Alarm Clock
Uncle Frank was my Mother’s younger brother. He was killed on a bombing raid over Berlin in the last months of the Second World War in Europe, shortly before I was born. His room in my grandmother’s house was kept very much as he left it, with a big bed in the middle that I slept in when I stayed over, under an eiderdown that always slipped off in the night.
In the bookcase were piles of his aircraft recognition handbooks issued by the RAF, with their silhouettes of Lancasters and Halifaxes, Spitfires and Hurricanes; and, of course, Junkers and Messerschmitts. I poured over these, fascinated, with no understanding of their life-or-death significance. On top of the bookcase was this alarm clock, nothing expensive, but in art deco style of the times. It now sits on the shelf in my study: the alarm is stuck, and every time on the hour set, the clock buzzes loudly. There is nothing I can do to change it. I am strangely fond of the clock, which reminds me of the trauma my mother’s family experienced at the loss of the youngest sibling.
There are so many stories about Uncle Frank: my sister told of watching his long fingers on the piano keyboard; my mother remembered how he hugged her in the street when he learned I was ‘on the way’. We have an old super8 cine film which includes him and this elder brother, Cyril, fooling around in uniform with my sister Ann and brother John in our grandmother’s garden. The lightheartedness of the movie belies the tragedy to come. When I was born shortly after his death, it seemed that I was in some ways to carry his memory: an imposition I carry with ambivalence, at times refusing it and then embracing it.
When Elizabeth and I went on a city break to Berlin, we visited the Commonwealth War Cemetery where he is buried, along with the rest of his aircrew. He was older than his companions, close to 30 while they were mostly still boys of 18 or 19. I read the family’s inscription, ‘Yours was the courage, laughing soldier; may ours be the fortitude’. I was on the edge of tears from the moment we entered the cemetery, a sharp wetness flooding up behind my eyeballs which I knew would soon pour out, as indeed it did when we found the grave. I weep gently again as I remember this visit; it is odd to live in the shadow of one so much loved.
Next post: My Father’s Bible by Elizabeth Adeline