Heaven Forbid E-Book

Christopher Hope

• Herausgeber: Atlantic Books
• Kategorie: Für Kinder und Jugendliche
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Beschreibung

In the sunny jacaranda-leafed garden of his Johannesburg home, six year old Martin Donally is king of a small and perfect world. It is 1948 and life is full of childish rhymes and his colourful extended family. There's exuberant Grandpa, who sings and races horses; chain-smoking Auntie Fee, who always sides with the ogres in fairy tales and who makes up her own stories about Martin's dead father; and above all, Georgie, the family's Zulu servant and Martin's confidant. But this cosy world of certainty ends as Martin's tale turns to political and personal tragedy. He can't possibly foresee the defeat of the liberal government that will usher in a new era of bigotry and intolerance, not appreciate the significance of the fact that Dr Verwoerd, architect of apartheid, is a neighbour. And what is he to make of dour, racist Gordon, his mother's husband-to-be, a man who seems determined to shatter the carefree world of the Donallys for good...

Leseprobe

About the Author

Christopher Hope was born in Johannesburg in 1944. He is the author of nine novels and one collection of short stories, including Kruger’s Alp, which won the Whitbread Prize for Fiction, Serenity House, which was shortlisted for the 1992 Booker Prize, and My Mother’s Lovers, published by Atlantic Books in 2006 to great acclaim. He is also a poet and playwright and author of the celebrated memoir White Boy Running.

Also by Christopher Hope

FICTION

My Mother’s Lovers

A Separate Development

Kruger’s Alp

My Chocolate Redeemer

Serenity House

Darkest England

The Hottentot Room

Me, the Moon and Elvis Presley

SHORTER FICTION

The Garden of Bad Dreams

The Love Songs of Nathan J. Swirsky

Black Swan

Learning to Fly

POETRY

Cape Drives

In the Country of the Black Pig

English Men

FOR CHILDREN

The King, the Cat and the Fiddle (with Yehudi Menuhin)

The Dragon Wore Pink

NON-FICTION

White Boy Running

Moscow! Moscow!

Signs of the Heart

Brother Under the Skin

Heaven Forbid

Christopher Hope

ATLANTIC BOOKS

London

Copyright page

First published in Great Britain in 2001 by Picador, an imprint of Pan Macmillan Ltd.

Paperback edition published in Great Britain in 2010 by Atlantic Books, an imprint of Grove Atlantic Ltd.

This e-book edition published in Great Britain in 2015 by Atlantic Books

Copyright © Christopher Hope 2001

The moral right of Christopher Hope to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Acts of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities, is entirely coincidental.

1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN: 978 1 78239 736 6

Atlantic Books

An imprint of Grove Atlantic Ltd

Ormond House

26–27 Boswell Street

London

WC1N 3JZ

www.atlantic-books.co.uk

Epigraph

‘With the passage of time, I’m convinced that my first years were a paradise. But I am undoubtedly mistaken. If there was ever a paradise, I must look for it earlier than all my years.’

E. M. CIORAN

Dedication

For Dee

Contents

About the Author

Also by Christopher Hope

Heaven Forbid

Copyright page

Epigraph

Dedication

1. At the Villa Vanilla

2. What a Boy Needs

3. Gumpf

4. Building the Country

5. Playing Politics

6. Rabbit Scoff

7. Lightning

8. Cherubim

9. The Glorious Dead

10. College Men

11. Keeping an Eye

12. A Pike of My Own

13. Visitors

14. Border Country

15. Home

16. The Price of Eggs

17. Marching Orders

18. Top-hole

19. Bombs Away

20. Onions

21. In Flagrante

22. Lake Como

23. Teepees

24. The Walk

25. Little Green Apples

26. Gordon the Good

27. The Troll

28. The Mirror

29. Balls

30. The Gay Gordon

31. Any Day Now

32. The Bitch

33. Our War

34. How I Discovered Dynamite

35. Iron in the Soul

Acknowledgements

1. At the Villa Vanilla

When I was about five, I used to lie in bed and think about my past. Back to when it was just my mom and me. When we lived with my grandpa, when we had a deal. In the Days Before Raymond, in the Time Before Gordon. Before I was denuded, desiccated, discombobulated … before I discovered dynamite.

