My Animal Life(31)

And indeed, things must have looked black to Mr Norris and other grownups at the time. I know now that American air defence — NORAD — had been told that unidentified aircraft were flying over Turkey, a hundred Soviet bombers were in the air, a British bomber had been shot down over Syria, the Soviet fleet was on the move. These ‘facts’ had moved forward contingency plans for a NATO nuclear strike against Russia.

Actually not one of the ‘facts’ was true, messy and dangerous though the Suez crisis was. The ‘unidentified aircraft’ were a flight of swans, the British bomber had a mechanical fault, NATO, on balance, preferred not to strike, the world was not about to end.

But I watched the skies, and thought about dying. Watersfield was on the flight-path to Gatwick. For the next few days, every plane that flew over was the one that would bomb us to smithereens. There was a constant ache of fear, which peaked when the hum of a plane began, a nagging presence growing slowly louder. Night-times were the worst, lying in bed and listening to the drone of distant engines.

What did Mr Norris think he was doing? Why did he want to frighten us? What point is there in telling children of evils that they are too small and powerless to do anything about? I sometimes think one reason for the apocalyptic streak that runs through so many of my novels might be the burden of terror Mr Norris gave me, which lingered long after the crisis went away. (But before I blame him for too much, I must ask why terror came to me so easily. I had seen my father trying to fight with my grandfather, rolling up his sleeves; ‘Come out and fight me.’ I had seen my mother crying in the kitchen. So the nerves and networks for fear were established. I did not have that ‘relative amity’.)

Children need hope. Deserve to have hope. The world will muddy it soon enough, so if adults can, they should leave children unclouded. Apocalyptic global warming has not yet happened. Should children be taught it is inevitable?

There were times in my childhood when I had no hope, when my whole mental landscape was choked with fear …

The cause of the original, primal terror was crumbs on a pale carpet. My brother John had dropped crumbs from his plate in Grandpa and Grandma’s front room, which was only used for special occasions. I believe that Uncle Lloyd and Aunty Hilda had come round, with their children Sue and Martyn, for ‘elevenses’, so perhaps there was some degree of competition about the behaviour of the children. Poor John managed to spill his crumbs (it was the only carpeted room in the house; the others had lino, with bright rag rugs that Grandma made; carpets were rare, and mattered). Indulgent to his first and favoured grandson, Pa leaped up and got the carpet-sweeper, a modern innovation, in those days, working on rollers, like a very small, silent vacuum cleaner. But my father had told John to pick the crumbs up. ‘I’ve told him to clean it up himself,’ Dad said. ‘John will pick them up, he has to learn.’ ‘Well this is quick and easy,’ Pa insisted, advancing on my father with the carpet-sweeper. ‘No, he has to learn.’ A full-blown confrontation had come from nothing. ‘I’ll pick them up,’ said John, as eager as everyone was to avoid trouble.

But trouble could not be avoided between these two fathers fighting over one son. Soon Pa had said the unforgivable. Apparently yielding, but in fact planting in my father’s breast an unbearable barb, he said, ‘Well, Vic, we won’t argue. You’re John’s tyrant.’ Though he said the word ‘tyrant’ as though it was neutral, though the form of what he said was yielding the point, there was bitter gall in the content. And my father, maddened like the bull he was, a heavy man compared to his father’s neat, dancing gadfly, groaned, ‘Tyrant? I’m not a tyrant. I’ll … Come outside, Pa. I’ll fight you.’

(And of course, the bitterness came from the irony. Pa himself, in his time, had been a tyrant. He was now indulging his grandson as he had never indulged his son.)

That morning of the year when I was six, I believed that the world was going to end. I remember every detail, half a century later. I watched Grandpa follow Daddy into the Peel Road garden. An unspeakable horror was coming upon us.

But then, through tears, I saw something else: Grandpa was pulling and patting at my father’s arm, not hitting him, trying to calm him down. ‘Don’t take on, Vic, don’t take on.’ The bomb didn’t fall. The war didn’t happen. The men, in the end, did not fight each other, we did not leave for home, as my father threatened, and the battle blew over, with much pain, and Grandma grey-faced, sitting clutching her chest.