I had become unusually voluble and a little emotional, too. I’d never been particularly nostalgic about family history and had little knowledge of all but the lowest branches of the family tree, but wasn’t this interesting? Our family heritage, our small role in history. Terence Petersen had fought in El Alamein, in Normandy too. As our only child, Albie would inherit his campaign medals. Shouldn’t he at least acknowledge their significance and the sacrifice of his forebears? Yet Albie seemed primarily interested in checking the signal on his mobile phone. My own father, had I behaved like this, would have knocked it out of my hand.
‘Perhaps I should have gone there anyway,’ I continued. ‘Perhaps we should all have gone. Got off at Brussels and hired a car. Why didn’t I think of this before?’
‘We’ll go some other time,’ said Connie, who had closed her book now and was watching me with some concern. ‘Would anyone like some coffee?’
But I had heard the distant rumble of an argument and now wanted the storm to break. ‘Would you be interested in that, Egg? Would you want to come along?’ I knew that he would not, but I wanted to hear him say it.
He shrugged. ‘Maybe.’
‘You don’t seem very interested.’
He ruffled his hair with both hands. ‘It’s history. I never knew anyone involved.’
‘Nor did I, but still …’
‘Waterloo is over there, the Somme is back in that direction; we probably had Petersens there, Moores too.’
‘It was my grandfather.’
‘But you said yourself, you never even knew him. I don’t even remember granddad. I’m sorry, but I can’t make an emotional connection to stuff that happened all that time ago.’
Emotional connection, what an idiotic phrase. ‘It was only seventy years, Albie. Two generations ago there were Nazis in Paris and Amsterdam. Albie’s a very Jewish-sounding name—’
‘Okay, this is a very gloomy conversation,’ said Connie, unnaturally bright. ‘Who wants coffee?’
‘At the very least you could have been called up for service. Do you ever wonder what that would have been like? Standing terrified in a forest in Belgium in the dead of winter, like my grandfather? No wifi signal there, Albie!’
‘Can both of you lower your voices, please? And change the subject?’
I had merely raised my voice to be heard above the ambient noise of the train, it was Albie who was shouting. ‘Why are you making me out to be ignorant?’ I know all this, I know what happened. I know, I’m just not… obsessed with the Second World War. I’m sorry, but I’m not. We’ve moved on.’
‘We? We?’
‘We’ve moved on, we don’t see it everywhere. We don’t look at a map and see these … arrows everywhere. That’s okay, isn’t it? Isn’t that healthy? To move on and be European, instead of reading endless books about it and wallowing in it?’
‘I don’t wallow, I—’
‘Well I’m sorry, Dad, but I’m not nostalgic for tank battles in the woods and I’m not going to pretend to care about things that don’t mean anything to me.’
Don’t mean anything? This was my father’s father. My dad grew up without a dad. Perhaps Albie thought that this was a perfectly acceptable, even desirable, state of affairs but, still, to be so aloof and dismissive, it seemed … disloyal, unmanly. I love my son, I hope that is abundantly clear, but at that particular moment I found I wanted to bounce his head smartly off the window.
Instead I waited a moment, then said, ‘Well, frankly, I think that’s a shitty attitude.’ Which, in the silence that followed, seemed scarcely less violent.
Alternative points of view are more easily appreciated from a distance. Time allows us to zoom out and see things more objectively, less emotionally, and recalling the conversation it’s clear that I overreacted. But despite being born some fifteen years after its end, the War overshadowed every aspect of my childhood: toys, comics, music, light entertainment, politics, it was in everything. Goodness knows how this must have felt to my parents, to have seen the traumas and terrors of their early youth re-enacted in situation comedies and playground games. Certainly, they didn’t seem overly sensitive or scarred. Nazis were one of the few things that my father found amusing. If the thought of his father’s loss upset him then he concealed it, as he concealed all strong feelings, anger aside.
My son, by contrast, was of a generation that no longer thought of countries in terms of Allied or Axis, or judged people on the basis of their grandparents’ allegiances. Outside of first-person shoot-’em-ups, the War never crossed Albie’s mind and maybe this was healthy. Maybe this was progress.
But it didn’t feel like progress on the train. It seemed like disrespect, ignorance and complacency and I told him so, and in response he tossed his book onto the table, muttered beneath his breath, clambered over Connie into the aisle and away.
We waited for the other passengers to return to their newspapers. ‘Are you all right?’ she said quietly, with the intonation of ‘are you mad?’
‘I’m perfectly fine, thank you.’
We travelled on in silence for two or three kilometres, before I said, ‘So clearly, that was all my fault.’
‘Not entirely. About eighty-twenty.’
‘No need to ask in whose favour.’
Another two kilometres slipped by. She picked up her book, though the pages didn’t turn. Fields, warehouses, more fields, the backs of houses. I said, ‘By which I mean you might sometimes support me in these arguments.’
‘I do,’ said Connie, ‘if you’re right.’
‘I can’t recall a single instance—’
‘Douglas, I’m neutral. I’m Switzerland.’
‘Really? Because it’s clear to me where your allegiances—’
‘I don’t have “allegiances”. It’s not a war! Though Christ knows it feels like it sometimes.’
We passed through Brussels, though I could not now tell you much about it. In a park to the left I caught a glimpse of the Atomium, the stainless-steel structure built for the World’s Fair, a fifties version of our present day and something I’d have liked to see. But I couldn’t bear to mention it, and could only manage:
‘I found his attitude upsetting.’
‘Fine, I understand,’ said Connie, her hand on my forearm now. ‘But he’s young and you sound so … pompous, Douglas. You sound like some old duffer calling for National Service to be reintroduced. In fact, you know who you sound like? You sound like your dad!’
I’d not heard this before. I had never expected to hear it and I would need time to take it in, but Connie continued:
‘Why can you never let things go? You just pick and pick away at them, at Albie. I know not everything is easy at the moment, Christ knows it’s not easy for me either, but you’re up, you’re down, you’re manic, chattering away, or you’re storming out. It’s … hard, it’s very hard.’ In a lower voice. ‘That’s why I’m asking again: are you feeling all right? You must be honest. Can you do this journey or shall we all go home?’
I found him as we entered Antwerp, sitting on a high stool in the buffet car eating a small tub of Pringles. His eyes, I noted, were a little red.