by Tony Parsons
‘Careful, Ken,’ one of them said in a Glasgow accent, ‘you’ll have the Health and Safety inspector down on us.’
They were having a good time. They had not seen each other for a while.
A few years before smoking had been banned in public houses, and everywhere else, the Royal Naval Commando Association had been disbanded, due to the toll of the years. There were not many of them left. The youngest of them – the ones who were teenagers in the war – had to be in their eighties now. They sipped their half-pints of mild and bitter and laughed together in the Trafalgar Square tourist pub.
I looked at Pat sipping his lemonade. He was smiling.
‘Singe Rana,’ Ken said. ‘Tell us the one about the three Germans at Monte Cassino.’
The old Gurkha frowned at his orange juice. He was the only one of them who wasn’t drinking beer for breakfast. I had tried to buy some food but they had little interest in eating. I had tempted a couple of them with a bag of cheese-and-onion crisps, and I had a feeling they would call it a meal.
‘That story is worn out from the telling,’ Singe Rana said in his quiet sing-song, and the other old men protested in their voices from the Clyde and the Taff and the Tyne, and the Trent and the Mersey and the Thames. Tourists at the bar turned to look at the noisy band, and then looked away. They were just a bunch of old men in their Sunday best. If the tourists saw the green berets and the medals, they gave no sign.
‘Go on, Singe, one more time, for your old mates,’ Ken said, getting out his tin of Old Holborn. Had he forgotten that there was no nicotine in here? No, I think it was simply that he did not care. The pathetic, semi-skimmed little rule-makers of the lousy modern world – he genuinely did not give a toss about them. He made a small gesture at Pat and me. ‘And for some new mates, too. They haven’t heard it.’
Singe Rana held his glass of orange juice and looked at it as he began talking. The old soldiers smiled and nudged each other with delight. But they let him tell his story without interruption.
‘We were on night patrol at Monte Cassino,’ he said. ‘Our colonel liked to use us for night patrol. He knew the Gurkhas were good mountain troops and that the night held no fear for us.’ He peered with interest at his orange juice. I looked at Pat. He was holding his lemonade and staring at the old man with a fixed smile. Ken Grimwood was chuckling to himself as he made himself a roll-up.
‘On our first night patrol at Cassino we found three Germans asleep in a slit trench,’ Singe said. ‘We took the two men on the outside and cut off their heads.’ His voice was very quiet. ‘The one in the middle we let sleep on. So that when he awoke, he would find his friends sitting with him.’ Singe allowed himself a small smile at this point. ‘And tell the others.’
The Gurkha sipped his orange juice as the old Commandos fell about laughing. I saw Pat still wearing his frozen grin, uncertain how to react, a little white around the gills. As if he thought he was missing something, as if the old men might be having him on. He looked at me for guidance then quickly stared down at his drink, suddenly knowing that every word of Singe Rana’s story was true.
We stood among the silent crowds on Whitehall and squinted against the bright November sunshine as the soldiers came marching past.
THE GLORIOUS DEAD, it said on the Cenotaph, and the poppies and the flags were bright splashes of colour against the pale Portland stone, and the three words burned my eyes.
I looked at my son’s face and I wanted to believe that he felt it too. All of it. The sacrifice, the courage. How ridiculously easy it would have been for my father to have died at Anzio or Elba or Monte Cassino, shot in a ditch or bleeding out in a landing craft or drowning in a dock choked with smashed men and machinery, how easy it would have been for my dad to die aged eighteen, and for neither of us to ever be born.
Pat felt it too, I thought, despite not growing up with it the way I did, despite not being taught about it at school. He got it. The heroism, the wild reckless courage. The armies of boys who never came home, or who came home with their bodies in shreds. And all that we would forever owe to these old men.
He leaned towards me. ‘It feels a bit like being in church,’ he whispered, with a little half-smile, and I felt a flash of irritation. But then I nodded and touched his shoulder. Because he was right.
Despite the light breeze on our faces, and the dazzling winter sunlight in our eyes, it was exactly like being in church. The quiet awe, the reverence of the crowd. The sense of being in the presence of something monumental, the way that being in this sacred place did something to your breathing, and to your heart. My father felt very close.
