‘I don’t want to talk about him,’ she said. She wouldn’t even look at us. ‘All I know is that he lives somewhere in Canada now. It was another life. I was another person then. It’s not important.’ We tried to press her, but that was all she would tell us.
Soon after this I became very busy with my own life, and for some years I thought very little about my convict father, my polar bear father. By the time I was thirty I was married with two sons, and was a teacher trying to become a writer, something I had never dreamt I could be.
Terry had become an actor, something he had always been quite sure he would be. He rang me very late one night in a high state of excitement. ‘You’ll never guess,’ he said. ‘He’s here! Peter! Our dad. He’s here, in England. He’s playing in Henry IV, Part II in Chichester. I’ve just read a rave review. He’s Falstaff. Why don’t we go down there and give him the surprise of his life?’
So we did. The next weekend we went down to Chichester together. I took my family with me. I wanted them to be there for this. He was a wonderful Falstaff, big and boomy, rumbustuous and raunchy, yet full of pathos. My two boys (ten and eight) kept whispering at me every time he came on. ‘Is that him? Is that him?’ Afterwards we went round to see him in his dressing-room. Terry said I should go in first, and on my own. ‘I had my turn a long time ago, if you remember,’ he said. ‘Best if he sees just one of us to start with, I reckon.’
My heart was in my mouth. I had to take a very deep breath before I knocked on that door. ‘Enter.’ He sounded still jovial, still Falstaffian. I went in.
He was sitting at his dressing-table in his vest and braces, boots and britches, and humming to himself as he rubbed off his make-up. We looked at each other in the mirror. He stopped humming, and swivelled round to face me. For some moments I just stood there looking at him. Then I said, ‘Were you a polar bear once, a long time ago in London?’
‘Yes.’
‘And were you once the convict in Great Expectations on the television?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then I think I’m your son,’ I told him.
There was a lot of hugging in his dressing-room that night, not enough to make up for all those missing years, maybe. But it was a start.
My mother’s dead now, bless her heart, but I still have two fathers. I get on well enough with Douglas, I always have done in a detached sort of way. He’s done his best by me, I know that; but in all the years I’ve known him he’s never once mentioned my other father. It doesn’t matter now. It’s history best left crusted over I think.
We see my polar bear father – I still think of him as that – every year or so, whenever he’s over from Canada. He’s well past eighty now, still acting for six months of every year – a real trouper. My children and my grandchildren always call him Grandpa Bear because of his great bushy beard (the same one he grew for Falstaff!), and because they all know the story of their grandfather, I suppose.
Recently I wrote a story about a polar bear. I can’t imagine why. He’s upstairs now reading it to my smallest granddaughter. I can hear him a-snarling and a-growling just as proper polar bears do. Takes him back, I should think. Takes me back, that’s for sure.
What Does It Feel Like?
Rwanda, Bosnia, Kosovo, East Timor. Ethnic cleansing seems as rife today as it has been throughout history. Yet in our oh-so-comfy England, it can seem a world away – ‘just on the telly’. I once visited, by chance, a village in France called Oradour, the scene of a dreadful massacre in the Second World War. The French have preserved the place as the German occupiers left it: burnt out and stark. As a memorial. I wrote this to remind me, and others, that it is not ‘just on the telly’. It is happening, now, as you read this.
Seven o’clock, and it was just an ordinary kind of autumn morning, much like any other. The mist covered the valley floor and the cows grazed along the river meadows. Sofia was still half-asleep. The wild roses smelt of apples. Sofia pulled a fat rosehip from the hedgerow and idly split it open with her thumbnail. It was packed with seeds. A perfect spider’s web laced with mist linked the hedge to the gatepost. It trembled threateningly as she opened the gate into the meadow. She loved spiders’ webs, but hated spiders.
Sofia sent the dog out to fetch in the cows and stayed leaning on the gate, her chin resting on her knuckles. Chewing nonchalantly, they meandered past her, ignoring her, all except Myrtle who glanced at her with baleful eyes and licked deep into her nose. ‘Bad-tempered old cow,’ Sofia muttered. And she followed Myrtle back along the lane towards the milking parlour. She could hear Mother singing inside, ‘Raining in My Heart’. Buddy Holly again, always Buddy Holly.
