Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays Read online

  I packed up myself and went outside to wait for a cab. Three New York hipster kids ran into the hotel with their coats above their heads, one of them complaining: “It’s not supposed to rain!” The dream persists, even as reality asserts itself. I looked to my right and for the first time that weekend spotted someone I actually knew: Bret Easton Ellis. He asked what I was doing in L.A. and I told him. I asked what he was doing, and he looked at me with a kind of beatific insanity, as if he didn’t quite believe what he was about to say: “I’m moving back to L.A.!” I wanted to a share a novelist’s joke with him: what if you got assigned to write about the Oscars and you didn’t mention a single actor? You know, as a kind of demystifying strategy? How about that? But he had to get in his car. Anyway, Bret’s been there, done that: his own Glamorama tried another demystifying strategy, with fifty celebrities name-dropped in the first five pages. But the fantasies of fame cannot be dislodged by anyone’s pen. It’ll have to be a collective effort; we’ll have to wake from this dream together. It’ll be darling.

  FEELING

  Fourteen

  SMITH FAMILY CHRISTMAS

  This is a picture of my father and me, Christmas 1980 or thereabouts. Across his chest and my bottom there is the faint pink, inverted watermark of postal instructions—something about a card, and then “stamp here.” Hanging from the tree like a decoration more mirror writing, this time from my own pen. Does it say Nothing? Or maybe Letting? I’ve ruined this photo. I don’t understand why I can’t take better care of things like this. It’s an original, I have no negative, yet I allowed it to sit for months in a pile of mail on my open windowsill. Finally the photo got soaked, imprinted with the text of phone bills and Post-it notes. I felt sick wedging it inside my OED to stop the curling. But I also felt the weird relief that comes from knowing that the inevitable destruction of precious things, though done in your house, was not done by your hand. Christmas, childhood, the past, families, fathers, regret of all kinds—no one wants to be the grinch who steals these things, but you leave the door open with the hope he might come in and relieve you of your heavy stuff. Christmas is heavy.

  Anyway, it’s done now. And this is me and my dad one Christmas past. I’m five and he’s too old to have a five-year-old. At the time, the Smiths lived in London in a half-English, half-Irish council estate called Athelstan Gardens, one black family squished between two tribes at war. It was confusing. I didn’t understand why certain football games made people pour into Biddy Mulligan’s pub and hit other people over the head with chairs and bottles, and I didn’t get the thing about people pouring into the Prince Charles the next day and repeating the procedure. I didn’t get the men who came around collecting for the IRA on Christmas Eve, and I didn’t have to give them anything either—once they saw my mum, with her exotic shift dress and her cornrows, they respectfully withdrew, thinking we had nothing to do with their particular argument. In fact, my parents were friends with an Irishman who gave us a homemade fruit bowl this same Christmas and then the following winter betrayed the spirit of Christmas by making a different kind of homemade gift with which he tried to blow up No. 11 Downing Street. We knew nothing about the bomb until years later, but we all knew about the ugly fruit bowl, ceramic and swirly and unable to stand straight on a tabletop. This was filled with nuts and laid on the carpet to limit the wobble. It’s out of the frame in this photo, on the floor by Dad’s feet. My brother Ben, a little fat thing back then, has it between his legs like Buddha with his lotus flower. Ben was always on food detail in the war that is Christmas. I did, or overdid, the decorations (as you will note, the tree is bending to the left under the weight of manga-eyed reindeer, chocolate Santas, swollen baubles, tinsel, three sets of lights and the presents I tastefully nestled in the branches). Dad cooked. Mum marked out television schedules with a pen. Ben ate the food. Just as Joseph tended to the Virgin Mary, we tended to Ben, making his comfort our first priority. He ate what he needed, and whatever was left we ate. I think it’s Carole King’s Tapestry on the record player. But which song? “It’s Too Late” would make thematic sense—my dad’s smile has the let’s-just-get-through-this tension of a code-red marriage. As for the “Natural Woman” Christmas or the “You’ve Got a Friend” Christmas—these predate my consciousness. But they must have existed, what with Ben being a September baby and me October. Those were the sexy Noels, delivering babies like presents nine months later. By contrast, Luke, my youngest brother, came in July and is still unborn in this photo. I’ve always assumed he was the result of awe-haven’t-had-sex-in-five-years birthday treat (Dad’s birthday is in late September), and by the time he turned up, Blood on the Tracks had replaced Tapestry as the family Christmas soundtrack. Maybe you wonder about the black man in the pink hat. I wonder about him, too. I think he’s an uncle of mine by the name of Denzil (spelling uncertain). My mother claims an uncertain number of siblings, certainly more than twenty, most of them—in the Jamaican parlance—“outdoor children,” meaning same father, different mother. Denzil must have been one of these, because he was six foot seven, whereas my mother is five foot five and shrinking, as I’m sure I will, and as my grandmother did before us.

