The Separation

The Separation

Christopher Priest

Part One: 1999

Part Two: 1936-1945

Part Three: 1999

Part Four: 1940-1941

Part Five: 1940-1941

The Separation

Christopher Priest

Copyright © Christopher Priest, 2002

To Paul Kincaid

Part One: 1999

1

The rain was falling steadily on Buxton that Thursday afternoon in March, the town veiled by drifting low clouds, grey and discouraging. Stuart Gratton was sitting at a small table in the brightly lit bookshop window with his back to the street, but from time to time he turned to look outside at the slow-moving cars and trucks, the pedestrians splashing along with their faces averted, umbrellas low over their shoulders.

On the table before him was a glass of wine which he had almost finished drinking and next to it a half-empty half-bottle of hock. Beside the wine glass was a narrow-necked flute, with a single red rose standing upright in the water. On the table to his right was a pile of unsold copies of his most recent hardcover book,
The Exhausted Rage,
an oral history of the experiences of some of the men who took part in Operation Barbarossa, the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941. To his left, on the edge of the table, were two smaller piles of unsold copies of his books, both paperback editions reissued to coincide with the new hardcover. One of the titles was
The Last Day of War,
the book published in 1981 which had established his reputation and which had been in print more or less ever since. The other was called
The Silver Dragons,
another oral history, this one recounted by some of the soldiers and airmen who took part in the Sino-American War in the mid-1940s.

His ballpoint pen lay on the table next to his hand.

The manager of the bookshop, an attentive and clearly embarrassed man whose name Gratton remembered only as Rayner, was standing beside him when the signing session had begun, half an hour earlier, but he had been called away to attend to other business a few minutes before. Now Gratton could see him on the far side of the shop, apparently involved in some problem with the till or PC. The area manager from his publishers, who was supposed to come along to support Gratton at the signing, had called on his mobile to say there had been a traffic accident on the M1 and that he was going to be late. The bookshop, situated in a side street but close to the main department and chain-stores in the centre of Buxton, was not busy. People came in from the rain from time to time, looked curiously at him and at the poster on the wall beside him announcing his signing, but none of them seemed interested in buying any of his books. One or two of them even shied away when they realized why he was sitting there.

It had not been like this when the signing began: two or three people had been waiting for him, including a friend of his, Doug Robinson, who had magnanimously driven over from his home in Sheffield to give moral support. Doug even bought one of the paperbacks, saying he needed to replace his old, worn-out copy. Gratton gratefully signed that, as well as the copies requested by the other customers, but now all of them were gone. By arrangement, Doug would be waiting for him in the bar of The Thistle, two doors down from the bookshop. Rayner, the manager, had asked him to sign some extra copies, a few ‘for stock’, and three or four more for mail-order customers who had ordered the books in advance, but in effect that was that. Somewhere, somehow, people must be buying his books because his work attracted consistently good sales and in his field Gratton was considered a leading author. However, few of his readers appeared to be in Buxton during that afternoon of dismal rain. Gratton was regretting having agreed once again to a signing session. He had undertaken similar stints in the past, so he should have known what was likely to happen. What made this one worse was the fact that he had cut short a research trip abroad to be home in time for the appointment. He was jetlagged from the long flight across the Atlantic, he was also tired from lack of sleep overnight and he was feeling oppressed by the backlog of work which had accumulated while he was away. In his introspective mood he suddenly remembered his wife Wendy, who had died two years before. Wendy liked this shop and used to buy most of her books here. He had hardly been back since her death. There had been obvious changes in the meantime: new shelving and cabinets, brighter lighting, a few tables and chairs where customers could sit and read.

Still with more than twenty minutes to go before the signing session was officially at an end, Gratton saw a woman coming into the shop from the street, a large padded envelope under her arm. She looked quickly around the shop, spotted him sitting at his table and walked across to him. For a moment they stared at each other. Her hair and coat, and the padded envelope, were rain-damp. There was a fleeting illusory sense that he had seen her before, that they had met somewhere.

