Of course, sometimes the angel of history gets the better of you; one part of your family simply secedes from the other. When my parents divorced, seven years after this photo, the Christmas war became briefly more violent (which day, which house, which parent) and then grew subdued, because peace is what you want, in the end, at Christmas. On that one day you value it more than your life. Nowadays, we all get into a car with presents in the trunk, quietly drive to my father’s in Felixstowe, where two people divorced fifteen years ago rediscover that cycle whereby “It’s Too Late” doubles back onto itself and becomes “You’ve Got a Friend.” It’s called a cease-fire.
Then, last year, out of nowhere hostilities resumed. Not with my dad, who is beyond such things now, but between mother and brood. That ancient battle poor Denzil couldn’t understand, the one about not bloody leaving the house on Christmas Eve, which is the one day you’re meant to spend with your bloody family, the one day your mother asks for a little quality time, et cetera, hit the house like a grenade, and everybody yelled a lot and walked out and I spent Christmas Eve sleeping in my friend Adam’s bath.
I see now the mistake we made. We thought that because we’d reached adulthood, Mum wouldn’t mind if we ditched Christmas-the ritual, the dream, the animating spirit, the whole shebang-and just paraded around town at nightclubs and other people’s dinner parties as if we were individuals living in the free world. Don’t ever think that. Where women are concerned (mothers especially), Zora Neale Hurston had it right: the dream is the truth. After all, for 364 days of the year you live in the Real. Your mother is asking you only for this one day. It’s nothing, it says on my photo, nothing but letting; it’s about letting Christmas in, letting go of that Kantian will of yours, getting freaky like Iris, giving it up to a beautiful, insane, mystical idea. So you damaged the photo of Christmas Past-well, let’s try it again: Christmas Present, Christmas Future. “War is over, if you want it,” sang John and Yoko. So let it happen.
Fifteen – ACCIDENTAL HERO
On the sixtieth anniversary of the end of World War II, the BBC asked members of the public to submit their personal war stories. These were to be placed online as a historical resource. I helped my father to write his account and then, using the material I had gathered, expanded it into a newspaper article, of which this is a revised version.
I knew my father had “stormed the beach at Normandy.” I knew nobody else’s father had-that job had been wisely left to their grandfathers. That’s all I knew. As a child, the mildewed war came to me piecemeal through the usual sources, very rarely from him. Harvey never spoke about it as a personal reality, and the truth was I didn’t think of it as a reality, but only as one of many fictional details woven into the fabric of my childhood: Jane Eyre was sent to the red room, Lucy Pevensie met Mr. Tumnus, Harvey Smith stormed the beach at Normandy. Later, in my twenties, small facts escaped, mostly concerning his year spent in Germany helping with the reconstruction. But Normandy stayed as fictional to me as Narnia. “Stormed!”-this made no sense. A sentimental man, physically gentle, pacifistic in all things and possessed of a liberal heart that does not so much bleed as hemorrhage. It is perfectly normal to phone my father around 6:30 in the evening and find him distraught, reduced to tears by watching the news.
Then one recent adult summer, I happened to find myself in Normandy, visiting an American poet. She was writing a verse sequence about the layers of social history in the area and took me on a day trip to the beach, where we swam and sat in the sun. It was stupidly late into my swim before it occurred to me that this might be the beach Harvey had landed upon, fifty-nine years earlier. I mentioned it to the poet, and she asked after details I was shamed to admit I didn’t have. Our day turned historical. She showed me Juno Beach, the cliffs in which the snipers crouched, the maze of hedgerows that proved so lethal. Finally, the American cemetery. Thousands upon thousands of squat white crosses, punctuated by the Star of David, line up in rows on the manicured grass. You can’t see the end of it. I’m my father’s daughter: I burst into tears.
I returned home, full of journalistic zeal. I bought a Dictaphone. This seemed like half the job done already. I was the gutsy truth seeker, uncovering the poignant war story of a man who found it all too painful to talk about. Except I found my father not especially resistant to the idea. True, he had never really spoken about it-then again, I had never really asked. He laid out a fish lunch in his garden in Felixstowe and carefully set up the microphone on its little stand.
“It’s funny you mention it, actually.” Why was it funny? “Well, I’ve been thinking a bit about it, what with the anniversary. It’s only now that I’ve started thinking: I would like my lost service medals back… you know, for next year. Just be nice, wouldn’t it.” But why didn’t you ask for them back, years ago? “Well… they charge you for them, don’t they,” said Harvey doubtfully, and returned to filleting his grilled sole.
A struggle my father has always had: between hating war and having been in one, between being committed to, as he puts it, the future, and at the same time not wanting to be entirely forgotten. I think he was surprised, at this late hour, to find he wanted his medals back. I was surprised I wanted to see them. A kindly veteran who lives opposite helped us send off the necessary paperwork. When the medals arrived, I came up to Felixstowe and we sat about staring at them. These moon rocks laid out on the kitchen table.
I was a bad journalist to my father, short-tempered, bullying. He never said what I wanted him to. Each week we struggled as I tried to force his story into my mold-territory previously covered by Saving Private Ryan or The Great Escape-and he tried to stop me. He only wanted to explain what had happened to him. And his war, as he sees it, was an accidental thing, ambivalent, unplanned, an ordinary man’s experience of extremity. It’s not Private Ryan’s war or Steve McQueen’s war or Bert Scaife’s war (of whom more later). It’s Harvey Smith’s war. If it embodies anything (Harvey’s not much into things embodying other things), it is the fact that when wars are fought, perfectly normal people fight them. Alongside the heroes and martyrs, sergeants and generals, there are the millions of average young people who simply tumble into it, their childhood barely behind them. Harvey was one those. A working-class lad from East Croydon at a loose end. At seventeen, he was still too young to be drafted, but when he passed the recruiting office on the high street, he went inside. They took his details and told him he’d be called up when he was seventeen and six months. “Made me feel a little bit special-and when you’re a teenager, that’s what you want, isn’t it?” In November 1943 initial training was completed. They moved to Suffolk, where Harvey joined the 6th Assault Regiment RE and was mobilized the week after Christmas. “That meant our unit were officially at war. I think that’s right. It meant that they could shoot you if you deserted, or something.”