Making an Elephant

by Graham Swift

  I don’t know what my father, if he’d had a real choice, would have wanted to be. For many of his generation it was an unasked question. You fell in with what was required. Nonetheless, among the many things he might have wanted to be, he’d been one: a pilot.

  He spent the rest of his working life in a department of the civil service that had a name Dickens might have invented: the National Debt Office. He toiled in and for the nation’s debt, a task of some immensity and the source of many jokes. But neither his office’s grandiose name nor the imposing sums of money he had to deal with could hide the fact that for not quite forty years he was essentially a bookkeeper, a clerk.

  The National Debt Office no longer exists, absorbed into the murky workings of the Treasury, perhaps on the skulking principle that the national debt is best kept as unlocatable as possible. At least in my father’s day it owned up to itself. It was housed then in a grey stone building in Old Jewry, just round the corner from the Bank of England, of which it was an official annexe. This meant that it was accorded, just inside its faceless entrance, a magnificent flunkey of a doorman, dressed in a bright pink tailcoat, waistcoat and top hat with cockade. All Bank of England departments had these florid sentinels and they all seemed to be tall and broad-chested and to have flamboyant moustaches.

  Inside was a sort of essence of bureaucracy. I can still make the smell of my father’s office tingle in my nostrils: the smell of waxed wood is in it, and of some standard-issue floor polish and of various kinds of standard-issue stationery. Something rubbery too (rubber stamps?), and, beyond that, the smell of cool, stony, featureless corridors that are mopped every day, and of sternly carbolic washrooms.

  It all blurs somehow with the daunting smell of the corridor outside the headmaster’s study at Dulwich—with the smell and clanging echoes of all those corridors of life of which we can never be sure if we have chosen them or they us.

  My father, who had reserves of humour, once wrote against ‘Occupation’, when filling out a form, the single eloquent word ‘Drudgery’. I only ever went a few times to his office and so rarely glimpsed him, in the professional sense, ‘at work’. But I saw him any number of times at home, hanging wallpaper, painting, fixing the car, doing this or that job with the zeal of a natural, versatile handyman. His office was always to me a vague, walking-through-the-wrong-door shock.

  For over thirty years after the war, like countless others, though not with the bowler-hatted, square-shouldered aplomb of those who made real money there, he travelled every day up to the City and back. The absolute paradigm: the new house in the outer suburbs, the job in town, the train to and from. It was the train at first, for many years, even when we had the car, then at some point in the car-owning era he acquired, through promotion or sheer luck, that priceless thing, a parking space in his office’s tiny, hemmed-in car park, and so abandoned the misery of the jam-packed trains for the more independent torments of the crawling, swearing car journey.

  Sometimes, in school holidays, I’d travel up with him—he always left very early to ‘beat the traffic’—and, while he went to work, I’d wander at will, as day broke, round the City. For me it had romance: a great grey beast stirring in the winter dawn. To him it was just the Smoke, the Grind.

  As a contented child, I saw none of the costs, personal or financial, of my contentment: that it was my father’s lot to administer the nation’s debt while constantly steering us out of the red, his accepted task to endure a daily tedium, to scale the ladder of promotion—executive officer, senior executive officer—so we might have all we had.

  Which wasn’t so little. Ours was the quintessential post-war package with all its fresh-faced promise and amenity. A brand-new semi-detached house built on the very edge of the suburbs and bought (as I later got to know) through the combination of a subsidy from my grandparents and the concessionary price offered by the developer to ex-servicemen. There was another former navy lieutenant turned white-collar commuter in number eight.

  A short distance away in one direction were open fields and farmland: the literal edge of the country. London was moving outwards, and behind all the bland domestic trappings of suburbia there was an odd, spit-on-the-palms pioneering spirit. We had a fair-sized back garden which I can only remember in its finished state, but it had needed to be worked from a virgin plot. My father, with his joy in physical tasks, must have loved nothing better. There’s another photo of him pausing in his labours, sitting on a wicker chair that has been carried outside, with a mug of tea and a cigarette (Senior Service). He could be an early settler in Nebraska.

  For years our hillside cul-de-sac remained unmade-up, just a rough broad track worn into the chalky subsurface of what were really the lower slopes of the North Downs. In summer it turned white and dusty. Clumps of flowering vegetation would sprout up along the edges, crowded, in my not-so-fanciful memory, with butterflies. Across the road, below where the houses began, was a tennis club, behind a strip of fence, where my brother and I, when we were old enough to become junior members, could pretend to be Laver or Hoad. Summers went with the pok-pok of tennis balls.

  Beyond the tennis courts was my primary school, St Peter’s, another paradigm of the new age: newly built, cleanly architectured and lawned. Rowans and silver birches waved in the breeze beyond the classroom windows. We were all told we were the New Elizabethans, and, apart from having to eat every bit of your school dinner, I barely remember a bad moment there.

  It all seems, in fact, a kind of dreamland, a modest little attempt at heaven on earth, though by the time I was in my teens, having been thoroughly nurtured by it, I’d naturally had enough of it.

