Nothing to Be Frightened Of (36 page)

So all reliable evidence for Stendhal’s Syndrome effectively dissolves before our eyes. But the point is not that Stendhal was an exaggerator, a fabulator, a false-memory artist (and Beyle a truth-teller). The story becomes more, not less, interesting. It is a story instead about narrative and memory. Narrative: the truth of a novelist’s story is the truth of its final form, not that of its initial version. Memory: we should believe that Beyle was equally sincere, whether writing at a few hours’ distance from events, or fifteen years later. Note also that whereas Beyle was “almost moved to tears” in front of the Bronzino, they “started to his eyes” when he wrote about the sibyls a couple of hours later. Time brings not just narrative variation but emotional increase. And if forensic examination appears to diminish the story of Santa Croce, it remains, even in its original, unimproved version, about aesthetic joy being greater than religious rapture. Fatigue and tight boots would have distracted Beyle from God’s glory, had he gone into the church to pray; but the power of art overcame pinched toes and rubbed heels.

Chapter 66

My grandfather, Bert Scoltock, had only two jokes in his repertoire. The first referred to his and Grandma’s wedding day, 4 August 1914, and so came with half a century of repetition (rather than honing): “We were married the day war broke out,” (heavy pause) “and it’s been
war ever since
!!!” The second was a story drawn out as long as possible, about a chap who went into a café and asked for a sausage roll. He took a bite, then complained that there wasn’t any sausage in it. “You haven’t reached it yet,” said the café’s proprietor. The fellow took another mouthful and repeated his complaint. “You’ve bitten right past it,” came the reply—a punchline my grandfather would then reprise.

My brother agrees that Grandpa was humourless; though when I add “boring and a little frightening,” he dissents. But then Grandpa did favour his firstborn grandchild, and taught him how to sharpen a chisel. It’s true, he never beat me for pulling up his onions, but his was a headmasterly presence in the family, and I can easily summon up his disapproval. For instance: every year, he and Grandma would come over for Christmas. Once, in the early sixties, Grandpa, looking for something to read, went to the bookshelves in my bedroom and, without asking, removed my copy of
Lolita.
I can see the Corgi paperback now, see how my grandfather’s woodworking and gardening hands methodically broke the spine as he read. This was something Alex Brilliant also used to do—though Alex behaved as if breaking a book’s spine showed you were engaging intellectually with its contents; whereas Grandpa’s (exactly similar) behaviour seemed to indicate disrespect for both the novel and its author. At every page—from “fire of my loins” to “the age when lads / Play with erector sets”—I expected him to throw it down in disgust. Amazingly, he didn’t. He had started, so he would finish: English puritanism kept him doggedly ploughing through this Russian tale of American depravity. As I nervously watched him, I began to feel almost as if I had written the novel, and now stood revealed as a secret nymphet-groper. What
could
he be making of it? Eventually, he handed the book back to me, its spine a vertical mess of whitened cicatrices, with the comment, “It may be
good literature,
but I thought it was SMUTTY.”

At the time, I smirked to myself, as any aesthete going up to Oxford would. But I did my grandfather a disservice. For he had accurately recognized
Lolita
’s appeal to me then: as a vital combination of literature and smut. (There was such a dearth of sexual information—let alone experience—around that a reworking of Renard obtained: “It is when faced with sex that we turn most bookish.”) I also did Grandpa a disservice earlier by suggesting that he left me nothing in his will. Wrong again. My brother corrects me: “When Grandpa died, he left me his repro Chippendale desk (which I never liked) and he left you his gold half-hunter watch (which I had always coveted).”

