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- Herausgeber: Salt
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
Astral Travel, about a charismatic but troubled Irishman and his effect on his family, explores the way that the secrets forged by cultural, religious and sexual prejudice can reverberate down the generations. It's also about telling stories, and the fact that the tales we tell about ourselves can profoundly affect the lives of others. In a framing narration that exposes the slippery and contingent nature of story, an adult daughter, brought up on romantic lore about her now dead father but having experienced him very differently, tells how she tried to write about him, only to come up against too many mysteries and clashing versions of the family's past. Yet when a buried truth emerges, the mysteries can be solved, and, via storytelling's power of empathy, she finally makes sense of it all.
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Seitenzahl: 532
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020
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ASTRAL TRAVEL
ELIZABETH BAINES
CONTENTS
ASTRAL TRAVEL
xii
AFTER AND BEFORE
It was the winter I discovered I had a cyst in my belly, grown all without my knowing, and my sister’s heart started banging as if it wanted the hell out of there now.
I went over on the train to the hospital she’d been taken to and rushed down the corridor and into the ward. She was sitting up, dark curls on end, still hooked to the monitor, but they’d given her a shot and her heart rate was back to normal. She was scowling, reminding me of our father, because they wouldn’t let her out of bed and she badly needed to pee.
There was a bed pan on the cover near the bottom of the bed. I said, ‘Use it, I’ll draw the curtains.’ She said, ‘You’re joking! Here?’ and looked around in horror at the drugged or sleeping patients each side and the curtains drawn on the bed opposite.
It’s a small town, of course, the one she still lives in, where our parents settled at long last when we were in our teens, and where she’s been a librarian all her adult life. She has her mystique to keep up.
The nurse came along and said my sister was OK now, her heartbeat had been normal for four hours, she could ring her husband to come back from his work to fetch her. As she took off the last plug my sister jumped from the leash and fled to the lavatory near the nurses’ station, slamming the door with a sound that rang round the ward.
2I didn’t tell her about the cyst. And of course, the heart-thumping matter of the novel I had written, the novel about our family, wasn’t mentioned. By then the subject was completely avoided.
When I was six and my sister was four, she came down with scarlet fever, the one other time she was ever in hospital, carted off to an isolation hospital in the north Welsh hills.
We had only just moved from south Wales, the first of what would be several moves.
I sat outside the hospital in the car with my father, our baby brother asleep in the back in the carrycot, while our mother went in to visit her. Someone held her up at a hospital window for me to see her, but what I saw didn’t look like my sister, like Cathy: we were too far away and the window seemed to be frosted; all I could see was a pink thing that made me think of a shrimp. I guess we must have gone at bath time and they were in the bathroom.
For years afterwards Cathy would recount the horror of that time, considering it one of her major childhood traumas: the enforced baths in Dettol; the compulsory drink of sickly Ovaltine at bedtime; being made to march beforehand down the central aisle with the other children, with their various strange accents, singing a song she didn’t know in which you claimed to be something called an Ovalteenie, although she had no idea what that was.
Knowing nothing of this, cut off from my sister for the first time since I crawled across my mother’s exhausted body 3to look at her newborn face and exclaim in wonder, ‘Is she ours?’, I felt a new bleakness and sense of loss. The hills outside the car window were alien and bare, and my father was broody and silent beside me, which was how he had been since we’d moved here.
And there was something that had recently come to me, a disappointing realisation. I wanted to ask my father about it.
He’d seen fairies, he’d said, in Ireland where he was born, and even here in north Wales. He insisted upon it. I’d looked and looked, desperate to see them myself, but never had. And now I had read that they didn’t exist.
‘Daddy?’
He didn’t respond in the way he would have done once, with a languid, crooked-toothed, teasing grin. He didn’t turn to me. His eagle-nosed profile was a stony sculpture against the car window. He was smoking, of course.
‘Hm?’ He sounded faraway, abstract.
‘Daddy, fairies don’t exist, do they, really?’
He didn’t answer.
I persisted. ‘Well, it’s like Father Christmas, isn’t it?’
He had gone completely still, and I knew what I’d done. I’d forgotten that he didn’t even know I knew about Father Christmas. My mother had said better not tell him, he’d be disappointed.
‘Daddy?’ He was still silent.
Finally he said, ‘No,’ with such frozen shock and, yes, such flat disappointment, that I was filled with guilt and dismay. And a sense that things between me and my father would never be the same again.
Well, that’s how I remember it. But what do I know? Things 4get lost, memory can be muddled. As I say, by then, by the time we sat outside the hospital in the hills, my father had already changed. He was no longer the father who took me with him on his insurance rounds, rattling in the little Austin Seven down the flickering country lanes of south Wales, zooming up to the hump-back bridges with a grin, fag in the one hand on the wheel or stuck behind his ear, laughing his head off as I left the leather seat and squealed with delight. By this time, probably, he’d starting hitting us.
And it wasn’t as if I went on not believing in fairies. I wanted to believe in them, or rather I didn’t want not to. After that day, on Sunday outings to those hills I’d take a bag of silver charms I’d cut from the tobacco-smelling silver paper from my father’s cigarette packets, hearts and flowers, bows and stars and sickle moons. I’d scatter them in the gorse, an offering and a plea for the fairies to appear and prove themselves.
As I begged for the silver paper and he handed it over, my father would snigger.
And a lot of what I remember is not the same as what the others remember, which was partly what caused the trouble when I tried to write a novel about it all.
