Corn

My subconscious popped up a punchline this morning for a terrible, corny, shaggy-dog-story kind of a joke, which would probably involve a clumsy journalist interviewing Lionel Richie over breakfast at Lionel's hotel; the set-up would feature the accidental flicking of toast-related preserves onto Lionel's clothing, between two and four times. Clearly the punchline would involve the words "But Lionel, you're once, twice, three times marmaladey".

Ouch.

Bombs

I'm coming towards the end of Keith Lowe's Inferno: The Devastation of Hamburg, 1943. This is an interesting book, which tells 'both sides' of the story of the RAF/USAAF bombing of the German city; there are some slightly strange (to my mind) tonal elements that sit a little awkwardly with the generally measured, objective and sombre tone of the book (as if he's trying too hard to create a sense of tension/drama or anticipation, or (unnecessarily) synthesise traditional human interest angles), but for the most part it is vividly and fluently written.

Having read many books about the bomber war in Europe in 1939-45, I was particularly impressed at how convincingly, powerfully and comprehensively he had portrayed the horror and suffering of those who lived and died under the bombs; Lowe's account of the firestorm that resulted from the second RAF raid of 27 July 1943 is detailed, relentless and harrowing, as are his descriptions of the aftermath of the firestorm, the subsequent raids, and the 'clean-up' operations that followed. These chapters speak compellingly of the fear, horror, exhaustion and suffering of the German civilians and service people. This is the most moving and insistent treatment I have read on this subject.

Something else that struck me as I read this book was how closely I identified with the bomber crews (particularly the RAF crews, whose cultural background I feel I know so much more about). This identification partly stems from my reading of Len Deighton's Bomber. I'm not sure exactly what age I was when I fist read my brother's thick, tatty, black-covered, bold red capital-lettered Pan Books copy of this novel, but it was probably around 1974 or 1975, when I would have been 12 or 13. I remember reacting powerfully to this book, and re-reading it often in the following years; in fact, I think it became something of an obsession - I thought it was such a fantastic book. (At this time I had a mental list of books that were the 'best' in different genres: Bomber was the best book about night bombing; Colin Forbes' Tramp in Armour was the best book about the war in France in 1940, Arthur C. Clarke's 2001: A Space Odyssey was the best science fiction book - and so on.) And Bomber keyed into another of my pre-adolescent/adolescent obsessions: war and war machines. Even at junior school I had been fascinated by war (particularly the Second World War) and I had been building model warplanes, warships and armoured fighting vehicles since I was six or seven; this book gave me a coherent narrative structure and set of imagined visual images around which I could shape my model-building and play, as well as a set of imagined characters whose voices and perspectives I could adopt as part of my creative world.

In retrospect, I think that one of the reasons I found Bomber so affecting and powerful was that it somehow legitimised this play-world of pilots, warplanes conflict and death that I had innocently been engaged in for years; the cool, objective writing of the book created a quasi-scientific narrative that delineated the use and effects of the weapons - bombers, bombs, night fighters, cannon-shells - in such a way (vivid but distant) that let me maintain a distance from the reality of those effects and avoid a deeper moral or emotional engagement with the issues. In retrospect, it is rather strange to think that most of the people in the book were mere adjuncts to the stunningly-written sections about air combat or the effects of explosions: the bits of the book that I approached with the greatest sense of pleasurable anticipation were the ones where German night-fighters and British bombers encountered each other in the dark night sky, 20mm cannon shells were fired, and holes were blasted through the stressed metal skins of Lancaster bombers. This was something like a pornography of violence: thrilling, abstract, rewarding. This, despite what I later came to understand as the novel's distinct anti-war thrust - there are no 'good' and 'bad' people, just the living and the dead.

It strikes me now that this unemotional focus on machines and imaginative abstractions helped to cement my crude sense of the morality of the Second World War, derived from comics and popular culture: a clash of Good (the Allies) against Evil (the Axis). Thus the bomber crews were fighting a just campaign against the people on the ground (who were largely faceless and unreal to me); this picture was nuanced by the sense that the German night-fighter crews were noble 'Knights of the air', unsullied by any unpleasant ideological taint from Nazism (in fact, this was implicitly reinforced by the portrayal of some of the airmen's disgust on finding evidence of the medical experiments that were being carried out 'for their benefit').

This 'good German/bad Nazi' element of the book did not make as big an impact on me as it might later have done. My early readings of Bomber were completed in a naive state, before my awareness of the Holocaust began and developed. In a way, my awareness of the Holocaust made it even easier to duck any moral questions about mass bombing and the explicit targeting of civilians, since it fostered a (largely unconscious) sense that 'they' (the bombed) had (all) 'deserved it', (a) because the Nazis had launched a war of aggressive conquest, and (b) because since the regime's genocidal policies were clearly morally repugnant, any qualms about adopting the measures of 'total war' could be easily dismissed (even if I had framed them in that way).

