In My Father’s House

As a child, I used to pray, deep into my pillow, that my father would die. I never had such violent feelings about my mother. The only part she played in my fantasies of paternal obliteration was that I wanted her to marry a more glamorous man.

A portrait of my mother, red-haired and slender in a wedding-dress of oyster satin, with the archaic smile favoured by Botticelli lending a curve to her cheeks, was painted a year after her marriage. It hangs in one of the rooms of the House that is always shown to visitors. Below the painting stands a framed photograph of the artist, Anthony Devas. Strangers, drawing the obvious conclusion, have often asked if the photograph is of my father. I told them, until I reached my teens and acquired a conscience, that it was. I liked to bask in their admiration of the artist’s handsome face and to hear them find some faint resemblance to my own. I liked to think it might be so, that my newly married mother had conducted a secret affair, of which I was the unacknowledged product.

‘Anthony? He was wonderful-looking. Just like the photograph. He painted that picture of me at his studio in Chelsea. He used to take me to lunch afterwards, somewhere in Sloane Street. Augustus sometimes came along. It was all such fun.’

I stare at her, dazzled by this easy jump into the past. ‘Augustus John? You never told me that before. What did you talk about? Did he try anything?’

She smooths the bright cover of her book with a gardener’s hands, square and strong. ‘Who, Augustus? I’m not sure he would have dared, not after he fell out with Mummy about the picture he did of her, the one she didn’t like. I did know him already, of course. He came and drew us all at Chirk, in the war.’

My mother has grown lively. Her book forgotten, she’s ready for a chat about life in the Welsh castle where she grew up. ‘Are you writing about Chirk yet? I was thinking – there’s so much I ought to tell you. Are you going to say anything about when Kipling came to stay with us, and Shaw? And you mustn’t forget about Chesterton and Belloc!’

I’ll have to remind her that this is not to be a book about her family, but her husband. ‘I haven’t reached Chirk. He’s only just left Winchester.’

‘Better hurry up, if you want my memories,’ she calls after my retreating back. ‘I won’t be here for ever.’

I’m suddenly full of the wish that she might be just that. It’s taken all of the ten years since my father’s death for my mother to blossom back to brightness as she emerges from the emotional bolthole in which she buried herself in order to survive. I used to hope only that her death should be merciful, quick as a blink or a dropped stitch. Now, I can’t imagine life without her. I want her never to die.

I chose Anthony Devas for my imaginary father because he looked so attractive. I also chose him because he looked, even with a paintbrush in his hand instead of a sword or a gun, as though he could play a military hero; my father did not. As a grown woman who has fallen in love with the House and its history, I’m ready to admire the tenacity with which George Seymour pursued his grand obsession; as a small girl, observing him with a hard judgmental eye, I saw unmanliness in my father’s caprices and fits of petulance. I noted and disliked his readiness to use emotion to score a victory.

The fathers I admired never cried. Not in public. They were bluff, capable men who lived up to their military titles. One girlfriend acquired at boarding school was dear to me less for herself than for her father, a nobly moustached colonel with a crop of thick white hair and long cheeks striped pink by desert suns. I liked his tales of war. I winced when his wife shouted at him for boring the child stiff, my dear. She’s heard it already. We all have. So we had, but never often enough. I wanted to take this old warrior for myself, to be the privileged recorder of his valiant deeds. If he could only be my father! (Once, while he was teaching me how to tack a sailing-boat across a small river near their family home, I found the courage to whisper my secret wish; the colonel answered by giving me a complicated set of instructions to keep me busy until we moored and went ashore for lunch. At which point, kindly patting me on the shoulder, man to man, he said that he was going to forget anything I might wish I hadn’t said. ‘But I do—’ He strode ahead of me, letting the garden gate swing shut behind him.)

My love for the colonel was heightened by the fact that he and his family lived in a cheerily modern house on a town street. The house was in no way conspicuous. It was neither pretty nor ugly. It represented all that I wished for, at an age when nothing about a journey to London appealed to me so much as a drive through the cosily interchangeable streets of Mill Hill and Hendon and Finchley. There was such comfort in conformity when I was a child, in the Fifties, such danger in being perceived as different. I didn’t, dear parents, mean to annoy you when I prayed to live in a house just like the one near the local garage, where a dressmaker worked at a sewing machine in the front window, seated in a theatre set of white lace curtains pulled back with red silk cords. Her pocket-sized lawn was bordered by pink and white flowers; her front door was picked out in contrasting tones of cerise and powder pink. I loved her home. I wanted nothing to do with a monster house filled with creaks and ghosts and pictures with censorious eyes. I longed to shrink our singularity to the colours of an entrance door or to the choice of which tree, flowering cherry or weeping ash, should throw a shadow-cloak over the pavement.

