Find Another Place

by Ben Graff

  It had not come back in the same way, but I could feel the pins and needles sensation in my legs as I stood and thought; this illness or potential illness in me was a difference from the way things had been in 2001. I was the same to look at on the outside and I felt more or less functionally the same on the inside. But everything that had happened served as a reminder that, one way or another, these were early warning signs. I had seen Anna and Martin, Theresa and Dave, Darren and both my parents die. They had all battled illness and health challenges that started innocuously enough, even my mother. In the end it was fairly obvious that things would not be any different for me. I had to take this moment, to use it while I could.

  I thought back to what Martin had told me in 2001 when he was being treated for the slow growing cancer on his shoulder. It was a time that had some significance for him; he often spoke of one of his school teachers who had been obsessed by the prospect of the millennium. “Only Homes and Davis have any chance of living long enough to see it,” he apparently had said.

  I wondered how that teacher would have viewed those early days of the twenty-first century, as the World Trade Center and the Pentagon fell to rubble because hijacked planes had been turned into bombs, seeming in every image to mock the notion that the world was somehow progressing, becoming more civilised and cultured. You could say that the teacher was better off not having lived to see those moments, but if that is really the alternative, what is the choice? The price of living is the need to continue to assimilate the unthinkable, to know that there is nothing that man won’t consider doing to man, and then to continue living anyway. Perhaps this is the real reason why all of our life spans are limited. It isn’t the physical but rather the emotional side of us that is worn out by all that the world faces us with. Some of our stories simply become too much for us.

  I have no idea who Homes and Davis were, or whether they found their way into the twenty-first century to grapple with these questions, but there in its formative period, all was not well for my grandfather, and in truth that day I could sense this, much as some species of animal can smell death on another.

  Apparently a number of people had advised against having the treatment, saying that it simply was not worth the risk, but he went ahead anyway. It’s a vanity operation really, I heard it said.

  It is impossible to know if things could have been different. I asked the same question after Katharine’s miscarriage, the deaths of both my parents and that of Darren. When I saw a counsellor after my mother’s death she said that you cannot think it different, it will always be this, and as I stood there in the pub garden, that was the one thing I could feel with certainty. It would never change, just as so many other things could never now be changed either.

  Martin had a proprietorial air when he handed me his journal, in some ways not so far removed from his more general grandness of manner. Slightly pompous, some might say. I remember a dinner my mother arranged in Bosbury for him with friends of hers from the village. He had opened the conversation by talking about the circles in which he moved, and had lost his audience before he had started. It was sometimes how he was.

  There were aspects of the actor in him perhaps, from all those years ago when he was part of an amateur dramatics group during the Second World War, something he wrote about in his journal. There was a certain air he could adopt with people that I now think might have been more about trying to hide his inner sensitivity than projecting any particular impression of grandeur. It is possible not everyone always saw it this way.

  Physically weakened as he was by the treatment, a little thinner and more hunched perhaps, there was defiance there too in his mannerisms that day. The journal was his story, and it occurred to me all these years later that he did not really have any hopes for it, beyond the desire to hand out a few copies. He never talked about publishing it more widely or gave any expectation that it would be. There were probably parts of his story that he might have wanted to turn out differently.

  I had wanted to find the journal again because I recognised that it was a piece of the story that he had tried to save and I had lost. As time had moved on, my desire to try and go back had grown, just as I wanted to do likewise in relation to my parents. There were final conversations that we were yet to have. Nobody else seemed to be able to find their copy either and I was running out of options when, finally, I stumbled across the original handwritten version, which I did not know I had, in a desk drawer. It was in a blue A5 book that cost £1.50 from Smith’s. A number of differently coloured inks used on various sections, all equally unreadable. I was no closer, but I found Kelly Stevens, a handwriting expert, who was able to translate most of it back into typescript, making large parts of it readable once more.

  Martin had always wanted to be a writer and this was his longest work. Standing outside the pub, I remembered the initial reaction of polite praise and unspoken disappointment which had greeted its completion. The kind of disappointment that does not need to be voiced to be understood within a family. Something I am sure he picked up on.

  He had focussed more on the dead than the living. “You get fewer complaints that way,” he had told me with a shrug. I thought perhaps that part of him would have wanted to write more about the living, but he had chosen to play it safe one last time. That said, he was a man of his time, not given to overstatement, quite discreet and, perhaps I have this all wrong and he did not even consider saying more, never thinking to comment on people who were still in a position to read his thoughts. Nobody can know for certain now.

  It occurred to me as I re-read his journal that I could go beyond the words on the page in some places, even if this risked making me the phony I had feared Holden Caulfield had seen in me all along. He had been more open in our conversations, often late at night, over the years. Less guarded, I could see that. Hence, where there were places where I was capable of filling in the gaps, going in deeper, I chose to do so. Occasionally I took an informed guess but only where it seemed consistent with what I had heard from him or what I knew from another source.