Every afternoon Georgie would swing me up onto the gatepost. The front gate was dark and wooden, and it faced Sligo Road. On the gatepost was a slab of stone, flat, good for looking down from, for seeing right down to the end of the road. A boy could sit there and wait for his mom to climb off that tram and come home from Consolidated Federal, where the ledgers were. Each afternoon she came home on the tram. It was red and cream, that tram, with a bell. She climbed off at Park Lake.

My grandpa told me he came to Parkside because it spoke to him of Ireland. The names of the streets were songs, and I sang them. Derry was the next street down; Wexford was the next street up. Then came Bally-murphy, then Mourne … Sligo Road ran down to Erin Avenue, and across Erin was Park Lake, where the tram stopped.

Up the road from Park Lake was the zoo, and in the zoo was a cage of lions, big and yellow and tired and dusty. They walked up and down all day in their cage. On my birthday, my mom and me, we went to the zoo and rode in a little box on the elephant’s back, with a pink umbrella over our heads, all the way from the monkeys to the seals. We passed the lions and she didn’t even blink but at night she cried in her sleep.

My grandpa painted his house cream. He called it the Villa Vanilla. The shutters were yellow, the red tin roof had a curving lip. There was a palm tree in the middle of our lawn. I was at home in the garden but the garden was not my home.

My mom came walking up Sligo Road in the cool of the afternoon, wearing a big white hat and a frock with yellow daisies. I wore my Robin Hood hat with the feather and I waited for her to come home.

You could rely on it.

When she saw me she’d begin to run, wobbling on her high heels, holding onto her hat. When her skirt lifted I’d see her ankles, and her stockings gave her legs a buttery sheen, smooth to the eye but, when you touched them, rough as cement. Her best nylons – they cost the earth. She’d lift me off the gatepost (you could bet on it), she’d say: ‘Hello, darling.’ She’d kiss me, then she’d say: ‘By golly. What a day. I’ve had ledgers in chunks. I don’t care if I never see another blooming ledger – as long as I live.’

You could depend on it. Yes, siree.

I had a green hood with a tall green feather in it. I didn’t have a tunic, but I had a hollow in my leg, right at the top. I didn’t know how I got it, but she did. She’d push her fingernail right into the hollow – push, push, push – ‘My golly, can you feel that? There! Know what it is? That’s pure bone. That’s where they put the needle in, when you were a baby. Again and again. We thought we’d lost you. How could you, Martin? To your very own mother. Some day I won’t be here. Then what?’

‘Then what?’

‘Then you’ll be sorry, won’t you?’

‘I will.’

‘It’ll be too late. You’ve only got one mother. Know what I mean?’

I knew what she meant. I was sorry even before it was too late. Hansel and Gretel got lost. Anyone without a fine sense of woodcraft got lost in Sherwood Forest. Except Robin Hood. He knew every leaf of the greenwood. James Morisson lost his mother at the end of the town, though he was only three. I knew how it felt. I knew every leaf in Sligo Road and if she ever got lost, I’d find her.

My room was next to her room. When I heard her cry the first time, I woke up and went through to her bed and climbed in and shook her.

Her voice spoke in the dark. ‘What’s the matter?’

‘You were crying and crying.’

‘Was I, darling? Fancy. Oh, Martin, just hark at them. Goll-ee. Isn’t it a good thing you’re right next door? It’s when they ruin my sleep that I cry. That’s the night-lions. Know what I mean? I’m not scared in the daytime. I’m as tough as an old boot. But at night … Who wants to be gobbled up by some mangy old night-lion you can’t see? Before you’ve time to say excuse me. Or, kiss my foot. I’ve had night-lions in chunks. Know what I mean?’

I knew what she meant. She didn’t like lions or ledgers or the past or the war or the dead or drunks. She had a soft spot for the little pig who built his house of bricks and cooked up the Big Bad Wolf in a cauldron.

