So Many Ways to Begin

by Jon McGregor

  The thing in his hands felt at once indestructible and hopelessly fragile. He was terrified of dropping it, or of spoiling it in some way, of holding it out in the air for too long. It felt as though he had only to put one of the cigarettes to his lips and he would be suddenly transported to that foxhole in 1914, crowded around a mess table singing carols with his fellow soldiers. He wanted to put the lid back on, to have Julia take it out of his hands, but he couldn't move and he couldn't bring himself to look away.

  Later, Julia took him to the Imperial War Museum and showed him soldiers' uniforms like the one her father had worn, and the type of rifle he would have used, and letters sent home from the front. She took him to the British Museum and showed him the treasures of Sutton Hoo, the Egyptian Mummies, the jewellery and weapons and costumes smuggled home from around the world. She took him to the Natural History Museum, the V&A, the Horniman, and each time he felt the same breathless excitement he'd felt when he'd first held her father's tobacco tin, the same thrill of old stories made new.

  And it was this that he had spent most of his life looking for: these physical traces of history, these objects which could weigh his hands down with their density of memory and time. Something he could hold on to and say, look, this belonged to my fathers and forefathers, this is some small piece of who they were. This is some small piece of where I began.

  5 Shoebox of assorted domestic goods, bullets, shrapnel, 1953-1960

  Soon after those first museum visits with Julia, he started collecting things for himself: broken crockery, an alarm clock with the face smashed in, the trailing wires of an old radio set, an empty picture frame; the cracked and rusting remains of other lives which he found on the bombsites where he wasn't allowed to play. He brought them home, brushing the dried mud from them with an old toothbrush, looking for maker's marks or other inscriptions, looking for something which would give these objects a story, attaching small labels with the date and the place where they were found and lining them up along his windowsill and his desk.

  What are you doing? Susan asked him one afternoon, not for the first time, standing in his open doorway with her arms folded across her chest.

  Nothing, he replied, turning away from her, trying to shield his latest find with his body, waiting for her to go away.

  Why don't you just collect cigarette cards like normal boys do? she said.

  Why don't you mind your own business? he said.

  It is my business, I'm older than you and I'm your sister, so there, she said, picking up a dented water flask from the floor and lifting it quickly out of his reach. Where did you get this from? she asked, looking at it, reading the label which hung from its neck by a piece of white thread. Have you been on the bombsites again?

  David stood up, reaching for it.

  Give us it back, he said. Colin's brother found it, he gave it to me.

  Don't believe you, Susan said. You'll be in trouble if they find out.

  Give us it back, David said again, jumping for it now, Susan lifting it higher and stepping back, turning towards the door.

  Maybe I'll keep it, she said, smiling.

  It's not yours, David said, his voice rising indignantly.

  It's not yours either, she snapped back. You don't even know whose it is, it could be anyone's.

  Finders keepers, said David, and Susan stepped out on to the landing, smiling again.

  Well, I've just found this so I'm keeping it, she said. David grabbed at it, Susan shrieked, and their mother yelled up at them both to stop it whatever it was they were doing. She pulled a face and gave him back the water flask, whispering for good measure that he was a smelly stinker.

  If she'd asked, if she'd sat down and said that she really honestly wanted to know, he would have told her that he collected these things because he was fascinated by them, because he couldn't take his eyes off them, because it was almost as good as having a real museum all to himself.

  But she didn't ask, and he rarely talked about it to anyone. He found it hard to explain, when anyone did ask, why he liked museums so much, why he spent so many of his weekends catching buses to museums in other towns, or gazing frustratedly at the building site which would one day become the museum Coventry was so painfully lacking. I just like looking at all the things, he would say, and imagining how old they are and finding out about them and everything; muttering as he spoke, knowing that the person asking wouldn't understand.

