I looked at the bedside clock. 5 a.m.; I was wide awake. I’d had a restless night after the Rolling Stone interview the previous afternoon; so much of the past had been dragged up. Most of the night had been spent going over my life like old television reruns.
I thought about my father and how I swore so many times while he was alive that I would never cry over his passing. How a year ago when I got a phone call from my sister telling me that he had died, crying was the first thing I did. I forgave him his transgressions long ago, not that he ever asked for or expected forgiveness from me. Forgiveness is often more for the benefit of those sinned against than for the sinner.
I was too young to remember him before World War II and wondered during the night, what if he had been killed in the war? My mother no doubt would have told me wonderful stories about him, I would have photos of this handsome man, and he would have been my hero for the rest of my life. Would it have been any easier to mourn the loss of a father than to mourn what I never had? The father he could have been but wasn’t?
My mother was a widow in her late thirties with a teenage son when she married my father. My father was Irish and much younger at twenty-five. He was unusual in that he was a Protestant from the south of Ireland, which is predominately Catholic.
He joined the British Army when he was eighteen and went to India, a British colony at that time. On his release from the army he was somewhat of an outcast in his own country. Being Protestant and ex–British Army, he immigrated to England. He became a stevedore, a laborer who loaded and unloaded ships in the docks in the East End of London.
Because my father had been a regular in the British Army, he was one of the first to go when the war started in 1939. He had told my mother, "It’s just a scare, I’ll be home in a couple of weeks." That’s got to go down as the understatement of the century. My mother was carrying my sister at the time and she was born three months after he left, so he never saw her as a baby.
He was part of Montgomery’s 8th Army that fought Rommel’s German army through North Africa. My sister Elizabeth was almost five years old when he returned. He came home briefly, then was a part of the Normandy Invasion in 1944 and didn’t come back until the war ended the following year. He went through all this with not so much as a scratch. When so many others died, is it surprising I should wonder "what if"?
Eventually I came to the conclusion, that as bad as things had been at times, I wouldn’t change a damn thing. We are all a product of what we’ve been through. I have seen sons of successful fathers who were more screwed up than I ever was.
I looked over at the clock again, now it was 5:15 a.m. It had rained during the night and the temperature had cooled a little. I had got up earlier, turned off the air conditioning, and opened the windows. I lay watching the window drapes blow in the wind, listening to the street noises below.
Garbage men were emptying dumpsters in the alleyway between the buildings. I could hear boom, boom, boom, as the mechanical arm lifted the dumpster and beat it against the top of the truck to shake loose every last bit of garbage. My mind went back to another time when I was only three years old.
Lying in my bed in my home in London, England, listening to German bombs drop in the distance, boom, boom, boom, when suddenly without warning a bomb fell in the next street behind us. There was a tremendous explosion and every window in back of the house was blown in.
My room was in the front of the house. The blast blew open the bedroom door and it slammed against my bed, which was right alongside the door. The next thing I remember was my mother snatching me up in her arms along with my sister, who was a baby about a year old at the time.
She rushed into the back bedroom where my stepbrother Alan had been blown out of bed and hit by flying glass. Although cut and bleeding he was conscious, so my mother took my sister and me all the way down to the cellar beneath the house. It was a coal cellar and as dark and dirty a place I’d ever been. My mother lit a candle, sat me on a cardboard box, and laid my baby sister across my lap.
"Hold on to Elizabeth and don’t move. I have to get Alan."
I was terrified and would have followed her but the cardboard box had collapsed. My butt was stuck and with a baby lying across my lap I couldn’t move.
I can’t remember if I was crying, but my little sister was screaming. There would be a silence that seemed like an eternity while she replenished her lungs with air, then out would come this piercing scream and her little body went ramrod stiff and shook with the vibrato of her screaming.
I could hear my mother calling out as she came back down the cellar steps dragging a mattress. "We’re coming, We’re coming."
She dropped the mattress on the floor. Alan was with her, carrying blankets and pillows. Fortunately his wounds were not serious. My mother took Alan’s pajama jacket and tore it into strips for makeshift bandages.
We spent the night huddled together listening to the bombs exploding around us. Luckily no more fell as close as the one that had sent us scurrying for cover like frightened rabbits in this cold, dark, damp hole in the ground.
It is unusual to have distinct memories as early as three years old, but I guess that particular night was so traumatic, they are as clear to me today as the events of a week ago.
A few days after the incident my stepbrother Alan joined the Royal Air Force. He was only sixteen at the time but like so many others, lied about his age and said he was eighteen. He told my mother he couldn’t stand by and let the Germans drop bombs on us; he had to help stop them.
I have no other memories from that period of my life. It was soon after this incident my mother took us out of London to live with her sister Joyce in the countryside of rural southern England. It was in this somewhat idyllic setting most of my childhood memories were formed.
Aunt Joyce had one son, my cousin Roy, who was seven years older than me. Her husband Bert was in the Navy so he was away in the war the same as my father. We lived together in cramped conditions until my mother was able to rent a small cottage in the same village.
This was one of four tiny cottages joined together in a row, built at 90 degrees to the road with a single gate to serve all four houses. Ours was the second cottage. The front door, which was the only door to the outside, opened directly into a small living room that must have been about ten feet by ten feet.
A cast iron coal range served for both cooking and heating for the whole house. Behind the living room was an even smaller room, which we called the scullery. In the corner to the right was a pantry, and in the opposite left-hand corner was a steep narrow staircase leading to two equally small bedrooms above.
There was no electricity or running water in the house. Lighting was by oil lamp and candles; water was drawn in a bucket from a communal well at the roadside behind the house. On the end of the four houses were four coal sheds, and next to that four outhouses with bucket toilets.
