Changing My Mind (35 page)

There followed six months of regimental training and tank training, how to ride in one, how to sleep under one, how to service it when it broke down. Harvey was still not expecting to see action before 1945. You had to be nineteen. When the rest of the unit moved to Calshott, he went to Felixstowe. (He ended up there once again, in the late 1990s, after his second divorce. Sometimes he refers to his life’s journey as “the round-trip.”)

“I was with the old buggers, like Dad’s army. But I was only there three weeks. The law changed; suddenly you could be eighteen. So that was me.” Harvey’s war was on. He spent that last month hiding in the Fawley woods with his regiment. You can’t see the stars like that in Croydon. On June 3, he listened to the final briefing with the rest of his regiment. “That’s when they told us the truth, where we were going, King Beach, and when. I was hoping to be in one of the tanks. But last minute, I was assigned to be the radio man for the CO’s truck. All the boys thought that was pretty funny. Me stuck alone with the CO.”

On the fifth of June at about 11 P.M., they set off. They were meant to land on the morning of the fifth, but the conditions had been too dreadful. They were still dreadful—everybody was sick. In the middle of the crossing, Harvey saw his first British warship, a huge shadowed beast, moving through the water. As he watched, it shot off a broadside from its sixteen-inch guns, rocking sideways in the recoil. “I knew then. I hadn’t known before. I knew this was serious.”

It was not to be as serious for Harvey as it had already been for thousands. He didn’t land at 6 A.M., he didn’t land in a tank (many of these had grenades thrown into them and “brewed up,” exploding from the inside) and he didn’t land as an American at Omaha. Though he didn’t know it, already he was steeped in luck. He approached the relatively quiet King Beach at midday and waited while his CO argued with an American general onboard who was convinced it was too dangerous to land. It was two hours before he drove onto the beach. So much experience that should be parceled out, tenderly, over years, came to my father that day, concertinaed into twenty-four hours. First time he’d left England. First time he’d been at sea. First time he’d seen a dead body.

“I was looking out from the back of the truck. Young dead Germans were everywhere. They looked like us; they could have
been
us. It was gruesome. And we’d heard by then that Major Elphinstone, our major, had died the minute he hit the beach. He stuck his head out of the tank to look about and—pop—a sniper shot him in the face. But you must write that I had an easy day. I had absolutely an easy day. The work had been done, you see. It’d been done. I wasn’t like Bert Scaife.”

Who?

“He was this bloke, he was a legend by the end of the day—caught so many men, shot all these mortars off—he got decorated later. I was no Bert Scaife. Not by a long way.”

Harvey’s truck rode up the lanes, unharmed. There were dugouts everywhere and people shooting at him, but with the help of the radio and excellent information, they made it safely through the worst. They stopped at a monastery that had been commandeered by the Nazis and now stood abandoned. There was a dead man in Nazi uniform lying in the hallway. My father bent down to turn him over and would have joined him in oblivion if it hadn’t been for his CO stopping his hand just in time. The body was booby-trapped. Coiled within it, my future, and that of my brothers, and the future of our future children, and so on, into unthinkability.

He slept that night in a fragrant orchard. And what else? “Well, I stopped in Bayeux a bit after that. Bought a pen.” At this point, my patience with my father bottomed out. He looked at me helplessly. “It’s so hard to remember. . . . I only remember the obscure stuff.”

So now I started playing hardball; now I picked the Dictaphone up and demanded to know about the shrapnel, for Harvey has some shrapnel in his groin, I know he does, and he knows I know. A doctor found it in a routine X-ray in 1991, forty-seven years after Harvey thought it had been removed. I was sixteen at the time, EMF had a hit with “Unbelievable” and I was wearing harem pants. If he’d come home and told me he’d been a waiter on the
Titanic
it couldn’t have seemed more fantastical.

“Oh, that was different. That was just after I bought the pen.”

A few days after the pen incident, then, my father was again in an orchard in the middle of the night. He decided to make tea, the way you did during the war, by filling a biscuit tin full of sand and a little petrol and setting that alight. He shouldn’t have done that. The flames were spotted and a mortar bomb sent over. He doesn’t know how many men died. Maybe two, maybe three. I leaned forward and turned up the volume. For hadn’t I brought this little contraption here for my own purposes? Not to record my father’s history, and not even to write this article, but
precisely for this revelation,
for this very moment or another like it; in the hope of catching a painful war secret, in the queer belief that such a thing would lead to some epiphanic shift in my relationship with my father. There is such a vanity in each succeeding generation—we think we can free our parents from experience, that we will be their talking cure, that we are the catharsis they need. I said, But, Dad, it was a simple mistake. We all make so many at the same age, but in a normal situation, they can’t lead to anybody’s dying. I put my hand on his hand. “But it was my fault.” “Of course it wasn’t. It was a mistake.” “Yes, yes,” said Harvey, humoring me, crying quietly, “if that’s how you want to say it.”

He woke up on a stretcher in a truck, two dead Germans either side of him, picked up from some other incident. That was the end of his war for a few weeks while he recuperated in England. When he went back, in the final months of the war, he did some remarkable things. He caught a senior Nazi, an episode I turned into idiotic comedy for a novel. He helped liberate Belsen. But it’s those weeks in Normandy that are most significant to him. The mistakes he made, the things he didn’t do, how lucky he was. To finish up, I asked him if he thought he was brave in Normandy.

