a hefty, red-faced man bellowing abuse. She had not gone more than a few feet towards the street when he caught her. He pulled her round to face him, and began belabouring her about the head with heavy fists, punctuating the blows with all the words of sexual abuse that his sodden brain could dredge up.

  ‘Here! Stop that!’ began Simon. He started towards them, but almost at once the blows and the screams sent over him a wave—of recollection, of nausea, of fear, whatever it might be—that seemed to submerge him, that sent his legs staggering under him, so that he could only stop and clutch at the walls of the passageway for support. The voice continued to bellow insults, the fists to fall, but Simon could only cling there, his eyes closed, his stomach rising in great heaves of panic and remembered fear.