‘Vandals,’ grunted the cop. He kicked one of the bottles littering the lawn. ‘Local kids, for sure.’
Grandad’s place was about six hours’ drive away. Just far away enough for a day’s visit to be too short. One of those little towns with no jobs and nothing for kids. His place was a little two-bedroom weatherboard bungalow. When we had got there, bottles littered the lawn. The local cop had arrived a minute later.
‘How would they know Grandad was dead?’ asked Mum, hugging arms tightly to her body.
‘Small town like this, everyone would.’ He kicked another bottle. ‘They mix that awful local stuff with hard liquor and they’re away.’
Constable Dodd was tall, with a drooping moustache that seemed to pull his long face down. His hair was cut very close, and he was dressed in a blue police jersey and long light-blue shorts and sandals. He looked around again and passed a hand over his long moustache.
‘You’ll need to make a complaint.’ This in a voice that said plainly ‘waste of time’.
‘Is there a chance of finding them?’ I asked.
Constable Dodd turned a who-is-this-kid? look on me. ‘Sure. But bring charges? No.’
A minute later he was driving down the road.
‘Well, that’s nice,’ said Mum.
You see, the night Grandad had died, his house was broken into. Furniture overturned, drawers emptied out, some cups smashed and the mattress slashed. That hurt, the mattress he had lain on just before he’d died.
And what hurt most were the loss of his medals. The D.S.O., Distinguished Service Order, the French Croix de Guerre. They were in a cigar-box in his dresser. The cigar-box now stamped on — and empty.
The medals he had earned in the last bitter months of World War Two. A famous squadron, a last hard aerial battle — ‘dogfights’ they called them. Now some local chick had them as a gift from her boyfriend.
So Mum and I just walked through the house. We breathed in the dead, still atmosphere and looked around. In Grandad’s room the bed overturned and the mattress ripped; the musty smell of flock in the air, specks of it drifting, tickling my nose. I sneezed.
I felt angry and frustrated. I felt guilty too — some six months since I’d seen Grandad. There was always a reason not to drive those six hours. By the dresser were photos torn from their frames; the silver-mounted frames gone. One brass frame dented where someone had trodden on it.
I will find whoever did this!
Grandad. Will I ever find him?
An odd thought to have. He’d gone and I was left wondering how much I knew him. Somehow I wanted to see him again.
Those photos. One showing Grandad — he looked really like me — well he was my age then. Two other guys with him, one in a leather flying jacket, with a long black moustache, the other clean-shaven and young as Grandad was — nineteen? Standing around a huge aircraft with a four-bladed propeller. Inscription on the back: Eighty-second — Me, Nessie and Jingo.
My grandmother had died ten years before. After she died, Grandad had closed off. But when I was young, seven or eight, we’d sit at the end of the garden and he’d talk about the early days. He’d flip chocolate at me, knowing I was too young to take it all in, but still he talked — perhaps as much to himself as to me.
Mum said once that Grandad never talked about the war. Wrong: he did to me — problem was, I could not remember a damned thing.
‘Sorry Grandad,’ I said aloud.
‘Oh you’re sorry?’ I could hear his wheezy voice, the emphysema that had helped kill him. Clumping into the room, clearing his throat in that loud awful way. Hoiking before he spoke.
‘You’re sorry? Well I have more regard for those evil scumbags who trashed my house than I do for all the family and relatives who treated me like a spare tyre — a flat spare tyre.’
‘Not fair, Grandad,’ I muttered.
Not quite fair. My mum did, second marriage and all. But they had always been at arm’s length. Grandad hoiked again, spitting a yellow bullet of phlegm across the room.
‘Think you’re put upon? Well you try Europe in ’45, one bloody big killing mess. Jeeze, the bacon —’
‘Grandad —’
‘Don’t interrupt. Lemme tell you how it started.’
So the afternoon shadows deepened and he sat there. It was getting darker, and his voice croaked just like it did at the end of the garden. I was listening with a mix of real and unreal horror as his voice drew me back across those sixty-odd years. Making their own pictures and reality.
