Swan River

by David Reynolds

  ‘I’ve read through them. There are only five from Swan River, but they give a little idea of what his life was like, if you’re still interested. Rough and hard, I would say.’

  ‘I am still interested. What about our idea of going there?’

  He looked at the ground and didn’t answer.

  ‘Remember?’

  He shook his head slightly and looked at me sideways. ‘I’m too old. I really am. I’d slow you down… but you go, if you want to. Take photographs and tell me about it.’

  ‘I’ll go sometime. I’m not sure when, but I’ll go. But you come with me – you’d be all right – if you want to.’

  He shook his head again. ‘No. I’m not up to it. It’s too far.’

  I looked past him; a group of children were pushing on a beam, slowly opening one of the giant gates. He had never before declared himself incapable of doing anything.

  Beyond the footbridge, on the lawn outside the big room where I had first heard the words ‘Swan River, Manitoba’, old people were sitting at tables having tea; a man in a white jacket stood in the doorway holding a jug of orange squash.

  * * * * *

  Back at home, my father handed me a brown envelope. ‘Have a look. They don’t tell you much, but you might be interested.’ He went off to the kitchen to make tea. The envelope was addressed to him at an office in High Wycombe; it had been posted in London in 1942. There seemed to be about ten letters, old and folded, written on flimsy paper of different sizes. I unfolded one carefully. There were several cream-coloured sheets, about the size of a page in a paperback book and faintly lined in green. The first page was headed ‘Durban, Manitoba, Canada’ and dated 14 October 1906, the year my mother was born – she would have been four months old then, and my father would have been two months from his fifteenth birthday.

  My grandfather had small, sloping handwriting, and used black ink and a nib that produced fat strokes in one direction and thin ones in the other. The letter began ‘Dear George’ – presumably Uncle George – ‘After leaving Winnipeg I got to Swan River, 319 miles at 11 pm.’ It went on to say that the next day he had walked twelve miles to Durban, where he had started work on the Thunder Hill branch of the Canadian Northern Railway. I looked at the last page. The writing was larger. There was a bold number 6 at the top, in the middle. At the bottom, with some flourishes on the capitals, was written ‘Yours sincerely T. Clifton Reynolds’.

  My father came in with tea and a packet of fruit shortcake biscuits, and I asked him why the letter came from Durban and not Swan River. He said that Tom had actually lived in Durban; that had been his address: just Durban, Manitoba, Canada. Durban was a small village and Swan River was the local town. I would see, if I read the letters.

  I knew my father had last seen Tom in 1902, on the night he left with two suitcases and said, ‘I’ll see you before long.’ The date of the letter revealed that four years had passed before Tom went to Swan River. I asked my father what had happened in those four years.

  He sat back with Joey on his shoulder and told me that Sis and Old George hadn’t allowed Tom to see him, and that Tom hadn’t known where he lived. They had moved from Norfolk Road after Tom left – not far, to some rooms, upstairs in a house in Rectory Road, Stoke Newington. This had been a come-down for Sis, but was also a relief, quiet and peaceful with no rows or drunkenness – just her and Cliffie much of the time, and Old George when he was at home. Sis did all the housework; there were no servants and no mother’s help. They had no gas, just candles and oil lamps which blew black smuts on to the walls and ceilings. Cliffie was ten years old and responsible for lighting the fires and the range, and he often fetched food.

  My father laughed and talked about ‘sheep’s jimmies’, which were half a boiled sheep’s head and cost threepence ha’penny. They looked awful – he said I’d’ve hated them – but tasted delicious. He also remembered buying hot boiled pork with a pennyworth of pease pudding from a shop called Robinsons in Stoke Newington High Street. For that, he had often stood in a long queue with a bowl he brought from home.

  He smiled as he bit into a fruit shortcake and recalled how on Saturdays Stoke Newington High Street had been full of hawkers. ‘My grandfather would take us and say, “Come on Sis. Let’s you and me and Jim spend a golden sovereign.” He was a spendthrift… like me, though not so bad.’ He shook his head and went on smiling as he told me about ‘the sixpenny ha’penny shop’ where everything – chamber pots, kettles, rugs, huge boxes of candles – cost that curious sum. The shop was lit by paraffin flares, and customers had a clipper card which was clipped every time they bought something. For ten clips Sis used to get a free hardback book; she usually chose Dickens.

