Warlight(32)

The British were not alone in this instinct to conceal certain truths of war. In Italy, the Nazis had destroyed the smokestacks of Trieste’s Risiera di San Sabba, the rice mill they had turned into a concentration camp where thousands of Jews, Slovenes, Croats, and anti-Fascist political prisoners were tortured and killed. Similarly, no records were kept of the mass graves in the karst sinkholes in the hills above Trieste where Yugoslav Partisans disposed of the bodies of those who had opposed the Communist takeover, or of the thousands deported who perished in Yugoslav detention camps. There was a hasty, determined destruction of evidence by all sides. Anything questionable was burned or shredded under myriad hands. So revisionist histories could begin.

But fragments of truth remained among families or in villages that had been almost wiped off the map. Any Balkan village, as I overheard my mother once say to Arthur McCash, had cause to seek revenge against its neighbour—or whoever it was they believed had once been their enemy—the Partisans, the Fascists, or us, the Allies. Such were the repercussions of peace.

And so for us, a generation later in the 1950s, the job was to unearth whatever evidence might still remain of actions that history might consider untoward, and which could still be found in stray reports and unofficial papers. In this post-war world twelve years later, it felt to some of us, our heads bent over the files brought to us daily, that it was no longer possible to see who held a correct moral position. And a good many who worked in that government warren would in fact leave within a year.



The Saints

I bought the house from Mrs. Malakite, and on my first day as its owner walked across the fields towards White Paint, where my mother had been raised and which had now been sold to strangers. I stood on a rise on the perimeter of what had once been her land, with the slow meander of a river in the distance. And I decided to write down what little I knew of her time in this place, even if the house and the landscape that once belonged to her family had never been the true map of her life. The girl who had grown up beside a small Suffolk village was in fact well travelled.

When you attempt a memoir, I am told, you need to be in an orphan state. So what is missing in you, and the things you have grown cautious and hesitant about, will come almost casually towards you. “A memoir is the lost inheritance,” you realize, so that during this time you must learn how and where to look. In the resulting self-portrait everything will rhyme, because everything has been reflected. If a gesture was flung away in the past, you now see it in the possession of another. So I believed something in my mother must rhyme in me. She in her small hall of mirrors and I in mine.

—

They were a country family who lived a modest and unassuming life in that recognizable era captured in the films made during the war. For some time that is how I imagined my grandparents and my mother, as they might have been represented in such films, although recently, watching the contained sexuality of those demure heroines, I was reminded of the statues that had travelled with the boy I once was, ascending and descending in the lift at the Criterion.

My grandfather, being born within a family of older sisters, was content to be surrounded by the company of women. Even when he eventually reached the rank of admiral, with no doubt draconian control of the men who obeyed his rigorous demands at sea, he relished his time in Suffolk and was at ease in the domestic habits of his wife and daughter. I wondered if this combination of a “domestic life” and a “life away” was what led my mother to first accept and then change the path of her life. For she herself would eventually insist on something more, so her married and then her professional life echoed the two worlds her father simultaneously inhabited.

Knowing he would spend most of his active life with the navy, my grandfather had intentionally bought a house in Suffolk that was not beside an “active river.” So where my mother was taught to fish as a teenager was a wide but quiet stream. There was no rush to it. Water meadows sloped down towards it from the house. Now and then in the distance one heard a bell from one of the Norman churches, the same toll earlier generations had heard across those fields.

The region was made up of a cluster of small villages, a few miles from one another. The roads between them were often unnamed, causing confusion to travellers, not helped by the fact that the villages were similarly named—St. John, St. Margaret, St. Cross. There were in fact two communities of Saints—the South Elmham Saints, made up of eight villages, and the Ilketshal Saints, which had half that number. A further problem was that the mileage on any signpost in the region was guesswork. A sign announced the journey between one Saint and another as two miles, so after three and a half miles a traveller would turn back assuming he had missed a turn, when in fact he needed to continue another half mile to reach the slyly hidden Saint. The miles felt long in The Saints. There was no assurance in the landscape. And for those growing up there, assurance felt similarly hidden. Since I spent some of my early years there, it might explain why as a boy in London I was obsessively drawing maps of our neighbourhood in order to feel secure. I thought that what I could not see or record would cease to exist, just as it often felt I’d misplaced my mother and father in one of those small villages flung down randomly onto the ground with too similar a name and with no reliable mileage towards it.

During the war, The Saints, being near to the coast, had taken on an even greater secretiveness. All signposts, however inaccurate, were removed in preparation for a possible German invasion. The region became signless overnight. There would in fact be no invasion, but American airmen assigned to the recently built RAF airfields were as a result constantly getting lost when they tried to get back from the pubs at night and were often found searching frantically for the correct aerodrome the next morning. Pilots crossing the Big Dog Ferry travelled unnamed lanes and found themselves crossing the Big Dog Ferry again going the other way, still attempting to stumble on their airfield. At Thetford the army created a life-sized model of a German town, which Allied troops were trained to surround and attack before their invasion of Germany. It was a strange contrast: English soldiers carefully memorizing the structure of a German town, while German troops were preparing to enter a bewildering Suffolk landscape where not one road sign existed. Coastal towns were secretly removed from maps. Military zones officially disappeared.