Now is The Window of our Discontent

It was one of those cold, icy winters, when the wind howled around our chimney pot, and blew smoke from the coal fire into the front living room. Dad, with blackened face, would start singing Al Jolson classics. “Climb upon my knee sonny boy, though your only three sonny boy…when there are grey skies…I can’t help the grey skies…”

I used to watch the grey skies from my upstairs bedroom window. Standing there, my elbows resting on the sill, I would look out across the town. Many times I would go there just to be out of the way. I would hear them shouting, then a door would slam shut, and the windows in our tiny house would rattle, then footsteps running up the stair, and the bedroom door banging closed, and then silence…

Sometimes, I would tiptoe out of my room across the small landing and stand outside, listening to mam sobbing. Delicate sobs, like soft rainwater falling. I wanted to knock on the door. I wanted to make everything all right. I imagined her laid there with her face in the pillow, her elegant shoulders rising and falling, and I just wanted to go to her, and hold her, and tell her that everything would be fine, but somehow I couldn’t do it. I would nearly knock. I would stand motionless with my fist clenched, wanting to, but I was afraid of what the consequences might be. So I would stand in the flickering shadows feeling ashamed. In silence I would go back to my room and crawl into bed, and pull the blankets over my head, not wanting to listen to my mother’s dreams ebbing away with each teardrop.

Outside, in the cold afternoon, the wind would blow through the trees, sounding like the sea crashing onto the shoreline. Low in the west, pale orange beams would stream down, and fall on the dark, wet, road… “For those in peril on the sea…”

I grew up with the War. There were many stories from my uncles who had fought in one capacity or another. Tales of Atlantic crossings, South Pacific beauty, wandering convoys, escape from the German’s. Flashing excitement. But my Dad fought a bitter and protracted war in the jungles of Burma against the Japanese. The Forgotten Army. At the time I did not know what this meant. I would listen to the stories of withering machine gunfire, and the dark, silent jungle that crept over the day. He would tell me of patrols up and down the nameless hills. Screaming pals, castrated villagers, bayoneted babies. The taunts of the enemy spoken in perfect English “Over here Johnny…go home Johnny nothing for you here but death and disfigurement.”

I never heard him mention fear. Fear: the cold, dread, sickly fever of looming badness. Fear: breathed in with each sunset, filling lungs and minds, with total mortality. Fear of the heat, the mosquitoes, the malaria and dysentery, and every cold, black, scabby disorder that crawled around those hills in Burma. This man that sat each Saturday afternoon in front of the telly watching horse racing from Plumpton, only spoke in machine gun bursts. I never asked enough questions about the Border Regiment, because I did not know. And when he shouted, 'shoulder arms!' And marched out of the kitchen holding the broom against his shoulder like a rifle, and presented arms to the dog sat by the door that to me, was just my dad.

I saw a violent man, not a suffering man. I saw a man who I was afraid of because of his unpredictable anger. Most times there was nothing I could do to make things right. I wanted to go underground, away from where I existed, to escape the ranting and raving, but most of all I wanted hope. Hope for the future. I wanted my hope to beat from my chest like a tin drum. I wanted everybody to know that I was hopeful and that despite my broken arms, my dad did not really mean to do it. “Yes! That’s reet, I fell down’t stairs Mam. I was laking… being really silly, and I tripped over and afore I knew it I was at the bottom…Oh! Mam don’t cry, it were accident ‘onest!”

I see the seasons from my window. April showers, flaming June, white clouds, floating beneath July skies. On long summer evenings, around the house, the wind blows mild, and meadowlarks sing in the nearby wood.

Down the valley, under the moonlight, skirmishing rain falls on the rooftops of the town. A silvery skin, being pulled over the Earth. Why do I make of the rain a creature in sympathy with what I feel?

My loneliness feels like my father’s jungle, fearful, silent, and dark. When I look at the town at night, the clamouring isolation of a thousand years blows up the hill and through my heart.

I want to be a cheeky – daft sort of a lad on top of the world but my dad governs my life. I want to walk with lasses in the wood, and make silly jokes, and show off on the swings, and do handstands, and help Barry Wood with his pigeons, but I am ordered to sweep the path. I am told to shovel the coal into the cellar in all weathers, rain and snow, and to make sure the coalscuttle, by the fire, is full. I dig the garden and plant potatoes. I polish my dad’s shoes for when he goes to the Working Men’s Club, paying particular attention to the uppers. I have to go to the shop at the bottom of the street and pick up his tobacco and newspapers every day of the week. The Daily Herald weekdays, News of the World, Sundays. “And don’t forget me 10 Capstan full strength!” Once when I lost the money he gave me, he dragged me down the street, shouting at me and hitting me, making me retrace my steps until we found the half – crown in the gutter by the bus stop. After this humiliation I gripped the money even harder.

