Warlight(66)

Nowadays I eat at the hour the greyhound does.

And in the evening, when he feels ready for sleep, he will drift silently to the table where I work, and lower his tired head onto my hand in order to stop me. I know this is for comfort, needing something warm and human for security, a faith in another. He comes to me even with all my separateness and uncertainties. But I too wait for this. As if he might wish to tell me about his haphazard life, a past I do not know. All the unrevealed needfulness that must be in him.

So I have the dog beside me, who needs my hand. I am in my walled garden that is in every way still the Malakites’ garden, with now and then a surprise of blossoms I was not told about. This is their longer life. When Handel had his breakdown, he was, according to my opera-loving mother, “the ideal man” in that state, honourable, loving the world he could no longer be a part of, even if the world was a place of continual war.

I have been reading recently an essay by one of my Suffolk neighbours on the Lathyrus maritimus, the sea pea, and how war helped the plant survive. Mines had been placed along our beaches to protect the country from invasion, and this resulted in an abundance of rough green carpets of sea peas with fat and sturdy leaves, thanks to the lack of human traffic. Thus the resurrection of the almost extinct sea pea, “a happy vegetable of peace.” I am attracted to these surprising liaisons, such sutras of cause and effect. As I had once linked a farce, Trouble in Paradise, with the secret transportation of nitroglycerine into the city of London during the war, or seen a girl I knew loosen a ribbon from her hair in order to dive into a forest pool where bouncing bombs had once been conceived and tested. We lived through a time when events that appeared far-flung were neighbours. Just as I still wonder whether Olive Lawrence, who later taught me and my sister to walk fearlessly into a night forest, ever felt her handful of days and nights along the coast of the English Channel was the highlight of her life. Few knew of her work during that period; she did not mention it in her book or on the television documentary I watched as an adult. There were so many like her, who were content in the modesty of their wartime skills. She was not just an ethnographer, Stitch! my mother had spat out scornfully, more willing to tell me of Olive than of what she herself had done.

Viola? Are you Viola? I used to whisper to myself, slowly discovering who my mother was on the second floor of that building I worked in.

—

We order our lives with barely held stories. As if we have been lost in a confusing landscape, gathering what was invisible and unspoken—Rachel, the Wren, and I, a Stitch—sewing it all together in order to survive, incomplete, ignored like the sea pea on those mined beaches during the war.

The greyhound is next to me. He lowers his heavy bony head onto my hand. As if I were still that fifteen-year-old boy. But where is the sister who offered only that indirect farewell to me with a puppet-like wave, using the small hand of her child? Or the young girl I might one day catch sight of, picking up a playing card on the street, and rush after to ask, Pearl? Are you Pearl? Did your father and mother teach you to do that? For luck?

Before Sam Malakite gathered me up from White Paint on my last day there, I washed some of Rose’s clothes and dried them outside on the grass; a few I stretched over bushes. Whatever she had been wearing when she was killed had been taken away. I brought out an ironing board and ironed a checkered shirt she was fond of, its collar, the cuffs she always rolled up. The shirt had never witnessed this heat or pressure before. Then the rest of the shirts. I laid a thin cloth over the blue cardigan she wore that disguised her thinness, and pressed the iron onto it lightly, at half heat. I took the cardigan and the shirts to her room and hung them in the cupboard and came downstairs. I walked loudly along the nightingale floor, closed the doors, and left.





ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS


While Warlight is a work of fiction, certain historical facts and locations have been used within its fictional framework.

In terms of texts and sources I would like to acknowledge research drawn from a number of excellent books: The Secret Listeners by Sinclair McKay, The West End Front by Matthew Sweet, Defend the Realm by Christopher Andrew, and Empire of Secrets by Calder Walton, Dangerous Energy by Wayne D. Cocroft, The Roof-Climber’s Guide to Trinity by Geoffrey Winthrop Young, London’s Lost Rivers by Paul Talling, Jules Pretty’s This Luminous Coast, The Waterways of the Royal Gunpowder Mills by Richard Thomas, and Men of the Tideway by Dick Fagan. Information on the Blitz was drawn from newspaper articles of the time as well as from the archives at the University of South Carolina, and from The People’s War by Angus Calder and Austerity Britain by David Kynaston. Research on unrest in Europe in the aftermath of World War II came from various sources, including Susanne C. Knittel’s The Historical Uncanny: Disability, Ethnicity, and the Politics of Holocaust Memory, Gaia Baracetti’s “Foibe: Nationalism, Revenge and Ideology in Venezia Giulia and Istria, 1943–5” that was published in the Journal of Contemporary History, and David Stafford’s Endgame, 1945: The Missing Final Chapter of World War II. I would like specifically to acknowledge the writer Henry Hemming for his generous, authoritative suggestions regarding intelligence work during the war.

I would like to thank Claudio Magris whose essay, “Itaca e oltre,” on the turmoil of post-war Europe is briefly quoted. I have drawn from “A Piece of Chalk,” an essay by T. H. Huxley, as well as Robert Gathorne-Hardy’s essay on the sea pea—“Capriccio: Lathyrus Maritimus.” The lines on the pearl are by Richard Porson (1759–1808). I have included a couplet from A. E. Housman’s “From the wash…,” two stanzas from Thomas Hardy’s The Dynasts, a line from García Lorca’s poem “Sevilla,” as well as an idea and a line from Marguerite Duras’s Practicalities. Thanks also to James Salter’s Burning the Days for two remarks, John Berger in his commemorating of Orlando Letelier, C. D. Wright, and Paul Krassner’s remark about relatives. I have drawn from letters sent by Dorothy Loftus about wartime Southwold in 1940, used courtesy of Simon Loftus, as well as from an article by Helen Didd on the preparations for D-Day that appeared in The Guardian. I also drew from a New York Times “The Rural Life” article by Verlyn Klinkenborg called “The Roar of the Night,” which quotes Robert Thaxter Edes on crickets. Numerous sources on greyhound racing included archival articles from the Greyhound Star, A Bit of a Flutter by Mark Clapson, and Norman Baker’s “Going to the Dogs—Hostility to Greyhound Racing in Britain,” published in the Journal of Sport History. A few lyrics that appear briefly are by Cole Porter and Ira Gershwin, while two lines by Howard Dietz were moved to a slightly earlier period without permission. A remark by Robert Bresson made during a filmed interview is the epigraph to this book.