Sofia wandered home, picking the last of the seeds out of the rosehip. She was deep in her thoughts. Mother did all the milking these days. She had done since Father went off with the other men to the war. He had been gone nearly three months now, and still there had been no news. No news was good news. Mother said that often. Sofia believed her, but she knew that was only because she needed to believe her. It was hope rather than belief. There was a photo of Father on top of the piano at home. A team photo, after the village won the local football league last year. He was the one with the droopy moustache and balding head, crouching down in the front and holding his arms out in triumph.
There had been little warning of his going. He’d just come out with it at breakfast one morning. Nan had tried to talk him out of it, but he was adamant. Mother and Nan held hands together and tried not to cry. ‘There’s five of us going from the village,’ Father had said. ‘We’ve got to, don’t you see? Else the war will come here, and we none of us want that, do we?’
The fighting was somewhere down south a long way away, Sofia knew that much. People had talked of little else now for a year or more. She’d seen pictures of it on the television. There was the little girl without any legs, lying on a hospital bed. She’d never forgotten that. She never wanted to be without her legs, never. And at school, Mr Kovacs drew maps on the board, banged the desk, flashed his eyes and said that we had to fight for what was ours if we wanted to keep it. All of us had to fight if need be, he said. But until the day Father left, none of it seemed at all real to Sofia. Even now, she had seen no tanks or planes. She had heard no guns. She had asked Nan about the war – Mother didn’t like to talk about it – about why Father was fighting.
‘Because they want our land. They always have,’ she’d said. ‘And because we hate them. We always have. We’ve hated them for hundreds of years.’
‘And do they hate us?’ Sofia had asked.
‘I suppose they must,’ Nan had said.
Sofia remembered the last day Father had been with them. She had come home from school and he’d been there all smiling and smelling of the wood he’d been sawing. That evening was the last time they’d been milking together. She smiled as she recalled how Myrtle had whipped her mucky tail across Father’s face. ‘Bad-tempered old cow,’ he’d said, wiping his face with the back of his hand. Sofia had laughed at the brown smudge on his face, and Father had chased her out of the parlour. She thought then of his strong, calloused hands and loved them.
Nan was calling her from her thoughts. She hurried her through her breakfast, grumbling all the time that the telephone was not working, that the electricity was cut off too.
‘I can’t understand it,’ she said. ‘Maybe there’s thunder about, but it doesn’t feel like thunder.’ She sent her on her way to school with a whiskery kiss.
It was ten to eight on Sofia’s watch. Plenty of time. The farm was just on the edge of the village, not far. Sofia scuffled through the leaves, all the way down the road. By the time she reached the village square, there were no leaves left to scuffle. So she limped, one foot on the pavement, one in the road. She liked doing that. Sometimes, when no one was looking, she’d do the dance from Singin’ in the Rain. This morning though, she couldn’t. There were too many people around, but very little traffic on the move, she noticed, just a few bicycles.
She crossed the road into the square. The café chairs were already out, and as usual Mighty Martha was scrubbing the pavement on her hands and knees. She looked up and blew the hair out of her face. Mighty Martha was the only famous person ever to be born in the village. She had won an Olympic silver medal for throwing the discus over twenty years before. Discus and medal hung proudly side by side on the café wall under a photo of Mighty Martha standing on a podium, smiling and waving. She was always smiling. That was why everyone wasn’t just proud of her, they loved her too. It helped that she also happened to make the best apple cake in the entire world. That was why her café was always full, even at this early hour. She was smiling at Sofia now.
‘Better hurry,’ she called out. ‘Kovacs will have your guts for garters if you’re late.’
Sofia turned into School Lane. She could hear the bell going now. She’d just make it. But then she stopped. It wasn’t only the bell she was hearing. There was a distant rumble that sounded like thunder. So Nan had been right. There was thunder about. Sofia looked up at the mountains. It couldn’t be thunder. There were no dark clouds. In fact there were no clouds at all, just jagged white peaks sharp against a clear blue sky.