‘I’m glad he did. Imagine how you’d feel if that wolf turned up at your door, his tummy rumbling with his sharp digestive juices, just dying to gobble you up …’ She shivered. She did a good shiver. ‘It feels like someone just walked over my grave. Know what I mean?’

I knew what she meant. If you had the wolf at your door, huffing and puffing, you’d better not build your house from straw. If you didn’t want to be dissolved in his sharp digestive juices you built with bricks. I was the bricks she built her house with.

She didn’t like war.

‘You won’t catch me dwelling on what’s dead and gone. Not me. Oh-o-o, no blooming fear. I don’t want to see another war – not till my dying day. No thank you. I’ve had war in chunks.’

She didn’t like Boers, she’d had Boers in chunks. For being ruddy hypocrites, the whole bally bang-shoot of them. They gave her the heebies, just thinking of them gave her the pip, and a cadenza.

She didn’t like running balances. ‘Running balances can be tricky. I know someone – he can do double-entry. Fancy that.’

She didn’t like lightning. ‘Never stand out when there is lightning in the sky, never ever use a telephone, or get in a swimming pool – or stand under a tree. A tree is the worst place to be near in a bad electric storm. Lightning loves a tree. A lightning strike can burn all the grass for miles around.’

What she did like were clothes and pearls and policemen and our deal, because we had a deal and we promised it was for ever. When the night-lions woke her, and I came to her, she pulled me into her bed and hugged me. The lions were tearing up the night.

She held my hand. ‘Just listen to them. Aren’t you glad we’re in here and they’re out there?’

I listened. They roared like a big yellow sea in the dark.

‘I’ll look after you.’

‘Will you, darling? Keep an eye out? For ever and ever? Promise me …’

‘I will.’

‘How do you know what to promise till I tell you? Promise me – if ever you get lost – promise me you’ll stay exactly where you are. Know why? Because I’ll always remember where I left you. But if you move, I might never find you again. Know what I mean?’

‘I promise.’

‘Then let’s practise. Say after me “My name is Martin Donally. I live at 99 Sligo Road, Parkside …” ’

I said it.

‘Repeat and remember …’

If I got lost I’d always stay exactly where she left me, and she’d find me. That was our deal. Repeat and remember. Tried and true. For ever and ever, world without end. Amen.

2. What a Boy Needs

I sat on the gatepost. I could see right to the bottom of the hill. I knew where to find her. She was always where I looked for her. I liked that. Coming up the hill, smiling. Behind me, somewhere, I could hear Georgie snipping roses, the sun was right over my head and the world was good. All I had to do was hold it there and things would be fine.

Good things came in the afternoons: sometimes rain, or the ice-cream man; my mom, always. You could count on it. She was kind, she had pretty legs, she wore big hats, her eyes were dark, she was frightened of lions. In the past, she’d been Monica MacBride, then she was Monica Donally – but now everyone called her the much-married Mrs Donally.

One day she said: ‘I’m thinking of reverting. I’m sick of being Monica Donally. I’m going back to being plain Monica MacBride.’

‘Can I revert too?’

She put her small finger in the corner of her mouth, turned her hand over and chewed her nail. And looked at me for a long time. She always did that when she was thinking hard.

‘Golly – I don’t know. Anyway, I’m reverting. And anyone who doesn’t like it can kiss my foot.’

At night I lay awake for as long as I could, listening for the lions. I heard my gran’s keys jingle as she walked past the bedroom door. She locked the door. I got up and unlocked it. My gran was very thin. She had a scar from a red Afrikander ox that had stabbed her with his long sharp white horn. Right in her middle. She had been driving from Curzon to Jo’burg and the Packard got stuck in a whole lot of cows and this ox stuck his horn though the window and stabbed her – just like that. It was a great scar, like a wide road. It ran all the way from her belly button to her breast and she let me touch it. She played the piano and she sang ‘The Moon Has Raised His Lamp Above’ with my grandpa, and their voices mixed like milk and honey. ‘The moon has raised his lamp above, To light the way to see my love …’

She wore a big bunch of keys on her belt and jingled.

