I returned home, full of journalistic zeal. I bought a Dictaphone. This seemed like half the job done already. I was the gutsy truth seeker, uncovering the poignant war story of a man who found it all too painful to talk about. Except I found my father not especially resistant to the idea. True, he had never really spoken about it-then again, I had never really asked. He laid out a fish lunch in his garden in Felixstowe and carefully set up the microphone on its little stand.
“It’s funny you mention it, actually.” Why was it funny? “Well, I’ve been thinking a bit about it, what with the anniversary. It’s only now that I’ve started thinking: I would like my lost service medals back… you know, for next year. Just be nice, wouldn’t it.” But why didn’t you ask for them back, years ago? “Well… they charge you for them, don’t they,” said Harvey doubtfully, and returned to filleting his grilled sole.
A struggle my father has always had: between hating war and having been in one, between being committed to, as he puts it, the future, and at the same time not wanting to be entirely forgotten. I think he was surprised, at this late hour, to find he wanted his medals back. I was surprised I wanted to see them. A kindly veteran who lives opposite helped us send off the necessary paperwork. When the medals arrived, I came up to Felixstowe and we sat about staring at them. These moon rocks laid out on the kitchen table.
I was a bad journalist to my father, short-tempered, bullying. He never said what I wanted him to. Each week we struggled as I tried to force his story into my mold-territory previously covered by Saving Private Ryan or The Great Escape-and he tried to stop me. He only wanted to explain what had happened to him. And his war, as he sees it, was an accidental thing, ambivalent, unplanned, an ordinary man’s experience of extremity. It’s not Private Ryan’s war or Steve McQueen’s war or Bert Scaife’s war (of whom more later). It’s Harvey Smith’s war. If it embodies anything (Harvey’s not much into things embodying other things), it is the fact that when wars are fought, perfectly normal people fight them. Alongside the heroes and martyrs, sergeants and generals, there are the millions of average young people who simply tumble into it, their childhood barely behind them. Harvey was one those. A working-class lad from East Croydon at a loose end. At seventeen, he was still too young to be drafted, but when he passed the recruiting office on the high street, he went inside. They took his details and told him he’d be called up when he was seventeen and six months. “Made me feel a little bit special-and when you’re a teenager, that’s what you want, isn’t it?” In November 1943 initial training was completed. They moved to Suffolk, where Harvey joined the 6th Assault Regiment RE and was mobilized the week after Christmas. “That meant our unit were officially at war. I think that’s right. It meant that they could shoot you if you deserted, or something.”
There followed six months of regimental training and tank training, how to ride in one, how to sleep under one, how to service it when it broke down. Harvey was still not expecting to see action before 1945. You had to be nineteen. When the rest of the unit moved to Calshott, he went to Felixstowe. (He ended up there once again, in the late 1990s, after his second divorce. Sometimes he refers to his life’s journey as “the round-trip.”)
“I was with the old buggers, like Dad’s army. But I was only there three weeks. The law changed; suddenly you could be eighteen. So that was me.” Harvey’s war was on. He spent that last month hiding in the Fawley woods with his regiment. You can’t see the stars like that in Croydon. On June 3, he listened to the final briefing with the rest of his regiment. “That’s when they told us the truth, where we were going, King Beach, and when. I was hoping to be in one of the tanks. But last minute, I was assigned to be the radio man for the CO’s truck. All the boys thought that was pretty funny. Me stuck alone with the CO.”
On the fifth of June at about 11 P.M., they set off. They were meant to land on the morning of the fifth, but the conditions had been too dreadful. They were still dreadful-everybody was sick. In the middle of the crossing, Harvey saw his first British warship, a huge shadowed beast, moving through the water. As he watched, it shot off a broadside from its sixteen-inch guns, rocking sideways in the recoil. “I knew then. I hadn’t known before. I knew this was serious.”
It was not to be as serious for Harvey as it had already been for thousands. He didn’t land at 6 A.M., he didn’t land in a tank (many of these had grenades thrown into them and “brewed up,” exploding from the inside) and he didn’t land as an American at Omaha. Though he didn’t know it, already he was steeped in luck. He approached the relatively quiet King Beach at midday and waited while his CO argued with an American general onboard who was convinced it was too dangerous to land. It was two hours before he drove onto the beach. So much experience that should be parceled out, tenderly, over years, came to my father that day, concertinaed into twenty-four hours. First time he’d left England. First time he’d been at sea. First time he’d seen a dead body.
“I was looking out from the back of the truck. Young dead Germans were everywhere. They looked like us; they could have been us. It was gruesome. And we’d heard by then that Major Elphinstone, our major, had died the minute he hit the beach. He stuck his head out of the tank to look about and-pop-a sniper shot him in the face. But you must write that I had an easy day. I had absolutely an easy day. The work had been done, you see. It’d been done. I wasn’t like Bert Scaife.”
Who?
“He was this bloke, he was a legend by the end of the day-caught so many men, shot all these mortars off-he got decorated later. I was no Bert Scaife. Not by a long way.”
Harvey’s truck rode up the lanes, unharmed. There were dugouts everywhere and people shooting at him, but with the help of the radio and excellent information, they made it safely through the worst. They stopped at a monastery that had been commandeered by the Nazis and now stood abandoned. There was a dead man in Nazi uniform lying in the hallway. My father bent down to turn him over and would have joined him in oblivion if it hadn’t been for his CO stopping his hand just in time. The body was booby-trapped. Coiled within it, my future, and that of my brothers, and the future of our future children, and so on, into unthinkability.
He slept that night in a fragrant orchard. And what else? “Well, I stopped in Bayeux a bit after that. Bought a pen.” At this point, my patience with my father bottomed out. He looked at me helplessly. “It’s so hard to remember… I only remember the obscure stuff.”
So now I started playing hardball; now I picked the Dictaphone up and demanded to know about the shrapnel, for Harvey has some shrapnel in his groin, I know he does, and he knows I know. A doctor found it in a routine X-ray in 1991, forty-seven years after Harvey thought it had been removed. I was sixteen at the time, EMF had a hit with “Unbelievable” and I was wearing harem pants. If he’d come home and told me he’d been a waiter on the Titanic it couldn’t have seemed more fantastical.
“Oh, that was different. That was just after I bought the pen.”
A few days after the pen incident, then, my father was again in an orchard in the middle of the night. He decided to make tea, the way you did during the war, by filling a biscuit tin full of sand and a little petrol and setting that alight. He shouldn’t have done that. The flames were spotted and a mortar bomb sent over. He doesn’t know how many men died. Maybe two, maybe three. I leaned forward and turned up the volume. For hadn’t I brought this little contraption here for my own purposes? Not to record my father’s history, and not even to write this article, but precisely for this revelation, for this very moment or another like it; in the hope of catching a painful war secret, in the queer belief that such a thing would lead to some epiphanic shift in my relationship with my father. There is such a vanity in each succeeding generation-we think we can free our parents from experience, that we will be their talking cure, that we are the catharsis they need. I said, But, Dad, it was a simple mistake. We all make so many at the same age, but in a normal situation, they can’t lead to anybody’s dying. I put my hand on his hand. “But it was my fault.” “Of course it wasn’t. It was a mistake.” “Yes, yes,” said Harvey, humoring me, crying quietly, “if that’s how you want to say it.”