Hungry ghosts, p.15
Hungry Ghosts, page 15
Ruth insisted that if she must leave Medmenham then they should return to London. Employment opportunities for Vic were limited in Buckinghamshire, and besides, Ruth wanted to be near to her family.
‘I need my mum and Carol close by. It’s going to be hard enough bringing up a baby as it is. Where I come from, mothers and daughters help each other out. For all her faults, I know my mum will support me,’ said Ruth.
Vic readily agreed. ‘I’m bored with gardening and the city will offer new opportunities.’
‘Do you feel well enough?’
‘I’m just fine, thanks.’
Neither Vic nor Ruth wanted to live with her parents and so they scoured the city for a new home. Post-war East London appeared to Ruth as a grey, damp, post-apocalyptic city from which recovery seemed barely possible. Whole streets had blown apart, and she could see right into what remained of people’s homes. After visiting one, unsuitable, flat, she stood across the road and stared into an abandoned room where a tall, narrow dress mirror still hung from its hook, leaving her with the eerie feeling that the occupants had fled in haste after an unimaginable catastrophe. She watched a woman walking down the street past the debris wearing a long, black coat and gloves to shield her from the cold as she pushed a pram past box-shaped cars with huge, round headlights. She thought, oh my, that will be me soon; this is my life now.
Most of the flats they found and could afford were unfit for human habitation. They were too small, or too damp, or too mouldy, or too dirty, or all those unwelcome features rolled into one. In the end, they settled for a ramshackle two-bedroom apartment perched over a bicycle repair shop in Stepney.
Twenty-eight Paradise Drive was a four-story red-brick block with small windows and tiny balconies; the paint on the doors was cracked and peeling. The interior walls of the two-bedroomed flat, once painted white, were now a dirty, melancholic yellow, and the tiny ancient windows left the occupants encased in a drab and gloomy atmosphere. On the plus side, it was warm and clean and came with a brand-new stove.
It wasn’t ideal, but Ruth felt lucky to have found it. The block was near enough to her family for them to support her, while being far enough away from Ethel that she couldn’t arrive unannounced at any time of the day. They could afford the place, just, and besides, they wouldn’t stay long. This was merely a short stop on their unfolding journey towards a bright, modern future.
Chapter 19
Vic sang along to The Andrews Sisters’ “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy” with tuneless gusto as he packed his suitcase in preparation for the trip back to London. American music was so much more exciting than its British equivalent. It had lit up the dance halls and mess halls of wartime England and set the tone for his exciting new adventure. And it wasn’t as if he was leaving behind dear friends in Buckinghamshire, except perhaps for Bill.
With surprising enthusiasm, Vic had been seduced by the siren call of daddy. He thought, well now, there is a purpose to my life after all – I am to be a husband and a father enveloped in a cocoon of love, and I will have children who will have children, and we will form the links in a great chain of human inheritance. In the wake of death and destruction, life goes on after all.
As he packed his belongings, Vic gazed with love at his most treasured photograph of Ruth, taken soon after they had met, which stood bounded by a silver frame on his bedside table. In the picture, she was resting her face on the vertical edge of an open door, with her eyes peeping around the frame as if in imitation of a 1940’s film star. She was his very own Ingrid Bergman.
Ruth’s intense hazel eyes – which appeared jet-black in the image – were set deep within her angular cheekbones and arranged with divine care beneath her ebony pencil brows, which were drawn like calligraphy over her milky forehead. Her dark chocolate hair, cut short by the WAAF, hinted at a boyishness that was continually repudiated by her delicate beauty. He thought, when she smiles, I smile; when she laughs, I laugh, and he was filled with a joy. Oh, what a wonderful feeling that was. At last! A new day, a new dawn.
Before his wedding, Vic had hoped to study chemistry at university, and the RAF were willing to sponsor him. It was a subject that combined his interest in science with his love of photography. But following his departure from the forces, and with Ruth expecting, he needed to find a new, better paid job. They would need to rent a flat in London, and the expense would put study well beyond their means. He felt downhearted, and offered a prayer of apology to Amelia, who would have been deeply disappointed that he would not, after all, be the first in the family to go to university.
Bill, however, persuaded Vic that a career as a photographer was a real possibility, and this lifted his spirits again.
‘You can do it, Vic. But it’s one of those jobs where you must start at the bottom and work your way up. I’ll ask around and see what I can do,’ he said.
Vic harboured lofty ambitions, Cartier-Bresson still occupied his mind, but for the time being, he was willing to do wedding photos, christenings and birthday parties, whatever it took to make a living and enhance his reputation. He thought it would be easy to find a job in London, but obstinate reality stood in his way. He made a portfolio of photographs and hawked it around to all the photography businesses he could find, but with no joy. Once again, it was Trevor who came up trumps. One of his mates on the docks, Phil, had a brother, Paul, who ran a family photography business that catered for all types of family occasion in East London.
‘It’s bread-and-butter photography, nothing fancy,’ said Paul, ‘but Trev showed me some of your work, and it’s good. The job’s yours if you want it.’
