I am reading Hemmingway. For Whom the Bell Tolls. And I remember things, and wonder why it is that some books pull things out of us and others do not. I have little to say about the book itself, other than it is an easier read than I expected it to be, a more human one perhaps, a more emotional one definitely, but you don’t need me to tell you about the book. Go read all the reviews already written about it. Better yet, go read it. It is an excellent, engaging, thought-provoking read. Eighty years on, it still speaks to the truth of the world. Yes. Go read it.
Meanwhile, I read things in it, and I remember other things that hang around it.
I remember being twenty years old and in my second year at university. This is the year that I settle in to working at my studies. The distraction of my first year has buggered off to America. My flatmate spends her weekends up north with her husband-to-be. It has suddenly occurred to me that I actually want to get my degree, if only not to disappoint the parents who had looked at each other when they’d brought me back to this dingy flat. My mother’s look had said it could be worse. My father’s look had said she’s young, it'll be fine. I think it helped that it wasn’t much worse than my godmother’s lodgings in Clifton Road. I was sharing a bathroom with only one other person, and we had our own kitchen.
So backflash: I am twenty years old, and slogging my way through the reading list on the social
history modules, because my grasp of my Economics major is sketchy and I realise that half the people on my joint languages major speak like natives. I’m cramming facts for exams. Which won’t work because when those exams come, I will be asked questions about things I do not remember even being on the syllabus. That’s in the future though. I am twenty years old and I am reading about the Franco years in Spain.
I spend long hours lying on the floor with the book and a pink highlighter pen (they were a new thing back then). Long hours sprawled in front of the two-bar electric fire that had singed my favourite sweatshirt when I tried to dry it quickly, the fire that I couldn’t really afford to run. This was before the guy who would stay with me for the next 30-odd years loaned me a portable gas-bottle heater, and long before I would be doing my swotting for finals in his flat.
I’m living opposite the laundromat (where on a bleak day I will read Jonathan Livingstone Seagull) and the Blockbusters Video Rental store, which meant nothing because I didn't know anyone who had a VCR. I had a black and white portable TV, that I only got to plug into the aerial when Pippa was away. She had first dabs; she lived there before I did. Which was also why the flat front door opened into my room, not hers, why she had a wardrobe and I didn't. Little things, that don't matter so much when you're 20, and skint, and still think the world could maybe be better than it is. Or at least, maybe your world could be. Their lights mean my room is never really dark. None of my rooms have ever been really dark.
I read different books in different places. Dickens and Vonnegut I read in bed, late into the night / early into the morning, waiting for a green Capri to turn up outside and switch off its engine. Set texts, I read in the library. I read Uncle Tom’s Cabin on the train home and weep, to Mam’s amusement because it made her cry too, decades earlier. I read what I am asked to read, and I read what others have told me I 'should' read, and I go down the warren-hole of liking an author and trying to get the complete perspective.
It doesn't escape me that I chose my university degree on the basis of not wanting to do literature, and I find myself haunting the 'classics' and 'sci-fi' and 'foreign lit' stacks in the library. Many years later I will remember more about "where and when" I read certain books than I will about the books themselves.
I remember that the history book about Franco, I read on the floor in the flat in Nelson Street…sprawled on my stomach, with a pink highlighter pen in my hand, trying to remember the facts, and vaguely, occasionally, trying to remember what the hell happened and why. I can't remember a single fact, but I remember how I felt reading it. This was history, but only barely beyond the boundary with current affairs.
I can’t remember the title of that book, or even what the cover looked like. I carried it with me through other flats and bedsits. I carried it as far as Cecil Road, to the flat where all my books lived in a cupboard, on a top shelf. The cupboard was damp. Every day I emptied de-humidifiers, and every day they refilled, and my clothes piled up in the kitchen waiting to be ironed, because putting them in the cupboard would just mould them into needing washing again.
I lived there for 13 years. Emptying the water out of my clothes and book closets.
Very few books survived the experience. The Franco one did not. It mottled and moulded and smelt of having been kept in a cellar. Half-pulped already, before I gave it up for the recycling.
So now (back in the real 21st century now) I’m reading Hemmingway about the war that preceded the Dictatorship, and I am wanting to re-acquaint myself with what followed. I wish I still had that book because I want to read it again. I want to read it without caring about “facts” but with a need for feeling, for understanding. I want to know whether the blowing up of bridges was worth it.
And I wonder whether my future self will remember reading this book. Will I remember how the light came through the high side window, and the low front window, and how quiet it was…until the planes went over?
Will I remember how different it feels, when you live here and the planes go over?
I remember being a child and visiting in Slough every Summer. The planes were constant. Jumbo jets. Large shining bulks coming in to land at Heathrow. Always coming in to land. The take-off flight path didn’t cross my Nanny’s garden, only the landing one.
Sometimes we were taken up to Gatwick, to the observation lounge, with spotter books, when a DC10 was still a thing.
Planes were full of happy people then. Jet set people and the beginnings of those with just enough money to think about a Spanish holiday, or somewhere more exotic along the Med.
When you live in Norfolk and the planes go over you know that they are not passenger planes. They have an angry roar that is meant to strike fear into anyone below. They have a drone. Not a drone as in a small unmanned thing, but a DRONE as in a long low noise that is felt as much as it is heard. If the roar is for fear, the drone is dread: an even more basic reaction.
We are used to the planes. We know the manoeuvres. You see two, and you look for the third. And then you know it is just a game. 9 for energy, 6 to calm, 3 for practice. If they are flying in threes, it is practice. The hunters and the hunter. Over the city and out to sea.
But sometimes we hear them for more than the passing of three, and we know that something else is going on. We know that a squadron is flying out and another is coming home, to and from a war that we are not officially fighting. Yet.
I wonder if my future self will get caught up in that war (the one that might yet come) and whether I will remember reading about the Spanish mountains, and the guerrillas that fought there a full seventy years before I walked those same paths, getting the shakes of heat-stroke even though there was still snow on the high passes.
Or if I will be lucky, and I will remember reading the book and remember only how the light fell through both of the windows and have no reason to think about the noise of the planes.
Image credit: Cover picture from Cornerstones paperback edition 1993
(ISBN-13: 9780099908609)