That was the moment Sofia remembered last night’s geography homework: ‘Mountain ranges of the world’. She’d left it behind. She fought back the panic rising inside her and tried to think. Both the choices open to her were bad ones. She could run home to fetch it and be late for school, very late; or she could tell Mr Kovacs that she’d left it at home by mistake, but then he wouldn’t believe her. Either way Mr Kovacs would ‘have her guts for garters’. Sofia chose what seemed to be the least painful option. She would fetch her homework, and on the way there and back, concoct some credible excuse for being late. She ran back across the square with Mighty Martha shouting after her, ‘Where are you off to?’ Sofia waved but did not reply.
The quickest way home was through the graveyard, but Sofia rarely took it. This morning she had to. She usually avoided the graveyard because Grandad had been buried there only two years before in the family grave and Nan went up there twice a week with fresh flowers. To pass the grave and see the flowers only made Sofia sad about Grandad all over again. There was a photograph of him on the grave that looked at her as she passed. She hated looking at it. She still half expected him to talk to her, which was silly and she knew it. Nonetheless she always hared past him before he had a chance to speak.
As she ran, her foot turned on a loose stone. She heard her ankle crack. It gave under her, and she fell heavily, grazing her knees and hands. She sat up to nurse her ankle, which was throbbing now with such a pain that she thought she might faint. When she finally looked up, Grandad was gazing at her sternly from his photograph. She tried to hold back her tears. He’d always hated her to cry. She rocked back and forth groaning, watching the blood from her knee trickle down her leg.
Her books were scattered all over the path, her English book face-down in a puddle. She was reaching for it when she heard the thunder again, much closer this time. For just a moment she thought it might be guns, but then she dismissed that at once. The war was down south, miles away, everyone said so. Mr Kovacs’ maps said so. By now she was hearing an incongruous rattling and squeaking, more like the noise of a dozen tractors trailing their ploughs on the road. She stood up on her one good foot and looked down into the village.
Two tanks rumbled into the square from different ends of the village, engines roaring and smoking. Behind them came six open lorries. When they reached the square they all stopped. Soldiers jumped out. The engines died. The smoke lifted through the trees and a silence fell over the village. Doors opened, heads appeared at windows.
Mighty Martha stood alone in the square, her scrubbing brush in her hand. The soldiers were gazing around like tourists as the last of them climbed down out of the lorries. Mighty Martha’s dog barked at them from the door of the café, his hackles raised. All the soldiers wore headbands, red headbands, except one who was wearing a beret, and there was a gunbelt round his waist like a cowboy. The soldiers – Sofia thought there must be perhaps thirty in all gathered around him – then wandered off in small groups into the narrow streets as if they were going to explore. They had their rifles slung over their shoulders. Sofia wondered if Father wore a red band round his head like they did. The man in the black beret leaned back against a tank, crossed his legs and lit up a cigarette. Mighty Martha stood watching him for a few moments. Then she dropped her scrubbing brush into the bucket, slapped her hands dry and strode into the café.
Sofia gathered up her books and hobbled down the path back towards the square. Mighty Martha would see to her ankle for her, like she had done once before when she’d come off her bike. She’d been a nurse once. She knew about these things; and besides, Sofia wanted to know what was going on. She wanted to get a closer look at the tanks. The homework and Mr Kovacs had been forgotten.
She had got as far as the toilets on the corner of the square when she saw Martha coming out of the café. She was holding a rifle. Suddenly she stopped, brought it to her shoulder and pointed it at the cowboy soldier.
‘This is our village,’ she cried, ‘and you will never take it from us, never.’ A shot rang out and the rifle fell from Martha’s hands. Her head twisted unnaturally on her neck and nodded loose for a moment like a puppet’s head. Then she just collapsed, fell face forward on the cobbles and was still. The cowboy soldier was walking towards her, his pistol in his hand. He turned Martha over with the toe of his boot.
