It was late October, 1962. Russian missiles were being shipped to Cuba. Kennedy was having words with Khrushchev. The world might be coming to an end.
It was a common remark: “Cheer up, it’s not the end of the world.”
Frank Greene’s wife, Joan, had just said to him, a look of genuine fear on her face, “Is the world going to end, Frankie?”
He said, “Don’t be silly.”
He’d nearly said, “How should I know?” But that would have sounded flippant. His wife looked truly distraught.
“Will it come to an end before the wedding?”
Had she really said that?
“Sophie’s shut herself in her bedroom. She won’t let me in. She’s in tears. We were going to collect the dress this week.”
“Well, collect it.”
It was a Tuesday evening. Frank, like many people, dreaded Mondays, but by Tuesday he could usually be quite good-humored. The worst day of the week was over, and he was resigned to all the others.
But this was no ordinary week. His daughter, Sophie, was getting married inside a fortnight. Everything was ready. He’d forked out huge sums of money, but that wasn’t the point. He ought to be sailing serenely through the days ahead. At work, they’d been saying to him, “Big event getting near, eh, Frank?”
But now, apparently, the end of the world would intervene.
He said again, with perhaps a gentler but more commanding tone, “Don’t be silly.” The look on Joan’s face was real. The news on the TV was real.
“I’ll go and see if she’ll let me in.”
“You do that.”
Frank did something he’d never done before. Standing in front of his wife, he gripped her by the shoulders with his two hands. With hardly any force, but deliberately, he shook her. As if to say, “Snap out of it.”
He realized that he was dealing with a state of incipient panic. The air was crackling around him. He understood that his wife must do with their daughter something like what he was doing with his wife now. If she could get into Sophie’s bedroom.
Their daughter was nineteen and about to get married. She was also the child who’d thrown an almighty tantrum on her ninth birthday, because it was chucking it down and the promised birthday picnic was not to be.
He remembered the tantrum. He remembered his own dismay at having no power over the weather.
“Tell her everything’s all right. And tell her . . . tell her it’s not our fault.”
Why had he said that? It wasn’t his daughter’s fault, no. So whose fault was it but the older generation’s? The one he and Joan belonged to.
No sooner had his wife gone to see if she could gain access to their daughter than the phone rang. He picked up, and it was Tony Hammond, Sophie’s father-in-law to be.
Tony got straight to the point.
“Should we call it off, Frank? Given the situation. Debbie’s having fits. Should we call it off?”
“Are you serious?”
Frank took a deep breath. He said, as steadily as possible, “It can’t be called off. It’s less than two weeks away. Everything’s set up.”
It was a bad answer. It implied that it might have been called off. His daughter’s wedding might have been sensibly called off at another time—it was only the lateness that was unreasonable. He should have said, “It’s my daughter’s wedding. No one’s calling it off.” Or just said, as he’d said to Joan, but with a touch of ferocity, “Don’t be so bloody silly, Tony.”
But he was talking to his daughter’s future father-in-law.
Tony said, “But what if no one comes? Given the situation. They might not come. If we’re all still here. They might not come if there’s still a situation.”
Was he hearing correctly? He formed a picture of all the guests he’d invited to his daughter’s wedding not showing up because they were glued to their radios, poised to sprint to the nearest bunker. Wherever such things were supposed to be.
If we’re all still here? Well, of course they wouldn’t come if they weren’t “here.”
“They’ll all be in a dilemma, Frank, and they might not turn up.”
Dilemma? Situation? There was something in Tony’s voice not unlike the look that had been on Joan’s face. He realized that Tony believed it. He believed what he was saying. Why would he have phoned up otherwise?
So was he, Frank Greene, the weird exception? He didn’t believe it. Was he the only one?
A voice inside Frank, deep in his guts, was now saying, “This isn’t happening, this can’t be happening.” It was the same voice he’d heard inside him when he was a bomb aimer, lying on his knotted stomach, above various German cities. He’d spent more than twenty years trying to avoid the memories. Now Tony Hammond was bringing it all back.
He couldn’t shake Tony Hammond by the shoulders, but he wouldn’t have wanted to.
A surge of rage built up inside Frank against this man who purported to be the father of the man Sophie was marrying. He’d met Tony quite a few times, met his wife, Deborah, who was, apparently, “having fits.” This man, in all honesty, didn’t mean a lot to Frank, but it had been necessary that they become friends.
