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to use the telephone – kept in a
bleak little study, which was never used for any other purpose – or to changefor dinner. We would see her later in one of her evening dresses when she came to say good
night to us; by then, we’d have been bathed and given our suppertime apple.
    Usually our father would also come and say good night – glamorous in dinner jacket, sometimes even more dazzling in white tie with his medals pinned to the breast of his tailcoat. How
little I knew of their lives! Not only were they parents, as opposed to people, but also I saw comparatively little of them. The occasions when I spent time with my father always seemed especially
festive and unusual – like a birthday. Sometimes he took me out by myself. I remember vividly a winter afternoon when it was the nurse’s day out, my mother had a cold and he drove me to
Kensington Gardens. There was snow – it had snowed off and on for several days and the Round Pond had ice on it. We walked until it was dusk and the park was almost empty of people. I found
an enormous snowball higher than myself. It was a dirty white from much handling, and in the dusk gave off facets of an unearthly blue. As I was staring up at it, wondering how it had been made, my
father, who’d joined me, said in a quiet almost conspiratorial voice, ‘Anyone looking?’
    I looked round the snowball and could see only the distant backs of people trudging home.
    ‘No.’
    My father suddenly drew the handle of his walking stick upwards and unsheathed a long, narrow sword with which he cut a large cake-shaped slice out of the snowball. Then he took out his silk
handkerchief, wiped the blade and returned it to its sheath. ‘Don’t tell anyone,’ he said, and I haven’t – until now.
     
2
    It’s time to say something about my parents and there has to be an element of hindsight in any sketch I make of them. My memory of how I saw them when I was a young child
is too scrappy, confined to fleeting sensations and pictures – probably from old photograph albums.
    After a fairly inadequate education my father left school when the First World War was declared. His brother, a year older, enlisted with the Coldstream Guards and my father naturally tried to
do the same, but they wouldn’t take him because he was seventeen. So he went to the Machine Gun Corps, lied about his age and was accepted. Both brothers went to France in 1914 with their own
horses, but they didn’t meet for fourteen months until, on a lane near Ypres, their horses neighed to each other before they came into sight. Both brothers survived the war.
    My father was a major before he was twenty-one. He got a Military Cross and bar, and was recommended for a Victoria Cross – I think the bar was given instead. When I asked him what he had
done to get his medals, he said one was for peeing on a machine-gun to keep it cool so that it would go on firing. The only other information he gave me about his war was when I asked who the
people in yellowing baggy uniforms were – the photograph that stood always on his dressing-table. They were his friends, he said. Where were they now? They were all dead. There was a
pause and then he added, ‘All dead, except me.’ He never talked about his time in France. He had spent weeks in gas-ridden trenches, andhis lungs never recovered
from that, but otherwise he was physically unharmed. I think now that in other ways he had been badly damaged. The schoolboy who went to France and did his best there for four years returned to
England as if he was a schoolboy embarking on the holidays.
    As I never heard him talk about his war experiences – I never heard any grown-ups talk about the war – it was years before I understood the great conspiracy of silence that must have
tortured so many young men when they came home on leave during the nightmare. How much worse this must have made it for them, and how, to survive, did they deal with it? In my father’s case I