I've read number of books in recent years that approach the question of mass bombing in a more morally-charged way (previously, most of the books cantered over any questions of morality). These kind of books (e.g. A.C Grayling's Among the Dead Cities or Frederick Taylor's Dresden reflect a recent trend whereby questions about Bomber Command's campaign have shifted from 'objective' discussions about the bombing's cost-benefit-based validity to starker questions about whether the bombing can be seen as morally defensible (these questions are also entangled with questions about the responsibility of the individual in a set of social contexts and about whether to admit that something is immoral necessarily taints the individual who was carrying out their duty in good faith); it's easy to see how you might have a similar discussion about moral/individual responsibility over the role of - say - a German soldier who had grown up from childhood under the Nazis regime and knew no other moral/social universe other than the one that they had lived their life within.

I realise that I have no established position on these questions: this does not strike me as necessarily a bad thing - it seems better to me to have a morally complex, difficult position than one which is simplified and polarised. Neither do I have the language or structured arguments of a moral philosopher with which I can express myself properly (at least, not without making a proper 'essay plan' instead of just putting finger to keys as I have done here. So the questions are still open in my mind - something to work on some more.

Skyscape Number 76

So. Driving home late this afternoon. The inside of my car is full of bright sunlight from the low-ish sun; in the middle distance, the still-wintry landscape of brown fields, bare trees, the odd streak of green or tan; in the far distance, a great curtain of grey-black cloud, with a scouring of paler grey in front - rain or snow falling - and a seam of paler sky showing between the base of the cloud and the horizon, with the precipitation smudging the bluish sky into grey.

Eventually, I nose the car in under the grey cloud, and the rain and sleet spatter the windscreen for a while, and then it stops, and I'm emerging into blue sky territory again, with a great swirl of dark cloud looping overhead.

Nearing home, I can see that the snow is scattered over the fields, and when the lowering sun breaks through at the top of Eydon Hill, I'm inspired enough by the scene to stop the car, jog back through the chilly air and take a few pictures.

image
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I was listening to Mary Chapin Carpenter's "Between Here and Gone" album on the way home, and there was something refreshing and reinvigorating about the light and the cold air that lifted my mood, chiming with the sense of everyday mystery and reawakening possibilities (in the midst of the damnably confounding human condition) that's embodied in a lot of the tracks on this disc.

So that was my drive home. :-)

The Return

Putting.
Some.
Words.
In.
A.
Line.

So simple and so pleasurable.

All of my life can be seen as a word-based reflection/commentary/stream of thoughts; without the words there is no life, there is no consciousness. There is nothing to leave behind. Words and language are everything - and yet we waste them.

Coming up with a phrase or a well-balanced sentence is so pleasurable: there was something at work today, in an email I wrote, about how something was 'homophonically Freudian' - something that I had never expected that I would ever say; and yet it was very appropriate, and pithy and funny. But just a set of words in a line, in a dynamic, unforeseen context, and now vanished forever, except, perhaps, in the minds of the sender and the recipient. A reflection/extension of my consciousness and sensibility, projected out into space and now...lost.

Possible Disservice

I may be making a horrible misjudgement. But...it seems to me that you can tell very quickly whether a work of art is 'true' or not: whether its heart is beating with the beat of a real life, or whether it feels like something cconcocted. Something that has been created within a framework that has constrained its mode of expression and rendered it...what? Bogus? Unbelievable? At the very least, you are aware of this thing straining to be art; you are conscious of its artifice and of what it is trying to make you think or feel. With film, I feel that this is possible almost from the first frame.

Thus "Flags of Our Fathers". A worthy subject. But as soon as the voiceover starts, with its carefully modulated commentary on the images we're seeing, you're aware that a script is being read: there's no sense that this is a real person voicing real thoughts - it's an actor reading a script. Artistically, this is death for me. Bogus and manipulative. Much as I wanted to watch this film, I had to stop, because - from that early moment - I didn't believe it.

Cinematic Sibilance

I've watched two films this week: Atonement (at the cinema) and The Seventh Seal (a reviewing on DVD after seeing it first about 20 years ago).

I think Atonement is probably the best film I've seen this year. I came away from the cinema feeling sad and reflective, while at the same time excited by what I had just seen, in the sense of being reminded how art can sometimes penetrate your mind deeply and trigger all sorts of thoughts and associations, such that you feel enlivened and invigorated. Atonement impressed in a number of ways: the acting was uniformly excellent; the design and cinematography was exquisite (from the bright, sunlit colours and shadowy, light-shot interiors of the country house to the desaturated hues of wartime France and London); the use of music, patterned on the repeated clack of manual typewriter keys; and the technical skill on display (witness the much-commented upon continuous tracking shot of the troop-strewn beach at Dunkirk).

It was the denouement of the film that I was thinking about most as I walked back to my car with the cool night moisture collecting on my cinema-warmed temples. Out of the swirl of visual beauty, narrative and the layered, integrated music, emerged an overall sense of sadness, beauty and bleakness; bleakness because, firstly, there's no happy ending for anyone in this film, and, secondly, because the author's attempt at atonement and making peace with her past is wholly inadequate in the face of the effects of her behaviour. Further, the author's admission of invention throws into doubt everything about the preceding narrative - how much of it is true? how much of it do you want to be true? - and makes me conclude that there is no redemption, no way of back-tracking on the paths taken and the choices made; there's just cause and effect coupled with randomness, and the narratives we invent/re-invent to make sense of what happens to us.

