Black Dogs Read Free Page B

smile. Her going-away perm is too tight, too prim, and does not suit her at all. Spring sunshine illuminates the strands that are already cutting loose. She wears a short jacket with high padded shoulders and a matching pleated skirt – the timid extravagance of cloth associated with the post-war New Look. Her white blouse has a wide open V-neck daringly tapered to her cleavage. The collar is turned back outside the jacket to give her the breezy, English rose look of the Land Girl posters. From 1938 she was a member of the Socialist Cycling Club of Amersham. One arm tucks her handbag into her side, the other arm is linked with her man’s. She leans against him, her head well short of his shoulder.
    The photograph now hangs in the kitchen of our house in the Languedoc. I have often studied it, usually when alone. Jenny, my wife, June’s daughter, suspects my predatory nature and is irritated by my fascination with her parents. She has spent long enough getting free of them and she is right to feel my interest might be dragging her back. I put my face up close, trying to see the future life, the future face, the single-mindedness that followed a singular act of courage. The cheery smile has forced a tiny pucker of skin in the creaseless forehead, directly above the space between the eyebrows. In later life it was to become the dominant feature in a seamy face, a deep vertical fold that rose from the bridge of her nose to divide her forehead. Perhaps I am only imagining the hardness beneath the smile, buried in the line of the jaw, a firmness, a fixity of opinion, a scientific optimism about the future; the photograph was taken the morning June and Bernard signed up as members of the Communist Party of Great Britain at theheadquarters in Gratton Street. They are leaving their jobs and are free to declare their allegiances which throughout the duration of the war have wavered. Now, when many have their doubts after the Party’s vacillations – was the war a noble liberating anti-fascist cause or predatory imperialist aggression? – and some are resigning their membership, June and Bernard have taken the plunge. Beyond all their hopes for a sane, just world free of war and class oppression, they feel that belonging to the Party associates them with all that is youthful, lively, intelligent and daring. They are heading off across the Channel to the chaos of Northern Europe where they have been advised not to go. But they are determined to test their new liberties, personal and geographical. From Calais they will be making south for the Mediterranean spring. The world is new and at peace, fascism has been the irrefutable evidence of capitalism’s terminal crisis, the benign revolution is at hand, and they are young, just married and in love.
    Bernard persisted with his membership, with much agonising, until the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956. Then he considered his resignation long overdue. This change of heart represented a well-documented logic, a history of disillusion shared by a whole generation. But June lasted only a few months, until the confrontation on her honeymoon that gave this memoir its title, and hers was a profound alteration, a metempsychosis mapped in the transformation of her face. How did a round face become so long? Could it really have been the life, rather than the genes, that caused that little crease above the eyebrows pushed up by her smile to take root and produce the wrinkle tree that reached right to the hairline? Her own parents had nothing so strange in their old age. By the end of her life, by the time she was installed at the nursing home, it was a face to match the elderly Auden’s. Perhapsyears of Mediterranean sunshine toughened and buckled the complexion, and years of solitude and reflection distended the features, then folded them in on themselves. The nose lengthened with the face, and the chin did too, then seemed to change its mind and attempt the return by growing outwards in a