Out of This World (5 page)

Right-hand man! My right-hand man, he would say. A dubious and all too blatant joke from a man with only one arm. I’ll never know what the real motive was. Some absurd, implausible, residual dream? That it might all come right and good – Beech and Son, the two of us in tandem, the greater glory of B M C. For which he was prepared to wait and pay and bribe. My expensive and lengthy upbringing (Winchester, Oxford): a long-term investment in my filial conscience.

Or just a punishment? Just a kind of revenge?

‘… You appear, Beech, to be a highly educated young man. It seems what we could most use from you are your brains …’

‘… And we understand, Beech, that you are interested in photography …’

He laughed when I told him I had opted for the R.A.F. The rough, gravelly laugh of the former infantry officer. He laughed even more scoffingly (triumphantly?) when he learnt the result of my Board – that I was made of too precious stuff, so it seemed, to be flung into the skies. He never ceased to remind me that if, after all, mine was to be a non-combatant’s role, I might as well have chosen to come in with him. That though, no doubt, I would have been worked off my feet, I would have been better off and better rewarded than in some ‘wretched hut’ in Lincolnshire. Perhaps – I can’t recall it now – there was the tiniest, barely detectable flaw in this mockery, the tiniest, stubborn note of gratitude. I don’t think I wanted to be a hero, a charioteer of the skies. My father was a hero. I didn’t worship my father. But I had wanted to fly.

And yet I saw the war from the air. Since the officers of the Commissioning Board, in their obtuse or ironic wisdom, took literally my professed interest in photography. And the ‘hut’ in
Lincolnshire – in reality a small country house not unreminiscent of Hyfield – was given over to the analysis of aerial photographs.

I looked down with a privilege no pilot ever had on target after target. Before and after. I became routinely familiar with the geography of western Europe. At first a motley geography of steel works, dockyards, power stations, refineries, railways, then a geography (rapidly altering, diminishing) of cities. Hamburg, Bremen, Cologne, Essen, Düsseldorf, Berlin … I learnt to distinguish the marks of destruction – the massive ruptures of 4,000-pounders from the blisters of 1,000-pounders and the mere pock-marks of 250-pound clusters – and to translate these two-dimensional images, which were the records of three-dimensional facts, into one-dimensional formulae – tonnage dropped as against acreage devastated, acreage destroyed as against acreage attacked (the tallies never included ‘people’, ‘homes’) – while someone in the hierarchical clouds above me refined these figures into the ethereal concept known as ‘the progress of operations’.

And as operations progressed, the statistics grew larger, the images more other-worldly, more crater-ridden, more lunar.

Frank Irving came to ‘the Manor’, as we called it, in the summer of ’44. I was delegated to show him the ropes. He and I were two of the youngest on a staff dominated by men over forty. When I think of Frank, even now, I still think of Lincolnshire in the war. Of the broad, grassy Lincolnshire countryside, of draughty Lincolnshire pubs, and the strange stigma and exclusion of being junior Intelligence officers in a region littered with airfields and serving airmen. I think of the saloon bar of the Crown Hotel in Grantham, where there is a dearth of female company, let alone unattached female company, and where Frank, on his fifth pint and in fluent voice, is announcing the voluptuous procession that is shortly to enter through the amazed hotel portals: Hayworth, Lake, Grable, Lamour …

He arrived with a limp in his left leg (two fractures and a damaged tendon), the result of a motor-cycle accident that occurred before he had even begun his pilot’s training. The story he told the Ladies of Lincolnshire (for we had our moments) was that he was shot down in his Spit back in ’42 – hence the wretched desk job. While the story he conferred on me was a legendary and invisible head wound. Marvellous what these surgeons can do now. My friend Harry here – you won’t believe it: totally blind in one eye.

False pretences. Of more than one kind? Did I intend it from the very beginning?

That summer, during fine weather, as the bombings intensified, we would sometimes be attached to the airfields themselves, working at all hours to monitor the raids and keep the crews effectively briefed. One hot July afternoon we were watching the tenders lumbering out to fill the bellies of the Lancs, and I said to him: ‘Do you know who makes those bombs?’

He looked puzzled.

I said, ‘My father.’

He looked puzzled still.

‘You’ve heard of Beech Munitions? Robert Beech? BMC? Cannon balls by appointment …’

I think what he said then, and what he’d say still, though in a hundred subtle ways, was: ‘Somebody has to make them.’ But his eyes lost their puzzled look and after that day they acquired an ever-alert expression. Some weeks later when we both had three-day passes I asked him if he’d like to visit Hyfield. And I might have guessed that his eyes would become even more alert as we drove through the gates. As I might have known (had I wished it?) that Dad, tired and irascible as he was looking, would take a shine to him, would be the soul of affability, would take advantage of the situation to knock volleys into the air I had no way of returning.

‘Now Harry will tell you … Now when Harry takes over …’

I pretended to be nonplussed.

That must have been in the early autumn of ’44, after the liberation of Paris and before they sent me on that sudden photography course. They had decided by then that the war would be over before long and it was thus a historical phenomenon worthy of documentation. And my gauche enthusiasm back in ’39 must have stuck on my file. I was sent to London where I was taught the parts and use of a camera in much the same manner as rifle drill. Then I was sent back to Lincolnshire, with equipment, a special pass and papers that would oblige senior and fellow officers to give me assistance, and told to get some pictures.

As if they might have said: You know, atmosphere, action, human drama stuff. Editor’s desk by midnight.

