The House Martin

by William Parker

  ‘Martha!’ she said, raising her voice as though addressing someone a little hard of hearing, ‘Old Freddie Burston from Courtlands—how long’s he been dead?’ There was a pause while a large old lady with a wisp of white beard and wearing a plastic orange apron shuffled into view and leant against the doorframe. She slowly folded her arms across an enormous bosom, settling herself into a comfortable position from which to indulge in the welcome opportunity of a break from her duties for a little gossip with her boss and the visitor finishing a late breakfast. Then she cast her eyes upwards and narrowed them, as though the answer to the enquiry might be written in small print on the ceiling. ‘Oh, must be more than a month, now, at least a month. They’ve put him next to his wife and son up there. Lovely view of the river they’ve got, too,’ she said in the Gloucestershire accent that I remember had always presented schoolboys with an opportunity for a tease. ‘You going visiting, then?’

  ‘Yes. Yes, I’ll be going up there, I should think. Gosh, I’d no idea—little Mark’s dead too?’ I said, remembering the toddler that I’d encouraged to walk all those years ago, ‘…and Mrs. Burston? How terribly sad. She can’t have been terribly old.’

  ‘When were you at the school?’ asked Mrs. Sheringham.

  ‘Oh golly! Eons and eons ago,’ I replied with a smile, ‘In the dark ages. The sixties, actually, end of the sixties. It’s sheer curiosity that brings me back. I really just wanted to see if I remember any of it at all. Tell me, what on earth did little Mark die of?’

  Q

  The thing is, I really don’t know how much I truly remember.

  I know I was on the roof. I know that it happened, but it might be that I’m recalling no more than split second flashbacks of that morning, as though they’re the last surviving fragments of some ancient fresco that I’ve later subjected to an over-zealous restoration, applying too-vibrant colours onto damp pink plaster. At first, my efforts had sat uneasily with the original, but the passing decades have tempered the brash unsubtlety of the fresh paint strokes; they’ve faded and mellowed a little, returning a unity and truthfulness to the piece. And so it no longer matters if my mind has invented the early morning sky as it begins to lighten, the vast canopy of the trees with the rooks’ nests and the squirrels’ drays, the fallen elm that opens up the view down the river to the majestic suspension bridge and farther on still to the far off towers of the power station, the chilled dew on the tiles that dampen my stomach, the scratch of the rough red bricks of the chimney against my bare back, the smile that I can’t suppress as I climb towards my destination, the joy of being free, and the sight of the house martins wheeling high above my head.

  It might well be that it’s the clearest memories of that morning that are the most unreliable. There’s the milkman far below on his early morning round shielding his eyes against the rising sun, not able to believe what he’s seeing; the monotone claxon call as he presses the horn of his van till outraged hands unlock doors, and windows clatter open in complaint; the pointing fingers of the gathering crowd in their dressing gowns in the narrow street, hands holding faces in horror; the boys from school spilling out onto the tennis court before they can be stopped and then being ushered back inside by Miss Carson and Miss Newman with flailing arms as though they might be marshalling a flock of geese, the far away sound of sirens approaching along the road from Gloucester, the giant red monsters that block the street with busy purring engines directing their swaying clanking ladders into the sky, the firemen slowly working their way towards me, their determined faces with puckered brows under the helmets that glint in the morning sun, the tangy smell of nervous sweat permeating the rough, serge uniforms that prickle against my naked body when strong, no nonsense arms crudely pluck me, uncomplaining, from my refuge.

  But it’s not just that immediate time that I have such difficulty remembering clearly. It’s also the following weeks and months from which I seem to have been cut adrift. It’s like a very small child’s mixed up recall of events, with its inconsistencies and contradictions, its made-up scenes observed from others’ viewpoints, its treasured anecdotes adopted from nursery-school friends and siblings who then object to the purloining of their personal memories. ‘No, it’s me that happened to, stupid. You weren’t even born then!’

