What I Know I Cannot Say Read online

  There were – straight across the mangled jumble of brick and steel and concrete that had been the heart of Cassino – about fifty yards to join up with the Kiwis. They would have to break cover and run and hope to avoid more friendly fire as much as any enemy bullets. He told Nipper and Lofty to shoulder their rifles and run with the officer held between them the moment he opened up with his rifle, aiming high and sightlessly to his right. When they were over where the square had once been, they were to stop in the lee of the post office ruin and shoot as he had done, non-stop to their left, whilst he, in turn, broke cover. He began to fire indiscriminately, and was surprised that the Germans hesitated before returning fire into the hotel they knew was theirs.

  More than halfway across, while they were scrambling and trawling the boy along with them, Nipper screamed and fell. Lofty dropped the officer and grabbed at Nipper. He pulled his friend with him, the smaller man’s leg grazed by a sniper’s shot, half-lifted him and dragged him until they reached – together – a standing pine-end wall, and collapsed – together – behind it. It was then that Lofty shouted back that Lah-di-dah had copped it and that it was every man for his fuckin’ self now, Taff, and so long.

  * * * * *

  When he opened his eyes and shielded them with his coupled hands against the blinding glare of the sun, it was to see Nipper kicking at the upturned soles of his own bootless feet. All around soldiers were out cold or staggering about, their eyes as flat and as empty as of those with battle fatigue, and they had all been to that place without horizons; but this time just because dead-drunk, and still standing. Quick, Taffy, quick, Nipper was saying, pulling at his arm. He sat up and shrugged him off. Nipper was screaming: You gotta help, Taffy, the other buggers are too pissed. He was pointing wildly at the middle vat of fermenting alcohol. Lofty’s fallen in, Taff, he said. He’s sinking, or something, he said. He’s drunk, he said. He said he’d climbed the ladder and that Lofty was gasping, choking, the silly bugger, fell in, didn’t he, or something and listen Taff, you cunt, we gotta pull him out. Nipper stopped. I can’t swim, you Welsh bastard. I can’t swim, Nipper said. I can’t do it myself, he said. I’ve fuckin’ tried. Lofty needs help, he said, and these useless twats are no use to anybody, arseholed they are, he said. So come, Taff, quick he said, be a pal, Taffy. He stared at Nipper and he lay back down. He closed his eyes on all the ruins of his life for what he half- hoped might be one last time. He saw again the boy face down in a rain-filled puddle in the small crater of the rubble strewn street where Lofty had dropped him. Nipper was saying, quietly now: Please Taff, please, he’ll fuckin’ drown otherwise, won’t he?

  “I fucking hope so, Nipper,” he said. “I fucking hope so.”

  AND AFTER THE WAR, WHAT HAVE WE LOST? HAVE WE GAINED ANYTHING? DID YOU?

  Oh, I gained all right. Everything. And we all lost, didn’t we? For me, though, it was a balance sheet on which my biggest gain was wiped out. You know that. Billy will have told you. You will have seen it. I could feel your sense of my loss. I said nothing, you were too young for that; and besides, I was a kind of curiosity to you, wasn’t I? And if I’d said, to either of you, that it wasn’t only about Mona not being there, you’d have thought it cold in me, or worse. It wasn’t. It isn’t. It’s what Mona did to me as much as for me that, almost in spite of myself, has made me live on within my despair. She’d made me feel for things: what people did, who they were, why anything mattered. Not just seeing things happen just because they did. That life passed and I could do no more than acknowledge it. The way it had been for me, and nothing more than that since I was a kid.

  After I met Mona, though slowly, I’ll grant you, my life supports of anger and oblivion weren’t enough anymore. I think I resented her for making me face that. I hadn’t wanted a future life, just to stretch out the present one as far it’d go without snapping. She made me uncertain, think of letting go, risk letting how we lived now shape the past that was already upon us. Mona didn’t teach any of this to me. She spelled nothing out for me. It was the way she lived. I would now call it love, but not as a sentiment. It was more than a single thing. And the love, the sentiment I soon felt for her, was lessened by the real gift she gave me, the one she left me to live with and suffer from. It was to love more than her, or us: to want to reach further than any of us on our own can ever do. Mostly I have failed. Perhaps, as I once thought, the failure has been widespread. Nye Bevan, just before he died, told a close friend that history had given us, that particular working class, our chance, and that we hadn’t taken it. I’m no longer so sure of that, of either end of it. What I do know is that the gift cannot be returned. If you take it, you keep it.

  The other thing to say is that in those first years after the war it had, for some of the time in some places for some people, all come together. That, I think, is what Bevan meant. The moment. The chance. What had become possible. Of course, some of that feeling, as a supposition, is retrospective, whether as romanticised or evidenced or both. But not completely so. We were teetering on a brink of who we were and might yet be. I was one of those who didn’t know this. Not straightaway. And knowledge too often and too readily follows the event, unless it manages to usher in power. That was the debate those who really did know, like Bevan, were trying to lead and influence.

