1945 – Page 2 – Writer-insighter

The (screen)play what I wrote

Once upon a time when the world was young and even I was younger too, people used to like to stay in on a Saturday night. Not because they’d get mugged or stabbed, or they were worried about drink-driving or they didn’t have any money. They didn’t; only one person ever was in my town and that was when he opened his front door; they weren’t, very; and nobody did, in that order. The past is a different country. They did things differently there. It was great.

The thing I liked them doing differently was having things on TV that were clever, my own definition of cleverness defined as making words dance. I wanted to get down to the Rose & Crown or the Red Lion as much as the next person who wanted to squeeze past Wendy Sedgewick. And no, nowhere else. Except the Lamb on a Monday night because there was what would now be open-mic, and although I didn’t, someone mistook me for someone who ran another club. That matters at 19 in a small Wiltshire town. In those days teens went to pubs.

Yes, I know it was illegal and all that blah. Everyone knew where everyone was and nobody ever got hurt, ever, so tell me the big deal about it. And I wanted to go. But I usually only went after I’d watched The Two Ronnies. Or Morecambe & Wise, both for the same reasons.

They, but in particular Ronnie Barker, made the words dance. Yes, a load of it was about suburban middle-aged dinner parties. Yes, a lot of the women were dressed in long, clingy evening gowns I’d never, ever seen anyone in Trowbridge slipping into, let alone out of. But the words. The words were the thing. And not like that moronic song that asked what are words worth. GEDDIT!!!!????

But hark, I might get to the point of this. I just wrote a screenplay. My first one won a BBC Writers Room competition (actually, as one says). I pitched it to Cascade and astonishingly the first time I pitched a script which was the first one I’d ever written, they didn’t go with it. Life is so unfair, as I didn’t bother to say as I went down Berwick Street and had an espresso at the Italian deli around the corner, same as I’d been meaning to for twenty-odd years. Anyway, after thinking about it for 15 years and fretting at it for two and boring a friend absolutely witless about it for a solid year, six weeks back with pneumonia I decided that I either got it written for another BBC script window deadline or I forgot about it for ever. Promise.

So I wrote it. A friend of a friend sent it to Film Suffolk, who seem quite taken with it. In fact, rather more than that. It needs some revision. A German resistance historian loves it. But what I don’t love is people saying “have you read Save The Cat?”

The answer is ‘not yet.’ Not because I think it’s bad – I haven’t read it so I don’t know. Because of this review, one of many.

This book is awesome and totally relevant to writing fiction! This book saved my plot! I had reached a stage in my MS where I had lost sight of what was actually happening. I was writing scenes but I couldn’t see where they would fit in the grand scheme of the story. By reading this book, I could easily see the bigger picture. I was able to put all my chapters into an order and look at the plot as a whole. So I would definitely advise reading it to help save your plot from the death spiral!

You don’t have to do the silly high voice when you say ‘Ahsome!!” but it will probably help. Like toadly. May I?

Don’t make a scene

I was writing scenes but I couldn’t see where they would fit.

Yep. OK. Let me stop you there. I know the reason for this. That’s because you don’t have what writers call “a story.”

I’m sorry to spring all these technical phrases on you like this, but bear with me. I know, because if you had a story you’d know the beginning, the middle and the end of it. Because you couldn’t think of a story that didn’t.

But you don’t really want a story, with that mindset. Instead you want a Paint-By-Numbers Hollywood millionaire kit. And you’ll find that right next to the unicorn horns, Aisle Three.

Right. I’m glad we’ve got that sorted. I’ll have a look at it, ok? I promise. But first, I want to think about the only thing that matters in a story. And that’s whether it’s there or not.

Would you sit and listen to it? Read it? Sit in a cinema and watch it? Because if not then you haven’t got a story and all you’re trying to do is get rich quick. So if you’re sitting comfortably, I’ll begin.

Once upon a time when the world was young and I had more patience and couldn’t tell a story, then I’d have thought deconstruction was a toolkit that could help you build something too. Except as someone whose student grant went to a motorcycle shop one term, I knew something important.

I knew that understanding how a Norton 500 engine comes apart and what all the bits are called – even understanding completely what they do, or what they’re supposed to do – doesn’t mean you can get it back together again. A Norton 500 engine, in case you’re wondering, is something made of metal. A lot more tangible and solid than words.

And that’s a true story.

Janni Schenck

I’ve been working on a story. It’s been in my head for two years, but that’s not true. It’s been in my head since I don’t know. 1997 or ’98 maybe, when I went into a pub one summer afternoon and found an old man arguing with a skinhead. The pub was close to a Rudolf Steiner school.

HitlerYouthKnife — What more could a 13 year-old boy want?

“Look!” I said wittily to the woman I was with, nodding at the white-haired, distinguished-looking old man. “It’s Rudolf Steiner.” She was kind enough to smile a little, but the afternoon got much stranger faster then. I heard the words “Hitler Youth” and thought I was witnessing a hate-crime. I thought the skinhead was saying how great the Hitler Youth were.

