was just like riding a motorcycle,’ he said. ‘You jumped into your crate and took off, and if you got hungry you just set her down in a field behind a village pub and went in to get a plate of fried eggs.’ He produced a thin smile and groaned as he got up. ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Help me carry in a pile of these boxes. We’re going to build a B17.’
That night I made mushroom omelettes, which we ate while gluing together the grey plastic pieces of aeroplane. The box had boasted a roaring flying fortress, her gun turrets spitting fire at viciously attacking Messerschmidts. What actually took shape in our hands however was a dull plastic lump with ugly welds. When the fuselage was finished, my father held it up doubtfully: ‘I’m beginning to understand why they all want to buy ready-made planes. This is a mess. What does he expect us to do next? Paint it?’ In the hallway, next to the piles of boxes, I had seen a bag of tiny pots of paint and equally tiny brushes. When I told my father, he grumbled to himself. ‘We’ll be the Fords of the model aeroplane industry then. If you file down the welds, I’ll do the painting. We’ll divide up the assembly per model.’
I thought of the wall of cardboard out in the hallway. I wasn’t really sure that, after this B17,1 wanted to build more planes.
‘Look, son,’ said my father. ‘This was your idea and I’m perfectly willing to carry it out, but not on my own. If you want to get rid of that pile, you’ll have to put your money where your mouth is.’
I started to say something, but when I looked at him I saw he was deadly serious. I stared down at the flotsam of plastic bits and pieces. If we went on at this rate we would have to assemble a plane every night for months to come. I looked at my father. My father looked at me. I sighed and lowered my head.
There was a stumbling noise on the stairs. The coat-hangers clicked against the shower rods. My mother opened the door and stared at the mess on the table. ‘What’s going on here? What are all those boxes doing in the hallway?’ She looked dishevelled. My father stood up and went over to her. He kissed her on the neck and turned around, so that they were both looking at me. ‘You should be proud of your son,’ he said. ‘He has come up with a wonderful idea to make us rich.’
‘How convenient,’ my mother said. ‘I just got the sack.’ She wriggled out of my father’s half-embrace, kissed me on the head, and looked at the aeroplane-in-the-making that stood between the empty plates. ‘What is that?’
‘The sack?’ There was a touch of concern in my father’s voice.
‘An aeroplane,’ I said. ‘We’re building model aeroplanes for the doll doctor.’
My mother looked from one to the other with an expression on her face as if we had just told her we were going to start a penguin farm in Greenland. ‘What did you have for tea?’
‘Mushroom omelettes,’ I said. ‘With fresh thyme.’
‘Did you let him cook again?’ she said to my father.
‘He’s better at it than I am. Why were you sacked?’
‘Time for bed,’ said my mother. She laid her hand on the back of my neck and gave me a gentle squeeze. ‘They threw me out. For impertinence. I think I’m too old for this kind of work. I can’t stand it anymore when some overgrown child with a little moustache who’s just out of school treats me like his slave.’
‘Oh, Lord,’ said my father.
I got up from my chair and let my mother lead me out of the room. As we passed my father he gave me a pensive look. He leaned down to kiss me goodnight. ‘That idea of yours,’ he said, ‘just became a plan.’
My parents first met when my father was brought into the hospital with so many broken bones that the osteopath told the head nurse to phone a colleague who liked doing jigsaw puzzles. My mother, who had just qualified and was standing for the first time as a fully-fledged nurse at a patient’s bedside, had failed to see the humour in it. She gazed at the tranquil face of the young man lying there on the white operating table and felt – highly unprofessional – compassion flooding her like a spring tide. His light, sun-bleached hair lay tousled on his forehead, and his face, despite the pain he must have felt before they had knocked him out, had the healthy complexion of someone who spent much of his time outdoors. No one in the hospital looked like that. No one she knew had his hair. And when they began to cut away his clothes she realized that she had never seen anyone with such a body. His limbs were bent where they shouldn’t have been and the left side of his chest and pelvis showed the first signs of haemorrhaging, but all the same he looked so familiar that she immediately knew his name. She called him Boris. (Later, when he woke up and was able to speak again, his name turned out to be Philip. That didn’t impress my mother. His parents had obviously made a mistake. This man was clearly a Boris. It was a name my father later accepted with pride, almost as if it was a mark of distinction, or a medal.)
My mother had become a nurse because of the war. In 1944, just outside the village behind the dunes where she lived, a plane had crashed, and she and her friends had found an English pilot, still in his parachute, dangling from a poplar. He wasn’t too far from the ground, so the girls could clearly see his eyes rolled back in pain. His injuries proved to be less serious than they had thought, nothing but a dislocated shoulder, but the experience had made a lasting impression on my mother. The helplessness she felt when she found the pilot made her decide to devote her life to caring for her fellow man, for the weak and the sick: she was going to be a nurse. Her father, the mayor of the village, pointed out that a smart girl like her could be a doctor if she wanted to, but that was something she firmly rejected. In my mother’s eyes, doctors were unstable types who told young women to undress when all they had was a cold and roamed the dunes with the mayor, the local lawyer and the vet, slurping noisily from pocket flasks and shooting helpless little rabbits. She was exaggerating, of course, but she wasn’t far off the mark. My grandfather was a hunting fanatic whose chief misfortune in life was that the queen had sent him to a village in the dunes, one of the few places in the country where there wasn’t a decent deer to be found. And it was also true that he, as I was to discover on later visits, played bridge once a fortnight with the lawyer, the vet and the village doctor, something that was really an excuse for heavy port and claret consumption. Whether the doctor actually did have his young patients undress for no medical reason, I don’t know, but I had noticed that, on the few occasions when we were in the village and met him at my grandfather’s house, that he behaved rather nervously around my mother.
My mother was what you’d call ‘a formidable woman’: both feet planted firmly on the ground and as certain of where she came from as where she was going. Somehow, at a time when many women still regarded themselves as their husbands’ loyal subjects, she was able to convince those around her that she was a free and independent person and quite capable of leading her own life.
But there was one thing she had forgotten to take into account, and that was her compassion, the way in which my father’s hair fell across his forehead and the boyish innocence of his broken body. When the osteopath’s scalpel made the first incision it was as if the knife penetrated her own skin, opened her flesh, laid bare her bones. Although this was not her first operation she felt her knees shaking and before the first pieces of the jigsaw puzzle that were my father’s legs could be put back together, my mother lay on a little bench in the next room, recovering from her first, and only, fainting spell.
My father had spent the war years in England. He was fifteen when the Netherlands were invaded and on the morning of May the tenth he and his best friend found themselves in the grounds of the glider club, where men were taking down the windsocks and signposts in a naive attempt to prevent the enemy from landing. That was something that was, indeed, not to happen, but most probably not because of the heroic resistance of the club members. The Germans seemed to have a lot more on their minds than capturing seventy yards of shorn grass and a couple of wooden sheds.
That morning my father, for the first time in his life, had had a fight with his father. They were standing in the sunny front room listening to the radio, when my father said