After the naturalistic perfection of Atonement, The Seventh Seal could be argued to look a bit creaky, both at the technical level (the stuffed hawk swaying unconvincingly in the breeze in the prelude) and in terms of some of the acting, which has elements both of theatricality and hammy comedy, and which, in a world seen through irony-tinted spectacles, can seem to grate with the film's more serious concerns. But the power of the film to engage the intellect and the emotions is undimmed: the knight's struggle for meaning after his loss of religious faith - given the apparent absence and silence of God - still resonates today in a world of moral relativism and uncertainty, while the terror and hollowness of organised medieval religion is powerfully conveyed in the procession of flagellants and priests, and in the burning of the supposed witch. The game of chess with Death facilitates the knight's realisation of meaning within a humanist (rather than strictly religious) context, and holds out the hope of meaning and fulfilment in a world that is devoid both of spirituality and justice. In this sense, it feels to me as if this film has more of a warm heartbeat of hope than the more intellectually arid Atonement. You might argue that I am deluded in looking to find meaning in a meaningless world, rather than accepting the premise that the only meaning derives from the individual consciousness and the order that it seeks to impose on the world. And I'd listen to that argument very sympathetically, still not wanting it to be true.

Today, I bought a compilation DVD of Shaun the Sheep by way of contrast. Note that, spookily, the 'SS' in this title matches the 'SS' in the Bergman film: I will study Shaun's activities closely for any signs of apocalyptic iconography and spiritual angst.

Natural History Museum, Oxford. Monday. Cretaceous period

Link

Memories/Memoir and/as Therapy

I’ve been reading Jonathan Franzen’s "The Discomfort Zone". It’s primarily a memoir of his childhood and adolescence, his relationship with his mother when she was terminally ill, with the sale of the former family home after her death as the initial point of departure. As almost always happens when I’m reading other people’s memoirs about their childhood, I
find myself recalling little scenes or sense memories from my own past, and these ripple and echo and repeat, firing and refiring the neural connections that have been stimulated so many times before: reinforcement, reinforcement, reinforcement…

Similarly, I could reflect that these ‘automatic’ recollections of these familiar images and feelings (the things that I like to recall, and to wallow in) are analogous with the repeated responses and behaviours that are firmly embedded in my unconscious repertoire, in my psychology, in the physical substrate on which those psychological structures have been built;
in my way of thinking about myself (and my self), my attitudes, the way that I ‘am’ in the world.

And it might be more important to reflect that it’s not these familiar, often-looked-at images that I need to re-examine again if I am going to change my course (or at least vary the range of experiences that I open myself up to – habit, damnit): on either side of each familiar image, and above and below them, there are darker, less visited places; the places where you don’t want to shine the light because the things there are too difficult and frightening; the underlying/embedded structures of your life and behaviour that you skirt around/ignore through habit or by (conscious or unconscious) design. These places might be illuminated by a few simple questions or observations from those people that know you and love you best, or by you posing those questions to yourself. However, because you’re a bit sensitive and difficult and cowardly and habitually evasive and in denial, you don’t ask those questions – not really – and you tend to steer clear of people and situations that might throw you, that might force you to confront these weaknesses or difficulties; the things that might expose you or make you vulnerable; and you only allow people who ‘respect your space’ (physical and psychological) to get close(ish) to you – the people who won’t ruffle your feathers, who won’t press you too hard about what’s really going on with you and your life, who will (with the best intentions and respect for you as an autonomous individual) help you to carry on being who you are and behaving in the way in which you’ve become accustomed to behaving (i.e. in a way that protects and perpetuates this established, habituated self/persona).

And thus you remain in this emotional/behavioural holding pattern, repeating what you have done before, revisiting the places and people and states that bring you solace, and continuing not to find things beyond the familiar and comforting, things beyond what you have already known and experienced, sometimes rationalising this as a way of maintaining your current state of stability/happiness/contentment, while simultaneously knowing that there is something different underneath these professions of objective rational analyses.

[too private]

And these repeated patterns become fossilised, atrophied, stuck. It occurred to me that it might be interesting (and potentially useful) for me to track back to my own childhood, adolescence and adulthood in order to deconstruct/reconstruct some of the formative experiences, sensations, images, relationships and stories: the habits, conflicts, addictions, patterns of thought, affectations, camouflages, screens and maladaptive behaviours (and patterns of thought). To uncover and illuminate for myself those darker corners beyond the things that are now so over-familiar as to have become transparent.

Next: I am born

I love...

......this tree. It does this every year, beautifully.

Vapour trails

I love what air and water can do.

What the expletive is going on?

Every TV and radio news bulletin, plus the BBC News website, has, as their main story, the news that Prince William and his girlfriend are splitting up.

WHAAAAAAT?

Clearly somebody has redefined the meaning of 'news' while I had my back turned. Sometimes I despair about my country and its culture.

Yes, it has.

Been a while, that is. Not sure why. Secretiveness? Laziness? Wariness? Mm.

Anyway. It struck me that all the news reports I heard (on UK TV/radio) about the bombing inside the Iraqi parliament talked about how the blast had killed 'three MPs and five others'.

Look at that bit in inverted commas.

The implicit assumption is that the people from the political class are more important than anyone else - that their existence is privileged over 'other', more ordinary people.