PART ONE
In which, against all previous likelihood, I begin to try to write a book about my father
6
PATRICK
My father had been dead ten years before I thought of writing about him. I surprised myself: there was a time when it was the last thing I’d have thought of doing. I’d put my father behind me for good, or so I thought.
It was the first of January, the first day of the new millennium. My kids had left home and I’d given up editing and publishing a literary magazine (twelve hours a day, in those days before you could publish at the press of a button). A fresh start, it seemed, a time to hope naively that all the conflicts of the old century were behind us, men against women, races and religions against one another, Manchester rebuilt after the IRA bomb. And Patrick Jackson, my volatile, contradictory and entirely unfathomable father, around whom we’d always had to tiptoe, long scattered on the spot in the narrow field above the sea in south Wales where he and my mother had first started courting.
I came back from the millennium parade in the city centre and sat down at my desk, and what popped into my head was the night my father died and the moments after he’d gone.
I was sitting then on the floor beside his bed and his newly dead body. I closed my eyes and behind my lids stars rushed towards me, as they did on the computer screensavers they had in those days. And then the ground rushed up, and I was zooming, flying low over a peat bog, rising and dipping with the subtle contours, towards the cottage I’d never seen but somehow knew, in which my father was born. 8
Of course I was dreaming – he had died in the early hours and we were all exhausted – but, still, I was spooked. I opened my eyes sharpish and stood up.
But now that sensation came back to me, and almost without thinking, I picked up my pen and wrote this:
He is falling, falling once more, this time through the legendary tunnel, out of the life he clung to against all the odds.
A light at the end, and he’s gobbed, spat out, and lands in a heap. He sits up, looks around. He can’t see much, the quality of light is strange, too bright yet somehow shadowed. There’s a sound, a huge hiss, some kind of breathless pressure, like steam …
It comes to him, he understands: it’s the sound of a water heater. He’s in a transport caff, one of those shacks on the trunk roads he travelled all those years. Slowly things come into focus: the rickety tables, the chequered oilcloths, the greasy bottles of vinegar and HP sauce and tomato ketchup.
It was like automatic writing.
I was half shocked by the way the scene had surfaced in my mind unbidden, the somatic sense that had come to me of my father idling in transport caffs all the times in my childhood when he’d been out or away, when we’d felt him only as a black absence.
I was now gripped by the fluid way the writing had emerged. Next day I went out and, for the second time only in my life on my own behalf, bought a packet of cigarettes, and laid them on my desk as a visual and olfactory aid.
The smell of cigarettes. The smell of my father. 9
I picked up my pen again and it seemed to go on along the page as if independent of me:
In this heaven, or hell, Patrick gets to his feet. He’s awkward and stiff, but all the pain of the last few weeks is gone.
The place is empty apart from one other man, a gnarled stringy feller like one of those men he once managed on the power-station sites, in a filthy tweed jacket and Fair Isle sweater, with wild dark hair and big bad teeth he’s showing in a grin. He waves Patrick over.
Patrick is suspicious. He’s hail-fellow-well-met, Patrick, but he’s also a snob. ‘Do I know you?’ he asks – matey, of course: always cover your back, that’s Patrick.
The feller doesn’t answer. He sniggers as if it’s a really good joke, and Patrick’s a bit unsettled. But the urge for a fag overcomes him. ‘You don’t have a cig, do you, pal?’
With a nod and a wink the guy pats his chest and pulls out a packet, and flicks it open, and there’s the row of orange-beige filters, pushed up like the pipes of an organ about to burst into glorious music. As the guy digs for his lighter, Patrick draws the silky stick under his nose, breathing in the perfume-clinical smell. And then, after all those weeks of dying, the smoke is curling down his bronchioles again, the cool clean burn steadying his shaken limbs.
A cup of tea appears in front of him, just as he always liked it, the colour of old leather. The guy pushes the sugar bowl towards him, the crystals caked and coloured caramel where others have pushed in wet spoons.
It’s a damn good cuppa.
‘So where are we?’ Patrick asks, snapping the cup back on the saucer. 10
The feller doesn’t answer. He bounces his bird’s nest eyebrows and there’s a sneaky look in his eyes, and this is when Patrick decides he can’t be trusted.
He has to get out of here.
He downs the cuppa. He stands. The chair scrapes with an aching sound, the air gels in a sunbeam slicing the room. In the gloom beyond, the thin arm of the waitress drops like a broken wing.
‘So long!’ Patrick calls to the waitress, and he’s through the door and out in a car park on windswept moors.
But the feller’s right behind him. And there’s nothing in the car park but the feller’s vehicle, an old Ford Escort. Not Patrick’s Rover, nor any of the vehicles he left in car parks like this down the years, the bright-blue sixties Ford Anglia, the motorbikes and vans, the Austin Sevens with their wooden dashboards drenched in the sun of stolen afternoons.
The feller unlocks his Escort and twitches his head for Patrick to hop in. ‘Where to?’ he asks Patrick, his tone magnanimous, as if he’s offering a ride in a chariot not a boneshaker, dashboard covered in dust, sweet packets and tissues and cans littering the floor. And ironic: because, of course, for the first time ever, Patrick doesn’t know where there is to go.
‘You’re the boss,’ Patrick tells the feller grimly, and the guy turns the key.
The engine coughs, whines, then peters out.
Patrick might have known.
He tries again; the engine whimpers, expires again.
Now Patrick is stranded, unless he breaks his lifetime promise to himself and gets his hands dirty for someone else.
There’s nothing for it. He tells the guy to release the 11bonnet and gets out. Wouldn’t you know it: distributor leads touching.
