Not My Father's Son (17 page)

“He was called Big Tam! He was tall for that time!” said David chirpily.

“He was called Big Tam?” I repeated in wonder.

“Oh yes, Big Tam, Big Tam Darling. Yes!”

His lovely, eager, smiley face beamed back at me. He was clearly enjoying his reminiscences.

“He was looked up to, as a—” I began.

“I looked up to him,” he interrupted. “Oh yes, and every one my age looked up to him. A man like that who had been in battle, who had been decorated for gallantry, and who had the service. Certainly one respected him. Men like him taught us our jobs. They were the backbone of the battalion at that time.”

He paused, looking out the window at the setting sun.

“Nobody ever argued with Tom Darling,” he added respectfully.

David told me of a man who was strong, tough, someone you never talked back to. And yet, despite his imposing stature and experience, he was a kind man too. David regaled me with stories of the jokes my grandfather would play, all the while keeping the men in his command aware that he was their leader. We then began to talk about the Battle of Kohima, which they had fought in together.

David’s tone changed as he remembered the events of that awful night, how the men went up that hill to face the Japanese, single file and nearly silent because of their expert training. Four hundred Highlanders made it up that hill, waiting to strike.

I asked where my grandfather was at the time, leaning on the edge of my seat to take in every single word.

“Well, Tam was with the carrier patrol, and they were with the forward troops. As the darkness fell, the Japanese guns opened up on us, and it was a real war scene.” Despite the inherent horror he was describing, David was almost smiling as he retold this story, clearly in his element and filled with pride at what he had been capable of, all those years ago.

“The Naga huts were blazing, the guns were firing, the smaller arms were popping away, my mortar was thudding away in the background. That night, a thunderstorm broke out, and about half past two in the morning, there was a flash of lightning, a roar of thunder, and out of the ground came two companies of Japanese, shrieking their heads off.

“It was the most unearthly sound I’ve ever heard in my life.
Tenno heika banzai!
May the emperor live a thousand years!”

It was terrifying. By the end, the Cameron Highlanders had lost a hundred and five of the four hundred men who had silently climbed that hill. One-fourth of the battalion was dead, wounded, or simply missing.

David told me that Tam must have been wounded that night, for it was some time before he saw him again.

“The next time I saw him was in the aid post,” David said. “The rain had started, we had lost a lot of men, we’d bitten off more than we could chew for a wee while. And everyone was a bit . . . realistic about things.”

He paused, and I knew that euphemism was really a description of the deep gloom that must have descended on the battalion.

“And he had been affected, Tam had been affected.” By the look in his eyes I knew he was trying to shield me from the true horror of just how much my grandfather had been
affected
.

“Do you think that he was having some sort of combat stress? I just sense that he had—”

Before I could continue, something in David’s face changed and he lurched forward in his chair for a second, then caught himself and leaned back.

“I just checked myself from contradicting you,” he began, and I could swear there was a tear in his eye. He took a moment and swallowed.

“Nobody had heard of combat stress . . . in those days, sixty-five years ago now . . .”

“Yes, a long time,” I interrupted nervously.

“It was a different generation, we were different men, this was a different country.”

He looked at me sadly, through his steel-rimmed glasses, no longer the soldier filled with pride recalling his acts of bravery.

“I never thought that I had any combat stress. But when I was first married, my wife woke me up and said, “What are you shouting for Sergeant Barrett for?” And he was my old platoon sergeant, the first name I always shouted.”

He bit his lip and rested his head to one side for a moment.

“And my little daughter came up behind me when I was kneeling down doing something in the house and she said,
‘Boof!’
And she said I turned around and she knew I could’ve killed her.”

I sat in silence. There was no way this man could know the extent of what he had done for me that day. To say that I was thankful, in awe even, didn’t do it justice.

David looked me deep in the eyes.

“He was a good man. He was one of the men that I respected. I did respect your grandfather.”

“Thank you,” I said, fighting back my tears.

A
t the top of our house at Panmure there was a room called the “Big Room.” It was where Tom and I did our homework and played games. In the center of the room there was a table where we played Ping-Pong. Once Tom had gone off to live with his wife, it became my hiding place. I would contemplate my future, gazing out at the endless rolling fields of the estate that sloped down to the North Sea. It was also where our deep freeze was, so my mum would make sporadic visits upstairs to get some food item or to deposit a Tupperware container of leftovers. But mostly, that room was my domain.

The Big Room was symbolic of so many things for me. It meant great solace on the nights when I’d go there to hide and avoid my father’s rage, listening to Kate Bush albums and plotting my eventual escape. I remember so vividly when the prospectus of the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama arrived and I took the first glimpses at the place that was to become my sanctuary. I studied hard at my schoolwork in that room too, rallying myself to be more focused and intent, with the notion that every minute of study represented an hour or a day of freedom in my not-too-distant future.

One night, my father pierced through the walls of my asylum. It was the night before my music “O” Level exam. I was doing well in the subject, but like any hardworking, anxious student, I was spending the night before a big final test cramming and going over the previous year’s notes to make sure I was completely prepared.