Then I noticed he wasn’t a skinhead, really. Just one of the people who don’t seem to have any hair these days. I think it’s the food they eat. Whatever it was, he didn’t have any hair. But he didn’t have any bluebird of freedom tattoos either. And it wasn’t him saying how great the Hitler Youth were, but the aristocratic old man with white hair next to him. The skinhead who wasn’t called the old man a Nazi and that’s when it kicked off. The old man said at some volume that he wasn’t a Nazi, he was in the Hitler Youth. And, he said, it was great.

You got flags to wave, songs to sing, camp to go to, something to be a part of. And more than this, at thirteen you got to shoot a real pistol and throw real grenades. When I was a boy half his age at thirteen, or maybe a little older, a Dutch woman who lived at the end of our road told me about firing the Colt automatic. She said “It kicked like a mule.” She was loud and a bit fat and they’d built an extension on their house and seemed to own the local shop. I didn’t know she’d once been hungry. I didn’t know around 30,000 people in Holland starved to death.

A present from the Netherlands. — A present from the Netherlands, a long time ago.

She had an odd accent I thought, but it was just a Dutch accent told to a small boy in Wiltshire who hadn’t been anywhere apart from Somerset. I didn’t know so many things then. I didn’t know, for example, that if she’d been caught by the German occupying forces anywhere near what was obviously a pistol for the Resistance dropped into Holland then she would have been shot, but probably not before she’d been made to tell the names of everyone she knew who knew about the gun as well. The alternative scenario – Allied soldiers took her shooting with a pistol because that’s how you’d entertain a girl around twenty whose country you just liberated. Sure it is.

I didn’t know too that as the old man told anyone who would listen, every German boy was conscripted into the Hitler Youth at the age of thirteen. Exactly the same way that at eighteen, boys were conscripted into the army. And apart, presumably, from the freezing cold nights manning anti-aircraft guns waiting for the mile-long streams of RAF bombers, it was mostly fun. Apart from the last day of the war, when the Americans came to the village.

The SS turned up first, in a jeep of some kind. They told the boys they had to defend the Fatherland and kitted them out with brand-new guns and steel helmets and grenades from a bunker in a field, that nobody knew was there. Years later I heard that the best way to hide something is simply to dig a hole and put the thing into it, with a sign saying ‘MoD – Keep Out’. Or ‘Water Company.’ It works in countries where order is an important thing. The boys made their way down towards their village again and the SS realised they had an important appointment somewhere else more urgently, coincidentally on the way to Switzerland, and left. The schoolmaster in the little village met the boys on their way to fight the Americans. He was the head of the Hitler Youth.

He beat the boys up, made them throw all the guns in the ditch and sent them home. The Americans arrived about an hour later. The old man said they would have shot everyone in the village if there was any resistance.

It’s stuck in my head. It asks so many questions. And now I’ve written it. It’s called Janni Schenck. It’s very nearly a true story. I can’t speak without gabbling. I’ve been ill and I’ve just slept for a couple of hours accidentally, fully dressed, instead of going out as I was going to do. But I’ve done it. I’ve got to buy some paper tomorrow and proof read it, because I can’t proof on-screen, but tomorrow is another day. I’ve done it. And I didn’t think I could.

The way we weren’t

I was born if not in a cross-fire hurricane, then certainly not in a Hawker Hurricane either. Although thanks to Airfix kits, I knew enough about them to kid most people along.

Flying, or the idea of it anyway, fascinated me when I was a boy. All this were fields, an’all, but that’s another story as equally true and/or plausible. I was about to say I didn’t get on an aeroplane, as we called them in my house, until I was nineteen, but it wouldn’t be true. Somewhere there’s a picture of me aged about four, wearing a tweed coat (oh because people did in those days, all right?) and somewhat improbably, a modern pilot’s helmet, sitting in the front seat of an English Electric Lighting. One of the only things I share with Jeremy Clarkson is a admiration for the Lightning. Someone I used to know got a ride in a Russian Foxbat about twelve years ago. She said it wasn’t like flying. Not like flying out of Heathrow or Gatwick, anyway. She said it got off the ground, got to the end of the runway then sat back on its haunches and went straight up. The same as the Lightning was designed to do, get to 36,000 feet in three minutes in 1959. It topped-out at 87,000 feet, deep into the edge of space. Think about that for a moment.

I've sat in one of these. Straight up. Although not to 87,000 feet. — I’ve sat in one of these. Straight up. Although not to 87,000 feet.

Obviously the RAF scrapped the Lightning and bought American Phantoms, which above all else, were American. The idea of an independent defence capability was a joke even then, before anyone even mentioned Trident. Aged four, I didn’t know any of this. I just loved aeroplanes.