I know why I craved a soldierly father, and why I wanted to be part of that world of reassuring sameness. I don’t know why or precisely when I began to wish my father dead. The urgency with which I muttered my secret prayer, night after night, still causes me to feel guilt. My mother doesn’t find it strange.

‘Children do find it easy to wish their parents dead; it’s not just you. I often thought like that about my mother, you know. It’s not a crime.’

The incident was sparked by some private grief of his in which I, a little girl with fine, mouse-brown hair held back by an ‘Alice’ band, had no share; my memory is only of the shocking spectacle of a grown man crying. He wanted, he said, to kill himself; all reason for wishing to live had gone. Sitting beside him, I looked sideways at his bent head and the tears falling on to his knees. Sobs blocked my throat when he told me that we would all be happy when he was dead. How could he think such a terrible thing? Weeping, I flung my arms around his neck and hugged him, rubbing my cheek against his. Too young to understand that the atmosphere of drama thickening the air was meat and drink to a nature such as his, I agreed to the pact on which, still sobbing, he insisted. If he promised to do himself no injury, I, too, must swear never to make an attempt on my life.

That set me off. I only had to picture my body, stiff and cold as a starched shirt, to feel emotion swelling to hysteria.

Tenderly, he stroked my hair. ‘You and I are too alike, my darling. We feel these things so much.’

‘I won’t. I’ll never – I swear it! But don’t – please don’t.’ I couldn’t speak the words. Carefully, he mopped my blotched cheeks with a freshly pressed handkerchief smelling of limes; gravely, we shook hands on our agreement. I went to bed tearful but exalted. It’s not often a girl of nine gets to save her father’s life.

Readers will spot the flaw: if I wished him dead, I should have welcomed this unexpected answer to my prayer. But suicide comes under another heading; the word, even to a child, is heavy with horror. Suicides, in the myths and folktales on which I feasted during raids upon the tall nursery bookcase, were among the damned, buried at crossroads, forbidden to lie in churchyards. I could wish my father dead by accident. I could not wish that he should take his life.

My father was in the best of spirits the following day. When I asked, a little reproachfully, how he was feeling, he looked surprised. The moment at which I lost respect for him was the one in which I saw that he had no idea what I was talking about. It was all words.

In fact, as I came to understand, my father placed a high value on his life. To approach him with a cold or cough was an act of unforgivable selfishness; to feed him with a dish which threatened to play havoc with his capricious stomach was tantamount to threatening him with murder. Far from killing himself, my father would have been happy to provide the reasons why he, of us all, should be spared. How could we get on without him? Who but he was indispensable to the survival of the House?

An old-fashioned phrase slides into my head. You wouldn’t want to be in a trench with—

‘You’re being unfair,’ my mother says. ‘He never had the chance to fight. We don’t know how he would have behaved.’

She shakes her head. I’m not going to win her assent to this. But I wouldn’t have cared to be with my father in a situation where one life had to be sacrificed. It wouldn’t be his.

Even as a child, I knew that the war was a bad subject. He was happy to play us a crackling record of Churchill’s speeches to the nation, but direct questions were never welcome. The closest I came to knowing what part he had played in his country’s defence was the clipped information that he had been ill. I heard my mother describe how a bad-tempered sergeant made her scrub canteen floors with a sanitary towel; from my father, I heard not a word. No word of the bombs, of the Blitz, or the dead: nothing.

The same hunger to conform that made me yearn for a small suburban home fuelled my longing for a father with a military record of which I could boast. It mattered, in the Fifties. Memories of war were close; the recent past was as rich with action as a storybook. Heroes had fought at Dunkirk, endured starvation and torture in prison camps, come home with medals and rank that paid tribute to their courage. But if it depressed a myth-fed child to learn that her father had spent his war years working in a provincial bank, how much more humiliation must it have caused to him?

This was the error I made. It was true that my father was not physically courageous. However, since he never was put to the test, why should I assume that he lacked the moral fibre to act with honour? Faith to do your duty was his family motto: given the chance, mightn’t he have acted on it?

