Graham Swift - Out of This World

You emerge from the cinema (it is called, perhaps, the Odeon or the Doric and is done up with fake Greek columns). Just for a while you possess an aura, a power, a stature. Your feet lift a little from the ground. It is a place for erotic training: the darkness, the clinches on the screen — what more instruction do you need? And how did you learn to walk, to stare, to stroke your jaw, to light your cigarette or toss it aside, in just that way? You learnt it from the movies.

In those days a newsreel was always a standard feature of the programme. Dressed up with inane music and plum-voiced commentaries, it was nonetheless a reminder that there was a real world as well as the faked one in which people moved with Hollywood stylization. Now, they no longer show newsreels in cinemas, but the movies you see aspire to the ‘actuality’ of the newsreel, while TV can never have enough ‘real life’ footage. So that it’s no longer easy to distinguish the real from the fake, or the world on the screen from the world off it.

In Vietnam it was common: ‘I don’t like this movie. Get me out of this movie. Someone, for Chrissakes, cut this SCENE!’

And it goes without saying that a task force of cameras should accompany the Task Force to the Falklands. As if without them it could not take place.

When did it happen? That imperceptible inversion. As if the camera no longer recorded but conferred reality. As if the world were the lost property of the camera. As if the world wanted to be claimed and possessed by the camera. To translate itself, as if afraid it might otherwise vanish, into the new myth of its own authentic-synthetic photographic memory.

As if it were a kind of comfort that every random, crazy thing that gets done should be monitored by some all-seeing, unfeeling, inhuman eye.

Not to be watched. Isn’t that a greater fear than the fear of being watched?

In the earliest portrait photographs everyone is posing . Un-selfconsciously striking Sunday-best, rhetorical attitudes, as if they do not yet know what a camera is — they think of it as some swayable human audience and they have a sense of themselves as belonging to some proud theatre. Then at some forlorn time posing got discredited. It started to seem embarrassing, artificial. And the cry of the photographer became that insistent, exasperated and paradoxical demand: ‘Act naturally please.’

How did this happen? And when? In 1918? In 1945? And what does that mean: to act naturally?

He nods his helmeted head. Agamemnon, leader of men. Does (naturally) what a man has to do. Says yes to war, myth, action, news, classical literature, the death of his daughter. Acts unnaturally.

I know it’s absurd, I know it’s unreal. Up here, in the Cessna, while she sits below the control tower, listening to Derek’s yarns, it’s as if there’s some invisible cord between us, like those model aeroplanes and their remote-control operators up on Epsom Downs. I know it’s a dream, it’s impossible, and one part of me was always ready for it suddenly to finish. Except now there’s something which can’t be undone. That first time in the plane, it wasn’t air-sickness. She told me that same day. She must have struggled to sound neutral, and my silence must have been blatant and cruel as murder. The mother not the child. (Prepare the words: ‘I think it would be better if —’) Then I saw that her face was awash with tears. ‘I want you to marry me,’ she said. That’s when it got deeper than deep, and beyond a dream.

I know it’s absurd. If I didn’t know her better, I might say she was too young to know better, and if I knew myself better, I might say I was too old not to know better.

But I don’t want to lose her. I don’t want to lose her.

So, my darlings, we will go to England. We will get the plane, just you and me, to England. To see your grandfather.

What is it like? It’s where you come from in a way, it’s where you were , but of course you won’t remember it. And maybe it’s no longer the way I remember it. Or rather, the way I remember it is like it never was.

England is green and cool and damp and old and crooked. Look at the map. England is like a little hunched-up old lady at the seaside, her back turned towards the rest of Europe, dipping her toe into the Atlantic Ocean and pulling up her skirts round her shrivelled body. She is sitting down because she is no longer steady on her legs. Someone has thrown in her direction a two-tone beach-ball called Ireland and she is screwing up her face in displeasure.

You wouldn’t believe that she was once a big, plump, bossy Empress. And you wouldn’t believe that even now, in 1982, there is a fleet of ships sailing off to fight, on behalf of this little old lady, for some even tinier islands on the other side of the world.

England is small. When we get there everything will seem as if it was built on a different scale, the houses, the streets, the cars. And you’ll see all those things you’ve only seen so far in pictures — castles, Beefeaters, funny red buses. So it will seem that England is really only a toy country. But you mustn’t believe that. That things are just toys.

We’ll get the plane, my angels. You’ll have to look after your mother, like two grown-up young men. It’s a big journey for me, you see — perhaps even bigger for me than for you. Going back can be the hardest journey. And perhaps, if I haven’t done so before then, that’s when I’ll tell you, up in the plane, high over the ocean. I’ll say: Once, in England …

He said, yes of course I should go. Take the boys too. Yes, it was the right, the proper, the best thing to do. He was smiling, as if he were truly happy for me. I showed him the letter. And I said, I want to go. He said, No, he wouldn’t come himself. It would be right at his busy time of the year, and he got enough trips to England, on business, didn’t he? And, in any case, it was right that just — He kept smiling. He always knew how to smile. He said he’d fix up our flights. Half price. And then I asked him, but what did he think, actually think — about Harry getting married again. And he said he thought it was crazy. Just plain crazy.

And then he said: ‘You mean the world to me.’

Peter says there is always a mark. Though it may not be easy to detect. No matter how much time elapses. Once the soil has been moved. Once men have interfered with the earth: it never reverts, there is always a mark.

An out-of-work actor, in jeans and old sweater. A hopeful Aladdin, putting his trust in the magic lamp of the camera. He is infatuated with the life and death of people he will never know, buried for over three thousand years beneath the ground. He gives me elementary briefings in prehistory. Almost certainly, the Bronze Age Britons had trading links with Mycenaean Greece. If Homer’s heroes ever really lived, they would have lived at the time the Bronze Age flourished in Britain.

But we are unlucky with 880390 to 960370. No spectral field systems loom into vision. He is undiscouraged. Another time. When the grass is higher, after a heavier rainfall, in a different light. It is a canny business, this hunting of the Bronze Age, like tracking some inordinately shy animal. He tells Michael to make one more circuit and tells me to keep snapping (because it can happen sometimes: the eye can’t see ghosts but the camera can).

And yet there will be something to celebrate. When we’re back at the airfield. When we’ve landed and we’re all together in Derek’s den. Our little agreement. ‘Listen everyone, Jenny and I have got something to tell you.’

We fly over the Wylye valley, across the southern fringe of the Plain to the Avon, then north towards Pewsey. Over our right shoulders, the spire of Salisbury Cathedral.