“I wasn’t brave! I wasn’t asked to be brave. . . . I wasn’t Bert Scaife! I wasn’t
individually
brave; that’s how you should say it for the paper.” Is that why he never spoke about it? “Not really. . . . I s’pose when you realized you were playing your part in killing ordinary people, well, it’s an awful thing to think about . . . and then, well, I spent a year in Germany after the war, you see, working for the army and making friends with ordinary Germans. I almost married a German girl, from the country, with a strong jaw. Lovely girl. And in her house there was a photo of her brother, in a Nazi uniform, about eighteen. He wasn’t coming home. And my mate who came to visit her with me, he turned the photo to the wall. But I said no. These were just country people. There was so much evil in that war. And then they were just people like that, simple people.”

That’s the end of our interview on the tape. Afterward, he phoned me up several times to reiterate one point. He wasn’t brave. I said, okay, Dad, yes, I’ve got that bit.

During one of these conversations, I revised my earlier question to him. If he wasn’t brave, is he at least proud? “Not really. If I’d been one of the medicos on beach. Or done something like Bert Scaife did, then I’d be proud, I suppose. But I didn’t.”

Harvey Smith is not Bert Scaife—he wants me to make that very clear to you. When he caught that senior Nazi, his fellow soldiers wanted to kill the man. It was my father who persuaded them to settle for a lesser punishment: he set the Nazi walking in front of their tank for five miles before handing him over to the authorities. It is characteristic of Harvey that he was somewhat ashamed to tell me that story. He feels he behaved cruelly.

In sum, Harvey thinks pride a pale virtue. To his mind, an individual act either helps a little or it does not, and to be proud of it afterward helps nobody much, changes nothing. Still, I am proud of him. In the first version of this article, I wrote here: “He was a man able to retain his humanity in the most inhumane of circumstances.” Later I scratched it out because
humanity
is these days a vainglorious, much debased word and
inhumanity
is a deceitful one. My generation was raised with the idea that those who pride themselves on their humanity are perfectly capable of atrocity. I think I’ll put instead: he didn’t lose himself in horror. Which is a special way of being brave, of bring courageous, and a quality my father shares with millions of ordinary men and women who fought that miserable war.

DEAD MAN LAUGHING

My father had few enthusiasms, but he loved comedy. He was a comedy nerd, though this is so common a condition in Britain as to be almost not worth mentioning. Like most Britons, Harvey gathered his family around the defunct hearth each night to watch the same half-hour comic situations repeatedly, in reruns and on video. We knew the “Dead Parrot” sketch by heart. We had the usual religious feeling for
Monty Python’s Life of Brian.
If we were notable in any way, it was not in kind but in extent. In our wood-cabinet music center, comedy records outnumbered the Beatles. The Goons’ “I’m Walking Backwards for Christmas” got an airing all year long. We liked to think of ourselves as particular, on guard against slapstick’s easy laughs—Benny Hill was beneath our collective consideration. I suppose the more precise term is “comedy snobs.”

Left unchecked, comedy snobbery can squeeze the joy out of the enterprise. You end up thinking of comedy as Hemingway thought of narrative: structured like an iceberg, with all the greater satisfactions fathoms underwater, while the surface pleasure of the joke is somehow the least of it. In my father, this tendency was especially pronounced. He objected to joke merchants. He was wary of the revue-style bonhomie of the popular TV double act Morecambe and Wise and disapproved of the cheery bawdiness of their rivals, the Two Ronnies. He was allergic to racial and sexual humor, to a far greater degree than any of the actual black people or women in his immediate family. Harvey’s idea of a good time was the BBC sitcom
Steptoe and Son,
the grim tale of two mutually antagonistic “rag-and-bone” men who pass their days in a Beckettian pile of rubbish, tearing psychological strips off each other. Each episode ends with the son (a philosopher manqué, who considers himself trapped in the filthy family business) submitting to a funk of existential despair. The sadder and more desolate the comedy, the better Harvey liked it.

His favorite was Tony Hancock, a comic wedded to despair, in his life as much as in his work. (Hancock died of an overdose in 1968.) Harvey had him on vinyl: a pristine, twenty-year-old set of LPs. The series was
Hancock’s Half Hour,
a situation comedy in which Hancock plays a broad version of himself and, to my mind, of my father: a quintessentially English, poorly educated, working-class war veteran with social and intellectual aspirations, whose fictional address—23 Railway Cuttings, East Cheam—perfectly conjures the aspirant bleakness of London’s suburbs (as if Cheam were significant enough a spot to have an East). Harvey, meanwhile, could be found in 24 Athelstan Gardens, Willesden Green (a poky housing estate named after the ancient king of England), also by a railway. Hancock’s heartbreaking inability to pass as a middle-class beatnik or otherwise pull himself out of the hole he was born in was a source of great mirth to Harvey, despite the fact that this was precisely his own situation. He loved Hancock’s hopefulness, and loved the way he was always disappointed. He passed this love on to his children, with the result that we inherited the comic tastes of a previous generation. (Born in 1925, Harvey was old enough to be our grandfather.) Occasionally, I’d lure friends to my room and make them listen to “The Blood Donor” or “The Radio Ham.” This never went well. I demanded complete silence, was in the habit of lifting the stylus and replaying a section if any incidental noise should muffle a line and generally leached all potential pleasure from the exercise with laborious explanations of the humor and said humor’s possible obfus cation by period details: ration books, shillings and farthings, coins for the meter, and so on. It was a hard sell in the brave new comedic world of
The Jerk
and
Beverly Hills Cop
and
Ghostbusters
.