An old press cutting in my archive drawer confirms that the desk was a retirement present in 1949, when Bert Scoltock, then sixty, left Madeley Modern Secondary School after thirty-six years as a head teacher in various parts of Shropshire. He also received an armchair—quite probably that very Parker Knoll; also, a fountain pen, a cigarette lighter, and a set of gold cufflinks. Girls from the Domestic Science Centre baked him a two-tier cake; while Eric Frost, “representing a group of boys from the Woodwork Centre” gave him “a nut bowl and mallet.” I remember this last item well since it was always on display at my grand-parents’ bungalow, yet never used. When it finally came into my possession, I understood why: it was comically impractical, the mallet firing shell-shrapnel all over the room while reducing the nuts to powder. I always assumed that Grandpa must have made it himself, since almost every wooden object in house and garden, from trug to book trough to grandmother clock case, had been sawn and sanded and chamfered and dowelled by his own hands. He had a great respect for wood, which he took to its final conclusion. Shocked by the notion that coffins crafted from fine oak and elm were reduced to ashes a day or two later, he specified that his own be made from deal.

As for the gold half-hunter, it has been in my top desk drawer for decades. It comes with a gold fob-chain for waistcoat-wear and a leather strap if you prefer to dangle it from lapel buttonhole into top pocket. I open its back: “Presented to Mr. B. Scoltock, by Managers, Teachers, Scholars and Friends, after his leaving after 18 years as head teacher at Bayston Hill C of E School. June 30th 1931.” I had no idea my brother had ever coveted it, so I tell him that now, after forty-odd years of suffering this sinful emotion, the watch is his. “As for the half-hunter,” he replies, “I think he would have wanted you to keep it.” He
would have wanted
? My brother is winding me up with this hypothetical want of the dead. He goes on: “More to the point, I now want you to keep it.” Yes, indeed, we can only do what
we
want.

I apply to my brother on the subject of Grandpa and Remorse. He has two explanations, “the first perhaps too trivial”: a running shame at having beaten his grandson for pulling up his onions. The second, more weighty, suggestion is this: “When he used to tell me stories [about the First World War] they would run up to the time the boat left for France, and then start back again in hospital in England. He never said a word to me about the war. I suppose he was in the trenches. He didn’t win any medals, I’m sure, nor was he wounded (not even a blighty). So he must have been invalided out for trench feet? Shell shock? Something less than heroic, in any case. Did he let his chums down? I once thought I’d try to find out what he actually did in the war—no doubt there are regimental records, etc. etc.; but of course I never got round to doing anything.”

In my archive drawer are Grandpa’s birth certificate, his marriage certificate, and his photo album—that red cloth-bound book titled “Scenes from Highways & Byways.” Here is Grandpa astride a motorbike in 1912, with Grandma perched on the back; roguishly laying his head on her bosom the following year, while grasping her knee with his hand. Here he is on his wedding day, hand around his bride’s shoulder and pipe cocked in front of his white waistcoat, as Europe prepares to blow itself apart; on his honeymoon (a studio shot which has faded less); and with “Babs”—as my mother was known before becoming Kathleen Mabel—born ten months after the wedding. There are pictures of him on home leave, first with two stripes up—Prestatyn, August 1916—and finally three. By this time Sergeant Scoltock is in the Grata Quies hospital outside Bournemouth, where he and the other inmates look remarkably perky as they pose in fancy dress for a concert party. Here is my grandfather in blackface, first with a certain Decker (cross-dressing as a nurse), and then with Fullwood (a Pierrot). And here again is that photo, the head-shot of a woman, still dated in pencil Sept 1915, but with the name (or perhaps the place) erased, and the face so scarred and gouged that only the lips and the Weetabixy hair remain. An obliteration that makes her more intriguing than “Nurse Glynn,” or even “Sgt P. Hyde Killed in Action, Dec 1915.” An obliteration which seems to me a much better symbol of death than the ubiquitous skull. You only get down to bone after rotting through time; and when you do, one skull is much like another. Fine as a long-term symbol, but for the action of death itself, try just such a torn, gouged photograph: it looks both personal and instantly, utterly destructive, a ripping away of the light from the eye and the life from the cheek.

Formal investigation of my grandfather’s war service is initially hampered by not knowing his regiment or date of enlistment. The first Scoltock to turn up is a box-maker invalided out with a medical statement that reads simply: “Idiot.” (Oh to have an officially designated Idiot in the family.) But then here comes Private Bert Scoltock of the 17th Battalion, Lancashire Fusiliers, who enlisted on 20 November 1915, and two months later took that boat for France with the 104th Infantry Brigade, 35th Division.

