The White Family

by Maggie Gee

  ‘No please go on, I’m enjoying it,’ said Thomas, and he really was, despite the appalling discomfort of the chair which the National Health must have put there on purpose to stop any visitors staying too long. The lights were coming on in the ward.

  This, he thought, is the real Alfred. Darren’s just worked himself into a state. It’s Susie’s fault. Pure … psychobabble. He eased his legs; the chair farted.

  ‘Next day I got up and it was English summer. I couldn’t believe the noise of the birds. I had spent the night with my uniform on, and for some reason I got up, put my hat on, I suppose because I’d have felt naked without it, a great sombrero, it was, with a feather, a little cockade thing stuck on the side, not exactly the thing to wear in Hillesden … But I was in no state to realize. And I walked to the Park as if I was asleep. I didn’t decide, I just found I was off there. Like a pigeon, I suppose. Homing. Homing. I hadn’t had breakfast, not even a cuppa. And I walked up the hill –’

  Alfred couldn’t continue. Fifty years later he still wanted to weep.

  (It was green, so green, and the smell of cut grass, and the shade of the oak trees, dappled shade, rippling over the hill in the breeze, and the wood pigeons billing, it was all like a dream … like the dreams I had dreamed in Palestine, but now it was real, the men had come home. But I lay on the hill, and I felt like a ghost. It was all the same, but I was not. No one knew me now. I was no longer Alfred, but a killer sent from another world, and if anything moved I should have to shoot it … The hill looks out over the burial ground. There seemed to be millions of graves in the sunlight, white and grey stones marching on forever, blurring as I looked across the sweep of the graveyard, as if they’d seeded like weeds in the war years … How many bodies of boys I had known were lying under the ground somewhere, with nothing to mark them, far from home? – names I had known, lost, forgotten – and the peace and the sunshine had come too late? I felt – queer, I felt very alone, I felt guilty, although God knows I had done my bit. But soon as I lay down, I slept, and dozed and dreamed half the day away, waking sweaty and frightened, every so often, and being calmed by the sound of the birds. And the wind in the leaves, and walking feet, not crunching boots but peaceful feet, padding, strolling, human feet, British feet, English feet, those wonderful sounds said I had come home, now I could rest among my people, here in the grass I was safe to sleep.)

  Thomas thought Alfred had nodded off, but after a second he began again.

  ‘I slept all morning outside in the Park. When I finally woke I felt a lot better. Almost human. I could hear children. The schoolkids must have just come out of school. The children in Palestine were different; they all looked alike, all brown with dark eyes, and they never really looked at you, and of course they spoke in their own language, a sort of screeching, jabbing noise. But this was the sound of English children –’

  (I remember it as if it was yesterday. I thought quite clearly, I want a family. I’ll never die, if I have a family. I want that girl, and I want a family. I saw in that moment that that was what I’d fought for. A world where the White family could live.)

  ‘I went off up Hillesden High Road looking for May. I thought she might be in her father’s shop –’

  (The sun was in my eyes. I hadn’t eaten since the night before. I hadn’t shaved. I was at least half-barmy, I no longer knew how to walk, I marched … I was half in the desert, although I was in Hillesden. I’d probably have frightened her to death.)

  ‘The great thing was, I never got there. I heard a crowd of beggars tagging behind me, beggar-kids, they always followed the soldiers, and I turned on my heel to scare them away and saw they were English children, not beggars, and I was in an English street. They were mad with excitement, shouting and laughing. “Cowboy!” they were shouting. “Look, here’s a cowboy!” I’d forgotten I’d got my stetson on … I was a hero to them. Well, perhaps I was a hero. We took it for granted, but we all risked our lives.’ He stopped for a moment, to steady his voice. ‘After a bit, I realized I’d scare her to death, turning up in that kit like a lunatic. I turned round and marched home, took my hat and boots off and went out like a light on Mum’s settee. They tell me I slept for three whole days, but I reckon it was one, at most.’

  ‘I like that story,’ said Thomas. ‘Amazing. My generation’s never seen things like that.’

  ‘The war did pull us together, in a way. Something we all went through together. All shoulders to the wheel, as they say.’

  ‘Are we the selfish generation?’

