Swan River

by David Reynolds

  We wondered where they went to the loo, and at lunch we asked my father. He told us that there was a proper flush lavatory inside the house on the ground floor. ‘It was very grand, with a big square mahogany seat, and the bowl was decorated in Wedgwood blue, like plates, with pictures of flowers and birds. In fact it was more comfortable and more convenient than the WC in this house. We were lucky. My grandfather had it installed at great expense; most people in the street had WCs outside in the garden.’

  In the afternoon we read through the rest of January, the whole of February and some of March. Nothing much seemed to happen, except that Sis’s father went away on business twice for a fortnight and her brother Ernest occasionally brought friends home after school and made a lot of noise. We read about Uncle George, who was seventeen. It seemed extraordinary that this young man – who so long ago didn’t seem to do much except go to work at an office, come home, eat, read, sometimes play cards or the piano, and go to bed – was the same man, the one who had just died and whom I had always thought of as very old. On Thursday evenings, he and Sis would usually walk up to a park called Hackney Downs for ‘band night’; they would sit on seats outdoors listening to a brass band play popular tunes.

  My mother had to work in the shop that afternoon and when she got back we had a late tea in the sitting room. My father toasted bread with a telescopic toasting fork, holding it against the glowing coals behind the bars of the Cosy Stove. Deborah sat between me and my mother on the sofa, my father sat in his usual armchair, and we watched Six-Five Special while my mother knitted and read the Daily Telegraph. Irritatingly, my father swivelled his chair so that he could see the television, and I knew what would follow: ‘Look at his trousers! He can’t walk in trousers like that, surely!’ as Joe Brown shook his brush cut into a microphone. ‘Why do they have to call women “babies”?’ he loudly interrupted Adam Faith, and looked round at me and Deborah as if we would have an answer.

  ‘Don’t know, Dad,’ I shrugged.

  When it was over, he switched the television off with a flourish, turned and said, ‘I’m astounded that you two have spent all day reading my mother’s diary. What do you make of it?’ He took out his tin and started to roll a cigarette. My mother put down her paper.

  ‘It’s interesting…I liked reading about Uncle George when he was seventeen, but her life seems to go on the same every day.’

  ‘Well. Life can get like that. Most of the world’s population do repetitive tasks day after day just to survive.’ He glanced at my mother. ‘I think at that time she probably was a bit fed up. She had to be a housewife before her time, looking after her father and two brothers instead of a husband and children.’ He lit his cigarette, inhaled deeply and blew the smoke towards the ceiling. ‘It was a shame, but she coped. She was a tough woman.’

  Deborah was staring upwards with her hands behind her head. ‘You don’t get much idea of what she thought about. It’s mainly one thing happened and then something else happened.’ She looked at my father. ‘She says whether she likes people, or doesn’t, but she doesn’t say whether she’s happy or unhappy or just going along without thinking about it.’

  ‘Yes. It’s more a record of what happened than anything else.’ My father leaned forward. ‘There are about twenty of those diaries and I read them all years ago, but that’s my memory of them. Even when terrible events occurred like my father’s drinking and eventually being thrown out, she just records the facts... It’s almost as though she’s not involved.’ He sat back and pulled on his cigarette again. ‘Do you think you get a good picture of what daily life was like, though?’

  It was my turn to answer. ‘I can see the routine and the different things they had then and the things they didn’t have – ’

  ‘You see, the thing is,’ my father interrupted, ‘she wasn’t really a writer. She didn’t have the imagination to express things as they really were.’

  ‘But she didn’t need imagination. She was there,’ I said.

  ‘Perhaps imagination is the wrong word.’ He pulled on his cigarette and stared at the ceiling. ‘But I think, you see, that good writers, even if they write a made-up story, tell the truth better than someone who just recounts facts…and it’s probably having a good imagination that helps them to do that.’ He then talked about Jane Austen, about whom I knew nothing, Charles Dickens – I had read A Christmas Carol at school and seen the David Copperfield serial on television – and Robert Louis Stevenson – I had read Treasure Island. He seemed to be trying to say that these people told the truth about the world around them.