There was a large garden divided into four plots, one for each house. Almost everyone grew vegetables; this was wartime and food was scarce but my mother made provision for a little patch of grass where I could play. There was also an apple tree with a swing suspended from a branch.
Next door to us in the first house lived Mr. and Mrs. Holmes and their daughter Lena. Mr. Holmes never spoke; my mother told me that he was "shell shocked" from World War I. Today we would say he suffered from battle fatigue or post-traumatic stress syndrome.
Our neighbors on the other side, in number three, were an elderly couple named Mr. and Mrs. Campbell. They had two cats, and it was old Mr. Campbell who taught me how to tell the time when I was young, before I started school.
In the last house, number four, lived the Flynn family, a widow with three young daughters, the eldest being my age. Mr. Flynn had been killed in the first year of the war.
And so it was in those early childhood memories, there was this thing called a war going on. I never really understood it, but felt its implications. I had a father, my mother told me so, but didn’t know what it was like to have a father.
Soldiers were everywhere, training and playing at war games. We would find and collect spent brass rifle and machine gun shells along with the clips that originally held them together, then join them back together and wear them across our chest Mexican bandit style.
I was with a friend one hot summer day on the lawn outside his house. We heard gunfire from an airplane overhead. Looking up we saw a plane towing a target, rather like an advertising banner. A single Spitfire was diving in and shooting at this target. We watched, fascinated, when suddenly huge brass cannon shells started falling all around us. They bounced on the lawn at our feet, much larger than the rifle shells we usually found. They probably would have killed us instantly had they hit us on the head. With no sense of danger, we scrambled and fought with each other to be the first to gather these trophies.
They were still hot from firing and as quick as we picked them up, they burned our fingers and we dropped them. We started kicking them like some crazy football game until we eventually called a truce and decided to share the shell casings. I think we ended up with about three each.
Going to church on Sunday with my mother, I was exposed to wounded soldiers who had returned home from the war. They often wore a distinct light blue hospital uniform. Seeing one horribly disfigured man I remember asking, "Mummy, what’s wrong with that man’s face?"
She told me a German sniper had shot him. The shot had hit him from a high angle almost directly above him. The bullet entered his left eye, went diagonally through his face, and took out most of his lower jaw on the right side.
At one time it was feared poisonous gas might be used against us, so everyone was issued a gas mask. Someone came to our house one day to instruct us on how to use them. I was still quite young so I got what was called a Mickey Mouse mask. It was bright red and had a rubber tube-like nose at the front that made a farting noise when I breathed out.
My sister was still a baby and had a device where her whole upper body was placed inside and tied around her middle. There was a Plexiglas window in the top, and a hand pump on the side with which my mother had to pump air.
The whole thing was like some weird game to me. Looking like aliens from another planet, my mother with her mask on, pumping away at this black rubber tube with the muffled screams of my baby sister coming from inside, and me making little farting noises in the corner. Thank God we never had to use them for real.
The closest we ever came to being under attack was when a single German plane came over in daylight and dropped a bomb on a town about five miles from where we lived. He was aiming to take out the main railway line from Bristol in the west, to London. He completely missed the railway station and hit the school next to it. Luckily it was Saturday and the building was empty.
He was chased by the British Air Force and dropped the rest of his bombs harmlessly in open fields. The plane was eventually shot down and crashed in the hills nearby. The German pilot bailed out and was taken prisoner. My cousin Roy, who was about thirteen years old at the time, went with some of his friends to look at the wreck of this plane and came home with pieces of it as souvenirs.
Those early years were generally very happy for me in spite of a war. The best times were when Alan came home on leave. He would take me fishing and show me how to make model airplanes. He was a fighter pilot and quite a hero. He would tell me stories of enemy planes he had shot down.
One Christmas he took me to the woods, where he climbed a large pine tree and cut the top off. We brought it home and decorated it.
I started school at age five, going with Lena Holmes, the girl next door. Those first two years at school were great; my first teacher was Miss Thornton. She was a kind and loving elderly lady with gray hair, which she wore in a bun. She made learning fun.
After two years with Miss Thornton I moved up to the next class in the little two-room school. For two years I had no idea what horrors went on in that next room. My new teacher was Miss Jones, and unlike the kind and loving Miss Thornton, she was cruel and sadistic. I got the impression that she hated kids, especially boys. She kept an official school cane in her desk. These canes were thin bamboo sticks and were furnished to schools along with books, pencils, and other supplies.
Never in my years at school did I see a teacher use the cane as much as Miss Jones. One time she hit a kid so hard she broke the cane and immediately went back to her house, which adjoined the school, and got another. She told us, "I have a cupboard full of these."
She would single out me and three other boys for punishment anytime it suited her. If she left the room and the class was unruly when she returned, the four of us would have to go to the front of the classroom for two or three strokes of the cane across the palm of our hands, whether we had done wrong or not.
At first I would cry when I got the cane, but in time I became immune to it. I told myself it was only pain, and I could take it. I would stand with my arm straight, palms up, look her defiantly in the eye and not even wince, which of course pissed her off even more.
I would deliberately misbehave and give Miss Jones a hard time just to get back at her. My attitude was, if I was being punished for no reason, I might as well do something.
It was about this time that my whole world started to fall apart. I came home from school one day to find my mother crying. She showed me a telegram she had received saying Alan’s plane had been shot down over the English Channel and he was missing, presumed dead. We cried together, then I became angry and said., "No, he’s not dead, he’s coming home."
But the days became weeks, and the weeks turned into months and Alan did not come home.