  As I stood outside The Fishbourne Inn, part of me wondered what I had done, but I had made the choice and there was no going back. So it was that years after first reading it, the rescued pages came to form a part of this story. I better recalled the parts that were directly about him than I did the whole host of family members who re-emerged from the dust, alive once again. Here it all was, set against a backdrop of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, encompassing two world wars, his marriage to Anna and the rise and fall of a number of business ventures. (If we are honest, it was mainly falls and mediocrity really. His son Mike and his nephew Richard were to prove to be the first real businessmen in the family.)

  The dramatic and the normal, still a little understated perhaps, but a voice on times and our family that nobody else could replicate, him a bridge beyond where I could go. The image that stays with me now is of him as a meter reader in the war, with a work list that did not always last the day, during those most desperate years in the middle of the twentieth century that would not find an echo until the first year of the twenty-first; the relationship at the heart of it which I think to most was the one with his father, which was difficult and then ultimately better, the family pattern between fathers and sons destined to repeat itself more than once in the generations ahead.

  In truth he was the grandparent I was closest to. His storytelling, model railway building and interest in talking through issues were certainly part of that. I think beneath the extrovert most people saw, I could sense a kindred spirit, perhaps slightly more adrift than might be immediately imagined from external appearances.

  I remember him telling me once that he had not been the favourite son, but it was still painful to see it written down on paper. I had heard the stories of him having to go into the family business, his brother Hugh being granted more latitude; Hugh was left the house, Martin more shares in the business
. The closeness that existed between the brothers was clear for all to see and unaffected by their differing relationships with their father, Arthur.

  Hugh was a highly amiable eccentric, who loved hunting with ferrets and drinking, albeit probably not in that order, a colourful presence when we were children. He spent his career racing rich men’s boats and falling off the pontoon into Wootton Creek. When he was nineteen he was in a motorcycle accident and was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes, a condition that would resurface in our family many years later through our daughter Gabriella. We would hear the stories from his daughter Janet, our cousin, of a house with no sugar and one large syringe of insulin a day, to be taken via a gigantic needle every morning. All far removed from the world we have come to know of pumps and Libres, fractional doses and perfect data, even if the underlying challenges remain just as scary as they ever have been, though Hugh’s attempts to drive and shoot long after his vision had failed him are things we are hoping not to have to worry about with Gabriella.

  So what follows is about meetings, endings and brothers. An old man looking back to a time when he was three and what was set in motion, and the reconciliation that eventually came after his mother’s death. I recall Martin’s son Mike saying that his relationship with Martin had also improved after the death of Anna. As Mark Twain said, history does not repeat itself but it often rhymes. I am not sure though that I would say the same for my own relationship with my father. It certainly grew deeper as we had to communicate directly with each other rather than through Mary, but that is not quite the same thing.

  Just before he was due to start his treatment for cancer we had a meal together at another pub. I think, given I was working, he was disappointed that I did not offer to pay, and we left on a slightly awkward note. For the first time in a long while I remembered that too, with a shiver of embarrassment, as I stood in the breeze of the beer garden.

  The week before he died I was encouraged by my mother to phone him but did not, preoccupied with other things, unsure quite what to say. Then finally, I was heading to the bus stop to go to work when Katharine ran after me to tell me that he had died. “Are you coming back home?” she asked, but I did not. I phoned the private room of the convalescence home later that morning and of course the phone just rang.

  So there are always some regrets. I cannot re-make that final week and pick up the phone to him as I should have done, but I can try and share some of his stories now.

  Martin’s Journal –

  Meeting My Father

  So it is finally time to start telling these stories. I am out of excuses not to and I fear more importantly nearly out of opportunity. But in the more immediate sense, time is paradoxically something that I have a bit of as I sit here now, with my notebook perched on my knees, writing these first few lines. I am going to be in this place, convalescing and receiving treatment for several months. It is not so bad, it is clean and the people are friendly and this is all part of the process of getting better, I would like to think. It has that institutional feel that all such places must have. A routine and a rhythm, the smell of toast, chipped walls and tired furnishings, a sense both of purpose and things somehow on hold.

  I have always wanted to write, to try and tell some of my stories, while I still can, and ultimately what else could I need? I have paper, ink and purpose and, of course, my memories such as they are. The family have long encouraged me to write but I am wary of offending, not that any of those who will outlive me have any reason to fear that causing offence might be my intention. Quite the opposite; but in any event the stories I could tell that they are in, they already know about and can do with what they will without me.

  No, I think the main focus of these recollections will be to go back further. To try and tell of the times that my beloved Mary and Mike, Colin, Ben, Matthew, James and Francesca (Mike’s two children) cannot know of, to at least try and give a window back to days long gone and what things were like for me when I was young. Now I am old I look back on my younger self and think both how different and how similar we both are; I would like to think that that person is still in me, even if there is little trace of him in the mirror.

