Sheila was sympathetic.
‘You poor darling, it’s not like you to see things.’
‘There Joseph stood, as close as you are to me. He said “Everything worked out all right” – almost like a voice from the grave. I couldn’t have seen him more clearly. He had been washing his hands.’
‘You poor darling,’ she said again. ‘It’s the heat. Temperatures were over ninety in Somerville when they took the noon reading. Why don’t you go up and get into bed and I’ll have Michelin bring you up a nice light supper.’
‘Perhaps I’ll do that,’ Clement said. ‘It sounds a bit feeble.’
‘You’re allowed to be feeble once in a while.’
‘“Everything worked out all right …” I can still hear his voice. It was amazing.’
‘Would you like me to get Dr Lloyd?’
‘No, I’ll go and have a bath as you suggest.’
‘Have a nice cool bath. Not too cool. Perhaps I’ll take your temperature.’
When he lowered his flabby bulk into the bath, Clement lay there half-submerged. He was unable to wash himself. Staring at the tablet of bath soap, his mind returned to that other bar of soap in Chesterfield Street, slowly revolving, foaming its substance away in Joseph’s hands. What had it signified? He tried to answer the question clinically, imagining it posed by Mrs Emerova. Answer would not come: only the vision of the soap rotating, its colour now forgotten, and the minute linked bubbles of foam falling away from it, regularly.
After the bath, he slid into bed between the sheets, to find himself shivering. He could not get to grips with himself or with his recent experience. The functioning of his brain seemed oddly affected, although he could not explain how. Nor was it possible for him to decide whether he had actually received a visitation from his brother, or whether he had had some sort of illness, say a minor stroke, which had caused a vivid hallucination. The latter possibility left him unmoved; strokes were part of the rational world. Far more alarming was the prospect that his brother might actually have come back from the dead to speak to him; the rational world had no place for such events.
Suppose, against all belief, Joseph had returned. The meaning of ‘Everything worked out all right’ was still obscure. Probably Joseph was referring to his own life. Or was he referring to Clement’s problem with the book, or with Sheila? Perhaps he meant that the whole confused world worked out all right, on evidence from some superior time-annihilating position of vantage granted those who had died …
It was more comfortable to suppose that the whole episode had been a delusion. Heat may have played a part. Clement remembered the smell of the flat; it might also have had a disturbing effect on the mind.
He dozed lightly, hearing traffic go by in Rawlinson Road. When he roused, his head felt better and he noted that he was less uneasy, at least until the thought of Mrs Emerova came into his mind. It would be difficult communicating this new episode in his life to her.
‘It was a vision of some kind. One hates using the word because of its Biblical connotations, but a vision is what it was: something between reality and unreality.’
‘Do you mean between objective and subjective? Is there such a state?’
‘Why do you look at me like that? I suppose you think the whole thing was just an outcrop of disturbed sexuality?’
‘Is that what you feel it was?’
‘It was just a joke. Maybe I was just having a kind of brain storm. I was rather upset by the friend of Joseph’s I met there, Ron Mallock.’
‘Why did he upset you?’
‘Oh, he was just talking about the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament …’
Suddenly, Clement remembered that a psychotherapist of his acquaintance at Carisbrooke had told him over drinks that two of his patients were high-ranking members of the CND who had come for treatment, in conditions of utmost confidentiality, because they found that competing with their wish to ban the bomb was a strong desire to see it dropped. Wish and fear were close neighbours; opposites attracted.
In a similar way, his vision in the Acton flat seemed to incorporate opposites, fear and reassurance, or his love of his brother and his hatred of him. Joseph had excluded him from his life.
Feeling slightly perked up, Clement sat up in bed and adjusted his pillows. The untidy bundle of letters he had brought from Acton lay on his bedside table. Taking them up rather feebly, Clement began to shuffle through them.
With one exception, the letters were from Lucy Traill, the last of Joseph’s long succession of girl friends. He knew Lucy was a physiotherapist, from the disastrous occasion when she had tried to practise her art on Sheila. He also remembered, as soon as he started to read the letters, that she was an ardent supporter of CND, and that Joseph had met her on some demonstration or march. She worked in a hospital in Richmond, and lived with Joseph only at weekends, which explained both the letters and their highly-charged sexual content.
Lucy was good at describing in detail what she and Joseph had done the previous weekend, and what she wanted them to do when next they met. The uninhibited nature of the correspondence caused Clement to stir uneasily in the bed.