The soldiers were old now – more than old. And surprisingly small. Almost like a different species of man. They reminded me of school field-trips and dinky suits of medieval armour gawped at inside glass cases. A race of pint-sized warriors.
They were stiff-limbed, self-conscious. It was more than old age. It was more than the memory of military bearing; it was as if they were self-conscious at being watched. Not by us, not by the crowds on Whitehall. But by the others. The ghosts of that Sunday morning. All of their fallen brothers.
I looked at Pat’s face. He had loved his grandfather more than he loved anyone in the world, but he had lost him when he was too young to understand. And I wanted him to understand. Because I could see that it was fading among his generation. All that priceless knowledge. The memory of what they did, and the awareness of our debt. Did he remember the way his grandfather looked when he took off his shirt in his back garden? Did Pat remember that terrible starburst of scar tissue that almost covered my father’s upper body?
‘Here they come,’ he said, and I turned back to the serried ranks of soldiers, scanning the row upon row upon row for the green berets.
I could see them too, and I felt my heart beat faster at the sight of what my dad called ‘my mob’. The Royal Naval Commandos. The bravest of the brave. In primo exulto. Rejoice in being first.
They were almost level with us when Pat’s phone began to ring.
Playing more than ringing.
It was that song again.
The song that sounds like a heartbeat. ‘Love Lockdown’ by Kanye West. Dun-dun-dun, it went, and the heads of the crowds turned towards us. Dun-dun-dun. Just like a piercing electronic heartbeat. And as Pat fumbled in his pocket, the people around us shook their heads and went tch-tch-tch and snorted with disgust. And someone behind us commented, ‘Oh, for God’s sake!’ as if we knew nothing, my son and I.
He had the phone out of his pocket, so it was suddenly louder, but in his rush to turn it off it squirted out of his fingers and fell to the pavement. You would think that might shut up old Kanye West, but it didn’t. The phone went on as if it was what in the old days we used to call the twelveinch disco mix. Dun-dun-dun, it went, as Pat fell to his knees – not easy in those packed crowds at the Cenotaph. Dun-dun-dun. Pat’s face burning like my blood.
I looked back at the old soldiers just in time to see Ken Grimwood and the others from the pub marching past. Pat picked up his phone and squirmed through the crowds, getting away. I called his name but he did not stop. I looked back at the Commandos, hoping that their hearing might have faded to the point where they could not hear Kanye West’s ‘Love Lockdown’ at the Cenotaph. But their hearing was not that bad.
And I could read their faces, the faces of the old men, those beloved, unforgiving old soldiers, just as I could read my father’s face when I broke a window, or dropped out of school, or got divorced.
For this?
For this?
We did it all for this?
Somewhere beyond the Remembrance Day crowds, and where the idling tourists began, I caught up with my son.
‘Give me that thing,’ I said. He did not move. I turned up the volume. ‘Just give it to me,’ I demanded, my voice way too loud, and tourists gawped as if we were a Covent Garden mime act.
The tears welling up, Pat gave me his phone.
I looked at
it.
ONE MISSED CALL FROM GINA, it said.
My fist tightened on the bloody thing as if to crush it, and I held my hand above my head, truly meaning to bring it down on the pigeon-flecked pavement and smash the phone beyond all repair.
Then I looked at my son and he looked at me.
I watched him wipe his nose on the back of his sleeve and choke down the tears. I looked at the poppy sticking awkwardly out of the buttonhole of his school blazer. I sighed and shook my head.
Still white with fury, I slowly lowered my hand and gave him back his phone.
‘Come on, kiddo,’ I said, putting my arm around his shoulders, not wanting him to start crying, and suddenly, desperately, wanting to be away from this place. ‘Let’s go home.’
But as we walked in silence to the tube station, I could feel it between us.
It did not really matter that I had given him his phone back.
Something had been broken.
Seven
I sat in the kitchen hunched over the glow of the laptop’s screen as my wife moved through the house locking up, checking windows and turning off the lights. She hovered in the doorway, tomorrow’s school satchel in her hands.