Maybe it was my father. As a professional liar he’d claimed he’d been a pilot when it turned out that in fact, he’d been the bloke who put air in the tyres and started the engines up. He watched black and white documentaries in the middle of the night. Once he got me out of bed to make me watch something about the Blitz. Forty thousand British people died from bombing in World War Two. About the same number of Germans died in three days in Hamburg and Dresden, but nobody even mentioned that, then.

Where is this going? I wish I knew. Tangentially around a picture I bought in Bath a couple of weekends ago. It spoke to me of my childhood, or my early teens anyway, when I discovered Captain W.E. Johns and his heroic creation, Biggles. I read them obsessively, especially the First World War stories. They had something about them I’d never read before; it was years before I knew why they were so powerful.

Firstly, although obviously any mortal man having as many adventures as Biggles would have been dead before he’d done half of them or even a quarter, Johns had been a fighter pilot himself, in France. He knew what he was writing about. This Biggles drank, got in fights with other pilots, loved, shot and killed people, crashed, got cold, got tired and displayed what now are so very obviously classic PTSD symptoms. Only later when the magazine articles had proved wildly popular Biggles’ diction changed and he switched from Scotch to lemonade at the insistence of John’s publishers and agents, to widen the market to schoolboys.

But Biggles of the Camel Squadron and Biggles of 266 are the original, first attempts. And while they’re polished, perfect little short stories with a beginning, a middle and an end, they’re also very raw. When pilots die in these stories, there’s no doubt but that they’re dead and little or no talk of glory or a purpose in their deaths. I’d never, ever read about a man crying when another man had been killed before; to this day it surprises me that the first place I read this was in a Biggles book. The shock was real; I didn’t know men did this.

I didn’t know men wrote about it either. It was a different world, a long way from my father’s fantasies of flight, a long way from the Wiltshire village I grew up in. But then as now, the past is a different country. They do things differently there.

You’ll never forget

A couple of weeks ago a man flew an airplane at an airshow, which wasn’t unusual in itself. Sadly for the pilot and the eleven people dead so far, the plane crashed. A lot of people seem to think that’s quite unusual too, but it isn’t.

Airshow crashes happen quite a lot. Right back as far as 1911, just a few years after airplanes started flying, there was an airshow crash just like the Shoreham one. You can read the details on Wikipedia if you wish.

At Shoreham, the plane looped, then went into the ground. It happened in Suffolk too, at the little airfield just down the road from me. It was flown by a man called Lt. Otto Jenkins, known to his friends as Dittie. He was killed on 24th March 1945. I was told the story by a man who saw it happen, who’d seen the aircraft fly past at about 20 feet, saw it clip the tree and go straight into the field, where it exploded and burned. There was quite a crowd that day too. Lt Jenkins had told people to watch.

He’d just completed his last mission over Germany. He was going home. When he got back to Leiston airfield he said his last words on earth, over the radio. “I’ll show you flying you’ll never forget.”

He took his Mustang down to get the speed up then looped it, going up and over in a complete circle. Then he decided to go it again, straightaway. According to the mechanics watching, they could hear something wasn’t right. They said it was ‘mushing’ as it went round the second time, trying to press itself out of the loop, skidding downwards out of the circle. There just wasn’t enough speed to make it happen twice.

I met a woman whose aunt dated him, or said she did. He was married, according to the old pilot who told me about it. We went to look for the tree. It was smaller then, but it’s still there. Oak trees are tough stuff.

Lt Jenkins got through several aircraft in the few months he was flying. After the custom of the time he’d named them, first Floogie, then Floogie II, then Toolin’ Fool. then Toolin’ Fool’s Revenge. The pilot who inherited Floogie II. Lt Schlieker, was killed later. He crashed near Butley church, nearby. He was in formation when his flight of four aircraft climbed into the clouds. That was the last anyone ever saw of him. He was identified by a name tag on his shirt. Bad weather and accidents killed more pilots on that airfield than the Luftwaffe ever did.

A badger track leads across the field exactly where there used to be a path the pilots used, but there’s no plank over the ditch any more. The Officer’s Club he watched the show from isn’t there either, and where the Mustang screamed past the huts now it would be flying through a hedge and 70 years of brush that’s grown up since the airmen went home. Not Lt Jenkins. But maybe he was right, somehow. Not everyone’s forgotten his flying.

Reading with the enemy

Longer ago than I want to admit knowing about Magazine had a song called Feed The Enemy.

Yes you do know. Almost certainly, if you’re in any way seriously into music, otherwise you’re in the same camp as someone saying they don’t know anything about Mozart because he did his stuff before they were born. And this on a rainy summer day when it’s far too wet to go for a walk and it’s Sunday too and even though there’s no school tomorrow and hasn’t been for several decades, only Kate Bush’s early songs can do justice to the mood of just-deferred despair that’s always been England, in my experience. I don’t mean the manic roaring in the ears of the Hounds of Love, but more the determined languid resignation of The Kick Inside. Anywaaaaaay, as girls called Emma used to say, curled up half-kneeling on the carpet in front of the fire in their Dad’s living room in the half dark of just the same kind of Sunday afternoons.

