Granta 125: After the War (26 page)

We go through the airport-style security of the Houses of Parliament, preceded by a regimental standard-bearer who has to fold the drapery around a pole and place the thing in a scanner. Inside the giant, medieval Westminster Hall, where Thomas More was tried and found guilty of treason, it is dark. St Thomas More is one of the Catholic martyrs from whom Maurice Dease was descended. My father processes slowly through the gloom, floating, propelled by the rubber tip of his stick, this man who has always insisted on walking briskly. We see a stained-glass window at the end of Westminster Hall and beneath it an edifice to those ‘who in the Great War consummated with their lives the tradition of public service’. The fourth name on the carved white tablet for the House of Peers reads ‘Arthur Reginald, Baron De Freyne’.

‘My uncle Reggie, Grandfather’s eldest son,’ says my father. ‘What a thing, I didn’t know this memorial was here.’ Reggie disappeared in America in 1905, the
New York Times
reporting that ‘the police think there are grounds for the suspicion that he was foully dealt with’ in the Bowery. When he reappeared in Ireland eight years later, it turned
out he had been in New Mexico on the ranch of an uncle (who had employed Butch Cassidy while he was on the run) and enlisted in the US Army. Uncle Reggie died in 1915 on the same day as his little brother George, both fighting in the disastrous Battle of Aubers Ridge. The younger boy wrote a letter home to County Roscommon a few weeks before their death: ‘We put a pole with a turnip stuck on it. The Bosche did not discover the jest and three times knocked the cap off the poor old turnip.’ Four of my father’s paternal uncles were killed in the First World War. Reggie’s stepson, who was rumoured to be the child of King George V, became a celebrated society murderer in the 1920s. But that’s another story.

After retirement my father produced a booklet called
Some Memories
. The cover showed a photo of himself in a matching pose to Uncle Maurice in the painting, looking away into the distance, dressed in a high-collared red coat, his left hand grazing the hilt of a sword and his right arm cradling an enormous black mass – a tall, ceremonial fur hat worn by the Royal Fusiliers. I have never asked him whether this recreation was deliberate, but I suspect he would answer it was not.

He was formed by two world wars: his own father died during the Blitz at the age of forty-one. If this were fiction, where loose ends are tied up, I would tell you now that my father is like an army dad in a movie, sternly organized and soldierly, distraught that none of his three sons have gone near the Fusiliers and none of his six children have married inside their community. But here’s the odd thing: he is not a typical military type, although the army has been his life. You would not want to entrust him with a practical task like, say, booking a ticket, servicing a boiler or replacing an ink cartridge in a printer. These days he sits down for Christmas lunch with a Muslim, a Jew and a Hindu – which sounds like the start of an old-fashioned joke, but they are his children-in-law. By temperament, he is a talker, a joker, a romancer who will never let a fact come in the way of a good story, and I take this, perhaps mistakenly, to be a second-generation Irish trait.

He is having a late flowering in the lead-up to the hundreth anniversary of the Battle of Mons, as books and television programmes are put together. The BBC has three programmes in which his uncle features, and the producers enjoy having a live military link to the past. Raidió Teilifís Éireann is making a documentary about Maurice Dease too. The long nationalist lull when Ireland steered clear of soldiers who had fought in the two world wars is over, and oblivious history is being recovered. The family of Sidney Godley recently auctioned their Victoria Cross, and the newspapers are full of stories about the inevitable feud, his eighty-nine-year-old daughter reportedly being ‘totally devastated’ and her son saying the sale of the medal has split the family. Years ago, my father sold his uncle’s Victoria Cross privately to his regimental museum to get money for school fees, and recently when he moved to a smaller house the oil painting followed it there.

We walk from Westminster Hall to the central lobby of Parliament.

‘Private Godley’s VC went for £280,000,’ he says. ‘I met the old boy when I joined the regiment.’

‘What was he like?’

‘He had a big moustache, and didn’t talk about the battle. His daughter is absolutely hopping. Uncle Maurice’s would have gone for £400,000 if I’d waited.’

The price of a house for a ribbon and some molten gunmetal.

‘Do you think Mozza knew Godley?’ I ask. I’ve caught this nickname from my younger son, who refers to his heroic antecedent as Moz Dog. ‘It’s weird the way they are always yoked together just because they got a medal on the same day.’

‘He writes about Private Godley in his diary as a good member of the section so he would have known him well. Did I tell you the government is launching its World War I centenary at St Symphorien cemetery in 2014? Maybe you can go to it.’