If ever there was an indictment of the war's privileging of political desire over humanism, those headlines are it.

also

I've got a lovely early morning picture of sky and vapour trails (from my camera phone), but Flickr seems to have become Fuckr, and no longer accepts my MMS submissions. Arsing annoying.

Also also

Saw "Days of Glory" (aka "Indigenes") last night: very impressive and thought provoking. Glib review to follow...

Thomas and Denis in the Field

I strain to lift my backside off the ground and the weight on my shifts a little, so I settle back down onto the ground and push at the rags with my hands.

The rags are slippery wet, with something spongy inside them, but I get some purchase on them and they start sliding down my legs, the backs of which are aching with the effort and the use of unaccustomed muscles. I manage to get my knees up a bit, and give the rags an extra hard shove with my hands: my right palm goes through the gap between two folded edges, and my hand goes up to the wrist into something soft and gooey that feels like thick, warm engine grease. It feels horrible, and I jerk my hand back out, instinctively shaking it to get the gooey stuff off it. I feel some of the stuff spatter on my cheek and forehead. The weight’s off me, and I wriggle through the mud past the rags and out into the fresh air. I look down at my hand and it’s stained with red and brownish green slime: bringing it up to my face I can smell the iron smell of blood and a smell like shit.

There’s a mist of blood and muck sprayed across the snow and mud and up the back of the tank.

“Tommy.”

The rags and weight are his legs: I can see the nail heads in the soles of his boots gleaming whitely in the snow-reflected light. There’s bone and reddish-purple [?] flesh showing at the torn ends of his overalls, and bits of muck and skin in the snow and mud.

The shelling has all stopped, and the cold, snowy wind sound is audible again, brushing across the delicate surfaces of my ears. My cheeks feel very hot, and I’m dizzy. The air is swirling past me, and I’m swaying.

I lift my head up and turn around, looking back towards the road. There are some dark shapes on the snow within ten yards of me, but I don’t want to see them, so I look at the road in the middle distance. The second half-track has been hit; smoke is boiling off the burning engine compartment and the wood and canvas, and there are flames flickering underneath the chassis. There’s debris and dark shapes on the road.

There are a couple of men moving across the field towards me, but they’re blurry and they waver as I look. I shut my eyes and sit down in the wet snow.

When I open my eyes again the men are nearer, and I can see that it’s Albert and Franz from my crew. They’re carrying blankets. They crouch down beside me and put a blanket over my shoulders and one over my legs. They’re saying things, but my head is swimming and I can’t concentrate on the noise they’re making, and I just hear a gargling swirl, like the last water draining out of a bath.

I just nod to them. I’m all right. I’m not hurt.

I shut my eyes again and feel Franz and Albert’s masses move away from me. The sky wavers and sways.

They’re putting blankets over things.

Tommy resting the nape of his neck on the seatback as our truck raced along a dust-parched road during the exhilarating summer offensive in [France…]

They’re putting blankets over the dark shapes.

Twisted snakes and chunks of meat.

Thomas wrinkling his nose and screwing up his face as the man in the bar was sick, sick, sick with the striptease girls’ lights shining through it.

The stump of his spine sticking out of the meat of his [hips and thighs], and the gaping red-orange and black cavern of his viscera-emptied [ribcage], with the sheared-off ends of the ribs all white, like the nuggets of bone in a pork chop [a spare rib chop, in fact].
Helping Thomas walk home from the Henkel Works’ Christmas party, that first winter they’d worked there during their apprenticeship; Thomas had had too much to drink and was within one more word of getting into a fight with the older man who had danced with Thomas’ girl, and who had ended up with her on his arm later in the evening. Thomas’ legs working away automatically like a puppet’s while Denis had his fingers around the back of Thomas’ neck, half-holding him up and half-guiding him towards home.

Thomas’ dark hair flittering in the breeze, brushing against the powdery snow. One eye open and still, the other lost in a mess of blood and torn flesh where head has been sliced in two diagonally and the jaw, cheek, teeth and gums have been smashed and shredded, mangled into pulp and ribbons of flesh and skin and seared into a half-burned mask of hideous intricacy.

Thomas’ mother putting a coffee cup down on the unfamiliar dark wood nightstand next to the bed in the spare bedroom. The rain-filtered daylight breaking into the room when she draws back the curtain: illuminating the steam rising from the coffee a foot from his face and shining through the stretched fabric of her blouse where she’s reaching up to the curtain, so that, just for a moment, he can see her arm in dark silhouette, the white gauzey space under her arm, and the start of the shape of her breast.

He’s in the back of one of the half-tracks, stretched out across the bench seat, propped up with a rolled tarpaulin that someone has stuck down in the footwell. He’s cold. The sound of the engine, the rolling rhythm of the tracks and the thick, oily smell of the [doped/treated?] tarpaulin is making him feel sick. He shuts his eyes.

When he opens them again, it’s darker. He can see the sky through the crenellated cut-out shape of the half-track’s body [the metal pressing?]: there’s dark snow cloud blowing in, below whiter, higher cloud and the glimpses of blue beyond the white. The half-track has stopped, and the engine is stopped. He can smell cigarette smoke nearby, and he thinks he hears the sound of someone moaning or being sick. He’s cold, and the smell of the tarpaulin is rich in his nostrils; he can feel a growing soreness there where the chemicals are irritating the soft membranes.