The leads are separated. Patrick tucks the rag back in its corner. He straightens. He reels. Maybe bending just after dying wasn’t so clever. He steadies. He looks around. He’s no longer on the moor. There are trees, oak leaves spilling dapples of shadow. He’s in the garage at Ballymoyne, aged fifteen, wiping his hands on a rag and vowing to get away as soon as he can and never get his hands dirty for a living again.
I stopped writing. I knew where this last had come from. It was one of the tales we grew up with, my sister and I, Cathy and Jo Jackson, the tale of our father in the garage at Ballymoyne.
When we first moved to north Wales, when we were six and four, our mother started telling us stories of the past. Plucked summarily for our father’s work from rural Llanfair in south Wales and transported to the seaside town of Prestatyn, we were homesick, the three of us, Cathy and I and our mother. We longed for the fields, fringed with creamy primroses in spring, for the lanes pungent with cow dung, the stroke of grey road leading down to the Bristol Channel and the quiet beach with its bank of clean-washed pebbles. Above all, Nanny and Grampa, our mother’s parents, in their pink thatched cottage down the hill from the village, tucked beneath towering elms and the high ivy-covered walls of the farm and the manor house nearby. Our minds went back there constantly, and after lunch on Saturdays, in the poky kitchen of our flat above the office of the insurance company our father worked for, our father out on his rounds, our mother would push aside the greasy egg-and-chip plates and the dishes 12smeared with jam and semolina, and while the baby slept in the gloom beyond the sunbeam, she’d tell us stories of her childhood and youth there, and of the time she met our father and was first married to him.
By contrast, our father never talked about his past, but when he first met our mother he had told her a bit about his childhood in Ireland, which he’d wanted to escape, and did, and she passed these stories on to us.
He was the eldest of six children, she told us, in a one-room cottage at a crossroads, with a dirt floor.
‘A dirt floor?!’ I cried, the first time she told us.
There was just a tiny alcove off, where he said a mad aunt and a couple of his sisters slept. Our father, for a long time the only boy, slept in a truckle-bed pulled out of a cupboard beside the peat fire.
The fact that he went barefoot, even in winter.
‘Barefoot? Even in winter …?!’ We couldn’t imagine it.
‘Yes,’ Mummy nodded. ‘I was shocked when he first told me, I found it hard to believe. And although he was clever, for a while he didn’t even go to school.’
It was too many miles off, and his mother needed him to help with things like fetching water, so she taught him to read and write herself. But then, one day when he was seven, just as he was bringing the bucket back from the well, the schoolmaster happened to pass by the cottage.
‘How old is that boy?’ the master asked his mother. And there and then in the road he tested our father, Patrick, on his spelling, and our father got every single word right, including the last and most difficult, the word for a female sheep, ewe.
‘This boy,’ the master pronounced, ‘is too clever not be at 13school. Bring him in September. But get him some good tough shoes and cut his hair.’
His hair, our mother explained, was down to his shoulders, and blond, white-blond, though nowadays it was a crinkled dirty yellow. It was my father from whom I’d got my strange albino-blond hair, so different from our mother’s and Cathy’s and the baby’s.
I would think of the scene: my seven-year-old father, just a bit older than I was now, standing staring through the flying silver wires of hair, staring and scowling the way I was always being told not to, his skin dark from the sun the way mine and Cathy’s went too, dust from the road between his bare toes.
By the time he was ten the cottage at the crossroads was so overcrowded he was sent to sleep at his grandfather’s house two miles off in the village, but every day after school he had to go back and work in the vegetable plot behind the cottage or fish in the lake for the family’s meals.
‘He was a bit of a terror, though,’ she would say, wryly laughing. When he was ten or so, he and another boy caught a goose and put it in a sack and climbed onto a roof and pushed it down the chimney to terrify the old man sitting by the fire below.
He was a terror, still, or, rather, he had been when we lived in Llanfair in south Wales. Once in Llanfair I’d watched a young woman run screaming from our garden with earwigs down her back, while our father, the practical joker, bent over double at the gatepost laughing. And as for climbing a roof, well, I knew he’d have no trouble: there were pictures of him in the air force doing handstands on the backs of chairs or holding up another man standing on his shoulders. 14
He was slimmer then, but he still had those big rounded muscles: he went to weightlifting now in Prestatyn. They were iron-hard, his muscles, I knew: I’d dared to touch them when he lay on the living-room floor doing what he called his yoga, which he said he’d learned in the RAF.
The first time, I thought he was dead. He lay flat on his back, bare muscly arms spread and palms upturned, corrugated hair spilling on the brown-and-beige carpet with the orange flowers and stripes in the corners, eagle nose pointing upwards, long nostrils vertical. He didn’t seem to be breathing. I ran to our mother. She laughed and told us that the first time she saw it she’d thought that, too, and she’d actually fainted.
So I dared to creep back and touch those muscles. I had to make myself do it, in a way I wouldn’t have done once: I put my finger out carefully and gingerly pressed. And the skin didn’t yield, didn’t feel like flesh at all.
So yes, Mummy went on, that schoolmaster saw our father’s ability and promise, and so he went to school. But then, once he left, what was there for a boy from a poor family to do but work as a menial mechanic in a garage? And so he made his vow of escape.
One night when he was sixteen, he put a small tin of treasures – a round pebble, a Stone Age flint and a black-bird’s egg – deep in the yew hedge in front of the cottage, for the day in the future when he’d return triumphant, driving a Rolls. And next day he was on the boat for England with his cardboard suitcase.
