always making deals?”
Because you don’t know how not to
.
“And what’s wrong with that?” she said.
Everything. Everything’s wrong with it
. But I said, “I suppose it brings people closer.”
She smiled again—but told me nothing more.
We parted in Galway, and I gave her a rough sketch of my travels for the next few weeks. Earlier in the year I had at last regularized my own timetable. I wasn’t so scattergun anymore; I moved through the provinces now in a kind of loose rotation. Therefore I could say where I might be reached close to any given time.
And so, in the third week of September, in Watergrasshill post office, I picked up a card from Miss Begley:
CM transferred back to London. Come to England with me. KB
.
31
October 1943
Adolf Hitler had red hair. So a woman in Dublin, a cabaret singer, told me. She saw him in Berlin in the late 1930s: Sitting on her father’s shoulders, she watched him drive down the street they call Unter den Linden.
“He was small and red-haired,” she said. “Common-looking. And the crowd went wild.”
That was the kind of detail I loved. I had been following the war in the newspapers and on the radio, and when it reached a finger into Ireland, I wished to touch it. In other words, I wanted to visit three of the four places in Dublin where German bombs fell in 1941. By the time I got to one of them, the worst of the damage had been cleared. Thus, I hadn’t been able to create the sensation I sought—how it might feel to stand on the earth as it rained bombs.
For some unknown reason, I told all this to Miss Begley on the boat from Dublin to Liverpool.
She said, “There’s times, Ben, when I don’t fully understand you. What did you want to know—what it’s like to be hit by a bomb?”
I said, “Sort of.”
“Ah, for God’s sake, Ben.” Not much stopped her in her tracks. “Why?” she said, groping to make sense.
“I’d have a better idea of what war is like.”
She reflected on this, and up went that damn eyebrow again. “Aren’t you afraid of the war?”
“Are you?”
She said, “Why would I be?” in that belligerent tone she used when she didn’t want to be challenged. “Ours not to reason why, ours but to do or die.”
I said, “There’s a lot to fear.”
“What do you expect we’ll see?”
I said, “Ruined buildings.”
“They’ll be taking it badly,” she said. “An Englishman’s home is his castle.”
“Some of it may hit us.”
And she said, “No. I’m never in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
Not, eventually, true—not true at all. But I’ve just remembered something Mother once told me: It’s the mark of a gentleman not to remind people of foolish things they once said.
Miss Begley then admitted that, like me, she’d been expecting to travel through a country shredded by bomb damage. We’d seen the photographs and newsreels of the devastation that struck Dublin. If that had been caused by a lone German aircraft (possibly a navigation mistake, we were told), what on earth must England be like by now? They’d had four years of ruin from the air.
As we stepped from the dockside to the waiting train, I asked her, “Why exactly are we going to London? What precisely will we be doing there?”
She looked at me with an impatient purse of the lips and picked up the book she’d been reading; I gazed out of the train window.
England looked glorious. They were enjoying an Indian summer, long days of golden light falling on leopard-colored trees. The train took us through acres of aftergrass green beyond reason, and spiky deserts of fawn stubble. England had spent the season growing extra food as part of the war effort; now, fallow and spent, their duty done, the fields rested, as calm as a woman after giving birth.
At first I felt confused, because it looked no different from Ireland—pastoral, empty, and still. Yet in my pursuit of every war report I could find I’d seen the rumors that we might get
Because you don’t know how not to
.
“And what’s wrong with that?” she said.
Everything. Everything’s wrong with it
. But I said, “I suppose it brings people closer.”
She smiled again—but told me nothing more.
We parted in Galway, and I gave her a rough sketch of my travels for the next few weeks. Earlier in the year I had at last regularized my own timetable. I wasn’t so scattergun anymore; I moved through the provinces now in a kind of loose rotation. Therefore I could say where I might be reached close to any given time.
And so, in the third week of September, in Watergrasshill post office, I picked up a card from Miss Begley:
CM transferred back to London. Come to England with me. KB
.
31
October 1943
Adolf Hitler had red hair. So a woman in Dublin, a cabaret singer, told me. She saw him in Berlin in the late 1930s: Sitting on her father’s shoulders, she watched him drive down the street they call Unter den Linden.
“He was small and red-haired,” she said. “Common-looking. And the crowd went wild.”
That was the kind of detail I loved. I had been following the war in the newspapers and on the radio, and when it reached a finger into Ireland, I wished to touch it. In other words, I wanted to visit three of the four places in Dublin where German bombs fell in 1941. By the time I got to one of them, the worst of the damage had been cleared. Thus, I hadn’t been able to create the sensation I sought—how it might feel to stand on the earth as it rained bombs.
For some unknown reason, I told all this to Miss Begley on the boat from Dublin to Liverpool.
She said, “There’s times, Ben, when I don’t fully understand you. What did you want to know—what it’s like to be hit by a bomb?”
I said, “Sort of.”
“Ah, for God’s sake, Ben.” Not much stopped her in her tracks. “Why?” she said, groping to make sense.
“I’d have a better idea of what war is like.”
She reflected on this, and up went that damn eyebrow again. “Aren’t you afraid of the war?”
“Are you?”
She said, “Why would I be?” in that belligerent tone she used when she didn’t want to be challenged. “Ours not to reason why, ours but to do or die.”
I said, “There’s a lot to fear.”
“What do you expect we’ll see?”
I said, “Ruined buildings.”
“They’ll be taking it badly,” she said. “An Englishman’s home is his castle.”
“Some of it may hit us.”
And she said, “No. I’m never in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
Not, eventually, true—not true at all. But I’ve just remembered something Mother once told me: It’s the mark of a gentleman not to remind people of foolish things they once said.
Miss Begley then admitted that, like me, she’d been expecting to travel through a country shredded by bomb damage. We’d seen the photographs and newsreels of the devastation that struck Dublin. If that had been caused by a lone German aircraft (possibly a navigation mistake, we were told), what on earth must England be like by now? They’d had four years of ruin from the air.
As we stepped from the dockside to the waiting train, I asked her, “Why exactly are we going to London? What precisely will we be doing there?”
She looked at me with an impatient purse of the lips and picked up the book she’d been reading; I gazed out of the train window.
England looked glorious. They were enjoying an Indian summer, long days of golden light falling on leopard-colored trees. The train took us through acres of aftergrass green beyond reason, and spiky deserts of fawn stubble. England had spent the season growing extra food as part of the war effort; now, fallow and spent, their duty done, the fields rested, as calm as a woman after giving birth.
At first I felt confused, because it looked no different from Ireland—pastoral, empty, and still. Yet in my pursuit of every war report I could find I’d seen the rumors that we might get
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