  Me, I had just drifted back. Homing pigeon instincts, perhaps, or more like good money calling out to experienced colliers, with the actual work no fright for me and no better prospects before me. I worked in deeper and more mechanised pits, and when I was not slogging at the coal I was sleeping or getting pissed. The pubs were crammed afternoon and night with men crowding up to the bar, no comfort to be had, squabbling over emptied pints since glass was a scarce commodity and someone might nick unseen the one you wanted to fill up again with smelly, local beer, weak as the proverbial piss, of which you’d need a gallon to sink you back to sleep so that you could go again. And again.

  It took me nearly three years to get clear of all that; to finally let what had been go. I was bored with being like that, and with myself as well. Life under socialism, in the pits under nationalisation after 1947, was not, in the day-to-day living of it, much different than it had been before the war. You’ll read that in some ways it was worse: the rationing, the putting up with shortages, the cold of the coldest winters of the century, the drabness. But, you know, that was only at a remove for us, where we were and how we lived. With work and steady wages we were – together, mind – already in a better place. And if you were there, you could, as well and strange as it might sound, put your finger on a bloody-mindedness which we’d brought back from the war. People knew they’d won something more than a war. It wasn’t just who was in power, believe me. It didn’t last, I know, and that’s my other point – but for a while it was a real, almost tangible thing. It penetrated. It led me to meet Mona.

  I was put to work on a heading underground, with her uncle, an older chap and lifelong bachelor. He was the Lodge Sec. as well. Always badgering me about the Fed – the NUM as we were from 1946, membership compulsory now – and politics, of course, though I had cloth ears for all that. But he never stopped going on at me. Finding a way to get to me. Then, once, when we had a spell for snap, he said he’d seen me with a notebook, sketching, he said, so I told him I liked to draw and showed him a few things. He said I should go to an art class, run locally by the WEA: Workers’ Educational Association, he said, as if I’d ever heard of it. He said I’d get to use oil paints, on canvas, learn techniques. Well, I never did; not there, though I did pitch up a few times. It was all art history, really, a bit po-faced and respectful, a university type; nice enough, but a bit wet. Still, he pointed me in the way of what they called a settlement, a bus ride away, and there I was let loose to paint and draw and look. Later there were other classes, and then art college. That came after I met Mona, but, see, it was not politics that took me to her, it was the way Isaac Prothero had dressed it up for me and it readied me for change.

 
; Look, there was no conversion or anything. My outlook was being jumbled up, is all. I’m not sure I was exactly happy about it. I stayed surly. From the off she treated me as if I was busted, broken. It was more that I was still indifferent to anything beyond the immediate – what passed for appetite. I saw her like that. And she let me, but only because she saw I knew no different. It took time. Once, early on in our marriage, she cried. I made her cry. I was so angry about her tears. I hadn’t understood how they had come. I told her she was soft, being daft; that it was a pointless weeping, that she should grow up and know better. She looked up at me, brushing at the wetness on her face, and it was in a kind of despair at the way this was, and as if I was to be both pitied and hated. I said it was pathetic and that I despised sentimentality. That it was a weakness. The incident was a small one, but it was not petty, and I have never stopped regretting how I was with her that day.

  I’d come home from an afternoon shift, washed clean in the new pithead baths. Bone-tired, but wanting to be with her, together alone as we were then. Mona would have been home from the primary school where she taught an hour or so before me. I found her at the table in our back kitchen. There was an old shoe box on the table. She was bent over it. Mona was fussing over a small bird she’d placed in the box, trying to coax it to dip its beak into a saucer of milk. The wren kept toppling from side to side in the box. It made gaspy, choking sounds. She said she’d found it, hopping and falling, in the back yard. That it was distressed. She’d picked it up, cradled it in her hands, and brought it inside. “Look,” she’d said, “it’s got some wire or something stuck in its beak.” I looked, irritated by the care lavished on this hopeless bird. I picked it up. The wire it had swallowed was some unravelled copper cable. It would not tug out. I said the bird would die like this, so better to see it dead soon. That cosseting it was a waste of time. Mona began to cry. I talked harshly, and said things not to be said to those who can love. I was not capable of love like Mona was. I had not yet come to know how to find myself by losing myself in another. By the time I lost her I can say that I had come to know that, and what it was that I was losing. As I say, Bran, there is more to it than this, and for all of us; but it starts from within us or it does not start at all. This cannot be told. It can only be known.

  ************************************************

  He got up from his armchair. He screwed the questionnaire into a ball and let it fall from his hand to the floor. He moved slowly, almost daydreaming, but knowing that he’d decided not to answer, not to tell her. Instead he would reveal to her what he had once tried to do to make some sense, find some light, from the shade of all his remembering. He could never stop remembering. His response to its chaos was graphic. It was to make a mark. A mark that was not of life as such, but a mark made on life itself, a still counterpoint to the restlessness of memory. The paintings he had made after her death were, in colour and in form, antidotes against her being lost to him. Their very abstraction was a riposte, a chiding of the trickery of his having to live on at all. But only Mona had ever been shown the other, this earlier work, and when she died he had gathered them up, put them between tissue paper, and snapped the lock of the suitcase shut on them.

