Memory and Straw

by Memory

  ‘Where to?’ I asked once we were on the M1.

  ‘Ambleside,’ he said, so I put the word into the sat nav and we drove on. He asked for some music and I played Bach’s chorale cantatas, which I knew he loved. We bathed in the voices and in the music. Surely there is such a thing as sacred music, as opposed to music which is sacred? And the cantata brings you to that place. As soon as you hear that opening chord you are transported heavenwards, or at least upwards. Is there any culture whose heaven is downwards, in the bowels of the earth, where fire reigns rather than air?

  ‘Do you have any pipe music on that thing?’ Grampa asked. I touched the iPod, and Donald MacPherson showed up on the screen playing ‘The Lament for the Children’, that other music which makes you raise your head and defy death. Music which acknowledges death before it stamps on it. For without confession there is no resurrection.

  ‘When were you last there?’ I asked Grampa. ‘In Ambleside?’

  ‘Oh. I don’t know. Let’s see now. Fifty? Sixty? Maybe seventy years?

  ‘That’s a long day, sure enough,’ I said.

  He laughed.

  ‘When you get to my age, son, it’s not that long. Just a morning. Minutes really.’

  The Temperance Hotel where he’d met Rachel was no more. In its place was a Premier Inn. We stopped and parked anyway and had coffee in a café down a cobbled alleyway. Home-made scones and jam. I idly wondered whether the waitress’s name was Rachel. So I asked her. Not directly of course.

  ‘Where are you from?’ I asked.

  ‘Liverpool,’ she said.

  ‘Ah,’ I said.

  Or maybe, ‘Oh.’

  ‘This is my Grampa,’ I added. ‘Magnus. He met a girl – my Granma – here many years ago.’

  It was her turn to say ‘Oh.’

  ‘Lovely to meet you,’ she added to Grampa, putting her hand out. ‘My name’s Zoe.’

  We left it at that.

  We drove on and stayed at Windermere for the night. And Grampa began to talk. Really talk. Bits of it were all jumbled up and now and again he veered from one topic to the next, but who doesn’t live in a maze, working at clues, sorting out scattered jigsaws? And how come one bit is always missing at the end when you’ve spent weeks putting that enormous pale blue sky together?

  And there was nothing maudlin or elegiac about his speech. Just a kind of running account, piecing things together like beads on an endless length of string. Unlike a rosary which is circular and confined.

  ‘I loved this area,’ he said. ‘Ambleside, Windermere, Keswick – the whole Lake District. It became an alternative Highlands to me. Softer. More civilised.’ He chuckled. ‘Nearer hills and nearer rivers. You see, Gav, rivers run. Of course I’m stating the obvious, but the first time I ever saw a river I remember simply thinking: it runs. Moves and shifts and alters, unlike the mountains and the hills and the moors, which were there forever, still and solid and immovable. Water flows across borders, and even if other countries then give the river a different name, that doesn’t matter. Our river was called Abhainn Bheag and though it became Abhainn Mhòr elsewhere, that’s what it still is and always will be.’

  ‘Forever and ever. Amen.’

  He wasn’t just talking about physical things. We both knew that. Or of things long ago. Our need to find metaphors, to put into pictures that for which we have no words, or for which words are inadequate. Those three magic words, ‘I love you.’

  We stumble into words as much as we stumble into anything else. There were thousands of things I’d never told anybody. I once begged on the streets for charity, and the only person who stopped to give me money was Dick Van Dyke.

  ‘Chim, chiminey, Chim, chiminey, Chim, chim, cher-ee’ he sang as he skipped down the street.

  I was in love with a girl at school but never told her. She was in the same year as me, but not always in the same class because we’d chosen some different subjects. These periods of her absence were agony. Art was best, for we’d get the chance to stand next to each other at our easels and were officially allowed to talk and critique each other’s work. I always praised hers. If I had my time again I would have praised her, not her work. I would be endlessly sending notes across the desks saying ‘I love you’. I would have told her, face to face, looking deep into the Atlantic of her blue-grey eyes. She was called Lauren. We could have been Bogart and Bacall and run away to China to live happily ever after behind the city walls.