I wonder what they have done with Tommy? Poor Tommy.

Denis: his aside about memory…{placement?}

It’s funny how I can remember so much from that time, and yet I can barely remember what I did yesterday. Whenever I watch a detective thing on the TV and the police officers ask somebody what they were doing on a particular day six months ago, I realise how far-fetched these whole things are, they way that they always ask the same questions. It’s not like real life.

I can remember things best from when I was a boy – less than ten – and then again when I was a young man, starting to go to work, from fourteen [?] to eighteen. And then some things from the war, and the early times with Julianne, and when we lived in the attic rooms after we got married. There’s lots of things from there that are very clear and fresh for me.

But then there are whole stretches of time when it’s all grey and blurred together, when nothing stands out. Things from the clearer times come back when I smell a smell or see a colour, of hear a sound or a piece of music maybe. And if one little memory starts off, sometimes a whole stream of others will follow straight along with it, like a line of dominoes all falling down when you click the first one over. That’s nice. Sometimes it happens at night, when Julianne is asleep and there’s just me awake, with the green light from the electric clock-radio glowing on the wallpaper by my bedside table, and the old alarm clock with the metal bells on top ticking away on the chest of drawers by the window. All it might take is for the edge of the eiderdown or the scratchy woollen blanket to tickle my cheek in a particular way when I pull it up to cover myself, and in my head I’ll be back in my childhood bed or lying next to Julianne or out in the field somewhere in my army days.

Sometimes it will happen that I’ll start thinking about the old days and I will just keep thinking about things and they’ll be going round and round in my head, and then I’ll get that horrible feeling when I know that I’m not going to be able to get back to sleep for ages, so I’ll stop trying and get out of bed and go downstairs and make myself a cup of hot chocolate and sit in the kitchen, on the high stool, facing the wall and listening to radio, turned down very low so that it won’t wake Julianne or Jos and [daughter’s name], so low that most of the time I can’t even hear the words that the presenter is saying between the music. But you have to have it low, otherwise the music blares out. (Years ago, there wasn’t even any music on the proper radio in the small hours – all the radio programmes closed down, and all you could hear if you listened in the dark was hissing and whistling and pops and crackles, and, if you were lucky, you might catch the sound of some foreign station for a while, and try and make out what someone was saying in English, or French, or Russian, or maybe even Chinese or whatnot. Nowadays there are all sorts of different stations on at night, but none of them ever seem to play the kind of music that our generation like; things with proper tunes and words that you can hear, and not all sung by singers who sound like they’re trying to sound like an American. The music’s all sex now, for the young people.)

It’s good when we go to a wedding and meet up with the old families – mine and Julianne’s. More likely it will be a funeral now, though. All those people that we grew up with…nearly all of our aunts and uncles have gone now. We’ve seen them when we were children, all smart in their suits that they only wore twice a year, the men with their hair all oiled down, and the women with earrings shaped like the middle of fried eggs (but a different colour) and pearls around their necks. And we’ve seen them get older and disappear…some in the war, when the city was bombed, others moved away for jobs, some we just drifted away from and didn’t get to see for years and then we heard that they were dead and it was too late, and we’d worry about whether we should go to the funeral as we hadn’t seen them or even sent a Christmas card for years, but in the end we’d usually go and there would be the old faces, with whiter hair or no hair, and grown fatter or all gaunt, and the older ones bent over or deaf, with the brown spots creeping down the skin on the back of their hands that was thin and greasy so that you could see the tendons through it, and the veins all ridged and blue. But even the youngsters – the dead one’s children – would be pleased to see you always, and after the funeral you’d all get together at the house or at the church hall or the Soldier’s Union, and after the sandwiches and the pies and a couple of drinks, people would start to reminisce about the dead one and the old stories would come out and people would start to get over their sadness a bit and start to laugh, which seemed wrong at first, but gradually the laughter would seem all right, and the talk and the food and the laughter would all seem to be more about the people who were left, and not about the dead one (though you’d mention their name in the story you were telling, and everyone in your little circle near the bar would stop talking and look down at the floor for a little while, and then someone would say, “Ah well,” and you’d go on.

And it was at these get-togethers that you could start talking about some little thing that you remembered from the old days – a certain shop, or a relative who died long ago, or a place that you all used to go to on a charabanc trip one day in the summer when all the factories were shut for the holiday week – and that one little thing would remind you of something else, and that would jog someone else’s memory, and all these “yes, and what about…” and “I remember that!” memories would all merge into each other and you’d all end up wiping your eyes with laughter, remembering all that shared history and the all the lost colours and places and friends that you’d known. All those things that you wouldn't have been able to remember on your own, as if they only exist when all of you are trying to think about them at once.