  I couldn’t quite see it: Scrooge and Bob Cratchit and Long John Silver seemed like imaginary people to me.

  ‘But they come alive in your mind, don’t they?’ my father said. ‘And does Uncle George, aged seventeen, come alive to you?’

  ‘No. Not really.’

  Deborah shook her head in agreement.

  ‘That’s my point. There’s something truthful about Scrooge and Bob Cratchit.’ He forgot about Long John Silver. ‘There were people like them. In fact, there are people like them.’

  The clacking of my mother’s knitting needles stopped and she turned to me and Deborah. ‘The best example I can think of is a man called Robert Graves. He wrote two marvellous books about a Roman Emperor called Claudius, but he wrote them as though they were actually written by Claudius.’ My father was nodding enthusiastically. ‘He imagined what Claudius thought and felt and those books give a better picture of what Claudius and life in ancient Rome were like than anything else. They are better than history books because they seem so real.’

  My father lent me two more of Sis’s diaries and over the next few weeks I skipped through them, feeling a little guilty about not reading every word. In 1888 Sis fell in love with a doctor; some of her writing about this was rather embarrassing, but for the first time there was a bit of a story and she wrote about how she felt, although it still didn’t seem very real.

  * * * * *

  Months later, because it caught my attention, I pulled Claudius the God off the bookshelf in my mother’s room and read the first two pages. It was hard to follow, but for a few minutes I was under the illusion that this was actually written by the Emperor Claudius.

  Later, I found my father in the sitting room and asked him how we could know that the book was true and how Robert Graves could know what Claudius thought. He started pulling out volumes of The Encyclopaedia Britannica and talking at the same time. ‘You see. I’ve been thinking about this for years. What is truth? It’s a question all the philosophers and poets and great writers have concerned themselves with.’ I sat down in the middle of the sofa. ‘Hundreds and hundreds of years ago, before the birth of Christ, there was a great Greek philosopher called Aristotle and he had a lot to say about truth.’ He dumped three volumes on the table and quickly turned the pages of one of them. ‘Listen to this.’

  He slowly read out passages about the thinking of this Greek from so long ago, poking the air with his forefinger and looking up at me intently from time to time. Some of what he read was very tedious but I got the idea that Aristotle, who my father thought knew what he was talking about, believed that fiction was better than truth. I’d always thought ‘fiction’ just meant the books in the library that weren’t true; but it seemed more complicated than that.

  ‘Aristotle thought that fiction was based on probability, rather than literal truth, and that this made good fiction ultra-real. Fiction distilled the truth. That means that it contains the essence of the truth, whereas, Aristotle thought, people who try to record the literal truth, people who write history – or perhaps diaries like my mother’s – convey the truth less well.’ He sat back and looked at me. ‘Does that make sense to you?’

  ‘I think so,’ I said. As he put the books away, I thought about Sis’s diaries and how, though she was presumably telling the truth, she somehow wasn’t telling the whole story.

  * * * * *

  For me the next year, 19
61, was still childhood, still uncomplicated hedonism. My mother worked part-time at the shop she had once owned and my father drove off most mornings in the grey-green A35. I took the bus with Richard and Adam to school in High Wycombe, getting home every day at 4.15; homework fitted in easily, and when the evenings grew lighter, I went, nearly always with Richard, either to hang around the recreation ground behind the station or to trespass in the bird sanctuary by the river beyond the lock.

  It was the time of my father’s great lawsuit against Sketchley, the dry cleaner. They made a mess of four of his shirts and foolishly failed to admit liability, which he reckoned to be £8, the price of four new shirts. He was an old hand at this, having taken legal action against various parties over the years, although the only other one that I remembered was his action against a shop called Daniel’s in the High Street whose manager refused to sell him a football displayed in the window; he was temporarily out of stock and would have had to crawl through a thicket of tents, fishing rods and mannequins in all-weather clothing to oblige. My father won that simply by looking up the relevant acts and case law in the Law Society Library in London and writing a letter quoting sub-clauses and precedents. The manager sent an assistant round with three free footballs and a note saying, ‘All right, you win and I hope we will continue to receive your custom.’