  ‘You’re not too bad,’ said Alfred, kindly. But he thought to himself, the lad is right. Darren and Thomas are boys, not men. They’ve never had a chance to find out what matters. Never been tested. Had it too easy. Nothing was easy for me and May. We waited for years, saving up to be married. If a thing’s worth having, it’s worth waiting for. ‘Things fell apart, after the war. We were very hopeful, in the fifties. I don’t know what happened. People got greedy –’

  ‘When was the coronation? Fifty-three?’

  ‘Coronation year,’ said Alfred. ‘Lovely … I think they were still dancing, in fifty-three. Dancing in the Park. May and I were newly married … We could do what we liked, and we hadn’t got kids. It seemed like we’d died and gone to heaven. Soon after, some idiot set a fire in the thatch of the bandstand, and that put a stop to it. Nice while it lasted.’ He smiled. ‘It does me good, remembering. They were great days. Tremendous days … You young ones think we didn’t know how to have fun, but we did, you know.’ And he winked at Thomas. ‘May and I danced with the best of ’em.’

  (She changed towards me when I came back. Probably because I had lived a bit. I went away a stupid boy who had never been further than Blackpool in summer. And she wanted something better than that. My May was a reader even then … I had something about me, when I came back, so she told me. I was tense as a watch-spring and trigger-happy and a stone too thin and burned practically black, but I’d been to the other side of the world. I’d seen the sun set over Jerusalem. I’d had – glorious times. We were like princes, sometimes, young and fit and fancy-free … I’d smoked kif and bumped about on a camel and heard the muezzin wailing their prayers, though it sounded like demons howling, to me. I’d seen men dying, and nearly died. I’d kept the peace; that was how May saw it. I’d lived in a desert that went on forever. It was hell, of course, but not to May.)

  ‘I took May dancing, my first weekend home. I’d borrowed a suit from my elder brother. Everyone put on the dog, in those days – you didn’t go dancing in a leather jacket –’

  (And the girls were so pretty in summer dresses that were really dresses, tiny waists, full skirts, like flowers, like poppies, whirling round and round in the summer dusk –

  But I was with May. She was in my arms. May and I never left each other. She wore blue, I think, with a tiny print, forget-me-nots, was it? – and her eyes were so blue, and she gazed at me as if I was a film star, and whispered ‘Alfred’ into my shoulder, I shivered with disbelief to feel it, a woman’s warm sweet breath on my skin, because while I was away she had turned into a woman, so white and rounded and serious and beautiful that I was afraid – till the tempo changed and the dance band let rip with ‘In the Mood’ and all of a sudden I was dancing like crazy, copying the spiv with the pin-striped jacket who was jitter-bugging with the girl next door, ‘Come on May,’ I shouted, ‘Come on, we can do it,’ and we did, although I’d never done it before, I whipped her around till she was flushed and laughing and fell into my arms when the music slowed down, and I silently swore I would love her forever, cheek to cheek under the rustling plane-trees and the blue sky of evening we no longer had to fear, cheek to cheek under the same pale moon that had made me long for her in Palestine.

  ‘We could be together,’ I whispered to her.

  ‘Not until I’m married,’ she said, quite sharp, I remember she didn’t understand, she thought I was suggesting something improper, which I’d never have dared to, with an
English girl.

  ‘I’ll marry you, May,’ I said, ‘if you’ll have me.’

  ‘Well ask me then,’ she said, but she was smiling, she was smiling at me with that slightly wicked dimple, and I realized with a sense of complete amazement that May Hill was going to say ‘Yes’, that she hadn’t noticed I was poor and ugly, or how much better than me she was. Or perhaps she had, but she still said ‘Yes’. In the middle of the dancers, a crowd of happy people, in the middle of the Park, under the evening sky, while the band played ‘Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered’ my darling girl said ‘Yes’ to me.

  After that we always called it ‘being together’, it became our joke, our little secret.)

  ‘– I proposed to her, that first weekend. But I was amazed when she accepted.’

  ‘Very romantic,’ said Thomas, smiling.

  But his generation is so different, thought Alfred. Are they ever together, really, like we were? Do they stay together through thick and thin?

  My children. Will they end up alone?