My mother has unearthed an old photograph that she thinks will interest me. It shows two young men in army uniform. These are my father’s first cousins, Lord Euston and his brother, Oliver FitzRoy, and the picture was taken late in 1943. The wistful look in their eyes may have something to do with the fact that they lost their mother when they were children, or with the more recent loss of a much-loved stepmother. Only a month has passed since then, and their lonely father has already chosen her successor. Their future feels threatened.

Hugh, the older of the two brothers, is about to set off for India with the Grenadiers. As the son of a duke, he’s due to be given an interesting time, on the staff of the viceroy. Oliver, the boy my father thought of as his soulmate, looks too young to be tested in the skills of leadership. His is a sweet face, soft, but guarded. He, too, has just joined the Grenadiers. In a year’s time, he’ll be sent out to fight in France.

Hugh Euston (later eleventh Duke of Grafton) and his younger brother, (my father’s idol) Oliver FitzRoy, in 1943.

I like these studio photographs. There’s another in this folder of Leo, my father’s older brother, also serving as a Grenadier. Alex, his sister, is giggling at the camera on the day after her engagement in 1939. She’s twenty-five, and glad to be settling down in Norfolk with a tall, agreeable young officer whose poor sight has spared him from being sent abroad on active service.

Caring for Alex through her first pregnancy gave my grandmother a reason to stay out of bomb-blasted London in the first months of the war. Dick Seymour, staying on alone at the tall red house in Evelyn Gardens, took new life from the sense of constant danger. Telling his wife about his daily walk to ‘the club’ in Carlton House Terrace, he joked about the plane fights overhead, the falling bombs, the roar of defending guns firing up from the backs of lorries along the borders of Hyde Park and Piccadilly. ‘You know how I hate agitations before breakfast,’ he wrote, with an almost visible twirl of his umbrella at the impertinent Italian pilots he longed to see brought down.

For the first time in his life, Dick Seymour and his mother were enjoying a state of mutual admiration. Lady Portsea was impressed by her son’s jaunty indifference to danger, and grateful for the regularity of his visits to her home in Eaton Square. He, in his turn, took pride in the old lady who, during some of the worst months of bombing raids, still climbed into her black Victoria carriage for a daily afternoon outing. The renaming of her two coach-horses was her only concession to an altered life: Fred and Ginger had become Churchill and Sarah.

Lady Portsea had always doted on her grandson. His announcement, in the autumn of 1940, that he intended to take on one of the Thrumpton farms, won instant support. ‘I love to think of you at work on the land – Mother Nature rewards those who cultivate and care for her,’ she wrote on paper newly topped with a coronet. (I think I know whom to blame for my father’s inordinate love of crests and coats-of-arms.)

Dick Seymour was less sanguine. ‘I can’t understand how George can be so foolish,’ he wrote to his wife. He was disappointed already that their son had shown no wish to follow his FitzRoy cousins to Cambridge and take a degree; couldn’t the boy at least be persuaded to take a course in land agency and learn how to make a living at a richer man’s expense? Perhaps a job could be found for him at Ragley Hall, home to the head of the Seymour clan, or even at Euston, if Vita was willing to raise the idea with her brother, the Duke?

Dick, it is clear, had failed to grasp what was obvious to the women of the family. George, after leaving Winchester in the summer of 1940, had sped like a homing pigeon to the House he loved and which Charlie Byron was encouraging him to look on as his heritage. University had never interested him – few men could use the words ‘clever’ and ‘intellectual’ with such complete disdain. He had no wish to be employed at Ragley, Euston, or anywhere else; his plans for the future did not extend beyond the boundaries of his uncle’s estate. When it was explained to him that a seventeen-year-old, with no experience of land management, could not be given a farm for free, he simply lowered his sights and proposed to work for one of the Thrumpton village tenants. Harvesting, and planting sugar-beet, the principal victory crop in the Midlands, required no special skills; a boy who was known to be Lord Byron’s nephew was unlikely to be overworked or ill-treated.

Nobody who knew my father ever doubted that he had a will of steel. This was his first chance to use it. He got his way.

‘No need to sneer,’ says my mother. ‘The farms were fearfully shorthanded during the war. He was being useful. And, besides, what else could he have done?’

