Fall Out

An old man came to see me today.  He said he was my son, can’t remember which one.  There was a time I could tell them by the colour of their hair, now they all look the same. 

He said that my husband, his father, had been a great man.  He said everybody agreed; as if this would please me.

I gave him that blank look that I use when I don’t want the conversation to continue.  I saw the pride in his eyes turn to disappointment.  Then I remembered who he was.  Ralph. 

When he was a child, Ralph had a mania for The Lord of The Rings.  They all did, those man-boys and their father, Robert; yes that was it, Bob.  It was another club I didn’t belong to.

He’d been going on and on about his admiration for Frodo at the kitchen table.  I was chopping carrots; the endless chopping of vegetables for instantly forgotten meals. 

‘You do know that Frodo dies.’  I couldn’t help myself, or perhaps I didn’t want to.  The cruel words spat from my mouth and I watched the damage play out.

Ralph was a fiery one.  His pain was palpable, he couldn’t bear it and with a strength and fury beyond his years, he took a kitchen chair and flung it at a wall so hard that it lodged, like an avant garde piece in the Museum of Modern Art.

Neither of us spoke.  We just looked at the chair.  It’s interesting when the unexpected happens. 

That was not the right reaction, Bob explained to me later.  I made him leave the chair there for a few days.  It seemed significant.  Bob had built the house, and I’d thought the walls rather flimsy.  The chair in the wall seemed to articulate something I just didn’t have the words for.

The Tolkien obsession spilled into summer holidays.  Bob had done with the house and turned his attention to the land surrounding it.

‘Now, boys, I have a plan.  We’re going to build a Hobbit hole.’

They thrashed out the details over one of those long, long breakfasts.   Summer, and life, seemed to spread before us, interminably.

It kept them busy.  I suppose that was a good thing, you have to do something with time.  They dug.  That is an understatement.  Wheelbarrow, followed wheelbarrow of soil, hour by hour, day by day, week by week.  I had to call a halt.  It was becoming dangerous.  Bob may have called himself an engineer, but he didn’t always consider potential outcomes.  In this case a huge, unsupported hole which might cave in on my boys at any point.

Bob spent the winter evenings making drawings for what would be the concrete and steel structure no Hobbit ever dreamed of.

Bob loved to talk, he always had ideas, crackpot ideas I would scorn, but he made me smile.  In those early days he did at least.

I had been like Ralph, a fiery one.  Bob and I both worked at the TNT factory, our eyes met and there were fireworks; that’s what we liked to joke.  We were practically children.  Nothing frightened us, so why would the prospect of being blown into a million fragments? 

We made bombs.  Bob imagined them wiping out evil.

We knew that a better world was coming.  We were helping. 

I had a tottering two year old and was four months pregnant when he went off on a warship in his smart officer’s uniform.  Off to save the world.  I felt frightened.  The world felt much bigger and my little family; so very small.

I remember Pearl Harbour.  I remember Hiroshima.  I remember Nagasaki.

There were no heroes.  Nothing would ever be the same. 

Bob came back and built our home in the woods above a lake in Vermont.  Far away from any city.

I passed the time weaving baskets, cross-stitching, making, making things nobody wanted or needed.  I tried to fill my head with different pictures.  I did not want those Japanese women and babies turning to flame each time I closed my eyes.  Make something new, make something safe.

I understood Bob’s obsession with the Hobbit hole.  I knew what he really wanted it to be.  Of course it failed; he hadn’t thought it through and we could never go into it.  It would never be the safe place against the spitting flames of those who would seek to hurt us.

He later claimed it was his own memorial to those who must never be forgotten.

I don’t forget.  Even now I think of the blown up photographs of Japanese women, naked, with kimono patterns burnt onto their skin; almost children in molten forms.  They are still there, I expect, on the inside of the concrete walls of the Hobbit hole, deep underground in the dark Vermont woods.

I survived; there are not many of us left and I’ll be gone soon. 

Strange, I never really knew who I was.