  We stayed up late. In the empty snug at the back of the bar where Grampa sipped from a single glass of Pale Ale all night and I drank whisky. He talked about Lord and Lady Berkshire and how good and kind they’d been to himself and Rachel and how the old days, as he put it, were different because class was accepted.

  ‘Except for the French Revolution and the Bolshevik Revolution and Red Clydeside and Joe Hill and all the rest,’ I wanted to say, but kept quiet because I knew fine what he meant: that rebellion was always the exception rather than the rule. Who was I to talk anyway, whose only work had been to screw the thousands of folk who were foolish enough to believe in stockbrokers like myself high on ecstasy? Which was no exception at all, but the most shameful act of capitalist class complicity you could imagine.

  I was desperate to ask him about Dad. What he’d been like as a child. If Dad had ever told me, I’d forgotten. I wanted to remember things at their best, when everything seemed as God intended. My interest was in fathoming how things came to be. Why everything was so fucked up. For nothing comes from nothing.

  ‘Your dad was… taken from us,’ Grampa said. ‘Maybe that’s the way to put it? Education made our children strangers to us. Though it’s easy to blame someone else, or something else, for that. School, or Lord Berkshire himself, who insisted on us sending him there… but where do you stop? We blamed ourselves.’

  He sipped his ale.

  ‘For we all took decisions, and after a while we just thought it best to go along with things and not question anything. And he and Miriam came and went and came and went, and next thing they were all grown up and gone and Rachel and I just got on with our lives. It’s not, after all, as if they did anything terrible. Or even wrong. It was just that… we never really knew each other. Properly, I mean. We became sort of… stitched-up. Stuck, like the zip in an old pair of trousers.’

  And he laughed. When Grampa laughed, he became a child.

  ‘Bet you had freckles,’ I said to him, and he smiled again and said, ‘I did. Everyone had freckles in those days. Being outside all the time in the sun and wind. You never see freckles nowadays. Do you think that’s why the world’s going to rack and ruin, Gav?’

  I loved him then more than I ever loved anything else before or since. The certainty he gave me that a child running in the wind was worth more than all the stocks on Wall Street.

  Grampa loved tea, and we shared three pots at breakfast. He preferred China tea made in a ceramic pot, and when breakfasting at home always insisted on the Yunnan variety, though in the evening he preferred green or Chun Mee tea. He loved the whole process of tea-making. Slowly boiling the kettle on the hob. Warming the teapot. Dropping the leaves in, mixing varieties when the fancy took him. Making sure the pot sat brewing for five minutes before any tea was poured, through the small silver sieve that Rachel had bought from old Jowles all these years before. Here in the Windermere Hotel we had no such choice or procedure. Earl Grey sufficed.

  ‘As long as it’s loose, not in bags,’ he whispered to the waitress, then turned to me.

  ‘At the Temperance Hotel where I met Rachel they served wonderful tea. Black and boiled in those days. Everything charred. The kind of tea that saved the working classes from the evils of strong drink, Gav. Always remember that! And what do we get nowadays? A crushed tea-bag flung into a cup and boiled water thrown over it! As if time was running short, or something.’

  The smile was in his eyes.

  We drove north again after breakfast. We travelled in silence, for Grampa dozed so
I kept the radio off. Though silence is such an imperfect word. I could hear his breathing, light and steady. This old man slumbering beside me, my Grampa, a freckled child running barefoot through the heather.

  ‘I love you, Grampa,’ I said to him, knowing that he wouldn’t hear me, for he’d be embarrassed.

  And I? Who has never run barefoot through any heather, yet know how beautiful it is to feel the earth beneath my feet, without the barrier of leather. I remembered as a child walking barefoot through Central Park. The best was in the early morning in spring when the dew was still wet and you left impressive prints. Coney Island sand was the same. Heel first, then sole and five toes. But heather would be rough and would take a bit of getting used to.

  ‘What was it like?’ I asked him when he woke.

  ‘Sore. Of course, we’d pretend it wasn’t hurting. You didn’t want the other boys to think you were a sissy. But you got used to it very quickly. You could then walk through fire if necessary. Then you softened up every winter when we were allowed shoes. But springtime always came round.’

