Free Another World by Pat Barker Page A

book was on the interaction between the individual veteran’s memories of his combat experience, and the changing public perception of the war. Geordie, from the moment she met him, intrigued her, not merely because he was old enough to remember the trenches, and remembered them clearly, but because he had, at different stages of his life, coped with his memories in radically different ways.
    As a young man just back from France, Geordie refused to talk about the war, and avoided all reminders of it. Every November he wore a poppy, but he took no part in Armistice Day commemorations. Instead he went for a long walk in the country, returning well after dark, exhausted and silent as ever. Refused all questions. When obliged to speak stammered so badly he could barely make himself understood. This was the man Nick remembered.
    Then, in the sixties, Geordie began to talk about the war. Over the next three decades his willingness to share his memories increased and, as other veterans died around him, his own rarity value grew. In the nineties he was one of a tiny group of survivors who gathered for the anniversaries of the first day of the Somme, and most of the others were in wheelchairs. There were rewards in this for him. He was sought after, listened to, he had friends, interests, a purpose in life at an age when old people are too often sitting alone in chilly rooms waiting for their relatives to phone. But the sense of mission was genuine. His message was simple: It happened once, therefore it can happen again. Take care .
    And the stammer? The stammer vanished or, at least, was reduced to a slight hesitation that had the effect of concentrating his listeners’ attention on the next word.
    Helen was interested in the reasons for these changes, in the social forces that had obliged the young Geordie to repress his memories of fear, pain, bitterness, degradation, because what he had thought and felt at that time was not acceptable. A later generation, fresh from a visit to Oh! What a Lovely War , the Dies Irae of Britten’s War Requiem pounding in its ears, couldn’t get enough of fear, pain, etc. The horror, the horror. Give us more. Suddenly a large part of Geordie’s experience was ‘acceptable’, though still not all.
    Towards the end of the published interview, Helen attempted to get Geordie to see that he still hadn’t been asked to talk about class, the different experiences of officers and men, profiteering, the whole idea of the war as a business in which some people suffered and died to make others rich, though this bitterness, as much as the anguish of grief for lost comrades, had shaped and framed his experience of the post-war years. He was still, Helen believed, remaking his memories to fit in with public perceptions of the war, only now he was working to a different template.
    She tried to get Geordie to frame his war experience in terms of late-twentieth-century preoccupations. Gender. Definitions of masculinity. Homoeroticism. Homo- what? asked Geordie. Helen, with her Oxford First. Geordie, with his board-school education, shovelled into one dead-end job at the age of fourteen and then, aged eighteen, into another. It was an unequal contest. Geordie won.
    ‘Penny for them?’ Helen says.
    Nick feels cold glass against his fingers and takes the whisky. ‘Oh, I was just thinking about this.’ He shows her the book. ‘I don’t suppose you’ve still got the transcripts, have you?’
    ‘Yes, somewhere. In the department, I think.’
    ‘May I borrow them? I mean, I’d get them photocopied and let you have them back.’
    ‘No problem. I’ll look them out.’ She curls up on the sofa, and chinks the ice in her glass. ‘You know, I went with him to the Imperial War Museum and he was in the trench talking to these kids and they were saying, “Was it like this?” And he was saying, “Well, this is pretty good, but in the real trenches there were rats and dead bodies and horrible smells, and bombs