‘Your father! Leave Thrumpton to help run somebody else’s estate? Can you imagine?’

Slight though the remaining evidence is of my father’s year of working on the land, the effect on him was profound. Bombs fell on Derby, Nottingham and neighbouring fields; another hit the local electricity station and blew out all the windows of Clifton Hall, the nearest big house. At Thrumpton, the only evidence of war was the placing of a searchlight on the hill and a request from the local shepherd to bring his flock down to lower pastureland. Every Friday, faces scrubbed, boots polished with spit, the farm tenants walked up to the Hall to pay their rent; every evening, when his work was done, my father walked through the park and back, with the sun dazzling his eyes, towards the House. He knew, by now, the name of every mound, copse and corner of the land on which it stood; the threat of devastation heightened its value as a precious commodity. Writing to his parents, his prose quickened with love whenever he turned to the subject of the House and the landscape:

Dear Thrumpton. The moon was full last night. I went for a walk by the lake and spent an hour down by the willows looking at the House. I pray no harm will come to it.

Action could not be put off for ever. In May 1941, George put his name forward for a commission in the Motor Battalions. The Byrons, dismayed at the prospect of losing the company of such a willing and solicitous nephew, grew fretful. What would they do without George to run their errands, act as their chauffeur, keep them entertained? Old Lady Portsea, picking window-glass off the staircarpet after a bomb flattened the house next door to her own, sent blessings to her grandson and congratulated him on having chosen to join the 60th (the King’s Royal Rifle Corps). Did he know, she wondered, that two of his Seymour forebears had joined the 60th and fought in the Transvaal? Prudently, she omitted to add that they had both been killed.

George had left Winchester, with a glad heart, in July 1940. In August 1941, he learned with dismay that he was to be drafted back there for his first spell of military training. Bushfield Camp lay west of Winchester, on the Hursley road. Tracking it down in the summer of 2003, I found the way to an empty hillside blocked by an iron farm gate. Beyond it, a derelict track climbed towards the square silhouette of a sentry box; on the gate, the warning sign was plain: Keep Out. Arrogance is one of the vices I have inherited from my father; such restrictions apply to other people, not to us. Like him, I expect a volley of cheap charm to rescue me if caught in the act. (‘It’s your land? I’m most dreadfully sorry! But what a wonderful place!’ Parroting the lines, I can hear his own suave drawl.) I climbed the gate and sauntered up the hill.

Bushfield Camp, according to local information, is a site ready for development for housing, or a leisure centre, or a car park. At present, it’s abandoned. The neat grid of roads that once marked out the camp’s boundaries is just visible between steep banks that, in high summer, are smothered with wild flowers. Bees hum; a small plane drones in the distance; otherwise, there isn’t a sound. A rusty sink juts up from a clump of mallow and tansy. The bolted metal doors that block my entry to abandoned buildings are scrawled with messages. Nothing sinister: Ellie loves Paul; John wants a blowjob; Marie thinks John should fuck off.

Standing on the windless hilltop, I try to imagine my father here in 1941, an underweight and – I’ll guess – sexually inexperienced eighteen-year-old with the mannerisms and attitudes of an elderly country squire. Was he conscious, as I am, of the irony of his topographical situation at Bushfield? I hadn’t, until my visit, realised that he was placed exactly between his two lives, the schoolboy, and the snob. On the left, lay Winchester; on the right, lay Hursley, one of the houses to which his grand connections had provided an introduction. In 1935, he boasted to his mother of his lunch out at Sir George Cooper’s home. He had been given a splendid meal, allowed to admire a set of Gobelin tapestries made for Madame de Pompadour, and taken into a magnificent ballroom designed by Sir Joseph Duveen. By 1941, however, Sir George was dead, his widow banished to a farmhouse after Vickers Aircraft took over the estate as their headquarters for Spitfire development. Did my father revisit Hursley from Bushfield Camp, I wonder? Did he see how they had daubed the Chinese silk wall hangings with a thick layer of grey paint, turned the linen store into a lab and the dancing room into a factory? (Dear Thrumpton . . . I pray no harm will come to it.) The fate of houses such as Hursley must have pierced his heart.

The record of what my father actually did during his brief spell at camp is minimal. His diary shows that he underwent drill from six in the morning until four in the afternoon, with a break for lunch. He was then at liberty to do as he pleased, to visit relations, wander around Winchester, or spend the evening with John Persse, a former schoolchum who was also at the camp.