  ‘I miss her, Gav.’

  Silence.

  ‘My heart has gone. Even if I were to live now for another thousand years, I’ll never see her again.’

  Except that she was all around on this cloudless day as we drove up by Loch Lomond. Grampa was fully awake and singing. By yon bonny banks, and by yon bonny braes, a deep baritone voice. He laughed.

  ‘You should see here on a normal day,’ he said. ‘Wind and rain and howling gale. Nothing bonny about it at all.’

  We stopped in a lay-by. Grampa lit his pipe and I took a bonny photo of him puffing away. We sat on a wooden bench looking out at the water. Ducks waited for bread which we didn’t have.

  Then Grampa surprised me by suddenly asking, ‘Gav, do you believe in God?’

  ‘I dunno. Depends what you mean by God.’

  ‘What kind of answer is that?’ he said. ‘None. When you get to my age the evidence is overwhelming. Every breath’s a miracle, and the most innocent… the most childlike solution is best. I want to see my people again. I look forward to fishing with Augustine and Aquinas. We will talk about precision engineering. About exactitudes. How nothing can diverge from its destiny. If you cast a rod, a fish will be on the end of it. Every note in a symphony must fulfil its destiny. Order, not chaos, Gav.’

  ‘Well…’ I began, but knew that the words I was forming were abstractions which he’d despise – not because of belief or unbelief but because of their verbosity. Things about deism and existentialism and the relationship between reason and faith and science and religion, which would sound like so many evasions and justifications to him. It just goes to show how little you know anyone, for he said, ‘You should read Descartes, Gav. He’s kinder than Dante.’

  Descartes? I thought.

  ‘Really, Grampa?’

  ‘He said lots of interesting things.’

  I hedged. ‘He sure did.’

  ‘About the past and future, for example,’ said Grampa. ‘That the past only matters if it’s a void. But if you fill it with the present, it ceases to exist as a past.’

  ‘Meaning?’

  He looked at me with some surprise, as if I were a child. He smiled and ruffled my hair.

  ‘My dear Gav,’ he said. ‘My dear, dear Gav.’

  I felt some tears coming, and resisted.

  ‘Don’t Gav. Let them roll. Be generous to yourself, so that you can be generous to others.’

  He put his arm round me as I cried.

  Afterwards, we sat in silence for a while.

  ‘It’s the eternal now, isn’t it, Magnus?’

  We were both surprised. I don’t know why I used his first name that solitary time. Maybe I was asking for Granma.

  ‘It is. Always. Like that loch in front of you, lapping backwards and forwards, backwards and forwards.’

  He scruffled inside his jacket and brought out a yellow piece of paper on which was written: ‘Above all else we should impress on our memory as an infallible rule that what God has revealed to us is incomparably more certain than anything else.’ (R.D.)

  ‘Pah!’ I thought. ‘Pre-Newtonian.’

  ‘You know very well that science has happened since, Grampa,’ I said. ‘Come on, let’s go.’

  I wasn’t going to argue with an old man about something I wasn’t even convinced of myself. For after solid wax melts and becomes liquid, is it not still wax? And even if I was convinced, that still didn’t make it true. Folk are convinced of all kinds of astonishing things, from fascism to UFOs.

  ‘Grampa – if I’d been born two hundred years ago I too would have believed in fairies.’

  ‘No you wouldn’t. You’re too fearful. Metaphysics takes faith.’

  It was the only conversation of its kind I ever had with him, for once we were back in the car, he fell asleep again and when he woke sometime later as we drove through Glen Dochart he glanced out the window and said something I didn’t understand.

  ‘What was that, Grampa?’

  It was the first time I’d ever him heard speak his native language. Gaelic. I presumed instantly that’s what it was. I don’t think I’d even heard him refer to it, ever, but what else could it be now that we were here, back in his native Scotland? So I asked him.

  ‘That Gaelic, Grampa?’

  ‘I’m afraid so,’ he said. ‘The language of the peasants. I was so ashamed of it.’

  ‘Go on.’

