EQMM, July 2012

by Dell Magazine Authors

  I think I was given my albums back then. I really don't know. I do recall a feeling of discomfort afterwards, however, although at the time I didn't know why. Things were never quite right between my grandparents and my father from then on. My grandmother and my father talked frequently alone and in furious whispers.

  * * * *

  My grandfather died in 1970 at the age of 83 and my grandmother five years later at 85. The contents of the flat were distributed between my father and his two brothers, with Dad inheriting most of the photographs. Until I was well into my twenties I would, from time to time, take out the old albums and the photographs that had once stood on the mantelpiece and look at them. But when I moved away to Yorkshire, in 1985, I forgot about the photographs and, to a large extent, about my grandparents too. Only when my father and his brothers got together to reminisce, if I was around at the time, did I think of them and smile.

  Dad and my uncles Geoff and Eric always referred to the old house in West Ham as the Time Machine. My grandparents had chosen to stop their personal clock around about 1929 when my father had been born, or so my Uncle Eric always said.

  “Even in the Blitz Mother always wore long skirts and put her hair up like old Queen Mary,” he said at one reunion back in the 1980s. “Frightened of electricity they were, the both of them, frightened rigid.”

  Not that their eccentric lifestyle stopped with lack of electricity. They had no bathroom and were accustomed to washing daily in the kitchen sink. When a proper hot soak was needed they brought in the old tin bath which hung on the side of the wooden shed that was the outside toilet. God knows how many kettles they had to boil on the old range to get enough water to bathe in. They didn't have a washing machine, had no television or transistor radio, and their bedstead was made of brass, which was very unfashionable back in the 1960s. Now that bed, not to mention the big black range in the parlour, would send the type of middle-class people my grandparents never met into raptures.

  It was generally agreed amongst my relatives that my grandparents’ strange aversion to change and modernity had a lot to do with the First World War. Granddad in particular had come from a fairly easygoing working-class family who actively embraced new innovations. But he'd had a bad time in the trenches. He had been gassed, wounded, and had returned to London and his wife with a profoundly pessimistic take on life. Why my grandmother had seemed to follow him along this course was not known, expect perhaps that women did always do what their men told them to back in those days. But both my uncles, Geoff and Eric, were born during the 1914-18 conflict, presumably conceived when Granddad was at home on leave.

  That said, along with Uncle Geoff, it was my belief that the death of Granddad's brother, Harold, possibly held the key. Blown up at the Battle of Mons, he had only been seventeen at the time. They'd been in the same battalion and Granddad always said that he'd seen Harold die. One minute he'd been by his side and the next he'd disappeared into a great ball of fire and metal and ash. There hadn't been a single trace left of him to bury, Granddad had said. Not a trace. How a person could get over such a thing was inconceivable to me. In the light of that, it was no wonder that he had been so very weird.

  Life moved on and the family photographs entered what would probably, under normal circumstances, have been their final resting place in a box in my parents’ attic. I had two children by this time and my many cousins had reproduced also. It was the generation before ours that was diminishing. Both my father's brothers died in the mid 1980s and their wives followed on after them, one just before and one just after the year 2000. My sons were taking their A levels when I was called by my mother to say I had to return to London immediately.

  “Your dad was taken bad two days ago,” she said. She didn't cry or even sound that much upset. “He's in hospital. The doctor, whoever he is, says he's got lung cancer.”

  I drove from Wakefield to London in four straight hours and when I got to my parents’ house, my mother was still calmly in shock. “They say he's going to die,” she said. “How can that be?”

  We didn't say anything at all about my father's lifetime smoking habit. We just sat in silence in my mum's living room and lit up cigarettes of our own. Suddenly, or so it seemed to me, I had blinked just once and my childhood and my youth had disappeared into a hole in the ground.

  * * * *

  My father was conscious. Hooked up to machines and drips, he looked small and was yellow and the sight of him made me choke with a mixture of utter grief and total horror. Because he was on the Intensive Therapy ward I had to wear a plastic apron and gloves whenever I was near him. As I put the gloves on, I began to cry. Unfortunately Dad saw me, but he smiled anyway and said, “Got a fag, have you, kiddo?”

  He hadn't called me that since I was a child. It took me back to Uncle Brian (long dead himself by then) and his stolen cars, to England winning the World Cup in 1966, to West Ham and Mum's miniskirts, and to Grandma and Granddad and the Time Machine. But then that, of course, was his intention. He and I, we had to go back there, because back there was something my father felt I needed to know.

  “The doctors say I'm going to snuff it,” he said as I leaned over and kissed his forehead and then sat down beside his bed.

  I didn't even try to contradict him. My father had always been a pragmatic man. To tell him he was going to be “fine” would have insulted him.

  “So now I've got to tell you something,” he continued. He wasn't gasping for breath as I had imagined that he would. But then Mum had said the doctors had told her that lung cancer didn't always do that to people, at least not until the very end.

