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Those were the memories he carried with him when he travelled back home to his wife, picking mud from his fingernails and thinking of all the things he would be unable to tell her.
And they are the memories he’s been shuffling around with all these years, unspoken because there is nothing to say, burying them deep down and finding them risen up again, the faces of the men, the smell of soil and flesh, the stumbling words of the chaplain drowned out by the distant noises of war.
And she doesn’t understand why he doesn’t want to put out his medal like a trophy.
And he can’t tell her that he liberated Europe with a spade.
Next door, at number eighteen, the young man with the blinking eyes leans out of his window and takes some final photographs of the street, his packing almost completed. He squints through the viewfinder and snatches the images in quick succession.
The boy with the yellow sunglasses poking at the barbecue.
The man with the burnt hands sitting on an old wooden chair.
The twins playing cricket, arguing.
A crane, looming brightly over the rooftops.
And on the way home I hardly say a word to Michael.
He concentrates on driving, making small adjustments to the heating, the stereo, the angle of his seat, the speed of the windscreen wipers.
I look out of the window, or close my eyes, and I think about the way of things now.
I think about my mother crying for a week, and I try to imagine her hard dry face changed in that way.
I picture precious water falling on desert ground and rolling across the surface like beads.
I picture a tap left on in a deserted house, reconnected at source and suddenly gushing forth with bright clean water.
And I picture my mother, actually, her face bloated and streaked, her eyes bloodshot and waterlogged, a handkerchief squashed into her hand like a sponge.
I wonder if she stayed in bed that week, buried in a mound of bedclothes, or if she stalked the house like an exorcist, or if she just fell to the floor beside the telephone and refused to move.
I wonder how my father felt when he heard her say the words, I’m safe now, if his heart leapt up inside him, I wonder if he was holding her at the time.
I remember that breakfast in the Little Chef again, a tiny brick building tucked into a valley of stone and pine and heather, I remember looking out of the window as though I was just waking up, saying where are we, looking up at the endless reach of the mountain into the sky.
And the whole thing creeps back to me, and I wonder how such important memories become veiled from us, like front rooms hidden behind net curtains.
My dad saying we’re in Scotland now, look at it love, this is Scotland, and me not understanding what he meant.
My mother slamming down her knife and fork so hard I thought she’d broken the plate, saying we’re not going, I can’t do it, we’re not going.
My dad talking quietly to her, trying to touch her hand and she kept moving it away.
Like two magnets face to face.
And he was talking so quietly that I couldn’t hear him, and I don’t think I would have understood if I could, and so I joined the dots on my placemat.
My mother saying you don’t understand I’m not going.
Leaving so quickly that I didn’t get a lolly even though I’d cleaned my plate, and not arriving back home until it was dark again.
I think about what it was that stopped her going, that made her feel unsafe for all that time.
I wonder how many ways there are for a mother to produce that wreckage in her own daughter, and my muscles tense as I think of them.
Locked doors, a belt, bruises in hidden places.