  And he spoke and spoke in this tongue that sounded like water pouring over rocks. Like scotch on the rocks if you like. I didn’t really listen. To the words, I mean, for I wouldn’t understand any anyway. But the sound was pleasant enough, though drowsy. I was glad for Grampa, though, who seemed to be entering that reckless place of freedom where I’d been myself when under the influence of ecstasy. Out of your head. A place where you didn’t give a damn about any external world, for all that mattered was the sound of your own voice. That sound which, despite everything, confirmed that you were alive.

  ‘Are you hungry?’ I asked.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘I’m fine. We can eat later.’

  Grampa spoke on like pastures green.

  ‘That hill,’ he said, in his second language, ‘is changed by my looking at it. In Gaelic, it’s called Beinn Dòbhrain. It used to be covered in blaeberries and cowberries and garlic and cotton sedge. It’s now denuded, as bare as death. In ictu oculi. It died of solitude.’

  Emma, I will die of solitude. Speak to me, for I’m dying to hear your voice. Things turn to ashes when silence burns up the future. I have never really spoken to you. Never shared these things. I have never listened to you. And never really heard your voice. I am beginning to believe that all our voices echo the particular pulses of our hearts.

  Grampa sang as we crossed Rannoch Moor and down into Glencoe. The Ave Maria at first, with its hora mortis, mortis nostrae for his slaughtered people long gone, and then a psalm so that we could lift our eyes unto the hills. Which was easy, given their beauty. Buachaille Èite Mhòr soaring above us in all her majesty and glory. Unlike New York this landscape was horizontal: you could see across the moors and lochs towards somewhere else.

  We stayed in Fort Augustus that evening. Grampa went to bed and since my phone had no signal I walked round to the village shop to buy a newspaper. Lord only knows when I last read a newspaper in print. I only ever read them online, and even then tend just to scan the headlines. The most viewed. The most shared. The most commented. I am of the ten-second generation. Who on earth can be arsed reading all that stuff when you can gather it into your brain at a glance? Justin Bieber arrested. The FTSE 100 Index closes at 72.7 points down. Real Madrid triumph in Champions League. What more could anyone want or need? So minus my iPhone I bought a paper. In fact I bought a few – The Times, The Guardian, The Telegraph and the local paper, The Press and Journal. Partially to have something to pass the time and partially to get an idea of what was going on. Even though most of the
things that were going on wouldn’t be in the press.

  I went back to my room and lay on my back on the bed and read. I’d almost forgotten what astonishing things newspapers were – that old-fashioned mixture of photographs and print, news and gossip and adverts. And the always surprising things to be found in the for sale, wanted, births, marriages and death announcement columns. These were always the best things in a newspaper. I was very moved by this one: Mrs Katherine Lockhart. Died on 12th May aged ninety-two, peacefully, in her sleep. Widow of Fl. Lt. A.R.J. Lockhart R.A.F.V.R. Killed in action on September 18th 1944.

  How gorgeous life really was. Full of all kinds of meaning for those who believed. And the letters:

  Dear Sir, Spring must finally have arrived. I heard my first lawnmower this morning.

  Yours sincerely, Dorothy Wellbank, Somerset.

  It passed the evening.

  The next morning we drove up Loch Ness on the way to Inverness. Grampa was right. The past is a fiction. We saw no monster, though we stopped by the loch and stood and looked for a while, then went on a lovely boat cruise and took photographs along with all the other tourists. We needed to capture what was in front of us because it would soon be gone. We captured the future, for even now I can touch a screen and the grey digital loch continues to appear. I think we were all secretly glad that we didn’t see the monster. It belonged to the twentieth century.

  I thought about one of Grampa’s notes. That by ‘vacuum’ we do not mean a place or space in which there is absolutely nothing, but only a place in which there are none of these things which we expected to find. And what did we expect to find there? Nessie? Or just grey dull water which became electric blue when the sun burst through the clouds just there above Castle Urquhart? Instantly magical.

  Imagine seeing a ball of fire rising in the east every morning and descending into the sea every evening. Would we not be astonished, as John Donne preached? A young woman stood by the loch-side with her child in a sling over her breast. She was pointing to the loch and smiling for the child.

  ‘This is different,’ Grampa said as we drove into Inverness. ‘All these new houses there. These used to be fields when I was a child.’