  He liked the smell of museums, the musty scent of things dug from the earth and buried in heavy wooden store cupboards. He liked the smell of the polish on the marbled floors, and the way his shoes squeaked as he walked across them. He liked the way that people's voices would drift up and be lost in the hush of the high-ceilinged rooms. He liked the coldness of the glass cases when he pressed his face against them. He liked looking at the dates of the objects, and trying not to get dizzy as he added up how long ago that was. He didn't understand why people had to ask, why they didn't enjoy museums as much as he did, and why some of the other boys at school started to call him a swot and a teacher's pet. It seemed perfectly natural to him, to be amazed by the physical presence of history, to be able to stand in front of an ancient object and be awed by its reach across time. A thumbprint in a piece of prehistoric pottery. The chipped edge of a Viking battle-axe, and the shattered remains of a human skull. The scribbled designs for the world's first steam engine, spotted with candlewax and stained with jam. It seemed like some kind of miracle to him that these traces of distant lives had survived, and that he was able to stand in front of them and stare for as long as he liked.

  When he ran out of display space in his room he started keeping the collection in cardboard shoeboxes under his bed, and it was from underneath his bed that he retrieved one of those same boxes some fifty years later, lifting the crinkled lid and sifting through the contents a few days before his journey, trying to remember where all these things had come from. A brooch, a set of keys, a bullet, a handful of blank-faced coins, a lumpen twist of rusted shrapnel: they could have come from any number of the sites he'd explored as a boy - the cratered fields he took as a shortcut across to school; the motor-works which still hadn't been rebuilt; the numerous acres of cleared land which had been marked out with foundations for the housing his father would build to replace what had been there before the war. Coventry was a city of building sites when he was a child, great unmapped territories for him to explore, piecing together stories around the objects he found, guessing which buildings had once been where, or what might be coming, watching the way the city changed as all his favourite places were gradually rebuilt upon.

  But the small leather shoe, in the bottom of the box, had come from his own back garden, not from a rubble-strewn bombsite. He'd dug it up with a handful of potatoes one evening after school and taken it to show his father, who was sitting on the back step with the paper. It fitted easily into his father's broad hand, and they'd both looked at it for a moment, cradled there, plastered with mud.

  Well that's something, his father had said.

  How old do you think it is Dad? David said, leaning over it with his hands on his knees. His father looked up.

  I'd say it's probably been in the ground there since '44, he said, so it's older than you at least. He looked over towards the potato patch, David's spade still sticking out of the ground, the pale potatoes lying in a bunch beside the small hole he'd made. I wouldn't tell your mother about this one though, he added. She might be upset. She might not let you hang on to it, he said. He looked at David, solemnly, and winked, and David tried to wink back. Now, you going to finish digging up the spuds? he asked, passing him the shoe and turning back to his paper.

  In the summer, if the weather was fine, his father liked to sit out on the back step when he got home from work. His mother would look out for him coming down the road and have the kettle and the pot ready so that by the time he got to the house there'd be a mug of tea there waiting. Sometimes she would meet him at the door, h
olding a damp handkerchief up to his face to wipe the dust and dirt from his mouth before kissing him hello. He would sit on the step and spread the evening paper out across his lap, steam rising from his mug, smoke curling from his cigarette, and he didn't like anyone speaking to him until he'd put the paper to one side and looked up again. He was always covered in dust when he got home, his face and hands coated with brick dust and powdered cement, his clothes scattered with woodshavings from the joiners working overhead, his hair threaded with thin white fibres from the panels they used in the roof and around the pipes. When he'd finished the paper, and got washed and changed before tea, he shifted back to being their at-home dad again, softer and more human seeming, but while he was sitting on that step, covered in the debris of work, waiting for his body to recover, he almost seemed to be someone else, some mythological character who built houses and schools and hospitals with his own bare and calloused hands.