Anyway. Feed the Enemy was written when just for a change the official story of Stuff That Just Is was just as split-personality as it is now. The Soviets are a threat. All the time. They want to destroy our way of life. So we’d better sell them cheap butter and wine that’s cheap because we make too much of it so the EC buys it and flogs it off to the USSR and complains about them invading Afghanistan at the same time. When university politics lecturers said things like ‘the USSR has to expand somewhere…’ (yes I’m looking at you, Southampton University Class of Oh Is That The Time Already?) It doesn’t really matter when it was. The names change but it’s always the same story. We give people guns or look the other way when our friends do then run about screaming that they’re trying to destroy our way of life.

Anywaaaaaaay, all of which, imaginary Emma from long ago, is a way of saying I had a bit of a First World Problem this week. Do you feed the enemy or not? I wanted a book. It was a biography of Rommel and the first page grabbed me because of the way it was written. It wasn’t the usual MilHist: “at 18:24 the XIVDivision advanced towards Mersa Matruh unchecked with only light casualties” describing families’s hopes and dreams like their menfolk rent limb from limb and burned alive. It was actually readable, about the man behind the legend.

So far so what?

Rude, but a fair point. I didn’t always read this stuff. I feel I need to now, possibly because I didn’t, possibly because for my generation the War as The Big Secret that adults didn’t talk about in any detail, it being distinctly bad form if they did and also as I know now, because it was much, much too soon away to start talking about it. And for other reasons involving people I know and people I’ve met and talked to.

The big FWP was simple. I wanted to buy the book. But it was written by David Irving. Mr Holocaust Denier. I wasn’t there. I’ve seen the photos and everyone else has as well, the same as I’ve seen photos of unicorns. In Photoshop world a photo on your laptop screen doesn’t prove anything one way or the other. I read about the American massacre of guards at Auschwitz who got themselves machine-gunned after they surrendered because the liberating Americans found a train full of machine-gunned Jews there. The fact that American aircraft had shot it up not knowing and not able to know what or who was inside wasn’t known and was surprisingly not well-advertised until much later. I don’t know if, as Irving maintained, there was or wasn’t arsenic in the plaster of the walls at the camp. But I’ve met people who saw piles of bodies at the camps with their own eyes.

I don’t understand why if there were extermination camps rather than say, camps where no-one particularly cared if the inmates died or not, why anyone at all survived there. But whether those people died of gas or bullets or typhoid doesn’t really matter, it seems to me. It also seems insane to say that what thousands of people saw for themselves just didn’t happen.

Hence the dillemma. The book was second-hand, after all, so it’s not as if Mr Irving was going to get my money for his stuff, and it was written a decade before he seems to have finally gone nuts and started saying things people I’ve spoken to saw for themselves just didn’t happen. But still. Do you buy the book? Do you have anything to do with people whose ideas are mind-numbingly offensive, however remote? Do you feed the enemy or not?

It’s always raining over the border
There’s been a plane crash out there
In the wheat fields
They’re picking up the pieces
We could go and look and stare

How many friends have we over there?
The border guards fight unconvincingly
Whatever we do it seems things are arranged
We always have to feed the enemy.

Magazine (Tomlinson/Devoto/Sony – Feed The Enemy).

The old man who told me about the time he saw the piles of bodies for himself, along with the rest of his squadron when they occupied a German airfield also told me how his unit marched the inhabitants of the nearest German town through the camp so nobody could say “I didn’t know.” He also told me how that evening there was a serious discussion about how maybe it would be a good idea to just break open the armoury and go back into town and shoot everyone they saw.

Elmer’s Tune

Today is probably the 70th anniversary of something I didn’t do. Obviously, if you saw me, even on a bad day, like the day after I fell off the boat ladder in the yard and banged my ribs into the side of it as I fell. That felt like I was 70 and not in particularly good shape. The time I fell off the earth bank at the side of a sunken lane and landed on both knees, ten feet down on gravel was pretty instantly ageing too. But none of those things are to do with Elmer’s Tune. It was a song someone used to like, back then when this happened.

There are several things I haven’t written and mean to write. It isn’t that I don’t know the stories; they’re very simple and both of them true. The issue – apart from laziness and never knowing whether anyone would want to read them – is what to write, whether to write them as a book, as a stand-up spoken word performance, as a screenplay or what. The screenplay idea isn’t so far-fetched. This one would make a good radio piece though. Visually it would need lots of airplanes that went to a Swiss scrap-heap long ago, a full-size American airfield in Suffolk, a blacked-out town and lots of young women in 1940s clothes, or at least hair-styles, given that getting these women out of their clothes was the major reason this particular story happened.

