Читать книгу Then Again: Travels in search of my younger self - Irma Kurtz - Страница 8

On my fourth birthday France and Britain declared war on Germany at last, and ever since, my generation has stumbled from one crisis to the next, greater or smaller, always faster and closer as speed of communication puts the Middle East a block away and Africa on the local tramline. Youngsters quite enjoy a crisis because it seems to promise change. The world is always changing for the young. And the world is always ending for the old. The young are bored most of the time. As much as ambition or curiosity or lust, it is the need to outrun boredom that accounts for their frenetic style. As life unwinds behind us and its sheer weight starts to slow us down, we turn round to squint at our memories. Old people are never bored; they are much too busy remembering. To remember, more often than not incorrectly and fantastically, is the final industry of the decrepit imagination. During my father’s terminal dementia, I sometimes sat with him in the day room of his nursing home. Well into his eighties, he still had his teeth and most of his hair; only his wits had left him. He referred to my mother as ‘the woman who brings me food’ and he called me by his youngest sister’s name, Sylvia, but I think he did not mind me there quietly beside him, watching him. I watched once how he ate an apple, chewing thoughtfully and slowly, and I followed the play of original memories behind his eyes. For him that apple was the only fruit. Its small crunch and pop in his mouth enthralled him; he was delighted by its flavour of ephemeral life and his mind was occupied by the hallucinatory images it summoned. Bored? Not on your life, sweetheart. Too busy sampling one more time and for ever the celebrated fruit of Eden.

When I set sail from Southampton for the Isle of Wight it was yet another critical time in British history. An epidemic of foot and mouth disease raged in the countryside. Unchecked by an urban government that models itself after the far reaches of upper management, the virus threatened an ancient agricultural society. A mist of anxiety rose from the pyres of burning carcasses and spread over the land, growing thicker and darker with every mile out of London. Crossings between Lymington and Yarmouth are short and frequent, and I had chosen to travel just before midday on Saturday. Many of the other passengers on the ferry were elderly couples for whom World War Two was only yesterday. They sat in the salon over cups of tea, looking into space, not reading newspapers or speaking very much. The underlying mood on board, deeper than palpable depression, was familiar to me from a ferry I take every year or so to visit an American friend on Martha’s Vineyard; also, there was the weekly boat that used to be the only connection to Ibiza where I lived, once upon a time. This too was a home-going vessel. Most of my fellow passengers knew exactly where they were bound. Their glances at tourists like me were vague, patronising and a little superior. Despite the chilly breeze, several young couples with children gathered out on the forward deck as soon as we pulled away. They kept their backs to the forest of slender masts in Lymington harbour and faced the approaching shoreline where grandma and grandpa were waiting with cakes and a nice cup of tea.

Disembarking passengers walked across a mat soaked in disinfectant while cars and one or two half-empty tourist buses rolled through a trough of the stuff; everyone then disappeared purposefully. All except me. The pretty little town of Yarmouth lay snug behind bastions built by Henry VIII, more decorative than defensive now in this era of airborne peril. Although I thought I had glimpsed the Needles far off to starboard as we were entering the port, I had no idea how to get to them over the rolling landscape, already greener than the mainland. I listened while the frazzled woman behind the desk in the tourist office warned a pair of young backpackers they were going to find some of the trails closed because of the crisis.

‘But surely you don’t have foot and mouth here! This is an island!’ the girl cried. She could have made the same complaint anywhere in Britain, it seemed to me.

‘Can I walk there?’ I asked about the Needles.

She looked at me for a long moment, assessing and bemused, she herself no spring chicken. ‘It is six miles. There’s a bus,’ she said.

The bus made a two- or three-hour circuit of the entire island. Theoretically, I should be able get off near the Needles, reminisce moodily for, say, half an hour or longer if the fine weather held, and then return to Yarmouth on a bus coming from the opposite way. I was pretty sure no more than two coastal buses were needed to service this island for retired gentlefolk, well-bred ramblers and mainland tourists who brought cars, bikes and buses of their own. At worst, I would have to wait an hour or so to pick up the same bus I had arrived on, and rejoin it for a round trip of the Isle of Wight, returning at last to Yarmouth from the other side. Browsing the bookshelf in the tourist office, while I pondered my choices, I realised with a start of recollection that the old and infamous Parkhurst Prison was on the Isle of Wight.