  “Do you remember when your granddad found that dead body in their backyard?” Dad asked.

  “Yes,” I said. “Of course. In the old chicken coop. The police never identified him, did they?”

  Sometime after the policeman had visited the house when Dad and I had been there, another officer had turned up and told them that the unknown man had been buried in a pauper's grave.

  “No, they didn't,” Dad said.

  “I expect they would have done these days,” I said. “What with DNA and everything.”

  “It's possible,” Dad said. And then he took one of my weird purple-gloved hands in one of his equally weird yellow mitts and he smiled. “But I know who he was,” he said.

  “You?”

  “Because your grandma told me,” he replied. “It was a long time afterwards. Your granddad was dead. But I knew she'd known something, without knowing quite what, for years.” He coughed. “Do you remember when that copper came round the house and your grandma took those old photo albums off you?”

  That had always been indelibly printed on my memory, mainly because Grandma had never done that before or after that occasion. Also, it was in the wake of that incident that things between Grandma and Dad appeared to me to cool.

  “She did that,” Dad said, “because as you turned the page there was a picture of the man who'd died in the yard staring up at her. An old picture, admittedly, but she was frightened that that copper would recognise the corpse from it and start asking questions.”

  Shocked, firstly to see my always so vital father in such a state, I was now almost beyond further reaction. I said nothing.

  “I never made the exact connection at the time. Not surprising, given what it was,” Dad said. “But that said, I had a bad feeling about it all from then on and one day when Grandma was in one of her moods to talk, I asked her about it. She said she'd tell me provided I never told Geoff or Eric and as long as I promised never to breathe a word to the police.”

  “The police?”

  Dad smiled again. He had such a big smile for a very thin man. “Don't worry, kiddo,” he said. “You can tell them if you want to. I won't hold you to anything. Everyone's dead now anyway. I'm almost dead. . . .”

  I began to cry then and for a while we had to break off because Mum came in and talked to Dad about how well their garden was doing and other stuff to “take h
is mind off it all.” But then she left—she couldn't bear more than a few minutes by his side, it was all far too distressing for her to take—and Dad continued his story.

  “Your granddad was a regular soldier when the First World War started,” he said. “He was in his late twenties and had just got married. He had, as you know, a lot of sisters, and a brother who was very much younger than he was.”

  “Uncle Harold.”

  “Harold was seventeen. Sweet, he was, loved by everyone. Your granddad had a notion that the war was going to be long and vicious and bloody and he told his brother to keep as far away from recruiting officers and the like as he could. But of course he didn't listen. Thought himself patriotic, like most lads then. So not only did Harold join up, he went into the selfsame regiment as your granddad.”

  “Yes, but what . . .”

  “It'll all become clear,” Dad said and then he coughed and coughed until his face changed colour and, although one of the nurses told him it might be better if I left for a while, he clung onto me and wouldn't let go. He had, he said, to get out what he needed to say no matter what.

  As soon as he could speak easily again, he said, “On the twenty-third of August, nineteen fourteen, your granddad's regiment, the Middlesex, went into battle at Mons. They fought, and many of them died, and your granddad was wounded in the leg and was briefly shipped back home to recover. He got a lot of sympathy because of his wound and of course because his brother Harold had been killed. Or so everyone thought.”

  I frowned. Uncle Harold's heroic and untimely death had always been a cornerstone of our family's mythology.

  “Uncle Harold deserted,” my father said simply.

  I was stunned. Even though the legend of Uncle Harold was no longer at the forefront of my thoughts, it was something I had been brought up with, like a half-resented, half-loved religion.

  “I was just as shocked as you are,” Dad said. He took my hand again.

  “Did they shoot him?” I asked. Deserters were routinely shot during the First World War. Some of them were tortured too. Granddad used to mutter about “lads left tied naked in full sun to gun carriages,” men slowly dehydrating and going mad.

  My father shook his head. “No. Harold got away,” he said. “He was a young silly kid, but your grandfather was a man and he made sure that Harold got out of there.”

  “How?” Fields of battle were chaotic, yes, but even so I knew enough stories about officers shooting men who ran “the wrong way” to know how hard such an endeavour would be.

  “Harold was terrified,” Dad said. “Sick all the time. Your granddad had to be behind him just to get him into the line. All he wanted to do was get out of there. The plan was simple and it could very easily have failed. In fact, I think that your granddad did probably think that it had failed. Once on the field, Harold dropped to the ground as if he was shot. And there he stayed until our boys had passed him by. Your granddad behaved as if his brother had died and when the day was over, there was indeed no sign of him.”

  “But if he did survive,” I said, “why didn't he visit his family? Where did he go? Did Granddad not try to contact him?”