‘You coming up then?’ Cyd said.
‘I’ll be right up,’ I smiled, and she nodded and moved away. Then I could hear her out the back, the recycled bottles clinking like wind chimes. She came back inside, and I heard the key in the lock.
I typed ‘Commando’ into the search engine and waited.
And then I sighed.
Type ‘Commando’ into a search engine and what you get is old Arnold Schwarzenegger product, violent video games and cheerleaders with no pants.
Going Commando once meant risking your life to save the free world. Now it means dispensing with your under-wear.
Cyd came back and stared at me. I pressed quit and the cheerleaders were instantly gone. My wife folded her arms and leaned against the doorjamb.
‘Interesting?’ she said.
‘Not really,’ I said. Then we both looked at the child monitor as Joni began to call out in her sleep.
‘I’ll get her,’ my wife said. ‘Don’t worry, Harry. You just carry on with what you’re doing.’
When she was gone I typed ‘Beach Parties’ into the search engine. I was offered just over 30,000 sites featuring people with no pants.
And soon I could hear the sound of my wife soothing our daughter on the child monitor, the little green lights rising and falling with the sound of their voices.
But long after their voices had faded to silence, and the house was still, I sat in the kitchen, looking for the ghost of my father.
‘We love edgy,’ Blunt said, speaking for the station, for the corporation, for the entire BBC. He gave Marty a professional smile. ‘We love controversial. We love danger. We love all those things.’ Another smile that glittered with frosty familiarity. Then he looked down with some distaste at the newspapers spread across his desk. ‘But we don’t like trouble. We don’t like anti-BBC leaders in national newspapers. We don’t like the media ripping out our liver and feeding it to the dogs.’
Sid from Surbiton had taken Marty’s advice. He had attempted to solve the parking dispute with his neighbour by shooting him in the face with a starting pistol.
Sid blamed Marty. SHOOT THY NEIGHBOUR, SHOCK JOCK TOLD ME, a tabloid screamed. The papers blamed Marty. The broadsheets had debates about the licence fee being used to promote gun crime. The tabloids just went bananas, absolutely ape-shit with righteous rage, choosing us as this week’s telling vignette from badly mangled Britain.
Pictures of Sid being hauled off to the cells shared front pages with Marty photos from the archives. He picked up a copy of the Daily Mirror that had a picture of him arriving at some forgotten premiere. He shook his head and looked at me with desperation in his eyes.
‘Am I losing my hair?’ he asked. ‘Have I put on a few pounds?’
I ignored him.
‘How bad is it?’ I said to Blunt.
‘The neighbour has a damaged retina,’ Blunt said. ‘It gets worse if he loses the eye. If he keeps the eye – that would be helpful. So we want him to keep the eye.’
I placed my hands on the pile of papers, fighting the rising tide of panic. The car was still parked across Sid’s driveway. So a fat lot of good shooting his neighbour had done.
‘Some of these reporters talked to other residents,’ I said. ‘Nobody liked this guy. The guy that got shot. They call him a neighbour from hell.’ There was a photograph of a front yard with a refrigerator dumped on a shabby lawn, and a pack of unwashed, unsupervised, sugar-crazed children clambering all over it. ‘Inconsiderate parking was just the start. He has kids running wild. One of those amusing signs saying, Beware of the Children, which is never funny if you actually live next door to the little bastards. Music turned up to eleven. A dog that had apparently been trained to pee through your letterbox.’
‘The usual,’ Marty said, making no attempt to stifle a yawn. ‘Chav scum.’
‘Popular opinion is definitely with Sid from Surbiton,’ Blunt conceded. ‘But I am not sure the response was commensurate with the crime. After all, the show is called A Clip Round the Ear. Not A Gun Blast to the Face.’
‘It’s a – what do you call it?’ Marty said. ‘An aphorism. A maxim. If you want to start getting all literal-minded then we could call it Hanging’s too Good for the Chav Scum.’
We both ignored him.