Sofia darted into the toilets, ran to the Ladies, closed the door behind her and bolted it. She sat down, squeezed her eyes tight shut and tried not to believe what she had just witnessed. She heard herself moaning and stopped breathing so that the moaning too would stop. But it did not. She knew then that it came from outside.
She climbed up on the toilet seat. The frosted window was a centimetre or two open. They were coming into the square from every corner of the square. Mr Kovacs and all the schoolchildren came in twos down School Lane, the soldiers hustling them along. The children seemed more bewildered than frightened, except little Ilic, who clutched Mr Kovacs’ hand and cried openly. None of them had seen Martha yet. The cowboy soldier was climbing up on to a tank. He stood legs apart, thumbs hooked into his belt and watched as everyone was marshalled into the square.
The doctor was there, pushing old Mrs Marxova in her wheelchair. Swathed in a shawl, her face ashen, she was pointing down at Martha. Some people were still in their dressing-gowns and slippers. Stefan and Peter from the garage had their hands high in the air, a soldier behind them, jabbing them in their backs with his rifle barrel. Up the road from the bridge Sofia could see all the old folk from the retirement home, a couple of soldiers herding them along like cattle. They would pass by right underneath the toilet window. It was they who were moaning and wailing. Sofia drew back so she wouldn’t be seen. She waited until they had gone and then peered out again.
The square was filling. The schoolchildren were gathered around Mr Kovacs who was talking to them, trying to reassure them, but the children had seen Martha. Everyone had seen Martha. Mrs Marxova held her hands over her eyes and was shaking her head. The doctor was leaning over Martha and feeling her neck, then he was listening to her chest. After a while he took his jacket off and covered her face.
Little Ilic saw his mother and ran screaming across the square. One by one now the children ignored all Mr Kovacs’ attempts to keep them together and went off to search for their mothers. Once found, they clung to them passionately as if they would never let go.
That was when Sofia saw Mother and Nan, arms linked, being marched into the square. All Sofia’s neighbours were with them too. They’d even found Mr Dodovic who lived alone in his hut and kept his bees high up the mountainside. Like all the men, he too had his hands in the air. Mother went straight over to Mr Kovacs and took him by the arm. Mr Kovacs shook his head at her. Sofia longed to cry out, to run to her. But somet
hing inside her held her back. Everyone in the village was corralled in the square by now and surrounded by the soldiers.
A machine-gun was being set up on the steps of the post office and another by the garage on the corner. Mother was talking to the doctor and looking about her frantically. Nan had sat down in a chair outside the café and was staring blankly at Martha.
The cowboy soldier on the tank held up his hands. The hush was almost instantaneous. Even the children stopped crying, except for Mrs Dungonic’s new baby. Mrs Dungonic picked her up and shushed her over her shoulder. The whole square was silent now, expectant.
‘You have seen now what happens if you resist,’ the cowboy soldier began. ‘No one will come to help you. All the telephone lines are cut. All the roads are blocked. You will do what we say. We do not want to harm any more of you, but if you make us, we will. Have no doubt about it. We are simply moving you. This land does not belong to you. You have been squatting here on our land for over three hundred years. You took it from my people. You stole it from us. Now we are taking back what is rightfully ours.’ No one said a word. ‘But we do not want to live in your stinking hovels so we are going to burn the whole place down. By this evening it will be as if it never existed. That way you’ll have nothing to come back to, will you?’ Still no one said anything.
Sofia was screaming inside herself, ‘Don’t just stand there. Tell him he can’t do it. Stop him. What’s the matter with you all?’
‘Now,’ the cowboy soldier went on as he swaggered along the side of his tank. ‘Here’s what you do. The men, if you can call yourselves men, you get in those lorries outside the shop. Be good boys now. Off you go.’ No one moved. He took out his pistol and pointed it at the doctor. ‘Go,’ he said quietly.
‘Where are we going?’ the doctor asked.
‘You’ll see,’ replied the cowboy soldier.
Sofia ducked down. A soldier was walking towards the toilets. Sofia prayed, her eyes tight shut, fists and jaws clenched. ‘Don’t let him come in. Don’t let him come in. Be good, God. Don’t let him come in.’