  We all begin with our parents and are destined to look back at much of what follows to us through the prism of our early days. I think that is right. I certainly still reflect on both of my parents now, so many years after their deaths. Albeit, it is my relationship with him that I dwell on more, perhaps because it was sometimes difficult, double-edged even. I should of course begin at the start, with that first encounter which seemed to set the tone for what followed.

  When my father Arthur returned from the army in 1919, I met him for the first time in the very Victorian hall of our house, Woodville, in West Street. It had glass cases full of stuffed birds, squirrels and otters in keeping with the fashion of the day, and the whole place had been scrubbed from top to bottom in readiness for this moment. A heightened sense of anticipation had been building throughout the morning as his arrival drew ever nearer.

  When I look back it is hard to know what exactly I felt during that wait and whether some of what I write is really based more on looking at all this through the spectrum of my life now ending, rather than the three-year-old I was then. Of course, this must be the case to some extent, all of us can only re-remember things after all, but my predominant recollection of that day was that I could not have been more excited, albeit not by him.

  There was a toyshop in St Thomas Square which had a wheelbarrow I had long coveted and my mother had said that I could have it “when Daddy comes home from the war”. So my poor father had barely had time to say hello to the assembled family before he and my mother set out for the toyshop, with their son running on ahead. They had only reached the halfway stage when they met me coming back, shouting, “I’ve got the barrow!” It remained for them to hurry on and pay for it!

  Who knows what was set in play in that moment. Whether it irritated him and he formed a perception of me that somehow crystallised. Or perhaps it was simply that you bond differently with a child you first hold as a newborn baby compared to one that you first meet when they are three. Possibly that is just the way it was for him. This would not have been an era in which such questions would have been asked and I am not sure if I even thought to them, at least back then. He was my father, I was his son, we were who we were. But as I sit here so many years later I think to them now.

  I wonder in particular what he might have thought about that first return, whether it met his expectations. Somehow, I think it did not. The war for all its horrors perhaps had its share of excitement for him. Even though he probably longed to be home, perhaps the reality fell short. Better to travel than to arrive, as they say. The pressure of developing the business and looking after a son he did not know and his wife, perhaps nagged at him that first day in ways that he could never have shared.

  But family life progressed. In 1921 my brother Hugh was born. Somewhat surprising as my mother had been told by doctors she would never have another baby! Doctors do not seem to have had a particularly good record in those days. I would like to say that they have improved a lot since then, but I do not really think this is the case. Certainly a longed for daughter never materialised.

  It is often said that the relationships with the most longevity in your life are with your siblings. They come into the world around the same time as you and with good fortune should be with you for most of your days. Whatever was lacking in my relationship with my father was present in my relationship with Hugh. His recent death is another sign for me of all that is being lost; more and more of those I know are passing. If siblings come in with you then I am under no illusions that the opposite must also be true.

  What can I tell you as to what my father was really like? Very little, I fear, but I can tell you some things about him. He was a keen footballer, playing for Ryde on numerous occasions; he had the natural sportiness I lacked. He owned a sa
iling boat, and the first motorbike on the Isle of Wight!

  When the First World War broke out he joined the army, being posted to the Royal Engineers. Being a biker he was a natural for the job of motorcycle dispatch rider. This was an adventurous job, carrying dispatches from artillery batteries to the front line. As a dispatch rider he had the automatic rank of corporal. For two years he worked closely with Frank Harrison, his lifelong friend. I sometimes envied their easiness together, but there we are.

  Arthur’s pay as a corporal was one shilling and six pence a day! Possibly about £20 a week in today’s money, a totally inadequate sum for Ada to keep herself and her baby son, me, born March 1916. Those First World War years must have been a struggle for my mother. I never really talked to her about them and it is funny how we often put off what might be most relevant and interesting until it is too late to know.

  One other thing I should say about my father was a story I heard through the shop about his uncle, my grandfather’s brother. Apparently my grandfather, Alfred, had put him in charge of a shop in Chichester, and shortly after the uncle (I do not even know his name) killed himself. I cannot say what impact this had on either my father Arthur or my grandfather Alfred, although the Chichester shop was apparently immediately closed down and replaced with one in Shanklin.

  I do not know the extent to which my father thought about this after the event, or whether it was symptomatic of a strain of melancholy in the family, a tendency to despair that perhaps resurfaces every few generations. Who can say? Suicide, like so many other things, was a completely taboo subject and this would never have been something I could have raised, even if I would have liked to have understood what he made it of all. I would have liked to have known more about my great uncle so he could be a person to me, not just a whispered fact I picked up from the staff in our shop.