Graham Swift: Learning to Swim: And Other Stories

I had with me a file of students’ work in preparation for my afternoon’s maths classes. He looked scoffingly at it. “All this—” he said. “You ought to have been a zoo-keeper.”

He wiped his mouth. His long sallow face was creased. I realized that nowhere could there be anyone like my uncle. I smiled at him.

That night I had a telephone call from Henshaw. It must have been about one in the morning. In a panic-stricken voice he asked me if I had seen Uncle Walter. I said no; I had been teaching at the adult institute, finished the evening at a pub and come home to bed. My uncle was probably already in bed when I came in. Henshaw explained that a security officer at the Zoo had found various doors to the special care unit unlocked; that on further investigation he had discovered the pen of the Hoffmeier’s Antelope empty. An immediate search of the Zoo precincts had begun but no trace was to be found of the missing animal.

“Get your uncle!” screamed Henshaw maniacally. “Find him!”

I told him to hang on. I stood in the hallway in bare feet and pyjamas. For one moment the urgency of the occasion was lost in the vision I had of the tiny creature, crossing the Prince Albert Road, trotting up the Finchley Road, its cloven feet on the paving stones, its soft eyes under the street-lamps, casting on North London a forlorn glimmer of its forest ancestry. Without its peer in the world.

I went up to Uncle Walter’s room. I knocked on his door (which he would often keep locked), then opened it. There were the books scattered on the floor, the fetid remnants of raw vegetables, the shredded photos of his wife … But Uncle Walter — I had known this already — was gone.

“THIS IS GABOR,” SAID MY father in a solemn, rehearsed, slightly wavering voice.

This was early in 1957. The war was still then quite fresh in the memory — even of those, like myself, who were born after it. Most households seemed to have framed photographs of figures in uniform, younger Dads, jauntily posed astride gun barrels, sitting on wings. Across the asphalt playground of my County Primary School the tireless struggle between English and Germans was regularly enacted. This was the only war, and its mythology ousted other, lesser intrusions into peace. I was too young to be aware of Korea. Then there was Suez, and Hungary.

“Gabor, this is Mrs. Everett,” continued my father, enunciating slowly, “Roger’s Mummy. And this is Roger.”

Gabor was a lanky, dark-haired boy. He was dressed in a worn black jacket, a navy blue jumper, grey shorts, long grey socks and black shoes. Only the jacket and limp haversack, which he held in one hand, looked as if they were his. He had a thick, pale, straight-sided face, dark, horizontal eyes and a heavy mouth. Above his upper lip — I found this remarkable because he was only my age — was a crescent of gossamer, blackish hairs, like a faint moustache.

“Hello,” said my mother. Poised in the doorway, a fixed smile on her face, she was not at all clear what was to be done on occasions like this — whether motherly hugs or formality were required. She had half expected to be ready with blankets and soup.

Father and the newcomer stood pathetically immobile on the doorstep.

“Hello Gabor,” I said. One adult custom which seemed to me, for once, eminently practical, and vindicated by moments like this, was to shake hands. I reached out and took the visitor’s wrist. Gabor went a salmony colour under his pale skin and spoke, for the first time, something incomprehensible. Mother and Father beamed benignly.

Gabor was a refugee from Budapest.

He was largely Father’s doing. As I see it now, he was the sort of ideal foster-child he had always wanted; the answer to his forlorn, lugubrious, strangely martyrish prayers. Father had been an infantry officer during the war. He had been in North Africa and Normandy and at the liberation of concentration camps. He had seen almost all his friends killed around him. These experiences had given him the sense that suffering was the reality of life and that he had, in its presence, a peculiarly privileged understanding and power to reassure. Peace was for him a brittle veneer. He was not happy with his steady job in marine insurance, with the welfare state blandishments of those post-ration years. The contentments of fatherhood were equivocal. Now, as I look back, I see him waiting, watching over me, the corners of his stern mouth melancholically down-turned, waiting for me to encounter pain, grief, to discover that the world was not the sunny playground I thought it to be; so that he could bestow on me at last — with love I am sure — the benefits of his own experience, of his sorrow and strength, the large, tobaccoey palms of his protection.

I must have hurt him. While he lived with his war-time ghosts, I was Richard Todd as Guy Gibson, with an RT mask made from my cupped hand, skimming ecstatically over our back lawn to bomb the Möhne Dam; or Kenneth More as Douglas Bader, cheerily cannonading the Luftwaffe.

Father scanned the newspapers. At headlines of trouble and disaster he looked wise. When the news broke of the uprising in Hungary and its suppression, and later the stories of orphaned Hungarian children of my generation coming to our shores, who needed to be found homes, he acquired a new mission in life.

I did not take kindly to Gabor’s arrival. Though he was not a proper adoption and was to be with us at first only on what the authorities called a “trial basis,” I was envious of him as as substitute child — a replacement for myself. A minor war, of a kind unenvisaged, between England and Hungary, might have ensued in our house. But I saw how — from the very start — I had a facility with Gabor which my parents did not, and the pride I derived from this checked my resentment. Besides, Gabor had the appeal of someone who — like my father — had lived through real bloodshed and conflict, though in his case the experience was of the present, not of the past, and belonged moreover to a boy my own age. Perhaps — unlike my father — he would share in, and enhance, the flavour of my war games.

Should this happen it would assuage another long-standing grievance against my father. I could not understand why, seasoned veteran as he was, he did not participate in, at least smile on, my imaginary battles. I began to regard him as a bad sport and — more serious — to doubt his own quite authentic credentials. I tried to see in my father the features of my cinema heroes but failed to do so. He lacked their sunburned cragginess or devilmay-care nonchalance. His own face was pasty, almost clerical. Consequently I suspected that his real exploits in the war (which I had only heard about vaguely) were lies.

The first lesson in English manners I taught Gabor was how to shoot Germans.

When I reflect on this, it was remarkable that he grasped what was required of him. Not only did he scarcely know a word of English, but there was an historical difficulty. I had absolutely no knowledge of Hungary’s role in the Second World War (I was ignorant of its collaboration with the Nazis), which I took to be a national duel between England and Germany. Nonetheless, when the smoke from our bren guns or hand grenades had cleared, and I informed Gabor, after bravely reconnoitering, of another knocked out Panzer, another slaughtered infantry patrol, he would look up at me with implicit trust and grin, manically, jubilantly.

“ Jó ,” he would say. “Good, good.”

Father was horrified at the careless zeal with which Gabor took part in my games. He could not understand how a boy who had known real violence, whose own parents (for all we knew) had been brutally killed, could lend a part so blithely to these fantasies. Some impenetrable barrier — like a glass wall which gave to my father the forlorn qualities of a goldfish — existed for him between reality and illusion so that he could not cross from one to the other. But it was not just this that distressed him. He saw how Gabor looked to me and not to him, how when he returned from our forays at the end of the garden Gabor would follow me like a trusted commander; how, from the very beginning, that affinity which he had hoped to have with this child of suffering had eluded him. I often wondered how they had managed together on that first day, when father had gone up to “collect” Gabor, like some new purchase. I pictured them coming home, sitting mutely on opposite seats in the train compartment as they bounced through suburbia, like two lost souls.