He went to stay with one of his mother’s two sisters who lived in Birkenhead in little red-brick terraces near the docks. The first night there, our mother told us laughing, he climbed 15out of the window and down the drainpipe to wee in the yard, because all they’d had in rural Ireland was a pit in the field, he’d never used a proper toilet before.
We wondered at that, and laughed too, yet I’d think of how nervous or puzzled and embarrassed he must have been.
I could now see a plan for what I was writing: my father forced in the afterlife to revisit the scenes of his life.
I went on:
Patrick hears footsteps behind him in the garage at Ballymoyne. Alert and taking no chances, he’s slammed down the bonnet and is into the car. And there’s his wild-haired companion beside him, and he’s on the moors in the afterlife again.
‘What the hell is this?’ he demands. ‘Bloody time travel?’
The feller opens up his palms. ‘Not exactly. The past is all around you here. You’ve got to make an effort, though, to see it properly.’
Well, that’s all right, then, thinks Patrick. It’s not an effort you’d catch him making. Never look back, that’s Patrick.
The guy is leaning on the wheel now, looking out at the near horizon with its mounds of heather like a heaving sea. He turns his head towards Patrick, almost underarm, his dark pupils burning in the hot white of his eyes, and suddenly Patrick knows where he’s seen him before.
He was on the boat from Ireland that day in 1932. Patrick was leaning on the rails. Gold and silver coins of sun on the water, the Wicklow hills sinking away as the ship reached the open possibilities of sea, the smoke from the funnel scoring a fading marker down the route it had come. He looked up and straight into the eyes of a wild-haired feller standing beside 16him, staring almost underarm. He had a moment’s unease. And then he dismissed it, discounted the stranger.
And now here he is in the afterlife, the feller, and Patrick’s stuck with him.
The guy is starting the engine, and this time it surges into life. They nose out of the car park and up the brow of the hill. Patrick cheers up. He’s always loved travel, was always up for adventure, and he’s looking forward to a new, panoramic view. But when they get to the top there’s another rise beyond and on the right the black wall of a pine plantation. The road forks, upwards on the left and on the right into the trees.
‘Which way?’ the guy asks, shrugging and ironic.
No contest: it’s the open road for Patrick. ‘Left.’
‘Oh, that’s another thing,’ the guy says. ‘If you won’t make an effort you can be forced.’
With that he swings right and into the forest, and as soon as they’re in, the road plunges downhill. He puts his foot down, and they’re plummeting, sun strobing through the treetops; they hit a rock and Patrick’s thrown, he’s falling, falling through bright air into the shadow of a high metal cliff, the side of a ship –
This was another story our mother told us, the story of our father falling down the side of a ship into the water.
After working for some months on the Birkenhead docks, she said, he went as a deckhand on a ship that called in at Sydney, Australia, which happened to be where another aunt, his father’s sister, lived. This aunt, Aunt Lizzie, had come up in the world: she’d once had a love affair with a famous 17matinee idol who’d bought her a whole string of businesses in Sydney. Well, of course our father wanted to impress her, but when he stepped on the gang-plank in Sydney harbour, wearing a new suit with big brown windowpane checks that he didn’t know was no longer in fashion, he slipped and went over the side into the water, the first of many falls.
As I wrote, I described it the way I had always imagined it: the glittering harbour, the high Australian sun, my father in his wide-checked suit looking like Charlie Chaplin. As a child I’d seen photos of the young Charlie Chaplin, and he looked like my young father: that crinkly hair, those deep-set eyes – except that, actually, I thought, my father was more handsome. The jacket plucked from his back as he falls, the baggy trousers lifted from his calves. And then, down between the ship and the harbour wall, his check shoulders and the almost-empty cardboard suitcase bobbing.
And on the quay his Aunt Lizzie. I always pictured her as stately yet cosy, elegant yet comfortable, in a plum-coloured dress, the thirties colour that my Nanny and great aunts in Llanfair still wore, shoes with little buttons, and a cloche hat on her head. I imagined her seeing my father for the first time and marvelling. She was stricken at once, our mother told us, with the handsome son of her brother, albeit wearing a ridiculous suit and dripping. I imaged him seeing her admiration, expecting it by now; by now, aged nineteen, he’d be fully aware of the power of his good looks and charm. I imagined the sleek black car I thought she must have been driving, her delighted glances at him sideways as she drove, rich childless spinster with a long-lost lover, desperate for someone on whom to lavish attention and affection, to treat 18like a son. The more fashionable suit she took him to buy and paid for, and the final scene our mother had always described:
Days later his ship is leaving; she is sad, devastated even, to see him go. On the morning before he sails she takes him to stand in front of one of her businesses and tells him that if he comes back and settles in Sydney, then that business, and all her others, will one day be his.
I saw it as I’d seen it all my life (though it has to be said that for many years I never gave it a thought, when my father was something I’d put from my mind), and the words flowed from my pen:
He’s hurtling again, on to 1938, speeding on a bike down the hill at Llanfair, twenty-one years old, an airman recently arrived at the training camp nearby, about to meet Gwen for the very first time.
My mother, Gwen. As the years went by I would see this scene opening out from the centre like an early film: my father, skimming in the dusk down the hill (it’s late October), the dark elms flicking each side, the double headlights on his bike – already in the camp he’s famous for his madcap excesses – carving a double scoop of light down the deep-shadowed lane. They score the stone-walled curve at the bottom, gulp over the crossroad where the cottage and the cowshed nestle beneath the canopy of trees, swing right and flash in tandem round the farm-building bends, then fly out on the open straight road to the sea.