He and Sheila rarely talked much about sex. Nor was there much in the way of description of sexual activity in Sheila’s Kerinth novels. Yet vivid and happy memories came back to him of their early years of marriage, when they had both discovered in themselves a desire for sexual intercourse out of doors. They had done it wherever and whenever they could, sometimes tumbling out of cars to perform in a lane or a field, quickly before anyone saw them – Sheila had always been fast off the button. They had done it in parks, in woods, by roaring motorways, on beaches. They had done it lying down, or had enjoyed knee-tremblers against trees in the rain.
Thought of those happy years brought a gush of pleasure to him. How close they had been! – And still were, perhaps because of that carefree, randy time. It had ceased with the birth of their daughter, Juliet, in 1970.
He sighed, still not willing to think of Juliet, and opened another of Lucy’s letters.
After a long description of their next encounter in bed, she wrote, ‘But all these joys may never be. You have been increasingly strange lately, not even coming on the last demonstration. We put on a great show outside the base at Lakenheath, yet you weren’t there. And that remark of yours about the Pershings – that they weren’t pointing at us. Okay, I know you were drunk. It was in The Queen’s Arms, remember. There was a sudden hush. Everyone suddenly shut up and stared at you. I felt such a fool. We have to be united, firm in our beliefs. Every missile in the world points at us. If you’re going to give up now, just when we seem to be succeeding, don’t count on me to be around.’
Her next letter showed that Joseph had given a reply she found unsatisfactory. Her tone was abusive.
Joseph had made a pained and elaborate response. That it had been important to him was indicated by the fact that he had typed it out on an old manual typewriter and kept a carbon copy. It was dated January 1987.
My darling Lucy,
We’ve always been honest with each other. I know the taste of your mind as well as I do the taste of your fanny. You’re a zealot -as I am, but it appears our zealotry sometimes goes in different directions. I just hope we don’t. I love you madly and would even overcome my rooted objection to marriage if it suited you, and adopt your kid, I suppose.
I’m older than you by quite a bit. You’re a child of the Cold War, born early fifties, whereas I did such growing up as I was ever going to manage in the World War. So I’m going to bore and irritate you (in a good cause) with MY story of the BOMB. I want to try and set it all down. You clearly confuse sex and CND, like many of our comrades. I confuse the Bomb and Life. Like this. Darling, I dig your deepest depths, please read this. Don’t be impatient. Assume a Zen posture.
You know Japan only as a distant country which showers down upon us all the electronic gadgets we now take for granted. You can’t imagine what a different face Japan showed to those who fell within her power. I fought against them in Burma, when our commander-in-chief referred to the Japs as ‘fighting insects’. They were rightly feared as pitiless – to themselves and others. They struck the first blow. They were an enemy who had to be fought and conquered.
After the Burma campaign, while the war was still on, my division, part of the Forgotten Army, was sent back to India and there disbanded. I was posted to a camp near Bangalore, and from there to Madras where, in hot and primitive conditions, we were set to practising amphibious landings.
We used landing craft which had been returned from operations in the Middle East. Old boats, good enough for South East Asia Command. These were the craft we were to employ in an assault on the Japanese armies ensconced in Singapore and Malaya.
This assault had a code name. Operation Zipper. The rumour was that we were to attack Singapore from the sea – this vauntedly impregnable fortress – and to invade the complex western coast of Malaya. Much later, it was discovered that some of the designated beaches in the Port Swettenham area were impossible places in which to land, with dangerous currents sweeping the beaches and mangrove swamps behind the beaches. Training for Zipper caused severe low morale, particularly for those of us who had served in Burma.
I tell you this for background to what follows.
Some luck came my way. I was unexpectedly posted from Madras to Bombay, to act as Out Clerk in a signals office there.
For the first time, I had some idea of what it would be like to be detached from the army, which by this time I hated. Instead of sleeping in a mildewed Great War tent on a strip of Madrassi desert, I found myself in a private house standing in a private road near Breach Candy, the luxurious bathing pool by the sea. I enjoyed that blessed luxury, a room to myself, and a bearer to look after me. I also enjoyed an unconsummated love affair – you don’t even know what the words mean, but life was different then – with a WAC(I) called Mary. The initials stand for Women’s Auxiliary Corps (India). I can’t tell you the racist and sexist insults poor Mary put up with in our signal office, where I was her defender, and fought a dispatch rider who insulted her vilely. This little affair went some way to satisfying the hungers of the soul. Oh, the hungers of my bloody soul. But on, on to the Bomb …
Despite all my manoeuvres, I found it impossible to anchor myself to Bombay. After a month, I came under orders to return to Madras, as if the dread Operation Zipper couldn’t start without me. I went back to my division (now the 26th Indian Div). It was early August, 1945.
