I wait till early summer to spring-clean so I’m moving my study, a stirring-up that invariably releases powerful methane from its swamp. Every meaningful valueless thing I own has been sorted through and removed from the pretty, bright room next to ours, with the garden below and the custard-cream scent of blooming wisteria, to a dark, unlovely corner of the top floor. It’s a study, not a viewing platform. I tell myself.
A while ago, we put a single bed in the corner of our room to tempt our youngest son from climbing into our bed when he came in at 2 o’clock every morning. And it has worked only too magnificently. Two years on, there are now three of us in this marriage. Teetering piles of Tintinbooksand Guinness World Records, inside-out trousers with inside-out pants stuck inside them, damp towels hurled across our pillows: these are the ornaments of the chamber. Returning from any nights away from home, I have to prise him from my side of the marital bed and endure thunderous looks and narrowed eyes. So the room next to ours has been cleared. Pleasing Ardizzone prints now hang on its walls, a toy train of five carriages – bearing the letters H, E, N, R and Y – stands on its mantelpiece, and a spectacular bed with plump feather pillows sits in its corner. Untouched, so far, by H, E, N, R, Y’s soft cheek.
But it’s an effortful business moving study, or it is if you do it properly. Every single piece of paper is soaked in distraction, so much thin gold on every leaf. Letters, limericks, pencil-and-paper games, orders of service from christenings, weddings and funerals. And notebooks. I’d forgotten about the notebooks – none more than half-filled – but those halves stuffed with illegible ideas for stories. As an aspiring writer since my teens, I have always scribbled down any plot idea that floated through my head. Hundreds of them. ‘Man who can hear harmonics others can’t – has all the answers and can CRACK THE CODE.’ Or rather cruelly, ‘Proud man with dwarfism inherits thriving family business – but it’s a CIRCUS’ (it was the early 1990s, you could not-get-around-to-writing all kinds of things you’d never not-get-around-to-writing now). Thank goodness sketch comedy – the original thing of shreds and patches – found me and my story fragments.
Then I started looking through various family stories my mother had compiled and found one that slapped me round the chops, initially only because it took place on 22 May – the very date I came across it– in 1940. It involved my great-uncle Conolly, who was fighting in northern France. He and a few of his fellow Irish guardsmen were in the ruins of a seafront street on the outskirts of Boulogne, trying to hold off their tiny section from the brutal German advance that was squeezing British forces along the coast towards Dunkirk (by now I’d sat down among the boxes, all sorting forgotten).They had been firing all the ammunition they could find, hoping to make it seem as if there were many more of them than the few that actually remained. Uncle Conolly was in the wreckage of a giftshop when the ammunition ran out, and in that bleak moment his eye happened to alight on one of the postcards in a broken rack amongst the rubble. It showed a picture of a smiling boy in a kilt. Conolly grabbed the postcard and stared at it: it was his son Marcus. And although he had never seen the photograph before, he knew it because he’d taken it himself in Ireland a couple of years earlier with his snazzy new Leica camera. The same snazzy Leica that had been pinched – evidently with that same roll of film still in it – when he was in Deauville later that summer. He knew then and there that he was going to survive. He did, and his actions that day – presumably stoked by such a talisman – earned him the MC. Something else I never knew.
We had our own minor brush with doom at the end of a splendidly life-affirming week in Tangier. Despite its rapid expansion, Tangier retains all its allure as a place of bohemian and unconventional tastes but they have faded, like the hint of cigar smoke and lavender in the smell of a worn sitting room, into something quite sweetly conventional. Sunday church at St Andrew’s, perched on its green hill in the city’s centre, has fuller and lustier hymn-singing than many an English parish. Veere Grenney showed us around his staggering garden and gave us beetroot sandwiches, whose blood-soaked appearance thrilled the young bed-hopper. I have often wondered what happened in a bird-strike. Ours came as we took off from Tangier, at that moment where every sinew of the aeroplane is straining and trembling, and that thrilling gearless acceleration is just lifting the wheels from the tarmac. A loud bang in the right-hand engine brought a severe slamming on of brakes and a lot of professional cheerfulness from our cabin crew. As I say, splendidly life-affirming. Although not, I fear, for the bird.
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