The Sound of Silence
Our Creative Writing group wrote about losing one of the senses; A bit deaf myself, I chose hearing.
My call up came as a relief to be honest. I had been living with Auntie Lilian and her three kids – my mum dead in the Coventry bombing and Dad and Uncle Albert away on the convoys. Auntie Lil was OK and Iwas helping to make ends meet now with my bit of money from the factory, but the noise of three young kids at full blast in that little terraced house. Sometimes it made my ears hurt, I should have noticed that.
So there’s me, eighteen and a half, never been to the seaside, on a boat with my all new “comrades”, with tanks and guns, big boys eh, on our way to the great adventure. No, on our way to hell on earth.
The blokes who knew said it must be France, we hadn’t been on the sea for long enough for anywhere else. I thought the sea was supposed to be blue, not red. Sand was golden in the holiday posters, not red. The sky blue? No, black with stinking smoke, and the noise from the guns pounding down on us, or firing over us. The noise was just unbearable.
Some adventure, crouching in the sand, separated from my crew mates, lost and scared witless. What had I ever done to deserve being cursed like this?
I found my unit, all the lads had survived, and off we rolled across Europe. Plenty of resistance, but cramped and stuffy though it is the outlook is a bit brighter from the inside of a tank. The whole world seems smaller when you are bigger than nearly everything else. And it’s noisy and you have earphones, you’re not different from anybody else – that was good.
And there were good times. Imagine the Coventry boy and his mate walking into the King George V hotel in Paris looking for somewhere good to kip! We didn’t know did we it was the kind of place that the Duke of Windsor and the Aga Khan stayed? The manager, didn’t turn a hair, welcomed us, fed us, gave us a room for a couple of nights and charged us nothing. What food, what a room!
We crossed the river Rhine, and right on into Berlin. The ruin, the distress, the starvation. Hard though to be sympathetic when your mother has been crushed under the bricks of what had been your home. No news of Dad and Uncle Albert. Bit low on sympathy then, non existent to tell the truth.
Our time there was OK though, our rations were good, and you could buy just about anything for a few fags, and I mean anything. I’m not proud of that. I got to drive every vehicle I could lay my hands on and I loved it, you can feel an engine going right, you can fool yourself. You get good at hiding the loss, especially from yourself, but you know it is happening, slowly, brick by brick the walls are building up around you, and all the tricks you can think of to hide it will only last so long. And always the same thought; my life was cursed. How had I deserved this?
But I fell on my feet after the war. Never went back to Coventry, Mum gone, and Dad lost in the Arctic. Nothing left for me. No, I got a job with Marconi, driving staff buses, delivery lorries, vans, you name it. North London, stayed with them all my working life, you can get away with silence driving. Folks think you need to concentrate, you can be cheerful, be with people and not talk, suited me as my hearing sank down. Hearing aids in those days were hefty chunks of plastic with big batteries attached that you wouldn’t be seen dead with, and nothing really worked. My hearing, poor to start with, had been more or less blasted away.
I was OK, managing fine, marriage, children, then our own house and a car. The ideal family, but with times when I felt as scared and low as I had done in those sand dunes another life ago as the silence got worse. Oh yes, despair blackness, and anger too, what had I ever done do to deserve this, how come I was cursed like this? It followed me always the old black dog.
I lost my Margaret twenty years ago, and our only daughter didn’t make it to one year old, but three strong boys, long grown up now with families of their own. They talked me into a retirement flat. It’s small but I have my little balcony to sit out on, and it’s friendly but private. I am the longest resident now, seen a few come and go, but I’ve made it past ninety. That was a birthday and a half! Family gave me a top whole party, lovely food, and a band. Not that I could hear the music but I could feel it, and I could watch the youngsters dancing. Top whole.
And now I am back in France would you believe. They clubbed together for me to go on an “accompanied” trip to the battlefields. My “accompanier” is called David, lovely lad, can’t do enough for me. They have to label people now, don’t they? Lads like that were just mates in the army, nothing was said. We are what God made us aren’t we?
The beaches and the countryside are all just like the posters now of course, though hard to forget what they meant to us then. And there is quite a mixture of us war tourists. I have even got quite matey with a couple of old Jerries. They are not so bad when they are not trying to kill you! Their English and my bad ears make for some laughs I can tell you. It seems when they were losing they conscripted them younger and younger. Thirteen, Carl was, thirteen when they took him away from his home to fight for the Fatherland. Should have been kicking a football around the playground, not carrying a gun. A kid.
Today was different. Today we saw the graves. Field on field of those cold white stones. I had seen it on the television, but that’s nothing to the grief that grabs hold of you when you really see it. Each stone a boy, laid in a cold grave, when he should have had a life. Lost, and for what? We were all a bit subdued this evening and went off to our beds with our thoughts.
David has gone off out with some of the other “accompaniers” tonight – it’s Ok – I am not too senile to get myself off to bed. But dammit I have knocked all my bits off the bedside table, money, keys, wallet all gone flying. I can leave them all for the lad to pick up in the morning – he won’t mind. But my wallet has fallen open, and I can see the two pictures I keep there. Margaret and me on our wedding day, and the family at my ninetieth. What a gang! Children, grandchildren, great grandchildren. There they all are smiling up at me. You silly old bugger! Ninety, ninety odd years it’s taken you to realise how blessed your life has been.