Out of the Blackout

by Robert Barnard

  ‘Ah,’ said Len, his eyes still on Simon. ‘It’s a funny old world, isn’t it? Lots of funny people in control, eh?’

  Simon shifted uneasily in his chair. The conversation was taking a direction he had hardly envisaged, and one he hardly knew how to cope with politely. Far from being cosy or intimate, the atmosphere seemed to have become fraught with an inexplicable tension. He felt, oddly, as if he were being sounded out by Len—quite the reverse of what he had intended.

  ‘At the moment I’m not too much worried about who’s in control, just in getting on top of my job,’ he said. And then, trying to take over the rudder of the conversation, he added: ‘If I have got anywhere, I put it down to my family. Encouragement in the home counts for an awful lot, as you say. And then having a united family—as your own is . . .”

  ‘Yes. Quite.’ Len’s body seemed to lose its tension, as if he were backing away from a perilous leap. ‘You could say Mother kept us together. Teddy fled the nest, in a manner of speaking, first with the war, then getting married not long after. But otherwise we’ve all mostly muddled along together.’

  ‘Even when you got married, in your case, I believe?’

  ‘That’s right. Oh—you saw the pictures, did you? The Ma sets great store by them pictures. Very fond memories she has—we both have, of course. Yes, when I got hitched I brought her back to live with Mother. Well—it was the only sensible thing to do, granted the size of the house, and that.’

  ‘The house you live in now?’

  ‘No—over Paddington way. I used to work in the ticket office of the station—that was before nationalization, of course. The GWR Station it was then. The house in Paddington was a bit of a barn, and back in the ’thirties no one was buying places like that, so Mother would have been stuck. So naturally we moved in with her.’

  ‘People say you should never have two women sharing a kitchen.’

  Len, for some reason, leaned back in his seat and laughed uproariously, as if Simon had made a witticism.

  ‘Depends on the ladies—eh, young feller? Well, we had three in our house, at any rate three as soon as war broke out. I won’t say there wasn’t a spot of argy-bargy now and then, because there was. Connie’s got a bit of a temper—not that she was often in the kitchen, oh no!—and Mother knows her own mind, or did then. But it was Mary who kept the peace. My Mary. She was a quiet soul, religious you might almost say, but she was a little wonder when it came to smoothing over unpleasantness. It was Mary who kept things on an even keel. I was proud of her, by golly I was!’

  There was something deeply unconvincing about Len when he spoke forcefully, like a politician with a prepared brief.

  ‘You must have been very happy,’ said Simon.

  ‘Oh, we were. Idyllically. I hope when you find yourself a nice young lady that you’re half as happy as we were.’

  ‘I hope so. I didn’t do too well first time around.’

  Len put his glass down on the table, pushed himself back on his seat, and looked at Simon with concern.

  ‘Well, strike a light! Don’t tell me you’ve been married.’

  ‘I’m afraid so. It didn’t work out.’

  ‘Well, I’d never have thought it. How old are you? And divorced!’

  ‘Separated. We will get divorced. I’m twenty-eight.’

  ‘Dear me. And that’s not old. You could knock me down with a feather. Here’s me thinking of you as fresh out in the big wide world, and now it turns out you’ve been hitched, and not just hitched but separated and all. Well, I am sad. Like I would be if you was my own son. It’s the way of the world these days, I suppose. It wasn’t like that in my generation, I can tell you. For better or worse, that’s what we believed. All I can say is: you try a bit harder next time, son.’

  ‘Oh, I mean to,’ said Simon, flinching at that casual use of the word ‘son’.

  ‘Take your time. Look about you.’ Len was becoming more expansive, as if the role of counsellor to the young was one he relished. ‘The fact is, you’re a nice-looking, well-set up young fellow, in a good line of work. There’s plenty around would like to get their hands on you for that reason alone. Keep a weather eye out. Take a bit of care. You want to be a bit luckier next time.’

  ‘That’s what my mother says.’

  ‘And she’s dead right. You want to find a nice, quiet girl who’ll devote herself to you, body and soul; one who’ll be a help in your career.’ He made it sound quite deadly. He thinks I should marry someone who’s only half alive, thought Simon. ‘Someone who’ll work for you, unobtrusive like, in the background. Bring up your kids in the right way, the old-fashioned way. That’s what you want. That’s what I call a happy marriage.’

