Snowleg (6 page)

In Mugging Hall, the roll-call had begun. Like the
Appell
at Colditz.

“Tweed?”

“
Sum
.”

“Sibley?”

“
Sum
.”

“Rood?”

“
Sum
.”

Numbly, he sat in his toyes and drew his curtain tight. He felt fragile, exposed, like a fruit cut in half and stitched back together. He wanted to jump in the Itchen. He didn't care if he never spoke to his mother again. What had she left him with as his identity? How was he to deal with Rodney?

“Liptrot?”

“
Sum
.”

“Leadley?”

“
Sum
.”

In a way, it would have surprised Peter less to discover that his mother was not his parent. Everything he was she had shattered and, all his solidity gone, he felt a complicated hostility towards her. This afternoon she had not simply lost him the father he thought he had, but she had given him one that was foreign. A German.

“Hithersay?”

Until he followed her onto “Revelation Hill”, the only German Peter had given much consideration to was a charred corpse in a cockpit. Beyond the pages of
The Colditz Story
or the Commando “trash mags” that circulated the dormitory, he had no vivid picture of the place or of its people. Germany, so he understood from his grandfather, was somewhere to escape from as soon as you humanly could, a blank region on the map over which his concentration skidded to the warm blue Mediterranean. East Germany was a greater blur. He had barely considered it.

“Hithersay?” repeated the testy voice.

Peter sat up. “
Sum
,” he called. I am. But now who was he?

That night, he attended evensong in Chantry, and singing the Nunc Dimittis he had a sense of what it must feel like to be excommunicated. The service drove home how English everyone was at school. He studied Tweed in the front row, tie tight-knotted, dressed in a new herringbone jacket of the same grey-green as the medieval glass. His voice bellowing for the Lord to let His Servant depart in peace. And all at once understood Tweed's eagerness to fit in.

Among his friends at St Cross, the one Peter admired most was Brodie, a shambolic extrovert two years older, who spent his every spare moment with a split-cane rod on the Itchen. Brodie had, for all his bumptiousness, a side that was gentle and considerate, and Peter trusted him.

On the following Wednesday he and Brodie were taking a short cut through the War Cloisters when Peter found himself reading for the first time the words from
The Pilgrim's Progress
carved into a stone plaque. “
THEN SAID HE MY SWORD I GIVE TO HIM THAT SHALL SUCCEED ME IN MY PILGRIMAGE AND MY COURAGE AND SKILL TO HIM THAT CAN GET IT
.” On pale columns the colour of his breath in the cold were plaques dedicated to fallen old boys in two world wars. A separate plaque was inscribed with two German names. “Members of the college who also died for their country. Here in equal honour.” The words provoked in Peter a feeling of such despondency that he couldn't think straight. He blurted out his story.

“Well, you know the first thing you've got to do?” said Brodie in his sympathetic but firm voice.

“What?”

“Learn German.”

“You're joking?”

“Seriously, Hithers.”

His French master queried him, surprised by the request, and Peter explained.

One afternoon Leadley clicked his heels in the tub-room. “Heil Hithersay!” He snapped out his arm and started to goose-step across the white tiles. “A Hun – and a Prussian at that!” Suddenly, he had the preoccupied smile of a baby filling its nappy. “Oh, I think I'm going to fart. Schnell, schnell!” He cocked his leg and something plopped out. Peter stared in mystified fascination at a mole-coloured turd.

Leadley's instinctive slur wounded him. Peter didn't know what it was to be German, hadn't a clue, but Leadley had firm ideas: the Germans were an aberrant race with no culture, strange food and an ugly syntax.

“Germans are our enemies,” declared Leadley, casting aside the
Hurricane
comic, the two of them alone in the dormitory.

“Don't be a prick. The Russians are.”

“You're wrong, Hithersay,” and leaped up on the metal-framed bed and aimed his arm. “And unless you admit you're a filthy Bosch, I'll shoot you.”

