Find Another Place

by Ben Graff

  Beyond the communal garden, a second house is being built in the grounds of one of the large properties that stands across the way. We look at the metal scaffolding and half-built brick walls. Dad rubs my back. “Nothing ever stands still,” he says. It surprises me, but in that moment he had guessed what I was thinking.

  After lunch, we would go to the seafront, a ten-minute walk, downhill on the way there, “Like sliding down a magic carpet,” Dave says. One of the houses we always pass has a sign up offering tennis coaching.

  Stone-covered beach and betting shops. Cheap cafes. Lots of old people. And yet, the sea on their doorstep and a sense of optimism and possibility Dave and Theresa both seemed to carry.

  We would play mini-golf and argue about mini-golf. Being the scorer always gave you an advantage, although there could be recriminations after the count. More than once I would have to explain why I’d misread my eight as a three. “If you don’t get the ball in the hole, you can’t score as if you have,” Dad would say.

  “Calm down, Col,” would be Dave’s retort, which usually irritated Dad further, as did his singing. We would eat ice cream and walk on the world’s stoniest beach. Occasionally we would swim, which always made Dave nervous. He would wave us in, which compelled me to turn and swim further out. We would talk about the Bognor Birdman and the carnival, which we had been to once. It was certainly a spectacle to see people in an array of costumes, with wings of various degrees of plausibility, throw themselves from Bognor’s pier in a forlorn attempt to fly. Whoever travelled the furthest through the air would win a prize. “Sometimes when I come to Bognor, I have a similar urge to throw myself over the edge,” I once heard my mother mutter to my father.

  All of our visits followed the same pattern. Some sort of incident with Echo, food, the beach, golf and then back to the flat for cups of tea and more biscuits, accompanied by final thoughts from Dave on Thatcherism while we watched the news. (Today is the eighth of the eighth of eighty-eight, Nicholas Witchell says, against a backdrop of multiple Japanese wedding ceremonies.) Then we re-trace our steps with a car journey to the station, by which time everything is generally quiet, Dave’s assault on capitalism and culture over for another day.

  He would be content mainly to hum under his breath, occasionally fishing yet more biscuits out of a carrier bag in case we were hungry, perhaps sometimes giving us another pound, ignoring Mum’s increasingly firm urgings that he should keep his eyes on the road and hands on the wheel. We would all be tired, but there would be a sense of both relief and accomplishment after he had said goodbye and we could continue on retracing our steps: Bognor Regis, Chichester, Fishbourne, Bosham, Nutbourne, Southbourne, Emsworth, Warblington, Havant, Bedhampton, Farlington Halt, Hilsea, Fratton, Portsmouth and Southsea, and finally Portsmouth Harbour. Re-crossing the Solent in fading summer light, air much cooler now, watching the lights from the boats fall across the water.

  “How did it go?” Martin would ask when we met him at Ryde Esplanade in the glooming for a lift back to their house.

  “Better than average,” Mum said.

  2014

  Part 2

  Arrivals –

  17 October 2014

  I step out of the car and push my poorly-fitting key into the front door, wrenching it open. My left eye feels a little heavy, as it sometimes does, and my legs are achy. I wonder about the forces at work in my own body right now, that I can still shrug off much more easily than he can, whatever is attacking him. Our respective battles to stay alive are not comparable, not today.

  My father is the hamlet’s longest residing resident, in this house that he chose with Mum and has gone on to nurture since. His house, his place in the world, though this October evening the sense that he is in peril, that rogue cells are wreaking more and more havoc, that time is running out, cannot be ignored.

  This is still instinctively both home and a homecoming of sorts, albeit one that now happens every few days. He had recently installed a fountain outside, the final structural alteration he would ever make to this or any other house. In the summer we had sat at the table next to it, listening to the gush of water that poured through its metal filter, gleaming in the sunlight. To me it somehow seemed to mock the latest set of bad news or disappointing data through its very newness, the fact that everything about it worked perfectly. But we are well into autumn now and it has been switched off, though it still drips limply.

  It does not feel like the sort of place that should interest the wider world much. It has its own quiet seasons and stories that belong to this and other times, just like anywhere else. For years, to come back here was to escape from something. To return to a place that was quieter and more sheltered than wherever I had travelled from, even if I was far from blind to its imperfections. The protective barriers and preconceptions were not absolute.

  Just a few weeks ago, it was difficult to make it down Dad’s drive, as the nation’s press was camped out to cover a murder–suicide. Not the thatched cottage where Mrs Sawmill had once lived, but the house with white windows and a pretty gate across the pond from us. Those windows were always a bright green when we were young.

  It is a curious juxtaposition. Neighbour on the front page one day, Cliff Richard the next. The media speculated as to what might have caused John to despair and end everything for both himself and his wife, Anne. Was it the travellers buying a neighbouring field and making camp, when he had passed up the opportunity to buy the land himself? He was known to think that this had wiped a considerable sum of money from the value of his property. Had managing Anne’s Alzheimer’s simply become too much for him? Was it a combination of factors? Did it make any difference? It was all done now.

