1982 Janine (17 page)

“Why is Labour afraid to nationalise?” said Dad plaintively.

“A nationalised industry – the Gas Board – discovered North Sea Oil. If Britain kept its own oilfields and developed them very slowly and carefully, with British skill and capital, for the public good, we would not need to buy foreign fuel for most of the coming century and we would be a lot richer. The Electricity Board would not be turning to dangerous powersources like nuclear energy. But now most of our oil goes to Americans who pay less for it than we do, and they'll have exhausted the supply within twenty-five years.”

He frowned as if examining an intricate knot then said shyly, “Son, I know your education was mainly electrical and that a technical college is not a university, but you meet more people than I do and are more a man of the world. Do you think things would have been different nowadays if the Attlee government had nationalised the banks?”

I said, “I'm sure it would have made a great deal of difference. And you are coming to live with me when you leave this place.”

After a silence he said gruffly, “That won't be necessary.” I said, “It will be convenient. Don't think I want a housekeeper. A woman comes in to do the cleaning and laundering.
But I'll enjoy reading an occasional book across the hearthrug from you. My place feels a bit lonely in the evenings.”

I said this to make it easier for him to come to me, but as soon as the words left my mouth I realised they were true. The house with him in it would feel more genial, more like a home. He said, “Well, cleaning lady or not, I think there will be more for me to do around the house than you anticipate.”

So the matter was settled.

It had been mid-evening when I entered the ward and now the nurses were tucking the patients in and dimming the lights. He composed himself for sleep with one hand resting on the book. We said good night. I got a phonecall next morning to say he had fallen asleep as soon as I left the ward and not wakened again.

A quiet death in the night without convulsion, choking or disarray. A suitable death for a man like that. A good death. I am glad we were friends before it happened and that we said goodbye properly.

Dad.

What is this ache inside me? It is pity, a slimy disgusting creature worming toward the surface of this face in order to split it open but by God it won't succeed. I hate pity. It does not work, it does no good, it is a device vicious people use to persuade themselves that underneath it all they are decent human beings. Why should I pity my father? He was a killer. At sixteen he joined the territorials who in peacetime, in their spare time, exercised under trained army officers in return for a small sum of money or else for none at all, just for love of it, I'm not sure which. The result was that when they killed our Ferdinand and Austria invaded Serbia and Russia mobilised and Germany told Russia to stop doing that and France mobilised and the British fleet went to Scotland and Germany occupied Luxembourg and Britain told Germany to keep out of Belgium and Germany said, “We can't, we're already there,” and umpteen millions tramped into France in bloody big boots and started killing
each other—the result was, Dad joined like a shot. He wasn't a pithead man in those days, he was a miner and probably hated it. A hellish job, especially then. So out of the fryingpan of home-sweet-home into the fire of Flanders he went like a swimmer into cleanness leaping out of a world grown old and stale and weary, as someone wrote at the time. “You should not have gone, Peter,” said Old Red, who had been a conscientious objector, “you should not have gone. Nobody should have gone to that war.”

“We were just weans,” said Dad, “we didnae know any better,” but he survived till 1918 so it is statistically probable that he killed a German or two.

I must have met many killers in the ordinary way of business but only a couple I could identify. One was a town clerk in Fife, a neat brisk active chap like myself apart from a wife and a grown family doing very well in the world. I saw one of the sons a few years back and asked after his Dad. Dad had killed himself. Dad had been a sniper in the Great War as they called it in those days. He sat up a tree, neatly and methodically picking off any Germans who showed themselves. He was a good marksman, he killed a lot of them, he was praised and decorated for it. More than forty years later, after a second Great War with Belsen Dachau Warsaw Dresden Hiroshima etcetera, the thought of the men he had killed grew so burdensome that his life was unbearable. Of course there must have been more to his story than that. He was a kirk elder and religious people are always a bit insane and I wonder how he got on with his wife? The other killer was an exciseman attached to a distillery in Menstrie in the days when I installed the systems myself. A lot of peculiar people are in the excise, Burns was an exciseman but this bloke was not poetic, not peculiar at all as far as I could see. He had an air of calm self-contained dependability which I have found in a lot of ordinary people who have done military service. At quarter to five he would look into the warehouse where I was working and murmur, “I will be holding communion in fifteen minutes.” I would clean up and go to his wee office and he, I and the distillery manager would have drams together till very late, three respectable Scotsmen quietly destroying their intelligence in a mood of
relaxed reminiscence. We had one thing in common: each knew the others were alcoholics and trustworthy with it, so we ended knowing more about each other than our closest friends and families knew. The exciseman had been with the army in Israel when it was called Palestine. He had gone into a living-room with a machinegun and sprayed it from left to right killing
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three or four small children, mother, father and grandparents in less than half a minute. I said, “Were you under orders?”