  When the Sketchley case looked like actually going to court, my mother encouraged him to drop it, not because she thought he wouldn’t win, but because she knew that it would raise his already high emotional temperature. ‘Is it really worth it?’

  ‘They tore my shirts. You’ve seen them, Exhibits A, B, C and D. It’s a matter of principle. Why should this greedy chain of capitalists get away with that?’ He lowered his voice. ‘You may have to be a witness, you know, to prove they weren’t torn already.’

  She sighed and carried on mashing potatoes. He sauntered out into the garden to look at the budgerigars. I followed.

  Reynolds versus Sketchley eventually came up at the County Court in Aylesbury. My mother declined to take a day off work to attend and I had to be at school. My father left wearing his dark suit, which only looked its age from close to, and his Savage Club tie. He returned that evening carrying red roses for my mother and a small transistor radio for me, the thing I wanted more than anything. He had not just won the case, presenting it himself against a fancy London barrister, but had been awarded an astonishing amount of costs. The judge had found in his favour and then enquired what work he did and how much he was paid for it; he must surely have lost some time at work preparing his case. My father told him that he was partly paid in commission. Forty pounds was added to the eight pounds’ worth of shirts for that, and then the judge revealed that he knew my father was a writer of some repute.

  ‘When do you fit your writing in, Mr Reynolds?’

  Truthfully he answered, ‘In the early mornings, milud. I get up at 5 am.’

  ‘And how much of your early-morning-writing time has been wasted on this case?’

  ‘Probably four or five days milud.’

  ‘And how much did you earn from your last book?’

  Again truthfully, ‘My advance was one thousand pounds, but it sold rather well. I netted six thousand, four hundred pounds milud.’ Eyebrows were raised – this was more than twice the judge’s own salary – but the Sketchley barrister, presumably accepting that he had lost thoroughly, stayed silent and my father had no need to mention that, despite writing almost every day, he hadn’t had a book published since 1949.

  The judge fiddled with pencil and paper. ‘I award sixty pounds for Mr Reynolds’ loss of earnings as a writer. The defendant will pay a total of one hundred pounds in costs.’

  This was more than my father earned in a good month, and, as he repeatedly pointed out, it was tax-free. Celebrations continued as the local paper reported ‘Local David Slays Dry-Cleaning Goliath’, and my father took my mother and me to a department store in Reading where we each spent £10 on new clothes – I bought two pairs of jeans, a sweater and a maroon waterproof jacket called a windcheater, with a collar that turned up over my ears.

  On the way home my father lost his temper with a van-driver because he was forced to brake when the van cut in front of us. My father swore at him and drove fast, overtaking other cars in an effort to keep up with him. I was in the passenger seat and could see the anger on his face. From the back my mother called to him to slow down; there was no point in endangering us all.

  He turned and looked at her angrily – and drove on in a greater fury, cursing the traffic in his way.

  He caught up with the van at some traffic lights, drove alongside it, hooted, pulled down his window, shouted at the man that his driving was a disgrace, and called him a stupid bastard. The van-driver got out, walked round to my father, yelled ‘Watch who you call a stupid bastard’, and punched him in the face. He got back in his van and drove off as my father’s nose bled all over his shirt. My mother drove home while my father lay on the back seat holding his handkerchief over his face.

  * * * * *

  On an evening in mid-summer Richard called round for me and we decided to go to the bird sanctuary. On the road by the lock we found Dennis leaning against the red-brick gateway outside Uncle George’s former home, smoking a cigarette.

  Richard was my best friend; he had curly hair and an open, freckly face. A few years before we had played with guns and toy cars and plastic models of red Indians – he had been the Apaches and I the Comanches – on each other’s front paths and living-room carpets. Nowadays, we kicked footballs around, looked at girls in the High Street, smoked and worshipped Elvis. Richard was a lasting, dependable friend, a year older than me – he would soon be fourteen – but about the same height.