  ‘Like yours,’ said Simon.

  ‘That’s right. Like mine. Because Mary was a self-effacing soul, and the better for it. Not that she couldn’t stand up for herself if needs be. But there’d be no argument for the sake of argument. Mary knew there was nothing to be gained by that. Even when we married—don’t get me wrong, young feller, we were in love, oh my word yes—but there was also her Pa, and my Ma, both strong churchgoers. Baptists, they were—the Ma still is: can’t get there often, but the Minister calls. So Mother and Mr Spurling, they thought it would be ideal if we two got married and set up home in Farrow Street (that was where we lived). They thought it all out between them. And Mary was influenced, naturally, because her father was a very fine man—real head of the family, like you had in the old days. So we got married, and you might say that love, in the fullest sense of the word, came later.’

  Len seemed somewhat confused as to when love had come, and Simon was not convinced it had come at all. Len, perhaps unused to being listened to so meekly, was now in fine flow, more unbuttoned than Simon had dared to hope. His long, angular body had relaxed from its usual spasmodic tenseness, and the watchful testing of Simon had been forgotten. He sat, relaxed and reminiscent, over his empty glass. Simon nimbly fetched him another, and then said:

  ‘And of course you had the little boy, didn’t you, to bring you close together?’

  ‘We did. Later on we had him. You saw that picture, did you? Had that taken in the war, when the raids started, thinking you never knew what might happen. How right I was! Now it’s my only memento. Though that’s not true: I’ve got my memories. And they’re the best mementoes, aren’t they?’

  Len dabbed at his eyes, and Simon had to repress an involuntary retch of disgust.

  ‘She looked as if she’d be a very good mother,’ he said.

  ‘Oh, she was. Second to none. It was what she lived for. I just can’t describe how happy she was when she realized a little one was on the way. Over the moon she was—in her quiet way, of course. Not demonstrative, because Mother wasn’t so happy about having a baby in the house. But Mary’d always been a real little mother to any stray kids around—a sort of auntie to lots of kids at church, taught Sunday School, and that. And when she had her own! Well, you should have seen her starting off my little David learning the alphabet when he was no age at all! She’d sit with him over a picture book with them great big letters, and she’d say them over with him, having him recognizing words. Tiny scrap of a lad, too! It was a picture, I tell you, to see them sitting together in the armchair, going through their kiddies’ books. It’s one of the last memories I have.’

  ‘He must have been a . . . bright little boy.’

  ‘Oh, he was. No question, he was. Couldn’t hardly recognize him as my own.’ Len gave a self-deprecating smile of the sort that really conceals an immense self-satisfaction. ‘He picked up things that quick, you wouldn’t believe. She used to bring him down sometimes to Paddington, when I was on the evening shift, and he’d sit in that ticket office (none of the bigwigs around to object at that time of evening) and he’d watch me selling the tickets. He picked up the system in no time. Learned all the names of the places people went, kept asking his mother to point them out on the map. Sharp as a knife, my little David.’

&nbs
p; ‘That’s awfully nice,’ said Simon, ‘provided they don’t know it themselves.’

  ‘Oh, his mother and I wouldn’t have let him get uppitty. Not like those ghastly American children you see on television. Oh no—he was a sweet child, and not at all clever-clever. Everyone fell for him. Of course he looked so nice. His mother kept him spotless, and neat as a new pin. Beautiful little clothes he had, and Mary was that good at mending and patching, like we had to then. There wasn’t a smarter little nipper in all Paddington. I sometimes used to watch him and his mother go off together in the morning—he used to pretend he was old enough to go to school, had his little satchel and all—and they’d go off together, him in his little grey trousers and his little blue blazer which his Mum made for him (he was that jealous of others going off dressed up for school every morning, and him not old enough)—and I tell you, just seeing them my heart leapt up with pride. It did. And if there were air raids, and he couldn’t trot about like that, he used to go with his Mum down to the shelters, and he used to keep the rest of them in stitches.’

  ‘There are some kids like that,’ said Simon.

  ‘That’s right. He had all those sharp little comments and questions that kids often have, only his were that humorous! We had a dugout shelter for three or four families along Farrow Street, and he used to call it “the burrow”. “Can we go down the burrow?” he’d say, if there hadn’t been a raid for some days. And when we were all down there, the neighbours’d say it was better than the radio—better than Happidrome.’