He said, “No. I was simply told to search that house. It was a routine search. I'd searched plenty of houses without doing that.”

I said, “How did you feel?”

He said, “Great. I felt I was shagging a woman. It was a good feeling.”

I said, “Have you ever wanted to do it again?”

He shrugged and said, “Not particularly. I'm a quiet sort of fellow.”

After a silence the distillery manager said that when he was a driver in the canal zone the sergeants told him that if he knocked down an Egyptian he should reverse over him because if he lived he would sue the army for compensation. I had no military stories. I was turned down for National Service because of bad eyesight. It must be a lot worse now. I'm the age Mum was when she left for New Zealand.

“We were just children,” said Dad, “even General Haig was nothing but a jumped-up public schoolboy who didnae know any better.”

“You should have been guided by your ain folk!” said Old Red sternly. “You should have listened to the Scottish Socialists, Keir Hardie, John Maclean, Maxton and Gallagher. They wanted the working class to stop the war by a general strike – as had been agreed with the German socialists beforehand. But no. When the flags started waving the crowds started cheering and the German socialists joined ranks with the Kaiser and English Labour joined the Liberals and Toe-rags. And the Clydesiders, the only folk who wanted to
change
the rotten set-up were decried as cowards and imprisoned for telling the working
class that it was being led into the mire.”

“Well,” said Dad with a sigh, “in the circumstances it could not have been otherwise.”

“You are WRONG, Peter!” said Old Red. “You should be ashamed of saying such a thing. A child is listening –” I was trying not to listen – “and could be influenced for life. Those who think the past could not have been different come to feel the present cannot be changed or the future either. God knows I am a dedicated atheist but even Christianity is better than spineless oriental fatalism. The common folk
did
stop the war by going on strike. You were involved, weren't you? In 1914.”

“Oh that,” said my father, “yes.”

“Have you told your boy about it?”

“No.”

“Tell him! Tell him now!”

“The boy is trying to do his homework,” said my mother.

“This will only take two minutes, Mrs MacLeish,” said Old Red. “Jock, listen to your father and you'll hear something so important that nobody has printed it in schoolbooks in case children learn from it. Carry on, Peter.”

“Well,” said Dad awkwardly, “on the morning of Christmas day 1914 the firing did not start as punctually as usual, in fact didn't start at all. We all heaved a sigh of relief – it looked as if Jerry was going to be sensible. Then we saw a few men walking about between the lines in German uniforms and in full view of our trenches. Madmen! I stared at them. Suddenly Tommy Govan beside me started laughing and climbing the parapet. I thought he had gone mad too.

I grabbed him. He said, ‘Don't worry Peter, this is a holiday!' So I followed him. This happened right across France the whole length of the line. We couldnae say much to them because of the language but we shook hands, swapped fags, exchanged a slug of rum for a slug of schnapps. It turned out to be a very pleasant day.”

Old Red said, “How did the officers take it?”

“O some got very angry and brandished their revolvers:

‘Back to your trenches you traitors!' sort of thing.”

“And what did you say to that?”

“Nothing. We turned our backs on them. In the circumstances they couldnae do a thing. However, next morning
the big guns woke us up again and everything was back to normal. The big guns never stopped after that. It was them that called the tune.”

