Richard House - The Kills

This birth brought little joy to my father, who would not approach my brother, feared any further attachment, and resented that the birth had cost so much physical trouble for my mother. As my mother recovered, A— remained delicate, and we all worked toward his welfare, either in the home or at what work we could find.

It is possible that A—’s frailty caused my father to ignore him. He robbed milk from my mother, leeched her limited vitality, he cried through the night, a thin noise, pathetic and unbroken, lamb-like. The midwife kept returning and brought with her chestnut oil, nutmeg oil, light scents to coax the baby to sleep. Even so, I do not remember my brother sleeping, he seemed to fight it, on the understanding, the midwife fancied, that he would be taken the moment he surrendered. While awake, he still lived.

I am not the man they claim. This is the evidence. I lived for my brother. I kept vigil over his cot — so small he was coddled in half a suitcase. We watched over him, and paid him every attention. I learned to feed him a weak broth on which he was weaned, anything to encourage and draw life into him. We raised my brother in the same way in which we had raised cast-off lambs.

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(page 24) Here now is a version of an incident that has been used to demonstrate how black a people we are. (…)

The first assault by the Americans brought unintended consequences. In landing on the ridges, overtaking the small villages in the mountains on that first salvo, the Americans inadvertently woke a long-standing resentment. This resentment has no logic, or that logic is now lost and there is no pure reason why the cities in the plains mistrust the villages on the mountains (accept that they are thieves; known cheats, unreliable in business. They are cunning as gypsies, oily, calculating, and equally unclean. The women are loose and unprincipled). Accept that this grudge exists: to welcome a man from one of these villages into your home would corrupt your name, spoil your reputation. There is between the city and these villages no trust and no common ground.

Imagine the reaction, shortly after the birth of my brother, when it was discovered that these villages lay within kilometres of the American army. Think also of the outrage when it became known that not one man sought to warn the city (they claim not to have known, and were as surprised, as alarmed as the people in the city when the Americans began to sound their guns). Imagine what nonsense they expressed as justification. The simple fact that an entire battalion of Americans could spread through a landscape they did not know seemed too incredible to accept. These villages, these villagers must surely have helped.

In order to protect ourselves it became necessary to clear these villages. To move the inhabitants elsewhere so they could no longer provide opportunity and support to our enemies. As documented in film, in photographs, the houses of two of the villages were systematically destroyed. While there are a number of other villages, V— and C— were chosen, being positioned at either end of the crescent ridge. A seven-day warning was given to the inhabitants of V— and C—, and so they were driven out of their farms and houses: once vacated the villages were razed to the ground.

The occupants of V— and C— had nowhere to go, and no means of travel. Their animals were slaughtered, and given the poverty of the villages, it is unlikely that more than a few of them could have afforded to leave, or have bribed the officials to provide them with passes and identification. Instead, they came down from the mountains and set up encampments on the outskirts of the city.

By this time many had fled the city, as I have earlier described. And this train of refugees — as this is surely what they were — was moved from place to place and not allowed to settle. The hope being that they would move somewhere distant.

One group, of perhaps forty, certainly no more, men, women and children, settled on the roadside beside the farm in full view of our palazzo.

These people were wretched. They wandered ghostlike without complaint, sat by the roads and track without energy. Idle and indolent, they did nothing to support or help themselves. Discussions in the courtyard of our palazzo grew hot. These people might seem passive, but they need food, they need water, and they will soon come to us for provisions and who knows what else.

In less than a week these fears began to be realized. Small shacks were built, from our waste — spare boards and wood and cardboard were fabricated into shelters. The encampment pushed a little into the field, a semi-circle overtook one of the vineyards (it has to be said that no damage was afforded to the vines), and they stretched their squalor alongside the road as an affront.

My mother, familiar with such degradation from her work in the hospitals and hospices, was no better than our neighbours. In practice her charity did not extend far, while her sympathy might have reached other cities and other situations, it did not travel so much as one step in their direction. Her fears, numerous, of disease, theft, murder, were slowly realized with more misery than she would have imagined. First an outbreak of measles, then an unnamed fever the source of which appeared to be the fetid pond that grew in the bald centre, which took with it the babies and the elderly. And then, one night, a fire broke out, which razed five of the eleven shacks. Imagine us gathered at our window to watch the fire. Imagine our attention on the rising brightness, how people fled, approach and ducked, shied from the heat, of how they sought help but found none. This emergency certainly drew out the good people from our tenement who grouped at the road, and seemed for a moment to be ready to set aside their resentments at these gypsies. But no, they did not assist. Instead, as the emergency vehicles made their attempt to approach, our neighbours valiantly held them back, delayed them, detained them from reaching the encampment. What of the police? What of the fire brigade? What of our army? It is true that they arrived in great numbers, a battalion of trucks and water wagons, but while the fire spread they appeared to discuss the situation with our neighbours so that it seemed to be the army, the fire brigade, the police who were manning the very barricade which blocked them from the fire.

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(page 28) Both of my parents attended the fire, they knelt with the neighbours on occasion to pray — for guidance, or a clean wind to lift the fire.

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(page 29) The Americans, and later the British landed their armies in the south. Swallowed the islands, overran the east and spread like cholera with dangerous and undeniable speed. I do not remember the war, and while its history is physically marked upon the buildings — if you look above the boutique and shop windows you will see bullet holes in the stone and blast damage to the cornices and carved decoration. In some districts, close to the docks, there are still vacant spaces, sockets left by the bombing raids — the vacant lots soon grew a scant kind of grass, so that the city took on, in my early memory at least, a damp aspect, damaged and melancholic.

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(page 32) The Americans took the Royal Palace and made the surrounding government offices their headquarters, leaving nothing for the British when they arrived a week later. The British settled at the outskirts, right under the city walls, and chose as their hub the vineyard, to use the old farmhouse and outbuildings as their command base. They managed to settle the land without destroying the vines, seemed to occupy us with an apologetic air. Later, on negotiation with the Americans, after the end of hostilities was formalized, they moved into the city proper and shared the government offices. In their absence, gypsies, who had been encouraged to settle, occupied the vineyard, growing in number from a few makeshift huts and huddled caravans into a larger encampment. They refused to settle in the houses and chose instead the outlying fields. They cared little for the vineyard, and the fields, which had survived the war, were soon spoiled. Our rooms looked down on an undisciplined, unkempt, unsanitary arc of tents and trailers. The vines were cut for fuel. The carefully tended embankments levelled. The irrigation ditches in-filled, so that the terraced field became nothing more than a mud flat.