My brother and I are surprised that Grandpa joined up so late. I had always imagined him getting fitted out in khaki just as Grandma was falling pregnant. But this must be a piece of back-imagining from our parents’ lives: my father joined up and was sent out to India in 1942, leaving my mother pregnant with what turned out to be my brother. Did Grandpa not volunteer until November 1915 because of his daughter coming into the world? He was, as the inscription on his half-hunter confirms, then head teacher at a Church of England school, so perhaps he was in a reserved profession. Or did such a category not yet exist, given that conscription wasn’t introduced until January 1916? Perhaps he saw it coming and preferred to volunteer. If Grandma was already a socialist by this time, he might have wanted to show that, despite having a politically suspicious wife, he was nonetheless patriotic. Did one of those smug women come up to him in the street and offer him a white feather? Did he have a close chum who joined up? Was he suffering from a recently married man’s fear of entrapment? Is all this absurdly fanciful? Perhaps trying to trace his statement about remorse back to the First World War is misconceived, since it never came with any date attached. I once asked my mother why Grandpa never talked about the war. She replied, “I don’t think he thought it was very interesting.”

Grandpa’s personal records (like those of many others) were destroyed by enemy action during the Second World War. The brigade diary shows that they reached the Western Front in late January 1916; there was heavy rain; Kitchener inspected them on 11 February 1916. In July, they finally saw action (casualties 19th– 27th: 8 officers wounded; Other Ranks, 34 killed, 172 wounded). The following month, the brigade was in Vaux, Montagne, and the front line at Montauban; Grandpa would have been in Dublin Trench, where the brigade complained of being shelled by their own under-aiming artillery; later in Chimpanzee Trench, at the south end of Angle Wood. In September and October they were in the line again (4th Sept–31st Oct, Other Ranks Casualties: 1 killed, 14 wounded—3 accidental, 3 at duty, 4 rifle grenade, 2 bombed, 1 aerial torpedo, 1 bullet). The brigade commander is listed as a certain “Captain, Brigade Major B. L. Montgomery (later Alamein).”

Montgomery of Alamein! We used to watch him on the dwarf ’s armoire—“ghastly little Monty poncing about in black and white,” as my brother put it—explaining how he had won the Second World War. My brother and I used to mimic his inability to pronounce his
r
s. “I then gave Wommel a wight hook,” would be our mock summary of the Desert Campaign. Grandpa never told us he had served under Monty—never even told his own daughter, who would certainly have mentioned it as part of family history every time we tuned in.

The brigade’s diary for 17 November 1916 notes: “The Army Commander has lately seen a very short-sighted man in a Battalion of Infantry and a deaf man in another. These would be a danger in the front line.” (There’s a novel would-you-rather: would you rather be deaf or blind in the First World War?) Another note from Command states: “The number of courts martial held in the Division during the period 1st Dec. 1916 to date tend to show that the state of discipline in the Division is not what it should be.” Over that period the 17th Lancashire Fusiliers had 1 desertion, 6 Sleeping on Post and 2 “accidental” (presumably self-inflicted) injuries.

There is no evidence—there could be no evidence—that my grandfather featured in these statistics. He was an ordinary soldier who volunteered, was shipped out to France for the middle period of the war, and progressed from private to sergeant. He was invalided out with (as I have always understood it) trench foot or feet, “a painful condition caused by prolonged immersion in water or mud, marked by swelling, blistering, and some degree of necrosis.” He returned to England at an unspecified date, and was discharged on 13 November 1917, along with twenty others from his regiment, as “No longer physically fit for service.” He was then twenty-eight, and oddly—I assume mistakenly—listed as a private in the records of discharge. And despite my brother’s memory, he did receive medals, if of the lowliest kind—the kind awarded for simply turning up: the British War Medal, given for entering a theatre of war, and the Victory Medal, given to all eligible personnel who served in an operational theatre. The latter reads, on its reverse, “The Great War for Civilization 1914–1919.”