of the few sailors ever to be saved by a shark, then, my grandfather Frank Lightfoot began in sail, abided in steam, and ended on shore; a charmed life indeed, if tedious. When he fell from the old Impregnable’s rigging, he was preserved by a Scotsman, who caught the youthful seat of his pants as they passed the lower yard-arm. After that he was unsinkable, undrownable, unexplodable. His recollections covered a vast red world of experience.
Such had always been the integrity of the family story. The males at sea, or foremen at the arsenal, the women at home – except in times of national emergency. We were the kind of folk who could put together a down payment, tough but reliable souls, salts of the earth. The kind who never had calamity or Zeppelins predicted for them.
Therefore my grandmother Lightfoot, not long married, with an infant, was surprised to find herself out at work and hardly in her new Co-op home at all. She was frightened too, making ammunition for the Somme. It was to keep up the payments, and do her bit while big Frank was escorting his convoys.
She had to leave my toddling aunt with a neighbour each morning and take the workers’ train from Abbey Wood. And once within the great black curtain wall of the arsenal she must give herself over dutifully to production. Extending her pretty finger ends, she picked up on each of them, including the thumbs, a cartridge-paper hat from the bench to her left. Then held them up – like a raw crown roast. She plunged them into the fish-glue in front of her on the stove. Judging the clutch to avoid a progressive cooking of her skin, she drew them out again, dripping, steaming, stinking. At last with a pianistic flourish which was entirely her own, she pressed her whole batch firmly into the empty cases, waiting at her right and newly machined – like brass lipstick holders. So each of her innocent digits made a neat bullet hole, time and again.
Erica, while powdering her nose once, had spoken of the Blitz and hiding under the stairs. But no one had actually died. They were stairs I should never see again. Nor should I ever set eyes upon the family I had been born into: immortals, familiar with weapons, innocent of death. Now we had left England, in circumstances I bluffed myself I had the hang of, and everything was new. We were wilful outlaws, pirates. The huge waves queued up in front of me. The wind tore at my hair. I stared back at the immense grey sea.
To put out to sea from Spain in a square-rigged ship was to swing past Africa to the Caribbean. The winds and the currents insisted. But for the English there was first the problem of our own dangerous coast, followed by the Bay. That was the trickiest part. Once an overloaded merchantman from Bristol or London got safely clear of Biscay’s lee suction, and past Cape Finisterre, the rest of the Atlantic could seem plain sailing. Barring the usual accidents and hurricanes, of course. And from the eastern seaboard of America there was one route home: on the Gulf Stream with the westerlies that bring the English weather. As far as we were concerned the Atlantic was for centuries a clockwise swirl of goods, criminals, slaves and starvelings policed by the Navy, one vast market of forces. It was a slow-motion whirlpool.
The great age of piracy lasted little more than ten years. That was in the early eighteenth century. Violent, torturing wretches, the pirates were products of the trade routes. They were its children, ex-Navy, ex-merchantman, bent on revenge. They rejected privilege, Church, State, marriage, property – they espoused instead whoredom, social equality, a kind of welfare and rough justice. They were radical mutineers, leftovers from the old days of the Levellers. Their communism foundered, as it had to, on its ultimate powerlessness.
Now, on that blasted nook of the Armorica, for all my romance of swashbuckling and daredevilry, I sensed at last the seriousness of what Erica and I had done in running away. Women and children cannot afford to split. Their mutiny comes home to roost. It began to dawn on me: Erica and I were actually mutineers to the bones, and must take whatever came to us. Yet even if that were drowning in this great swell, I knew I did not wish to return to Abbey Wood.
There was a custom in those days to keep one room ‘for best’, on the off chance of company. People were wary of trusting any show of their arrangements. This dusted sepulchre is what we are really like. Judge us by these fixtures and fittings, not the grubby cram we actually live in.
Had we been religious, we should have come back from church in our Sunday clothes, guests to ourselves almost, to eat the roast off that fine dark table in the front parlour. We were not. Our Sunday meals were, like all others, served in the cramped back room. We never went to church. We had not God but Tradition: King’s Regulations and the Articles of War.
So it was only on very special occasions we might use it. And we kept ourselves dutifully ready.
Our particular ‘best’ room functioned, then, like nothing so much as the Great Aft Cabin, waiting, ever waiting, for its true Admiral to come aboard. I was not officially allowed in, except for formal punishments: the cane was kept in a drawer. The door was always closed with the key in the lock – because the latch had gone some time during my father’s childhood, and had never been seen to. So it was bypassed, unmentionable; it became almost sacred, perhaps. There was no fire kept up in that elaborate fireplace. No point.
That room rose through the storm to my mind’s eye, cold, prim, bleaching in the wan sun which crept through the large projecting window. Raised up to the height of ‘the ladders’, our view was that same panorama of distant cranes and the Isle of Dogs. You might gaze out as if across the waters of a dull home port. In the evening a last light could sometimes strike right through to the wallpaper opposite, where above the useless piano The Fighting Temeraire hung amid the pattern of small buff flowers.
Mirrored and picture-railed, it was all a waste of space. And time. The hanging-bowl lampshade in marbled glass was two decades pre-war – the kind that marked out aged people. On the mantelshelf either side of the clock stood two lacquered bronzes of horse and tamer. Around the table in the bay window, the slim, japanned dining chairs. The chesterfield suite, antimacassar-draped. The bookcase-escritoire. The carved ivory trophies from Shanghai. The model junk, the brass gong, the shells, the Benares coffee-pot for the coffee we never drank. Against this Atlantic gale that room shimmered insistently.
Six months before, a gleaming Buick had drawn up outside in the street. And Mr Chaunteyman, US Navy, came up the ladders and was ushered straight in.
He suddenly fulfilled us. He was the expected officer, a junior Lieutenant-Commander. That must have been how he slipped so unchallenged, even feted, past my father’s defences – who thought it was himself the American visited, the American with the matinee idol’s line moustache, like Errol Flynn’s. And Mr Chaunteyman did not have the brash crew cut of so many ordinary American servicemen of that decade. He kept a dignified shine to his thick, dark wave. Mr Chaunteyman was a true gent.
They met at a do in Greenwich Naval College, to which my father and some of his associates, as local ‘other ranks’, were invited. It was a gala occasion; my mother bought a new dress. It was a success. And they struck up a familiarity; Dave Chaunteyman impressed them with his informal style. He was in England, he said, to teach an anti-submarine course. Hey, he moved around the world a heck of a lot. He had visited before, during the war. Couldn’t get over the place. It was so staid and quaint. So small and kind of cute. And our house: smoky, homey.
My parents bathed in his attention. In the new world, said my father, social divisions were out. There was no more rationing; the war years were over. He was a civilian citizen and the view ahead would be chromium-plated, televised. Who cared for old-fashioned niceties? This was what he had fought for. Soon, in the nuclear age, there would be no need even for the dirty fabrications of Woolwich Arsenal. He might get a job over the river at Dagenham, making Fords. Own a new car. Drive to work across the free ferry. Who could tell? They were on first-name terms at once, Dave, Harry and Erica. My parents were ripe for the dazzling.
Of course my grandfather, his mind going, would first hold court when Mr Chaunteyman called in for English tea. In the heyday of empire he had been at the Spithead Review. On a later inspection he had exchanged a few words with Queen Alexandra and been brushed by the King’s