White Lies

by Rudolph Bader

  “Yes, it was a case of national hysterics.”

  With this statement, the conversation was closed. Nora would have liked to ask more questions, particularly about Dad’s personal experiences, but to approach such a delicate subject proved to be more difficult than she had imagined. She was determined to try again at a later opportunity.

  Christmas and New Year came, and Nora’s first winter in Britain turned out to be quite cold with lots of snow and ice on the roads, although never as much as they used to get back in Chicago. But everybody said how unusual it was for England.

  The public discussions, as well as the conversations in the family, turned more and more often to the present situation in England, especially the dispute in the coal mining industry, which threatened to culminate in a national strike action of the coal miners. In the Newcastle area, indeed in the entire Midlands and the North East, this was felt very acutely. The impending strike action threatened to shorten their supply of electrical power.

  “There are going to be regular power-cuts soon, unless the dispute can be solved,” Dad announced one evening in January.

  “How are we going to cope?” Mum asked.

  “I’m sure we’ll cope. They say there’s going to be power for three hours, like twelve to three, then no power for three hours, like three to six, then back to power from six to nine, and so on,” he explained.

  Nora listened to this without emotions. She was confident that the strike would still be stayed off. Such a thing could never happen in this country, she was quite sure. But then she remembered all those other strikes in British industry that the news had been full of, ever since they had been in the country. There had been the railways, then the motor industry, there didn’t seem to be an end to strikes. So this new threat was perhaps more than likely.

  Indeed, the big strike became reality, the power-cuts were implemented, and Edward Heath declared a national state of emergency from the 9th of February. At first, Nora and her school-friends found it quite funny. It was an adventure to cope with these power-cuts. The teenagers began to gather at one of their homes and sit round an electric fire for three hours, warming up as best they could, keeping up their lively discussions with tea and Digestive biscuits, until the power went off and candles were lit. Then things turned out really romantic for about an hour and a half, the talks became more personal, sometimes even quite intimate, and all sorts of daring things were uttered under the cover of the dim candle-light. But then everyone began to feel cold. The outside temperatures on such nights often dropped below freezing point, so even in their rooms things became quite uncomfortable during the last of the three hours without power, and even their talks often died out when everyone had to concentrate on keeping warm in their layers of jackets and coats. So when the power came back on, Nora and her friends cheered with great pleasure, and they all felt like little heroes.

  On some of these nights, Ned was among the group of friends. Naturally he was sitting next to her in their circle round the candles on the floor. Both of them found their hearts beating a little more quickly when the power went off and the candlelight rendered the atmosphere more romantic. However, even though they felt they might do more than just sit next to each other they had to restrain themselves. Nobody was to find out that they were having a special thing between them, so they couldn’t even kiss. Still, it was an exciting experience.

  The “thing” between them remained in its delicate budding stage for several months. They both felt they would like to follow their inclination and explore each other’s bodies, but they were just too shy. Nora felt she would like to feel Ned’s skin and really wanted him to feel hers, but she didn’t know how to let him know and was too shy to start doing anything herself. Where could it lead? She was only going to be fourteen in a few weeks’ time, and her mind was full of her mother’s warnings. As a girl you never knew what tricks boys could be up to. Thus, her faster heart-beats during those candlelight sessions stemmed mainly from her inner conflict between wanting and dreading.

  When the strike ended and regular power supply returned in late February, Nora wasn’t sure about how to feel. Her only hope for a more intimate development in her relationship with Ned was gone, but on the other hand she felt more relaxed because they could just continue with their kisses behind bushes and in back alleys as they had enjoyed them before the strike. She only really regretted the intimate atmosphere of the candlelight evenings, not only with Ned but equally with their other school-friends. Nora felt she had now acquired quite a respectable circle of friends after only a few months in the new country. There were several quite nice girls that she liked, and she was glad to have spent all those evenings with them getting to know one another a lot better.

  There was Debbie, who lived only two streets away. She had a round face that always had a friendly smile, her hair was something between fair and red, she had an older sister like Nora, she also liked Latin, she could play the piano and her father worked for Barclays Bank. Nora found herself naturally drawn to Debbie, and now, after those intimate evenings during the power-cuts, they realized that they had become best friends.

  Another very good friend was Janet. Nora liked her, although she didn’t live in Gosforth like Debbie and most of Nora’s other friends, but in Jesmond, which was something of a hippie suburb of Newcastle, full of students living in digs, bedsits or small flats in one of those identical terraced houses off Osborne Road. Janet’s parents had gone to a great effort to be allowed to send her to Nora’s school in Gosforth. The family lived in one of the few mock-Tudor houses with black beams towards the upper end of Osborne Road, which placed them nearly on the same social level as the rest of Nora’s circle. All these insinuations about social class really annoyed Nora, but living where she did, in one of Newcastle’s posh suburbs, she simply couldn’t escape them. After living there for a few months, she realized that she was stuck in this box, there was no way of escaping her family’s social label, which was upper-middle-class. At times, she would look back and remember their lives in Chicago in a wistful mood. There had been no question of social class. Or had she simply not seen it?