‘1954: When we sailed past a pretty island, the Isle of Wight, white rocks stood like armed soldiers in the sea and a few people waved to us from high up on cliffs. And here we are! Here we are! We landed in Southampton! Southampton! I have seen liners sail into New York from Southampton. We didn’t see much of it, just the docks and cranes of a working waterfront. The dashing Tony was waiting and hustled us on a train to London. From here on in, he told us, we will be travelling by bus: he called it “a coach”. A coach! And four! I feel like Cinderella. Everything is English! Men in vests! Little houses with chimneys and no TV aerials!’

It never entered your young mind, did it, that the pretty island gliding by as we made for Southampton was an Alcatraz of chilly climes? Or that just beyond our vision was justice, replete with her miscarriages, making all men equal in suffering as they had not been in wickedness. You were so young! You had periodic pimples; specks were forever flying into your wide eyes; you regularly hit your funny bone as children do, sending vibrations to your fingertips; and you believed; you believed so many things. You believed there was love enough to go round, you believed good prevailed in the human heart and must triumph over evil in the last reel; you believed greed was an aberration, and the English were ever so well bred skinny people in vests they called ‘waistcoats’. Home is reality for the young; everywhere else they believe to be a set for make-believe so you could not yet believe in crimes or punishments except those of your homeland; no sirens portended misfortune or tragedy as far as you could believe, except they were American. What one believes, young Irma, is what one prefers to think: that’s what belief is – an extension of hope, and hope against hope. To know, on the other hand, is to have no preference, no choice. You knew so little then, young I. But you were keen to learn, I’ll give you that. And now? Now, my old darling, we know a thing or two. Now we know better.

In imitation of the what-the-hell way I used to up and go in my youth, I had made no hotel reservations on the Isle of Wight nor planned how long I’d stay. I packed my toothbrush and wore my hiking boots, and basking in the back of my mind was a dreamy open fire and a single-malt whisky after a day, perhaps two, spent strolling in the country to the sound of birdsong. Plastic in credit and a bank balance generally in the black have taken youthful what-the-hell out of travel and replaced it with a more mature and affluent version: faced with the complications of using the Isle of Wight bus system to get me to and from the Needles, I rang a local taxi company – what the hell? The driver kept me waiting outside the tourist office. He arrived at last, an unsmiling, affectedly busy man in his early fifties I guessed. Too big for the job, too broad and tall to spend his day comfortably in a car, he was solidly built in layers of compacted frustration and irritability: a smoker perhaps, not permitted by his employers to smoke at work? But no, it was evident in the brisk way he motioned me into the front seat this was no man to be bothered by the petty rules of overlords; more likely he was a once-prosperous self-employed businessman forced by adversity to drive a cab. Every third minicab in England is driven by one such. Would I be able to persuade a tough customer like this to wait quietly in the car some distance away while I stood in the shadow of the remembered rocks and all by myself tried to recollect myself?

The Isle of Wight was in much greater peril of infection than the tourist office had led me to believe. Among many closed roads was the one down to the coast and the Needles. ‘Bloody typical!’ the driver muttered when we were stopped by a red tape stretched across our road.

‘Bloody typical!’ he said again, though in all my decades in England there had only once before been such an outbreak, and it was typical of nothing.

When I told him in a burst of chronic loony loquacity that I was on a quest for memories, not only did he drive me to a vantage point atop a cliff, whence he said I could see the Needles, he even stayed behind in the car, I assumed to smoke a cigarette. I stepped alone into an old-fashioned amusement park for children overlooking Alum Bay. Not a child or grown-up was in sight. Salt-stung vacancy, cartoon artwork on empty stalls, and merry-go-round horses stalled in mid-leap conjured charm out of the air and stirred memories of childhood encounters with sleeping magic.

