Life: An Exploded Diagram

CONTENTS

P
ART
O
NE:
P
UTTING
T
HINGS
T
OGETHER

1. NORFOLK, EARLY MARCH, 1945

2. THE HEARTBROKEN NAZI

3. LABOR

4. WIN LITTLE

5. DNA

6. RUTH

7. A WINK IN THE BARLEY

8. THINGS RUTH DIDN’T KNOW ABOUT GEORGE AT THE TIME

9. EGG AND SOLDIERS

10. A HOME FIT FOR HEROES

11. THE PERFUME OF AXLE GREASE, THE WHIFF OF HALITOSIS

12. GOOD-BYE TO ALL THAT (NEARLY)

13. THE BEST OF ROOMS, THE WORST OF ROOMS

14. 1956: THE CLOCKWORK OF HISTORY TICKS

15. AN UNSENTIMENTAL EDUCATION

16. NORFOLK FROM THE SKY

17. THE END-OF-THE-WORLD MAN

18. WIN’S MELLOWING

19. THE STRAWBERRY FIELDS, EARLY SUMMER, 1962

20. THE GIRL WHO ATE HIS HEART BUMS A SMOKE

21. THINGS CLEM DIDN’T KNOW ABOUT FRANKIE AT THE TIME

22. NERVY PASTORAL

23. A LATIN-AMERICAN INTERLUDE

24. SEEING THE FOREST FROM THE TREES

25. YOU LEARN NOTHING ABOUT SEX FROM BOOKS, ESPECIALLY IF THEY’RE BY D. H. LAWRENCE

26. MAN IS NOT AN ISLAND; HE’S A PENINSULA

27. A BIT OF CHIAROSCURO

28. THE NIGHTS DRAW IN

29. THE LIMITED OPPORTUNITIES FOR OBTAINING CONTRACEPTIVES IN NORTH NORFOLK IN 1962 . . .

P
ART
T
WO:
B
LOWING
T
HINGS
A
PART

30. WASHINGTON, D.C., TUESDAY, OCTOBER 16, 1962: “THOSE SONS A BITCHES RUSSIANS!”

31. MAD

32. HAWKS, DOVES, DOGS

33. GEORGE DOES A BIT OF TIDYING UP

34. GOOD EVENING, MY FELLOW CITIZENS

35. THE LAMBS OF GOD ARE SHORN

36. RUTH GETS THE CHOP

37. THE BOGS

38. STUMBLING TOWARD THE BRINK

39. THE SHIFTY WORD
Standstill

40. THE BRINK

41. POETRY DOES THE TRICK

42. JACK AND NIKITA TALK TURKEY

43. THE DAY THE WORLD ENDED

P
ART
T
HREE:
P
ICKING
U
P THE
P
IECES

44. MY LIFE AFTER THE END OF THE WORLD

45. BAD TIMING

    
AUTHOR’S NOTE

R
UTH ACKROYD WAS
in the garden checking the rhubarb when the RAF Spitfire accidentally shot her chimney pot to bits. The shock of it brought the baby on three weeks early.

“I was expectun,” she’d often say, over the years. “But I wunt expectun
that.
”

She’d had cravings throughout her pregnancy, ambitious ones: tinned ham, chocolate, potted shrimp, her husband’s touch, rhubarb. Rhubarb was possible, though. Ruth and her mother, Win, grew it in the cottage garden. They forced it, which is to say, they covered the plants with upended buckets so that when new tendrils poked through the soil, they found themselves in the dark and grew like mad, groping for light. Stalks of forced rhubarb were soft, blushed, and stringless. You could eat them without sugar, which was rationed, and Ruth wanted to. So she’d waddled out into the garden on a rare day of early-spring sunshine to lift the buckets and see how things were doing. See if there was any chance of a nibble.

Win had said, “You put that ole coat on, if yer gorn out. There’s a wind’d cut yer jacksy in half.”

Ruth hadn’t seen George since his last leave, when, silently (because Win was sleeping, or listening, a thin wall away), he’d got her pregnant. Now he was in Africa. Or Italy, or somewhere. There was no way she could imagine his life. He might even be dead. The last letter had come in January:

The last push, or so they say . . . Cold as hell here in the nights . . . Hope you and the little passenger are well.

Love, George

Probably not dead, because there’d have been a telegram. Like Brenda Cushion had got, six months ago.

Ruth had gone down the garden path with her huge belly in front of her. She was frightened of it. She had little idea what giving birth might involve. Win had told her almost nothing; she was against the whole thing. Knocked up by a soldier: history repeating itself. Nothing good could come of it. The baby had grown in Ruth, struggling and undiscussed. An unspeakable thing. A wartime mishap. The two women had sat the winter out in front of dying fires of scrounged fuel, listening to the wireless, grimly knitting, not talking about it.

Washing blew on the line: tea towels, Ruth’s yellowish vests, her mother’s bloomers ballooned by the wind, their elasticated leg holes pouting.

There were two rhubarb clumps, a rusty-lipped bucket inverted over each. Ruth had leaned, grunting, to lift the first one when all hell broke loose above her head.

The air-raid siren had not gone off. The air-raid siren was a big gray thing the shape of a surprised mouth, mounted on a wooden tower behind the Black Cat Garage, more than a mile away. It made a moan that turned hysterical, then stopped, then started over again, rising in pitch, driving the local dogs mad. Throughout the summer of 1940, it had wailed day and night as the German planes came over, and Ruth and Win had spent terrible long hours in the darkness under the stairs, waiting for it to stop. Or for the riot in the skies to fall upon them and kill them. (Sometimes Ruth couldn’t stand it and had gone outside, despite her mother’s prayerful begging, to watch and listen to the dogfights in the sky, the white vapor trails scratched against the blue, the black trails of planes falling, the awful hesitations of engine noise that meant one of ours or one of theirs was falling, a man in a machine was burning down.) But on this occasion, the siren remained silent. There had been no German air raids for eighteen months, after all. The war was over, bar the shouting.

So Ruth was terribly surprised when the chimney pot exploded and the German plane came from behind the elms and filled the garden with savage noise. The machine was so low that she was certain it would plunge into the cottage. She fell backwards with her knees in the air and saw, with absolute clarity, the rivets that held the bomber together and its vulnerable glass nose and the black cross on its fuselage and the banner of fire that trailed from its wing. One of the Spitfires in pursuit was pulling out of a dive. Its underbelly was the same blue as the heavy old pram that Chrissie Slender had lent her. The sound of the planes was so all-consuming that the fragments of the chimney tumbled silently into the yard. Inside their wire run, the hens frenzied.