It’s lighter out there. Ahead in the dusk there’s a knot of people walking seawards. Two airmen he knows, with two girls.19
It was my mother who would tell us this tale, of course, but it was only at this point that I would see it from her perspective: hear him screech to a stop just behind, turn to see the two skewed headlamp eyes, watch him alight, his feet seeming hardly to touch the ground.
I would hold that moment, a moment pregnant with consequence, imagining bats flitting through the dusk, the sea beyond the hedge and the narrow field breathing as if alive.
‘Hey Jack!’ the other two airmen cried. Jack, he had them call him in the air force, our mother told us: he wouldn’t have them call him Paddy. When he got to know our mother he asked her to correct him if he came out with what he called any Irishisms – not that he ever lost his accent, or stopped saying filum.
‘Show us your handstand, Jack!’ the other airmen cried. And our father, Patrick, set off running with his bike, one hand on the saddle and the other on the handlebar, and then flipped up his legs and balanced on his hands on the moving bike.
‘I thought he was a madman!’ Mummy would say, dipping in and out of the sunbeam in the gloomy kitchen as she laughed. But of course it was impressive, I took it for granted she’d be impressed and attracted. It surprised me therefore, and unsettled me, to learn that it wasn’t Mummy our father first starting courting, as she called it, but her sister Molly, two years older, the other girl on the road that night.
Of course, I realised as I grew, my mother was really then just a child. Now, all these years later as I sat at my desk, I saw her as I guessed he’d have seen her then, as I’d seen in photos of her taken at the time: fourteen years old and small and underdeveloped for her age, her straight black hair cut in 20a shingle and held back with a schoolgirl clip. It was Molly, a busty sixteen, working as a maid in the Manor, whom our father walked his bike beside as they all went back up the road. He probably didn’t even notice my mother, lagging behind (as she told us), playing a childish game with one of the other airmen, tossing his cap ahead in the air and running to be the one to catch it.
But perhaps later, years later, after all that happened, he’d look back at that moment and see a look on my mother’s face at once shy and brazen, that mixture of impulses that I came to see as typical of her: a yielding politeness shot through now and then with a contradictory critical appraisal.
And so, in the novel I was writing, in the fall from the afterlife into that moment, that was how I made him see her, prefiguring all that would come after.
And then he joined up with Molly, the bike chain ticking in the darkness. And they reached the knot of buildings at the top, the velvety foliage and high stone walls closing round with the certainty of a long-established and intimate community that must have been balm to my father, I always thought, a young man far from home, who’d grown up in straitened circumstances.
The pink-washed cottage beyond the crossroads, glowing, floating in the dark like the ship its Tudor beams had been taken from, two hydrangea bushes moored each side of the little wicket gate. The step down to the door – they invited the airmen in – and beyond the little porch, the flags of the one big room flickering with firelight. Gwen’s mother, plump Nanny, her hair coiled in the two earphone plaits she still sometimes wore when I was a small child, rising from where she’d been knitting beside the big range, holding out her palms the way 21she always did, in comfortable surprise and welcome. And Grampa, our beloved Grampa, Gwen’s father, in his braces and rolled shirtsleeves, the spike of bristly hair sticking up on his head. And from behind the range, the sound of crickets, a ticking heartbeat in the cottage walls.
PATRICK AND GWEN
Right from the start, before they even started courting, our mother said, she and our father quarrelled. She always laughed as she told us. In those early days we’d laugh too, but later, privately, ironically, we’d tell ourselves and each other it was no surprise.
‘Well, you know your father,’ she’d laugh (a laugh that got tighter and grimmer down the years). ‘He could argue the hind legs off a donkey! He’ll argue black is white and left is right!’
‘People warned me not to marry him!’ she’d say, laughing.
They first quarrelled, she said, about the principle of torque, which our father had learnt as a trainee airman fitter but which our mother had never heard of in grammar-school science: the idea that no object can exert a force on another without having the other exert a force on it in turn, making a nonsense of everyday notions of push and pull. Our mother thought that was nonsense, and I could always imagine her: a cocky schoolgirl whose best subjects, she said, were science, absolutely sure of her view, consciously pricking his airy-fairy bubble, just as throughout our childhood, in spite of telling me not to spill about the fairies, she did.
She had the backing of a stable, respectable village community; she was a Sunday-school teacher, from the age of thirteen she’d been the chapel organist; she was getting a grammar-school education. So maybe right away he felt resentful towards her. But I also suspect he felt superior, too: 23not only was he eight years older, he had special skills. She could read music, and he couldn’t, but he had the magical talent of picking up any instrument and playing by ear; he could diagnose a plane’s engine simply by putting his ear to the metal frame; he had his athletic skills. He could lift my schoolgirl mother one-handed over his head, palm under her belly, and, held on high like that, she told us, she’d spread her limbs in a star-shape like a circus artiste.
But of course my mother quickly grew up, and of course she found him attractive. Of course in the end they were mutually attracted, I took that for granted, in spite of, or even because of, the challenge they gave to each other.
It was my father, though, once things had petered out with Molly, who fell head over heels in love. Always the more pragmatic, my mother had her eye on her studies and a career, and, besides, our father would soon be moved on with his unit.
The morning they moved on, she said, milling with their backpacks on the little leafy station, she was there too, waiting for her own train to grammar school in her uniform, the adjustable gymslip with the buttons on the shoulders, that had to just touch the floor when she kneeled, the straw boater and black thick stockings.
Our father had promised, though she hadn’t asked or expected him to, that every time he was moved on he’d write and tell her, so she’d always know where he was. As soon as he arrived at the new base he did just that, making a point of telling her that all the airmen on the train who’d crowded behind him at the window as he waved goodbye had declared her a peach.