We woke one morning to find that the atom bomb had been dropped on Hiroshima.
Ever since then – since that merciful time when Operation Zipper was cancelled – I have been a student of what manoeuvres went on on the international scene. It was a crucial period in the history of the war.
So much savagery was unleashed on the world. That savagery is always there, in war or peace – something has to contain it. All we know to contain it so far is the threat of retribution. The way Mater contained me.
Japan in 1945 was a country slowly succumbing to starvation. American B-29 fire raids on Tokyo were killing 80,000 civilians and injuring over half that number in one night. Yet there were high officers in the Japanese military who believed that the war must continue at all costs, for honour’s sake, if necessary to the last man, woman, and child. They thought like that.
However, Japan’s foreign minister, Togo, was suing for peace. He sued in the wrong place. He directed his efforts at Moscow, capital of what he took to be a neutral country as far as Japan was concerned. But devious plans were in the making. Stalin was secretly preparing to attack the Japanese in Manchuria and then to press on to the home islands. He wanted a presence in Tokyo itself. So his foreign minister, Molotov, found it convenient not to see Togo’s ambassador.
On the 2nd August, Togo cabled that ambassador, ordering him to speak to Molotov. A note of desperation breaks through the stiff diplomatic politeness. Togo said, ‘Since the loss of one day relative to this present matter may result in a thousand years of regret, it is requested that you immediately have a talk with Molotov.’
It was not to be. The nearer the weir, the faster the water. The slow and secret preparations to manufacture an atomic bomb – the Manhattan Project – to be dropped on Germany were complete. The bomb was ready, but Nazi Germany was already out of the war.
You’re supposed to know all this, but you refuse to bloody think about the past.
On the 5th August, the crew of a B-29 christened the Enola Gay ate a midnight breakfast of eggs, sausage, toast and coffee, and then attended a church service. In the early hours of the 6th August, the Enola Gay took off. This was from a small airstrip on Tinian, an island near Guam. They had the bomb aboard, and were accompanied by a weather plane.
Their target was Hiroshima, an army centre and military supply port. The flight was without event. The bomb was dropped from an altitude of 31,600 feet on a city just going about its morning business. A peaceful city, an enemy city. 71,379 people were killed or just went missing, 68, 023 were injured.
The world changed, Lucy. Never has there been such a clear-cut division between one age and the next as that marked by the mushroom cloud boiling up over Hiroshima. All that savagery and hate had found technological embodiment.
This first bomb, code name Little Boy, was a uranium bomb. On the 9th of August, a plutonium bomb was dropped on the seaport of Nagasaki. In the time between these two bombs, on the 8th of August, the Soviet Union declared war on Japan. (Did you know that? What an hour to strike!) Japan surrendered unconditionally on the 14th of August.
It’s a bit of a platitude now, but you see that the last military act of World War II was also the first political act of the peace that followed – or rather of that uncertain state between peace and war we call the Cold War. The Russians could go no farther, and Tokyo did not become the Berlin of the Far East, quarrelled over by the major powers.
At the time of the armistice, a Japanese report stated simply, ‘The whole city of Hiroshima was destroyed instantly by a single bomb.’
Is that what we’ve had to face ever since, or the savagery and hate which conjured up the bomb in the first place?
Do you know what we did when we heard the news from Hiroshima? ‘Fucking great!’ we said. We rejoiced. They had it coming to them. That’s what we thought.
A third bomb would have been ready from 15th August onwards. Even on the 13th August, the day before the Japanese surrender, the war was still very much in progress. The Soviets were advancing across Manchuria, American naval and air attacks were carried out against Tokyo and Kyushu, and I was jumping from a boat into four feet of water with a 22–set on my back. A Japanese war party was opposing their government’s attempts to terminate the struggle. In the Japanese cabinet itself, fierce dissension raged; only the concession by the Allies that the Emperor Hirohito could retain the throne decided the Japanese to sue for peace, and not to fight on despite the bombs.
Hirohito himself said, ‘I cannot endure the thought of letting my people suffer any longer. A continuation of the war will bring death to tens, perhaps even hundreds, of thousands of persons.’
So it was all over, and we were supposed to become ordinary people again.
Forty years on, and consciences are still troubled about this dramatic conclusion to the biggest show of the century. They are mainly post-bellum consciences. At the time, peace at any price was the cry. Britain had been at war for six years.