  My father went to his bookshelves, pulled down a book and handed it to me – a small, fat copy of Martin Chuzzlewit with a dark blue binding. It had come from the sixpenny ha’penny shop. The type was tiny and black, and I tried to imagine Sis reading it in the light of an oil lamp. My father said they’d had lots of them when he was a boy; Tom had collected them too.

  I asked about Tom – where had he been in those years before he went to Canada? Most of the time, my father told me, he had been homeless, a vagrant living on the streets of London. Sometimes he slept outdoors – on the embankment, my father guessed – and sometimes in a hostel for the poor, of which there were many, but even the poor had to pay something. He ate in soup kitchens where a meal cost a penny. He tried to get work of any kind, but there was a surfeit, even of labourers. His mother had died, and it seemed that only three people kept in touch with him: Uncle George, La Frascetti and his brother Bertie, the chess-player – his other brothers and sisters wouldn’t see him because he was a drunk and an embarrassment. Old George had him sent away when he came to beg at his office in Shoreditch. But Uncle George gave him money from time to time, and La Frascetti took him out for meals and bought him clothes.

  I was amazed that my grandfather had had to live like that, and the shock no doubt showed on my face.

  My father stopped talking and stared at me for a few moments. ‘You have to understand that there were lots of men in his situation then – and women and children. Thousands of them with nowhere to live, and many of them actually starving. I saw them when I went wandering in the real East End with Toppy, in East and West Ham, Canning Town, the docks, Plaistow; it was like Calcutta… There was a famous case where a starving man was arrested for stealing a few oats from a horse’s nosebag.’ He shook his head. ‘It’s not surprising the Labour movement got going around then.’ He sat back and smiled a little. ‘And my father was a well-qualified, reasonably educated man. He went to Canada to fill his belly. You read those letters… You’ll see. Just about the only good thing he has to say about it is that he got good food and plenty of it.’

  ‘I thought he went because he wanted to start a whole new life, or something. He just went for food?’

  He raised his hands and shrugged, and explained that the Canadian government had been offering subsidised passages to Europeans who wanted to go there to work – especially on the railways which were rapidly expanding west. A ticket for Tom by boat and train from Liverpool to Winnipeg – which was where they had wanted people – had cost four pounds, a lot of money, despite the subsidy. Uncle George and a wealthy friend of Tom’s brother Bertie had paid two pounds each.

  I was surprised that I hadn’t heard about this before.

  My father held out his forefinger and Joey hopped on to it. He stroked the top of the bird’s head for a few seconds, with his nose on his beak, then moved him away and looked back at me. ‘You see, I didn’t know any of this till years later. They just told me he was all right and living in London, but that it was better if I didn’t see him, and then that he had decided to go to Canada because he might be able to get a job there.’ He waved his free arm towards the table. ‘I didn’t know those letters existed until years after he died. Two of them are to me. They just put them away and didn’t tell me.’ He was animat
ed, but he didn’t seem to mind that his father’s letters had been kept from him. ‘I don’t blame them. He was just trying to make trouble; you’ll see if you read them.’

  I felt annoyed with Old George and Sis – on my father’s behalf. ‘Why didn’t you tell me all this before?’

  He seemed surprised. ‘Well, I wrote all that stuff.’

  ‘I know… That’s great… Sorry, I’m not complaining.’

  ‘Well… I suppose I didn’t write about my father after he left, because there wasn’t much to say – and it didn’t involve me.’ He stroked Joey again, and looked at the clock. ‘Let’s watch the six o’clock news. Keep those letters. Read them in London when you’ve got time.’

  We didn’t often watch the six o’clock news. He seemed tired. He hadn’t had his usual nap and had been talking all afternoon.

