“It’s not the same Krups!” Viola shouted at him. “They’re completely different. And anyway, the war ended nearly fifty years ago. Don’t you think it’s about time you got over it? Plus”—there was always a plus with Viola—“a lot of the workers in those factories you were bombing were slave labourers, Jews too. There’s an irony for you,” she said triumphantly. Case closed. Jury convinced.
Viola’s first car after her “emancipation” from Dominic (and four attempts at passing her driving test) had been an old VW Beetle and when Teddy had murmured something about “buying British” she had erupted with accusations of xenophobia. Later, after he’d been living in Fanning Court for several years, the cheap built-in oven that came with the flat gave up the ghost and Viola ordered a new Siemens one from Currys, without any consultation with Teddy. When the delivery men turned up with the oven he asked them (very politely) to put it back on the van and return it to the store.
“I suppose you bombed them too?” Viola said.
“Yes.”
He remembered Nuremberg (he could never forget), the last raid of his war, and in the briefing the intelligence officer—a woman—telling them that the Siemens factory there produced searchlights, electric motors “and so on.” He learned after the war that they had manufactured the ovens for the concentration camp crematoria and wondered if that was the “and so on.” During the war he had been introduced to a friend of Bea’s called Hannie, a refugee, and, although he knew it could mean nothing to Hannie now, it was for her that he made this rather paltry gesture towards Currys. Six million was just a number but Hannie had a face, a pretty one, little emerald earrings (“Costume!”), and she played the flute and wore Soir de Paris and had a family who had been left behind in Germany. There was a suggestion that Hannie was still alive when she was shovelled into the ovens at Auschwitz. (“One so wants to forgive them,” Ursula had said long ago, “and then one thinks about poor Hannie.”) So he didn’t really feel that he needed an excuse for not buying a German oven. Or for having bombed the living daylights out of them for that matter either. That wasn’t entirely true and he might have admitted it if he hadn’t been in an argument with someone as intransigent as his daughter. He had killed women and children and old people, the very ones that society’s mores demanded he protect. At the twisted heart of every war were the innocents. “Collateral damage” they called it these days, but those civilians hadn’t been collateral, they had been the targets. That was what war had become. It was no longer warrior killing warrior, it was people killing other people. Any people.
He didn’t offer this reductionist viewpoint to Viola, she would have agreed with it too easily, wouldn’t have understood the dreadful moral compromise that war imposed on you. Scruples had no place in the middle of a battle where the outcome was unknown. They had been on the right side, the side of right—of that he was still convinced. After all, what was the alternative? The awful consequence of Auschwitz, Treblinka? Hannie thrown into an oven?
Teddy looked at Sunny, slouched against the kitchen sink, and knew he could never communicate any of this to him.
What a pair of old farts, Sunny thought as the row in the kitchen continued, backwards and forwards like a game of table-tennis. He had enjoyed table-tennis (once, anyway) when he was a child, although Sunny wasn’t entirely convinced that he had ever been a child. They’d had a summer holiday—himself, Bertie and Grandpa Ted—in a big old dilapidated house somewhere, with a table-tennis table in a garage or a shed. It had been the best holiday of his life. There’d been horses (“Donkeys,” Bertie corrected) and a lake (“a pond”).
The argument in the kitchen ground on. Ha ha.
“So you bought a Philips coffee grinder instead?” Viola said. “And you’re going to tell me that their hands were clean during the war? No one’s hands are clean in a war.”
“Philips’s hands were pretty clean,” Teddy said. “Frits Philips was declared ‘Righteous Amongst the Nations’ after the war. That means he helped the Jews,” he explained to Sunny.
“Pah,” Viola said dismissively, indicating she was losing the argument.
Sunny yawned and wandered back out of the kitchen.