Warlight(33)

Much of the war work in which my mother and others participated was carried out, it is now clear, with a similar invisibility, the real motives camouflaged, the way childhood is. Thirty-two aerodromes, along with decoy airfields to confuse the enemy, were built almost overnight in Suffolk. Most of those flesh-and-blood airfields would never exist on a map, even if they appeared in several short-lived barroom songs. And eventually by war’s end, the aerodromes disappeared, in much the way four thousand air force servicemen would leave the region as if nothing untoward had happened there. The Saints slipped back into everyday life.

—

As a teenager I would hear about those temporarily un-mapped towns from Mr. Malakite as he drove me to and from work on what had once, long ago, been Roman roads. For on the periphery of the abandoned airfield at Metfield he was now growing vegetables, and it was on those old grass-covered runways that I once again was taught to drive, legally this time. Where the Malakites lived was called a “Thankful Village,” for it had lost no men during the two wars; and it would be to that same village that I returned to live, a decade or so after my mother’s death, in the small timbered house with its walled garden where I had always felt secure.

I used to wake early at White Paint and walk towards the village, knowing Sam Malakite would drive up alongside me, light a cigarette, and watch as I climbed in beside him. Then we’d be off to various town squares such as Butter Cross in Bungay, heap his produce onto the trestle tables, and work till noon. On the hottest days of summer we stopped at the Ellingham Mill where the river was shallow and stood in it, water up to our waists, eating Mrs. Malakite’s sandwiches—tomato, cheese, onion, with honey from her own bees. A combination I’ve never tasted since. That his wife had made this lunch for us that morning several miles away felt parental.

He wore bottle-thick spectacles. His ox-like stature made him distinct. He had a long lowland “badger coat,” made out of several skins, which smelled of bracken, sometimes of earthworms. And he and his wife were my watched example of marital stability. His wife no doubt felt I lingered around too much. She was organized, ardently neat, whereas he was the rabbit’s wild brother, leaving what looked like the path of an undressing hurricane wherever he went. He dropped his shoes, badger coat, cigarette ash, a dish towel, plant journals, trowels, on the floor behind him, left washed-off mud from potatoes in the sink. Whatever he came upon would be eaten, wrestled with, read, tossed away, the discarded becoming invisible to him. Whatever his wife said about this incorrigible flaw did no good. I suspect, in fact, she took pleasure in suffering his nature. Though give him credit, Mr. Malakite’s fields were immaculate. No plant left its bed and wandered off as a “volunteer.” He scrubbed the radishes under the thin stream of a hose. He spread his wares neatly on the trestle table at the Saturday market.

It became the pattern of my spring and summers. I earned a modest wage and it meant I did not have to spend much time on one side of that seemingly uncrossable distance between me and my mother. There was a distrust on my part and a secretiveness on hers. So it was Sam Malakite who became the centre of my life. If we worked late I would have an evening meal with him. My life with The Moth, Olive Lawrence, the smoke-like Darter, my river-leaping Agnes, had been replaced by the easygoing and reliable Sam Malakite, oak strong as they used to say then.

During winter months, Mr. Malakite’s fields slept. It was just a caretaking world for him then, with a cover crop of mustard with yellow flowers to build up organic material in the soil. Winters were quiet and still for him. By the time I returned the fields were already filling with vegetables and fruit. We began work early, had a noon lunch and a brief nap under his mulberry tree, then continued until seven or eight. We gathered green beans in five-gallon buckets and chard in a wheelbarrow. The plums in the walled garden behind the house would eventually be made into jam by Mrs. Malakite. The Stupice tomatoes that grew near the sea had an intense taste. I was back within the seasonal subculture of market gardeners and the endless discussions across the trestle tables about blights or the failure of spring rains. I would sit silently, listening to Mr. Malakite’s gift of the gab with his customers. If we were alone he’d inquire about what I was reading, what I was studying at college. There was no mockery about my other world. He saw that whatever I was learning there came from some desire in me, though when I was with him I seldom thought about what I had been doing academically. I wished to be part of his universe. With him those indistinct maps from childhood now became reliable and exact.

I trusted each step I took with him. He knew the names of all the grasses he walked over. He’d be carrying two heavy buckets of chalk and clay towards a garden, but I knew he was also listening to a certain bird. A swallow knocked dead or unconscious from hitting a window silenced him for half a day. It remained with him, that bird’s world, its fate. If I said something later that encroached on the event, I’d see a shadow in him. He would turn from our conversation and I’d have lost him, find myself suddenly alone, even if he was beside me, driving his truck. He always knew the layered grief of the world as well as its pleasures. He tugged off a sprig from every bush of rosemary he passed, smelled it, and preserved it in his shirt pocket. Any river he came to distracted him. On hot days he removed his boots and clothes and swam through reeds, cigarette smoke still escaping from his mouth. He taught me where to find those rare parasol mushrooms like fawn-coloured umbrellas, with their pale gills underneath, that are to be found in open fields. “Only in open fields,” Sam Malakite would say, holding up a glass of water as if making a toast. Years later when I heard he had died, I held up my glass and said, “Only in open fields.” I was alone in a restaurant when I said this.