  * * * * *

  On a Saturday early in the next year, 1968, my father called at our new London flat with a middle-aged woman and her eight-year-old son. The visit had been arranged several days before, and they arrived on time at noon. He had met the woman and the boy for the first time less than half an hour earlier on the steps of the Royal Court Theatre, and had driven them round to meet me – and, coincidentally, Dave. The idea was that he would marry this woman.

  He had told me he wanted to get married because he wanted companionship and someone to cook for him – and, I gathered from his letters, he hoped for sex as well. He didn’t know any women who would be likely to marry him, so he filled in a form and sent it to a marriage bureau with a cheque and his photograph, the studio portrait taken in 1947 for the cover of his Autobiography – the one that had sat, facing a photograph of my mother, close to my bed at boarding school.

  I was required to make a good impression on my potential stepmother, and supply coffee and biscuits. I felt extremely uncomfortable. I would have been pleased if, in a more natural way, he had come across a nice woman – one who thoroughly understood what she was letting herself in for – and married her. But this approach to marriage seemed crazy and very unlikely to succeed. As well as supplying a deceptive photograph, he had lied about his age on the form; the woman would be expecting a fit man in his early sixties, instead of a very deaf one, aged seventy-six, who walked with a stick. I felt sorry for the woman, even before I met her.

  Dave – who could easily have stayed in his room, or gone out, for an hour – was supportive and amused; we dusted and hoovered the flat and went shopping for biscuits. When the bell rang, Dave lit the gas under the kettle and I opened the door. My father was wearing a white shirt and the tie he had worn on the New Year’s Eve before last, his old suit and a tight, beige overcoat with brown leather buttons that was someone else’s cast-off – and he wasn’t carrying his stick. The woman had a hat and looked cross, and my sense that she disapproved of me, as well as of my father, was intensified by the black-rimmed glasses that rose at a steep angle from the bridge of her nose. The boy was small with an intelligent face and looked awkward in a grey flannel suit with short trousers.

  There was no sitting room, so I led them into my bedroom and invited the woman to sit down in my rickety armchair. My father sat on my desk chair and the boy and I sat next to each other on a low sofa. We managed to talk for a minute or two about the GPO sorting office next to our building and how the vans made a lot of noise during the night. Then I found out that the woman lived in Chiswick and my father talked about one of his cousins who had once lived there. The little boy turned his head sideways and stared at my ‘Legalise Cannabis – The Putting Together of the Heads – Hyde Park Stone Free Concert’ poster, from the previous summer; Dave and I had discussed taking it down, but had decided that the lettering was so psychedelic that none of our guests would be able to read it.

  It was a lugubrious gathering until Dave came in carrying a tray. ‘Don’t often have coffee parties.’ He beamed at everyone with raised eyebrows. ‘Thought perhaps I should wear an apron. Now, what would sir like? Custard cream or chocolate digestive?’ He bent over the little boy who smiled for the first time and took a biscuit. ‘And would sir like coffee, or I have a very good orange squash?’ Even the woman smiled a little, while retaining her pained expression.

  Somehow, we got through half an hour and then, at last, they left to have lunch at a restaurant in Battersea Park. I shut the door on them and went back to Dave. He looked at me, and started to make a hooting noise and wave his arms about.

  I didn’t think it was funny. ‘What does he think he’s doing? That poor woman and that sweet little boy.’

  ‘That woman’s face. Oh dear, I think I’m going to die.’ He held his stomach. ‘I’ve never seen anything…’ – his face was screwed up and the hooting continued – ‘like it… Did you see her when… when… your dad… said how he admired… Lenin?’

  ‘What’s going to happen now? She won’t want to marry him.’

  He shook his head and went on laughing. ‘And he won’t want to marry her. Oh dear… I don’t think I’ll ever recover.’

  We went to the pub and recalled every agonising moment. I relaxed and began to laugh along with Dave; I could see that we had been involved in an exquisite farce, as well as a pathetic tragedy.

  When we came back to the flat, my father was sitting alone in the Cresta outside. There had been no plan for him to return. He climbed out of the car, frowning. ‘I’ve been sitting there for an hour. Was about to give up. Can I come in for a minute?’