London. A knocked-about and thoroughly battered old lady of cities. Early September, 1944, lots of rain washing the whole place grey, grey pale civilians in grey raincoats. Those black bowler hats. The rations were bugger-all: I got one decent steak meal in London and that was horsemeat.
And on a collapsed wall, white sloppy letters of paint. LONDON CAN TAKE IT. That was right.
London had taken it. Daylight bombing, night bombing, a big number earlier that year. Flying bombs, thousands of them. They made a sound like an old coffee percolator, and if it cut out overhead, you were for it. Two thousand pounds of high explosive, take out every damn thing in a twenty-five-yard radius.
Then the V-2s, real rockets. Shot up into the stratosphere and down again and they’d take out a whole city block, no trouble. So the shift was on to push Jerry beyond the firing ranges. But he was still full of fight and making us pay in blood for every bloody inch.
And uniforms from everywhere. Canada, America, Brazil, us, the Aussies, whole damn Commonwealth. Every shade of skin from everywhere under the sun. Free Corps from every damned country in Europe.
We were trained up, genned, just outside London. A crash-course on the new Tempest fighter-bomber — yes and the latest data on the new German wonder-weapons. Gimmicks, said the instructor, just to boost German morale.
Gimmicks? Yeah, we’d find out about those gimmicks.
New Zealand-born, but me, Mum and Dad went over in ’36, living in Croydon with little sharp-nosed bi-planes flying over every day. Then the monoplanes doing loops and rolls. So I hung around the airfield, taking it all in and wanting to be a pilot.
Not just a pilot — an Ace. Five enemy planes shot down makes you an Ace. So it was the Air Force when I turned eighteen, I was young and gong-happy. And I had a score to settle: Mum and Dad had copped it from some bloody Jerry who had let his bomb-load out too soon. I’d watched the dogfights scribbling white lines on the blue sky. We kids would collect shrapnel, a nose-cap was a real find.
Yes and those awful little incendiaries. Each day we kids had to line the sportsfields and check for them. They left little brown holes in the grass, we had to stick our fingers in — hell, what was I talking about?
Anyway, when I got into the war, we all thought it was nearly over. D-Day, the Courland Pocket, Jerry was on the run. Well I wanted to be an Ace; I wanted those gongs because I had seen what was left of Mum and Dad when that bomb hit them. I wanted to get back at the bastards who did that. That’s all I wanted, from the moment they dug me out of the ruins and I woke up in hospital.
I was in a hurry because everyone figured the war was nearly over, ending Christmas 1944.
Well everyone was bloody wrong, including me. There were bloody long months ahead and there was Jingo —
‘Matt?’
My mum’s voice. I jerked my head up. Grandad’s last words were an echo and it was nearly dark outside. I sat up, looking at the chair opposite, empty.
‘Matt?’
‘Mum?’
My neck was shooting with pain because I had slept at an odd angle to the bedstead. Mum’d come in earlier, seen me asleep and gone out for groceries.
Asleep. No, I was talking to Grandad.
Or was I? I rubbed my neck and followed her out into the kitchen, where a ton of groceries was piled on the table and Mum was talking in a bright fluttering voice, ending with words that chilled me to the core.
‘And … ah Matt … favour to ask.’
Oh hell. The light way she said this made it a huge favour. That spooky dream of the afternoon still rang strong and clear in my mind. I felt a chill.
‘Matt, we were going to go back home tonight. But, you know, what with the vandalism, would you mind staying on here?’
She was feeling guilty and so was I. And neither of us wanted the house revisited again by hoodlums, so I said yes.
Hugging herself tightly again — because every smart kid knows the body language of his parents — I could see she didn’t want to stay. She was hurting; that special hurt of asking Did I do enough? The deep hurt of distance that she now magnified into neglect — just as I had. It wasn’t right because she’s a good person and Dad couldn’t be there, some marketing thing had blown up that he had to deal with. So I nodded, and it was worth it to see a smile.
Grandad’s empty chair somehow mocked me, and my head was full of questions and secrets. It didn’t help to know I was here for the night.
It would be a long night, in this silent empty house.