  Dad said that John had mentioned nearly killing himself years ago. It was Katharine who had found out about John’s secret love child. He had told her really, the way people always seemed to tell her things that they wouldn’t share with others. I notice Dad did the same with her too.

  Of course, by this point Dad had fallen out with his neighbours, having once been close. He didn’t fully appreciate what would happen when he suggested playing a new variation of bridge with someone who had Alzheimer’s. The consequences were disastrous. There was also something in it all about botched work their son had done on Dad’s car. The son said no one had ever spoken to him in his life the way my father did.

  I had phoned John a few days before he killed himself, to see if things could be patched up, being the parent I suppose. Before I’d said a word he said, “We are not available” and put the phone down. Not available now.

  The press had filled the garden. Did we have any comment on the ‘poor man’? Long lens cameras pointed through their windows. Cars and vans parked up on verges and in the field. Reporters phoning asking for my mother; aerial photos of the house appearing in all the newspapers.

  My father held my hand when I told him and did not say anything for a long time. We watched villagers, many of whom didn’t seem to know the deceased, give interviews to Sky and the BBC. Everything happens to someone.

  A drama on a larger scale that fleetingly captured the national imagination and enveloped our own quieter, more everyday disaster, a comparable form of which would be playing out in other next doors, unknown to us. Much as others will have looked at pregnancy tests that yielded a single blue line on 9/11, somewhere everything is happening. There is a saying that there is ‘nothing new in chess’, so to, in life. Most chess players would assume the origins of the quote came from the Russian player Viktor Korchnoi, but it is based on the more poetic Ecclesiastes 1:9.

  ‘What has been will again,

  What has been done will be done again;

  There is nothing new under the sun.’

  I still do not know whether the thought is a comfort or not, hardly in the context of this drama, perhaps more so in others.

  Now the press have moved on and the lanes and fie
lds are quiet once more. The house across the pond in darkness, no one there tonight, already on the market and priced for a quick sale. Mrs Sawmill is but a memory too; a young couple live in her thatched cottage now.

  I am support and witness, even if I am poorly equipped for either task. Somebody I work with said to me, “You can only do your best.” Whatever that is, I have to try and find it from somewhere, in amongst my fatigue and general sense of inadequacy and the mutual irritation my father and I sometimes feel toward each other.

  The hall is still, the television off. I know where he will be. I head up the stairs with the paper bag containing the apple turnovers held awkwardly in one hand, phone in the other. Jane, who was once the cleaner but has now become one of his carers, is sitting with him. In recent weeks she has taken to asking him how much the paintings are worth. “And what about the cars?” she says.

  As usual, I’m not entirely clear how to initiate a conversation, but this is what he is waiting for. He always makes me feel self-conscious without actually doing anything. Is it because it can’t be said or doesn’t need to be said? It is all understood, or is none of it? I’ll never be able to answers these questions, not really. He does not make it easy to build a bridge to them and at one level I have stopped trying to force a connection. Yet he is the one who breaks the silence, who takes the lead, and I am grateful for it. In that moment he takes charge, is the parent once again, something else that is happening for the final time.

  “What can you tell me?” he says, holding my hand. He props himself up on the bed, looking tired but focussed. The skin around his face has a yellowish tinge, is tighter now than it once was, but he is not ruined. If you were looking at his face for the first time you would still think that he was handsome, or at least be able to notice through the shadows that once he was.

  The quilt hides the thinness of his body; the bedding literally just changed by Jane smells fresh. Radio 5 whispers away, a sense of comfort and normality even though these are not normal times. By the side of his bed are empty discarded packets of Rennies and an untouched glass of water. Everything smells of mint and the chalk of the indigestion tablets.

  He has read the newspaper, which lies discarded on what was Mum’s side of the bed. His question is part rhetorical, which does not make me any less grateful for it; somehow he knows how to make things easier.

  I squeeze his hand and offer him an apple turnover. He smiles and says he will have one later.

  Dad’s Work

  In his letters to Mum he had acknowledged some of the differences between them, that her leaning was artistic and his was scientific, and what surprised me first when I looked through his old work folders was the poetry, if it could quite be called that. There were a number of limericks that had been written by his colleagues at a work Christmas party, about him, even if, on the surface, they did not necessarily give me much insight into his character. That came more through the fact that anyone had thought to write them in the first place.

  A Divisional ‘Super’ called Graff,

  Was keen to retain all his staff.

  A bit sad for him,

  The Chief Scientist’s whim

  Reduced all his budgets by half!

  A Divisional ‘Super’ called Graff,

  Got on quite well with his staff;

  Until one fine day,

  He was heard clear to say,

  The whole crowd were not worth a laugh!

  There were several pages of these, as well as puzzles and word games, and they surprised me too. Unless it was Shakespeare, he was always quite dismissive of poetry, but he and his colleagues seemed to write more of it, more than I might have expected, which is to say any at all.