  At weekends, or on long evenings when the light held, he would work on the garden, swapping the dust of the building sites for the mud and soil of the ground. There were photographs, taken when they first moved into the house, in which the garden was nothing but piles of sand and builders' rubble, a few nettles and thistles springing up from the odd patch of soggy ground. By the time he died, he'd turned it into something out of a gardener's catalogue - a small lawn at the front, kept carefully trim and straight, bordered with rose bushes, hydrangeas, dahlias, and hollyhocks on either side of the front door. Long rows of vegetables in the back, carefully weeded, carrots and cauliflowers and brussel sprouts, potatoes and parsnips, wigwams of peas and fat runner beans.

  Years later, when Dorothy first met Eleanor, she took great pleasure in showing her around the garden. This was all a wasteground when we moved in, David heard her say as she took Eleanor by the arm and led her around the borders. It took six years for the magnolia to flower but it was worth it, don't you think? And Eleanor smiled and said that she thought it was. And as David watched them, from his place beside the back step, looking at the pale pink flowers of the clematis, which had been trained to the top of the slatwood fence, looking at the heavy handfuls of lavender and thyme growing out of the half-brick rockery in the corner, looking at the gnarled and sagging branches of the two small apple trees, it seemed as if his father had hardly gone away at all.

  6 Postcard from Greenwich Maritime Museum, c. 1953

  When David told Julia that he wanted to be a museum curator she didn't nod and say that's nice, or make a face, or ask him why; she clapped her hands and said it was a wonderful idea. You'll have to invite me to your first exhibition, she said enthusiastically and whenever he saw her after that she would ask how his collections were coming along, what lessons he'd learnt from the museums he'd been to since she saw him last, whether he'd have any jobs going for a work-shy duffer like her once he was open and ready for business. He started telling her about the sort of museum he would run, the exhibitions he would put on, the archives he would collect. I'll have some displays that people can pick up and hold, he said, and more people to explain what things are. And I won't have anything in storage, he said. It'll all be out on display and if there isn't enough room I'll buy a bigger museum because it's not fair to hold on to things and not let people look at them. And I won't have any replicas or artist's impressions, he said.

  He reminded her about the boat he'd seen in the Maritime Museum; it was sitting in a small white-washed room of its own, beached on the bare floor and propped up by a pair of painted timbers. He'd walked around it, just able to see over the gunwales and into the plain interior, a couple of bench seats the only sign of comfort. The display panel on the wall had said that this boat, all twenty undecked feet of it, may well have been sailed across the Atlantic by the Vikings. He'd read those words over again and turned back to the boat, a storm of excitement breaking over him, pressing his hands against it breathlessly, wanting to climb in and run his hands all over it, to push his face into the rough-grained wood and smell the salt tang of sweat and sea and adventure, to sit on the bench and imagine the lurch of the open ocean, the endless tack and reach towards an unrelenting horizon. He'd looked at the wood, which must have been eight or nine hundred years old, and wondered why it wasn't roped off from the public, why it wasn't a little more crumbling and worn, why the varnish was gleaming under the spotlights. And he'd gone back to the display board, and read the last short paragraph explaining who'd built the replica and how, and he'd wanted to kick the whole thing to pieces.

  It didn't mean anything, he told Julia later. It wasn't real, it was made up. You can't learn anything about history by looking at made-up things, he said, talking quickly and urgently. It's stupid, it's not fair. It's a lie, he said. They're lying. She held up a hand to steady him, smiling at his earnest scorn. It's better than nothing though, isn't it? she asked gently. It gives you an idea at least, wouldn't you say?

  7 Opening programme, Coventry Municipal Art Gallery and Museum, 1961

  It was still in good condition, kept clean and dry in a plastic wrapper, and when he slid it out to look through the pages the only marks of age were in the stilted language of the text and the starched formality of the photographs; the mayor, the director, the city treasurer, the benefactor's wife, sitting on the platform with their hands folded into their laps, their hair waxed neatly into place, listening attentively to one another's opening speeches, applauding.