A few steps to the summit of the encircling cliffs and finally, there they were again: the Needles, dental white and small below me in the greenish water, as if seen from a low-flying plane. I waited for a moment, trying to recall the thrill of that sight all those years ago from the deck of the Castel Felice; instead I found myself wondering: wondering if someone had happened to be standing right there in that very place at 9 a.m. on 8 July 1954 – an English girl of eighteen, perhaps, whose dreams were travelling the opposite way. Had she by chance looked out to sea at the very moment our toy ship was sailing past, bound for Southampton? Was she one of the figures we saw waving at us on board? I wondered if the telescope put in that place for tourists swallowed her halfpenny as it did my twenty-pence piece and delivered no view but the very same big black ‘O’ it gave me. Soon she boarded her own Castel Felice and crossed the Atlantic to a whole New World. And in New York the young English rose met and fell in love with a dark American boy who grew up to become a shrink, say, or a book reviewer and professor of Russian Literature at City College of New York. After two children, now grown with children of their own, and thirty-three indigestible Seders with her alien in-laws, and the menopause, and years of increasing, wasteful fury, she divorced him. I don’t blame her. It is precisely what I would have done in her place. He then married a secretary he’d been canoodling sporadically, or maybe a nurse. Clever old philanderers usually choose a nurse or secretary as their final helpmeet: to help them meet their makers and leave no mess behind.

The ashtray was clean when I returned to the car and there was no smell of smoke; the driver sat precisely as I had left him, sullen and massive behind the wheel. His introspective anger was too heavy to penetrate in any customary way; uncharacteristically, I never discovered his age, political affiliations, or even his name. Certainly in charge, every inch the driver, he said he had something for me to see, and before I could tell him I’d really rather not he’d turned off on to a bumpier road. En route he complained bitterly about the shortage of tourists, and the lack of civic concern shown by aged residents who had retired to his native island and who didn’t give a damn what happened to it. A dilapidated fence appeared in the middle of nowhere beside our road; when he pulled to a stop in front of its gate the scrunching of our tyres sounded of dereliction and breakage. He did not bother to lock the door and I left my small overnight case on the front seat. When he led me through a space where the gate was off its hinges, I was dismayed to see a large sign claiming the area for ‘Warner’s’. I would have preferred the cause of his dark anger not to derive from an American company. In spite of coiled barbed wire here and there, the deserted compound was easily accessible. It had clearly once been a vast holiday camp for adults, another haunted place where the cool breeze seemed to carry echoes of past years’ amusements. He referred to the rows of attached units as ‘chalets’; I would have called them barracks. Smashed windows and unhinged doors gave on to small rooms with peeling wallpaper. A few torn mattresses and pieces of broken furniture were scattered around, but there was no wet mess, no drug paraphernalia and no sign of fire. Propriety in desuetude: further evidence the Isle of Wight belongs to the well-off aged. The smell of the sea was everywhere and its irrepressible sparkle was reflected against the sky; however, the buildings were tucked into a dip behind the cliffs as they were at the amusement park, out of sight of water, facing inwards and each other, designed for an island chastened by prevailing winds and by terrors that sailed in on ancient tides.

‘1954: Pirate country!’

The driver led me from place to place feverishly, describing each landmark in its heyday: the naughty casino, the ballroom once so lively, the best chalets set apart from their neighbours in the camp and turned towards the sea that lay beyond a rise and out of sight. He was not animated by nostalgia but by rage and outrage: a rapacious invader had snatched all the gay days from him, from him alone, from him and nobody but him. He told me that in his youth he had worked here to earn extra money during the summer holidays from school.

In my day and my place, students on summer break used to work at hotels in a region of the Catskill Mountains known as the ‘Borscht Belt’. On the wall of my London flat is a photograph of my father’s first Buick with its long sleek running-board like a stowed gangplank, and me, about three, grinning out of the window. Behind us is one of the long white buildings that housed the busboys and waitresses at the Borscht Belt hotel where my grandparents spent the summer. Called ‘hotels’, most of them were in fact a collection of dedicated buildings older, prettier but along the same general lines as those at Warner’s abandoned holiday camp on the Isle of Wight. Nice old Jews from New York used to go to the Borscht Belt to escape summer in the city. They rocked on the porches while competitively enumerating symptoms of their ailments. They splashed in the pools awkwardly, not a generation of swimmers. Some of them remembered and would tell a visiting grandchild how more than half a century earlier when they were little they used to tremble in the dark pits full of stored potatoes where their parents hid them from Cossacks on the rampage. Of course, they did not yet know and could not imagine – who could? – that an infinitely more efficient machine was even then slipping into gear, preparing to exterminate friends and relatives left behind in the cities and shtetls of Europe.