  31 • May

  May sat in the garden for half an hour. There was a blanched wooden seat minus one of its bars, and she sank down on to it gratefully. The bushes had grown wild in the absence of a gardener.

  (If Alfred goes …

  When Alfred goes …)

  The woods decay, the woods decay and fall …

  Man comes and tills the field and lies beneath

  And after many a summer dies the swan.

  She sat and thought about their life together. His dependability, which made him sound boring, but really it was miraculous, to do the same job for fifty years, to love the same woman, to live in the same place. And always do it with a will. Faithful Alfred. Her loyal man. Even when the council let him down; even when they sold off the Park Keeper’s lodge that he’d always expected to be his, he wouldn’t complain: ‘I expect they have their reasons.’ That stubborn, closed look which Dirk had inherited. Alfred would never criticize.

  They took away the uniforms; they took away the dogs; they took away the good men who worked with him. They left him there unprotected, on his own, they wouldn’t even spend a few tenners on a mobile, and all he could do was walk a little faster, always hurrying, she’d seen him, these last few years, whenever she popped in for a chat, a driven man, you might call him, now, his white head sprinting along the pale paths that crossed the Park from corner to corner, for all of it was his territory, these days, the whole responsibility was his, his duties growing larger as he grew smaller, his drive growing stronger as he grew weaker – For now she could admit it, she knew he’d grown weaker. She had seen the effort, sometimes, when he pulled on his shoes, standing on one leg, as he always did, balancing pluckily on one leg and pulling on his work-boots with the opposite hand, rather red in the face, concentrating too intently where once the absurd procedure had been easy, once he’d balanced like a dancer, graceful, automatic.

  But he never gave up.

  He never slackened.

  He never made life easy for himself.

  She admired him with every bone in her body. His high standards, his fierceness …

  There were holly-bushes here that had grown into great trees, nearly berry-less, now, in March, the red beads eaten by the birds, but the thicket of sharp leaves were glassy bright in the sun that caught them halfway up their height, so they were half black, half glittering. And beside the bench were the larger, longer-toothed, spiky leaves of a Mahonia, and now she identified the slow sweet smell that had come to her nose as she sat and wept: long yellow tassels of densely-set flowers, it was a Mahonia ‘Charity’, one of Alfred’s favourites, though he wouldn’t know the name –

  I helped him with words, he helped me with things. We made a good pair, the two of us together. We’re still a good pair. I’m strong. I can help him –

  …Tho’

  We are not now that strength which in old days

  Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are.

  She could feel the cold increasing as she sat, she saw the sun’s slow retreat up the holly, but she breathed in the air that the trees made sweet.

  His sweetness to me. And his fierceness.

  He adored his kids, yet he made them wretched.

  If they totted it up, how would he come out? I know he is a good man. I have no doubt. If there’s any justice, God will let him in. God will tell St Peter to let him in. Because Peter’s job is a bit like Alfred’s, he was the man with the key to the Gates.

  (But was there any justice? – May wasn’t sure.)

  Perhaps in heaven – if there was a heaven – but there must be a heaven – she hoped – she prayed … She hadn’t prayed in a church for so long.

  (Shirley, of course, was always on her knees, as if we had given her a lot to pray about.)

  It felt so awkward. May squeezed her eyes shut.

  Take care of Alfred, Lord, because he’s tried … he has been a good man, haven’t you noticed? … Stay near him now in his hour of need … Don’t let him down, like the council did –

  But it wasn’t any good. She was arguing with God. Arguing against the contradictory voices,

  the little rift within the lute

  That by and by will make the music mute …

  It couldn’t be denied he was bad to Shirley.

  He felt – mortally threatened, I know he did. He thought that Shirley chose Kojo to spite him. Perhaps she did, because he hurt us, when he lost his temper he hurt all of us, I try and forget it but I know it’s true. Even me, one hot summer when the café in the Park had been broken into and he came home desperate, I accidentally cooked the wrong thing for supper and he got up and hit me across the mouth, and my denture broke, and my cheek swelled up, and I told myself I would never forgive him, and Dirk was crying, his little white face …

  But it went away, when the children did. He hasn’t hit anyone for years and years. And he can’t say sorry. Lord, he can’t. But I know he’s sorry. I know he is.