She wrote back, ironically flirtatious: ‘It must have been the black stockings!’ but she didn’t write again. 24
He kept his promise, though. Every time he moved on he wrote to let her know, letters to which, since she hadn’t agreed to receive them, she never replied. She turned her mind to her coming Matric. And now that the war had begun, there were dances for the service people every Saturday in the village hall, or up at the air force and army camps. She loved to dance. (And one thing about our father was that, in spite of his graceful athleticism, he’d never learnt to dance.) She was never short of partners, or, as a matter of fact, she would tell us with a laugh, offers of marriage.
Well, of course. Once she grew up, my mother looked like the actress in Gone with the Wind, only, actually, I thought, prettier. I would sit beside her in my parents’ Prestatyn bedroom looking at our two reflections in the dressing-table mirror as she applied her wisps of makeup: a dab of powder, a quick spit of mascara, a flick of red lipstick. Me on one side with my fuzzy-but-straight albino hair, my square flat face, my sticking-out teeth (I sucked my thumb) and specs (by the age of seven I was short-sighted), and my mother on the other, with her heart-shaped face, her stark black hair swept back in waves, the winged eyebrows, the plump lips.
Well, anyway, she told us: it all backfired. She passed her Matric with flying colours and the school announced she was university material, but Nanny and Grampa had decided that with all this dancing and so many young men competing to woo her, she’d soon be married. They wouldn’t let her stay on. She had to leave, and went to work at a chemist’s in the next village instead.
By the age of six or seven I understood that people of Nanny and Grampa’s generation had an old-fashioned view that women shouldn’t have ambitions, and that, though she 25never sounded bitter, our mother had suffered for that. And she’d tell us as we grew – smiling ironically – how her brother Gwilym, our Uncle Gwilym who still lived with Nanny and Grampa and whom we loved almost as much, would come in from the farm before taking off his coat and drop husks and grain all over the flags. And Nanny would tell our mother or Molly to go and sweep them up, ignoring our mother’s complaints. And how, once they started work, both Molly and our mother were expected to contribute to the household income, but Gwilym wasn’t, since he was a boy and would have to save up to buy his own farm.
However, Nanny and Grampa’s decision was a self-fulfilling prophecy: our mother went and fell in love with an airman, a man called Arnold Hitchins, and, since university now seemed a far-off dream, she agreed to marry him.
Arnold Hitchins. A name that sounded through our childhood, though never mentioned in front of our father. He had come as a lay preacher to the village chapel. She was very religious in those days, our mother, and it was the thing they had in common, which she and our father hadn’t. Religion, in fact, was one of the big things that she and our father, brought up Catholic, had quarrelled bitterly about. He got upset, she would tell us, when she criticised his religion for the way it always let you off scot-free, left you free to sin because you knew you could confess. And by the time we were about nine and seven, we knew all too well our father’s view of our mother’s religion: as moralistic, uptight and hypocritical.
Well, she and Arnold Hitchins had agreed they would eventually marry, and our mother had gone with him more than once on his leave to his parents’ house in Nottingham. 26But she didn’t want to get officially engaged: she hadn’t entirely given up on her hopes for a career. The chemist she worked for had promised to make her his apprentice, which could pave the way to study Pharmacy at college after the war. She didn’t want to scotch her chances, as you would have done in those days, by getting engaged.
She had still been getting letters from our father and ignoring them, but now she did reply, thinking it only proper and fair to let him know that she was promised to someone else, and to ask him to stop.
One evening in March not long after, she was coming home from work in the dusk to the empty cottage – Nanny and Grampa had gone to the pictures in town, Molly was on duty in the Manor and Gwilym busy with the lambs – and she rounded the bend by the cattle shed and there was a man sitting on the low cottage wall. Her heart turned over in fright – in those days, in the war, you had to watch out for strangers in the lane. The man stood up, and she saw it was our father: he had come to claim her back.
I wrote it all down, and, since that was the form I’d hit on, I made my father relive it from heaven. But even in those early days when my mother told the story, I would see it that way, from his point of view. For didn’t I know that aching hiraeth for Llanfair? Didn’t I live it every day since we’d left? And didn’t I know that sense of relief and anticipation as you returned, stepped from the station at the top of the hill, the ancient branches roofing the road, hazels sprouting in the hedges, the earthy, ferny smell. The crossroad on the bend at the bottom, the cottage about to swing into view with honey-coloured light leaking from the windows and porch. 27
This night, the house is in darkness. At first my father thinks it must be the blackout curtains, but then he understands the cottage is empty – something I’d never known, and the thought of which made my stomach hollow. He sits on the wall. The dusk gathers. Across the way in the barn the cattle move unconcerned through the straw. Above and unseen in the dense dark trees, a bird shrugs off from a branch with an indifferent rustle. In the field beyond the trees the sound of a horse grazing systematically rips the dusk. The cold seeps from the stone through the wool of his RAF uniform. It’s almost dark when Gwen’s light footsteps approach and she rounds the bend.
Perhaps he didn’t feel like that. Perhaps he was excited, sure of his success. Perhaps I was simply seeing the scene through its outcome.
She told him outright that he was wasting his time. I imagined the adamant air she could turn on sometimes. She’d meant what she said in her letter, she told him, she was promised to someone else. And next morning, after a night spent on the sofa, he had to trail up the hill to the station again, and watch from the train as the silver marshes slid by and away for what, it seemed, was the very last time.