‘When we ran the Grange Hotel everything had to be locked – sugar and salt and liquor and eggs, pantry and larder and fridge and bar. Or they walked in the night. Grew legs and skedaddled. Lock it or lose it. To this day if I see a door I turn a key.’

Sometimes my mom woke me up in the morning and she’d be laughing.

‘My mother passed in the night. She’s locked us in. What ever would happen if we wanted to move?’

‘I don’t want to move.’

‘You shall stay here for as long as you wish,’ my grandpa said.

‘Promise?’

We were sitting in the big green armchair in the living room, under the stain. I pressed back, feeling the tick of his fob watch. His cuffs went shooting out of his mustard-yellow suit like two white tunnels, smooth and starched. And in their buttonholes were soft milky pearls and on his finger a heavy gold ring with a peregrine cut into its black face and he was telling me what a boy needs:

‘Fifteen years old. I came to Africa and lay alone in the veldt at night, listening for the enemy to cough or scratch a match. African spirits, Martin, to be sure, are small and hairy – that’s the sooty sprites of Africa – veldt goblins and tokoloshes. Very kind to foreign fellows is your average African tokoloshe, ever ready and willing to warn a poor soldiering boy that someone’s trying to kill him. That’s when a boy learns what he needs. It’s a bit of a fright to be freshly arrived in a strange land, and suddenly you’re thinking: “Lord. Someone here­abouts is wishing me dead.” It’s discombobulating.’

‘What does a boy need, Grandpa?’

‘A boy needs every bit of help he can get. He needs height. Elevation. He needs to be up where he can see what’s coming. He needs light or the darkness gets to him. He needs fight. Above all, a boy needs bangs. High-explosive. Cordite, gelignite or – best of all – dynamite. Oh, we could have seen off the English – if we’d had more bangs. Shall we sing something, dear fellow?’

He wound his Supa Crystal Gramophone, blew dust off the shining discs, black wax in brown paper sleeves. He had Nat King Cole, Frank Sinatra and Bing Crosby. Paul Robeson was my grandpa’s favourite singer of all time. Not counting Al Jolson and John McCormack. He dropped a record onto the silver stub. The songs went spinning into my head.

‘Let’s do Al Jolson, shall we? Giving the great line all the lean for which Jolson is justly famous … Ready? One, two, three. Mamm-ee, Mamm-ee, my dear old Mamm-eeee …’

My grandpa hated sportsmen. What a curve he got to his lips. He bent the word, he flicked it, it stung like a whip. ‘Sports-men! Grubby-rugby-ites, Clickety-cricketyites. Socks and jocks men. Bags of golf-wallahs. The white-hatted, green brimmed, brown-shoed bowling brigade. Oh, Martin, my dear, the barbarian is at the gates. And how do we know? Easy. Never mind his sword, look at his shorts. Lord save us. Let’s cleanse the mind and have a story. Which shall it be tonight, Martin?’

‘ “The Swiftly Flowing Stream”.’

‘Again?’

‘I’ll be you, and you can be the man who nearly drowned.’

‘Very well, my dear, I’ll be starting.’

He went and lay down on the green carpet, which was the swiftly flowing stream. I started walking round the room, because I was on my way home from Mass one Sunday morning many, many years ago in Waterford and I passed the stream. My grandpa lay on the green carpet and waved his arms and coughed because he was nearly drowning in the swiftly flowing stream. He kept shouting: ‘Help, help! For Christ’s sake, help!’

I came along, my hands in my pockets. I was being him, walking along the riverside, whistling ‘Poor Old Joe’. ‘I’m comin’, I’m comin’, though my heart is full of woe …’

The drowning man was going down for the third time. He gurgled. He was a fine drowner. I jumped into the stream. My gran sneaked in sometimes when I was in the water and we were swimming for our lives and she’d say: ‘For Pete’s sakes, Dan, what sort of example are you setting the boy rolling about on the floor like that? And you in your suit too.’

