Ali Smith - Public Library and Other Stories

He was a nice man, poor man , he said once when I asked him about his father. He wasn’t well. His lungs were bad . When he died himself, in 2009, my brother unearthed a lot of old photographs in his house. One is of thirty men all standing, sitting and lying on patchy grass round a set of WWI tents. Some are in dark uniform, the others are in thick white trousers and jackets and one man’s got a Red Cross badge on both his arms. They’re all arranged round a sign saying SHAVING AND CUTTING TENT next to a man in a chair, his head tipped back and his chin covered in foam. There’s a list of names on the back. The man on the grass third from the left is apparently my grandfather.

We’d never even seen a picture of him till then. One day in the 1950s, after she’d been married to my father for several years, a stranger knocked at the door and my mother opened it and the stranger said my father’s name and asked did he live here and my mother said yes, and the stranger said, who are you? and my mother said, I’m his wife, who are you? and the stranger said, pleased to meet you, I’m his brother. My father said almost nothing when it came to the past. My mother the same. The past was past. After my mother died, and when the Second World War was on TV all the time in anniversary after anniversary (fifty years since the start, fifty years since the end, sixty years since the start, sixty years since the end), he began to tell us one or two things that had happened to him, like about the men who were parachuted in for the invasion of Sicily but by mistake had been dropped too far out from land so the sea was full of them, their heads in the water and the ships couldn’t stop , you couldn’t just stop a warship, we waved to them, we called down to them, we told them we’d be back for them, but we knew we wouldn’t and so did they.

Now I tell my father, who’s five years dead,

you know, I wrote to the Imperial War Museum recently about that old picture with your dad in it, and I asked them whether the white clothes he’s wearing meant anything special, a hospital worker or something, and a man wrote back and told me maybe your dad was an army baker but that to know for sure we’d need service records and that the problem with that is that 60 % of First World War Army Records were burned in a German raid in 1940.

Things get lost all the time, girl, he says.

Do you know if he was a baker, maybe? I say.

Silence.

My grandfather doesn’t look much like my father in the picture, but he looks a bit like one of my brothers. I’ve no idea what he saw in his war. God knows. There’s no way of knowing. I’ll never know what his voice sounded like. I suppose it must have sounded a bit like my father’s. I suppose his voice was in my father’s head much like my father’s is in mine. I wonder if he could sing. Red sails in the sunset , my father sings right now, out of tune (or maybe to his own tune). Way out on the sea. Gas! — GAS! — quick, boys! — . That was the Wilfred Owen poem. In it gas was written first in small letters then in capitals, which, when I was at school, I’d thought very clever, because of the way the realization that the gas was coming, or maybe the shouts about it, got louder the nearer it came. Oh carry my loved one. Home safely to me . And Owen had convalesced, and met his friend Siegfried Sassoon, and learned to write a whole other kind of poetry from his early rather purple sonnets, at Craiglockhart Hospital near Edinburgh, which was close to home, even though Edinburgh was itself a far country to me, at fifteen, in Inverness, when I first read Owen. He sailed at the dawning. All day I’ve been blue.

My father’s voice is incredibly loud, so loud that I’m finding it hard to think anything about anything. I try to concentrate. There was a thing I read recently, a tiny paragraph in the International New York Times, about a rare kind of fungus found nowhere else in the UK, but discovered growing in the grounds of Craiglockhart and believed by experts to have been brought there from mainland Europe on the boots of the convalescing soldiers. Microscopic spores on those boots and decades later the life. But I can’t even think about that because Red sails in the sunset. I’m trusting in you . Okay.

I sing back, quite loud too, a song of my own choice. War is stupid. And people are stupid.

Don’t think much of your words, my father says. Or your tune. That’s not a song. Who in God’s name sang that?

Boy George, I say. Culture Club.

Boy George. God help us, my father says.

The 1984 version of Wilfred Owen, I say.

Hardly, he says. Boy George never saw a war. Christ. What a war would’ve done to him.

Wilfred Owen was gay too, you know, I say.

I say it because I know it will annoy him. But he doesn’t take the bait. Instead:

People aren’t stupid. It’s that song that’s stupid, he says.

It’s not a stupid song, I say.

You got that Wilfred Owen book as a school prize, he says.

Oh yes, so I did, I say.

You chose it yourself at Melvens, he says. 1st prize for German. 1978.

How do you remember all this stuff? I say. And really. What does it matter, what prize I ever got for anything?

You were good at German, he says. Should’ve kept on with your languages. Should’ve learned them all while you had the chance, girl. You still could. I wish I’d had the chance. You listening to me?

No.

No, cause you never listen, he says. And you were learning Greek last year –

How do you even know that? You’re supposed to be dead, I say.

— and gave it up, didn’t you? he says. As soon as it got too difficult.

The past and the future were hard, I say.

Start it again, he says in my ear.

Can’t afford it, I say.

Yes you can, he says. It’s worth it. And you don’t know the first thing about what it means not to afford something.

I’m too old, I say.

Learn anything, any age, he says. Don’t be stupid. Don’t waste it.

While I’m trying to think of other songs I can sing so I don’t have to listen to him (Broken English? Marianne Faithfull? It’s just an old war. It’s not my reality) —

here, lass, he says. Culture Club!

What about them? I say.

That fungus! In that hospital, he says. Ha ha!

Oh — ha! I say.

And you could write your war thing, he says, couldn’t you, about when you were the voice captain.

When I was the what? I say.

And you had to lay the wreath at the Memorial. With that boy who was the piper at your school. The voice captain for the boys. Lived out at Kiltarlity. His dad was the policeman.

Oh, vice captain, I say.

Aye, well. Vice, voice. You got to be it and that’s the whole point, he says. Write about that.

No, I say.

Well don’t then, he says.

It was a bitter cold Sunday, wet and misty, dismal, dreich, everything as dripping and grey as only Inverness in November can be; we stood at the Memorial by the river in our uniforms with the Provost and his wife and some people from the council and the British Legion, and we each stepped forward in turn below the names carved on it to do this thing, the weight of which, the meaning and resonance of which, I didn’t really understand, though I’d thought I knew all about war and the wars, until I got home after it and my parents, with a kindness that was quiet and serious, sat me down in the warm back room, made me a mug of hot chocolate then sat there with me in a silence, not a companionable silence, more mindful than that. Assiduous.

Damn. Look at that. I just wrote about it even though I was trying not to.

Silence,

silence,

silence.

Good. It’s a relief.