Changing my mind: occasional essays - By Zadie Smith Page 0,107
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