You may think this is special pleading, but, if the war had continued in the East, it would have entailed many more fire-bombings of Japanese cities and most probably an invasion by sea of the Japanese mainland. Losses on both sides would have been formidably high.
Earl Mountbatten and Commander Slim, on the British side, inherited large parts of what had been the ‘Greater East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere’, where 128 million people awaited rehabilitation after the war’s end. Among them, spread over a wide area, 750,000 Japanese were still at large, often prepared to fight on till death (some who never heard the news of the surrender were still on standby twenty years later). Some 125,000 Allied prisoners-of-war were also awaiting rescue from death by starvation or torture.
As for the Americans, whom all good followers of CND are supposed to mistrust, it was different in 1945. Grave responsibilities faced them. There were already signs that the Soviet Union would turn at any moment from untrustworthy ally into enemy, and might be disposed to sweep westwards through an incapacitated Europe when it was denied Japan. It was foreseen that, in the coming winter of 1945–46, millions of Europeans would die of starvation if America did not promptly shoulder the responsibility for feeding them – a responsibility it would hardly have been possible to undertake if the war in the East were still raging.
On every count, the sudden armistice procured by the two A-bombs was a life-saver all round the globe. Not least to those of us on Operation Zipper. To this day, I believe that most of our lives were saved by Little Boy and its sinister companion. Many men who survived the war in the East will carry that same belief with them to the grave.
After the Japanese surrender came the immense task of putting things back in the boxes where they belonged. 26 Indian Div was part of that mopping up operation. We put to sea from Madras and, on the 4th of October 1945, islands loomed out of the fog before us. We had crossed the line. Ahead of us lay Sumatra, and a peace that was not peace.
Perhaps there’s no such thing as peace. There’s too much hate and savagery. You know how much of those emotions we meet with in the ranks. Don’t we generate hate to keep our morale up?
All this explains why I had to have a very deep change of heart before I went on my first Ban the Bomb march to Aldermaston. I had to suppress my emotional response to the bomb and allow my intellect to win. My intellect told me that it was insane to drop nuclear bombs on anyone. Even the Russians. (Sorry!)
But you see really my stand regarding the bomb was about something else, deep down in that part of us which construes its own version of reality. The hatred of authority came into it. Ever since my schooldays, I have hated authority. They rule by force, whether with canes or nuclear arms. It’s an Us or Them situation. I’m always the underdog. As the Far East experience wore off, I began more and more to interpret the country’s nuclear policy as an excuse for authoritarianism. Something against which to revolt.
And another persuader. I had a grudge against England. It let me down. I fought for this fucking country and it paid me off in pennies. I came back here from the East pretty well destitute, and have had to fend for myself as an underdog ever since. Let’s face it, all this history over which I sweat, year in, year out, brings no reward, in terms of money or respect. It didn’t even bring me you – you came to me through CND, where many of those with some grudge or other against their country find refuge. Some of them long to see the bomb dropped on Mrs Thatcher.
Hatred of authority, grudge against England. Emotive reasons for screaming Ban the Bomb and singing We Shall Overcome. How wonderful to have the pigs grab you up by your duffel coat and dump you in their van. Through the veins goes pure cleansing hatred. Very cathartic.
So I was as keen a marcher as anyone. It made me feel good. And I pulled women. I’m funny, I know. Can’t resist a female body, can’t establish a lasting relationship. Some fundamental mistrust driving me …
Shit. Anyhow, I also made pals like Ron Mallock. A good drinking friend. And met you.
When you took me to Greenham Common to see the women living rough and laying siege to the base, I became even more emotionally devoted to the cause. That was just before Christmas 1983. The women sang that carol – ‘Peace on Earth and Mercy mild’ – as they rattled the wire. They wore their kind of informal uniform, wrapped up against the cold in woollen hats, bright scarves, heavy coats, striped leg-warmers, and boots. They didn’t use make-up. They had something going between them: they were a tribe. They lived in those improvised tents among the trees and bracken, some with kids. Camp fires smouldered among the leafless trees, the smoke filtering up towards a clouded sky. We saw one woman pull up her clothes and shit among the ferns, careless of who might be looking. They were a tribe. I understood; it was their Burma.
And they were laying siege to an RAF camp. The RAF! In my schooldays, the heroes of the Battle of Britain, the country’s saviours … All that forgotten by a new generation. What a reversal. This is that fatal phenomenon at the heart of the sodding world, enantiodromia, the incessant and inevitable turning of all things into their opposites.
