This is a brief extract from my novella 1969 A Year in a Life. You can still get it with a discount if you are on my mailing list.
SWEET LONG-SUFFERING BRITT
I was on the night shift at the British
Airways Air Terminal in Victoria, London on New Year’s Eve... Within an hour or
so the arrival coaches had all been met and our job was to prepare the flights
for the following morning. It was boring paperwork and gradually my elation
wore off as I dealt with the grim routine of office duty in the duty office.
From then on it was just a question of getting through the night. We had the
chance to sleep for a while before preparing for the morning shift take-over
and at seven we were released into the chilly early hours of the New Year,
1969.
When I got back Britt was already asleep,
the revelries had ended for her quite early. She was not at the peak of health,
I knew. But I was alarmed when she asked me to accompany her to Westminster
Hospital the following day for a chest x-ray.
Why? I asked helplessly.
Why do people go for chest x-rays? I can
still hear the exasperation in her voice. She was more than usually irritable,
irritated by me, as she so often seemed to be of late. I remembered once how
she got extraordinarily angry with me when I didn’t take her question about the
right way to treat frostbite seriously. Warm the affected part, of course, but
how? Rubbing? Are you crazy? Rubbing is likely to make it worse! Rubbing can
cause ice crystals that have formed to do irreparable damage to the tissue. So
what would you do? I was losing my patience, we were both losing our patience,
and I was also embarrassed by my ignorance. It was obviously something I needed
to know if we were going to live in cold Norway – which I really didn’t think
was all that likely. Britt persisted. OK, warm the affected part, but how,
quickly or slowly? The answer was as quickly as possible but with lots of
provisos, but I got it wrong. Sorry, the correct treatment of frostbite, just
like political exile, was neither in my field of experience nor that of
acquired knowledge.
Just as it simply wasn’t in my field of
experience for people to go to hospital, for any reason, never mind for
something as ominous-sounding as a chest x-ray. Then she told me the news she
had been holding back the previous evening. She had been diagnosed as having
TB, tuberculosis. It was, they conjectured, the result of a visit to the west
coast of Norway we had made the summer before. They told her there was a high
incidence rate of the disease there, a proposition I found astonishing in view
of the evident purity of the air there and scarcity of anything like heavy
industries. The incidence of TB was associated with the pulp and paper
industry, they said, the presence of which I had noted nothing in the part of
west Norway where we were.
Be that as it may, Britt could be assured
that she would receive the best possible treatment at the chest clinic. She
would be ok. They had discovered the infection early and it was curable. In my
case, there was a chance of contagion, as I understood it. It had to be checked
for, more as a precaution than anything else. We would be all right. I’m sure I
haven’t caught TB from you, I told her. How do you know? she asked angrily,
aggressively. We bickered about it for a bit and I ended up saying that I bet
she would feel disappointed if she had not infected me. Where did it come from,
that petty malicious thought? Why did we always argue over trivialities? How
long had it been going on?
Meanwhile, I was working on A-level exams
with a view to getting a place at university as a mature (ha-ha) student.... Britt
had encouraged me in my academic aspirations from the start, hoping to see me
as a potential husband make something more of myself. She saw me as a state
school teacher in a small fjord-side town on the west coast of Norway. She saw
us living in a spacious and comfortable house with a modern utilitarian design
and a view across the fjords. Enjoying high status in the local community. She
showed me photos of typical state school teacher houses. One of Britt’s
obsessions, one that I never understood, was to choose a set of cutlery for our
future matrimonial home.
Britt had very clear ideas about what this
cutlery set should be like and it was evidently very important for her. It had
to be of a traditional Norwegian design, with intricately decorated handles,
and none of this plain functional modern Scandinavian stuff, which was actually
Danish, she said. Decorative retro designs based on popular rural art styles
were very much in vogue among the middle classes in 1960s Norway, so Britt was
able to show me catalogues with a wide selection of different styles, only they
all looked pretty much the same to me.
The styles were all a sort of Norwegianised
baroque, or rococo, I can never remember the difference. Which is the very busy
style, with a lot going on at the same time? Baroque? Well, these were baroque
then, with lots of ornamental scrollwork and complex interwoven geometrical
elements and plant-inspired flowing patterns. Rosemaling-influenced, if you know what that is. Many of them were,
it suddenly occurred to me, a micro two-dimensional equivalent of the lavish
carvings you might see in stave churches, if that makes sense.
‘Which ones do you prefer?’ Britt asked me.
I sensed it was important for her that I choose, and choose right: the same
design that she liked. Choosing right would help demonstrate our compatibility
and go some way towards cancelling out our frequent differences of opinion and
attitude. More than that, our joint choice of cutlery would symbolise our
standing as a respectable teacher family in her fjord-side home town. This was
all so tiresome and unreal for me. For one thing, I did not want to become a
teacher even if I could, which I doubted, and certainly not one in her remote
fjord-side home town; that is, the town where her father was from and now
lived. Secondly, I was BOAC groundstaff with a couple of scraped-through A-levels,
and it was not certain I would ever get into university, or teacher-training
college for that matter. And thirdly, I did not speak Norwegian, which seemed
to be a weird and wondrously put-together and impossible-to-learn variant of a
mythical north European language with roots that went straight back to the
Middle Ages, if not to the Vikings.
But I did want to go to university and make
something more of myself, and the deeper motivating drive for me came from the
feeling that I was missing out on something, not having gone to university,
being deprived of an experience some of my friends made sound appealing and
rewarding. University life would make me a more complete person. And increase
my social status, sure. It would be, in itself, both rewarding and fun.