  He remembered their applause carrying out into the street, to the long crowd of people pressing and shifting back down the steps and away round the corner, five or six abreast, chatting and smoking and bending stiff legs, their hands stuffed into their pockets and their collars turned up against the last of the winter winds. One or two policemen were there, keeping order, walking up and down the line, asking people to keep out of the road and leave space for passers-by, keeping an eye out for light fingers and lost children. A pair of journalists were hanging around at the front of the queue, squiggling comments into a notebook, lifting a camera and encouraging people to smile, catching a shot where all the bleached white faces managed to look into the lens at once, a long stretch of them fading back into the dark evening; David near the front, waiting, unsmiling, half hidden by the heavy black coat of the man ahead of him.

  The inky picture ended up on the front page of the Evening Telegraph, and the front page landed on the kitchen table for a while before being neatly clipped out and filed away into the box under his bed.

  Didn't it occur to you to smile? his father asked, standing and leaning over the paper, still dressed in his dust-plastered work clothes. Didn't the photographer say cheese or something? David shrugged, embarrassed.

  Wasn't bothered, he said. Susan, who'd come through from watching television when Albert called, pulled the paper across the table and said let me see, where is he? She searched through the faces and found her brother, smiling in spite of herself, reluctantly impressed.

  Fame at last, she said. You'll have all the girls after you now. David ignored her, his face colouring, and leant over to try to read the article. Dorothy, standing at the oven to stir the gravy and check the chops and the potatoes, turned to Albert and said it's almost ready now if you want to get changed. Albert waved his hand at her in passing acknowledgement.

  Listen, he said, taking the paper back from Susan. Crowds gathered last night to be among the first visitors to another of our city's proud buildings, the long-awaited Municipal Art Gallery and Museum. Guests were especially honoured to have in their midst the future director of the museum, one Mr David Carter Esquire, pictured here with a dirty great sulk on his face. David tried to pull the paper away, but his father whisked it up from the table and stood back, raising his voice above Susan's laughter. The city treasurer, he continued, a tight-fisted bugger if ever we saw one, said it's a shocking waste of money of course, but I was out-voted at the committee stage. It doesn't say that does it? Dorothy asked, lifting her hand to her mouth as she realised her mistake. They all laughed, and
she joined in, embarrassed, and they kept on laughing until Albert began to cough and splutter and double over in an attempt to haul in some breath.

  You really should go to the doctor's, Dorothy said when he'd recovered, handing him a glass of water. Albert didn't reply.

  And there was nothing now to show for this, in the archives he had kept. No medical records, no photographs of his father's face turning a violent red as he fought for breath, no prescriptions or bottles of pills. Just the memory of that cough, the angry defiant bark of it, dry and choked, as though his lungs were full of tangled steel wool. There should have been something, at least. Something to hold up to the light, or to pin to the wall.

  If he was asked, he was going to say that he remembered his father as a strong man; as someone who could balance two dozen bricks on his broad shoulders while he climbed a ladder, who could swing both him and his sister up in the air at the same time, and dig the whole vegetable patch over in the hour or two of light that was left after supper. He was going to say that he remembered his father as a busy man; as someone who always seemed to be in a hurry to be somewhere else: home from work, out to the garden, away from the supper table and out to join his friends in the pub. And he was going to say that he remembered his father as a loving man; someone who could hold his wife in his arms without shame and kiss her as if nobody else was in the room, someone who could find the time now and again to tuck his son into bed, with broad strong hands that smelt of soil and dust and cigarette smoke.

  No one was much surprised when he died, and Albert was probably the least surprised of all. It had been coming on quickly for months and he seemed to have given up and started waiting for it. It feels like I'm breathing in tiny splinters of metal every time I open my mouth, he told David once. It feels like there's a barrow-load of bricks weighing down on my chest. Dorothy found him when she got back from the shops one afternoon, his head tipped back over the arm of the sofa, a blanket wrapped around him like a shroud. She called out, and by the time David had run downstairs she was kneeling beside the sofa, holding Albert's hand and stroking the side of his face. The shopping bags were on the floor, split open, tins and packets and loose wrapped meats spilt halfway across the room, and it was only when the doctor arrived that she pushed herself back to her feet again.