The women didn’t want me around the Common. They only tolerated me because they knew you and respected you. You’d been with them. You were one of them.
They had a cause. And to prove it helicopters roared overhead, photographing them, and police guarded the perimeter, and troops waited inside the perimeter. And we stumbled across a posse of mounted police, sitting silent on their horses in a straggling copse of silver birch, awaiting word over their intercoms to charge.
I felt in my bones the women were right. That whatever the pros and cons of the international situation, nuclear weapons were too obscene ever to be used. Someone had to speak up against them – and of course it would have to be the underdogs, who would die in their hundreds of thousands if the weapons were unleashed.
How those women moved me! That day I was whole-hearted. Remember how we clutched each other. Here at last was a spirit that would vanquish war. All your feminism made sense then. Laughing, I quoted to you the old poet of my youth, William Westlake:
Those men forget who pray for arms to cease
War but enacts the mischief sown in Peace.
It seemed then, in that encampment already half at war, that Westlake was talking through his hat.
That day I was whole-hearted. Just to be whole-hearted filled me with energy. Perhaps you remember how we screwed in the back of the van, clothes and boots still on. God, I enjoyed that. Somehow love and revenge were all mixed up in my fucking head.
We’ve had such good times. Don’t leave me now. Please. I need you. Forget ideology, remember me.
… It’s four in the sodding morning. Another glass of whisky and perhaps I’ll finish this – whatever it is. I know nothing about life, nothing. I’m as ignorant as the day I was born.
Lucy. I no longer feel as I did that day at Greenham Common. Useless to camouflage the fact. You know I had that amazing revelation on the night of the full moon, November last year in Dorset. In a few short weeks, it has changed my life. I told you about it, or tried to.
I saw then that all my years I had somehow been mistaken. I’m too tired to go into it, and in any case why should it matter to you? It concerns only me, my little dot of consciousness which, I’m well aware, is of such small consequence to anyone but its possessor.
But the result was – still is, the process still goes on – a complete revision of everything I have lived. Christ, that’s about sixty years of life and still I’m not tired of pursuing some phantom of perfection, of trying to make myself … complete, perfect?… No, make myself into something I can’t clearly see until I get there. But a person who lives and breathes truth … (Don’t laugh.)
For all its miseries, I have lived life so passionately. You’ve felt it, or you’d not have cared, for you too have passion – and not just sexual passion. Your job is the manipulation of human bodies, trying to make them better.
I’ve been like that, but all the time I have operated under a bad misconstruction. A self-inflicted misconstruction, set up in self-defence by the unhappy child I once was.
It has warped my emotional life. I am now rethinking the habits of a lifetime. That includes my attitude to England and authority. I never wanted authority. So why should I hate those who want and get it? They are in a different category from me, just as bank clerks are. Let them get on with it; why waste my time in hatred?
England, too. It’s as neutral as the jungles I fought in. It’s an abstraction, largely, apart from the physical land area. To hate it is to admit to a hatred of one’s parents – and that was at the bottom of all my problems.
The Bomb was my parent. It once gave me life. It was my father. Some such distortion had taken place in my psyche.
And for the first time I have been seeing that the idea of unilateral disarmament is an emotional fantasy. Any country that disarms itself voluntarily – as Czechoslovakia was persuaded to do by Britain and France in 1938 – writes itself out of history. It is overcome, because it has given up its will to live. There’s a Darwinian logic which operates. We cannot give up our arms. We must negotiate the arms away from a position of strength. (God, but you’ll laugh at that.) The disarmament negotiations now in progress, hellish though they may be, have a grasp on reality that unilateralism doesn’t. It is realistic to haggle and argue and threaten and orate; that keeps the hate and savagery within barriers. Dropping your trousers to the enemy doesn’t.
I’ll put it simply in other terms. All my life I have had to fight for my inner identity and existence; unilateralism is not part of my make-up. I’m an old soldier. I actually would rather die than give in.
And I’d rather face the truth about myself, however shabby it may seem to others, than deceive you. I want you. I will still come to meetings with you and Ron, because I consider that the pressure CND exerts on governments to get on with negotiations is valuable (as long as it never gains its true objective!); but you will know now that it is just intellect moving me, and not emotionalism any more.
Here’s where I’d better stop. If you don’t show up next Saturday, I’ll understand.
Your storm-tossed
Joseph.
Clement dropped the letter on the blanket and began to weep. Again Joseph was saying that he had misunderstood and misconstructed his own story. What exactly he meant by that, Clement could not yet comprehend. Some of his tears were for his own lack of comprehension.