  ‘It was a funny time for a child to grow up in,’ said Simon. ‘I don’t remember much about it myself, except for the food.’

  ‘No, well, little David didn’t really understand, of course—took it to be normal, if you take my meaning, because he didn’t remember anything else. And his mother—my Mary—she used to make a joke of it for him. However worried she was herself, she’d always make a joke of things for him. I wasn’t in the ARP then—that was later. I wasn’t found fit for the army—spot of chest trouble, you know—but I did my bit on the Home Front later on. But even in those early days she was worried—naturally, because the stations were prime targets for the bombers. But she never let on to David. Never let him see how worried she was for me. What a woman, eh? A real saint!’

  ‘What—what happened to them?’

  Len’s conversational flow suddenly dried up.

  ‘I lost them.’

  ‘In the blitz?’

  Len had taken out a handkerchief, and was looking past Simon, down the ill-lit, half-empty bar. His naturally cratered face seemed about to crumble into total collapse.

  ‘That’s right. I lost them both in the air raids. It’s ironic, really. Things got so bad here . . . raids every night, fires raging all around, you can’t imagine what it was like . . . so Mary found this place in Sussex, not far from Brighton. I wanted my boy in the country, out of the raids. We’d often been to Brighton on holidays, and Ma had some church contacts there—fellow Baptists, you know. That’s how it came about. I used to sit in the shelter in Paddington during them raids, and I used to think: well, supposing I go, I know little David will be safe . . .’ He wiped at his eyes, and Simon could see tears well up and begin to stream down his face. ‘And what happened? There was this German bomber, off course for home, and he off-loaded his bombs just before he got to the Channel. There was me, went through the war with hardly a scratch, and there was little David—direct hit, killed instantly.’ He sobbed. ‘It’s the tragedy of my life. I still can’t bear to think about it. I tell you, I haven’t been the same man since I lost the two of them. Not the same man at all.’

  Simon watched horrified as the tears coursed down the man’s hollow cheeks, unstoppable, overflowing. He felt in his stomach a heave of repulsion for the man who could cry so convincingly for an imaginary grief, who could act out sorrow in so abandoned a fashion when he had merely been retelling a fantasy. For surely it was not possible that Len was uninvolved in the disappearance of his son? Surely it was not possible that he had been fed a fake story? Yet the sobs that were racking his body were so heartfelt that Simon did, just for a moment, wonder whether Len Simmeter might not actually believe the story he had just told.

  • • •

  Later that evening Simon sat up writing in his notebooks, trying to put down every tittle of information he had gleaned from Len, and trying to recapture, when possible, Len’s own words. Sometimes as he wrote he seemed to feel a twinge of memory: those little grey trousers; that blue blazer. But short grey trousers and blue blazers were common enough features of an English childhood. How could one distinguish memory from wishful self-deception? Even the things he was sure he remembered—the train arriving at Yeasdon Station, for example—had become hardened in his mind into a sort of snapshot, something he could flip through his mind to, at will. Did he remember? Or did he just remember that he had once remembered? Tentatively, aware of the pitfalls, he headed a page of his notebook ‘Memories’, and collected everything from the beginning that could possibly come under that heading. The notebooks, he was pleased to realize, were at last beginning to assume a more solid, fleshed-out form.

  That night he had a dream that he had not had for many years. The dream was a violent one, and he lay beneath the sheet in the warm night air threshing and tossing about, trying to wrestle himself back to wakefulness, but sinking back over and over again into a dim struggle of black shapes. Those shapes could not be seen clearly, but he knew they were a man and a woman. There were cries, sobbing, and there were shouted threats and insults. And there were blows. Not at first, but soon: repeated blows. Sometimes the people and the cries seemed to fade, but always it came back: the insults, the sobs, the struggle. He was conscious there was another reality to return to, and he struggled to rise to the surface, but he always sank back down—deeper, deeper, the cries more intolerably urgent. Though he could not identify the shapes, he knew that the other he, the smaller he of his dream, could have identified them, knew what they were fighting about. Though the blows were never aimed at him, they were about him. So it was a fight he was witnessing, but also one in which—small, helpless as he was—he was involved. Responsible. Someone was being mistreated because of him.