A young man who happened to be an American fighter pilot went to a dance. Because he was excited, because he wanted to sleep with this English girl, because all kinds of things, he missed his lift back to his airfield. The dance was in Ipswich and the truck picked people up near the railway station, except by the time he got there the truck had long gone and he had to walk. He was due to fly in the morning, escorting bombers on one of the last raids of the war, the last time his squadron fought, flying out of Leiston airfield.

So he walked. Through the blacked-out town. Up the hill along the Woodbridge road, out past what was then Martlesham airfield, where Bader had flown, but silent at that time of night. Over what is now the A12 but then was just a minor road. Over the huge roundabout that wasn’t there, past the huge Suffolk police headquarters that hadn’t been built. Some police officers have sworn that they’ve seen people in there who aren’t really there now, people who used to be there, judging by their clothes. In the 1950s some people swore they’d heard airplanes on the base, ten years and more after they all went home.

Down the hill past the Black Tiles pub, down into Old Martlesham and the Red Lion, all shut and long empty then. Along the low road, past what wasn’t then an antique shop, under the railway bridge and as the road starts rising again, up to the roundabout where the Woodbridge bypass begins, the other side of the valley the old road slid down into, the valley the modern road drives straight across. You can see the old road here for the first time, going straight on where now the road sweeps round to the right.

He may have gone straight on along the bypass. It was built in the 1930s. It’s possible. Or right, through the little town. When he told me this story he couldn’t remember and it was dark anyway. He thought he might recognise the street, but in the dark these narrow thoroughfares look much the same. He would have walked through Wickham Market next, either way. Some of that looks very similar.

Before you get to Wickham there is an avenue of trees on another abandoned stretch of this road. In the 1970s the A12 was upgraded. Part of the old bypass was bypassed and a half-mile stretch of it shaded by big trees sits in a field. Those trees must be seventy feet high; they were just about ten years old when the pilot walked under them. If he didn’t walk through the town.

Out past Wickham the modern road plays tricks again. There are so many places he could have taken a wrong turning. There was no-one to ask, no passing traffic. Petrol was rationed and around here only people like doctors had cars anyway. Military vehicles didn’t pass often and this part of England, so close to the invasion coast was emptied of people five miles back from the shore. The Army confiscated huge parts of this place, all around Iken, Snape, Blaxhall and Tunstall, to practice for the invasion of Europe.

Unlike Imber village, the people were allowed back after the war. In Orford they found some changes to the Jolly Sailor pub. Hardening the building as a defensive strongpoint in 1940 the Army poured concrete on the upper floor. It’s still there, bowing the roof beams in the room below, pushing the walls outwards much heavier than the wood and plaster it sits on top of, but the Jolly Sailor is another story all its own.

Another seven miles from Wickham to Saxmundham and from there straight up the hill the way the leave truck went, the six wheeler everyone piled into when they weren’t flying to take them down to the railway station, London and the Picadilly Commandos, the working girls who knew that American officers, gentlemen even if only by virtues of their wings badge were paid five times the rate British soldiers were given. It would be light by four-thirty. It was today, 70 years on, the day I always think ‘shall I walk it today?’ But it’s a long way and it’s raining and much as I might want to for other reasons, there’s nobody to make me go to Germany today.

Past the Waitrose and the Tesco and the Costa, past the charity shop, the bookies and the factory discount store. One of the pilot’s friends cycled down this hill once. He gave a lift on his bike to a girl in the street and they cycled up the hill the other side of the rialway station to a little triangle of grass at a crossroads. They made love there, overlooked by houses not even fifty yards away that 1945 afternoon.

Past the church, another two miles up that long, long hill, out into open country then left on the corner and over the railway crossing, past the memorial to this squadron and its 82 dead pilots that wasn’t there and on to the changing rooms, kit up and walk to the flight line to report for duty. Last flight of the war. That war, anyway.

When I first came to live here I talked to an older woman who as a girl had played on Leiston airfield just after the war, with her friends. They were airplanes. Boys and girls alike became P51s, arms out for wings, mouths open for take-off, the imagined sound of engines coming from childrens’ throats as they ran across the empty runways, bound for Germany.

Under the empty blue sky of 1946 the phantom tyres stopped rumbling on the tarmac. The shadowy wing tipped a little one way and then the other and then steadied. A silent Merlin engine clawed its way into the forgiving sky as the wheels lifted, folded and locked back. All in a child’s mind on an abandoned airfield.

I met someone who grew up in a town flattened at the end of the war for no reason. It wasn’t a strategic town. It didn’t make anything much. It was just a beautiful place with medieval buildings until one day in March 1945 when half of it was demolished by the pilot’s friends, because it was there.

It made me feel differently to meet someone who described herself as ‘the third generation of the War.” But still at Christmas I come here to this memorial. I stand and read their names out loud so that someone remembers these boys who couldn’t go home.