  Lord, forgive us, take care of us.

  She sat there, shivering up at the sky, the rectangle of blue, growing deeper, more distant.

  If only we could live with just the best in us. The best of Alfred was heroic, marvellous. No one was braver, no one more true. He would have died for me, for the Park, for the kids.

  It must count more than the – unpleasantness.

  32 • Dirk

  Dirk had moved beyond unpleasantness. Dirk had moved beyond failure, or pain. Dirk had swigged down four cans of Special Brew in half an hour, and was off to the game. There was a match between Hillesden Wanderers and the Dublin Demons, and the lads were going, and so was Dirk, though he hadn’t got a ticket. With the beer inside him, he knew he’d get in. When he’d had a few drinks, he was – invincible. He was more than himself. He was enough, at last.

  (The trouble was, it always faded, leaving him worse, leaving him less.)

  But today would be brilliant. Seeing off the Irish. Bloody Catholics, bloody bombers –

  Dirk and the lads barrelled on to the train.

  He wasn’t as keen on football as his dad had once been. As a boy, he’d gone to matches with Dad and loved it, sitting there together and yelling for their team. Dad used to stick an Aero chocolate bar in his pocket, and Dirk tried to eat at the same pace as Dad, one section at a time, very slowly, bursting the bubbles but he always finished first, it was harder for a kid.

  The other side of football wasn’t nearly as much fun. Dad expected him to be a good footballer. On Sundays, he took him in the Park with a ball, when he was off-duty and his mates were on. ‘This is my youngest. We’ve come in for a kick-about. His elder brother played for Middlesex Juniors.’ On an average day it took Dad around thirty seconds to lose his temper. ‘Look what you’re doing! You kick it, you fool! Come on, Dirk. What’s the matter with you?’ Then he would dribble away on his own, dancing with the ball, showing off, Dirk would think. Or showing his workmates that he wasn’t like his son, that clu
msiness didn’t run in the family.

  These little outings didn’t last long. ‘You’re never going to be an athlete, are you?’ Dad had said in the end, one bright winter day when he’d shouted more than usual, and Dirk had begged to be allowed to go home. ‘Never mind, lad, we can’t all be winners.’ Although Dirk wanted it over, the weekly torment, it gave him a horrible, sickening feeling to hear that he would never be an athlete.

  Failure left a shadow on the game. When Alfred next got tickets, he said, ‘I suppose you can watch it even if you can’t play it,’ and Dirk said, ‘No thanks, I’d rather watch TV.’ But he didn’t really mean it. He felt a bit better for at least ten minutes, but he missed standing there with his dad sucking chocolate, shoulder to shoulder, on the same side, howling at the enemy, yelling for their heroes.

  As a teenager Dirk began to go with the lads. He didn’t much care about the football but he liked the buzz. All for one, one for all. An army of men who accepted him. Then sometimes when they took an end. Taking an end was the best feeling, when they drove the fans from the other side out of their favourite end of the stand. Just shoving on through, all fists and elbows, giving a good kicking to anyone who fell. A knee in the groin and they usually fell. When they took an end, then Dirk was a king.

  But he’d hardly been to football for the last three years. Frigging George had stopped him. Always frigging ill. The frigging shop. He’d been a frigging slave, he’d been a frigging fool, an idiot –

  Now he was free. He was free at last.

  (He had nowhere to go. He was nothing, no one.)

  Darren was a winner, unlike him.

  It makes it harder for me, Dirk thought. My brother was a very good footballer. (I have to take that on trust, because I’ve never seen him. Being fifteen years older than me, of course. By the time I was old enough to have noticed he’d got too smart for it, hadn’t he? He was being very good at other things instead. But I heard about it. Oh, I heard about it. I’ve always heard about how good he is. When I went to secondary school there was a master who’d been stuck there for thirty years, he’d been there when it was a grammar school and Darren went there and won all the prizes and got a scholarship to sodding Oxford. All right, good for him, but a pain to me. Because old Plummer went on about Darren whenever he saw me. ‘You’ll never be the equal of your brother, White. Now there was a boy. Scholar, athlete.’)