When Britt got moved from the chest clinic in
Westminster to the King Edward VII Sanatorium in Midhurst, on top of the South
Downs, it was less easy to get to see her. Visiting hours were restricted. I
used to get a train at 12.50 from Waterloo to Haslemere and spend a couple of
hours with her after lunch. I’d get a bus from the train station and then still
have a fair way to walk through the grounds to the sanatorium building. The
grounds were always fabulous, a perfect melancholy park landscape in late
winter. It was February and the weather always seemed to be sunny and crisp and
cold, you could feel spring just around the corner. In the air, at least; if
not in the heart.
Apart from that longish walk from the bus
stop to the sanatorium, I rarely spent any time outside Britt’s bedroom.
Patients were encouraged to take daily walks through the grounds and there were
a number of picturesque walks laid out through the woodlands. Once or twice I
remember we sat in the shelter of the forecourt at the north front of the
hospital, to enjoy some sunshine, or we strolled in the gardens adjacent to the
wards. But for most of the time I was confined to sitting next to poor Britt’s
hospital bed in her bare hospital room, which she rarely showed much
inclination to leave; at least, while I was there.
I caught that train to Haslemere four times
in February and three in March, and that was about it. During this time my
position as Britt’s lover and indeed her fiancé was gradually undermined and
usurped by a rival, Philip, who she had known from a time way back before she
met me. He was the son of friends of Britt’s father, from the time he served in
London supporting the resistance during the Nazi occupation of Norway. He was
from Surrey, a Home Counties boy, so he didn’t have so far to come to visit
Britt, and he had a car, a sports car, a Morgan, that he had gone himself to
collect from Malvern. Otherwise, he would also borrow his dad’s Bentley for
special occasions, no doubt.
He was from Godalming or Weybridge or
somewhere there along the River Wey, somewhere in that hilly, thickly wooded
part of the green commuter belt round London, living in a much desired,
parent-owned, large-gardened, detached piece of real estate, so typically
English in that attractive and appealing, privileged, high-quality, historic and
expensive sort of typically English way that we love, or, as in my case, hated.
Philip had long but kempt, wavy blond hair,
which, from my northern provincial point of view, struck me as effeminate. And
he wore good clothes, though I can’t remember what they were, you know,
trousers and shirts mainly, but quality, not Carnaby Street fashion, more
made-to-measure impeccably fitted and subtly textiled Savile Row. He was there
all the time, the creep, winning her round with his suave Home Counties
manners. On the last two or three occasions I was there he dropped in shortly
before I left and stayed long after I had gone. No rushing off to catch buses
and trains for him. The timing of his visits was obviously by prior arrangement
with Britt, and deliberately arranged to tell me something. In the end it was
blatantly evident even to me that I had lost Britt to this smooth Wey valley
boy. I was only too aware that there was a rivalry between us that I was losing
hands down. I was losing sweet long-suffering Britt in the course of a sort of
proxy class war, waged between the commuter belt beau and the inept left-hander
from up north that was me: I didn’t have a chance.
I had by now got so used to Britt’s
increasing criticisms of me I hardly noticed them; I thought they were a part
of normal relationships, or a normal part of our relationship. It wasn’t until
Tania and Mick visited her in my absence and she spent the hour they were there
moaning about me that I got to realise from what they reported back to me exactly
how the land lay.
She wouldn’t have spoken like that if she
really loved you, Tania warned me. I protested at first. We love you, she said,
meaning Mick and her, and it would never occur to us to think let alone say the
things she says about you. They’re completely untrue, of course; maybe we can
put it down to her illness. In any case, Tania went on, and bless her heart for
it, what she says ignores the purity of your thought, the kindness of your
spirit, and the generosity of your heart. It is as if she had never even
glanced through the open book that is your soul. She does not see what is there
for everyone to read. I continued to protest weakly, not recognising myself in
Tania’s unconventional use of words, though flattered by them, and not wanting to
see it was the indelible writing on the wall of comfortless reality that
counted rather than the faint scribblings in the open book that may or may not
have been my soul.
One obvious forewarning of the imminent
break-up of our relationship came to light over a number of photographs I had
taken of Britt on holiday the previous summer. I had only just got round to
getting them developed. That’s how it was in those days. You had a film of,
say, 36 shots in your camera and when you had used them all up to your
satisfaction, you handed the film in at the chemist’s to have them, in due
time, processed, revealed, or whatever you called it. What happened was that
sometimes you had a few shots left over on the film and it took weeks or months
to find an occasion to use them up. I had used up the last takes on this
particular roll of film at the get-together in my flat on New Year’s Eve and
so, some time in those first weeks of the new year, I finally got to see them,
those photos from the previous summer.
During that summer holiday Britt took to
objecting to me taking photos of her, saying her nose was red, her face was
red, and the sun had brought out the freckles across her little snub nose and
broad cheeks. She didn’t want anyone to see her in such a state. So I took a
number of photos of her from the neck down. Some of these headless photos were
pretty erotic indeed, honing in unapologetically on her slim waist and well
developed breasts, down to the curve of her hips. One in particular, just of
her torso, as she lay not quite naked on a rocky ledge at the water’s edge,
conjured up for me a sort of Scandinavian Henry Moore Aphrodite, recently
emerged from the waters of an ice-cold fjord, like a sculpture, only in flesh,
so tempting in how the lure of the soft warm flesh contrasted with the
repellent chilling dark waters and hard stone bed that cradled her sensuous
form. These photos were really quite good, but they had disappeared when the
pack of 36, now at the most 30, was returned to me after I had left them with
her to show other visitors. I accepted the censure gracefully, acknowledging
her right to her own image. I dare say she tore them up and did not show them
to anyone, not to Philip, that’s for sure.
1. Britt's remote fjord-side home town. 2. The kind of cutlery she was wild about.