‘So it doesn’t help us,’ I said to Blunt. ‘It doesn’t help us that everyone hated this guy.’
‘It doesn’t help you,’ he corrected.
And we stared at each other across a BBC desk covered with the morning papers, and we understood each other perfectly.
I stood in the newsagent’s looking up at the shelves of tobacco. SMOKING KILLS, it said under a leering skull. SMOKING HARMS YOURSELF AND OTHERS. YOU ARE GOING TO DIE NOW. DEATH. DEATH. CERTAIN DEATH. PUFF, PUFF – YOU’RE DEAD.
‘Is it for yourself?’ said the boy behind the counter.
‘No, it’s a gift,’ I said.
I thought that I would buy Ken a tin of Old Holborn. The kind of tin that he carried, and that I could clearly remember my father having – yellow and white, with a drawing of a Ye Olde Georgian street on the front, and ‘Old Holborn Blended Virginia’ written in that fake fountain-pen font, as if nothing in this universe was more tasteful and sophisticated and classy than rolling your own soggy little man-made snout.
I thought that I might be purchasing the last loose tobacco in captivity. But the newsagent’s was full of the stuff. Just not in tins.
‘You could try eBay,’ the kid behind the counter told me. ‘They sell them on eBay. But we got these.’
The kid made a gracious gesture with his hand, like a proud sommelier presenting me with his extensive wine list. Amber Leaf. Golden Virginia. Van Nelle. Samson. Domingo. Drum. And Old Holborn itself – still going strong but in small packs rather than big tins now, and given new brave new world colours of orange, black and blue, kin to a lovely pack of Jaffa cakes.
‘You want some skins with that?’ said the kid behind the counter.
I stared at him, struck dumb by the fact that the baton dropped by my father’s generation had been picked up by what my dad would have called the pot heads – the kind of people he despised above all others. Apart from men who wore dresses. And Germans.
I got a 500-gram pack containing ten convenient grow-your-own-tumour sachets. It wouldn’t make up for Pat’s phone going off at the Cenotaph. It would not make up for smashing the silence with ‘Love Lockdown’ by Kanye West.
But I didn’t know how else to say I was sorry.
At Nelson Mansions, Tyson dozed at the foot of the concrete staircase, his enormous front paws clamped possessively on some hideously chewed object, possibly a human bone.
I stepped over him and skipped up the stairs, passing a couple of children huddled in their elf-like hoods, like some T
olkien nightmare. It felt much colder than November, but that might have been just the ceaseless wind that always whipped through Nelson Mansions, whatever the weather.
I rang the doorbell and a man in his early fifties answered. He looked soft and rich, like a banker enjoying his day off in lime-green Lacoste, a man whose life had treated him well. His thin lips and little eyes made three slits of his face, and he could be nobody else’s son. I held out my hand and introduced myself.
‘Ian Grimwood,’ he said, and his accent was different to his father’s – a classless modern drawl. ‘Thank you for – you know. Everything.’
I saw him looking at the Old Holborn in my hands. ‘No problem,’ I said.
Singe Rana was just leaving. He turned his soft golden face towards me. ‘I’ll come back when it’s over,’ he said.
‘I wanted to say I was sorry,’ I told him. ‘My son’s phone – it rang as you were marching. And – I felt bad. I felt terrible. About all the old soldiers.’
Singe Rana smiled gently. ‘Don’t be so fretful,’ he said. ‘Half of them are so deaf they couldn’t hear a bomb go off. And the other half don’t care.’ He tapped my arm fondly with his rolled-up copy of the Racing Post. ‘They have seen worse things.’
Then he slipped away.
Voices were being raised in the kitchen. Ken’s unmoving, old man quaver and, much louder, the voice of a woman. She had the same accent as her brother. One of those accents that sound as though you come from nowhere.
‘I don’t know how you can even think such things,’ she said, coming out of the kitchen. She was a bit younger and in much better shape than the man. A good-looking fifty-year-old woman. But she had the same small slash of a mouth, and the same slightly squinty eyes as her brother, and her father, who followed her out of the kitchen with a bread knife in his hand.