Now this same man was rapidly becoming an enemy. Yet it was extremely important that Frank not let loose at him. It was vital, in fact, that he treat him as an even more significant and valued friend.
Was this how it was with Kennedy and Khrushchev?
Frank had the thought: Now they can do it all with missiles. They don’t have to send hundreds of men up into the air to die.
He said, patiently and calmly, “No one’s calling off my daughter’s wedding just because the world’s going to end.” Had he really said that? “In any case, Tony, you can take it from me, you can rest assured. The world’s not going to end, I promise you. Stay calm. We’ll all be here next week.”
Had he really said those words? How the hell did he actually know? Did he even have the right to know—to promise? Was he God?
“And we’ll all be there on the Saturday. At the church. You know how to get there? Give my best to Deborah. Tell her to stay calm. And my best to Steve, of course.”
Tony hadn’t mentioned the condition of Steve, the bridegroom. Was he cowering under a table?
People could get into total flaps about weddings. Frank knew this. It was common knowledge. But he’d never before faced the wedding of his own daughter. He’d spoken as if he’d already arranged this wedding many times, been present at it often, so this time he had it all sorted. There’s doing things and there’s having to do them again and again. Such thinking doesn’t, or shouldn’t, apply to weddings.
The truth was that it was all entirely new to him and part of him was terrified. Even without the end of the world, he’d have been terrified.
But he was right. The wedding did happen. The end of the world didn’t. By the crucial Saturday, it was clear that Kennedy and Khrushchev had come to an understanding. The world could breathe again. The wedding was only made more special, more jubilant—the pealing of bells, the scattering of confetti—by everyone’s recognition that the world hadn’t ended.
His daughter hadn’t looked like a grizzling girl. She’d looked like Grace Kelly.
Then the wedding was over. Time moved on. The event itself would always be indelible, but all that preparation and anxiety were done with. The bride and groom, now Mr. and Mrs., were still on their honeymoon (something else that hadn’t been cancelled), and Frank and Joan Greene were getting used to the fact—it was clearly going to take time, it was a whole new phase of life—that it was now “just them.”
It was November, darkness pressing in, the time for the wearing of poppies and the time of Guy Fawkes Night.
Frank still had his old sheepskin-leather Irvin flying jacket, and he’d slip it on now and then to do odd jobs around the house when the weather turned chilly: sweep the leaves from the back lawn, wash the car, climb up a ladder to clear out the gutters.
It was not so strange to see men who’d turned forty wearing such things. It was evidence that they could still get into them, that they’d not lost the physique of their youth. Frank hardly thought now of how he’d once worn this jacket. It had become just a familiar domestic item that hung on a hook in the garage.
If someone had said to him all those years ago, “One day, you’ll wear this jacket to sweep up the leaves in your garden . . .”
But who could possibly have said that?
If asked why he still wore his wartime flying jacket, Frank might have blinked a bit and said, “It’s a good jacket.”
Every fifth of November, for a few years now, he had put on his flying jacket and gone along to the Harpers’, at No. 20, for their Guy Fawkes Night. Sometimes, but not usually, Joan and Sophie would go with him. Bob and Kate Harper had two small boys, so Guy Fawkes Night in their garden was a fixture. He and Joan, with just their one daughter, had never made an event of it.
It was a chance, Frank was well aware of it, to go back to his own boyhood. How he’d loved Guy Fawkes Night—Bonfire Night, as it was usually called. How he could remember still, across all the accumulating years, the annual thrill of it. The magic of a box of fireworks.
Bob and Kate had been at the wedding, and Frank, in his father-of-the-bride regalia, had said to them, “I suppose I’ll see you on Monday. If you’ll still have me. Not dressed like this, of course.”
Kate had laughed and said, “Why not?”
Frank had seen himself, in his morning suit, standing by a bonfire.
The fifth of November happened to be a Monday—one of those days Frank detested. But Monday evenings set you straight again. When he came home from work, he double-checked with Joan.
She said, “Go on. Off you go.”
He felt almost at once that he was doing the wrong thing. He should have said, “I think I’ll give it a miss this time, Joanie.”
He could tell from Joan’s voice that she was thinking, Isn’t it high time he gave up this annual foible of his? She was thinking, Sophie’s not here and now he’s slouching off for his fireworks.
But Frank also felt that, this year, he wanted to go all the more. It was fifty yards down the road, and he’d be gone for an hour. He was hardly leaving Joan all alone like a widow, and why couldn’t she come, too?
