Alfred and Emily (24 page)

As the afternoon neared its end, ‘We'll meet again, don't know where, don't know when…' If you were a short way from the house looking out over the rise that soon would be carrying a new suburb, this song was unbearably sad, on and on, and then again, ‘We'll meet again…we'll meet again…'

Quite soon my brother and I would pile our old cars with the young men and take them to town to catch their buses back to the camps, but meanwhile, even if it was the afternoon, they demanded to end with ‘Goodnight, Sweetheart'.

Full daylight still, the street-lights not yet on, but,

By the time they left my mother might have been playing
popular songs for hours – Emily McVeagh, who had once been told by her music teachers that she could have a career as a concert pianist if she wanted.

‘She's a good sort,' said the RAF lads. ‘She's a real sport, your mother.'

Those years before we all left Rhodesia, as ships became available, no, they were not a good time. You long for a war to end, and then it ends, and…Sometimes, when life gets tough, I tell myself, ‘If you could survive those years after the war, in Rhodesia, then you can survive anything.' I'm sure my mother wouldn't have much good to say about them. For one thing, both her children said to her, ‘No, no, you will not run my life for me.'

‘Anyone might think you were accusing me of being an interfering mother,' she cried, defiant, but humorous, because of the absurdity of it. There was even a roguish little twinkle, that begged me, my brother, to admit she was in the right, that what we had said was only a little fit of naughtiness. For a moment Emily McVeagh stood there, or perhaps even John McVeagh: I'm sure roguish twinkles were what he would go in for if unfairly accused.

I look back sometimes and see myself sitting on the steps of that house, listening to the thump-thump-thump of the jolly tunes, the wail of the sad ones, ‘There is a long, long trail a-winding…' and what I was thinking was, No, no, this is not possible.

The wireless is on, as always, telling us the news.

There are millions of refugees stumbling along bomb
cratered roads, starving, thirsty; there are thousands without homes; there is no harvest, no seeds to plant; in the ruins of Europe's great cities children are playing.

It could not be possible because every one of us had been brought up with ‘Wash your hands before you sit down at table'; ‘No, don't do that, or you'll tear your dress'; ‘Please – you must say please and thank you'; ‘A good little boy'; ‘A bad little girl'; ‘Be nice, Emma, Chantal, Hans, Dick, Ivan, Ingrid – you must be kind', all that, but still the bombs fell and…some of these children brought up to expect law and order had heard bombs falling for four, five years. ‘I simply cannot believe this isn't some awful dream.' So everyone, but everyone, was thinking, as we went through the war, the enormities of it, the weight of it, the horror of it, the grotesque nastiness of it all, This can't be happening, it can't…

Along the veranda one of the young men is playing with my mother's little white dog, while still humming to the tunes, ‘I'm gonna get a paper doll…' He is bouncing a ball against a pillar and the dog is trying to catch it.

This young man, whose name I have forgotten, had had his own dog at home, but it had had to be put down: it was old, and its little stomach could not deal with the wartime food for animals. ‘My mum did give him a little bit of her rations, but he was used to the best, my little dog was. His name was Patch, he had a black patch on an ear…' He bounced the ball hard, and the little dog leaped. ‘It's about time we left, isn't it? Goodnight, sweetheart, We'll meet again tomorrow…' he sang to the dog.

The RAF did at last get home, and they wrote letters, we wrote letters, and my mother sold the house, when my brother married, and for the short years before she died, at seventy-three, she spent her afternoons and evenings playing bridge with other widows. She was, they all said, a very good bridge-player.

My thanks to the photographer Francesco Guidicini
who helped with some very old and sometimes
dilapidated photographs.

NOVELS

The Grass is Singing

The Golden Notebook

Briefing for a Descent into Hell

The Summer Before the Dark

Memoirs of a Survivor

Diary of a Good Neighbour

If the Old Could
…

The Good Terrorist

Love, Again

Mara and Dann

The Fifth Child

Ben, in the World

The Sweetest Dr.eam

The Story of General Dann and
Mara's
Daughter,
Griot
and the Snow Dog

The Cleft

‘Canopus in Argos: Archives' series

Re: Colonised Planet 5,
Shikasta

The Marriages Between Zones Three,
Four, and Five

The
Sirian
Experiments

The Making of the Representative for
Planet 8

Documents Relating to the Sentimental
Agents in the
Volyen
Empire

‘Children of Violence' novel-sequence

Martha Quest

A Proper Marriage

A Ripple from the Storm

Landlocked

The Four-Gated City

OPERAS

The Marriages Between Zones Three,
Four and Five
(Music by Philip Glass)

The Making of the Representative for
Planet 8
(Music by Philip Glass)

SHORT STORIES

Five

The Habit of Loving

A Man and Two Women

The Story of a Non-Marrying Man
and Other Stories

Winter in July

The Black Madonna

This Was the Old Chief's
Country
(Collected African Stories, Vol. 1)

The Sun Between Their Feet
(Collected African Stories, Vol. 2)

To Room Nineteen
(Collected Stories, Vol. 1)

The Temptation of Jack Orkney
(Collected Stories, Vol. 2)

London Observed

The Old Age of El
Magnifico
Particularly Cats

Rufus the Survivor
On Cats

The Grandmothers

POETRY

Fourteen Poems

DRAMA

Each His Own Wilderness

Play with a Tiger

The Singing Door

GRAPHIC NOVEL

Playing the Game
(illustrated by Charlie Adlard)

non-fiction

In Pursuit of the English

Going Home

A Small Personal Voice

Prisons We Choose to Live Inside

The Wind Blows Away Our Words

African Laughter

Time Bites

AUTOBIOGRAPHY

Under My Skin: Volume 1

Walking in the Shade: Volume 2

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United Kingdom
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United States
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