The drama of Leadley's turd took precedence over the novelty of Peter's German ancestry, but not for long. By the end of term everyone at St Cross knew. Thereafter his Germanness became a badge. It defined and labelled him and he couldn't escape it, not even in the Australian outback. In English they were reading
Voss
by the Australian Nobel-prize winner Patrick White. “‘Uggh!' said Mary Hayley. ‘Germans!'”

Initially, Peter tried to pretend away his new identity as something to be suppressed and fought against. At the same time, it tallied with a feeling he had inside him of being odd and incomplete. He had often wished to be someone else. Now he was.

“Prepare to die Schweinehunde!” yelled Leadley one night, and from his vantage point on the coarse blue blanket he sprayed Peter's stomach with a double-fisted rat-a-tat-tat.

Soon a fresh set of faces stared from his toyes wall. He replaced Steve McQueen with a portrait of Bach. He took down Camilla Rickards, the “I'm backing Britain” sticker, the House of Lords poster. The only survivors were a tanned half-naked model with a sandy elbow, and Sir Bedevere.

CHAPTER FIVE

T
HE NOTION THAT HIS
mother would tell a difficult story straight was, of course, absurd. First time round, in her choppy and defensive way, she had given a watered-down version. At the start of the summer holidays, to fill in the shadows, he walked up Tisbury High Street and pressed a bell saying “Milo Potter”.

Peter enjoyed a close relationship with his grandfather. Unlike Rosalind, who had always been tricky with him. She hated his smell. Screamed if he tried to kiss her. Ran out of the room as soon as he embarked on one of his six war stories. “I can stand the blood and guts – but it BORES me.”

But with Peter something happened: Milo Potter lost his accusatory tone. All the warmth he couldn't offer his daughter or granddaughter, with both of whom he shared a temperament, he concentrated on his grandson.

Consequently, Peter was the one his mother would take on visits. Peter never minded listening to him. It pleased his mother and it pleased the person he listened to. Old people, he learned early on, liked to talk.

He once heard his mother enthuse to the vicar: “Peter's wonderful with my father. He never complains when he repeats himself.” Nor when his grandfather farted as he sat down in his wing-back chair. Or mislaid his teeth. Or soiled himself after a morning at the Black Dog pub.

Peter's shyness helped. It was a kind of shyness, after all, not to want to hear your own voice. But it was more than shyness that made him draw out a crusty old man about his experiences with the Royal Army Medical Corps in the Adriatic or, after 1945, as a general practitioner in Clitheroe. It took Peter off from himself. Relieved the unease that sometimes he felt when he looked in the mirror.

His mother remarked that his eyes gave him warmth. Hers were pale green, the colour of her favourite herbal tea. Peter's on the other hand were dark and slightly slanted, the irises as black as his ropy hair, and photographed well. His skin was dark, too, a shade of oloroso that marked him out from others at school as well as from his parents and sister – and which his grandfather attributed with a knowing chuckle to a French sailor in the family. Peter took it for one of his stories.

Like anyone who has fought in a war, his grandfather was full of stories. Alone with his grandson, he told Peter about the places he had seen. The train station in Trieste. The enemy flag he had captured from a castle. His adventures.

Milo Potter. Terse, tricky, a good hater of Germans and a lover of pale ale and the dark chocolate he kept in his freezer. Who shared his daughter's stubbornness, but not her hope that Peter would grow up to be a medical man like him. “I don't know why your mother wants you to become a doctor.” Or rather he did know, but wasn't telling. “Just because doctors cure people, it doesn't mean they're good. Don't be fooled into thinking
that
.”

At his grandfather's flat the curtains were drawn in the living room, which stank of stale breath and urine. Peter walked into the small kitchen and called in a loud cheerful voice, “I'll get you a beer.”

His grandfather had returned to his chair. He sat in his favourite woollen sleeping cap, knitted for him 62 years before by the Baptist women of the Shepherd's Bush Tabernacle. Peter handed him the glass and kissed him on the cheek, slipping something onto his lap and whispering, “I've brought you some Bournville.”

