Pebbles in the water

It’s August 1960, a world in black and white; the British summer echoes to the sounds of The Shadows’ Apache, Hank Marvin’s echoey, vibrato-heavy guitar evoking for English listeners the quintessential Native American brave, and outselling their collaborator Cliff Richards and the naïve singalong charm of his cheesy ballad Please Don’t Tease Me. The 1960s was for now an unseen presence lurking just off stage, and Britain, six years on from the end of wartime rationing, its cities cratered by the Luftwaffe, was a country on the cusp; behind, the war and its privations, ahead the shopping malls, high rise flats, motorways, that would compose the familiar syntax of the modern world.

A young couple have driven their six-year-old son from industrial North Derbyshire, up the tedious A1, crossed the Firth of Forth by the old car ferry, and eventually reached the rural county of Fife; here the boy is left with his grandparents, with instructions to be good, and some parental anxiety; it will be their first separation. This done, they headed for London, boarded the gruelling boat train to Ostend, en route to Darmstadt, a city in the Hesse region of Germany, near Frankfurt (the journey “was murder”, wrote the young wife, in a series of letters to her parents, now in a box in my attic).

At this point I should come clean; the young couple are my parents, the six-year-old boy my brother; I was not to appear for a few more years. Their Darmstadt trip was under the auspices of the brand-new town twinning arrangement, linking together peoples divided by war. Twin towns were amongst the many idealistic phoenixes fluttering timorously from the ashes and rubble of war, reflecting what Churchill movingly described in his 1946 Zurich speech as the necessity to “recreate the European family”. Churchill, the great visionary, recognised that no European peace and prosperity was possible without Germany, and his evocation of a “spiritually great Germany”  would have been immediately appealing to my Germanophile parents,  lovers of Goethe, Schiller and Heine.

And so they arrived, and found themselves- well, I’ll allow my mother to pick up the narrative again- charmingly accommodated in “a very old house on the river bank” by “a very nice young couple, with two children, ******** (10) and ******* (8)”. I’ve edited out the family names for reasons which will become apparent, but bear with me. Herr G*******, an English teacher at the local school, was looking forward to showing his guests around in his little Volkswagen (“very noisy to our ears”- my mother again).

But this is where the story all goes wrong. The following day, returning from a sight-seeing tour to Bad Konig, and again in my mother’s words, “A car tried to overtake us, hadn’t nearly enough time, and there was a head-on collision. The two cars, or one of them, then hit us. [Herr G] was a cautious driver”. The past tense here is chokingly sad, as my parents’ affable young host was killed immediately, and I’m moved by my mother’s loyal vindication of her kind host.

My mother spent a month in hospital with concussion, and it was an extended Scottish sojourn for my brother, from whom this was all kept secret.

I’ve always tried not to dwell on the tragedy, not only its obvious pathos, but the very real possibility of my never having existed; there but for the grace of God.

However, rereading the archive recently, I found myself pondering it, and specifically, the children whose father never came home after that hospitably intended drive. I wondered what they’d been told, and how impossible it would have been for their mother and grandmother- it was her house, and she lived on the top floor- to comfort or console them on that faraway day and in the years that were to follow.

And then, this being the 21st century, where there are no secrets, I thought I’d see if I could find them. And, this being the 21st century, I did. The eight-year-old boy is now a retired professor of music; he looks distinguished, a scarf wound nonchalantly around his neck in the bohemian manner of European academics.

And now, having prised open this particular version of Pandora’s Box, I have a decision to make. Do I reach out to this stranger, to whom I’m oddly bound by tragedy? I’d like to tell him how welcome his father had made my parents feel, and how much they respected him. And that his death, that August day sixty-three years ago, was not in any way his fault. I’d like to propose that if ever he comes to Cornwall, perhaps I can repay in some small way the hospitality.

And (by the way, I am well aware that that’s the third successive co-ordinating conjunction I’ve used to begin a paragraph, and hope you’ll allow it)…and, I’m also wary. Wary of myself- am I, the inveterate Romantic and teacher of literature, simply seeking narrative resolution? Am I turning these real people into characters? What right have I to disturb the past, in search of a cinematic Steven Spielberg sense of resolution? Wary of throwing an unnecessary pebble into the waters of memory, calmed presumably by the passage of time; wary of sending a seventy-year-old man back to his eight-year-old, vulnerable, painful self.

One click will despatch a message.

And (there’s another one) there are times when, for all the moral good and wisdom imparted by literature, I just really don’t know. It could have ended so differently- had my parents died, I would not be here to have these thoughts; but it wasn’t.

The sheer randomness of History is truly terrifying, and the opportunities to find answers vanishingly rare.