I wrote:
His squadron’s on the move again. They’re piling onto the trucks. Ahead is the flat grey land they must cross to the base where Gwen will now never know or care that he has gone. He pulls himself up onto a truck; the truck moves, sets him adrift.
They pass through the barrier. The sentry salutes, and catches his eye. Grins, knowing. A gnarled dark face beneath the field cap. Teeth yellow and long. Patrick remembers with 28a thud that this is a replay; the thud becomes an almighty slam, and he’s falling again, wheeling through the air, hit from behind by a car.
He was hit from behind by a pilot officer drunk as a lord and racing his open-topped Bentley round the bend in the country lane where our father was walking.
Our father was not expected to live. He was in a coma. His skull was cracked, all four limbs and several ribs were broken.
He had terrible scars. A white worm wiggled from his forehead into his hairline, his shins were deeply pitted. Sometimes, when we were small, if he lay on the floor on his belly and we were playing nearby, he’d say, ‘Give us a scratch,’ and lift up his shirt and we’d see the scar on his shoulder, a deep puckered dent.
Before we got to be too afraid, we’d creep up when he was doing his yoga, and gingerly lift the wide bottoms of his trousers and gaze at the blue pits reaching into the bones of his shins. Until the time, that is, when I’d carefully lowered them back, stood as quietly as I could and turned to go, and something vicious bit my ankle: his hand. I struggled to turn – he was holding my ankle so tight it hurt – and met his blue eyes, sharp with cold mocking triumph.
We knew he’d had other accidents, too. Twice in Llanfair he’d had motorbike crashes. I had a memory of one of those times, when his brakes failed on a hill and he crashed through a plate-glass shop window at the bottom. I remembered the moment he came back from the hospital. I was five. I remembered the greeny, acrid electric light as he stepped through the door, his face dotted all over with what looked like grey metal studs, a glittering sliding look in his eyes. 29
I ran from the room. My mother called out that the things on his face were just scabs, they’d heal, but this didn’t dispel my feeling: a sweeping feeling of dismay, of something lost for good.
I probably got over it, he probably took me bouncing over bridges and laughing again, but that was the moment, at the age of five, that I first felt an aching desolation somehow connected to my father.
Of course, after being mown down on the road, he did live, he pulled through. And once he’d regained consciousness he asked a nurse to write down a letter he dictated to our mother – he couldn’t write it himself; both his arms were in slings – telling her what had happened.
Our mother didn’t think she ought to reply. Nanny thought she was hard-hearted. Poor boy, Nanny said, so ill and far away from his family, but our mother didn’t think it right to give him false hope. So she closed herself up in the way we would come to discover she sometimes could: so positive and smiley so much of the time and then, out of the blue, surprisingly firm.
She was eighteen by now, and no longer working at the chemist’s. She’d had a bad blow: the chemist had failed to keep his promise; his son had finished school and he’d given him the apprenticeship instead. Six and four, seven and five, we consciously absorbed the lesson: another instance of the unfair practice of boys being put before girls. She’d left the chemist’s in disgust and dismay, and now she was working up at the station, filling in for the ticket clerk who’d been called up.
All her chances of college seemed to be gone, and Arnold Hitchins was starting to be insistent about getting engaged. 30He was about to be moved on with his unit, and he wanted to make things official before he left. Our mother thought this ridiculous: why did they need to prove their love to others? They didn’t need a ring or a public announcement to keep them faithful to each other! Besides which, she loved dancing, and she didn’t want to have to stop going to the dances – the way it was in the village, once you were officially engaged, you couldn’t go to the dances without your fiancé without being considered loose.
So they didn’t get engaged. And instead of a ring, Arnold gave her a little Bible in purple leather, to think of him by.
Three days after he’d gone, she got a letter from him telling her this: the night before writing – two days after leaving! – he’d gone to a dance and met somebody else!
I suppose, looking at it now, he must have decided before he even left that she wasn’t committed, and maybe she wasn’t, because when she received another letter from our father – ‘He would never take no for an answer!’ she would laugh, and the older we got the more grimly we’d think, How true – she gave in and wrote back.
She had been in Hull, staying with her uncle, a Baptist minister, to whom Nanny had sent her because the letter from Arnold Hitchins had caused her a deep crisis of faith. The hypocrisy of Arnold! Supposed to be so in love with her! So insistent on getting engaged … And the letter was so formal, so cold … No expression of regret, or any thought for her feelings … So un-Christian. And him so pious – a lay preacher, even! So much for pious Christians and Christianity!
Her uncle had talked her through it. She shouldn’t blame Christianity, he reminded her, quoting from the Bible, but false Christians. Beware of false prophets which come to you in 31sheep’s clothing but inwardly they are ravening wolves.
When she got back, our father’s letter was waiting. Arnold had been a wolf in sheep’s clothing; it was Patrick, our father, who’d stayed faithful, after all that time and in spite of all the rejections.
So she and our father started courting again. Previously whenever he got leave he’d go to his aunts and cousins in Birkenhead, but now he’d come down to Llanfair. And it wasn’t long before they got engaged: she had no doubts now.
That is, not until a fortnight before they were due to be married in mid-August.
The banns had been called in the chapel, she had given in her notice at the station, and our father had organised a married billet outside the camp in Shropshire where he was based. She had been to town to buy her wedding outfit, a woollen dress she always described to us in detail: powder-blue, knee-length, with short sleeves and Peter-Pan collar.
But a fortnight before the wedding a terrible thought came to her: that she was marrying our father on the rebound. And if she had any doubt, she knew, she shouldn’t be doing it …
She knew then what she had to do. She got on a train to Shropshire.