‘I am being saved, Mabel.’

Then my grandpa played his da, who was a terrible man for the drink. He was waiting when I got home; he saw water streaming from my one and only Sunday best black suit. My grandpa was good at playing his da, very fierce, reaching for his desk ruler, which was his da’s small black cudgel. Beating the daylights out of me for ruining my Sunday suit while I lay on the carpet, kicking and screaming – but softly, because if we made too much noise it upset my gran.

Then, after I’d been beaten, I ran away from home.

I loved this bit. I opened the door and stepped into the passage, looked back, waved, and my grandpa wrapped his hankie around his head. Now he was being his poor old mam, waving goodbye to me from behind his chair, which was the window of the MacBride hovel, back in old Éire. Her silver hair was shining. She waved and wiped a tear from her eye. I stepped aboard the Union Castle liner that carried me to Cape Town to fight for Kroojer and the Boers, and left her behind for ever.

When we got to the boat bit, my grandpa always started singing ‘Mother Machree’.

‘Sure I love the dear silver that shines in your hair, and the brow that’s all furrowed and wrinkled with care …’

I waved, she waved back and my grandpa’s voice got just the right sob:

‘I kiss the dear fingers so toil-worn for me-e-e-e, Oh, God bless you and keep you, Mother Machree.’

I often cried at this bit. It was such a good, sad song.

But it was fine now. After years and years away, my grandpa was going home to Waterford, to the hovel in the hills. His ticket was booked on the Pendennis Castle – a city afloat. He read me the ads – there was a string orchestra and the first-class smoking room was lined in white linen, making it one of the coolest places in the tropics …

‘Such luxury, it’s a wonder anyone ever gets off.’

But I knew he’d get off. He’d step ashore in old Éire, he’d drive to Waterford.

‘I shall run up the path of the MacBride hovel.’

‘Yes, Grandpa.’

‘My old mam will be at the window.’

‘Holding out her hands, all toil-worn …’

‘Holding ’em out to her own dear lost son. My goodness, what a hugging and kissing and a song and dance there will be. Forty years it’s been. We’re all ready – but for one small fly in the ointment.’

‘We need to keep an eye on Uncle Kei.’

‘Clever boy. We need to keep an eye. Uncle Kei is the fly. It is his predilections.’

He smiled his very slow smile, he lifted his cane, he spelt it out on the blue sky. ‘Pre-di-lic-tions … urgings, predispositions, secret and shameful yearnings against which the man is powerless. Hence the need, continually, to keep an eye.’

‘I’ll keep an eye. You go home to your old mam.’

‘Bless you, dear fellow. But Kei’s predilections are not easy to spot.’

Words he spoke, he sang, he drew. My grandpa gave away words every day. They tasted fine and I swallowed them:

Pe-ri-pa-te-tic – so full of clicks you might have been talking Xhosa.

With a pencil he drew a big ‘T’ and next to it a big ‘P’. ‘Know what that stands for? “Tee-pees”? Tall persons. Grown ones. Watch out for them. You’re small; it’s a tall world. Being young and short by destiny, a boy better watch his back. Yes, sir. This is Injun country.’

I sat in his lap counting three buttons hard against my back – God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Ghost. I listened to the tick of his fob watch and the rise and fall of his breath.

‘What’s to be done about said urgings? That is the question.’

‘Don’t know, Grandpa.’

‘Great minds think alike. Darned if I know either. I am quite discombobulated by Uncle Kei.’

At the back of the Villa Vanilla was a long white wall. It stood up high and kept us from whoever lived behind us. I never saw anyone behind us. A mulberry tree stood in front of the corner. You pushed through the long branches of the mulberry tree and there you were, in the corner, between the high white back wall and the garage wall. It was a secret place. No one went there, only me. You had to be small to squeeze under the mulberry branches. A big log lay against the wall, white and smooth. I was at home in the garden but it wasn’t my home. My mom said so.