“And now could we have a bit less about war in my kitchen?” said Mum quietly. She was knitting. She despised the gossip of women, she hated the arguments of men. She was as silent as I am nowadays.

“We were just children.”

Before President Reagan announced his ten-year multi-megabuck missile modernisation programme the B.B.C. broadcast a film of American armed-forces chiefs who explained why it was necessary. I liked these men. They had none of the drawling condescension of the English officer class. They were middle-aged but pink and healthy, enthusiastic about their work and keen to explain its problems to the general public. A communist or pacifist might have thought them EVIL but they were obviously innocent, boyish men with straight, competitive one-track minds. Their only problem was this. Any improved weapon which they or their technicians could devise had been devised, or would soon be devised, by their opposites in Russia, so they had to have it first. They were not warmongers. No doubt a few were like my friend the exciseman, normally dependable men who sometimes, with their finger on a trigger, would enjoy going
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and exterminating three generations, but that sort are always a minority. The majority definitely hope, and the minority usually hope, that the weapon race lasts for ever. A continual weapon race with continual weapon exercises is their only notion of peace. Without such a peace they would be useless men, mere timeservers. And this is true of all technicians, scientists, bureaucrats, industrialists, computermen and machinists who profit by the defence business in America, Russia or anywhere. Today everyone who profits is profiting partly from the defence business. If there was a revolution in Russia tomorrow, if a liberal regime came to power as in Greece or Spain, we would have to treat it as a potential enemy or form an alliance with it against China, which also has a great many soldiers. But the race must continue. We
must all hope, all pray that it never ends because we can only imagine one ending. Boomboomboom. Our defence systems run like my fantasies which can only continue by getting much bigger and nastier than were first intended. Nobody can keep control of a processs like that for ever. In 1914 and 1939 the big industrial nations, having fucked the rest of the planet (in the vulgar sense of the word) started wanking all over each other. None of them enjoyed it but they could not stop. This will soon happen again. I am ready for it. Sip.

A year or several years ago I sat near some young men, idiot Tories and idiot socialists who were having the usual heated discussion in which each side contradicted itself far more than its opponents. The Tories said that the Shah of Persia was a good ruler because he had dragged his nation into the twentieth century, Stalin a bad ruler because he destroyed the rule of law. The socialists said Stalin was a good ruler because the U.S.S.R. was too backward to be governed democratically, the Shah a bad ruler because he had destroyed primitive forms of tribal communism. I was tempted to tell them that any govenment which arrests, imprisons, tortures people without a proper public trial by jury is a bad government, but that would have raised the question of Ulster so I was silent. Among these men sat a fat Buddha-like fellow who was paying for the drinks. Because he was listening quietly, and because the youngsters sometimes referred their arguments to him, and because he always responded with a slight smile or shake of the head, I thought, ‘One of my kind. He knows they're talking nonsense.' Our eyes met and he nodded to me, then one of the younger men asked my opinion. I said I was only interested in things I was able to change so did not give a damn what any foreign government did unless it threatened us with war, a remark which of course swung the discussion on to the topic of THE BOMB. I suppose this was the middle seventies because not many people call nuclear weapons The Bomb nowadays, just as people stopped calling the First World War the Great War in 1939. Anyway, the idiot Tories said the world was a safer place because of the bomb, and if it was not they would rather die than live
on a planet ruled by Russia; the idiot socialists said Russia was only an imperialist state because she feared America, and if Britain dismissed nuclear weapons from her shores America would ensure the Russians did not invade us. I said that if I owned a small bottle of strong barbiturate pills I would not care a damn which was more likely, a nuclear war or a Russian invasion. At this the fat older man quivered and snuffled (it was his way of laughing) and the younger men left the hotel. I bought the older man a large Glenlivet. I learned he was a chemist, a widower who lived in rooms behind his shop on the main street. Near midnight, when we were both well oiled, he said, “I'll give you what you want. Come home with me.”