And at the end of the evening, when you’d been to the toilet for the last time so that you wouldn’t be too uncomfortable on the bus home, you’d step out of the warmth of the hall and into the night (usually it would have been raining, and the air would be starting to get colder), and the smell of the men’s beer and the ladies’ face powder and eau de cologne would be on your face and clothes from the round of kisses and handshakes that you’d made just before you left. Just you and your wife, facing the journey home in the dark, in the city that now belonged to younger, ruder, noisier people, and as you walked down the tarmac path between the wet bushes and down to the road, leaving behind the glow of your shared memories and the yellow electric lights, you’d pull you coats closed and take each other’s hands for comfort and security as the cars sloosh past on the hard black tarmac and the shouts of yobboes echo around the streets.

Denis and Thomas

Thomas leads me right around to the far end of the bar and through a door into another room, where there are more seats, but where it’s quieter and darker: the ceiling lights are all turned off, and the tables and chairs are only illuminated by the light spilling from the bar; beyond the bright bar lights and the scurrying figures of the barmaids I can see the throng of men that we’ve just passed through. On this side of the bar, there are just a couple of young women in dark coats, talking to each other at the bar, drinking little glasses of green drink that looks thick and sweet with the light shining through it. They look over at Thomas and me, but barely seem to see us, and they turn back to each other and carry on talking in voices that are too quiet to hear.

Thomas climbs up on one of the fat [banquettes?] that line the walls and pulls on a cord to turn on one of the wall lights. Then he moves around the room collecting all of the cardboard beer mats, eventually coming back with a stack about a foot high. He spills them out on the table and sits down before leaning across the table towards me. His eye sockets fall into shadows like a picture of a skull. He whispers, “Those are the lady dancers,” and nods a slow, exaggerated nod.

Most of the beer mats are distorted and corrugated like the furrows in a picture of a ploughed field. When we play trying to stack them up in colour-coded piles, they fall over when the pile reaches three or four mats in height. It’s frustrating. Next we try and make a kind of house of cards, but the edges of the mats are too buckled and irregular, so we start trying to spin them across the table to each other and catch them. We don’t say much.

The fat barman comes into the room and talks to the lady dancers; all three of them leave by a dark wooden door that’s in shadow at the end of the bar.

Thomas says, “Come on, they’ll start in a minute. Let’s watch.”

I nod, wondering how he knows so much about what goes on in this grown-up place, and feeling jealous because I know so little about anything outside of my mama and pappi and my story books. I want to be Thomas’ friend so that I can learn about the grown-up things without having to be with grown-ups and getting laughed at.

The lights in the main bar go off as we try and make our way through the crowd in the other bar. Blue and red lights are shining above the curtains above the little stage, and these and the lights and mirrors reflecting behind the bar create a funny atmosphere, like Christmas lights or a fairy grotto, glinting on beer glasses and men’s teeth and eyes, painting little bits of the darkened world in unusual colours and casting strange shadows.

The men are gradually moving towards the stage end of the bar, and some are climbing up on stools or chairs so that they can get above the rest of the crowd. The crush is too solid for Thomas and I to get through (and it’s a bit scary down here in the dark at our low level, with the men all moving carelessly), so we move to the wall where the windows are and climb up onto one of the well-padded [banquettes?]; from here, we can see, now and again, between the constantly moving silhouettes of the grown-ups’ heads and shoulders, the top third of the curtains and the lights above. There’s a spotlight shining on the curtains, and they now have a rich, bright blue look, the colour of a kingfisher in my story book. The men are talking loudly and laughing, and when they turn their heads sideways to talk to each other we can see their mouths open and close in silhouette and their heads nod up and down.

A burst of applause, whistling and shouting as the curtains open, something joyous and animal about the sound, and it fades down and there’s somebody playing the piano [need to establish its placement earlier…], a bouncy, comical rhythm that makes me think of a camel trying to walk downstairs with big slippers on. The roaring men quieten down, but there’s still a background noise of whistling and isolated shouts and laughs that go along with the piano.
The music changes to something a bit slower, with long repeated phrases that have a lazier, swinging rhythm, like the rhythm of girls twirling a skipping rope in the street. Every now and again the men cheer. Sometimes we see one of the dancing lady’s dark-haired heads moving, spotlit, across the space between the men’s silhouettes, or her white hands in the air above the men’s heads. The lady’s hands and arms look pale, pasty white.

Thomas shakes my shoulder and points towards the bar; one of the men has peeled off from the back of the crowd and is bent over with his hands above his head on the edge of the bar. His back is heaving and hollowing, and slivers of light sparkle and glisten on the strings of stuff that are pouring out his mouth onto the shadow-hidden floor.

Denis and Tommy in the field

Tommy’s swearing as we run, and I’m laughing with the gulping, breathless excitement of the [adrenalin rush] and his characteristic string of profanities, the standard sing-song rhythms of his conversation: “Shit, fuck, shit, fuck, shit…” Then he must trip, because I hear his sudden intake of breath and the thump as the hits the ground. I stop and look around, and there he is, scrabbling his way to his feet amid the mud and snow, swiping the snow off his face. “Don’t stop!” he shouts, “keep fucking running!” I laugh and do as he says.

When I reach the disabled tank, I half-stumble, half-dive under the Leopard’s big exhaust pipes and into the dark space underneath the hull. Another shell explodes behind us, much closer, and I feel the blast’s pressure wave and hear the earth and snow and stones pinging against metal. Tommy’s weight thuds in against the back of my legs and I lie panting, face down in the dirt and snow, smelling metal and burned paint and ash and wet earth. The backs of my legs are wet. There’s cool bluish snow-reflected light in the spaces between the [road wheels].