My place was somewhere right, where you could sit and lean against the wall and be very, very quiet, where you could tie down the sky, right there, between the red roof of the Villa Vanilla and the sharp tip of the palm tree, with, sometimes, the clouds in the sky, hanging there like washing. I sat there to make sure everything was right. I knew where I was, nothing changed, nothing moved – at least not for now.

I started on the words – ‘Peripatetic … discombobulate … predilections …’ Then I had a burst of ‘Mother Machree’ ‘I kiss the dear fingers so toil-worn for m-e-e-e-e …’ I had to get the words right. If I got them exactly right then maybe we’d just go on being where we were.

3. Gumpf

Auntie Fee was my favourite aunt – she told me so I wouldn’t forget. She said there was nothing she wouldn’t tell me – only I wasn’t allowed to tell anyone. When Auntie Fee wanted me to do something she looked like she was going to cry.

‘I love you to bits.’ Her big green eyes went blink, blink. ‘And if you don’t love me right back –’ blink, blink went her green eyes – ‘I might cry. You wouldn’t like that, would you?’

‘I wouldn’t.’

‘Give me a kiss, then. I wouldn’t either.’

The hair on her cheekbones was shiny and soft, her dark hair on her head was springy. She had cat’s eyes, quick eyes that jumped on you sideways while she was telling you something. To see what it did to you. Was it helping? Was it hurting? You never knew which she was hoping for. She was so kind. It was scary.

She was married to my uncle Jack. He was an ex-fighter-pilot ace. He had a dimple in the middle of his chin, blue eyes and wavy black hair with a white line down the middle of his head. Uncle Jack’s real name was Horatio but no one called him that. And he was married to Auntie Fee. Her real name was Fionnuala but only my grandpa called her that.

Auntie Fee didn’t read me Christopher Robin, or Jonathan Jo with a mouth like an O, or Peter Rabbit, or The Little Engine Who Could.

‘Gumpf, pure gumpf.’

She read me Robin Hood. I liked Robin Hood because he could blend and merge and vanish in the depths of Sherwood Forest. In his suit of Lincoln green, invisible among the mighty oaks, he felt the breath of his pursuers hot on his neck. Robin always outran his pursuers.

Auntie Fee said: ‘They’ll get him one day. You wait.’

She shook her head when it said in my book that Robin Hood and his Merrie Men laid out a mighty feast on the greensward and supped till midnight.

‘Sward? I’ll give him sward. Sward my eye.’

She liked the Sheriff of Nottingham. She said he didn’t have a black heart and Robin of Locksley hadn’t any business loosing an arrow through it.

‘Absolutely not. Damn cheek. You do not go around shooting sheriffs.’

When Robin lay in Locksley Hall, and turned his face to the casement, and loosed a shaft through the window because he knew that he was going to die, Auntie Fee smiled.

‘It’s all very well running round in green briefs, very high and mighty. But just wait. Till the iron enters the soul. Hoo, boy!’

She was sorry for the giant in Jack and the Beanstalk. Jack was too big for his boots. If anyone should’ve been shot through his black heart it was that Jack. She liked it that the Giant had a voice that chilled your blood. She liked it when the Giant said he’d grind Jack’s bones to make his bread.

‘So would I. Silly boy. I’d grind his bones to make my bread any day of the week. I’d have made a very good ogre.’

She liked The Three Billy-Goats Gruff. When she got to the smallest Billy-Goat Gruff nearly getting eaten by the troll, she said: ‘Serves the blighter right. I think those silly goats had it coming. Trit-trotting across his bridge. Drive me mad, it would. Trit-trot, trit-trot … Give me the troll any day of the week. You can talk to a troll. What’s to be said to a lot of goats?’

When she was telling stories she looked at you like the Giant looked at Jack. It was true – Auntie Fee would have made a good ogre, if she hadn’t been my aunt. A good troll. She had a voice so soft and sweet and melting that it chilled the blood.

‘There’s nothing I won’t tell you. Nothing I can’t remember. I’m as wise as Solomon; I’m as old as the hills. I’m an old fossil, I am. Do you know what’s a fossil, Martin? Something so old it has turned to stone. Something that remembers every wrinkle.’

