Find Another Place

by Ben Graff

  Introduction to

  Aunty Noreen’s Diary

  Every year my mother gave my Aunty Noreen a copy of the Good Housekeeping Diary and Account Book, which was renamed the Good Housekeeping Diary in 2000, perhaps in commemoration of the millennium. Between 2001 and 2007 the series was renamed again as Good Housekeeping Everyday, and what happened to it after that I cannot say. Noreen started a 2008 diary but did not finish it, and it is now lost in any event.

  My mother the diary giver outlived Noreen the diary writer by six short months in 2008. They had other connections too. Both were literate, and despaired when apostrophes were misused, as it was alleged Noreen’s son Richard sometimes did when advertising potatoe’s (sic) for sale at his pub. For many in the family the day they came to say goodbye to Noreen at her funeral was also the last day that they would see my mother.

  The two of them were linked by the gift, the annual Christmas present that spanned all the way back to 1979. Noreen wrote an entry most days. I look at the volumes now as they are all laid out on her daughter Janet Morter’s table, in her house on the Isle of Wight. The covers are mainly dark blacks and browns, with a handful of bright red ones from 1981, 1982, 1986, 1987, 1988 and 1992. All are smooth to the touch, other than 2001 which is much rougher, although you can only tell this by actually stroking the cover. The silver lettering on blue background gives no hint of this difference from its siblings.

  The books are a little smaller than A5. There are pages in the middle dedicated to a ‘Guest Menu for August’. I did not know Noreen wrote a diary until, while on the Island for a family wedding, I mentioned to Janet that I was working on this book. A few weeks later I got up early one Sunday morning and drove to Portsmouth. I was due on the 10am, but managed to make it onto St Clare for the 9am crossing. It felt strange to be on the Solent by myself, with no family with me, even if this was all part of the exercise of trying to understand a bit better what had gone before, to find a way to share it in some way – a day as a detective, unsure what it was I might find.

  Noreen’s handwriting was better than Martin’s, which was something, if not as good as Mum’s. Certain themes emerged very quickly. She wrote a lot about the weather: high winds, and boats stopped by fog, and the lashing rain.

  ‘Snow from Sat. night still V. thick + temps down to -5c, though wind dropped. J arrived from Yarmouth 3.30, & met by R after prolonged attempts to get home from Kim’s. Colin forced to go back to Aldershot without M & the boys’ was an entry from 1981.

  Significant events were re-highlighted year on year: Hugh’s broken leg in 1960, Richard in hospital in 1963. Much later, the arrival of Sky television in 1996 was deemed worthy of repeating in future editions.

  Birthdays were also recorded. In 1981, she wrote that I was six and she had sent me a Meccano tractor set. A few years later a £5 book token. Later still, rather than references to my birthday, that date came to feature repeat mentions of an upgrade to the toilet, which I tried not to take personally.

  She had been a deputy head, and a formidable one at that. She wrote of somebody throwing a brick through her office window and how she essentially shrugged it off. I mentioned this to Janet who said Noreen would have been furious, but that didn’t show in her writing. She wrote of dealing with drunken parents and psychotic pupils, managing school office politics, all with a steeliness and skill that she undoubtedly possessed. She was a magistrate too, but while she recorded when she was in court and when she finished, she never wrote of the cases she heard.

  There were some entries about times in our own childhood that we had spent with her, such as this one from Sunday Dec 30th, 1979. ‘Cleaned up kitchen floor & laid new tiles – v. pretty. Ben, Matthew came in pm & Mary and Colin for a meal in evening. M&C = 8 years.’

  There were also some anecdotes from the parenting of her own children, in one of which she mentioned waiting up for Richard from 5.45am to 7.45am, desperate with worry, before it transpired that he had been sleeping at a friend’s house.

  I remember seeing her and Hugh when we were older children - picnics in the field, shooting with Hugh’s guns. She always had a certain intelligence and approachable grandness about her. In 1994 she had a stroke and her writing became unreadable for a while, before improving again. Her recovery was a long and slow one and she said it did change her attitude to things, but she managed to go forward.

  Noreen’s Diary – 1994

  Monday 5th September –

  What a day! It began normally and we got on with repainting the shed wall. After lunch, we went to the hospice to see Anna. Wonderful caring feel to it and Anna seemed bright despite a broken arm. Later we heard from Martin that there was no cure in prospect, so perhaps 2 weeks or a month, not much more.

  Saturday 10th September –

  Martin rang early to say Anna had settled into the hospice and we hope to see her tomorrow.

  Sunday 11th September –

  Saw Anna with H & Rich and it demanded a lot of self-control from me as she looked so frail and thin. Home to clean up in garden.

  Tuesday 13th September –

  Prepared soup for Anna who came out of the hospice this P.M. We ate in the garden.

  Thursday 15th September –

  H off early with ferrets so another early start. Martin here in evening for a rabbit casserole, so only a bit of gardening today.