  I was talking about it to Val Lorrimer recently on his most recent trip to London. We’ve become fast friends. I sought him out once I stopped drinking, initially because I wanted to spend time with people for whom alcohol wasn’t important, and then because his self-deprecating humour made me laugh. It hadn’t been difficult to pass on the corrected number of my mobile to the secretary of The old Breconians and within a day or two, he’d made contact with me. I encourage him to stay with me now and again, and he’s been the grateful recipient of a key to my front door. I love to hear him sending himself up about his tireless efforts to make amorous conquests in various bars that I no longer frequent, and I’ll take a vicarious pleasure in the day that he fixes himself up with someone special.

  ‘Don’t you just hate all the rejection, though, Val?’ I asked him last week, ‘I’d find it rather hard to bear.’

  ‘Listen, Ben, how many passes have you made in the last six months?’

  ‘God, Val. I don’t know. I’m rather out of practise actually, and not that bothered either. To tell you the truth the whole sex thing seems horribly daunting without a skinful. In the old days, the two rather went together, really. There was a very half-hearted attempt a month or two ago, and I was rebuffed, too. Actually, I was horrified at being turned down and at the same time quite pathetically relieved not to have to do anything about it. Don’t think I’ll be repeating the experience in the near future.’

  ‘Well I’ve made hundreds of passes and been “rebuffed”, as you put it, by ninety-eight percent. But the remaining two percent means I’m getting a hell of a lot more sex than most. I feel as though I’m making up for lost time really—years and years of lost time.’

  Val tells me he remembers practically nothing of that summer term either—except for the fruitcake on the roof, of course. ‘If you’re in trauma, your mind will jettison the memory, Ben. You weren’t just sitting on a roof looking at the view, you know. You were having a nervous breakdown! Of course you don’t remember it clearly, our little hero of the rooftops! Likewise me. My parents were going through the muckiest divorce in history, and I remember nothing about it, about them, about school, about the ghastly court cases for custody. Nothing. Fuck all. Just you on the roof—and Wallington’s enormous dick.’

  Q

  Lt. Mark Burston. Beloved son of Frederick and Mary. Saxham, 1966 - Balleygawley, Northern Ireland, 1988. So cruelly taken from us. RIP.

  Mary Enid Burston. 1931-1989. Beloved and devoted mother and wife. Requiescat in pace.

  Three graves. The last in the neat little row has heaped, newly turned earth with a small wooden cross with no name. It’s too early for a gravestone.

  I’d signed the visitor’s book, paid, and said my thank yous to Mrs. Sheringham, taken my overnight bag to the car in preparation of a hurried departure should I lose my nerve, and then walked straight over to the church where I’d found the graves bathed in winter sunshine under the stained glass window of the high altar.

  He was their only child. And now there’s no one left to clear away the rain-smudged messages of commiseration for his father. They are still attached to the skeletal wire frames of decomposing wreathes and soggy, browning bouquets wrapped in cellophane that rustles plaintively in the chill wind. There’s no one to make the decision that the time has come to collect the decaying bunches and respectfully place them on the compost heap at the far side of the graveyard. The family will lie together through summers and winters and the day will arrive when no one comes to visit, and no one remembers them. The headstones will begin to lean with the weight of the passing years, swallowed up by the long grass until the fading, mossy le
ttering on the grey granite stones might as well say ‘forgotten’. In the bare, swaying branches above my head, the rooks caw loudly, taking exception to the presence of a lone stranger, as though they might be the self-appointed guardians of the graves of the Headmaster, his wife, and their son.

  I’ve left them behind where they lie together high above the river and walked down the hill towards the old school. I take a long deep breath and turn the corner at the bottom to confront my memories.

  Q

  I’m standing in the road in front of the great door with its massive fanlight. It’s no longer a dull green, but a brilliant white that matches the row of tall windows high above and to either side. When I cross the road into the freezing shadow cast by the building to look closely at the lion’s head knocker, I see an array of brass doorbells set into the side of the doorframe with little engraved plaques that spell out the names of the inhabitants of the luxury flats within. I walk back across the road and lean against the wall of the house opposite, squinting in the low sunlight. The brickwork, once the colour of red-raw chilblains, has been scrubbed clean and repointed; now, in the sunshine that’s battling its way through the icy mist over the river, it’s a welcoming salmon pink. The assembly hall, the gym, and kitchens that stretched along the street on either side of the main building have gone. Shorn of its clumsy limbs, the old school reaches for the sky like a Scottish tower house. In the windows to one side of the still shuttered hall, there’s a smart kitchen with halogen spots shining onto a dark marble worktop. It’s in the large room that I think I remember used to contain the footbath where I dreaded taking off my unmuddied kit after games. As I creep round the side of the building, my view into the interior is obstructed by heavy blinds with tassels and voluptuously swagged curtains. Audis and soft-top Mercedes wait on reserved, herringbone-brick parking spaces where the Assembly hall once stood, ready to whisk their owners into the offices of service industries relocated from London to converted riverside warehouses in Gloucester.