  This Christmas was the only time we ever met each other, Denzil and I. He was the gift that kept on giving, with his strange patois and his huge feet and the piggyback rides he conducted out on the balcony because the ceilings were too low. Outside was where he wanted to be anyway—you can tell that much from the look of infinite weariness he’s giving my dad’s left elbow. Poor Denzil; off the plane from Jamaica into bitter England, and stuck in the most cultish, insular day in the nuclear-family calendar. Families speak in semaphore at Christmas; the falcons are the only ones to understand the falconer, and something dismal is slouching toward Bethlehem. It’s called The Truth About What Happens to Your Family When No Member Is Allowed to Leave the House. Outsiders do best if they seeketh neither enlightenment nor the remote control.

  Denzil found this out when he attempted, on this most sacred of days, to do the things we could not do because we’d always done them another way, our way—a way we all hated, to be sure, but could not change. Denzil wants to open a present on Christmas Eve—don’t do that, Denzil. Denzil wants to go for a walk—I’m so sorry, Denzil, that’s impossible. We’d like to, but we just can’t swing it. Why not? Because, Denzil. Just because. Because like the two parts of Ireland, because like the Holy Trinity, because like nuclear proliferation, like men not wearing skirts, because like brandy butter.

  Because that’s the way we do things around here, Denzil. We don’t eat till four o’clock, we open the smallest presents first, we have to watch two MGM musicals when we wake up, followed by a Jimmy Stewart movie, and then settle down in front of a feted sitcom’s “Christmas special,” which is also the time—read my lips—when we begin the search for batteries to go into the many things we have bought that require batteries we forgot to buy. Don’t mess with us on this, Denzil. The Smiths are not for turning. It’s our way or the highway. We want Christmas, dead or alive.

  I make it sound bad. In truth, we had great times. As great as anybody’s. Certainly better than Denzil’s the year he got his own place and phoned us to say he’d killed a partridge in the backyard with a slingshot and just finished eating it like a proper English gentleman (it was a London pigeon, of course). Oh, we Smiths are ardent seekers after the spirit of Christmas, and we do not listen to Iris Murdoch’s sensible analogical advice: “Good represents the reality of which God is the dream.” We’re chasing the dream, baby.

  But we do sense the more difficult truth: that Family represents the reality of which Christmas is the dream. It is, of course, Family (messy, complex, miserable, happy, so many gradations of those last two words) that is the real gift, beneath the wrapping. Family is the daily miracle, and Christmas is the enforcement of ideals that, in truth, do not matter. It would be tempting therefore to say, “Well, then ditch Christmas!” the same way people say “Ditch God” or “D
itch marriage,” but people find it hard to do these things because they feel that there is more than a ghost in these machines; there is an animating spirit.

  Santa help me, but I believe this, too. You know you believe it when you start your own little family with some person you met four years ago in a bar, and then he tries to open the presents on Christmas Eve because that’s what he did in his family and you have the strong urge to run screaming from the building holding your banner about the end and how it is nigh. It is a moving and comic thing—a Murdochian scuffle between the Real and the Dream—to watch a young couple as they teeter around the Idea of Christmas, trying to avoid internecine festive warfare.

  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.”

  There followed six months of regimental training and tank training, how to ride in one, how to sleep under one, how to service it when it broke down. Harvey was still not expecting to see action before 1945. You had to be nineteen. When the rest of the unit moved to Calshott, he went to Felixstowe. (He ended up there once again, in the late 1990s, after his second divorce. Sometimes he refers to his life’s journey as “the round-trip.”)

  “I was with the old bugge
rs, like Dad’s army. But I was only there three weeks. The law changed; suddenly you could be eighteen. So that was me.” Harvey’s war was on. He spent that last month hiding in the Fawley woods with his regiment. You can’t see the stars like that in Croydon. On June 3, he listened to the final briefing with the rest of his regiment. “That’s when they told us the truth, where we were going, King Beach, and when. I was hoping to be in one of the tanks. But last minute, I was assigned to be the radio man for the CO’s truck. All the boys thought that was pretty funny. Me stuck alone with the CO.”

  On the fifth of June at about 11 P.M., they set off. They were meant to land on the morning of the fifth, but the conditions had been too dreadful. They were still dreadful—everybody was sick. In the middle of the crossing, Harvey saw his first British warship, a huge shadowed beast, moving through the water. As he watched, it shot off a broadside from its sixteen-inch guns, rocking sideways in the recoil. “I knew then. I hadn’t known before. I knew this was serious.”

  It was not to be as serious for Harvey as it had already been for thousands. He didn’t land at 6 A.M., he didn’t land in a tank (many of these had grenades thrown into them and “brewed up,” exploding from the inside) and he didn’t land as an American at Omaha. Though he didn’t know it, already he was steeped in luck. He approached the relatively quiet King Beach at midday and waited while his CO argued with an American general onboard who was convinced it was too dangerous to land. It was two hours before he drove onto the beach. So much experience that should be parceled out, tenderly, over years, came to my father that day, concertinaed into twenty-four hours. First time he’d left England. First time he’d been at sea. First time he’d seen a dead body.