‘You’ll find a nice Jewish boy some day, Irmele,’ the old ladies used to say, stroking my hair, trying to console me for being born female.

Then the men maybe played pinochle, a card game incomprehensible to us little Americans raised on gin rummy and canasta, while the women boasted about sons and grandsons, and tried to arrange a few marriages: what’s the harm? Big kosher meals were the main event of the day, and live entertainment in the evening featured sharp, satirical jesters in Yiddish and English, sentimental balladeers and, occasionally, a world-class violinist with a repertoire heavy on Brahms.

The driver was furiously trying to dismantle a barricade so he could show me the Olympic-sized swimming pool. Empty swimming pools are creepy; they put me in mind of murder and accidental death. Besides, I had not packed my little bag and locked my door behind me to go out in search of his memories, thank you very much. Admittedly the Isle of Wight might seem an odd starting place for a repeat of my first journey to Europe; nevertheless, it had been our stunning landfall after many days at sea, and I hoped to find there a glimpse of myself and England as we were fifty years ago when the Castel Felice sailed by on its way to port.

‘Please don’t bother! Please don’t!’ I said twice as he beavered away at the fence, and once again before it got through to him. ‘Please! Stop!’

He remembered that pool from the old days. Oh, the old days! Oh, what times they had! Oy, what times! Like the boys and girls employed at Borscht Belt hotels, he in his youth got up to no good at this holiday camp, you can be sure. Here he had probably loved for the first time. Was it the loss of innocence or the failure of love that fuelled his anger now? It is generally perceived failure that maddens men in middle age. And sexual menace attaches to a grown man’s anger, be he lover or stranger, or father. Back when I was an urban kid with a developed alarm system, I would never so gormlessly have trailed any big, angry man into a lonely place. Not unless I trusted him. Or fancied him. Was the driver any threat to me now that I was old and of no account to questing males? Not unless he was crazy. Or I was. It struck me then, as I watched him fulminate, that the lust of strange men was going to be missing this time from my repeat odyssey. My years would protect me on the road even when I returned to sexy old Italy, the most overtly flirtatious country in Europe of my youth. The driver, shaking his head now, perplexed as a bull, would never have had the temerity to take a young woman to such a desolate location and show her the source of his anger. No adult male with half an ounce of sense would dare embrace such a dangerous test of his self-control with an inadvertent temptress looking on. So my age was going to protect men, too, on the journey to come. I was as near as a woman can be to absolutely safe. At last. Alas.

We stood side by side looking through an open door into a ruined bedroom full of erotic rustlings. All around us, fattening on silence, were memories: not the memories I had come for – not my own.

‘You should write about what’s happening here,’ he said. ‘The waste.’

‘No, no. Not me, you,’ I said and, sounding dismissive to my own ears, I added as gently as I could, ‘They are your memories. You have to write them.’

We made two more stops on the short trip back to Yarmouth. The driver, apparently known locally and fearful of being recognised, stayed in the car and sent me out alone to scout functioning holiday camps, he said, and see for myself; I wasn’t sure what or why. They were certainly underpopulated, but it was very early in the season, and even though the few guests in residence were pretty much of the Zimmer frame generation, the grounds were well equipped and well tended. Was it age itself and the ruination of all things that surprised and enraged him to such a degree?

On the outskirts of Yarmouth at last, we passed a number of little shops that were boarded up. ‘Closed. Closed. Closed,’ he hissed at each ‘to let’ sign.

His anger started to change its nature; no longer raw or personal, it slowly became political, until by the time we neared Yarmouth it was hardly more than pub moaning over beers with like-minded mates. His mobile rang once and he spoke to his wife about some necessary shopping on his way home. When he told her he had taken his big-city fare to observe the sorry state of the island, I matched her undoubted gaze heavenward. By the time he and I shook hands in Yarmouth my mind was practically made up to leave the Isle of Wight on an early boat. First, however, I wanted lunch.

And it was there, as the only customer in a café on a side street in Yarmouth, I found my own memories, and to spare. As memories often arrive and always will, they came in a bottle.