Even when we die

I walked out of the exhibition at SMM in Hamburg at the end of a day looking at ships engines the size of most people’s houses, dehydrated and wondering if I had time to have a shower before the Inmarsat party in the evening, and back then, Inmarsat parties were legend. You never knew what might happen, apart from that everyone would be immaculately dressed, the Inmarsat crew would be working the whole time even if they were singing, dancing or just talking and the drinks would keep coming, on the company. What happened a couple of times later definitely wasn’t working, but the past as we all know is another country and that’s about enough detail I think.

I had time to have a shower if I didn’t walk back to my hotel but it had been a long day. There were mysteries in Hamburg. My hotel near the big, blackened railway station gave the lie to all the rubbish you ever need to hear about precision bombing. The station looked intact but it must have been rebuilt, massive in the middle of a plain of buildings that had obviously replaced the ones bombed flat all around it.

I walked through a little park then crossed a road, quite a big road, then into another park. It was about an hour before dark so far as I could judge and I could see the big Hamburg transmitting tower that made me think of old radio dials, the kind that used to have magic words written on them: Berlin, Hilversum, Luxemburg, Hamburg, Moscow, Home Service, back when you could smell the radio waves. I walked past a little lake and a small cafe and along a path by some trees. There were only one or two people in the park by now, apart from me. Then I saw it.

Swastika? No, sorry, no idea what you're talking about... — Swastika? No, sorry, no idea what you’re talking about…

I’d read about how all the Nazi symbols had been smashed off buildings after the war, how swastikas or hakenkreuz symbols clutched in stone eagle talons had been chiselled off buildings. I knew this. There are before and after photos all over the web.

I didn’t expect to come face to face with a huge monument in the park. In lots of ways it was the same as any other big stone memorial to Our Brave Boys. But it wasn’t. It was to Their Brave Boys. The Germans. The enemy. And I didn’t know how to deal with it.

Monument to the 76th Infantry Regiment. A real slap in the face. — Monument to the 76th Infantry Regiment.

That was 2003. I couldn’t find any mention of it in guide books and I wasn’t sure which park I’d been in and eventually, even whether it had all been a dream. They couldn’t have left a memorial celebrating Nazi soldiers standing. They burned the whole city down. About 40,000 were burned alive here, by us, the Allies, the RAF and the US Army Air Force. It was called Operation Gomorrah. You don’t have to know a lot of your Bible to know this was about removing a city from the map. Forget the fairy tales of the Memphis Belle going round on its bomb run again to miss the school next door to the factory. 150mph winds burning at 800 C don’t miss things. They had no intention of missing things. I didn’t understand how this memorial had survived. If it missed the bombing there must have been no shortage of people with chisels and hammers in June 1945 to take care of it.

But there it still is, at Dammtor. You can read about it here. I’m not sure why it stuck in my mind. Because it wasn’t like a war memorial. Because it seemed triumphant. Because Our Brave Boys were wearing the boots and the wrong-shaped helmet, the Stalhelm. Because they were Germans. Because like everyone of my generation, the War was this huge thing that grownups didn’t talk about. That wouldn’t go away.

A man with one arm lived up the road from us when I was a boy. My parents disapproved of him because he wasn’t married to the woman he was living with. Her daughter bore the mark of their shame. Please don’t think I’m joking. It wasn’t all like the Darling Buds of May growing up in the English countryside.

“He didn’t lose his arm in The War, you know.”

It was always there. It was there in the names of the Polish kids at my school, it was there in the reason why there was an Italian motorcycle shop. It was there in the candles burning on a Friday night in the front window of the small family of pale, dark-haired people who kept themselves to themselves down a dark lane, the parents younger than I am now, the two girls, Miriam and Rebecca. I never heard them shout or scream, the way any other children did, but maybe there’d been enough screaming in their family already.

I left the monument and got back and walked up the stairs in my hotel, past the huge sailing ship hanging from the ceiling in the lobby and found a small window at the top of the building that didn’t look right. As I looked at it more closely I could see that the glass was thicker at the bottom of the window than at the top. I felt sick because I knew what had happened.

The fires from the bombs dropped by the RAF had burned so hot that the glass in the window had started to melt, 100 feet above the street. Now try to read that again after you’ve wiped your eyes.

It doesn’t matter how much you blow your nose. It will never be all right. It doesn’t matter who was right or who was wrong. The bell tolls for all of us.

Deutschland muss leben, und wenn wir sterben müssen.

One of the inscriptions on the memorial says “Germany must live, even though we die.” Or thereabouts. Just by the passage of time almost everyone who put on a uniform back then, any uniform, has died now. Almost all of them. But Germany lived. It became something greater than practically anyone then could possibly imagine. A country without a war. Even when we die.

It wasn’t me.

About ten years ago I stayed at a hotel in Hamburg, within sight of the railway station. I knew Hamburg had been ‘badly bombed,’ in The War, ‘badly bombed’ being a polite, English way of saying it was almost removed from the map by the RAF and USAAF who dropped tens of thousands of tons of bombs on civilians.

