Weds 26 and Thurs 27 October

The thing you notice next about skinhead bloke – after his impressive physical presence and his fighter’s posture – is that he smells like all-day drinking: stale beer, scorched fat, and poverty wage cigarettes. This is the smell of imminent violence, Mathilde thinks. Punky must be stupendously innocent, insensitive, or drunk. Even though it’s her parents’ house, and her Uncle’s pseudo-wake, and even though she does feel vaguely responsible for people’s standards of behaviour in this environment – despite all that, she moves away from the threat of confrontation and violence as quickly as she can, finding her way upstairs to her room which, despite being dominated by the coats that the visitors have piled on the bed, offers her a few moments of the solitude that she craves after so much time spent in other people’s company today.

If she’d been in the living room a few minutes earlier she would have seen how the skinhead/punk face-off started. Some of Jan’s relatives had been talking about him, and about his post-war colonial service, and someone had mentioned how great the country had been when it still had its Empire: then, we were someone in the world – people had taken notice of what we said and did. Look at it now, though…a little country with a little voice, and all the old values gone.

Punky listens suspiciously to the fragments of conversation he can he can hear being muttered or hoarsely discussed – “Who could do such a thing to an old man? Not someone from round here” (with the usual racist undertones). “It’s terrible the way this country’s going – you’re not safe anywhere now, in your own city, in your own home, even…” – everyone’s got their own story to tell about crime, decline, and the increasing decadence of the modern, multicultural city, especially as compared to the simplicity, law-abidingness, community spirit and tolerance, the cultural homogeneity of the old, monoracial neighbourhoods. “Nothing against them, mind, but…”

This had been punky’s cue: his belligerence, teenaged contrariness, smattering of left-wing historical theory and beer-relaxed tongue were an irresistible combination. But maybe it’s actually a good thing that we’re not out there any more? Maybe those colonies are better off without us there, skimming off all the profits and the raw materials while the native people work for nothing? Nobody asked us to go there in the first place…

The consensus amongst the older people was that this young man was rude, ignorant and sadly misguided, but their generalised politeness and solicitude meant that they didn’t express their contradictory views: instead, they smiled indulgently and turned away from punky, seeking less inflammatory subject matter in smaller groups. Punky, though, wasn’t satisfied – he needed a deeper, sharper intellectual victory. So he had to push his argument on until someone took his bait, and so he’d taken up a position where he berated people (in general) who (in general) wouldn’t engage in discussions about things that they knew they’d lose the argument on. That’s the trouble with this country…nobody wants to talk about what really happened in the past. It’s all made up stories and myths from films. This rankled more deeply with the older folks, but this group was sober and mature enough to let punky have his say unchallenged.

But this blanket denunciation of the older – war-fighting – generation had been too much for skinhead: his own father – now housebound with arthritis – had been an air gunner in the bomber force during the Eastern war, and had seen many of his school friends killed or go missing. Punky’s generalised disrespect was an attack on his own father.

“Listen,” skinhead said, putting his latest empty beer bottle on the mantelshelf and stepping into the small space between punky and the old folks, rendering that space suddenly smaller and more claustrophobic, “you don’t know what you’re talking about. My dad was there, and these people were there, and they know more about it than you do. So don’t lecture them.”

Punky was tenacious, with a degree of moral and intellectual conviction that made him feel untouchable: he was fortunate to have been schooled and colleged in an educational environment where wit and cleverness were the only weapons that people used in debate – and in the playground and changing room, too. He’d grown used to the brain and the voice being the arbiter of discussion. He was unfortunately now in a different environment.

“I’m not lecturing anyone,” he said haughtily, “I’m just stating the facts. We went to these places as occupiers, and – ”
“We brought those people civilisation, mate. Civilisation – ” – he jabbed his finger at punky for the first time – “ – without us they wouldn’t have nothing. Nothing.” Punky’s judgement is good enough not to challenge the double negative, but he notices it, and it fuels his unstoppable sense of intellectual and moral superiority. He presses on with a few more pious judgements about history, and ‘ordinary people’s’ motivation in the past, and how it wasn’t really their fault (they were just powerless actors driven forward by impersonal historical forces) before skinhead steps forward, puts his massive arms around punky in a shoulder-height bearhug, and carries him through the living room, through the kitchen (which turns to watch him in silence), and out into the back yard.

Punky can’t see anything now: his face is hidden in skinhead’s t-shirted chest, and he can feel the coarse cotton crushed against his nose and cheeks. He can smell sweat, and beer, and – beneath all that – the sweet fruity smell of skinhead’s deodorant. Punky’s face feels red-brick hot, and he feels a bit sick all of a sudden. He can’t breathe.

Skinhead lets punky’s feet back down onto the dark-shadowed grass near the back fence, but holds him around the shoulders still.