  Saturday 17th September –

  Anna died at 7am – the end of a long association with many happy memories. May she rest in eternal peace. Day was confused by this news but I did my Chequers duties, came home for a snack lunch then to Janet’s to help with the children. Anna is to be cremated on Friday.

  Friday 23rd September –

  What a day – the requiem mass, the get together at Michael’s then the evening meal with Janet and Paul. In all the trauma, it was a wonderful day in Anna’s memory.

  A Letter from Anna – 1994

  Carmel

  Stonepitts Close

  Ryde

  Isle of Wight

  My dear Colin,

  We talk to Mary every day and it would seem that you are now making good progress.

  Trying to sleep in a Hospital ward is no easy task as we can both testify.

  We are sending you a small token which we hope you will spend on something you need.

  It must have helped you having your family rally round in support.

  Make the most of the rest and treatment. Concentrate on getting back to full strength as soon as possible.

  The Summer has arrived today and hopefully we will have a long spell.

  With love & best wishes for a speedy recovery.

  Anna & Martin

  Ghosts – 1995

  “Of course they exist,” says Martin. “How could they not? I’ll never forget that house. Not ever. When I woke in the night there were figures around the bed, all looking at me, just looking at me,” he pauses, the silence drawing me in closer. “I just kept the light on and read. What else could I do?” His face is frozen, his eyes somehow accentuated in the ensuing stillness. He delivers his lines with the air of an actor. It is a story he has told me before.

  We are both comfortable in the silence, as we sit in the kitchen of his house in the late evening. A year on from Anna’s death everything is as clean and tidy as it ever was but somehow more empty, more functional than when she was here. More of a house and less of a home. Something I think he senses too, but knows cannot be changed with her gone. Whilst not in the process of falling into the sea, like their last house, this one too has problems: set back from a main road, it has been burgled twice in recent years.

  “I can’t bear the thought of people looking at my things,” said Anna at the time.

  It’s a dormer bungalow, with lots of internal glass, small kitchen, but bigger dining room and sitting room. Royal blue carpets. The garden, with its elabora
te fish ponds and greenhouse rammed with tomato plants, is a suntrap that smells of summer at its height.

  Fixed to the wall of the stairway is a framed piece of writing in elaborate lettering that starts Go placidly amid the noise and haste… It speaks of your career, however humble, as a true possession in changing times, and a universe no doubt unfolding as it should – be careful, strive to be happy, that sort of thing. I would often read it if I went to the toilet in the night, which was not every night in those days. Sometimes, I would listen in the stillness, to the bleat of a ferry’s horn on the Solent, the ticking of the clock on the landing, my father snoring upstairs.

  Martin tells me about the hospice movement, for which he is now a fundraiser. A caricature of him in this role hangs in the hallway and will eventually find a new home in Mike’s games room. The day before Anna died she had a beautiful haircut, he says.

  There were no good choices toward the end. One of the few times I saw my mother cry was when she told me that Anna had said she had wished she had died the year before, on the operating table. Anna could remember her childhood but not much beyond, although she still knew who everybody was.

  “When are we going home?” she would ask Martin.

  “This is home,” he would say.

  “Yes, of course it is,” she would reply.

  He’s long since moved from drinking half-milk, half-coffee to martinis. I’m drinking beer. Working in a holiday camp on the other side of the Island for the summer and staying with him while I do. He is easy to talk to in some ways. Roughly the same mass of contradictions as the rest of us. He has extreme views on law and order, but is a committed, and by all accounts popular, prison visitor. He thinks drug dealers should be shot, but when a family friend runs into completely unexpected difficulties, he is supportive. The key is to gently steer him off his soapbox. Perhaps that’s the secret with all of us.

  He has always been a good storyteller and, for years, telling me and Matt a bedtime story was a part of the summer holiday ritual. But his own attempts to write were a disappointment to him, although I remember one very good short story he wrote, now lost.

  When we first moved to Hereford, we stayed with him and Anna while Mum and Dad sorted out the new house. There were fights with water pistols, games of swing-ball, which Anna was to ban in future years. As we got bigger it looked more inevitable that either I was going to decapitate Matt or, more likely, vice versa.

  But the way my grandfather tells this, this thing about ghosts around his bed, does not feel like a story. He’s too matter of fact, even if he does have a certain disposition to this sort of thing. I can almost sense what the figures might have looked like, even though he has not described them.

  Though in many ways as different as two people could be, Martin and Theresa shared an interest in mediums and tarot cards, although I doubt they knew that they had this in common. Theresa said she and Dave had been to a séance in the 1970s. There were people milling around in the crowd to gain information before the event started, which she thought was a bit odd, but you know… She even mentioned Helen to one of them. But nothing. Nothing.

  They went home and they wept.

  Dad and Matt both say they saw Mum immediately after she died. I did not, and both resented it and hoped that they had seen her. It was something that could only be placed in the category of the unexplained. However, a few years previously, when the four of us were driving past Quarr Abbey very late one evening, something shrouded and luminous seemed to cross the road just in front of us, oblivious to all around it but clearly moving, then gone. “Did you see that?” Mum had said. My father and brother had not seen anything, but I had.