At about 7:30
P.M.
my father threw open the door to the Big Room, and stood behind me. My desk was in the window that overlooked the nursery and our field, which was presently bereft of sheep and so had been mowed.

“The field’s been mowed,” my father said in that dark, inevitable way, and I knew this was not going to end well.

I turned round to look at him. Surely he wasn’t going to . . . not tonight of all nights.

“I have my ‘O’ Level music tomorrow,” I said pleadingly.

“Never mind that,” he said, already turning for the door and his bedroom where he would change and then leave for the evening, to drink in the local pub or entertain one of his women.

“Get down to that field and rake up that grass!”

And he was gone.

“I have to study!” I shouted after him. These days my burgeoning teenage manhood made me put up a bit of a, if not fight, then at least protest.

“Get it done,” he thundered. And I knew I had no choice. I would have to forgo my last-minute studying and spend the evening raking an entire field’s worth of grass. It was as if my father had been reading my mind and knew that I had come to view school as my first step towards freedom. It couldn’t have been more of a conscious action on my father’s part. He wanted me to fail.

I did the raking, eventually having to do so by flashlight as the sun went down. I knew the consequences of that field not being cleared by the time I left for school the next morning were inconceivable. I ran for the bus with blistered hands as my father silently inspected me across the sawmill yard. I felt like I might never get away.

That night I got home and he asked me how my exam had gone. I knew I had done well, but I didn’t want to give him that knowledge. I didn’t want to let him ever think he was justified. I never did. Instead, I became that much more driven to succeed.

Hanging in one of the cupboards of the Big Room was the uniform my father had kept from his days in the air force: a blue, thick wool, itchy pair of baggy trousers and a short jacket. There was also a long, gray raincoat, which he said he had worn when he first returned to “Civvy Street” or the real world as referred to by the young men in the UK forces. When I left home to go to college, I took these items of my father’s, along with a blue sweater-vest my mum had knitted for him. I didn’t ask if I could have them, for I knew what the answer would be. So I stole them.

I’m still not sure why I did this. It was the early eighties and everyone was wearing baggy, vintage ensembles, but that wasn’t the whole reason. In some way, I suppose the clothes came to represent my relationship with my dad. I needed a piece of him, something more than bad memories and pain. I needed him to know that I could take too, even if it was only things, and not innocence, or childhood. And also they meant it wasn’t over. It wouldn’t be resolved for many years to come.

Over the years I lost or gave away the army ensemble and eventually the gray raincoat, but never the knitted blue sweater-vest. It is upstairs in a closet of my house. I haven’t worn it for decades, but I see it every now and then as I reach for things on the high shelf it sits on. Occasionally I take it down and smell it, imagining I can still feel him, or in some way Panmure and that time of my life. I realized recently that I wore it in the first headshots I had taken when I was starting out as an actor. I think I needed to remind myself that wherever my future might take me, it was important never to forget where I’d come from. That sweater is still a portal to another time, another life, yet it is a part of my happiness today, because it’s a part of me.

I
woke up the next morning with a hangover. I had gone out with the crew in Bristol the night before, and lots of beer and hardly any water was partaken of. Everyone it seemed was up for a big night. I was sharing one of the most revelatory and mind-blowing weeks of my life with relative strangers, but even so, these men and women were almost as emotionally invested in my granddad’s story as I was. It made for a good amount of camaraderie, and certainly gave me a chance to forget about everything else going on in my life at that moment.

We drove back to London on Saturday morning and I thought about all I had learned about Tommy Darling. I decided my grandfather was still Tommy to me. He may have been Tam to David and to the men who looked up to him in his battalion, but I knew his secrets, and he would remain forever Tommy. Tommy was a great, respected, and decorated soldier, but also a daredevil, a cheeky chap, and in search of something. Was it family? Was it thrills? Maybe it was both. It was certainly belonging. And I understood that. I also understood how events or circumstances could cascade out of control and your entire ability to deal with the present can be lost.

When we reached London we
headed for a street just off Piccadilly where, in a very stuffy military officer’s club, I was to see yet another historian. Rob Liman was going to tell me about Tommy Darling’s life after the war.

I learned from Rob that after his stint in the hospital at Deolali, Tommy Darling returned to duty in India for the remaining months of the war. In 1945 he returned to Britain to visit his wife and family. But that was the last time they would ever see him.

He was made an officer and stayed in the army for four more years, working in an administrative role in Germany and the UK, close to his family and yet never visiting home. Earlier in the week I had seen, on one of the many documents that had been presented to me, a contact address for Tommy Darling during a period of leave he had from the army, in St. Albans. This was puzzling. My granny and my mum and uncles were hundreds of miles away at the top of Scotland. Why had my grandfather lived in St. Albans? Why did he never go home?

I also knew that my granddad had ended his life in Malaysia, formerly Malaya, working for the Malayan police force, but why he had taken a job so far away from home was also a mystery. Rob, a dashing, natty, signet-ring-wearing military type, was dying to explain why.