  I touched his shoulder. ‘What happened?’

  ‘I couldn’t see behind properly in the car park at Battersea. Backed into another car. There was a bit of a bang, and she just got out and walked off with her boy. Didn’t say a word.’

  ‘Oh dear… I’m sorry about that.’ I looked at the back of the car. There was a new dent in the bumper.

  He glanced at it and shrugged. ‘It’s nothing serious. I’m dying for a pee.’ Dave and I followed him slowly up the stairs. ‘Ghastly woman, didn’t you think? Unsmiling harridan. Wouldn’t have married her for all the tea in Joe Lyons.’

  ‘No, she wasn’t my type – or yours, I wouldn’t have thought.’

  He went into the bathroom and left the door open. Dave disappeared and I hovered outside. He shouted over his shoulder. ‘Nice little boy. Shame about his mother.’

  He followed me into the kitchen and sat down. I made some tea and Dave came in and leaned against the wall. My father rolled a cigarette, drank the tea quickly and asked for another cup. He looked at Dave. ‘Well, Dave. A narrow escape, I think, but thank you for doing the coffee and all that… Just sorry I wasted your time.’

  Dave smiled. ‘That’s all right. It’s nice to see you.’

  My father looked round at me. ‘I’m meeting another one next week.’ He smiled.

  25

  Awareness Ends

  I thought about going to Swan River that summer – I had two weeks’ holiday before starting a new job. I decided, with some sadness, that I didn’t want to go with Deborah; I didn’t want to be alone with her for that long – at the moment, anyway. In the end I couldn’t afford to go at all, and went to the Channel Islands with Dave and Pat instead.

  When I returned, I found a letter from my half-sister Ann asking me to telephone her; my father had had a stroke and was in a hospital in Aylesbury. I sat on my bed with the letter in my hand. I felt weak and nauseous. I imagined he would soon die, if he hadn’t already; the letter was a few days old.

  I had contemplated his death often; for most of my life I had thought of it as something that would happen one day but not in any foreseeable future, and had wondered vaguely how I would feel. Since he retired, four years before, my sense of his death as a real possibility had grown gradually until, a year or two ago, I had begun to feel glad that he was alive every time I saw him or heard from him. When I parted from him, usually on his front doorstep, I felt sadness in a tingling wave through my arms and legs, not just because he seemed lonely, but because I was thinking, without willi
ng to, that I might not see him again.

  Ann said that he wasn’t about to die, but that it was serious – he seemed to have lost some movement in his arms and legs and, though she couldn’t define it, his brain appeared to have been affected a little; he didn’t seem quite the same, though he could talk and even joke. He had been found lying on the floor in front of the fire by the woman who lived in the front part of the house; she had noticed the light on all night and hadn’t heard him walking about as usual. He had been conscious, but hadn’t been able to speak, and had been taken to Aylesbury in an ambulance. He had been there a week and had recovered to the point where he thought he should go home, but, Ann said, he certainly couldn’t look after himself – not yet, and perhaps not ever.

  I told her that I would go to see him the next day, Sunday, and she warned me that the hospital was grim and depressing; it catered for the elderly and incapable, and the mentally ill. She had been trying to get him moved to somewhere nicer and nearer to her.

  * * * * *

  It was a gabled, late-Victorian building on the edge of the town. A few shrubs flanked a tarmac entrance that led to a grimy swing door. I was taken to the threshold of a badly lit, high-ceilinged room with bare floorboards, in which there was nothing except a row of wooden chairs against each of the longer walls. I saw him immediately. He was sitting very upright on the nearest chair, some feet away, with his hand on his stick and his mouth open. His hair, which for years had been a steely grey, had turned almost white. I looked across the room to see what he was staring at; a young man in a grubby double-breasted jacket was rhythmically flicking his tie, up and down.

  He smiled sweetly as soon as he saw me, and made an effort to stand up. I saw that someone had fitted a rubber knob on the end of his stick. ‘So glad to see you.’ His voice was hoarse. ‘Thought you’d never come.’ He grasped my hands.