  Janet didn’t play a musical instrument, but she was more into modern pop music, of which she had a huge record collection. Also, she was different from Nora in her attitude to school. Perhaps in protest against her parents, who had fought so hard to get her into this school, she disliked most of the subjects, she only made a minimal effort to cope and she considered their teachers stupid people. On the other hand, there was a very special charm about her, a charm that didn’t escape Nora. This charm consisted of very good looks, a winning smile, a general sense of easy-going carelessness and an extremely catching sense of humour. Nora felt that Janet was her other half, her contrasting shadow, or some other person who belonged to her despite all the differences between them. Sometimes she thought she needed her to balance her own views of things, like some sort of regulator. Of course, she never spoke to her about this aspect of their relationship. When they were alone together, without any of their other friends, Nora wondered if Janet had similar ideas of their differences and their relationship. But like her, Janet never mentioned anything in that direction. It was as if their unequal relationship was either just taken for granted or was really only a figment of Nora’s imagination. After all, Nora’s experience of the world was still rather modest. The important thing for the time being was that the two girls were happy about each other and spent a lot of good times together.

  There were a few other friends, but none as intimate as Debbie and Janet. When the whole group of friends went to town to do some window-shopping, perhaps daring to buy a small item of clothing - a T-shirt, a pair of tights or cheap jeans - from Fenwick’s, the only department store worth looking at in town, Nora, Debbie and Janet were usually accompanied by other girls like Amy, Christine and Sophie, who all went to the same school and lived in Gosforth. The group liked to
travel to the City on top of a double-decker bus, and they usually got off the bus near the Civic Centre, laughing and happy about their common experience in the big city, which made them feel quite grown-up.

  * * *

  Nora turned fourteen in March, and this spring marked the first anniversary of their residence in England. Although the parents didn’t mention it, Nora and Margaret celebrated this anniversary in private. They sat down on the soft cushions in Margaret’s room, lit some candles and allowed themselves a few small bottles of Coke.

  “Isn’t it odd?” Margaret asked, “We’ve been here for a whole year now, but it feels like ten years?”

  “Yes. Sometimes I can hardly remember everything from our old home. And what about you?”

  “Well, I can remember enough for my taste. But then I have to focus on our life here, with things as they are at school.”

  “You’re going to take your A-Levels next year, aren’t you?” Nora wanted to know. “Are you going on to university then?”

  “Yeah, I guess I will.”

  Nora still admired Margaret and her clear ideas about her own future. She had always known what to aim for, and she seemed to have very succinct ideas about her working life as an adult. This made Nora realize how much she herself was still a baby. She had no definite plans for her future, she didn’t even know if she was going to continue with school after her O-Levels. And whereas Margaret had a gift for science and apparently wasn’t interested in boys - she probably never even had a boyfriend - Nora’s interests lay in languages, history and boys. Sometimes Nora feared her interest in boys made her inferior to her elder sister’s abstinence. How could Margaret not be drawn to the other sex? Nora knew she would always “run after boys”, as their mother labelled a girl’s pronounced interest in boys. She couldn’t help it. She was a weak girl, a weak person. Her sister was a firm rock in the wild sea of life.

  “Do you think Mum and Dad are happy here?” Nora asked.

  “I think they are. Dad likes his work. He seems to be quite a big cheese in his company, which gives him a sense of importance, much more so than back in the States. And Mum is thrilled about her new part-time job. She told me so only last week. So yes, I believe they’re very happy here. Why are you asking?”

  “Well, I don’t really know. Sometimes it just seems to me there’s something,... I don’t know,... Dad seems so withdrawn sometimes. As if I couldn’t get near him, as if he was trying to hide something.”

  “Oh, that’s just your changing world, little sis. You’re growing up. You’re reshuffling your views, particularly your views on our parents, on boys and men, and so on. So you begin to see Dad in a new light, from a more grown-up vantage-point.”

  In bed that night, Nora couldn’t go to sleep immediately. She spent a long time thinking of what Margaret had said and wondered if it was just that.

  Eight

  Mr Woolf - or Didi Woolf, as his business friends liked to call him - was always very busy. His work was very important to him, but he also spent as much time as possible with his family in their comfortable house in Gosforth. He loved his daughters Margaret and Nora, and he was still very fond of his wife, Emily, even after nearly twenty years of married life. He still found her an extremely attractive woman, and she suited him in every possible way. She may be a little boring sometimes, perhaps too “normal”, without any sense of adventure or excitement, and their marriage had been bubbling along quite nicely for all this time, but this had its advantages, too. As long as their sex life was still intact. Which it was. At least Didi thought so. They had sex about once a month, usually in the middle of the night. Always on his initiative, never on hers. Sometimes she wouldn’t even be fully awake, and if she did wake up, it was usually when he’d already reached his climax and felt like going back to sleep. But they never talked about their sex life. So, he was convinced it was good.