My Mam was brave in the face of his anger. She would stand up to him at times, and because of this I saw him break her nose, and blacken her eyes. I saw it happen in the kitchen when I was stood outside afraid to go in. They were arguing. The door was slightly open and I saw his fist clenched…then afterwards when I mentioned it, she would say it was a frying pan that had fallen off the top shelf of the cupboard, and that I was mistaken. She said that many times. I thought maybe I was wrong. The light in the kitchen was poor. I could have made a mistake. “Yes, that was it Mam, I made a mistake, sorry.” It seems I made so many mistakes when I was growing up.

There was hardly a family in the neighbourhood who had not been affected by the War. So many had lost loved ones. In the gloomy afternoon of autumn, shuffling down the street to the bus terminus, the blind would lead men with wooden legs. We few, we happy few, we band of Brothers.

When I first saw Anna I thought she was a man in a brightly patterned frock. She got on the bus by the Wooden Hut fish and chip shop one Saturday afternoon, her bight red lipstick smudged, and one of the high heels broken on her red shoes. Her orange face powder was a mess; her rouge too low on her cheeks, gave her jowls that aged her ten years. I smiled at her and helped her up the step. I could see people nudging each other, mouthing words behind her back, pulling faces. The Bible tells us to forgive those that know no better.

She had been experimented on by the Nazi’s, pumped full of testosterone and steroids. She had had special operations. Her voice was manly and deep. In broken English she would shout, “Give me ticket! No money! Ha! Ha!”

Watching her hairy, nail-varnished fingers clutching her cheap, plastic handbag, I saw beneath her mascara painted eyelashes, the hopelessness. She would roll her head and laugh. A terrible laugh that came from somewhere deep inside, where nobody else could go, a frightening place of torture and debauchery.

I wondered if she had ever walked tall and proud in the sunlight, clutching the hand of her mother.

I would sit opposite her sometimes on the long seat, on the downstairs of the bus, and try not to look at her clumsy, painted makeup. She too had been a child. I wondered if she had gathered bluebells from the woods around Krakow when she was a girl. Had she seen the melting of Dresden? Would she have understood what was happening when she was released from Auschwitz extermination camp? There was no Liberation for her.

This land of foreigners did not hit her, they just turned away, too embarrassed to confront her manly gentility. She did not fit. She could not pray. There was no church for her. She could only cackle, and stare in wonderment at the grey overcoats, and brown hats, with gloomy tired faces that walked down dirty steps to stand on litter strewn roadsides. And when the bus left a stop, stray winds would scatter pages of old newspaper, and litter would swirl, and all day, and into the murky night, grey over – coated brigades marched to and fro down windswept streets striving for normality in a world that had changed forever.

I would see her in town sometimes staring into shop windows. Could she see a reflection of herself, was there a stranger looking back? Did she see her Armageddon, a dreadful place of horror and desolation, which no imagination could invent? What did I know of the war’s demented language or what it was like to feel powerless against death and destruction or to feel the Jackboot stamping on my face?

By the railway station she fed the hoards of pigeons that flew down from rooftops, throwing breadcrumbs high into the sky, the fluttering mass of cooing, diseased birds, black with the soot of industry, ate greedily.

Everybody knew her. She leapt on and off the rear platforms of the buses around the shopping centre, shouting, “Me no ticket! Ha! Ha! Ha!” Her bright yellow scarf fluttering in the breeze, whilst on the street corner the Salvation Army played “Onward Christian Soldiers.” I loved her. A reckless child, salvaged from the war, playing in the ruins of her ravished life.

Then she was gone. Weeks passed. I never saw her again. She had died the Monday morning after I had seen her whizzing round the town waving frantically from the bus platforms.

She had gone home and turned on the gas, in her tiny room, and the next-door neighbour found her the following morning. And Mrs Raydon told my Mam that she had a brother somewhere, who should be notified soon, but nobody bothered. She was buried in Bolling Cemetery in a pauper’s grave, and nobody came.

The bus journeys to town were never the same. I always expected her to get on by the fish and chip shop in her summer frock showing through her brown winter coat, her pill – box hat tipped to one side of her dark hair, her lost, crazy eyes, laughing. She never did.

I went to the cemetery and found her grave. “Anna Kopenski known unto God. RIP.”

I would sit by her grave until hunger drove me home, imagining her hairy fingers, gently tweaking my cheek, whilst she told me about her life. About the fitful relationship she had with her first love, a married man with two children. How she would wait every Sunday by the clock tower, waiting for it to chime two o ‘clock, wearing her pink dress and smelling of “Lily of the Valley.”

Then the bomber moons, the burning bushes, the faces of babies falling away with the smoking leaves. Her son howling in the wind.

In the sanatorium, her father coughed his lung into a basin, stirring his fingers delightedly in the thick, red, blood.

The dead were the dead; there was no time to be pitying them or asking silly questions. Now, Anna’s outraged life had finished forever. Now she would find her peace on this unknown hillside overlooking the town that did not care.

The moon slid down the sky. It was as pure as water. It bathed the stars.

Clocks ticked in homes. I lifted my hand to touch the narcissus growing on a nearby wall, the symbol of an immaculate spirit. Once more I ran home to my father’s regimental parade ground, where Sergeant Major Britain barked out his orders of command, to one unwilling soldier