  And perhaps if I had seen this figure at Quarr, then what my brother and father thought they saw might have been real too, and that would mean… I don’t know… something… and in the absence of everything, sometimes something has to be enough. The slightest hint that there might be other things, other realms, other ways of being… that we cannot quite touch but might occasionally catch a glimpse of.

  Bognor – 2000

  I get the train from London and Dad picks me up at the station. “I’m sorry,” I say and he nods. He pats me on the shoulder and Mum hugs me, saying that it wasn’t the initial heart attack but the subsequent drugs they gave him at the hospital to prevent another one.

  “It’s rare, but he had a very bad reaction to them and died instantly.”

  Back at the flat, Theresa is shaken.

  “He was just on the floor,” she says. “He told me he had twenty pounds in his pocket that might be useful. I told him Matt was on his way and he nodded.” I acknowledge the point, irrationally jealous that I was not mentioned in the interaction. “He was very calm and he didn’t really say anything after that. He was just cleaning the bathroom this morning, so it doesn’t make sense. We’d been watching television. Just the usual, you know.”

  The doctor arrives and Theresa embraces him. He is in his fifties I would guess, corpulent and stately, dishevelled in a vaguely patrician sort of way, with greying hair that need washing, rumpled shirt and protruding stomach.

  Before he can speak, Theresa says, “What happened, what happened? He saw you last week and you said he was fine. How can this be? How can this be?”

  She half hugs, half shakes him and he hugs her back, before wriggling free, much like we used to as children.

  “I told him his life was not in immediate danger, in that moment, as we were talking. That’s what I told him. I also told him that he was in the final stages of heart disease.” He speaks with a certain gravitas that is both calming and somehow underscores the finality of the moment. There is compassion and a sense of empathy, but no surprise. The doctor has done all this many times before.

  “He told me, you said he was fine,” she says. “He was fine.”

  We sit quietly that evening, sometimes wandering out to stand on the balcony, breathing in the warm summer evening air. That everything looks the same is both extraordinary and entirely as it should be. It’s just Dave; he can’t see it anymore, unless of course he can.

  I think that the day of my own death will be similar, as will the day of all our deaths: in a world where so many other things will be happening, and where the sky and the season will doubtless be unremarkable. Days will outrun us all.

  We pause to peer at photographs on the sideboard as if looking at them for the first time, Theresa unusually quiet, knitting untouched.

  “I was just talking to him,” she says to herself.

  “He wasn’t meant to be here at all,” Theresa says later, as the two of us stand on her tiny balcony.

  I ask what she means.

  She says that Dave’s parents had fled Lithuania around 1900, before Dave was born, after the man who would have been his uncle had been murdered by two soldiers. He had been shot, seemingly randomly, outside his house.

  Except it was not random.

  “Anti-Semitism did not start with Hitler,” she says with a sigh. “So they fled on a boat. They had booked their passage to America, but when they reached London they were told that they were in New York. How were they meant to know any different?

  “That was when they changed their name to Graff. It had been Wengrow, but they wanted to make it sound more English. They did not really know what they were doing.

  “Still, if the boat had gone to America, Dave would have been born there and we would never have met. None of this could have followed. Whoever cheated them out of America, I am grateful.”

  She turned and walked back into the flat and the moment was gone. It was the only time I would hear this story. I mentioned it to Dad once, but he shrugged and I could not tell whether he did not know it, was not interested, or if the shrug indicated something else, perhaps simply that it did not matter now, but his reticence might have run deeper than that. He was always wary of opening up the past. Whatever
the truth, I never did learn more about this.

  It will only take fourteen years for me to be the only one who was there that night to be left, looking back on a time when I marked the loss of my grandfather with others who are now also all gone.

  That night we light candles. I sleep on the sofa, the flickering light keeping me awake, but blowing them out seems very wrong. In the morning it is clear that my grandmother forgot they were still burning, and blows them out as soon as she enters the room, with a slightly flustered look.

  I don’t even have a dark-coloured suit with me, but it doesn’t seem to matter. We stand in the bleak cemetery of stone, which is on a vast scale beyond anything that comes to mind when you think to Christian churchyards. Huge slabs of marble, a special section for the Cohens, a stone that says the mother of a teenager who died in a car crash will be in anguish forever; these become lodged in my mind.

  There are no flowers here. Jews believe that the living and the dead should be kept separate. Instead, rocks and pebbles have been placed by some of the graves. There is a tap to wash your hands on leaving, to symbolise life, but it conjures up other associations for me.

  Mum says she doesn’t know where she is going. Theresa tells her it will be alright. There is not quite a tension between them, but it is not quite a connection either.

  “He’s arrived, poor soul,” my Mum will say as he reaches the cemetery. Again, it is all different from what we know. A simple car, a plain coffin placed on a cart to be moved inside for the service, and then onwards for the burial.