  Between school and university I took myself off, as many of my generation did, across Europe with a rucksack towards Asia, though the hippy trail petered out for me somewhere in eastern Turkey. My father at the same age could never have done or even contemplated such a thing.

  A small incident stands out from my childhood. I still keep its physical relic—which I realize now has acquired the totemic status of those mysterious odds and ends in my grandfather’s house. My father was the happy handyman I could never be; I became the willing pen-pusher he never was. But once, in spontaneous deference to his handyman skills and wanting to please him, I made a wooden elephant.

  He must have seen real wild elephants in Africa during the war. He must have looked down from his cockpit and spotted them lumbering through the bush—dipped his wing and swooped to get a better view, but none of this would have occurred to me when I made my wooden one. Three pieces of thick plywood cut from a pattern with a fretsaw (I was good at twisting and breaking the blades): one for the body, head and trunk; two for the legs either side. Glue them together, rub down the joins and if you’d done the cutting well you had an elephant that could stand up by itself.

  I didn’t do such a bad job and my father had watched progress keenly, encouragingly. Then the time came to paint it. What colour, he asked. Yellow, pink?

  I found these suggestions ridiculous. Grey, of course. Elephants were grey, weren’t they? He counter-argued, ready for me to choose from his impressive array of paint pots, but I just didn’t get it. Grey it was.

  The strange reversal stays with me, as does the sad object of it all: that I should have been the realist, he the fantasist. It’s not even a true elephant grey. It was the only grey available, the one used in finishing off Airfix kits, battleship grey.

  As I stood, years later, outside his boyhood home, seeing those derelict cars, I thought: would he really have got this joke? Two cars, just left to decay in the front garden, the front garden itself gone rampant: such things to him would have been sacrilege, surely?

  I wish I’d painted it pink.

  In the late 1970s, because of some civil-service shake-up, he was offered early retirement. For some in those days this could have been a sort of execution, a knell, but he snapped it up. By then he’d not quite notched up the all-important forty years of service, but a full pension, t
emporarily on ice, was part of the package. He was fifty-five, my age now. He turned his back on the National Debt, sold the house in South Croydon (with surprisingly little sentiment or ceremony, I recall) and moved with my mother to the Sussex downs near Hastings.

  Another paradigm: the house on the hill, the view of the sea —though I don’t remember his retirement being particularly retiring; there was always some task, some scheme, some enthusiasm on the go. Here he had fifteen free and contented years, till one summer when I’d gone to Australia, when he was seventy, an otherwise fit and full-of-life man, he developed stomach cancer and died.

  Now I do the bookkeeping, actuarial sums. He might have worked till he was sixty-five. He had those fifteen years. Therefore he was lucky. As he was lucky to have lived through the war. As he was lucky, as he himself often said, that all those blandishments of the Sixties didn’t just favour the younger generation. This was the time, after all, not only of the hippy trail but of the package tour: sudden affordable foreign travel for all. So, from the mid-Sixties on, there he was, with my mother now, seeing the world again, back again in the blue Med just for pleasure this time, and the photographs now in colour. Good times. The kids off their hands. In the cupboard under the telly, a regular stock of duty-frees.

  At some point in the Sixties he made a small but historic decision. He switched from his old-sailor, non-filter Senior Service to cosmopolitan, jet-setting Peter Stuyvesant—to which, so the slogan insisted, people were changing in ‘city after city’. Even in Croydon. It always seemed to me a telltale, watershed moment, a throwing off of the past, a throwing in of his lot with the new.

  I see him in the porch of the Sussex house when I arrived on visits, a beam on his face—the gin-and-tonics soon to be poured —looking like a man on permanent holiday.

  His end was quick and cruel. He handled it as he handled so much of his life: practically, without fuss and with the usual recourse to humour. He was always, in those last weeks, concentratedly there—always, insistently, himself. Though how much of a life, at its end, do you see?

  He made little notes and memos—what the surgeon had told him, what to ask—the handwriting a little shaky, but unchanged from the captions under the photographs, from the entries in the pilot’s logbook. He might have lived to ninety. But, of course, death had been close to him—he knew more about it than I did—long ago, before. Others had had their turn then.

  Only once, in those last few weeks, did we ‘lose’ him—I mean, other than when he was simply unconscious—only once did I almost not recognize my father. The end was inevitable, but certain procedures, interventions, were still offered, disruptive in themselves but designed to ease his suffering. He agreed to undergo them, more in a spirit of workmanlike cooperation —little last projects—than anything else, though he didn’t agree to them all. One of his refusals produced, as he was dying, one of the best jokes of his life: ‘Doctor, I don’t think I’d have the stomach for that.’

  But one procedure he did assent to left him—because of the drugs involved, I suppose—babbling, agitated, even thrashing about in his bed. It passed soon enough; the nursing staff were reassuring, but while it was happening it was genuinely frightening. The sidebars had been raised on the bed and for a while he was actually like a creature in a cage. I remember him trying to bite the hand I put out to him.