  Didi cut a very good figure. He was just under six-foot tall, slim, with a handsome, clean-shaven face and thick, dark brown hair made more daring by a few grey streaks, and he had this successful aura about him that a certain type of American businessmen had. He looked best in his grey suit. When he had his hair freshly washed and wore his narrow blue tie, some friends’ wives said he looked almost like JFK or sometimes like some oil tycoon from that American soap on TV. People who met him for the first time were bound to admire him for his charisma. Unfortunately, that brilliant first impression was sometimes a little shaken by his strange clipped accent.

  People knew he was American, so they just noted that his accent was a bit different but couldn’t define it. However, there was that specific halting rhythm and that slightly monotonous intonation, an idiosyncrasy that only a few people with a fine ear for languages detected, and of those there were few enough in Newcastle in the 1970s.

  His wife and daughters knew about this, of course. They knew he had a Swiss-German accent, probably with a little proper German thrown in.

  Something that his family found hard to understand was his ongoing interest in German politics. They accepted it as a weird hobby of his, but when he began to talk about it more often in the spring of 1972, his interest seemed to take on a new dimension. His family became fully aware of this when he came home for dinner on the 18th of May. He threw a bunch of newspapers on the sideboard and announced his interest in watching the news on TV in the evening. He said it was very important to follow the news about Germany. Neither his wife nor his daughters knew what he meant, but they went along with this general bit of information. Like all their friends in England, as well as their old acquaintances back in the States, they never cared about what was going on in the world outside their countries. Why Germany? Who was interested in Germany?

  Because she had developed quite an interest in history, and not only British and American history, but European history in general, Nora was the first to break out of this family pattern and realized that there had to be important news indeed if their father announced it like that. She knew that the greatest hotspot in the world, where the two super-powers were standing in confrontation, was the Berlin Wall, and that was in Germany.

  So they watched the news on TV, and after that only Nora remained in the room with her father to discuss what they had just heard and seen. It was an important speech made by the German Chancellor, Willy Brandt, about the new phase in German politics in relation to its Communist neighbours in Eastern Europe. Only the day before, Brandt had explained the new Ostpolitik and the new Ostverträge in the German parliament, after which the parliament - called the Bundestag - was going to ratify the Warsaw and Moscow Treaties. This meant that, 27 years after the end of the War, Germany could at last begin a new phase in international politics, and the Russians were officially no longer threatening to attack West Germany.

  “But what’s that to us, really?” Nora wanted to know.

  “Oh child, can’t you see how dramatically this new development is going to change Europe? It could even be the beginning of the end of the Cold War. After agreeing to these treaties, the Russians will no longer be brazen enough to attack a Western European country, not even enforce their supremacy over Eastern European countries with military force, as they did in Hungary in ’56 and in Czechoslovakia in ’68. Can you see that?” His voice rose higher with passion.

  “Sorry, Dad, you may be right, but I still can’t understand.”

  “Let me explain,” the father began, “it’s really quite simple ...” but Nora interrupted him, claiming to be too tired to concentrate on politics. So the father gave up, but she could see how excited he was.

  Next morning, she asked her history teacher at school.

  “I don’t really know,” Mr Jackson said, “but I think it means that the Germans will no longer have to be afraid of Soviet aggression.”

  “But why should my father be so excited about it?” Nora wondered.

  “Well
, didn’t you tell us your father had some personal connection to Germany? Perhaps someone in his family resisted the Russians during the War, they may have been afraid of a Russian invasion ever since, and now they may feel safer. I don’t really know. Time will tell.”

  But Nora wasn’t satisfied. She only wondered why her father obviously took such a strong emotional interest. She didn’t know of any relatives in Germany who could have done anything against the Russians. She decided to discuss this with Margaret.

  When she asked Margaret a few evenings later, her elder sister was surprised at Nora’s interest in the matter. “What does it concern you?” she asked nervously.

  “Aren’t you interested?” Nora asked back.

  “Why should I be? That’s old hat! We live here and now, and all that stuff about Germany, the War, the Russians and the Communists, that’s got nothing to do with us. And what if Dad did have some relations for whom things might change now? He never told us anything about his German connections anyway, so just forget it.”

  After this, they never touched the subject again. But Nora decided to keep her mind alert and find out more. After all, this was real world history within her own family.

  Meanwhile, she had more pressing things on her mind. There were some problems with Ned, and also her friends Debbie and Janet had some issues with Christine and Sophie. Through most of the summer, Nora felt that life was getting a bit too complicated for her.

  Her relationship with Ned had been going quite nicely through the winter, through the power-cuts, and well into spring. They had gone for long walks, and they’d often sought out secluded spots where they felt safe enough to engage in some pleasant cuddling and kissing. She believed she was in love with him. But as the weather turned warmer in spring, Ned seemed to lose interest while wanting more from her. He no longer told her he loved her, while he began to place his hands under her clothes and stroke her naked skin in ever more passionate ways. When, at last, he reached her naked breasts with his warm hands, she was puzzled as to how to react. While she found it exciting and very pleasant, she couldn’t help feeling the wrongness of the situation. She felt she was mutating into a split personality, one side of her enjoying the titillating physical sensation, while another self was looking down at both of them from a critical elevated position.