The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August(26)

Harriet chided me, but she, more than any other, I think, could sense the thing beneath the surface which I was trying to express and dared not say out loud. Even Patrick, not averse to the willow wand, seemed to beat me less in that life for my transgressions, and my cousin Clement, usually the bully of the household, hid from me in the house.

Then at last my father replied.

I stole the letter off its silver plate by the door before any in the household could see and ran to the woods to read it. His handwriting, infuriatingly, was a lot like mine. How insufferable, I concluded, to have inherited so many genetic traits from this overindulged man. Then I read, and my anger diminished.


Dear Private H. Brookes,



I have received and read your letters with interest, and cordially thank you for your courage and fortitude in both enduring what you have endured, and expressing the truth of it to your superiors. Please know that I bear you no ill will for anything you may have expressed to the enemy, for no one could have suffered what you suffered and been less the man. I commend you, sir, and I salute you.

We have seen things that men cannot name. We have learned, you and I, to speak a language of bloodshed and violence; words do not reach deep enough, music is no more than hollow sound, the smiles of strangers grow false. We must speak, and dare not, cannot, unless it is in mud and the screams of men. We have no kin but each other, for our loves to our mothers and our wives demand that we protect them from what we know. Ours is the fellowship of strangers who know a secret that we cannot express. We are both of us broken, shattered, hollow and alone. Only for the ones we love do we remain, painted dolls in the playhouse of this life. In them we must find our meaning. In them we must hold to hope. I trust you find the one who gives you this meaning, and remain always,

Your sincere friend,

Major R. E. Hulne





I burned the letter after reading it, and scattered its ashes beneath the trees. Private Harry Brookes did not write to my father again.





Chapter 23


There is an art to navigating London during the Blitz. Certain guides are obvious: Bethnal Green and Balham Undergrounds are no-goes, as is most of Wapping, Silvertown and the Isle of Dogs. The further west you go, the more you can move around late at night in reasonable confidence of not being hit, but should you pass an area which you feel sure was a council estate when you last checked in the 1970s, that is usually a sign that you should steer clear.

There are also three practical ways in which the Blitz impacts on the general functioning of life in the city. The first is mundane: streets blocked, services suspended, hospitals overwhelmed, firefighters exhausted, policemen belligerent and bread difficult to find. Queuing becomes a tedious essential, and if you are a young man not in uniform, sooner or later you will find yourself in the line for your weekly portion of meat, to be eaten very slowly one mouthful at a time, while non-judgemental ladies quietly judge you. Secondly there is the slow erosion–a rather more subtle but perhaps more potent assault on the spirit. It begins perhaps subtly, the half-seen glance down a shattered street where the survivors of a night which killed their kin sit dull and numb on the crooked remnants of their bed. Perhaps it need not even be a human stimulus: perhaps the sight of a child’s nightdress hanging off a chimney pot, after it was thrown up only to float straight back down from the blast, is enough to stir something in your soul that has no name. Perhaps the mother who cannot find her daughter, or the evacuees’ faces pressed up against the window of a passing train. It is a death of the soul by a thousand cuts, and the falling skies are merely the laughter of the executioner going about his business.

And then, inevitably, there is the moment of shock. It is the day your neighbour died because he went to fix a bicycle in the wrong place, at the wrong time. It is the desk which is no longer filled, or the fire that ate your place of work entirely so now you stand on the street and wonder, what shall I do? There are a lot of lies told about the Blitz spirit: legends are made of singing in the tunnels, of those who kept going for friends, family and Britain. It is far simpler than that. People kept going because that was all that they could really do. Which is no less an achievement, in its way.

It seemed perverse for 1st July 1940 to be such a pleasant day. Without the wind, it would have been too warm; without the sun, the wind would have been too cold, but today these elements seemed to have combined into perfect harmony. The sky was baby-blue, the moon was going to be full that night, and so the men and women passing briskly through the square had a rather downcast look, cursing the heavens under their breath and praying for fog and rain. I sat on the north side of the square above the steps down to the fat, shallow fountains and waited. I had come early–nearly an hour before the specified 2 p.m.–to scout the area for whatever signs of danger I hoped I would be able to recognise. I was a deserter. My call-up had come in 1939 and, aware of my appointment with Virginia, I had fled, to the shame of Patrick and quite possibly my father. Like many of our kin, I had taken care in my fourth life to note one or two useful events, including the clichéd but essential winners of races and sporting events. I didn’t make indiscriminate money off this knowledge, gleaned from a sports almanac in 1957, but used it as a basis to achieve that level of outward comfort and stability that was so important if you were to be considered for a comfortable and stable job. I chose an accent that was almost as parodied as Phearson’s received pronunciation, letting a little of my natural voice drop into it whenever I wished to impress potential employers with how hard I’d worked at my social status. Indeed, that thing I loosely described as my “natural voice” had become so distorted by travels, time and languages learned that I often found myself verging on a parody of my colleagues, unconsciously acquiring their syntax and tone. To Patrick I talked as a northerner, to my grocer as a cockney and to my colleagues as a man dreaming of working for the BBC.