‘I think I’m busy that day.’

We ascend in a tiny elevator staffed by a large seated man. The officers in the gallery of the House of Commons, who I presume
came from the armed services in some form, wear a white bow tie and a strange metal buckle at the stomach. ‘I’m afraid the damage is done,’ says an old comrade of my father. ‘We’re going to lose 2RRF.’ He is right: though today’s protest gets good coverage, the government disbands the battalion anyway. My father takes it stoically, as he later does the news that the Mons Hall at Sandhurst is being renamed the King Hamad Hall because the king of Bahrain has paid for it to be refurbished, the British government being short of funds.

I slide into a tiered wooden row beside my father, briefly forming part of a collage of men, as they crane forward, holding their walking sticks and black berets with the red-and-white plume. During the debate, man after man, and two women, stand up from the green benches below us to say how much they admire the regiment, and how proud they are of the United Kingdom’s sailors, soldiers and airmen. Some of the speakers know an extraordinary amount about the history of the Royal Fusiliers, and one refers to them winning six VCs before breakfast at Gallipoli. Nobody minds when the veterans in the gallery cheer and clap, though it is against the rules. The old soldiers enjoy the ritual praise, but they know power does not rest with these MPs.

This is not my world, but I know its codes, its rhetoric, its assumptions. I want to leave, but I stay, letting the speeches run over me.

In this antiquated setting, my mind is full of what I have forgotten. I don’t want to underestimate the peculiarity at home when I was growing up. In my teens, my sister was living in Kenya; my elder brother was a drug smuggler serving time at Her Majesty’s Pleasure in Wandsworth; my three younger siblings were, if not feral, raising themselves. My younger brother slept for weeks on end in an airing cupboard and wore, day and night, a dark felt cloche hat that had once belonged to the Hon. Mrs Maud French. My middle sister’s pony lived in the kitchen. In the spare room upstairs, the ceiling had declined until it dissolved completely. Another part of the house was rented by a man with white hair in a plait which reached his waist,
who had made a harpsichord out of wood that he found in a skip and duck quills picked from the park. My father went on with his shooting, raising pheasants in a pheasant pen up at the camp. My mother was having what she later referred to as a nervous breakthrough and was incapacitated by back pain. Her bed was moved into the library, the room where Uncle Maurice hung and which had a cracked wall through which you could peer into a slime-ridden passage outdoors.

She was far from being a natural army wife: she could never remember which regiment my father was in; when someone offered her a drink at a drinks party, she could request a cup of tea; at one stage, she wore trainers she had coloured in with a felt-tip pen; if she was asked a factual question, like which road to take to Bath, she might say, ‘How much?’ We put on plays, using a raised area by the stairs as our believable stage. When my mother was well, she painted and careered through the streets of Warminster in a pony and trap. The library was furnished with Irish books about hunting that nobody would ever read again, as well as
De Imitatione Christi, The Martyrology of Donegal
and a complete edition of Butler’s
Lives of the Saints
. You could tear the thin pages from the back of a missal and skin up a joint. You could do pretty much what you wanted because nobody knew what was going on. The house was its own fiction, disconnected from the town around it. Anybody might appear. Dave, a short-haired hippy who had once been Mick Jagger’s gardener, said to my mother in his stoned, inveigling accent: ‘What you should do, if you want more attention, is cut the face out of the portrait of this man, this one here in the red coat who found a war to die in, and stand on a little stepladder behind the picture, and stick your neck through the hole.’ My mother laughed and burst into tears but was less annoyed than she was by yet another visit from Brigadier Dunderdale, who had taken it upon himself to minister to the afflicted of this garrison town. ‘I haven’t asked him to come, the bugger just turns up,’ she said as his stooped, commendable form passed by the French windows. One time Brigadier Dunderdale bumbled in to say he had brought her copies of
Country Life
and asked, ‘Any better this week?’ My
mother bawled him right out of the house, rising from her sickbed like a cripple raised by a televangelist. I loved her for that.

You could always catch my mother or my father with a joke. When she died before she had a chance to get old and someone had to identify her body, a policewoman holding a clipboard asked me what my relationship was to the deceased. The officer was spherical, orbited like Saturn by a belt of objects: torch, pen, radio, handcuffs, telescopic truncheon.

‘She’s my mother.’ The policewoman nodded to the clipboard for the next question. ‘How long have you known the deceased?’ How long had I known the deceased. My mother would have loved that line, if she had been able to hear it, and was not lying dead beside us on a hospital trolley a few miles from Salisbury Plain.