Krauts. So in early 1945 Dad’s MTB anchored in some Belgian port, I forget which, and took potshots at the church tower from the stern cannon, and when they went onshore they pissed in the streets because that’s what the Belgians were habituated to, apparently. Awful people, almost as bad as the French.
Many years later, when I went on a work trip to Antwerp, I kept my eyes trained upwards in case they started throwing buckets of piss out of the windows, as my dad gravely assured me they would. No proper sanitation in Belgium, you see – an echo, in my dad’s mind, of John Betjeman’s bitter little list of stuff which made Britain distinct:
Free speech, free passes, class distinction,
Democracy and proper drains.
My mum had never been abroad, not even to kill people. A little later, in the early 1970s, she said she quite fancied visiting Egypt because they were at war with Israel and she didn’t much like Jews. But she never went.
So, anyway, after this short cross-examination in Selfridges I got my plane, pulled off the wrapping paper on Christmas Day and ran around the house with the thing with its lights on and the engine making that fucking demented noise, swooping down every so often to attack our amiable half-breed dog Skipper who, after a few moments of this torment, bit me deeply on the arm and then cowered behind the settee, tail wrapped underneath his arse and backbone curved almost in a semi-circle, because he knew he was in the shit, with me howling holding up my arm for all to see. And yet as it turned out Skipper was exonerated, my mother correctly assuming that the dog had been provoked beyond all reasonable limits and I had got what I deserved. So I stood there crying at the injustice of it all while Skipper – out of contrition or hunger, who knows? – licked away at the blood still pouring from the gash on my arm, the edges of the wound slightly blueish where his dumb and blunt half-Labrador teeth had merely bruised, rather than cut. But the licking was OK, because dogs’ tongues were antiseptic, according to my mum. ‘Better than Germolene, a dog’s tongue. You don’t need a bandage,’ she had said. I don’t know why, but I’ll always remember that purple-blue colour around the wound. It seemed exotic and in some way more severe, more of a grown-up wound, than if it had just been blood.
The plane lasted maybe three days before the huge clunking batteries gave out and my interest in swooping around with it – carefully avoiding the dog now – gave out too. And I had a sense, by about tea-time on 28 December 1966, when the family at last scuttled itself gratefully back from the sitting room – which would next be used twelve months hence; hell, you could still smell the pine needles in June – to the warm cluttered chaos of the parlour, that it had been a wasted opportunity, this growling, flashing plane. One trip to London every year – we lived twelve or thirteen miles away in Bexleyheath, and my dad worked in town during the week, but aside from Christmas we never, ever, went in ourselves – and one big present every year, and I’d chosen this thing that just made a noise and flashed its lights. I wasn’t sure what I should have chosen, but the plane definitely wasn’t it. The plane was, I thought to myself silently, shite.
Its very shiteness, of course, is why it sticks in the memory, a forlorn disappointment and also a warning. It nags away at me now when I buy presents for my own kids and they express the mildest interest in something which I know will hold their attention only briefly and will consequently be, for them, a source of long regret. Toys which are flashy, superficial and demand nothing from their owners, like those rides at Alton Towers or Thorpe Park in which you queue for hours to be strapped down and flung somewhere for twenty seconds, maybe through water if you’re lucky, and you end up wondering what the fuck it was all about, all that waiting, with the furious wasps buzzing around a thousand hideous onesies smeared with ketchup and the dried-out sugar from soft drinks and the whining, the incessant whining, about how long we have to wait for stuff.
But actually I shouldn’t worry – because there are three cupboards upstairs full of discarded toys with corroded batteries, and three more full of toys which are still, intermittently, used. The occasional duff present is of absolutely no consequence to my children. The problem these days is wondering what the hell I can buy the little bastards that they haven’t already got, wandering confused and desperate through Hamleys and Comet and Dixons, while they themselves are disconcertingly blasé about presents: nothing you can give them excites them, no matter how much you spend. At Christmas and on birthdays I check with the mother of my two boys – we’re divorced – and she’s as much at a loss as me. What can we buy them that will induce that immensely gratifying gaze of awe and delight, that look you want to see on their little faces on Christmas morning? A Ferrari, maybe, or their own country. Buy them Chad, or Belgium. Would that raise a smile, get them excited for a moment? But on Christmas morning what they really want is a lie-in, just to sleep ever onwards. And it’s not their fault, any of this. They don’t clamour for gifts; quite the reverse. They don’t clamour like I used to clamour, back when presents were exceptional and therefore it really mattered what you were given.
The plane banks sharply to the left, too sharply for my liking. My plastic beaker of warm chemical urinous white wine and half-empty packet of bowel-racking nicotine-replacement gum slides across the plastic tray table and I see the cheerful gay cabin steward with his impeccably neat number-one cut frown suddenly halfway down the aisle as he temporarily loses grip of his big trolley of scratchcards and duty-free chavgifts and booze and the whole thing careers onto the shoulder of some placidly dozing woman to whom he copiously and noisily apologises. You watch their faces, the cabin crew, and when they look worried, when they look startled, you worry too.
I don’t fly well. I have to suspend my disbelief when I get on a plane. Here we are, 38,000 feet above Paris. The weather was fine when we left Freiburg, it was predicted to be OK at Gatwick; but there’s always that mysterious clear-air mischief lurking in between, up here beyond the clouds in this desolate and silent realm – a ‘bad, evil and dangerous place’, as some sixty-year-old American crop-duster pilot told me when we were thrown together in cattle class on a scheduled flight to San Francisco not so long ago. He never flew above 10,000 feet. Up to that level, he knew where he was; beyond it he was lost and scared – it’s too cold and too weird up beyond the clouds.
So I watch the cabin crew and listen for a change in the timbre of the engine noise, which might well mean we’re fucked, or – this always has me frightened – after the distinct lack of emphasis with which the landing gear supposedly locks itself into place, when the tray tables have been obediently stowed and we’re nearly at the end, that prolonged muffled whirring and growling and the lack of that satisfying click.
I don’t fly well. Like everyone – nearly everyone – I don’t want to die, and flying all over the place seems to be tempting providence, to be tweaking the tail of death. It seems to be, you know, pushing it a bit. At least on a plane I am so terrified by the prospect of airborne death flapping its big black wings above my head that I temporarily forget the stuff that plagues me the rest of the time: the black crab in the brain, the sterol noose around the heart, the scarlet blood in the stool, the sudden lurched slump and slurred diction occasioned by rapidly detonating blood vessels, the fire in the basement, the flight of piss-stained concrete stairs, the mugger’s knife.
My kids – well, the two boys – sit strapped in next to me, oblivious and insouciant, one of them reading Lord of the Flies (and identifying, I fear, with Jack), the other one trying to fashion a paper aeroplane out of his boarding-pass stub. They fly very well indeed, never a complaint from them, packet of pretzels and a Coke and they’re fine for however long – an hour, thirteen hours, you name it. CAT makes them grin and take the piss out of their father for the beads of sweat which line up sentinel-like on my brow, for the suddenly gripped armrest, dry mouth and hyperventilation. They’ve been doing it for so long now, since they were born, I guess. Long and short haul, across the world and back in time for The Simpsons. Lucky, lucky, boys. Their mother isn’t with us – we’re divorced; did I mention that? – she’s on a different plane, heading for New York. Their stepmum and stepsister are somewhere in the middle of the plane, where it is technically slightly safer if we land on water, but also where the stale flatus tends to congregate, I’m told. This was an Easter break, Vienna and the Black Forest. A treat for them, we explained. A bit of culture, a modicum of fun here and there, the opportunity for the