‘I’d like to buy one of these, please,’ she said, reaching forward to select a paperback of
The Last Day
of War.
Droplets of water fell on the table. ‘Do I pay for it here?

‘No, you have to take it to the till,’ Gratton said, pleasantly surprised to be doing something at last.

‘Would you like me to sign it for you?’

‘Yes, please. You are Stuart Gratton, aren’t you?’

‘I am,’ he said, opening the cover and beginning to inscribe the title page.

‘My father was one of your most avid readers before he died, she said in a rush, while he was still signing. ‘He thought you were doing important work, recording those experiences.’

‘Would you like me to dedicate the book to you? With your name?’

‘No . . . just sign it, please.’ She turned her head to see what he was writing, then said, ‘It was about my father, actually. Coming here to see you.’ She nodded towards the poster on the wall next to him. ‘I was in this shop the other day and I found out you’d be here. I only live in Bakewell, so it was too good an opportunity to miss.’

Gratton finished inscribing the book by writing in the date. He handed the copy back to the woman.

‘Many thanks,’ he said.

‘Dad was in the war too,’ she said, still speaking quickly. ‘He wrote down his experiences in notebooks and I wondered if you might be interested . . . ?’ She indicated the padded envelope she was carrying.

‘I wouldn’t be able to get them published for you,’ Gratton said.

‘It’s not that. I thought you might be interested to read them. I saw your advertisement.’

‘Where was that?’

‘An old wartime colleague of Dad’s sent it to me. He’d spotted it in a magazine called
RAF Flypast.’

‘Your father wasn’t called Sawyer, was he?’

‘Yes, he was. I’m a Sawyer. That’s my maiden name. I saw your ad and I thought that Dad’s notebooks might be what you’re looking for.’

‘And he was in Bomber Command during the war?’

‘Yes, that’s the point.’ She pushed the large envelope towards him. ‘Look, I have to tell you that I haven’t read Dad’s notebooks myself. I’ve never been able to decipher his handwriting. He didn’t say much about them but he spent hours in his room, writing away. He retired ages ago, lived on his own for years, but towards the end he moved in with me and my husband. He was with us for the last two and a half years of his life. He was always scribbling away in his notebooks. I never really paid much attention, because it was keeping him out of my hair. Maybe you’ve had a similar experience . . . ?’

‘No. Nothing like that. Both my parents died some years ago.’

‘Well, Dad told me once that he’d put down everything in writing, his whole life, his time in the air force, everything he did. That’s the other problem for me. Most of what he wrote about is the war, which I’ve never found interesting. But then I was sent your ad - so, well, here I am.’

Gratton regarded the damp padded envelope lying on the tabletop.

‘These are the originals?’ he said.

‘No, the originals are a couple of dozen ordinary exercise books. They’re lying around in his old bedroom, gathering dust. I can let you have the originals if you need them, but what I’m giving you are photocopies. I thought if the material turned out to be no use you could have the pages recycled.’

‘Well, thank you . . . er . . . ?’

‘Angela Chipperton, Mrs Angela Chipperton. Do you suppose Dad is the man you’re interested in?’

‘It’s impossible to say until I’ve read what he wrote. I’m curious about something I came across. Sawyer’s not an unusual name, as you no doubt realize. I’ve already received ten or twelve responses to the advertisement, but I’ve been away and I haven’t been able to get around to any of them yet. I’ll read your father’s memoir as soon as I can. Have you left an address where I can contact you?’

‘There’s a covering letter with my address.’

‘I’m really grateful to you, Mrs Chipperton,’ Gratton said. He stood up.

‘I hate to ask you,’ she said, while they were still shaking hands. ‘But is there likely to be ... I mean, if the material turns out to be suitable for publication and there was the possibility of payment, would I - ?’

‘I’ll do what I can and let you know what I think. But in practice, war memoirs don’t have a general market these days, unless they’re by someone famous.’