Vic reluctantly accepted his father-in-law’s generosity. Needs must; compromise was demanded of him now. Besides, the job represented a start in the business and made Ruth happy and so he seized the opportunity to take up the post in Stepney with Dalton & Son, Family Photographers.
‘There ain’t no son, actually. So, I guess you’re kind of it,’ said Paul.
‘Sure thing, Dad,’ said Vic, laughing.
Vic wondered if one day his son – he was sure he was having a boy – might join his business. Vic Woods & Sons. Plural. For the first time in a long time, he was feeling buoyant and optimistic.
Vic laboured all the hours that an ambitious young photographer could squeeze out of a day. He journeyed from one wedding to another, and from a christening to a funeral, all in the space of a twelve-hour day. After work, he drank pints of bitter in The King’s Arms with Paul and, when he could afford it, he bought a bottle of scotch and got blasted. Every time he passed by a bar room window, he saw a savvy survivor. He had made it through the war, overcome his breakdown and was carving out a new career.
During the day, he worked like a dog for the future; in the night, he dreamed of the past. His sleep was interrupted by images of smoke and flame and the echoes of Freddy’s screams. From time to time, he found himself crawling along the wing of a Lancaster until a gust of wind blew him over the edge and into the void.
Falling, falling through the sky towards the rubble and flames of Dresden. A firestorm sweeping through buildings. White light, white heat. Enough to melt iron. Enough to melt bodies. People transformed into pools of fat and calcium. A child dissolving before his eyes.
Falling, falling through the sky into the furnace that was Hiroshima. White light, white heat. Enough to melt iron. Enough to melt bodies. Men, women and children fried like a pig on a spit. Enola Gay banking away in the distance.
Falling, falling through time. He was falling towards a red planet. The green earth transformed into barren Mars.
Ruth held him in her arms and softly stroked his head with her fingers when he awoke in a sweat at two o’clock in the morning. She whispered words of love as she rocked him back and forth like a baby and told him everything would be alright.
In the evening – and increasingly during the day – he found that beer, and if he could afford it, whisky, settled his nerves. When from time to time he came home under the influence, and his maudlin feelings returned, she would sit on his knee and wrap her arms around his neck while he told her why the whole world was fucked. And when his rant was finally through, she would take his hand and lead him to his room, where he lay on the bed and she stroked his head until he fell into some kind of peace. The next day, he would awake with his energy renewed and his purpose rekindled, until the next time, when the wheel turned again.
Vic’s skill as a photographer was soon evident and admired. His pictures of family gatherings, weddings and babies were praised by his clients; his reputation grew, and his local celebrity status was enhanced when a prominent London family – the Gordons of Kensington – allowed a wedding photograph that he had shot to be printed in the local newspaper and he was given a written credit. Six months into the job, customers were requesting that he photograph their precious moments rather than his boss. If Paul Dalton was jealous or annoyed, he didn’t show it. Vic assumed that he was just pleased to see the business boom, and he was happy with the pay cheques and the recognition.
The job soon got boring, though, and it was clear to him that his restless soul would not be content to remain a family photographer for the rest of his life. If there was one thing war had taught him, it was the capacity to separate his outward demeanour from his feelings: on any given mission, you could feel fear, but you couldn’t show it. And so, he smiled and joked with all the clients, presenting a warm and friendly persona, while inwardly regretting that his talents were being wasted. He understood the importance of family photography to his customers and did not despise them; he just wished he could be doing more interesting, publicly significant, praiseworthy work.
In his spare time, he set about taking more creative photographs of post-war London life and accumulated a collection of black-and-white images that documented the destruction of the city and the birth of new hope. The upside of his work was the opportunity to travel throughout East London, and sometimes beyond. In the breaks between jobs, he would steal half an hour or so to wander the streets in search of engaging subjects.
He watched the cars rumble past and studied the pedestrians who wandered from one shop to another. He studied a young mum dragging a child by the hand while she pushed her other child along the street in a buggy, and an old man bent by life, still moving forward through his world one slow step at a time. Ordinary people living ordinary, extraordinary lives.
One Monday morning, his attention was captured by a young man performing outside Bethnal Green Station dressed in clown’s garb – wide, multicoloured check trousers, red braces and a bright-red nose – who was juggling half a dozen firesticks in a bid to entertain the crowd and earn a little extra cash. The act culminated in the classic fire-eating trick of swallowing flames, much to the delight of the crowd that had gathered around him. Vic thought the act a little passé, but nonetheless it brightened everybody’s day and made for a wonderful photograph of contrasts: jollity against a background of destruction.
Mostly, though, his black-and-white photographs displayed the eerie remnants of houses reduced to rubble and the hope inspired by the reconstruction. His favourite image of that time mixed the two sentiments in one striking image:
Two old blokes are sitting up against the wall of The Black Cat pub, sharing a bottle and flinging stones across the wasteland opposite, which is scattered with rubble following an air raid that had crushed the apartment block. The front of the flats has been ripped away, and the onlooker can see paint and paper still on the walls, while in one room, an indistinct painting still hangs on its hook. The viewer feels as if they are peering into a giant doll’s house abandoned in haste by its fearful occupants. In the yard below the units, someone has scrawled “Let’s Pretend We All Love Each Other” across the side of an abandoned truck, while four young girls aged between eight and ten are happily playing on the rubble. They are laughing and smiling as if they are having the time of their lives.