  Were all scientists frustrated wordsmiths? Was he? Growing up I thought he had a disdain for all things arty, those things which had given me a dubious sense of intellectual superiority. Was I reading too much into a handful of limericks and other such playfulness now? I couldn’t know, but he had chosen to keep them. Perhaps he and his colleagues were not the one-dimensional number bods I had vaguely imagined them to be as a teenager, if I even thought to them at all.

  My own children, particularly Francesca, will often ask me what I do at work. “I write emails, I go to meetings, that sort of thing,” I will say.

  “Sounds really boring; what do you actually do?” she will ask.

  I once heard it said that explaining what you do at work without feeling the need to kill yourself is meant to be one of the tests as to whether you are in the right job. It is not that I hate it, but if I hedge a little it is because there are other things I would rather talk to her about, things that interest me more, and it is only when I think to this that I wonder if I was too hard on Dad. It always used to frustrate me that he had no inclination to tell us much about what he was doing at work, and now I am doing the same. There’s more of him in me than I immediately recognised.

  The difference though was that what he did was secret.

  Growing up it seemed obvious what Mum did. She was an English teacher at the Royal National College for the Blind in Hereford. It was entirely in keeping with Dad that what he actually did was something of a mystery to us. He never talked about it. Aldershot and Malvern. Defence. He kept his security pass with its metal chain by his bed. They wouldn’t let him in without it. He had signed the Official Secrets Act. We used to joke that he had probably begged to sign it, while also wondering why any of his superiors would have thought it necessary, given how tight-lipped he was. Did he actually speak to any of them when he was there?

  We could never walk on the bit of the Malvern Hills that overlooked his office as he did not want to catch sight of the place when he wasn’t there. Yet by all accounts (well, Mum’s really) he quite liked what he did, until the final few years at any rate. I have no way of knowing whether or not this is true, or whether it is even a question that he could have answered. He worked in Malvern from 1983 to 2007 and there must have been all sorts of moments, good, bad and indifferent, during that time. Perhaps sometimes in my quest to understand I am too quick to reach conclusions.

  His misfortune perhaps was that he worked in the defence industry in that brief period when history seemed to be over. The Cold War had finished. There was no hint then as to what was to follow it, even if all of us were to live long enough to see that answered in the skyline over Manhattan.

  Later he had been more involved in air traffic control, we knew that much. He was running larger teams by the end, and was significantly better off than when we were younger. The money only really came after we had started work ourselves. Prior to that there were a succession of ageing Volvos, and once a mini-van that never lived up to our parents’ initial optimism for it. He made money in a share deal when QinetiQ was formed, but could have made more if he had applied for his full allocation. He seemed to have an unspoken fear of anything other than cash, and had not wanted to take the risk. Perhaps his financial caution was a product of growing up in a family where money was tight and cash was king. Ready money to hand was a safety net of sorts if the laundry customers had not paid, and it was the only way to trade in London’s poorer markets. In later years, particularly after the Northern Rock Building Society was bailed out in the banking crisis, transferring cash from one bank account to another became a hobby, which added unforeseen complexity to the eventual untangling of his estate and made me reflect again that he had needed better things to do with his time. For all his caution, the QuinetiQ shares he did invest in were still enough for more work on the house and a number of nearly new German cars.

  There was an ‘open day’ once, but I only remember corridors and files and a sense of surprise that I could see the similarities with my own school building. I had not realised that all institutions shared some of the same physical and metaphorical bearings.

  Some of the detail that I did not know when he was alive was filled in whe
n I went through the boxes in the spare room, afterwards. In addition to the limericks, I found a CV and a number of development assessments undertaken by external professionals. There were newspaper cuttings, one with him on the front page of The Malvern Gazette. I remembered also that he had once been on Radio 5, whilst I was at Bristol. Quite late at night, but talking about something related to his job. I hadn’t listened to it.

  I wonder if my children would listen to me if I was on the radio, talking about work, or even if I would want them to? I wonder if it disappointed him that I had not listened when he was on, for what was his one and only national media appearance, there in the deep of night when even his own son was doing something else.

  Some of the technical details may not seem scintillating of themselves but they are things I did not know and now, thanks to his papers, I do. They are a part of the process of discovery. It all started with a BSc in physics from the University of London, then an MSc in cryogenics from Southampton in 1969, where he met Mum. Then came a nomadic three years. The British Oxygen Company (who years later rejected me for their graduate scheme), Marconi, Ferranti. He seemed to be employed in systems engineering and mathematical modelling positions, whatever they were.

  By the time I was born in 1975 he was working in the mathematics department at The Royal Aircraft Establishment in Aldershot. He was a section leader working on databases and supercomputers, building his career. In 1983 he moved to the Royal Signals and Radar Establishment, focussing on integrated air defence systems. By 1990 he was promoted to superintendent, and then again to director of Missile & Defence Solutions Focal Business in 2004.

  About all of which I understood nothing, but I knew he was good at maths. He had done all my numbers-related homework for years. When in the fifth year at secondary school my teacher noted that my work was declining, it was actually the opposite. Dad and I had agreed that I needed to start doing more of my homework myself if I was to have any chance of scraping through my GCSE. Which is what happened. Just. Without his earlier help I assume the school would have thrown me out years before.