“Christ, Tommy, that was close. Another five seconds and I reckon that one would have had us.”
Tommy doesn’t say anything, and I jerk my legs to get him to move off them; “Shift, Tommy – you’re squashing me.”

Shells are still exploding, but they’re getting further away now. The one by the tank must have fallen short: it’s the road that they’re ranging on.

Tommy just lays there, though. I think I can feel him shaking.

I kick out again. “Come on, Tommy, don’t piss about – get the fuck off me.” After the exhilaration of the running and the near-miss, I’m excited and [a bit manic, unconstrained], and I laugh as I twist myself around so I can push him off.

It’s not Tommy that’s resting on me, I realise: it’s a dark bundle of something whose shape I can’t make out in the semi-dark. The field outside is bright with sunlight that’s breaking between the thin clouds, and the whiteness is dazzling/confusing my vision and the contrasts here in this shadowed space. Maybe it’s a tarpaulin or something that’s blown off the back of the tank. Which means that Tommy must still be outside, I realise… “Tommy? Tommy?” I shout, and just hear the wind whispering across the snowfield and the stubble. I struggle to get up, desperate to get outside and see what’s happened.

I’m leaning back now, as there’s not enough clearance under the hull to sit up straight [true? Check ground clearance…], and the bundle’s weight is on me legs up as far as the thighs.

Denis and Thomas

Behind the curtains, the little stage is lit by streaks of light and the reflected pallor of the yellowed ceiling. The other boy pulls the curtains together, and immediately it feels quieter, cut off and private, despite the heave and hum of the drunk men in the bar. Thomas sits down on a fold-up wooden chair; there are others stacked at the back of the stage, as well as a couple of tall stools and a low [chest/ottoman].

“I’m Thomas,” says the boy, “what’s your name?”

“Denis.”

“Is your daddy here?” asks Thomas.

“Yes, he’s here talking to his friends from the tram garage.”

Thomas splutters with laughter.

“ ‘Talking to his friends’, eh? Never heard it called that before!”

I laugh too, not wanting to be left out or to let him see that I don’t know what he means.

Thomas says, “My daddy’s here, too. He’s always here. He just comes here to get pissed,” and he pulls a face, twisting his mouth and looking at the floor.

The sound of the swear word is exciting; I know that adults are allowed to swear, but it’s not something that children are allowed to do in our house. Whenever I’m walking past a group of rough children in the street with mama, she always looks away from them and makes me hold her hand, putting herself between me and them, as if she doesn’t want me to be contaminated; she says that they’re ‘common’ and ‘grubby’ and ‘dirty talkers’. Thomas seems a different kind of boy, though: he’s quite smartly dressed, and his hair is combed over and oiled. The way he uses the swear word – just as description, and not as a way to annoy or upset someone – makes him seem less of a child, and more a part of the grown-up world where these kind of words are part of normal conversation, and not the taboo rarities that mama makes them out to be. Although Thomas looks as if he’s younger than me, he’s already at an advantage, with a kind of adult authority over me.

He swings his feet backwards and forwards under the chair a couple of times, then cocks his head on one side and says, “Would you like to play something?”

When I nod, he gets up and pulls one of the heavy curtains aside, letting the bar light flicker in.

“Come on, then – we can’t stay up here. The lady dancers will be starting soon, I should think.” He speaks with such authority that I’m compelled to follow him, content to wait for the meaning of what he’s saying to become clear. When I climb down from the stage he’s already disappearing into the throng at the bar, the light shining on his oily hair as he insinuates his narrow little body into the gaps between the men’s legs. I hurry, not wanting to be left behind.

Thomas and Denis in the field

Metal and wood scrape together heavily as the crew deploy the [towing ramps] across the verge and the ditch at the field’s edge. Each Leopard weighs over fifty tons, and we’ll need to make a separate trip for each tank if we can’t repair them in situ. We have to hook up the three [Bison/s] with towing rods and combine their pulling power to tow the loaded trailer. We’ll use the combined power of the three winches to drag each tank across the field to the road.

We start back towards the road to help the chaps get things ready. We’ve walked fifty yards before we hear the sudden sound overhead, like a rush of wind, falling in frequency, and then a column of earth fountains up from the edge of the field, twenty yards from the first Bison. The sound of the artillery shell’s detonation cracks and echoes across the field, and Tommy says, “Shitting fuck. Shit, shit, shit.”

He grabs my arm and we turn and run back towards the Leopard to take cover underneath its armoured bulk. The snow and churned earth make it hard to run properly.

More shells come in quick succession, whooshing over our heads and exploding behind us near the road. The third explosion brings the thunk and screech of tearing metal, and someone screams.

Tommy’s swearing as we run, and I’m laughing with the gulping, breathless excitement of the [adrenalin rush] and his characteristic string of profanities, the standard sing-song rhythms of his conversation: “Shit, fuck, shit, fuck, shit…”

I half-stumble, half-dive under the Leopard’s big exhaust pipes and into the dark space underneath the hull. Another shell explodes behind us, much closer, and I feel the blast’s pressure wave and hear the earth and snow and stones pinging against metal. Tommy’s weight thuds in against the back of my legs and I lie panting, face down in the dirt and snow, smelling metal and burned paint and ash and wet earth. The backs of my legs are wet.