“Dear boy, how are you?” sitting up, with a squeezed expression, revived by the sight of the beer. A week before, driving to Port Regis, Rodney had been alarmed to see him shuffling in his slippers towards the Black Dog. “You know, you're very sweet to come and spend this time with me, particularly since I've been such a pain to your parents.” He unwrapped the Bournville. Pinched blue eyes, skin the colour of horseradish and a dent in his forehead that might have been left there by an exploding cork. “Tell me about school. What are you doing?”

“I'm studying German.”

“You're not studying German! You're English, for God's sake.”

“I have a German father, Grandpa.”

“I want you to forget about your so-called father,” he said angrily. “Here you are, English mother, English stepfather, English upbringing, and you're at an English public school. It's just one of those things that happened.”

“Put yourself in my position. What would you do?”

“What do you mean, ‘do'?”

“If you discovered you were German.”

Silence.

“Go on, Grandpa,” and Peter egged him on, breathing through his mouth to avoid the smell, all his concentration on the figure who rocked in his chair and struggled to snap off a square of chocolate.

Milo Potter folded his lips and chewed. And stared at the sisal floor. Forced by his grandson to see the English officer lying between his slippers. Watching himself leap from the jeep to attend the groaning man. “Maybe when you're older,” licking at the dark rim on his lips. And telling him anyway. “If I discovered I was German, I'd top myself. It's simply the bottom end of the scale. Let me tell you a couple of things about Germans . . .” and gulping his beer, he started to talk with a fluency that he couldn't bring to the recent past.

Later, Peter stood on the pavement where he and Rosalind used to play hopscotch. My God, he thought, am I capable of slitting throats?

CHAPTER SIX

I
NSTEAD OF
T
HE
D
OORS
he listened to punk.
Anarchy in the UK
.
Bodies
.
Pretty Vacant
.

“Filthy Boche!” chanted Leadley, chewing his ear. His voice lazy and larval and powered by inherited money. “Achtung, Spitfeuer, aargh!”

In March went the last of his moorings. Amid acrimony and controversy, St Cross had sold the Malory manuscript to the British Library and his favourite history master resigned. Encouraged by this master and also by Rodney, Peter had set his heart on reading history at Oxford.

His German father became the sword he drew against those who approached. To stop the dissonance in his life he thought of him obsessively. He wanted to know about the man. To see and to touch someone who was his blood, who looked like him, who might understand him.

“
We
know our fathers' names, where we come from,” whispered Leadley, heatedly stroking Tweed under the blanket. “What we want to know is: What's
your
father's name?”

“Oh, go screw yourself,” but reading in Leadley's eyes the horror of his deformity.

While Mr Brodribb, the replacement history master, stuttered through the dissolution of the monasteries, Peter sat in the back row and imagined his father in a toyes-sized cell. Scrubbing himself beneath a cold shower. Sweeping the hair from his eyes (was that his habit too?). Sometimes he reflected on the sentence uttered by his father that had caused him to be imprisoned. Could there be a comparable formula to bring him back, to undo the spell?

Then, in the summer term of his lower-sixth year, a Hamburg academic contacted St Cross to enquire if there might be a boy willing to improve the English of his daughter, a member of the German Winter Olympics team.

Peter volunteered and was accepted, but waited until half-term before approaching his parents to pay for the journey. His instinct being to treat them separately, he asked his mother first, seeking her out in the living room where she sat at the walnut piano. She had played it all weekend: Mendelssohn, Beethoven, and more and more Bach. Eschewing Chopin, Scarlatti and Borodin in favour of German, German, German music.

Now it's out in the open, he thought, there was bound to be a reaction.

He explained that he wanted to spend the summer holiday in Hamburg. “Mum, this is what I really want to do. I just want to look like somebody. I want to see someone walking up the street who looks like me.”

“Darling, I understand,” and her expression said: Look at my life, the way it has been made. There's no way I can go to Germany to find your father. But I am moved to see you studying German, and it's perfectly natural that you should one day go looking for him in the city where he wanted to be. “It's just that I don't know if Daddy can afford it. Things are rather tight right now.”