Ali Smith - Public Library and Other Stories

Did you know about this? I say to my father. There was a German linguist who went round the prisoner of war camps in the First World War with a recording device, a big horn-like thing like on gramophones, making shellac recordings of all the British and Irish accents he could find.

Oh, the first war, my father says. Well, I wasn’t born.

I know, I say. He interviewed hundreds of men, and what he’d do is, he’d ask them all to read a short passage from the Bible or say a couple of sentences or sing a song.

My father starts singing when he hears the word song. Oh play to me Gypsy. That sweet serenade . He sings the first bit in a low voice then the next bit in a high voice. In both he’s wildly out of tune.

Listen, I say. He made recordings that are incredibly important now because so many of the accents the men speak in have disappeared. Sometimes an accent would be significantly different, across even as little as the couple of miles between two places. And so many of those dialects have just gone. Died out.

Well girl that’s life in’t it? my father says.

He says it in his northern English accent still even though he himself is dead; I should make it clear here that my father’s been dead for five years. We don’t tend to talk much (not nearly as much as I do with my mother, who’s been dead for a quarter of a century). I think this might be because my father, in his eighties when he went, left the world very cleanly, like a man who goes out one summer morning in just his shirt sleeves knowing he won’t be needing a jacket that day.

I open my computer and get the page up where if you click on the links you can hear some of these recorded men. I play a couple of the prodigal son readings, the Aberdonian man and the man from somewhere in Yorkshire. The air round them cracks and hisses as loud as the dead men’s voices, as if it’s speaking too.

So I want to write this piece about the first war, I tell my father.

Silence.

And I want it to be about voice, not image, because everything’s image these days and I have a feeling we’re getting further and further away from human voices, and I was quite interested in maybe doing something about those recordings. But it looks like I can’t find out much else about them unless I go to the British Library, I say.

Silence (because he thinks I’m being lazy, I can tell, and because he thinks what I’m about to do next is really lazy too).

I do it anyway. I type the words First World War into an online search and go to Images, to see what comes up at random. Austrians executing Serbs 1917. JPG. Description: English: World War I execution squad. Original caption: ‘Austria’s Atrocities. Blindfolded and in a kneeling position, patriotic Jugo-Slavs in Serbia near the Austrian lines were arranged in a semi-circle and ruthlessly shot at a command.’ Photo by Underwood and Underwood. (War Dept.) EXACT DATE SHOT UNKNOWN NARA FILE: 165-WW-179A-8 WAR & CONFLICT BOOK no. 691 (Released to Public) . There’s a row of uniformed men standing in a kind of choreographed curve, a bit like a curve of dancers in a Busby Berkeley number. They’re holding their rifles three feet, maybe less, away from another curved row of men facing them, kneeling, blindfolded, white things over their eyes, their arms bound behind their backs. The odd thing is, the men with the rifles are all standing between two railway tracks, also curving, and they stretch away out of the picture, men and rails like it might be for miles.

It resembles the famous Goya picture. But it also looks modern because of those tracks.

There’s a white cloud of dust near the centre of the photo because some of these kneeling men are actually in the process of being shot as the photo’s being taken (EXACT DATE SHOT) . And then there are the pointed spikes hammered in the ground in front of every one of the kneeling prisoners. So that when you topple the spike will go through you too, in case you’re not dead enough after the bullet.

Was never a one for musicals, me, my father says.

What? I say.

Never did like, ah, what’s his name, either. Weasly little man.

Astaire, I say.

Aye, him, he says.

You’re completely wrong, I say. Fred Astaire was a superb dancer. (This is an argument we’ve had many times.) One of the best dancers of the twentieth century.

My father ignores me and starts singing about caravans and gypsies again . I’ll be your vagabond , he sings. Just for tonight.

I look at the line of men with the rifles aimed. It’s just another random image. I’m looking at it and I’m feeling nothing. If I look at it much longer something in my brain will close over and may never open again.

Anyway, you know all about it already, my father says. You don’t need me. You did it years ago, at the High School.

Did what? I say.

First World War, he says.

So I did, I say. I’d forgotten.

Do you remember the nightmares you had? he says.

No, I say.

With the giant man made of mud in them, the man much bigger than the earth?

No, I say.

It’s when you were anti-nuclear, he says. Remember? There was all the nuclear stuff leaking on to the beach in Caithness. Oh, you were very up in arms. And you were doing the war, same time.

I don’t. I don’t remember that at all.

What I remember is that we were taught history by a small, sharp man who was really clever, we knew he’d got a first at a university, and he kept making a joke none of us understood, Lloyd George knew my father he kept saying, and we all laughed when he did though we’d no idea why. That year was First World War, Irish Famine and Russian Revolution; next year was Irish Home Rule and Italian and German Unifications, and the books we studied were full of grainy photographs of piles of corpses whatever the subject.

One day a small girl came in and gave Mr MacDonald a slip of paper saying Please sir, she’s wanted at the office, and he announced to the class the name of one of our classmates: Carolyn Stead. We all looked at each other and the whisper went round the class: Carolyn’s dead! Carolyn’s dead!

Ha ha! my father says.

We thought we were hilarious, with our books open at pages like the one with the moustachioed soldiers black as miners relaxing in their open-necked uniforms round the cooking pot in the mud that glistened in petrified sea-waves above their heads. Mr MacDonald had been telling us about how men would be having their soup or stew and would dip the serving spoon in and out would come a horse hoof or a boot with a foot still in it. We learned about the arms race. We learned about dreadnoughts. Meanwhile some German exchange students arrived, from a girls’ school in Augsburg.

Oh they were right nice girls, the German girls, my father says.

I remember not liking my exchange student at all. She had a coat made of rabbit hair that moulted over everything it touched and a habit of picking her nose. But I don’t tell him that. I tell him, instead, something I was too ashamed to say to him or my mother out loud at the time, about how one of the nights we were walking home from school with our exchange partners a bunch of boys followed us shouting the word Nazi and doing Hitler salutes. The Augsburg girls were nonplussed. They were all in terrible shock anyway, because the TV series called Holocaust had aired in Germany for the first time just before they came. I remember them trying to talk about it. All they could do was open their mouths and their eyes wide and shake their heads.

My father’d been in that war, in the Navy. He never spoke about it either though sometimes he still had nightmares, leave your father, he had a bad night , our mother would say (she’d been in it too, joined the WAAF in 1945 as soon as she was old enough). My brothers and sisters and I knew that his own father had been in the First World War, had been gassed, had survived, had come back ill and had died young, which was why our father had had to leave school at thirteen.