She had sent a telegram to say she was coming. I always imagined him cycling, unsuspecting, to the station to meet her. I imagined the blur of blue vetch in the verge as he sped, the quiet of the station as he parked his bike against the wall, the song of a blackbird spilling through the hot afternoon. Then the rails beginning to hum as the train approaches, the station filled with the long harsh cough of steam, and our mother stepping down with her terrible news.
She said he broke down. Not far from the station he leaned 32on a farm gate and bent over and sobbed, on and on.
And so she gave in.
She said seeing him so desperate made her so upset too that she knew she loved him. Whatever the odds, whatever anyone said – People warned me not to marry him! – she had to be with him.
And so they were married.
She always kept the wedding photo in pride of place on their bedroom wall. I would study it closely. There they were, in black and white, standing in front of a curtain as if on a stage. My mother, twenty years old, not wearing the blue dress she’d bought after all, but a bias-silk wedding dress someone had lent her at the last minute, slimline and spilling in a circle on the floor all around, so she looked like a fairy queen. A spiky tiara in her dark waved hair, from which dropped a diaphanous veil edged with embroidered ferns, and in her hands a frothy tumble of moss and pale roses that she told us were pink. And there was our father beside her, eight years older, handsome in his uniform, holding his folded cap and showing his crooked teeth in a smile. Happy, I would think. He looked happy. And on his other side, Gwilym, our mother’s brother, Uncle Gwilym, his best man, hair slicked down in a way we never saw it as a rule, making his ears stick out even further, and on the far side of Mummy, Aunty Molly, taller and bigger altogether, looking like an Amazon in a long, wide, stiff dress with huge shoulders.
But because our mother had said, that day she went to see him, that she was afraid she was on the rebound, our father, she said, was afterwards constantly jealous. I’d think: Well, she was so pretty – even the young minister who married them had been in love with her, she’d told us. A week after 33they were married, they went to a dance at the camp and our mother accepted a pilot officer’s invitation to dance, and our father, who of course didn’t dance, was furious!
They were billeted with a spinster, a retired schoolmistress, down a country lane in a slate-roofed cottage with an orchard, beside a track where our father kept his first car, an Austin Seven. When we were small we loved to hear the tales of that time because they were funny. Miss Protheroe was a very proper lady, aristocratic-looking, tall and thin with a long hooked nose and her hair in a steel-grey bun at the nape of her neck, and a real stickler. But she doted on our father, just like his aunt in Australia, just like all the old ladies, in fact, and all women, really. Round about then our mother and father cycled all the way from Shropshire to see his aunts and cousins in Birkenhead, and our mother could see that all the women there adored him – turned out that when he’d lived there he’d even had a fling with one of his girl cousins. When he’d left to join the RAF, the aunt he’d lived with had told him, just like Aunt Lizzie in Australia, that he’d always have a home with her if he wanted, and had always kept his room ready and intact, the little cardboard case sitting on top of the wardrobe where he’d left it and his dressing-gown hanging on the back of the door.
Miss Protheroe was very deaf, and used an old-fashioned hearing trumpet, like the ones we’d seen in Victorian illustrations, but it hardly ever worked. So our mother learned some sign language, but our terror of a father wouldn’t. He would sit at the breakfast table eating the eggs it was our mother’s task to collect each morning, and say to our mother, through the side of his mouth away from Miss Protheroe, ‘We’ll go for a run in the car this evening, but we’re not taking the 34old bitch.’ ‘What did he say?’ Miss Protheroe would ask our mother, and our mother would tell her: ‘He says we’ll all go for a run this evening,’ and our father would kick our mother under the table while Miss Protheroe smiled a smile of great satisfaction and patted his hand and indulgently passed him more toast and home-made jam.
She was so innocent, Miss Protheroe, in spite of having been a teacher, that the first time they took her out and she saw the cats’ eyes on the road, she asked from the back, ‘Who lights them up?’ ‘The fairies, you daft old bat,’ said our father, knowing she couldn’t hear him, and our mother had to struggle to keep a straight face as she turned back to explain. When we were teenagers and old enough, she would tell us how when they took her to the pictures at the aerodrome and the camera panned discreetly away from a romantic scene to a train entering a tunnel or a foaming stream, Miss Protheroe would shout in her loud deaf-person’s voice: ‘What’s happening? What are they doing now?’ and lift up her trumpet for our mother to shout her answer, and the whole cinema would erupt in laughter.
But by the time I was eight or nine, the tale of living with Miss Protheroe had become for us darker. Although our mother laughed as she recounted it, we felt on her behalf the resentment we’d have felt ourselves at being treated the way Miss Protheroe treated her.
In that place the war was distant. Our father was working on a base where planes were sent for overhaul; he had risen in the ranks now and was an Acting Warrant Officer, overseeing several workshops. But there was no work for our mother – no war work, even: she’d been sent with an official letter to a nearby cheese factory, but they didn’t need her and sent her 35away again. She had to stay home and help Miss Protheroe, who was very strict when it came to housework. Every doily to be kept in line on every surface, every cupboard to be emptied and cleaned out monthly, the potatoes for tea to be put on the stove at five-thirty prompt every afternoon. Clearly, we could see as we got older, though our mother never suggested it, she was jealous of our mother and was keeping her in line. And it was in this story that first surfaced the dark question that sat, a tense knot, at the heart of our childhood and beyond: the question of money and our father’s profligacy, and the poverty that ensued.
THE QUESTION OF MONEY
As soon as