Persse, a horse-loving, unbookish young man whose family lived nearby, thrived on his time at Bushfield; my father was wretched. It was, he lamented to his parents after five days at the camp, ‘a frightfully hard life’. Paying a visit to sympathetic elderly relatives who knew how strings could be pulled, he told tales of loneliness, bad food and a sadistic insistence on rigorous exercise. The relatives promised to do what they could: two weeks later, George was released, to spend a month of sick leave at Thrumpton. No record survives to tell me how he felt, after a spell of successful grouse-shooting in Scotland, about being tersely ordered to return to military duties at the end of September.

‘Pneumonia,’ my mother says briskly when I ask what ended my father’s brief army career a year later. She frowns, doing her best to remember what she was told. ‘Did they give him the wrong pills? Something like that.’

‘He never mentioned anything about a driving accident? Before the pneumonia?’

‘An accident?’ And she looks so blank that I know she’s telling the truth. ‘Oh no, darling, he never had an accident. You know what a good driver your father was.’

My father was a fast driver but not, until the last months of his life, a reckless one. He prided himself on the speed of his reactions. He was pitiless in his contempt for any guest who failed to stay on his tail during a nerve-testing dash to some social occasion for which punctuality stood high above kindness. (‘Where on earth has he got to? We’re five minutes late! My God, that friend of yours is so slow!’)

Given his attitude, it is unlikely that he would admit to having crashed an army vehicle shortly after his return to Bushfield Camp. His family, while sympathetic, were plainly uncertain of the details; George may not have been in a hurry to provide them. His first request was that he might be sent to Thrumpton for his convalescence; instead, he was despatched to the new military hospital at St Hugh’s in Oxford, to be treated for concussion and head wounds. On 12 December 1941, he was moved again, to spend two months at Middleton Park, a country house newly built by Edwin Lutyens and handed over by its owner, Lord Jersey, for wartime use by patients with head injuries.

Middleton Park, its claustrophobic teak and marble interior contrasting strangely with the façade of an eighteenth-century chateau, cannot be viewed as one of Lutyens’ happiest achievements. My father loathed the house, taking comfort only in the survival of an unrestored family chapel in the park, and of a peaceful library in which to keep up his correspondence.

Two days after his arrival at Middleton Park, my father sent what he considered disturbing information to, of all inappropriate people, Charlie Byron’s underpaid deputy butler, a boy of twenty. Bursting with indignation, George revealed that he was being forced to share a bedroom at Middleton Park with communists (the deduction was drawn from the fact that two of his fellow patients had been complaining that workmen deserved better rates of pay). The next step would be revolution; Lord Byron had better prepare himself to be hanged from a lamp-post when he next left home. In the meantime, he, George, intended to do what he could to help these idiots to appreciate the selfishness of their attitude, and the importance, while the country was at war, of preserving tradition and loyalty!

My father expected his correspondents to be prompt – he did not expect them to dispute his opinions. A round, laborious hand suggests that James Hopkins was not especially well-educated; the tone of his letter suggests that my father had chosen the wrong man with whom to share his alarm. Perhaps, Mr Hopkins wrote, my father was unaware of how hard life was for those less privileged than himself? Nobody wanted to assassinate the aristocracy or to be paid above their merits; it was simply the case that society needed to change. The war must be hard on men like my father, Hopkins added kindly, but perhaps this convalescence would prove a real blessing, a chance to listen to people who could open his mind and broaden his views. Hopkins ended this candid and surely unwelcome letter with the news that he was leaving Lord Byron’s service to sign up.

My father, for once, did not reply. A few months later, James Hopkins was killed in action.

The only other surviving evidence of my father’s stay at Middleton Park is a spectacularly hideous rug: lime green was, to his annoyance, the only available shade of wool. His diligence in creating this monstrosity was fuelled by zeal: by showing the so-called communists a representation of his beloved Thrumpton, he hoped to soften and humanise these misguided men. His scheme was disclosed in his diary. The results were not recorded.

My father returned to duty at Bushfield in May 1942. Two weeks later, he caught pneumonia and was sent back to St Hugh’s, Oxford. His condition was serious; the fact that he failed to attend the funeral of Lady Portsea confirms it. She had been, with the exception of his mother, his favourite relative.

