In the middle of the war my parents moved into town – to Salisbury, now Harare. It was impossible to nurse my father any longer on the farm. But the old house, leaking so badly a storm was marked by rain pattering on the linoleum, and where the four winds blew, and sometimes inside as well as outside, had suited him better than the bungalow, which he hated.
The diabetes was very bad. They had not refined the treatment then, the doctors, and looking at his illness from its beginning to its end, the constant theme was the restriction of food, and his diet was so limited that my image of him is this haunted, gaunt man, sitting at the table with, beside him, little brass scales, where he measured an ounce of this, two ounces of that, half a scone, a little potato. Everything has changed: now the doctors are so clever and flexible, balancing insulin against the food, so that living with a diabetic, it is easy to forget that he is one. If my father’s doctors had had these levels of skill he would not have been so dreadfully ill.
Fate, or my karma, or chance, has caused me to have to look after a diabetic, just as my mother did, and I can compare what happens now with then. How lucky we are in our medicines: diabetic sufferers have no idea how they would have been dealt with not so long ago.
We are all conditioned, wired, evolved, to accept calamity as a blow, a suddenness. He fell off a horse; an arrow pierced his eye; she died in childbirth, of a burst appendix, of food-poisoning; there was a sniper, a suicide-bomber, a rock fall; or a fire, a flood, a car crash. But to imagine, let alone describe, a slow, long descent through illness is hard. If I say my mother nursed my father day and night for the last four years of his illness, a minute-by-minute vigilance, while his organs failed, one by one, and everything went, until he was begging to be given death, then it is hard to take in. And she had nursed him for the ten years before that.
She didn’t have enough help. I and others would look after my father for an afternoon, an evening, so she could go out, but she really needed people who would say, ‘I’ll take over for the weekend so that you can…’ very probably just sleep. I didn’t know how to cope with that apparatus of syringes and test-tubes, and the batteries of pills, among which there was not one for his dreadful depression.
It was such a bad time for everyone, the war and its aftermath, but particularly for my mother. We now know the war did have an end – 1939–45 – but while it dragged on, we didn’t know, and no one foresaw the awfulness of the after-war years. It is so hard to convey the unremittingness of it all, the deadening slog. While they were going on, my father’s last years, it was hard to feel, with my mother, what it was really like for her, but I would say that people who have had to do something of the same kind themselves will understand.
His children, certainly, were no joy for my father. My brother nearly went down with the Repulse, but was saved, and then he had a long, hard war in the Mediterranean, where so much fighting went on. As for his daughter, I left a husband and two children and married a German, classed as an enemy alien. My parents were not anti-German, but there are stereotypes of German. One is the large, hearty, probably pipe-smoking, good-natured man, rather like Father Christmas, whom they would have liked. Another is the Prussian, aloof, correct, cold, ungiving. How could they have liked my second husband? And he was a Communist, a real one (and stayed one until he died). There were whole hinterlands here that luckily they knew nothing about: for instance, that Gottfried only married me, as enemy aliens married local girls when they could, to keep himself out of the internment camp. But it must have been obvious to them, particularly to my father, that Gottfried and I were not well suited. As it is put. Gottfried, hating everything about his life in Southern Rhodesia, was inveterately polite, and they were polite too. Now I cannot see how the behaviour of my father’s daughter could have been worse for him.
But he and I understood each other very well. When I sat with him on those long afternoons and evenings, he would hold my hand and we were complicit in a rage of understanding. I think my father’s rage at the Trenches took me over, when I was very young, and has never left me. Do children feel their parents’ emotions? Yes, we do, and it is a legacy I could have done without. What is the use of it? It is as if that old war is in my own memory, my own consciousness.
My father dreamed a lot about the Trenches, and my mother said that sometimes she felt as if his old comrades were there in the room with him – with us.
‘They were such good chaps,’ my father would say, ‘such fine men. And they all died in Passchendaele. Every one of my company. And I would have died with them, but I got the shrapnel in my leg just before the battle. I must have told you – I’m sure I did. But those fine chaps, they would be alive now. They were just cannon fodder, that’s all.’
Years later, in London, I visited the Imperial War Museum, where they have created a most uncomfortably realistic set of Trenches. Standing looking at them was a woman, and she was crying. I saw she was crying with rage so I went to stand by her. She gave me a glance and took in that I was at one with her. ‘It’s as if they were just rubbish,’ she said. ‘Like rubbish, to be shovelled into the Trenches. They weren’t worth anything, you see.’ Exactly.
And my father talked more and more about cannon fodder. ‘If you had only known them,’ he said, holding my hand hard. ‘Such good men. I keep thinking of them.’ And my father, crying, an old man’s tears, his eyes wide and childlike – an old man’s eyes (but he not yet sixty) – and he was murmuring the names of those fine chaps, his men, who died in the mud at Passchendaele, while the wireless, which was never turned off, told us news from the battlefronts in Europe and in the Pacific.
‘I think of them, yes, I do, there’s never a day I don’t think of them, oh, such fine young chaps…’
My mother might come in and sit on the old basket armchair, brought from the farm – her chair. She was utterly worn out. I could see she wanted to get a few minutes’ nap, perhaps, and she rested her hand on her cheek, the hand where the rings were loose on her fingers.
‘I must have told you,’ my father said, seeing her sitting there, ‘yes, I’m sure I did. If the shrapnel hadn’t got me I would have died with them, and sometimes I wonder if it wouldn’t have been better if I had.
‘The thing is,’ said my father, rousing himself, ‘I keep thinking, it could all have been done better. Done differently, don’t you see? Emily? Emily?’
‘Let her sleep,’ I begged. ‘She’s so tired.’
‘Emily?’ he shouted, in a panic.
‘Here I am,’ said my mother, returning.
In the District there were other soldiers from the Great War, the war to end all war. One woman had lost a husband and three sons to the Trenches; she had one son left, too young for the war. She would say, dignified with her sorrow, that when she looked at this youngest son, she saw all her other dead soldiers. When those survivors of the First World War met, they would talk in a way that has fallen out of fashion. ‘The armament-makers,’ they would say, ‘they made the war happen. Krupps made our war.’ The German small-mine worker down the hill, my father’s friend, who had bits of shrapnel in him too, from the German Trenches, talked about the armament-makers, Krupps and the profiteers.
How strange that the words – and the idea – have dropped out of our minds. The ‘military industrial complex’ does not have the same ring, does not remind us, or make us think. When a war starts up in Africa, a pointless war, apparently, for the sake of a few acres of scrub, my parents, that generation, would have said, ‘It’s the armament-makers at it again. It’s the profiteers.’ And what has been achieved at the end of it? A few hundred dead, but millions of pounds, spent on weapons, safely lodged in somebody’s pockets.
Grocz’s pictures were of the profiteers and armament-makers, who did well out of that war.
Profiteers and armament-makers – gone from our speech and, so it seems, from our minds.
At the funeral I was too angry to listen or watch. My eyes were shut, and I was praying, if curses can be called a prayer.
My mother was exhausted and she did not quickly get over it
And so, that was that.