Sophie had left them. They’d known it would happen one day. It wasn’t the end of the world.
Though as Frank, in his flying jacket, walked along to Bob and Kate’s, things were already starting to go flash and bang all around him. There was a smell of smoke.
Centuries ago, there’d been a Gunpowder Plot. That hadn’t transpired, either.
Bob, in outdoor scruffs, opened the door and ushered him straight through to the garden. Kate was there with the two boys—both of them hopping with excitement. She looked like someone restraining two dogs on leads. She’d just lit a firework. She waved and grinned. The bonfire was already ablaze. The “Guy” on top of it, a figure in an old pair of pajamas and a crayoned cardboard mask, was calmly awaiting incineration.
There was the sudden dazzle and crack of the firework.
Bob said, “Quite a show on Saturday.”
Frank said, “Glad you were there.”
“We wouldn’t have missed it.”
“And I wouldn’t miss this.”
For the Harpers, these annual visits of Frank’s were simply an open invitation, a tradition—including the wearing of the flying jacket. They didn’t question why he usually came alone. They may have thought, without any judgment, He just wants to be a boy again.
“How’s Joan?” Bob said.
“Fine. Sends her best.”
“I’ll get you something to keep the cold out.”
Frank laughed. “There’s a blazing fire, Bob, to keep the cold out.”
But then Bob was besieged by the boys and their mother, begging him to set off a rocket. It was a grownup man’s job to set off rockets. They were launched from an empty milk bottle.
Frank said, “Off you go.”
He stood and watched. The garden was juddering in the light from the bonfire. Bob crouched with a matchbox while Kate held the boys back. There was the usual tense moment when everyone thought nothing was going to happen. Then, as if with a mind of its own, the rocket whizzed up and did its glittery burstings, to oohs and ahs.
Frank had the sudden outrageous feeling that he wouldn’t have minded if Bob and Kate had become Sophie’s parents-in-law. Outrageous and, of course, impossible. Which one of those two prancing boys would have married his daughter?
But Bob wouldn’t have phoned up to rant hysterically.
The worn leather of his flying jacket glistened. No one could have said to him, either, all those years ago, “One day, you’ll wear it to watch fireworks on Guy Fawkes Night, two days after your daughter’s wedding.”
He’d stood outside the church, in his regalia, in November sunlight, his heart hammering as he ceremonially offered Sophie his arm. She was spectacularly dressed. Days before, she’d shut herself in her bedroom. Now it was as if she’d stroked his wrist and said, “Everything will be all right, Dad.”
There was the irrevocable sound of the organ starting up inside, the scuffling noise of the congregation rising to its feet.
It should have been the last thing he’d ever want to do: wear his old flying jacket and stare into flames, watch fireworks.
And the truth was that if, back then, he could have been, in some impossible way, both there and not there, just a safe, immune spectator, he might have been able to say that, on a grand and terrible scale, that was just what it was like: immense fires below, and up in the sky a great show—flashes and bangs, colored flares, dancing searchlight beams.
His inner voice had said, “You’re not really here. This isn’t happening.”
His actual voice had said, “Steady, Skip . . . hold her . . . not yet . . . not yet . . .”
He needed to be getting back to Joan. All the feverish anticipation, then everything was soon over. Nothing left to ignite. The “Guy” was no more. The bonfire was a collapsing orange pyre.
But, before he could make his departure, Bob, with apologies, plonked a steaming mug into his hand. “Have some of that to see you home.”
See him home? Fifty yards.
He sniffed the steam and recognized the faintly earthy smell. Bob couldn’t have known.
“Bovril,” Bob said. “That is, Bovril with a good slug of Scotch in it. You wouldn’t think it would make such a good mix.”
Bovril. Breakfasts. Debriefings and breakfasts. The tea could be awful stewed muck. Not that you were fussy. It was hot and wet and a chance to fill yourself with liquid sugar. But there was usually also Bovril, if you wanted it. It wasn’t bad.
Bovril for breakfast. It was the taste of safety, of getting back, of being—for the time being—still alive.
It might have been five in the morning, barely dawn.
In their unbelievable way, those mornings were like Monday evenings. Well, you’d got through that. Now you could adjust to getting through it again.
He took a swig.
Bob said, “Good?”
“Yes, Bob, very good.”
Even without the slug of Scotch, it would have been very good. ♦
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