In pursuit of his ambitions, Vic set out to meet important men who worked for newspapers. He showed up in the right pubs; he chatted to the right blokes; and he wagered that the price of a few beers today would pay off tomorrow after he shoved his best pictures under his new friends’ noses. He even mounted a small exhibition in a boutique Soho gallery and invited anyone and everyone he knew to come.
‘Nice work,’ they said. ‘Good one, mate, we’ll see what we can do.’
His charm offensive finally paid off when an old RAF colleague, Jack, said he had a mate at The Times who had told him that they were seeking a top-notch photographer.
‘They want someone who can handle a camera and I’ve told ’em you’re a master craftsman,’ said Jack. ‘So, get yourself over there; mention my name; and the job is yours. It’s all about who you know.’
And so it was that in May 1948, two years after he had teamed up with Paul Dalton, Vic joined The Times as a photographer.
Oh, lucky man! Vic was fortunate enough to be in the right place at the right time. And isn’t that so often the way of it? he thought. Good luck by its nature rarely springs from our intentions but appears by chance, like a sunny day. We spend our lives mapping out our glorious futures and project them onto the screen of an imagined tomorrow, and yet it is by the ocean of contingency that we are buoyed or drowned. Ah well, he thought, we must learn to love our fate. To accept and embrace it.
As chance would have it, he was strolling over London Bridge one luminous spring day in 1950, admiring the early morning light as it sparkled across the Thames and smiling to himself – to be alive on such a glorious day was a great joy – when Michal Kowalaski, for whom life must have lost its colour, hurled himself out into the void from a steel girder thirty feet above from where Vic was standing and plunged into the watery depths below. How he got up there, no one knew.
Perhaps it was the sight of Michal’s tumbling body in his peripheral vision, or maybe it was lady luck once again. In any case, Vic reached for his camera as automatically as he might have clutched at a railing to break a fall. His Leica clicked and whirred in the blink of an eye that it took Michal to plummet across the lens, allowing Vic to immortalise his final moments on this earth.
Black-and-white photograph. London, 1950. A man is falling through the sky after he has jumped from a girder high up on London Bridge, his mouth sucking in the air, his eyes dark and wide like a solar eclipse. He appears to float in the void against the backdrop of a familiar London skyline. We know he will hit the water soon, and yet that moment is held at bay in a transcendental, frozen moment.
This shocking and powerful image was the photographic equivalent of a haiku. A condensed moment that hit the viewer in the guts with the unspoken significance of life and death. It was the picture that launched Vic’s stellar career.
It turned out that Michal had been a member of the RAF’s 303 Polish fighter squadron, celebrated for shooting down German planes during the Battle of Britain. On the back of his hero status, he had become a local politician of some note, whose recent infidelities and receipt of brown paper bags from property developers had already made the headlines. The following day, Vic’s picture dominated the front page of The Times and boosted him up the newsroom rankings from a nobody to a somebody as surely as if he had married the owner’s daughter.
And yes, Vic was troubled that his “heads” was poor Michal’s “tails”, that his triumph was occasioned by an unhappy ex-pilot’s grim passing. Nonetheless, he accepted his good fortune with a whoop and a punch in the air. The gods in their wisdom had gifted him an instinct for drama and a talent for framing it through a lens. He stumbled on calamity with his camera at the ready the way Saharan nomads unearth water. He believed that his attraction to catastrophe was his fate, and his rapture; perhaps it was even his tragedy. Call it his demons, call it his egotism, call it his obsession, you may even call it his spirit; whatever the names, he was driven to do his work the way an addict seeks out a dealer. The mother of his invention was compulsion: his creativity emerged from the needs of the psyche, and without the capacity to express something of itself, he believed that his soul would have withered and died. He loved his work. The hallucinations stopped when he kept himself busy.
Chapter 20
Ethel expected Ruth to give birth in the family home in Bethnal Green.
‘That’s our tradition,’ said Ethel. ‘We’ve all been through it. That’s what women in our world do.’
Ruth had other ideas. During the war, increasing numbers of women had given birth in hospitals located outside of London where they were safer. The East London Maternity Hospital had shifted its location to Buckinghamshire to avoid the bombs after it had been damaged during the Blitz, and though that option would have provided Ruth with rest and care, she decided that now the war was over, she would stay in London, and she found a bed in the Tottenham maternity unit to the north of her home.
The labour was routine, in as much as any birth is predictable. Ruth grunted and groaned and cried and screamed and sweated and swore at the midwife until her baby was laid on her chest and she suddenly felt as high as a kite. This tiny body, this amazing new life, was reaching for her breast, and he was now her responsibility. All the worry and pain evaporated, and she was filled with an overwhelming feeling of love that made her cry with joy. Surrounded by wartime destruction, Ruth gave birth to hope and purpose on New Year’s Day 1947.
