stupid mistake? I wasn’t ever angry with Charlie but I put him out of my head. I thought he was dead, which might make me sound heartless but by then my heart was broken. All I had was you. Don’t think I didn’t love your brother, but after the War he came back so full of bitterness and anger, and he still idolised his father. Hubert could do no wrong in Charlie’s eyes. There were times I wanted to tell him the truth about the sorry mess of it. I wanted to remind him of what his father put us all through. Hubert had fallen apart, and he’d let his family fall apart around him. Still, talking like that wouldn’t have done any of us any good, and talking doesn’t bring people back. It wouldn’t have changed nothing.
‘We have all of us lived with our loss, now all we remember is that loss.’ Could Hubert really have informed on his own son, and then offered himself as sacrifice? I had always thought that it was the living who told us the most about the past, but perhaps there is only truth after death, or in death. My mother spoke of the matter this one time, and never again.
[N.B. Write again to Anton Vern.]
22ND DECEMBER 1985, 6 p.m.
[In the box room, pretending to look for missing fairy lights]
Dad stayed in his study for two whole days after his Waterloo at White Rock, but I don’t know that for sure because I was at school. Mum said she checked on him the morning he died, but she wasn’t able to say when. She was frustrated with him, she admitted, and she was worried he’d not taken his insulin. But she didn’t call Dr Senner about it. All I remember is that she dropped me at school early and I spent the whole day dreading going home. In the end I went over to Vicky’s for my tea.
When I got back at six Mum was in the hall, with her ear glued to the phone. She told me to go and sit in the garden, which is exactly what I did. Dr Senner drove up, and then there was an ambulance. Dad’s heart had already stopped, though. When Mum told me it was heart failure I thought that sounded right.
But it was a lot to take in at once and I don’t think I processed all the facts. I usually have to write stuff down and repeat it over and over. Perhaps you can see why I’ve become a bit suspicious. It doesn’t take a (Village) idiot to work out that there’s no simple or single explanation for anything, there’s just an OFFICIAL VERSION that tidies all the secrets away.
And here’s the biggest secret so far: I wasn’t ever very interested in the Bloody-Stupid German Occupation, but I thought I might find something in Dad’s books and journals and letters to explain what Mum wouldn’t. Shouldn’t History explain everything?
But then, knowing everything doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll be happier/better-off. Sometimes the more you know, the worse it is. I wish I hadn’t known about Therese and her affair, for instance, or that I’d told Nic I knew. I wasn’t trying to stir up trouble – I just wanted to show Nic that I could keep a secret. I wrote her a letter, explaining how I finally understood why she was being so horrible to me. I told her that it couldn’t have been easy for her, living with lies. I said I was sick of it, too. I laid it on mega-deluxe thick but was still so deep-pile nice to her. I told her we were just the same. And do you know how she repaid me? You wouldn’t believe it. Well, you probably would.
Every year on Bonfire Night there is a firework display at Saumarez Park. Saumarez Park is Guernsey’s only proper park – you’d think there’d be lots of open, rolling fields and green space but, according to Miss Jones, Guernsey is more densely populated than most of Northern Europe. This is on account of the Posho-Porsche-Driving English People and their Swiss-Wanker Bankers (who, of course, pay for the fireworks).
Perhaps it was odd that Vicky had asked me to go with her to the display, but I’d helped her collect dandelions for her New-Recipe-Dandelion-Wine and I’d even been her guinea pig. I thought that meant we were friends again. I was glad. It felt like things were getting back to normal. When