  When he finally fought his way back to wakefulness he was no longer small and helpless, but his chest, his back and his forehead were wet with sweat, and he felt as though he had spent the night wrestling under the sea with some dark aquatic monster with numberless entwining tentacles that choked and fettered him.

  After some hesitation he entered this dream in his notebook under ‘Memories’.

  CHAPTER 9

  One area of bafflement left by his heart-to-heart with Len was unexpectedly illuminated for Simon before the end of the week.

  He had been given the job of entertaining and showing round the Zoo a visitor of no great importance—a member of the scientific staff of the zoo at Cracow. As a rule at that time the Polish government allowed outside their borders only emissaries or delegates of the most dreary party-line respectability, but this man had unexpectedly turned out to be jolly, well-informed and inquisitive, so that once Simon and he had found ways of getting round the various linguistic trip-wires which such encounters entail, they got on very well. Simon lunched him moderately lavishly at the Zoo restaurant, and around half past two said that he’d take him back to his hotel.

  ‘Is little ’otel in Paddington,’ said his guest. ‘Is no foreign currencies for better.’

  So Simon found himself once more in Paddington. By the time he had paid off the taxi, in a dreary little side street ten minutes from the station, the afternoon was as good as gone. He toyed with the idea of going to have another look at Farrow Street, but he gave up the idea: there was no longer any point in trying to gain admittance, even if he could think up an excuse, and the exterior had certainly yielded up all its secrets. From neighbours he might, eventually, be able to prise more, supposing any still remained who had been there in th
e Simmeters’ time, but would he get anything from them that he had not got already from Len or his mother? One other area of investigation, the Baptist church, it would be best to embark upon on a Sunday: Baptist churches in the suburbs of London were not likely even to be open on a Friday afternoon.

  So Simon began making his way towards the Underground at the main line station, desultorily, hoping for memories or for a flash of inspiration from the ethos of the place. So indefinite were his intentions that he had walked past the Paddington Library and had done no more than register that that was what it was, when it struck him that a library in Paddington would be the very place to look for a notice of his birth. He had vaguely intended one day to cross the river and look it up at Somerset House, but the Simmeters, pillars of the church, would surely have announced it in some local newspaper. The actual date of his birth was no very urgent matter for him—he was happy enough to celebrate it as the day he had arrived in Yeasdon—but it was a way of passing the afternoon, and a way of getting a whiff of the period when he was born.

  The day he arrived in Yeasdon was May 10th, 1941. He had generally been said then to be about five. The likeliest period for his birth, then, seemed to be the second half of 1935, or some time in 1936. Up in the Reference Library on the first floor the attendant was very helpful. There was no doubt, she said, that the most widely distributed local newspaper at that time was the West London Recorder. Oh yes, the files were easily accessible. Lots of local people, and historians, consulted them. Paddington had been a very lively, mixed community at the time, and its history had many aspects that interested sociologists and social historians. In a matter of minutes Simon was seated at a desk with two large and unwieldy volumes, containing all the copies of the paper for the relevant years.

  The West London Recorder was a lugubrious paper by the standards of the ’sixties (when the slide towards tabloid hysteria was already well under way), but once Simon got used to the look of it he found it admirably set out for his purposes. The announcements of births, marriages and deaths were almost invariably on page five, opposite the main news page. The news, in the early summer of ’35, when Simon started his search, was much taken up with celebrations of the Royal Jubilee. Preparations, decorations, official committees and planned festivities were reported and commented on in laborious detail. Pictures of King George V—dignified, sick-looking, slightly bemused—were printed on the slightest, or no, pretext. But this was May—too early, Simon thought, and he merely did a lightning-quick check through the advertised births. The unusualness of the name Simmeter was again a blessing. Simon could flick from one week’s issue to the next in no time, even though he also took a side glance for the name Spurling. In August 1935 he did in fact find the name Spurling: Thomas James Spurling, who had died on the 23rd, aged seventy-six, and mourned by children Alice, Arthur, Henry, Enid and Mary. Simon noted down the names, and all the details that seemed relevant, in the notebooks that he took everywhere in his briefcase, away from the prying interest of the Simmeters. Elsewhere in the same issue, which he examined with special care, he found a small news item which brought with it a little more sense of the personality of the man: