A day like any other

(Winner of the 2023 PNR Creative Essay for Postgraduates)

I’m sitting in the front porch. I like to be here when I’m writing, I feel contained. I can look outside to the expanse of field beyond the fence. It is room enough for one, with a chair and a small round wooden table. The space is warmed by the sun when it shines or a small electric heater when, like today, it doesn’t. Looking out the sky is grey and empty. The swallows and swifts, all gone by early September, left a whisper in my thoughts, “it’s too early”. The emptiness of the yard echoes their silent absence.

On the table a small silver coloured plastic box. Inside, nestled in green plastic cushions, my hearing aids. My hearing contained. When the small instruments flash green and are fully charged I put them in my ears and the demand comes, “Listen”. These devices connect me to the communicating world. For the time being, while writing, I enjoy my silent world where I hear my inner voice more clearly.

My daughter called me this morning, not on the phone but on my laptop, so I could see her. A joy, as she lives in Malta with her Maltese husband and their two Maltese sons. Distance disappears when I see them on the screen, Iz zewg neputjiet mill-isbath. My two wonderful grandsons.

Lizza tells me they were woken at 6.00 a.m. by the entire building shaking. She assumed it was an earthquake, a common occurrence when tremors reach their island. She took the boys into bed and went back to sleep. Relatives then phoned with information; two streets away a fireworks factory had exploded. Hers was apparently the first building not to have lost all its windows. When she looked, she realised the metal doors at the back and front of their flat had been blown open, their catches twisted by the force of the blast.Television reports told her one man had been killed and two badly injured.

In Malta saints’ days are celebrated with fireworks produced in small, hidden factories peopled by families skilled to produce coloured explosions to delight the neighbourhood faithful. Occasionally an unplanned explosion takes place, but this time it was enormous. A tragic accident.

Lizza went out on her balcony to look at the damage further along the street. Her Syrian neighbour stood above her on his balcony. “I thought it was an earthquake,” she called up. “I didn’t” he replied, “I didn’t, I knew.”

I was reminded of the peoples for whom the sound of an explosion means something far from celebration, or accident.

In May 1941 an eighteen-year-old midshipman left Scapa Flow, in Orkney, on Britain’s largest warship, HMS Hood. This was his first posting and he may have felt youthful excitement - a burst of adrenaline waiting to sail sail and the order for battle stations. Surveillance planes launched from Orkney had spotted the battleship Bismarck, pride of the German Fleet, heading for the North Atlantic. Hood had been ordered in pursuit.

The ships encountered one another in the Denmark Straight, just to the east of Greenland. Bismarck quickly scored a direct hit on Hood and the aft shell magazine exploded, destroying the ship. By extraordinary chance, three sailors found themselves still alive in the freezing waters. The mighty Hood, held by its crew to be impregnable, had gone entirely, along with a ship’s company of one thousand four hundred and eighteen men. Midshipman Bill Dundas was one of those survivors. Eleven years later he became my father.

HMS Hood

 For the rest of his life he lived with the effects of that explosion, physically, mentally and emotionally. No-one spoke about it within the family, ever.

My father was a modest man, thoughtful, yet distant. By the time I became part of his life he was Lieutenant Commander. He retired from service when I was six. We moved to Argyllshire where he taught his children the value of self-reliance and stoicism. He hid from us the fact that he drank. Gin. From early in the morning until bedtime. He was never drunk, or loud.

Nor was he available. His eyes were always focussed elsewhere, and even when enclosed in his arms there was distance. I never knew my father with an adult heart. He died when I was twelve. I have only a child’s memory of who he was. I loved him.

There remain a great many words about that battle in the Denmark Straight. I have read most of them in search of my father. Contacted by writers to give background to who he was I always refuse. There is no truth in my adult brain providing information that only my child heart knew.

What I know now is thathe was not involved in an accident. That explosion was warfare where both sides are intent on destruction of the other. The unexpected part was the size of the explosion. As an adult I understand the extent to which my father was affected by the explosion, and the burden he must have carried, being alive when so many had died. He wanted nothing to do with being recognised for an accident of fortune. 

My search for him continued beyond his death.

At school I read the poems of Sassoon and Owen. He did not share their anger at the futility of war, but I recognised him in their words,

Who are these? Why sit they here in twilight?
Wherefore rock they, purgatorial shadows…
night comes blood-black;
Dawn breaks open like a wound that bleeds afresh
—Thus their heads wear this hilarious, hideous,
Awful falseness of set-smiling corpses. [1]

(‘Mental Cases’)  

No doubt they’ll soon get well; the shock and strain
Have caused their stammering, disconnected talk.
These boys with old, scared faces, learning to walk.
They’ll soon forget their haunted nights; their cowed
Subjection to the ghosts of friends who’d died… [2]

(‘Survivors’ )

By the time I encountered these poems my father had been dead for some years. I gazed at photographs of him, so often his look was of a boy who thought he might be in trouble, a half-smile of ‘forgive me’ playing on his lips.

On the main drive to a large house near here are lines of beech trees, reputedly planted by Napoleonic prisoners of war. Ancient, silvered bark sets them apart from their scattered descendants which form a community around them. Being among them brings solace. In a chapter on ‘Intimate Immensity’ Gaston Bachelard refers to forest peace being inner peace, an inner state. He quotes the poet Jules Supervielle who knows that in our peaceful moments we are ‘Sensitive inhabitants of the forests of ourselves.’ [3]

Were I to clear away some of the beech mast and leaf litter from beneath the trees, I might find fungi pushing towards the light. Apparently, these wonderful trees have long, almost invisible threads of mycelium connecting the trees one to another. Chemical messages travel along these threads carrying information about drought or invasive species and the trees respond in a manner which suggests mutual support. [4] Invisible threads of communication reflect the restlessness I feel in trying to find connection with what I understand of my father. Messages of shared experience, my father, the Syrian neighbour standing on his balcony in Malta, me, and countless others… but I am getting ahead of myself.

In the winter of 1977, I fell victim to a completely unpredictable domestic explosion. A cast iron kitchen range, against which I was warming my backside, exploded, taking me with it. What was an ordinary domestic situation- a warm kitchen on Friday night, became something else in a shorter moment than it takes to write about it. My life as I had known it disappeared, along with the house in which I was building that life. All that was trusted had gone.

Let’s not linger on burns and broken bones. After much care I emerged from hospital a changed person. I had lost my hearing, and my trust in the world as a safe place. But see what’s happening here? Look at what I’m doing, or rather not doing. I don’t want to talk about it, and even if I did I can’t. There are no words to describe the experience of explosion. The brain knows nothing of it when it happens. Life changes in a moment - that’s it. Where there are no words there is nothing.

Through the silent years of my recovery I felt more connected to my father except in one regard. I was involved in an accident. There was no intent on anyone’s part to harm me. It was not my fault. I lived through the years of television reports of victims of IRA bombings, and of explosions in the Falklands war.  Their threads of connection reached out to me. My mother, having lost her husband now had a daughter as distant from her as he had been. A space, a hollowness, an emptiness.

I found my mother reflected in Virginia Woolf’s novel, Mrs Dalloway. Lucrezia, an Italian woman, married to Septimus Warren Smith, a victim of shell shock from World War 1, sat next to him on a park bench, “Septimus!” said Rezia. He started violently. People must notice. “I am going to walk to the fountain and back,” she said. For she could stand it no longer. Dr. Holmes might say there was nothing the matter. Far rather would she that he were dead! She could not sit beside him when he stared so and did not see her and made everything terrible; sky and tree, children playing, dragging carts, blowing whistles, falling down; all were terrible. And he would not kill himself; and she could tell no one. “Septimus has been working too hard”—that was all she could say to her own mother. To love makes one solitary, she thought. She could tell nobody, not even Septimus now, and looking back, she saw him sitting in his shabby overcoat alone, on the seat, hunched up, staring’. [5]

When I started writing this, thoughts sparked by the explosion in the fireworks factory and the response of the Syrian neighbour, I was sure that being involved in an explosion in wartime, or as a victim of terrorism, is fundamentally different from experiencing an explosion as an accident. War, intention to kill. Accident, no responsibility. But now I think I’m wrong, and here’s why.

In 1917, 1941 and 1977 Post Traumatic Stress Disorder had not been identified or described; shell shock, trauma, lots of words to describe something that comes from the outside in. In the early days of PTSD it was seen as a psychiatric disorder. In my head was the question, what happens so deep inside it is indiscernible to the external observer?

In the local medical centre, waiting for an appointment with a GP about some minor ailment, I picked up a copy of the National Geographic Magazine. Inside was a headline ‘The invisible War on the Brain’, and a paragraph, followed by a description of an Art project with veterans, victims of blast injury. ‘Brain trauma from blast force is the signature injury of the Iraq and Afghanistan campaigns, afflicting hundreds of thousands of US combat personnel. Although unseen, the damage strikes deeply into a soldier’s mind and psyche.’ [6]

Unseen, unheard. A lot of science about how blast causes concussive shock waves in the brain which repeat. PTSD from the effect of blast is brain injury, not psychiatric disorder.I think about waves in the sea, a big one then smaller and smaller, ripples, repeating, washing grooves into the sand. The tide goes out, then it all happens again. I have different neural pathways in my brain which connect me, invisibly, to hundreds of thousands of people who have suffered blast injury.

That makes me want to dance. To dance with my dad, with the Syrian neighbour, with Septimus Warren Smith, with the man in the bomb shelter in Agota Kristof’s novel, The Notebook which describes the descent into depravity in wartime of twin brothers. They were taken into a bomb shelter by a man,

Suddenly, somewhere, bombs go off. The explosions get nearer. The man who brought us to the cellar runs over to a pile of coal in one corner and tries to bury himself in it. Some women snigger contemptuously. An elderly woman says: ‘His nerves are all upset. He’s on leave because of that. [7]

 I want to dance with him too, in all his sootiness. The waves are sweeping through his brain. Again.

The veterans, making papier-mâché masks to express what they couldn’t say to their loved ones, photographed in the magazine, move me to tears. They express what I lived too. Photograph after photograph, mask after mask, mouths closed, stitched, gagged or locked shut, images of prevented speech. [6] Veterans I don’t know mirror my experience. They took what was inside and wore it on their faces. Art expressing the inexpressible. The communicating threads strengthen. We might not be in the same forest, but the messages travel.

In Carl Phillips’ reflection, ‘On Restlessness’ he opens with, ‘I saw that restlessness was neither the problem nor the solution. Was just the fact. And though eventually it might break me, I would not refuse it’. Restlessness to understand what happened in my brain because of blast left me a clear decision. To accept vulnerability as a living state, knowing that nothing, not one single moment is guaranteed safe, or to close down from the joy of discovery of how this extraordinary vessel I call my body, my person, responds to the life I have lived and continue to live.

Phillips asks, ‘What is the relationship between restlessness and uncertainty’? He suggests, ‘here is a sensibility that … recognises vulnerability as a zone of possible illumination’. [8]

There is sadness that my father had no recourse to knowledge available now. My mother remained upset by a naval report written about Dad’s first posting after the Hood, ‘Dundas seems to show no detrimental effect of his experience.’ [9] It is now known that effects of blast injury may not show for months, even years after the event. Knowledge can be a bittersweet thing.

• References

  1. Wildred Owen, ‘Mental Cases’, Owen and Sassoon: The Edinburgh Poems, (Polygon, 2022) p. 68.

  2. Siegfried Sassoon, ‘Survivors’, ibid., 86.

  3. Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, (Penguin Books , 2014), p.205.

  4. Peter Wohlbern, The Hidden Life of Trees, translated: Billinghurst, Jane (Harper Collins 2017), p.50.

  5. Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway (Penguin, Random House, 2000), p. 22.

  6. Caroline Alexander, ‘The Invisible War on the Brain’, (National Geographic Magazine, February 2015), p. 35.

  7. Ágota Kristóf, Trilogy (CB Editions 2022), p.76.

  8. Carl Phillips, ‘On Restlessness’, New England Review, 30(1), 2009.

  9. Dundas, Lt Cdr R.N. W.J. Dundas, Service Record 1941-1958 (Private family archive)

• Biographical Note

  Jeannie MacLean is doing an MLITT Writing Practice and Study postgraduate degree at the University of Dundee.