I stood directly under the open window and shouted up through it that I was off to find someone to unlock the train and let her out.
The smallest boy snorted a laugh.
Don’t need to go nowhere, he said. We’ll get your friend out.
All three boys stood back from the train carriage. The smallest scouted about for a pebble. The other two bent down and picked up large stones. The dog started to bark. It was almost immediately after they began throwing the stones at the side of the train that the men in the luminous waistcoats came running towards us.
Shortly after this the afternoon came to an end. We said our goodbyes. We went our different ways. I myself went back to the station and bought a ticket home. What was it you were telling me down there? the woman asked me when she’d finally got off the train, after they’d backed it to a platform, opened its doors, brought the sloping ramp they use to help people in wheelchairs to get on and off and allowed her to wheel herself out. There were many apologies from people in suits and uniforms. Well, that’s the last time I take the train! is what she said, with some campness and a great deal of panache, when the doors finally automatically hissed open on her like the curtains of a strange tiny theatre. The people on the platform laughed politely. She didn’t mean it, of course she didn’t.
In Shakespeare, the word stone can also mean a mirror.
The word pebble has, in its time, also meant a lens made of rock crystal and a sizeable amount of gunpowder.
The word mundane comes from mundus, the Latin word for the world.
At one time the word cheer seems to have meant the human face.
The word last is a very versatile word. Among other more unexpected things – like the piece of metal shaped like a foot which a cobbler uses to make shoes – it can mean both finality and continuance, it can mean the last time, and something a lot more lasting than that.
To conclude once meant to enclose.
To tell has at different times meant the following: to express in words, to narrate, to explain, to calculate, to count, to order, to give away secrets, to say goodbye.
To live in clover means to live luxuriously, in abundance.
For the past month or so, while I’ve been editing and readying this book, I’ve been asking the friends and the strangers I’ve chanced to meet or spend time with what they think about public libraries – about their history, their importance and the recent spate of closures. Here’s a transcription of one of the earliest responses I had, from Sarah Wood:
This is what I think of when I think of school holidays, me and my friend Lisa cycling at full speed on our bikes and the route is always to the library.
It started before the time they’d let us walk to school by ourselves. But for some reason we were allowed to do this. First it was the branch library. We were eight or nine years old and we went most days. We’d get out our books, cycle home and read them in the garden in one go. It was an independence thing for sure – we went, chose, borrowed, pedalled home, read what we’d got, then went back again, chose again, came home again and read. We’d throw our bikes down outside its doors – I remember that like it was a part of it, and that we didn’t have any money, but that we didn’t need money: here transaction was a whole other thing. There was a scheme where you got points for taking out books and when you’d reached a certain number of points the prize was that you got to help the librarian tidy up the shelves. We all wanted to do that. We read as much as we could so we could win that prize. The librarian was canny.
Then the new library was built, a terribly stylish five-storey building, a giant addition to the borough where we lived. A real frisson came off the place, it still does when I remember it opening. It was cleverly imagined, beautifully designed. Inside the children’s library there was a sunken reading space that went down into the floor, a small-scale amphitheatre where we sat, citizens of thought, books open on our knees. Across from us there was a window into the place where adult readers could go and listen to records on a great big semicircular sofa – the librarian, momentarily transformed into DJ, would put the record on a turntable on the librarian’s desk and the people listening would plug in a set of headphones behind them on the sofa to hear it, music for free.
Art too: this was also the floor where you could borrow paintings and prints; you could take home a work of art to make your own home as stylish and modern as the library. Downstairs was fiction. Above us were the study carrels where the older children did their homework and all the pupils from different schools met and hung out together. It was exciting. It was like the future would be. In fact I got my first Saturday job there, which was the first time I saw the amazing off-floor facilities they had, the modern stacks full of – well, everything.
I can’t tell you what the opening of that library was like where we lived – it was an event. It was a really fantastic moment in my life, in our lives, a moment of real change. The brand new building brought with it the idea that our local history was important – that books were important, but also that we were too, and that where we lived was, that it had a heritage and a future that mattered. There was something very grounded about that beautiful new build. I’m pretty sure that’s why we were allowed to go there, on our bikes by ourselves like we did, so long as we cycled on the pavement there and back and were careful about the traffic.
Good voice
There was a man who had two sons. And the younger of them said to his father, Father, give me the share of property that is coming to me.
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 r
andom. 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.
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.