Regarding the Possibility of Ever Going Home
by Zoe Fowler
March 1st 1942. The Java Sea. Artillery blast, smoke stench, a fatal torpedo hit. From the water, my grandfather watched his ship, the HMS Exeter, list and sink. Over six hundred men had been on board. I imagine the water littered with them, the waves swallowing their voices. My grandfather took turns with another sailor to cling to a floating table and then that man was gone as well and my grandfather was alone with the table and the ocean and the slow-dawning, slow-drowning realization of loss.
I left home at sixteen. I rode horses, fell in love, became a teacher, moved to the States. Where I am is where I am; where I am is in a classroom teaching.
The Japanese fished my grandfather from the ocean. An unwanted catch, part of a shoal of broken men. Barefoot and barely dressed, they were forced to march through the streets of Macassar. Burning tarmac blistered their feet, the sun stripped salt-stained skin from their shoulders. These men had been at sea so long the ground rose like waves as they struggled forwards. Odyssean, they carried nothing but their memories; “their native homes deep imaged in their souls.”
I teach in a small military university in Vermont. A classroom with greenish chalkboards and broken blinds. I am explaining semaphore to my students. Most of them are in uniform, preparing for imagined futures in fighter jets and armored tanks and state-of-the-art military vessels. With semaphore, I say, the body becomes the text. I stretch my right arm perpendicular to my side, lift my left arm overhead. My students are baffled, amused. Don’t I know about radar, they ask; don’t I know about telecommunications and computing, about tropospheric scatter.
The men fished from the Celebes Sea were imprisoned in an abandoned Dutch military base on the southwest coast of Sulawesi. A handful of Japanese guards kept hundreds of prisoners in order through the principles of starvation and leverage. If one man escaped, nine others were beheaded. For the rest of the war my grandfather lived in a series of concrete floored huts. Oil cans, sawn clumsily in two, filled the center of each space. A place where men shat and vomited and died.
Even the names of awful things can make a kind of poetry: malaria, pellagra, beri-beri, dengue fever, dysentery, death.
I learned semaphore from my grandfather. As I teach, I think I glimpse him at the back of the room, glimmering in that space where motes of sunshine dance with chalk dust. He is a younger version of himself, the same man I thought I saw leaning against the coffin on the day of his burial. He has taken his smile from a 1940s wedding photograph and borrowed the color of his eyes from my youngest daughter’s face. Undamaged, unscarred, he is the man I wish I had known.
Only two men were able to walk out of the camp on the day of their liberation. The rest, bird-boned and starving, were carried on litters and shipped to Australia to gain weight and strength enough to survive the passage back to England. They laid in bath chairs on wooden verandas and waited to go home.
Hiraeth is a Welsh word. It means a longing for home; that heart-wrenching yearning for a place we used to be. No English word corresponds directly with “hiraeth.” More than homesickness, hiraeth is a desire for the essence of home, a thirst for the seductive distillation of something that almost used to be. That old idiom of never being able to go back home isn’t about things changing when the post office is pulled down to build a supermarket, or the neighbors move away; it means we can’t go home because home never really existed in the way we remember. We make shadow puppets from our memories, distorting details, suffocating the truth in the unrelenting black of time.
My students are tarnished by a week’s Thanksgiving vacation where they have eaten and slept with abandon. Today the sky is dark with snow and there are shadows on their faces. Putting my lesson plan aside, I tell them one of the three stories my grandfather brought home from his four years in a Japanese camp. A prisoner was being beaten close to death by the gold-toothed guard they called Yoshi. Something inside my grandfather snapped. He stepped forward, took the stick from Yoshi’s hand, and stood between the guard and the man. As a child I was allowed to touch the place where Yoshi had thrust a knife’s blade. The scars, one on each side of my grandfather’s hand, looked like incomplete moons. My grandfather told me he had urinated on the wound to stop infection spreading and I tell my students I like this part of his story best.
When the ship from Australia docked in a post-war Britain, the band played “Don’t Fence Me In.” Shoulder to shoulder, the POWs slowly marched into lives which looked a little like that which they had imagined. My grandfather wore a uniform he could no longer fill. He did not look to my grandmother like the man she had spent the past four years mourning after the telegram told her he was missing, presumed dead, and the only photo he had had of her had been swallowed with his ship. Married five years earlier, my grandfather and grandmother were strangers to one another.
