Christopher Priest - The Separation

Home turned out to be a state of mind rather than a reality in which I could live. Everything I knew had gone or was going. As soon as I reached my parents’ house I learned the truth about Dad that my mother’s intermittent letters had deliberately skirted: he was in the advanced stages of prostate cancer and he died at the end of July, shortly before the atomic bombs were used against Japan. My mother’s own death from angina followed soon afterwards. Joe of course was dead; Birgit had remarried.

I tried to obtain a job in civil aviation, thinking that I should put my flying skills to use, but there were many ex-RAF pilots around with the same idea, and flying jobs were few. A small number of dead-end jobs followed but I was only twenty-eight. I still felt youthful, still able to look forward to a future. I took a decision that many men of my age and background were taking at the time and in March 1946 I bought an assisted-passage ticket to Australia. I had to wait four weeks before the ship left.

With one more week to go before I sailed, I borrowed a friend’s car and drove across to the Cheshire side of the Pennines. I entered the village, drove down the lane and passed the house where Birgit and Joe had lived, where she had still been living on the day she wrote me her final letter. I halted the car a short way down the lane, turned it around so that I could look back at the house and switched off the engine. It was a fine day, with thin clouds and intermittent periods of sunshine. From the quick glances I took as I drove past, and from this more distant but steady look, the house had not changed much. The roof still needed retiling and the flashing I had amateurishly fixed in place against the chimney stack was the same.

The sight of the house evoked in me a strange mixture of feelings: it had become the love nest where Birgit and I spent those still memorable weekends, but it was also Joe’s house, a place I should have been forbidden to enter. I sat there in the car for an hour, wondering all that time whether I should stay or leave. If Birgit was there, then one thing; if she was not, then another. Both seemed likely to hurt. To be honest, I really had no idea why I was there at all. I had finally decided to drive away when I saw a movement by the front of the house.

Birgit appeared at the front door, reaching back inside to hold the door open, looking downwards. She was smiling. Her hair was short and she had put on weight. I stared at her, my feelings suddenly awoken by the sight of her. She was facing towards my car but apparently had not noticed me. A small child ran past her and out into the garden and promptly sat down, out of my sight. Without even glancing towards me, Birgit went back inside the house, leaving the door ajar. She had been in sight for only a few seconds.

I left the car and walked down the lane. As I approached the house I saw that a chicken-wire fence had been put up to create a play area. Someone had dug a shallow pit in one corner of the sloping lawn and filled it with white sand. The child, a small girl dressed in brown dungarees, was sprawling in the middle of the sandpit, making tiny shaped piles with her hands. Her hair fell forward across her face, as Birgit’s had often done when she concentrated on her violin. As I reached the fence and stared down at the little girl, she glanced up once, looked straight at me, then immediately lost interest and continued with her game.

I was thunderstruck by the child’s appearance. She had the look of my family: I could see my father’s face in hers, his eyes, his mouth. Her colouring, her hair were the same as mine. The same as Joe’s. She had the Sawyer look, whatever that was, but it was instantly recognizable to me on some instinctive level. I tried to guess the girl’s age - I was inexperienced with children but thought she might be about five. That would mean she was born in 1941, which itself would mean that she must have been conceived in the latter part of 1940.

I was still standing there, mentally reeling, my gaze locked on the playing child, when the door of the house burst open.

‘Angela!’

Birgit was there, in a desperate mood. She dashed across the lawn, snatched the little girl up, shielding her head and face with her hand, and moved quickly back into the house. She did not look at me once.

As the door slammed behind her, I heard the child starting to wail in protest at the rough way in which she was being handled. The door did not catch properly but swung back open. I could see a short distance into the narrow hall that lay beyond. I heard Birgit’s voice again, shouting: ‘Harry! Harry! There’s someone out there!’

So I had a name for the child. I held the knowledge to me like a coveted prize. Angela, her name was Angela. My daughter -I felt a thrill of intoxicating excitement - my daughter was called Angela!

A moment later the door opened fully again. A man stepped through with a rough movement of his shoulders. I had never seen him before in my life: he looked to me as if he was about forty or fifty, with a weather-beaten, unshaven face. In the house behind him I could still hear the child crying. The man stood there on the threshold of his house, staring steadily at me, his silence and the resentful set of his head radiating a stubborn aggression.

I backed away, returned to the car and drove away down the hill.

The following week my ship sailed from Southampton and I set off on my fresh start in Australia. During the six-week voyage, itself an adventure like nothing I had known before, I made a conscious decision that if I was going to make a go of my life in Australia I must leave the old emotional baggage behind. Of course, such a decision is easier to plan than to carry-through, but I sensed that many of the people who were on the boat with me, emigrating for similar reasons to mine, were undergoing something of the same feeling themselves. We talked about our hopes and plans, about the challenge of starting again in a new and young country. We were silent about our past lives.

As we sailed across the calm swell of the Indian Ocean, I felt all that starting to slip away.

I arrived in Australia. In that beautiful and exhilarating country I lived my new life, working hard and long. First I was a part-time pilot for a crop-dusting concern. There was a great deal of work available because Australia had vast fields. Soon I graduated from part-time hired pilot to full-time salaried pilot; later I became a manager in the company; within fifteen years I owned the whole firm. After that I moved into other aviation businesses, usually involving the chance for me to keep flying, something that burned up energy if not always my own.

I returned to Britain in 1982, when I reached sixty-five. By then I had earned and saved plenty of money and I bought the flat where I have lived until recently. I settled down to retirement, not really thinking what it would mean until I had time to sit still long enough. Sitting still long enough turned out to be what I was least good at.

I went through a period of physical restlessness, endlessly travelling, constantly trying to meet people and make new friends, opening up possible non-vocational interests and projects. I made tentative contact with some of my colleagues from the RAF and prison camp days, even visiting one or two of them. I realize that this can be predictable behaviour in some recently retired people, those whose lives have been full of activity. In my case it achieved little and anyway it was brought to a sudden end by a minor heart attack. Whether one thing led to the other is not for me to say but the result was that since then I have been taking things much easier.

In the time of reflection that necessarily came while I recuperated, I started thinking back over my life. Reflection was something that seemed timely, now that I was in my seventies, living with a heart that had given me an unwelcome reminder of my own mortality. It was time to think matters through.