  Now, upstairs in the small, cold back bedroom he had used as a studio, he pulled the suitcase down from the top of a single wardrobe – utility furniture from the post-war years – and placed it on a wickerwork chair. He scarcely noticed the flat ribbons of cobweb that twirled from its handle and the fine grain of dust that covered the unopened case. At his feet were the crusted droppings of the acrylic paint he’d used for the abstract canvases. Oil paints spattered the boards of the carpet-less floor. He never looked at the paintings once they were finished. He had stacked them face-in against a wall. In knowing they were finished he also knew that their expression was, for him, limited to the act of doing them. No memories. No traces. No echoes.

  He snapped open the catch of the unlocked case. He could not remember whether he had once intended to layer the contents in any order. Yet at the top were the three blank postcards he’d pocketed from the wreckage of the Hotel Continental. Views of Cassino never to be sent, of buildings he’d never seen. The one of the monastery looked almost benign, a benediction on the pre-war town and its people; not the malevolent brooding presence over the valley and their wartime lives which its destroyers had felt as a personalised thing, a warren of spiteful death even after it was reduced to a ruinous heap. The other two postcards were of a lively town, a junction for road and rail halfway between Naples and Rome, a place for travellers and merchants to stop and stay. He remembered how outside that town, on the days before they went into it for the third battle of Cassino, they had been made, officers and NCOs, to study maps in order to memorise the roads, streets and buildings which were meant to guide them to their objectives after the bombing by air and the shelling by artillery had stopped. Strategic points to capture, to hold, to reinforce for attack on the stone husk that the monastery already was. The post office. The railway station. Hotels. Castle Hill. The bends and plateaux up the hills to the prize itself: the monastery. In one postcard he could clearly see the open piazza, its trees for shade, the hotel windows shuttered against the sun, the road climbing away up to the knoll of Castle Hill. But when they crept into Cassino behind the tanks that spluttered and stalled, none of these former things were left to be seen. Whatever had been the sign of human settlement had been erased, made to vanish along with the people long fled to caves and the mountains, all who had once lived there. The postcards held between his fingers were curled at their edges, and the place they had pictured for that moment had, he knew, been rebuilt. If so, it was apparently the same, even down to the monastery; recreated stone by stone and its manuscript treasures all returned, even the graves of all who had died there become an encircling diadem of further homage. He had seen those post-war magazine pictures, too. Another world created to make new the old one which had gone. He felt no grudge for this, only that it was not, either old or new, the world that was the end of the world, which was what he knew when he had been there.

  Beneath the postcards there was a sheaf of drawings. Black-and- white like the postcards, but with nothing poignant with charm in their subject matter. Scrolls of coiled barbed wire and fenced-in munition dumps and the prowling about on the heaped ruins of feral tanks. He remembered how, with no sense of unease amidst the collapse of all civilised certitude at Cassino, he had gleefully sat to one side working on paper in pen and ink as the troops swept across the finally bridged river through the town’s rubbled remains into the expanse of the Liri Valley, onto fabled Route Six to Rome and another ending. He picked out the one he would show her to make his particular confession of barbarianism.

  He remembered the moment and its setting. Here were the charred stumps of the fire blackened trees which had, in the pre-war postcards, once titillated Cassino with their fritillary of palm fronds and tracery of leaves. Their gracefully scalloped trunks had been twisted into grotesqueries of shape, leafless lumps of charcoal, and what had been the waving branches of trees were skeletal limbs, snapped and torn into supplicant form. By the marks he had made on paper the eye was drawn up a makeshift road to the shell-blasted hill with its crumbling tower. In the drawing the way up to the battered walls of the redoubt on Castle Hill was not a smoothly inviting transit as it was in the postcard, nor a morass of stone and brick and hillocks of torn metal as when soldiers had picked their way over its murderous passage. He revealed it as it had become after the final battle in May 1944 had been won: just a bulldozed and cleared pathway on whose winding way an armoured car bounced along.

  He held the drawing, and looked at it with a misery which was almost fear at the thought of the thing he was then. The horror he had depicted had been done, he knew, with the energy of exultation. The vehicle in his picture careered skittishly around the water-filled voids where the bombs and shells had struck again and again. It raced where they had once fought in a cra
wl, night and day, to the hill above the road. The armoured car in his picture, was jaunty in its motion and, as he’d sat there at the roadside and watched it jounce past, he had cheered and loved its fuck-you joy-ride through the precincts of what had been hell. He knew in the years that came on and changed him that the gladness he had felt then in the very pit of his stomach was an emotion available to him because he had once been other. Other than human, even. He was not sure whether this carapaced otherness only came to him because of the war, but he knew that what the war had done to him was a terrible completion. It was not, either, that he had lived and those others had not. That species of fear and the instinctive grab at survival had long left him. The dread he shivered at again, in this cold, upstairs back bedroom decades after the war had ended, was the dread of being at one with destruction. The ease of it; the exquisite pleasure in being a part of all the destruction. His sketch was a barbaric yell against all that was said to have been better about places like Monte Cassino. That was the horror.