“Listen,” he says, “listen, I mean it. You listening?”
Punky, instantly sobered, and instantly recognising how he has misjudged the reality of how this family’s intellectual dynamic works, and feeling his stomach loosen and yawn with the threat of impending violence, nods silently.
“Sure? You’re really listening?”
Nods, says “Yes. I am.”
“Right. Now listen: if you go back in there, I don’t want to hear you slagging off any old people, or the empire, or anything, OK? My dad fought in the war, my dad was in the air force, OK? So just don’t say anything, OK?” (His alcohol content is lapping at the base of his coherence and belligerence now, the arrow-straight logic of his argument and threat drooping impotently.)

But Punky gets the message. After skinhead releases him, punky waits a while, avoiding the eyes of the smirking lads by the back door, then steels himself to go back into the house, retrieve his bag, and go to the toilet before leaving with as much dignity as his reddened face, untucked shirt and unconditional surrender in the face of violence will allow him. This is one of those humiliating moments that will haunt him with incredible clarity and emotional recall for the rest of his life.

The older people pat skinhead on the back and bring him drinks for the rest of the evening. When he goes home, he’s puffed up with righteousness (and beer gas), and has a shouting argument with his mum and dad about the volume that he’s watching the TV at.

Mathilde – back at Jan’s house later in the week
It doesn’t take her long to work out Jan’s naming conventions, storage patterns and labelling; it’s a bit like assembling the materials for a term’s lessons.

She sorts out the personal and unit diaries and lines them up – as far as she can – in chronological order on the workbench. She’s also found the strips of map that Uncle Jan has cut from atlases, and she pins those up just below the first shelf above the workbench, where a small wall-mounted strip light will illuminate them. She noticed that there were lots of pin holes in the maps, usually clustered around towns, and she’s planning to reconstruct the path of the army’s advance in the same way that she presumes Jan has already done. (As she lays out all these materials, feeling their rough, age-desiccated surfaces against her soft fingertips, she gets the strong feeling that she’s merely following in Jan’s footsteps, and that all these materials have passed through his parched, wrinkled hands in the same way that they’re now passing through hers.) The musty smells and textures of the War Office boxes make her think of her Uncle’s dryish skin, parched hair and tweed jackets.

The workbench is getting crowded now, but she lays out as many of the framed photographs and plastic models as she can as well. She doesn’t know that much about military hardware, but she hazards guesses about which trucks and tanks saw service first, and arranges them, nose to tail, in the best chronological sequence she can.

The first unit diary is dated 1938, and they run through (in different handwriting, and occasionally with typed pages pasted in) all the way to 1947, when the War dribbled the last of its blood into the exhausted Slavic soils of the East.

Reading the diaries is a peculiar experience: she’s so used to the familiar archive footage and talking heads (mainly politicians and senior officers) from the classic documentaries that the voices of the ordinary serving soldiers seem strangely banal and narrow-focused; they don’t speak of strategy or tactics, or about philosophy and nationalism (at least, not much), but they do speak of the concrete, the everyday, and the deeply personal. It’s a new and intriguing perspective for her.

Jan had put out his ‘call for documents’ at the last of the reunion dinners he’d attended, about five years ago. Mariette had been complaining that he didn’t have any hobbies any more, and that all he ever seemed to do was sit with his eyes closed, ‘listening’ (her inverted commas) to music on the radio (she acidly commented that, whenever she asked him what he was listening to, he was rarely able to name it or describe it). Eventually, he got so fed up with her repeated complaints about his ‘laziness’ and ‘vegetation’ that he agreed to do something ‘constructive and creative’. He couldn’t think of anything that he specifically wanted to do, and it had been Mariette who suggested the idea of writing a pamphlet history of the unit that he’d been attached to in the East as an economist/logistician. Once the idea was in place, however, he had embraced it with an enthusiasm and creative gusto that he’d barely known since his teens, when he had been a keen draughtsman. In his mind, it became purely his project – he erased Mariette’s moral rights to any ownership.

So he’d stood up at the start of the reunion dinner (before the drink had really started to kibosh the old boys’ memories) and asked them all to loan him any diaries, memoirs, papers, photographs or mementoes that they still had. He would photograph the artefacts and transcribe anything interesting into a composite unit history that he would have printed at his own expense, and which he would distribute at a subsequent dinner, or by post if people were willing to pay the postage. He’d had a stack of cards made at the printers’ already, with his address and telephone number on, and he distributed this so that the old fellows could contact him and send him their things.

People had been very enthusiastic about his project at the dinner, and he’d had many promises of materials made. When only one letter and a small packet of photographs had arrived a month later, though, he began to suspect that the old soldiers’ enthusiasm was not going to be matched by concrete action. Mariette feared that this would mean another retreat into indolence and sleepiness. Just before Christmas, however, there was a sudden deluge of materials, and thereafter a steady flow of packets, parcels and letters came. He reorganised his workroom and put up some extra shelves to cater for the volume and logistical challenge of organising the materials in a usable, intuitive way. Mariette’s pleasure at his revivified interest in doing something was slightly tempered by the fact that she now seemed to have the downstairs of the house all to herself, while Jan spent most of the day and evening in his workroom.

Letter from Lorenz Thomas to his wife Maria, dated August 17th, 1938: Dearest Marie, I send you my love from the town of L.

(c. 2100 words)