She didn’t like stories about Ireland, and saving people from drowning.

She said: ‘Irishry? Hmm … my Eye-rish-ry, more like.’ And she lit a Goldflake cigarette.

‘There comes a time when the iron enters the soul, hot and hard it comes. And not just in fairy stories.’

My grandpa liked stories about people who got on. Auntie Fee liked stories about people who had gone to pot. She’d point up at the stain on the ceiling and I’d push back into the deep green chair.

‘Follow my finger,’ Auntie Fee said.

I followed her finger and there it was – the stain on the ceiling. Dark and sad. It still looked wet. The cracks between the floorboards went racing into the distance, shooting like arrows for the stars, running like roads across the face of Ireland.

‘What’s that?’

‘Cousin Caítlín’s map.’

‘Dead right. Cousin Caítlín on the ceiling, Cousin Caítlín twice removed, who came from overseas, and who went to pot. See – there’s Waterford, where your grandpa came from. Screw up your eyes, Martin, and you can almost see the MacBride hovel … That’s Dublin, and there’s County Cork, and the Mountains of Mourne. You could drive around the country, from that map.’

‘Why didn’t she cry England – where she came from?’

Auntie Fee said: ‘England’s bigger. So she stuck to Wales. You don’t want to cry big places. It’s bad enough crying Ireland. It’s a titchy place. Imagine if you did Russia?’

Auntie Fee stroked the back of my neck. Her voice got nicer, softer, sweeter. It was very scary.

‘I don’t want you ending up like that. Imagine crying a country – a biggie? Like Egypt – or even Mesopotamia. Can you imagine how much crying that’d take?’

‘How much?’

‘Oh, weeks.’

‘Let’s have Cousin Caítlín.’

Auntie Fee sighed, shook her head and lit another Goldflake.

‘Cousin Caítlín was a funny, lovely country girl, with coal-black eyes and a love of horses. She came from the Welsh Borders. A good rider. Surprisingly fair for a half Welshwoman. The Welsh tend to be small and dark and Celtic. Not tall and blonde, with deep grey, slate-grey, almost charcoal eyes. She was blonde and black, fair and dark, your cousin Caítlín. She wasn’t stuck-up either.’

Auntie Fee always sounded surprised; she expected people ‘twice-removed’, and from ‘overseas’ to be stuck-up.

‘Thinking they know everything about everything. And as result they are – what, Martin?’

‘Clots, Auntie Fee.’

‘Are they ever. And often Pommies to boot.’

‘Cousin Caítlín was a cut above.’

‘Very much a cut above. Cousin Caítlín sailed across the sea in a Union Castle boat, from Southampton to Cape Town, and then she went by train from Cape Town to Johannesburg. Then she went down to Curzon and stayed at the Grange – Grandpa’s hotel. Cousin Caítlín said of it, “My, my, this is a jolly little place.” ’ Auntie Fee snorted smoke. ‘Imagine. A jolly little place …’

When Auntie Fee’s smoke was sucked into her mouth it was blue, when it blew out of her nose it was grey.

‘Caítlín came, she stayed, she conquered, just like old Julius Caesar. And just like poor old Julius she got stabbed in the back. Cousin Caítlín had a fling … and it was fatal, fatal!’

Her voice shivered the air over my head. I loved that cry. It made me hear the horses they rode, my uncle Matt and Cousin Caítlín, when they had their fling. I heard the hooves in the veldt. That was the thing about words, you could do what you liked with them. When my aunt said ‘fling’ I saw a woman in a wide yellow skirt turning, and her skirt getting wider and wider around her, like ripples.

‘Uncle Matt was as handsome a devil as ever wore uniform. Caítlín didn’t sit around. She set her cap at Matt.’

The only caps I’d seen were the caps my uncles brought back from the war. Army, air force, navy. My uncles wore them when they sat out in the garden or went down to Park Lake and lay on the grass, and if they didn’t cover their faces with newspaper then they laid their caps over their eyes and said things like ‘Gosh, I’d love a zizz.’

How did you set a cap?