Mustang pilot J.C. Howell, USAAF, Leiston.

Like you, I saw the film Memphis Belle. And the noble scene where the pilot refuses to just toggle the bombs away and go home but takes the airplane through the bomb run again, in case his bombs hit a school next to a factory. Because he was noble. Because he was American. Because it was a stupid film.

I had an American pilot from the war stay at my house for 10 days, a couple of times. By the end of the Swing music and recollections my significant other and I had the start of a drinking problem we had to deal with but we were pretty sure we’d qualify on the P51. Early one morning the pilot was describing a manoeuvre I couldn’t understand, something about how flying in flights of four aircraft and having to swing back and forth over the stream of bombers they were escorting, but having to fly much faster than the bombers because that was the way the planes were built, when they turned the inside plane would have to throttle right back and turn tight in, while the outside plane in the four would have to speed up in a much wider turn. Then a couple of minutes or so later they’d have to do it again, but the other way around. Then again a minute or so later again, back the way they’d started. For three or four hours. When I said I didn’t really know what he meant the first time around the old pilot was suddenly in my face, angry.

“What do you mean? You were there!”

It disturbed me. I didn’t know who he was remembering and confusing with me. I didn’t know and suddenly didn’t want to know what happened next.

The bombs went pretty much anywhere, most of the time. I don’t think anyone could tell where in a circle of 500 yards anything was going to go, assuming they could see anything in the first place. And in Hamburg, and Berlin and Hildesheim – at the end, pretty much anywhere, it didn’t matter. Nobody was really aiming at anything. They just wanted those places gone.

I used to use the stairs in the hotel. I didn’t understand then or now how the railway station looked the same as when it was built, except blacker. I thought that would have made a handy thing to aim at, but it was clearly very much still there. So was the hotel. It had a huge Hanseatic ship model hanging in reception.

At the top of the stairs there was a little window that looked wrong. When I had a good look at it I could see why. The glass was much thicker at the bottom of the pane than at the top.

I think the glass had started to melt when the firestorm came. My ancestors did that. My father was in the RAF. He wasn’t the pilot he lied and said he was; he didn’t fly the aircraft. But he helped.

And for all of that I am ashamed.

It Had To Be You, Django

What is there to say, Django Reinhardt?
You take forever now to smoke
That cigarette on the album cover.
A perfect swirl of smoke
Rises past your svelte lapel.
It all went pretty well that evening,
Even from here I can tell.
You did the gypsy thing
The jazz thing, the war thing
And now I’m older than you then
I still can’t do the guitar thing
The way you did with just two fingers.

Your wife made trinkets out of celluloid
Shirt collars, the same stuff they used to use
For film and like old pictures always could
It can burn. And then it did.
The caravan you lived in,
You two crazy kids in your teens,
The whole thing caught light
And as you saved your wife
You lost your hand; or at least some fingers.
You thought it would change your life
And it did but not the way
Anyone might have thought.
You were a gypsy jazz musician.
You looked like a Jew;
That’s what people said in those days.
Some places they still do but you,
When the Nazis came you got lucky.
Hitler might have detested jazz;
And Heydrich, the Reich Gaulieter of Bohemia
And Moravia wrote the rules but the guys
With the boots and the guns, the farm boys
And the doctors, the fliers and the sailors
Listening to Lili Marlene and Bing
And Miller and Dorsey, all of that swing thing
They liked that stuff. They were hep to that jive,
Man. Betty Grable! What a dish!
That music swung too, so Django, you didn’t
When nobody would have taken bets on you
Coming out the other side of that war.
Nobody at all. But someone looked after you.
You hid in plain view, playing at the Hot Club de Paris,
Not down some alley off a half-forgotten street
In an unfashionable arrondisement.
Not you. You were still up there with your name
In lights same as it was with you and Grapelli,
Back before; Someone else
With a pressing reason to leave Paris fast.
But it worked out somehow.
Nobody knocked on your door
In the small hours or if they did,
Only for friendly reasons
And with some pressing urgency,
The way it is sometimes.
Someone was looking after you.
And then June ’44
And America and electric guitars
That you never really liked
Listening to you, it’s plain that’s true.
The fluency still there but the sound flat.
Maybe nobody knew what electric guitars
Were for back then. Maybe even you.
Transatlantic meant a week on a ship before
You came home again to Soissons-sur-Seine.
Thirty seconds of pain before
You put down your guitar for good.
You played better with two fingers
Than most people learn to play in two lifetimes,
That sound that people danced to, crooned to,
Swooned to, the forever sound of golden years.
In an imaginary past full of promises
That no-one meant to break, but still.
You know how it goes. You do now, anyway.
You played Limehouse Blues for a place
Where now you need a million,
To even think about it. That’s blue.
Nagasaki for a somewhere else
We don’t like to talk about too much.
You told us, back in Nagasaki
Where the fellers chew tobaccy
The women wiggy waggy woo. And maybe they do.
So I’ll see you in my dreams, and in nuages,
In a Sentimental Moon, Beyond The Sea,
In Echoes Of France with those Swing Guitars,
Swinging In Springtime. It had to be you.
Django. Didn’t it? That and Stephan’s Blues,
Double Whisky, Christmas Swing. Just for Fun.
Oubli. Parfum. Swing 39, 41 and 42.
All of these your tunes. It just had to be you.

