Going Home Again

Psychologically, I have never fully left my birthplace in Crouch End, North London, England, N.8. Being born during World War II, growing up in the London ruins, and listening to family war stories kept me grounded and sure of my geography and history. Then an older sister, from my mother’s first marriage to a WWI veteran, met and married an American GI and paved the way for my parents, two brothers and me to move to America.

My father died two years after our arrival in the states and my mother was a widow again, with her three young sons. My older brother would soon join the US Army. My younger brother and I would join the US Navy. The three of us seemed to have an unstated understanding that we must lighten our mother’s load. We seemed to have been schooled early on in the “arc of the immigrant.” There seemed to be a sense that my brothers and I would best serve our mother by getting out of town. I went to Port Chicago, CA, north of San Francisco and the home port of ammunition ships, including my vessel, the USS Mount Baker AE 4. In time, I would understand why ammo ship would be parked so far from “civilization.”

Years later I would write the novel, “USS Bunker Kills: A Sea Story,” an historical, coming-of-age novel about a British immigrant who was assigned as an ammunition handler for a ship supporting early American involvement in Vietnam and the region. At five-hundred and seventy-four pages this account still seems like unfettered biography and psychology of war, born during the London blitz and recast in tonnage, expertise, and memories that have lasted a lifetime.

“Crouch End,” is a place on a North London map and a receptacle of my earlier psychology. The Clock Tower, in the middle of the Broadway and visible from the bedroom window, seemed central to the family’s movements and daily schedule. There were a few clocks in the household but none seemed to work or at least be on time, very likely having been wound into another dimension by the playful hands of three young boys searching for that secret link to a very dominant “Clock Tower” that served as calendar and memory bank. And often as anchor of play for my two brothers and me.

The Clock Tower, true to its history and place in my adolescent psychology, decades later become the cover image of my novel, Limey Down, a dark, comic novel of a British male’s immigration to Pittsburgh, PA. He has to face an anti-immigrant crowd, his father’s early death, and the family’s penury. Of course, he joined the Navy. And, of course, Crouch End was with him at all times, deep within his psyche. I got to know the young man. And I got to know myself very well, especially during storms such as Typhoon Nancy, that seemed to come very close to taking our ship down in 1963.

My Navy experience also prompted the poetry book, That Kingdom Coming Business, and the poem, “Holding the Wheel of a Ship During a Vietnam Replenishment.” “Yes, the wheel of a ship shakes when the bombs bounce in arcs from ship-to-ship, skimming the water and lurching heavily in hemp nets, dropping on the decks on the carrier with a thud, raising planes with the yaw of a catapult, triggered by heat.” In subsequent dreams I sensed these sounds were rooted in the war theater at 32A. Those sounds seem to be still “hanging fire.”

I suppose war has never really left me, though I must admit, studying Jungian psychology at the C.G. Jung Foundation in New York City for the last decade or so has helped substantially broaden my attitude toward war and life. Psychologist James Hillman’s book, A Terrible Love of War, has been particularly helpful, adding to my compass by arguing at some length that “Religion is War,” an anthem I am still chasing.

For the last couple of years, I have been back in that zone, writing “When War Becomes Us,” perhaps my final effort to reflect on my youth, the war, and my deep attachment to Crouch End, in part for its post-war recovery, enriched by the arts, technology and all the talent that has flocked to the place. I have returned to Crouch End more than a dozen times since my family left for America and have always been surprised by advances in the arts, technology, and culture. I still feel at home there after all these years.

As noted, the geography of my youth was largely visible through the windows of our Crouch End home. The Clock Tower, that universal timepiece, governed our days and nights, especially my father’s, who was a London policeman. It was an anchor and often a haven. Our flat was plagued with plumbing problems and the Tower served as an extension of our North London flat.

In many respects the London of my youth still had a faint look of a war zone with bombed out buildings, including across the street from our flat, where air raid shelters, some badly damaged, served as a play space for my two brothers and me. We found these spots dotted across north London.

Not surprisingly, these “Crouch End” memories have long been a part of my psyche and are finding a place in my novel mentioned earlier, “When War Becomes Us.” In some respects, the landscape remained the same, with Alexandra Palace still in plain view from our Crouch End flat but taking on a new import as a center for television and other technologies to serve London proper.

My father often mentioned that Alley-Pally served as a Belgian/Dutch refugee camp during WW II, as well as an internment camp for German prisoners. Growing up I heard stories of TV transmitters at the “Palace” that were used to jam Lufwaffe navigation signals during the Battle of Britain. I couldn’t get enough of these stories.

It seems the “fun” didn’t start at the Palace until after my family moved to the states, with appearances there over the years by Sean Connery, John Lennon, Ozzie Osbourne, the Grateful Dead and many others. It was a pleasure to read this history.

Later, it was Stephen King’s short story, “Crouch End,” in which characters lose their way, that really caught my attention. On reflection, this wasn’t an unfamiliar story, psychologically speaking, as I had, with my brothers, felt the same way leaving Crouch End for the states without really informing our friends per our parents’ orders and my father dying soon after our arrival. Then my brothers and I, struggling to survive the anti-immigrant rants, found a home in the American military. Then all the “Blimey Limey” chants stopped for the duration.

As noted earlier there was something ironic in that my first assignment in the US Navy was on an ammunition ship that served the early needs of America’s Vietnam War effort. My first response was that I got this assignment because I was an immigrant, until I had a fuller understanding of the selection process.

I don’t think I had a full notion of what it was meant to serve until shipmates and I were encouraged to donate blood during visits to Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It brought back memories of a brother from my mothers’ first marriage, who was part of the Allied effort, helping the A-bomb-ravaged cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I explore this and related subjects in an earlier volume of poetry “In the Shadow of the DMZ.”

I’ve been away from Crouch End for most of my life, but it has remained central to my psychological development and my efforts to understand war, pathology, and related psychologies. My oldest sister Pat, who was the daughter of a British World War I veteran, married an American GI who served in the Battle of the Bulge, and who never seemed to really outrun the war.

I must say I have tried hard to move beyond the martial sphere and embrace a fuller psychology of life. My PhD work at Lehigh University has helped, so have my study of Jungian psychology and a fuller appreciation of the feminine, as in my poetry book, “Set Pieces of the Feminine” and the novel, Chanting the Feminine Down.

My father wrote to my mother a few months before we followed him to America: “The boys will be better in the states.”

He was right.