  Lately I had grown to like Dennis, mainly for what I would later be able to define as his dry, lazy humour. He was small and lean, with lank dark hair that flopped into his eyes, and he spoke softly in an Irish accent. I liked to listen to him talk and sometimes found that I was unwittingly mimicking his speech patterns in his presence, and had to stop myself. He liked to tell stories about things that had happened to him, and about Ireland where he had lived until he was eight and where he returned every summer.

  He came along with us, holding his cigarette cupped in his hand. It was the middle of July; the evening was still warm; the lock was full of pleasure boats and the riverbank beyond was crowded with fishermen, strolling families and children paddling in murky water. We had to wait until there was no one in sight before vaulting the gate marked ‘Bird Sanctuary: No Trespassing’. We stumbled between head-high brambles until we reached a shady clearing under a huge spreading oak. Richard and I had often climbed this tree and that evening, followed by Dennis, we climbed high and out along a sturdy branch, some thirty feet above the ground. We sat, legs dangling, staring down at the river as the sun began to set behind the white suspension bridge beyond the lock.

  Dennis handed out Woodbines that he told us he had removed from his brother’s pocket. As we smoked, he spoke about a time, the summer before, when he and his brother had trespassed on a rich man’s estate near his grandfather’s home in County Waterford. They had been examining some baby pheasants in a wood when a man appeared from behind a tree and threatened them with a gun. He had never run so fast.

  He stopped talking, and in the silence we could hear small children shouting as they paddled in the river. There was no wind to rustle the leaves and we caught the throaty rasp of an angry swan; looking down we could see it protecting two mottled brown cygnets from a sailing boat that had gone too close.

  ‘Are you really going to boarding school?’ Richard turned to me.

  I felt annoyed that he had asked me then, when we were outdoors enjoying ourselves. It was one of my two worries. The thought of either of them sometimes made my shoulders and hands tingle and tremble momentarily – the other, of course, was my father’s treatment of my mother.

  Soon after I was born, my mother had p
ut my name down for a boys’ public school, where her father and uncles had been. Then, when I was seven, an aunt of my mother’s, whom I had innocently charmed as a small child, died, leaving money specifically to be spent on my education. My mother wanted me to go to this school because she believed that there I would get the best possible education and that almost any sacrifice, certainly her own, was worth this goal. My father was ambivalent. His political principles shrieked against such a step, but there was an elitist, snobbish side to his character, which I believe he would have liked to subdue but could not. Both of them would miss me, I knew that, but education – which both of them had, in their own opinions and for different reasons, not had enough of – had an allure that transcended personal pleasure and conviction.

  When boarding school had been a distant prospect, I had actually looked forward to it. When I was nine or ten, I had read Billy Bunter and Jennings and Darbishire books, and it all seemed like lots of fun away from the restraints of home. It was still nearly a year away. If I was to go, I was to go the following May. We had visited the school and met the man who would be my housemaster; he had been friendly but had seemed old and austere. I was due to take an entrance exam in the autumn.

  I stubbed my cigarette carefully on the branch beside me and dropped the butt to the ground. ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Don’t! You’ll hate it… No freedom… No girls.’ Richard stretched, and then wobbled on the branch. He quickly dropped his hands to his sides to steady himself. He was right; what I had thought of as the restraints of home, when I was nine or ten, seemed to have fallen away. Save that I had to go to school and perform a few perfunctory household chores, there were no irksome rules.

  ‘I wouldn’t go to a place like that, I’ll tell you… Don’t they beat the boys whenever they get the chance? They do in Ireland. I know.’ Dennis squinted against the sun as he peered at me. ‘Stay here with us. Marlow’s OK, and your school’s OK.’ He was right as well. I liked the town – the river, the lock, the park, the cinema, the High Street, our house, my friends – and my school was fine, given that I had to go to a school; I was around the top of the class, played football, liked two of the teachers a lot, hated one of them – but everybody hated him.