‘You see, when I saw your ad I wondered if that might be it. To me he was just Dad, but I thought perhaps he’d been involved in something important during the war.’

‘I don’t think so. I’ve never seen references to anyone called Sawyer in the standard works on the war. I think he must have been just an ordinary airman. That’s why I’ve been advertising for information, to see what I can turn up. There might be nothing in it. And of course, your father might not be the man I’m looking for. But if anything comes along I’ll certainly let you know.’

She left soon after that and Gratton resumed his vigil in the bookshop window.

2

The next day Gratton found that Mrs Chipperton’s padded envelope contained more than three hundred unnumbered pages, photocopied, as she said, from ruled exercise books. The ruled lines of the pages had come out of the copier with almost equal density to the words themselves, promising hours of eye-strain ahead, the occupational hazard of researchers of popular histories. The handwriting was small and some of it at least was regular and clear, but there were several long passages where the writing became wilder and less legible. Other parts of it appeared to have been drafted in pencil, because they had photo-copied badly. Gratton glanced through a few of the pages, then placed them back inside their padded envelope. He took out the covering letter and put it in his correspondence file. She lived in Bakewell, a small Derbyshire town on the other side of Buxton, on the road to Chesterfield. So far he had learned of the existence of about a dozen officers and men called Sawyer who flew operationally against German targets in RAF Bomber Command during the 1940s. Nearly all of them were dead now, and few of them had left little more than letters or photographs as records of their experiences. Gratton had already been able to eliminate most of them. The rest would need more detailed investigation. Mrs Chipperton’s late father looked promising, but the sheer size of his text was daunting.

Gratton put the padded envelope on top of the pile next to his desk. He would have to get around to reading everything later. Much of the material sent in response to the Sawyer enquiry was waiting for him on his return from abroad, an additional workload he should have anticipated. His trip this time had been a long and circular one, taking in several interviews and a great deal of archival research. Much travelling had been necessary: first to Cologne, Frankfurt and Leipzig, then from Germany across to Belarus and Ukraine - Brest, Kiev and Odessa - then north to Sweden; finally ten edgy days in the USA, visiting Washington DC, Chicago, St Louis, beset by suspicious officials every time he boarded one of the great transcontinental trains or, the one time he took a short internal flight, when he passed through an airport. It was increasingly difficult for foreign visitors to travel about in the USA, partly because of the currency restrictions but mainly because of a general distrust of anyone from Europe. Another occupational hazard was what Gratton considered this to be, but the long delays created by US Customs and Immigration when entering or leaving the US were becoming a substantial nuisance. Beyond the aggravations of travel his researches involved the usual itinerary of old men and, increasingly often these days, of their widows or grown-up children.

It was gratifying, though, to keep being reminded how much in demand his work still was. In addition to the mountain of letters and packages lying in the hallway for him on his return, there were several hundred e-mails stored on his server in-box, and a score or more messages were waiting on the answering machine. Most of the recorded messages sounded vexed because they hadn’t been able to get through to him on his mobile number: it was a plus or a minus, depending on your point of view; that European cellphones were still unusable in the US while deregulation was being fought over. Gratton worked for two days on his backlog, glad to be home and free to work once more. He labelled and indexed his most recent tapes, then parcelled them up to be sent to the transcription agency. While he was doing so, he again noticed the huge Sawyer manuscript. He was tempted by the detail he glimpsed in certain passages. It would save time in the long run if he had it transcribed professionally - the agency he used had someone there who specialized in deciphering holograph manuscripts. Once he had thought of doing it there was no going back. He wrote to Mrs Chipperton and asked her to send him the originals of the notebooks. He enclosed a formal copyright release note that would allow him to have the transcription made and later let him quote from the manuscript if he needed to. All this made him think again about the Sawyer problem. On his fourth morning at home he sat down at his computer and carefully composed a letter to one of his earlier interview subjects.