Family affection always came second to his love of the House. When George was released from St Hugh’s, he accepted an invitation from Charlie Byron to complete his convalescence at Thrumpton. The proposal was not without self-interest; gardeners were hard to find in wartime and George, while never athletic, could be relied on to help keep the lawn smooth with an iron roller. Resourcefully, my father found a donkey to pull the roller while he lay stretched out in a cane chair, describing an idyllic summer in long, minutely detailed letters to his mother in Norfolk.

Three months at Thrumpton were enough to make even my languid father impatient for a recall to duty; it came in September, when he was ordered to join a training camp near York. The discipline here was harsher than at Bushfield; four days after his arrival, my father fainted on parade. Despatched to the local military hospital for inspection, he was diagnosed as suffering from ‘effort syndrome’. The specialist was not impressed by either his physique or his attitude to being drilled (my father loathed all forms of team activity, and reacted accordingly). Writing his report, the specialist offered a personal opinion: this N.C.O. would never be passed as fit for action. He urged that the young man should be discharged immediately or transferred to an office post.

Clerical work offered no appeal; George wrote to give his parents the news that he was leaving the army. He begged them not to intercede, or to pull strings; what was done was done. ‘I can’t help but feel pretty depressed,’ he admitted. He had no idea as to what he should do next.

My father’s despair sounds authentic; nevertheless, I feel dissatisfied. The specialist’s report has survived. It states that he was incapable of strenuous exercise; in the diaries, however, he recorded his cycling trips. During the early part of September, while he was still at Thrumpton, he had been notching up as much as forty miles a day. More tellingly, a letter from one of his Winchester classmates, Philip Parr, congratulated him on the good fortune of his escape, ‘knowing you loathe the army as much as I do.’ (Philip wasn’t so lucky; he was killed on service in Greece the following summer.)

‘Effort syndrome’ sounds like a bad joke. When I investigate, it turns out to be a new name for the condition known as ‘soldier’s heart’. First observed in the American Civil War, this was brought on by stressful situations. Soldiers on the Western Front suffered from it; so, later, did those serving in Vietnam and the Gulf War. But there’s a difference. These men were on active service, living under the daily threat of death. My father’s effort syndrome was a response to the unpleasant, but far from dangerous, routine of daily drill.

‘I won’t have you saying your father was a coward,’ my mother says with the fierce loyalty that can still take me by surprise, given all that she has endured. ‘He probably got on the wrong side of his drill sergeant. And you know he hadn’t been well.’

‘Then why didn’t he take a desk job? He had a good brain. Couldn’t he have worked for the Ministry of Information, or at Bletchley?’

But I’ve lost my mother’s sympathy. Crossly, she reminds me how poorly I always did at team sports. ‘Just like him, you see. I keep telling you so.’

‘I had bad eyesight.’ My voice is sharp and defensive; I hate being reminded of my unhappy schooldays. ‘And it was a completely different situation. There wasn’t a war going on.’

This opens the way for my mother to remind me, not for the first time, that I haven’t the slightest idea of how it felt to be at war, or to experience training drill. ‘You’re determined to show him in a bad light,’ she says. ‘And he can’t answer back.’

This is the first of our discussions that has ended in disagreement. My mother, who carried on as a hard-working member of the ATS, even after suffering a nervous breakdown, doesn’t want to accept that she married somebody less courageous than herself. Pneumonia had seemed a respectable reason for a discharge; the idea that George suffered from this absurdly named ‘effort syndrome’ is an embarrassment.

I look at the surviving evidence once more. If he had failed to make a complete recovery, how was he able to go on those cycling trips? If he felt as mortified as his letter to his parents suggests, why was he ready to spend the first weekend after his discharge in a jolly Yorkshire houseparty, eating like a horse and going on long walks? And what about the letter congratulating him on a lucky escape, ‘knowing you loathe the army as much as I do’?

Looking at that letter once again, I wonder if it is open to a different interpretation. Was Philip Parr doing his best to make my father feel better about a situation they both understood to be profoundly humiliating? I may do better to stop being censorious, and consider the effect that his discharge might have had on my father. A combination of bad nerves and ill-health bought him a ticket to safety, but the price, in terms of guilt, must have been immense. How can it feel to know that your contemporaries are risking their lives while yours has been spared? How can it feel to read of their deaths?

Who am I, searching for an explanation of the wound in his heart, to say that my father didn’t suffer when he was told to go home?