Try to Tell the Story: A Memoir - Hardcover

David Thomson, author of “Have You Seen . . . ?” and The New Biographical Dictionary of Film, is a regular contributor to The Guardian, The Independent, The New York Times, Movieline, The New Republic, and Salon. He lives in San Francisco.

I

My grandmother told me one morning that Hitler might be hiding on Tooting Bec Common. “Adolf Hitler,” she added. I was four, but it was the spring of 1945 and boys knew who Hitler was. Nearly every day in the papers there was a picture of him, the unsmiling pale face stamped on the page, the mustache like a scar. He was missing. He might be dead—shot, burned, poisoned, whatever anyone could think of. But we did not know that then. There was no official report. He might have been taken by the Russians, for sport or research. And so the word had spread that he might have slipped through the closing trap in Berlin. Such magic would make it more plausible that he was the Devil. And there were hiding places on Tooting Bec Common, the surprising extent of open land that began at the end of our road. The Common was my playground, and I knew dells and glades where the desperate might hide.

I say the word had spread, and my grandmother had her way of suggesting that she led a rich and full life, with many chatting acquaintances. But I never saw them, and never really read any message save for her solitude, her loneliness. I should have guessed that she had made it up. She made everything up, including her own superiority in life—and that can prove an odd training for a grandson. But it was tough enough to regard it as my duty, to go out there on the Common, beating the bushes for the sleeping Adolf. Wouldn’t he have Alsatians sitting at his side, too grave to wake him, but so alert as to seize me silently? I knew the Alsatian was a German dog. I wondered why Grannie didn’t speak to people and have Hitler dealt with. She read my thoughts.

“Of course,” she said, “the glory could be all yours.” You may begin to appreciate my perilous state—that, still only four, I was reckoned to be susceptible to “glory.” But the word and its power had reached into me already, and I think Grannie had put it in, like the doctor with the wooden spatula looking for bad tonsils. “Glory” shone from the newspaper pictures of the Victory parade in London later that summer. It must have been a Saturday march, for the Sunday papers were full of it, and we took half a dozen Sunday papers (instead of any church attendance). Representative troops of the Empire had come to London: the Aussies in their slouch hats, Indians in turbans, Greeks in dresses, and the Gurkhas, little fellows with moon faces and what Grannie called “wicked knives.” We cut out pictures of these florid regiments for a scrapbook, and there was Grannie, supervising the work, saying “Glorious” under her sour breath. It was as if the war had been fought to rescue her. N And it was glorious, too, when she had taken me out to a street corner not far from where we lived, and she had ordered the gathering crowd aside with, “Let the boy seeWinnie!”

So I had been sucked to the front and I had seen him, the Prime Minister, sitting in an open car, Winnie, Churchill, a pink face in a black suit—and I was pretty sure that he had seen me, picked me out, and given me not just his “V” signal but a special grin of encouragement. And when I was restored to Grannie, she had whispered, “Glorious.” I felt sure she must knowWinnie personally— and I did wonder, if Hitler was on the Common, whether it wasn’t really more up to Churchill to find him than to me. Presumably he had bulldogs ready to stare those Alsatians into whimpering Nazi dismay.

There was “glory” too in a blue-bound book that sat on Grannie’s shelf. It was a famous book, as it happened, the journals of Captain Robert Falcon Scott on his disastrous expedition to the South Pole that ended in 1912. Grannie read to me from the book in her clear, piercing voice— about the hard sledging, the cold days when motors, ponies, and dogs all having failed, Scott and his last few men had begun to pull the sledges themselves. Grannie did not read the end of the story to me. I think it was regarded as something I could not bear. But Scott’s bleak words and her tragic delivery left me in little doubt. It was a disaster. Albeit one couched in “glory.”