  I ignore the sign that informs me that this is private property, step over the low chain that connects the bollards separating the parking spaces from the pavement, and walk cautiously round the side of the building. There’s a manicured lawn where the tennis court and the cook’s vegetable garden used to be, an ocean of green touched by frosty white fingers. Now, it’s unencumbered by the wire fences that penned generations of small boys. It sweeps down towards the river, interrupted in the very middle by an elegant flight of curving stone steps with two vast urns on either side before the descent.

  I can’t stay for long. I’m trespassing after all. I expect to be told off at any minute, waiting for a window to open, for a polite but slightly threatening enquiry about whether I need any help.

  The great slate balcony along the upper ground floor still runs the length of the building. I half close my eyes and try to imagine a view of parents, prefects and staff ranged along it for Sports Day, little Mark in his mother’s arms as he imitates the boys below, clapping at a high jump victor.

  I look up, high above to the row of dormer windows that face out over the river. My eye starts at one end and travels along to the other. It comes to rest on the last one, the most southerly. It’s a window no different to all the others; it’s closed tight against the biting wind.

  I try to manufacture an image. But I can’t get one to appear—my imagination uncharacteristically failing me. There’s no window being flung open, no skinny naked child emerging into the half-light, no belly-sliding ascent to the cliff face of the chimney, no swooping house martins celebrating a boy’s escape.

  And what did I think was going to happen if I could summon him up? Was his ghostly image going to bring about some almighty change in me, some earth shattering epiphany that explained and changed everything; a rebirth that banished fear, turned me whole, explained and laid the past to rest?

  I wanted to be reacquainted with his spirit, to let it touch and change me. But no miracle’s been brought about by my being here; there’s to be no damascene conversion to a life of calm, peace and security, free of useless fretting.

  But I am glad I’m here. I’m glad I’ve come back to be reminded of his joy and the determination that came to him from nowhere. And perhaps the spirit of that brave little boy is not dead. It’s just a question of finding it—a spark, a tiny flame that still burns somewhere deep inside me, waiting patiently for rediscovery.

  There’s wire netting around the eaves under the dormer windows. The new occupants obviously don’t want the mess that the house martins would make on the balcony while they’re building their nests and feeding their young.

  But now that I step farther away from the old school, bravely trespassing onto the lawn to give myself a view right up to the chimney that grows out of the roof, I can see that under the cornice at the very top, just below the tall chimney pots, there are the obstinate remnants of last year’s nests, enduring battering winds and rains while they wait for the return of the birds from their winter homes in Africa.

  The house martins will come back in the spring to rebuild them, to raise their young as they have done for generation upon generation. And Tom Thumb’s descendents will be amongst them. They have lived through times of lean and plenty, through storms, searing heat and bitter cold, falling prey to cats on the ground and hawks on the wing, bullied by crows and hungry magpies who covet their eggs. But they take life as it comes, and in the spring they’ll return to glide and dive, climb and stall, to spiral upwards on kind thermals that will gently lift them into the sky. They’ll be back, in just a few months’ time, once again to fly high and free above the river.

  The House Martin

  William Parker was born in Newport, Wales, and spent his early childhood in the Middle East. He attended schools in Gloucestershire and Wales before studying drama at the Guildford School of Acting. William spent 20 years acting, including a season at The Royal National Theatre, two national tours of Peter Pan, a production of Hair at Her Majesty’s Theatre, Haymarket in the West End, in addition to three seasons in repertory theatre and many supporting roles in TV and film. He is now happily settled into a part time job—off stage—with Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Really Useful Group, which gives him time to pursue his interest in writing. He has a nine-year-old son and lives in London.

  Eirini Press