Slowly, I am learning to place my students’ voices. Stayton has a long, slow Tennessean drawl, Maine-born Jonathan drops his ‘r’s, New Jersey Jay shrugs a lot and says “whaddever.” Few of them have travelled overseas and only a couple have been to England. Sometimes they ask me if I think I will ever go back home. On the parade ground, during each morning’s formation, they look the same as one another; their heads are close-shaved, their uniforms identical. Their faces are no different from the faces I have seen in photographs of English soldiers taken seventy-five years ago.
As a veteran, my grandfather was given a job at the steelworks. Back then the world was simpler, crueler: working men worked until they retired, the term “post-traumatic stress disorder” had not been coined, the concept of shell-shock belonged to an earlier conflict. My grandfather had survived. That was everything. They called him the Mad Marine. He gained an infamy of sorts for standing on the top rung of the tallest ladders and rocking back and forth, hundreds of feet above the ground. Neither gravity nor death bothered him much.
There are moments when fate shakes us loose from the narratives which held us safe and fast; fate turns the map upside down and laughs when the destination we had set our hopes and dreams on turns out to be somewhere else. In the suddenness of that moment, we find ourselves to be someone other than we thought.
In Lincolnshire dialect, home is pronounced ho-am, the rhythm of the word echoing the voices of the Anglo-Saxons who sailed up the river Trent and stole farmland from the Romans. People native to Lincolnshire—yellowbellies, as we are called—have roots in the earth. Perhaps it is centuries of farming that have filled our dialect with words for the weather. It doesn’t rain in Lincolnshire, it puthers and siles, drizzles and mizzles; snithe winds turn haar to mist. Home is where you hide from the storm.
My students want to become the kind of man my grandfather was, but the man I knew was a mardy codger, a miserable old bugger; irascible, cantankerous, he spent his mornings blacking out squares in the daily crossword so that his answers would fit, and his afternoons smoking in front of the telly with the volume turned high and his hearing aids disconnected. I adored him. He let me slip through the gates of his anger and, together, we would watch the show-jumping and horse-racing. Later, when I ran away from home, troublesome and uneasy in my teenaged skin, he wrote me long letters about a rural childhood on a family farm where he spent endless summer days playing with the farm horses. My greatest comfort was that he understood.
When I think of home, I think of this. Mornings at my grandfather’s house. Late to rise, he would sit unspeaking in his wooden kitchen chair while my child-sized fist wrapped the handle of a grown-up’s knife. I cubed bacon fat and cheese rinds and stale bread crusts; he smoked. Before the crumbs landed on the grass, my grandfather’s birds were all around me: a darkness of starlings, a business of sparrows, the silent dignity of the wood-pigeons, a solitary song thrush. My grandfather would watch, eyes rheumy, fingers nicotined yellow. After the birds were fed, he would tell me a story.
On the day my grandfather died, my father told me there had never been a family farm. There had never been farm horses. My grandfather’s childhood had been spent in motherless poverty in a small terraced house behind the steelworks. We sat in my grandfather’s kitchen—two daughters newly arrived in adulthood, an emptied wife, an only son—and listened to the alien footfall of undertakers struggling the coffin down the stairs. I knew in that moment that everything was fake. But, if my grandfather had been there, he would have seen straight through the carefully tended insouciance of my face; if my grandfather had been there, leaning back in his chair with a white vest stretched over the heft of his stomach and last night’s bristles coarse as pig hair on his chin, he’d have reached for his cigarettes and lighter, inhaled the morning’s first mouthful of smoke, and offered me a story. By the time I knew him, he didn’t understand why anyone might want anything else.
My students leave for their winter vacation and the Vermont sky is thick as curdled milk. Ice scratches the windows. There is no desolation more complete than the silence of birds when winter is at its worst. I am clinging to what I have left: enough wood stacked to let the stove burn ‘til May, enough food hoarded to weather the spring snow-dumps that will break the power lines and block the lane, enough hope to think my marriage might survive another year. Before he died, my grandfather told me the end is the end is the end; no heaven, no hell, no hauntings. But he has moved closer to me over the years and I smell cigarette smoke when no-one is near, glimpse his blue-eyed grinning out of the corner of my eye, feel the thick Lincolnshire slip of his dialect in the shape of my words. He’s the part of me who says this moment isn’t forever, who shines the steel that runs through my soul. He’s the reason I cube bacon fat and fill the bird feeder, then struggle through snowbanks hoping for a darkness of wings.
Zoe Fowler, originally from Lincolnshire, England, now lives and teaches English in Vermont. She is studying an MSt in Creative Writing at the University of Oxford and feels as though she spends her time with one foot on either side of the Atlantic Ocean.