‘9 July 1954: So this is England! London, at last! Englishmen walked by in black bowlers, even some old fellows with mutton chops. This evening the three of us went to Marble Arch, a corner of Hyde Park where complete freedom of speech is practised. Men on soapboxes were advocating points of view as disparate as misogyny is from Communism! There were some ferociously witty hecklers. The bobbies were strolling about but there were no disturbances. We met a wonderful Englishman who walked back with us and outlined an elaborate plan for the assassination of Senator McCarthy. I wish! He said everyone could tell we were American because of our trim clothes and sparkling eyes. But we heard some cruel things said about us, too: “Overlords of Western Europe …” Could that be right? Perhaps! I hope not. I want the lovely differences to last. Midge and Evelyn and I went out to eat. Most odd! There was something on my salad that was sticky and sweet and tasted like a big mistake. Why put sugar in salad dressing?’

Oh, so much to discover! Men of the far left, for example, were – still are? – more overtly male chauvinist pigs than pigs of the far right. In Communist households I visited hopefully when I was young in New York and later in Paris, the food was always prepared by silent women and dished up to voluble men who did not believe in enslaving women: not one at a time. Monogamy was a bourgeois concept except, apparently, in the kitchen. Communism lost me in the end for many reasons, among them because I have never been keen on the catering business. Neither was the young waitress on the Isle of Wight who brought me the scampi salad I had ordered wistfully, inspired by sea and salt in the air. Reconstituted, thawed, deep-fried, faintly fish-flavoured patties rested on a bed of undressed lettuce. Along with a cold doughy roll on a damp plate, she plunked a bottle of salad cream in front of me. And bang! A whiff of old smoke and river, and there was London as I had first encountered her in the 1950s, still a post-war city, showing the furtive appetites and cautious guilty reassembling of battered pride that a Yank from the unscarred land of plenty summed up in her journal as ‘innate dignity’.

‘July 1954: The city is big, bigger than New York but left-handed, much quieter. London has innate dignity. I like this city. I want to come back.’

Not long before setting out for the Isle of Wight, on a subsequent reconnoitre of mother’s many stores of a lifetime’s sweepings, I had come upon a box full of letters and postcards from different people and in no particular order. In the jumble was a postcard of London Bridge, dated July 1954: ‘London is a wonderful city!’ I had written. ‘But somehow it feels weary. Only the flowers in the park are bright and velvety. It would be sad to live here.’ An illustration of to what a great degree prophecy is based on experience and why the young for all their gifts cannot be trusted as oracles, for in time the fact turned out to be that I could live happily nowhere but in London.

I put a drop of gooey salad cream on my finger, tasted it, and instantly a misplaced memory fluttered back where it belonged. I was no stranger to the Isle of Wight. How could I have forgotten? In 1962 I gave up my wretched job at the Berlitz School in Paris and my poky room on the Left Bank, and came to live in Cowes for ten days aboard a twelve-metre yacht, Stormsvalla. Eight of us friends and crew provisioned her there, preparing to sail the Bay of Biscay to Gibraltar. On 11 June of that year we made a quick unscheduled sortie out of port, perhaps far enough to take us past the Needles, I don’t remember. We were following an ocean liner westbound for New York. My parents were on board, though not on deck to watch us bravely tacking in their wake. Probably they were below in their cabin blaming each other for their only daughter’s defection from all that was established and proper. Ostensibly on a European tour, they had in fact come to check up on me after more than four years. I am sure of the date because I also found a thin blue sixpenny air letter from me to them postmarked ‘Cowes, Isle of Wight, 12 June 1962’, the return address: care of Yacht Stormsvalla, Poste Restante, Gibraltar. ‘If only you had been on deck yesterday, you would have seen me aboard Stormy waving goodbye. Tell me of your adventures after we parted in Paris. I am sorry I had to leave you there and go on to London. London is a nice place to visit.’

There is a reason beyond wear and tear for the blank space the Isle of Wight left in my memory. I was in love. Being in love changes the nature of an adventure; love on the road is like staying in five-star hotels, it irons out impressions and puts recollection to sleep on lavish cushions. What I remembered suddenly with the scampi salad was a threat made a few miles down the road and a few decades earlier by one of Stormsvalla’s crew, Martin W-T. The lean, likeable, daft Englishman swore he would mutiny if I, as chief galley slave, did not stow enough bottles of salad cream to see us to Gibraltar. Tinned milk, it turns out, is not the only great white corrupter.