I played the Scott game. I took the clotheshorse and draped it with a blanket. That was my tent. I had a cushion for a sleeping bag. And then, with iron rations—a digestive biscuit, most likely—I lay shivering in my tent, waiting for the blizzard to abate. I was quietly amazed at my courage, and sustained by the “glory” of it all, and Grannie peeped in occasionally to make sure I was not dead yet. She would feel my pulse, with the hand on which she had only three fingers. She had been born with that distinction—I daresay our line was unsound (it helps explain a lot). And I was used to just the three fingers, though I noticed every time that while I was on the brink of South Polar freezing, her hand was far colder than mine.
This was in a place called Streatham, SW16, a bit of London’s infinity, in a small section of residential houses named for lakes in the Lake District—so there was Ambleside, Rydal, Riggindale, and Thirlmere, and the last contained our house, number 10, about halfway down the road. Our house was semidetached with number 8, but there were some single houses on Thirlmere and I would guess that when the street was made, early in the twentieth century, it was a well-to-do development. The houses— maybe they were called villas—were built with large rooms and high ceilings on the ground floor and had cellars and attics. There was a manhole for coal delivery in front of the house where I could get in in an emergency, working my way over coal heaps, through the cellar and up to the ground floor.

It was a nice, quiet road. In those days hardly anyone there had a car and the kids learned soccer, playing with a tennis ball on the steeply cambered streets. Each house had a front garden and a back and there were old men—tanned and calm—who worked as gardeners. There was a dairy delivery every day except Sunday—nothing happened on Sunday then—and a horse-drawn greengrocer’s cart came round twice a week. I had the glorious task of shifting the providential manure onto the roses in our front garden. And, as I said, there was the Common at the end of the street. All this and Streatham High Road with its shops within easy walking distance. So it was just bad luck that there had been a war, with the main railway line to the South Coast ports only a few hundred yards away. Diligent Germans aimed at that rail link for years, with the result that our house was hit three times by bombs or bits of their fire. Or so I was told. It was my father’s straight-faced humor to suggest that Hitler was targeting me personally
because somehow if I survived he knew his Reich was curtains. It was not a joke he was telling. It was a strange, hopeful gesture—a way of saying don’t worry if you’re unknown. Even the great ones, like Hitler, need to think you might be a hero. A lifetime later, I remember being strangely moved by the story line of the film The Terminator, where an agent of the future has come back in time to destroy the seedling of the boy who may make a great rebellion.

I do not really doubt the three blows to the house. After the war, due to the damage, about six feet was chopped off one wing. And the attic was burnt out. I remember the smell as well as the Sunday-afternoon incident when a manon the street waved to my father at an upstairs window. My father opened the window and the man down below said, “Excuse me, sir, but I believe your roof is on fire.”

“Good Lord!” said my father. “So it is! Thank you, very much.” For it was Sunday and all agencies ran slow on that day. The fire was put out but the attic was useless and it was very hard to get repair workers during the war. So three is plausible.

I was apparently there at the time, but I cannot remember any explosions or fires. I do recall the discovery, on some frosty morning, that the house at the end of the street was no more than a shambles of black, smoking timbers. There were bomb sites all over the neighborhood.Why not us tomorrow?

I do remember lying in the air-raid shelter. It was an iron cage, a rectangle, with sleeping places and survival rations and drinking water, too. The theory was that if the house was hit by a bomb and collapsed then the shelter’s structure would stay intact and there would be a chance to dig the survivors out. I lay in that cage, with my mother, and Grannie and Miss Jane Davis, hearing the great sounds in the sky. Perhaps it was German bombing raids, perhaps it was Allied flights going the other way a year or two later. I know now that Streatham—whatever its perils—was a holiday next to Dresden. But Germany had asked for it, hadn’t they?

I don’t list my father in the air-raid shelter because it was family legend that he didn’t use it—not just because he didn’t use the house itself that much, but because when he was there and the air-raid siren sounded, he disdained safety or precaution. It was his contribution to wartime morale, I suppose, or some sublime mixture of arrogance and laziness. My mother said it was because he snored so badly—and, alas, as the same affliction has overtaken me, I suspect that may have been the case.

In later years, I recall my mother sometimes being asked whether she thought my father was sleeping with other women.

“Not likely,” she said—she had a nice South London voice, proper but a bit sly. “He’d wake up bears in January.”

Our house, number 10, was three floors on an open plan. Grannie lived on the ground floor. I lived on the middle floor, with my parents. And Miss Jane Davis lived on the upper floor. That meant that when Miss Davis came home from work, she came in th...