So I went round the bases. And up (oh, just a few hellish times) at night with the crews. I flew. Saw. The whole works. Flak and tracer and vomit and kerosene and rear-gunners turned to meat. The photos on the desks, under the lamps and magnifiers, came alive and polychrome (so I could turn them into photos again), and I watched the light-show of Dresden burning, far below, in the dark.

Half my pictures, of course, they buried. You aren’t supposed to see, let alone put on visual record,
those
things.

A photographer is neither there nor not there, neither in nor out of the thing. If you’re in the thing it’s terrible, but there aren’t any questions, you do what you have to do and you don’t even have time to look. But what I’d say is that someone has to look. Someone has to be in it and step back too. Someone has to be a witness.

Sophie
 

‘Let’s go back, Sophie, shall we? As far back as we can. Tell me about your earliest memories.’

‘But that isn’t a fair question.’

‘How come?’

‘Because how do you know, when you go back that far, that it’s really memory? Not what you were told later, or what you’ve invented. Or just sheer fantasy.’

‘Okay. Tell me your fantasy.’

‘If you tell me yours.’

‘You first.’

‘Oh – you know – that everything was just fine, of course. That everything in the garden was lovely. Hasn’t it got to be that way? So we can believe we come from Paradise? Then it gets fucked later. You’re not going to tell me that the first thing people are going to remember, even if it
is
the first thing they remember, is the first Bad Time they ever had?

‘You see, I had this wonderful Mummy and Daddy. Straight from a fairy tale. He was English, she was Greek. She was beautiful and he was handsome. And they’d met long ago, in Germany, and fallen in love, and got married all in a rush, and he brought her back with him to live in London.

‘Shouldn’t that be the most beautiful story there is? The story of how your mother met your father. The story of how you came to be. You know that line in the song? “Your Daddy’s rich and your Momma’s good-looking. So hush little baby …” Save that Harry wasn’t rich. He was – but this is Harry’s version, not mine – disinherited. Isn’t that a great old word, Doctor K – “disinherited”? And Grandad, according to him, was just being kind because of Mum and me.

‘Okay, so he used to go off now and then, I never knew why, for a week at a time maybe. But I always thought that was a necessary process. Like he was some faithful knight-errant. He’d always come back to Mum. They’d kiss. And one day we’d all settle down together at Hyfield. That was what Mum wanted. I know. She loved the place. And I think that for a while Harry even wanted it too. He took me up to where he worked once, in Fleet Street. I couldn’t have been more than four – how’s this for a first memory? There was this big room with men and telephones, and another down below with machines rolling and thumping. I guess I cried. He held me tight. And he said something like: Everything from all over the world comes here.

‘Or how about this? We’re all sitting, the four of us, out on the lawn at Hyfield. Mum’s wearing a blue dress. She has big, dark, wide eyes. (Do I have big, dark, wide eyes?) She says things to me in Greek and I can understand them.
“Élado poulákimou, chrysoulamou.”
“Come here, my little bird, my little golden one.” She’s talking to Grandad and Harry’s sitting there, just listening. I can see that Mum and Grandad are fond of each other and that this somehow brings Harry and Grandad together. They’re drinking something out of a big glass jug with bits of fruit floating in it. They all laugh and I laugh too.

‘Holidays. That’s what I remember. We went down to Cornwall – two, three years running. Last time with the Irvings. A hotel on a cliff. Steps down to a beach. (Jokes about the
Beeches on the beach!) I was supposed to have nearly drowned there once, but I don’t remember. Just Harry rushing suddenly into the water, and shouting at Mum who was swimming, further out, and grabbing me and carrying me up the beach. He held me so tight. Then Mum and Uncle Frank and Auntie Stella came clustering round and he held me so tight, as if he didn’t want to let me go, even when Mum wanted to take me, and I cried. But I don’t remember nearly drowning.

‘I remember. I remember when the world was just sun and sand and sea and salt air. I remember when the world didn’t exist except where I was. I remember all of us playing games with a beach-ball, and thinking the world was like a coloured beach-ball, you could catch it in your arms. And Uncle Frank putting me on his shoulders to carry me. And I remember Harry taking photos of me. Just holiday snaps. My hair blowing. Giggling, licking ice-cream. He used to take that kind of photo too. It’s hard to think of him taking photos like that.’

Harry
 

When you put something on record, when you make a simulacrum of it, you have already partly decided you will lose it.

When I am not with Jenny, when she is away for only one night visiting her mother in Bristol, I play the game of trying to imagine exactly how she looks. I never can. When I see her, she is always so much better than the picture in my head. But I don’t know if this is good or bad. If it’s good that reality outshines the image, or if the fact that I can’t imagine her means that I don’t know her.

I used to say once, on those few occasions when I was persuaded to make public statements, that photography should be about what you cannot see. What you cannot see because it is far away and only the eye of the camera will take you there. Or what you cannot see because it happens so suddenly or so cruelly there is no time or even desire to see it, and only the camera can show you what it is like while it is still happening.

She wants me to take ‘real photographs’ again. We climb up the hill behind the cottage, the wind is riffling and polishing the grass, and she says, pointing at the downs and the clouds and the shafts of sunlight probing through them, ‘You could start right here.’ And I say, ‘Why?’ And she says (as if I don’t
have eyes), ‘Because it’s beautiful.’ And I say, ‘So, if it’s beautiful, why photograph it? If you have the reality, who needs the picture?’