“Christ, Tommy, that was close.”

Shells are still exploding, but they’re getting further away now. The one by the tank must have fallen short: it’s the road that they’re ranging on.

Tommy doesn’t say anything, and I jerk my legs to get him to move off them; “Shift, Tommy – you’re squashing me.”

He just lays there, though.

Cacktopia - 1. The opening

She's convinced that everyone's life has an arc, like a line on a graph. Most of the time, when you're in the midst of your life, you might have a sense of the ups and downs of the day, the week, the month, the year. But it's only with distance, with the perspective of the years, that you can see the shape of the arc; and the whole arc can only be plotted when you are dead.

But here she is, still not quite believing that her life could have taken the turn that it has.

Denis: Thomas’ Bloody Death

(…to the soundtrack of Vaughan Williams’ Phantasy Quintet and Yes’ “The Gates of Delerium”?)

Whenever we went to recover vehicles that had been disabled in combat, we couldn’t resist trying to reconstruct the circumstances of the fighting that had taken place. When our convoy of recovery trucks, cranes and trailers slithered to a halt at the edge of the snowy field that morning after a slippery drive along the slush-smeared, pot-holed roads, the woods flanking the field were still burning, a pall of sweet smoke drifting across the road on the edge of the breeze, grey and wispy against the washed-out blue winter sky. There were remnants of orange flame amongst the blown grey ash and the blackened trees, and when the truck engines were cut we could hear the sound of burning wood spitting and crackling.

The two Leopards were in good recovery positions, a hundred yards apart and facing the enemy lines, turrets turned to the baling out position. One of the tanks was a little nose down, with the front half tipped up into a [hollow], but it didn’t look as if we’d have too much difficulty attaching the tow cables and winching them up onto the trailers.

Thomas and I walked carefully across the field towards the tanks, our boots crunching through the top layer of snow and into the melted layer of slush underneath; underneath that was the melt-softened earth and the stiff fibres of the crop stubble left behind after the harvest. Although we knew that the enemy had been driven back from their positions in the trees at the high end of the field, it was hard not to keep looking up there to check that there were no silhouettes of soldiers or tanks or artillery pieces. There were a number of parallel gouges in the snow that lead up to the tree line, torn-up earth and snow and crop remnants from where the remaining tanks in the troop had continued their advance on the enemy positions. There were small patches of disturbed earth where anti-tank or mortar shells had hit the ground.

It was more raw out in the middle of the field, where the breeze travelled unhindered, and I could feel the inside of my mouth getting colder as I breathed in the chilly air. Thomas stopped to light a cigarette, turning his back to the draft and hunching his body around the lighter flame until his cigarette took, and I saw the smoke sweep around the shoulder of his black overalls, which looked inkily dark and monotone against the dazzling white of the snow. After being in barracks for a few days while the snow and fog had curtailed the fighting, I’d half-forgotten that strange snow effect, whereby the snow’s brightness and lack of contrast makes the light flicker in your eyes, and you feel disoriented and anxious because it seems, just for a moment, as if you can’t focus on anything or see any edges or shapes, and you have to look up at the sky or the horizon to restore your sense of perspective and balance.

As we reach the nearest Leopard, we can see that the right-hand track has been thrown, spooling out twenty feet in front of the tank. There’s a smoky smear above the main driving wheel, presumably where the anti-tank shell hit. Around at the front, it looks as if another shell hit the driver’s vision port: the horizontal slit of glass is shattered, and there’s ash and melted rubber and leather spilled out around the driver’s hatch on the decking above. Up close, the chemical-rich smell of these burned materials is obvious in the winter air. There are blackish bloodstains on the decking too. This happened late yesterday afternoon.

“The anti-tankers must have been over in the woods,” says Thomas, nodding in the direction of the smoking trees. “Bloody lucky shot to hit the vision port dead on.”

“And bloody bad luck for the driver,” I say.

“Poor bastard.” He pulls hard on the cigarette while I do a circuit of the tank, checking that all of the tow-hooks are [unencumbered] and that there’s nothing else to complicate the recovery. As I walk around behind the rear of the tank, planting my footsteps carefully in the churned-up earth, I can see the rest of the recovery crew standing on the trailer at the edge of the field. I wave and give them the thumbs up, and the drivers restart the truck engines so that they can manoeuvre the winches and trailers into position.

Thomas is crouched down by the right driving wheel, poking around with the big screwdriver that he always carries around with him. I stand a little way off, and when I hear him grunt as he straightens up, I say:
“Our fighter-bombers must have fire-bombed the woods, I’d say.”

“Mm,” says Thomas. “The [Ivans] must have got the hell kicked out of them after that. Look at all the crows flitting about in that treeline – they’re not going to be hungry for the next few days.”

I smile and nod. Metal and wood scrape together heavily as the crew deploy the [towing ramps] across the verge and the ditch at the field’s edge.

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My lovely new digital radio: it's a beaut!
Originally uploaded by andycorsham.

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Originally uploaded by andycorsham.

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Originally uploaded by andycorsham.