M I C HAEL S M AL L, W RITER MONDAY, 7 FEBRUARY 2011
HOMEWARD BOUND It was I who killed my father.
The Luftwaffe strafed his nerve-ends on the beaches of Dunkerque. And I left him for dead. The sepia photos of 1939: Reg, my father’s clean-cut khaki dapperness; round-open, winningly warm eyes that I knew to be pale green; the forage-cap sitting jauntily on the waves of very short hair; his enlisted smile is generous, confident, trusting. Compared with the demob photo of ’42: a heaviness shadows the brow; a grin lopsided with knowledge of unspeakable horrors and possibly a survivor’s sense of guilt; a stiffness of manner supported by the walking stick; the hair flattened slick. And Agnes, my mother, a blushing rose, auburn hair with a pronounced wave curled back from the forehead, such a modest smile. Flawed by a readiness to think ill of noone; self-effacement that often mounted to self-reproach. With the curtness of his post-war bitterness, my father blighted her with the nickname Mumpsie, a left-over from a feverish attack of mumps. Father number one, the pre-war dad that I scarcely met and Agnes had expected to marry, was apparently a good mixer and cheerfully cavalier, not afraid to dress up in silk and taffeta as Cinderella for Ralph Reader’s Gang Show or vamp out a piano rag unsighted. The centre of attention, my mother said, the life and soul of the party, all the girls fell for him etc. Stripped of his prefectship at grammar school for escorting home the dewy-eyed schoolgirl who would become his wartime bride. No, I could never have killed the prototype. Only occasionally did I recognise his ghost in flashes at family twenty-firsts and weddings, where he’d be quick-stepping with another man’s wife, bestowing on his glowering son an outrageous wink as he