  You’d have thought he’d gone mad.

  Not completely mad, however. There was a thread of desperate intention to it all. It seemed he saw us—his family—as people trying to overpower him, to prevent him, prohibit him from something. In his ravings the word ‘plane’ kept coming up. ‘My plane.’ It seemed he believed he was being kept from his plane. Everything had been twisted into this terrible conspiracy of restraint. Why wasn’t he allowed to get to his plane?

  How do you interpret such a thing? Hold it in your memory? Next day he was himself—his dying self—again. But right there and then he was a man I didn’t know, couldn’t ever know: my father, before I was born. And the situation was clear, no subtle interpretation was needed. He was being grounded against his will.

  POEMS

  In the misty and often lengthy periods which I later come to realize are the preludes to my starting a new book, I’ve noticed that my reading can shift from novels, or anything large, to poetry, as if I’m aware that whatever I do next will arise not from any grand design but from some small, insistent vibration; a blink of light through the fog.

  I’ll often concentrate on the poems of just one poet and even be drawn (though there’s not such a wide field) to poets better known for their prose. Raymond Carver’s poems, for example, have sometimes been my companions in the mist, and it would be true to say that I’ve derived more from them than from his widely admired stories. The poems give me that feeling of being in the same space as the man, which in these obscure intervals seems to be what I need.

  Just once, so far, has this temporary inclination for reading poetry toppled over into writing it. Some months after I completed The Light of Day I found myself, unexpectedly, writing little else. One poem seemed to lead to another, so that I acquired, until it suddenly stopped, the cautiously darting momentum (quite unlike the momentum of writing a novel) with which you hop from stepping stone to stepping stone. That suggests it all had some transitional purpose, though I think it was more a case of not wanting to feel, while I waited for a new novel to loom, creatively becalmed. Perhaps it was just refreshing to be making those quick, frequent leaps. Novels come with gaps between them too, and I wouldn’t want to say that there’s any particular purpose or pattern to the way they’re interspersed, just as I can’t really explain how I make the larger leaps—or rather, slow, tentative journeys—between them. In the end, after a gap, they just happen. These are some of the poems that, in one of the gaps, just happened too.

  This Small Place

  The world is big enough,

  Though getting smaller, they say,

  And as for the universe—let’s not think of that.

  But there’s always this small place, close to hand,

  This place of small talk and whispers and memories

  And small mercies and small blessings,

  And small comfort, true enough, sometimes.

  We started here, and now and then

  We’ve come back, only half meaning to,

  But thankful enough to find it still there,

  In the small hours,

  With only some furniture and our thoughts.

  And it’s where we’ll be at the finish,

  We know this too,

  Sure enough, true enough, big enough.

  Waves

  When we all gather together,

  Get thrown together, at bashes and dos,

  I think of the seaside, the gleeful light,

  Of how we’ve all gone in for a dip and, beyond the sparkling froth,

  There are big waves running and

  Up and down we go,

  Up and down.

  Those moments when we laugh at each other to see it:

  Up and down!

  Those moments when a wave slaps us, mid-laugh,

  And we gulp and panic a little but laugh again.

  Those moments when between the crests and troughs

  We lose sight of each other altogether.

  Our Childhoods

  They pluck us on the shoulder sometimes.

  Remember us?

  And we think of them

  Perplexedly, if fondly,

  As if we don’t know who they really are.

  And yet we know something they don’t know:

  That really they’re orphans, all orphans.

  Look at them there, up to their old tricks.

  When will they find out?

  And then, when they have, who will they become?

  Rush Hour

  The fog of their massed breath,

  The still-sleepy glitter of their eyes.

  So this is their life, what th
ey do every day,

  Funnelled into work like hour-glass sand?

  No, no, look again. It’s not what it seems.

  This smoky-blue dawn

  That hasn’t yet torn them from dreams,

  These lights on their faces.

  Not regulars, but extras, taking their places,

  Here for this one, unrepeatable scene.

  To His Dead Father

  Their age freezes, but we go on,

  Burning the years.

  If I could meet him now

  There wouldn’t be that gap between us.

  I’d say, ‘I’m catching up,’

  Like someone adjusting

  To the other’s brisker pace.

  I’d say, ‘I see it now like you saw it.

  The thing is, I just lagged behind.’

  We’d walk, we’d talk, we’d know each other.

  We’d be like equals, brothers, friends.

  Inmates

  School dormitories, barrack rooms,

  Hospital wards and, by a stretch,

  Prison wings too.

  All of a muchness and all grim.

  But imagine them empty,

  All the narrow beds unburdened.

  Thrown in, we learn the hard way to muck in too,

  All fondly supposing there’s some other free place

  Where we’re all tender autocrats,

  All sweet, proud exceptions to the rules.

  And so it should be.

  But, still, imagine them empty:

  The long spaces silent,

  Not a door being swung,

  The beds simply waiting, as if no one’s said,