A history

Every time I try to write this story it spins away from me. It started off simply enough. An old man in a pub was having an argument with a fat British skinhead and I heard the words ‘Nazi’ and ‘Hitler Youth’ and thought the old man was attacking the younger one for using the words. I was only half right. It’s happened before. He was, but only insofar as the old man resented being called a Nazi. He’d been in the Hitler Youth, like every other German boy of his age, because they were all conscripted on their thirteenth birthday. And it was great, he said. He really enjoyed it. They went on camps, they had big flags to fly and songs to sing and they lived in the golden summer in the open air and it was a dream come true in a time when most of the dreams had starved to death.

The elderly language teacher in Mr Norris Changes

I was fourteen when I saw these for sale in a shop in Carmarthen. I think they were £12. I didn't have £12. — I was fourteen when I saw these for sale in a shop in Carmarthen. I think they were £12. I didn’t have £12.

Trains wasn’t skeletal because he was on a diet. But these boys had food and campfires and singing and hope and even better, if you’re thirteen, pistols to shoot and grenades to throw. They even got a special knife, the blade inscribed with Blut und Ehre, blood and honour. Free.

On the last day of his war the SS came to his village and marched all of the Hitler Jungend up to a field where they scrubbed around in the grass until they found a hatchway that nobody in the village knew was there, opening up a bunker that held brand new machine guns and more grenades and steel helmets. They issued the boys all of this gleaming kit and told them to defend the village, the fatherland and their honour while they, the SS, had some urgent business to attend to in the opposite direction to the one the Americans were arriving from. In about an hour.

The SS left, the boys grabbed as many guns as they could and their schoolmaster, when he saw them, as the leader of their Hitler Youth troop beat them up, made them throw all the guns in the ditch and sent them home crying.

Every time I try to write it it gets jumbled up with other stories I’ve heard first hand from the same time, the stories that are spinning away now, with so few left to tell them.

I heard from an American pilot who at the same time, April 1945 had to walk back from a dance, 22 miles, because he’d missed his transport, out shagging in Ipswich and a mission to fly to Czechoslovakia the next day, eight hours there and back five miles high. I heard at second hand of a Wermacht surgeon who the same month decided enough was enough, and walked home to Bremen from Czechoslovakia to surrender to the British, who once they’d emptied his pockets told him as he lived literally around the corner to piss off home.

Except they didn’t empty his pockets completely. I’ve held in my own hands the field surgery kit that lived in his pocket for five years, the green cloth roll holding the small forceps, the massively thick suture needles thicker than the ones sail makers use, the curved and the straight scalpel, the little sharpening stone. They let him keep them. Or maybe he went home first and emptied his pockets there, before he went out to surrender. I’ll never know the answer to that now because of time.

It was the fiftieth anniversary of D-Day in 1994. I remember the Battle of Britain Flight Lancaster flying over my house. I remember a curious dream where I could see an armada of ships stretched out to England and the horizon as the dawn broke grey across the water and knowing more and more ships would come and I would die.

I drank a lot back then. Maybe that’s why this picture fascinates me. I found it on the web by accident, yet another cat picture, but for me it’s more than that.

It’s England. It’s summer, with friends and food and wine and a funny cat off doing the things that cats do while we laugh and talk to each other and drink and we’re not going to have to go and fight in any wars, ever, and the green hills hold us close while behind us, ignored and always there, there’s the war, waiting. The England of Kate Bush’s Lionheart. My England and yours, where it’s been such a beautiful day and everything’s fine and yes, I will have another glass of wine, thank-you, and maybe some cheese. This red, sorry, what were you saying?

The triangular things the cat jumps between are dragon’s teeth. That’s what they were called back then. They stop tanks. They’re too big to drive over and too solid to blow up quickly, which is why they’re still there.

I don’t know who these happily drunk girls were that afternoon nearly twenty years ago. I think that’s when it was because of the colours of the picture. Because this is my history too. I don’t know what happened to them or whether they’re still happy now. But I know the stop lines across England were peppered with these concrete blocks and pillboxes from East Anglia to Wales, to hold the German advance when the invasion came. They were in the fields where the rivers meet at Tellisford, where I used to fish when I was a boy. The past is a different country and besides so many wenches are dead now and the young men too who should have met them. But at the same time the past is still here, just behind your shoulder, the thing your cat’s jumping off. And while we have their stories, so are they.