21
And still they gazed, and still the wonder grew,
That one small head could carry all he knew.
OLIVER GOLDSMITH, The Desertted Village, 1770, describing the village schoolmaster
Where will you go?” friends asked as I headed for London on the track of Archie’s time in England. “The Imperial War Museum?”
“Eventually. But not right away.”
They looked skeptical. “You’ve got another source, as good as the Imperial War Museum?”
“Better,” I said.
The farther north you go in suburban London, the less you feel you’re in Britain. In the 1930s, European refugees settled on these tree-lined streets in Victorian apartment blocks, known as “mansions.” Squint and you could imagine yourself back in Simmering, Licht-enrade, or some other district of Berlin or Vienna. Conductors on buses about to enter this alien world of delicatessens, kosher butchers, watchmakers, and old men in cafés playing chess would yell jokingly, “Next stop Swiss Cottage. Passports ready, please.”
The Sage of Golders Green
The sense of another country intensifies in Golders Green, of all these suburbs the most mittel European. Although the tide of new arrivals from Iran, Syria, and Lebanon has diluted the sense of a corner of some foreign field that is forever Dusseldorf, the presence of a vast cemetery and crematorium stand as reminders of why so many people crossed the Channel to make a new home here.
Neil is from emigrant stock; his family fled pogroms in Russia to settle here in the 1880s and take up the very European trade of tailoring. The stamp of that culture has long since faded, however. Tall, upright, bearded, brusque, Neil could only be English. In his theatrically modulated voice I hear Rex Harrison as the sea captain who haunts the coastal cottage of Gene Tierney in the film The Ghost and Mrs. Muir.
In one respect, however, Neil’s roots remain deep in European soil. He’s an example of that respected, even revered individual, the scholar.
Such people study for the pleasure of acquiring information. They may use what they discover as material for writing or teaching, but most are driven by the pure urge to know. To pass a bookshop without browsing, to visit a house without looking at its books, to meet persons of adventurous ways and not coax them for anecdotes would never enter their head.
Scholars choose professions that leave them free to wander off for weeks on end. For Neil, that was performance. Busking his way across Europe as a young man fed his tireless intellectual curiosity. Back in Britain, he formed a small acting group called Phantom Captain that directed the spirit of inquiry into theatrical projects: a musical based on particle physics, for instance, and Loaded Questions, a show that carried the scholarly impulse to surreal extremes by consisting entirely of questions.
In his early seventies, he still performs. In 2010, he could be found doing street theater at the Shanghai Expo, for which he invented Krikitai Chi, a tai chi–like slow-motion version of cricket without bat, wicket, or ball.
Occasionally he appears as a solo act, often in bizarre personae. For one festival, he dressed as a tramp in scuffed shoes, shapeless felt hat, and seen-better-days suit and hung a sign round his neck advertising “Lick You All Over—One Pound.”
Looking at a photograph of this bedraggled creature—ever the scholar, Neil documents everything, even his humiliations—I asked, “How did it go?”
“Quite well for a few hours. Everyone seemed to get the joke. But then one woman actually gave me a pound and demanded I do as promised.”
“And . . . ?”
“Put it this way. By the end, I felt I’d fully explored the possibilities of the role.”
We were talking in Neil’s study, halfway up the rambling apartment he occupies with his wife in Golders Green. The number of levels remains a mystery: the upper reaches are inaccessible to all but Neil, the staircase walls lined by shelves jammed with books and the landings piled with objects too bulky to place elsewhere.
I stumbled over one of these on my way to the bathroom: a life-size bust of a young woman, shoulders draped in a real lace shawl. Next to it was another head, of a beaming man with flowing mustache, topped with a Chinese cap, also real.
“Shop window dummies?”
“Ah, no. The remains of an experiment, actually.” Neil brushed the dust from the man with the mustache. “This is supposed to be me. They’re wired for sound. When they’re working, one can have a conversation with them—or at least appear to. I thought of using them in a theater piece, but it never quite worked out.” He pointed up the flight of stairs toward the bathroom. “Watch the chain. It’s a bit tricky.”
When I got back to his study, the coffee table in the middle of the room was piled with card folders, brown manila envelopes, and ring-back binders.
“These are a few World War I things I thought might be useful.”
The term “primary source” has a special magic for the researcher. A clear Xerox copy or scan of an old and faded document may be easier to read, but there is no substitute for the original. To feel the texture of the paper and smell the dust is to hear the scratch of the pen that wrote it, the clack of the typewriter, the thump of the rubber stamp, and, through them, to achieve a psychic contact with those who created it.
A museum might give me access to superior copies of what Neil showed me. But they were no substitute for the real thing. Respectfully I opened a plastic envelope.
Popular Songs of the A.E.F, a tiny booklet on cheap brown paper, barely larger than a playing card, published by the YMCA in 1918. On the yellowing water-stained cover, I could just read the words “Give me the man who goes into battle with a song in his heart.”
A song in your heart—in the mud of the Somme? What bloody fool said that? And yet, to read these titles is to feel a link no history can convey. “If You Were the Only Girl in the World,” “Keep the Home Fires Burning,” “Love’s Old Sweet Song.” For soldiers far from home, songs, even as sentimental and trite as these, have always been the ultimate repository of emotion. “Strange,” mused Noël Coward, “how potent cheap music is.”
A second envelope contained another booklet. My First Week in Flanders by Lieut. the Hon. W. Watson Armstrong, 1/7th Northumberland Fusiliers. Privately printed in London in 1916. Water-stained also, though printed on better paper than the YMCA booklet. Lieutenant the Hon? Only the children of viscounts, barons, and earls may style themselves “the Honorable.” I leafed through it.
One shell, which burst a yard or two off me, killed two of my men and injured another. The two men displayed great heroism in their dying agony. One of them, Bob Young, as he was carried away, minus his legs, called upon an officer, who was almost overcome by the sight, to be a man; and I was further told that he died kissing his wife’s photograph, and with the word “Tipperary” on his lips. . . .
Next, a phrasebook without cover. Phrases appeared in English, then in French, then in a phonetic version. At random, I opened it at “Care of the Wounded.”
“I feel very tired.” Je suis très fatigué. Je swee tray fateegay.
“I am cold.” J’ai froid. Jay froah.
“I am suffering very much.” Je souffre beaucoup. Jer soufr bok-koo . . .
Minus his legs, he called upon an officer to be a man . . .
Neil said, “And I thought this might be of interest.”
A battered lump of a book, its thick brown cover, chipped at the edges, bore the label:
Salmon’s
Popular Series of
Patriotic Post Cards
The binding had long since ceased to contain its bulging contents, a collection of colored postcards, each glued down to a page. I knew of Salmon of Sevenoaks as a major postcard publisher. I was holding a sample book carried by one of its salesmen. He’d have shown it to stationers and tobacconists who wanted to order cards.
I eased off the elastic band that kept it together. Cards spilled out, some detached from the page: the symbolic figure of John Bull in top hat and Union Jack waistcoat, with a truculent bulldog at his side; languid youths playing tennis or billiards when they should be at war; a cringing but sneering kaiser, mustache drooping, pickelhaube on his head. Archie might have seen these cards in the newspaper kiosk on a drafty railway station as he endured the hurry-up-and-wait of military life. There he is. A tall, diffident man in a khaki greatcoat and flat military cap. Cautious eyes: asking a favor of a stranger never comes easily to Australians. Would you have a cigarette, mate?
“So,” said Neil. “Any of this useful?”
“Oh, yes,” I said, closing the book. “Yes, indeed.”