  “Granddad wouldn't have contacted him,” Dad said with a smile. “That wasn't his job. His role, as you youngsters have it these days, was to make sure that no one ever knew the truth. You have to remember, kiddo, that deserters were regarded as scum even by their families back in the First World War. Granddad wanted to save his silly little brother's life, but he couldn't tell anybody about it. That was the deal. If Harold got caught, then George, his brother, knew nothing about his desertion. If he didn't get caught, then he just disappeared. He was ‘dead’ and that was the end of it. And as the years passed, even if Granddad had wanted to tell his family, he couldn't have done so. Harold was awarded medals posthumously, he has a grave somewhere in one of the war cemeteries over on the continent. He'd become a dead man, and until that night back in November nineteen sixty-seven, he'd stayed a dead man.”

  Harold had come back? I began to feel chilly. I rubbed my arms with my strange purple hands and watched as Dad smiled up at me again.

  “Do you remember Mo who used to live upstairs to Grandma and Granddad?” he said.

  “Yes.” Mo had been funny to a kid like me, always staggering about all the time and, occasionally, swearing.

  “Mo went down the pub and left the front door open,” Dad said. “Your grandma was doing the dishes in the scullery when this bloke walked into the parlour. She didn't know who he was at first, couldn't see his face. There was just a silence. Your granddad didn't speak and neither did the other man. According to her, when she did go into the parlour, they were both just standing there, looking at each other. Harold, she said, was faced away from her. But she saw the expression on your granddad's face and so she walked around so that she could see the man. She got a right shock.”

  “Did she?” Grandma couldn't have seen Harold since he was not much more than a child over fifty years before.

  “Your granddad went berserk.” Dad coughed. “Said that Harold had broken their pact. Told him to bugger off to where he'd come from and never come back. All, apparently, Harold kept on saying was that he was lonely, that he couldn't do it anymore, that he wanted to be part of something again. Granddad hit him. He took the coal shovel in his hand and he hit his brother over the head with it. He did it just as Mo was walking through the parlour door as drunk as a sack. Harold had left it open when he walked back into your grandparents’ lives.”

  Bile from my already grieving stomach rose up into my throat. “Granddad killed him.”

  “He didn't mean to. He was angry.”

  “And Mo saw him do it?”

  Mo had used the word “murder” to describe what had happened that night. I had never known why until that point. I had never even questioned it. Mo had been a drunk. He'd eventually died in a pub brawl in 1969, a year before my granddad's death.

  “Mo helped your granddad drag the body out to the yard,” Dad said.

  “But how did Mo never tell anyone? How . . .”

  “He told us, inadvertently,” Dad said. “But he never told the coppers. Your grandparents had the tenancy of that house. If they'd've had to go, then the landlord would have chucked Mo out too. He didn't want them carted off to prison. It was really an accident.”

  “Granddad killed Harold!”

  “He didn't mean to.”

  “Yes, but he did it anyway!”

  “Love,” my dad said. “He turned up out of the blue. It was a shock, it . . . The cause of the ‘unknown man's’ death according to the coppers was a heart attack. He had a coronary and he hit his head on the side of the old chicken coop as he fell. That's what they said.”

  “Yes, but he didn't . . .”

  “He did die of a heart attack,” Dad said. “I asked and that was what I was told. The blow to the head wasn't fatal.”

  “So he had a weak heart anyway,” I said. “Doesn't make what Granddad did right.”

  “No. No, it doesn't.”

  My father didn't know where Harold had been or what he had done in the long years that had followed the First World War. Maybe he hadn't done anything much for fear of being discovered? Or perhaps he'd had a family who had left him or died and that was why he had turned up, lonely and weary, at my grandparents’ place on that ill-fated November evening? I realised then, as I realise now, that I would never, ever know.

  Two days after my father told me about Harold, he slipped into a coma and died. Family and friends came from far and wide to attend his funeral, and I often visit his grave up at the East London Cemetery. But about Harold I have remained silent. What good would upsetting what remains of the family about such a thing be now? Feelings still run high about the First World War, even though modern opinions about desertion are more enlightened than they were at the time. I did do one thing, however. And shudder as I do when I write of it, I am glad that I did do it.

  I didn't find my Uncle
Harold's grave, but I did find a record of the death of the unknown man in my grandparents’ yard for November 1967. It is the police doctor's estimate of Harold's age that haunts me. 17. Seventeen. Write it twice, in numbers and letters, it doesn't get any better. And how can that be?

  Harold, I estimated, had to have been seventy in 1967. So whoever my grandfather killed, it can't have been Harold. And yet my grandmother said that it had been. And indeed, why and for what reason would my gentle grandfather have attacked and killed a perfect stranger? I've spent sleepless nights wondering whether the man who entered my grandparents’ house that night was Harold's son, his grandson, or just someone who happened, for whatever reason, to look like him. My grandmother was, after all, frightened enough to not want the policeman who visited them to see any of Harold's photographs, either in the albums or on the mantelpiece. But in spite of all that, was it just a case of mistaken identity? If it was, however, why did “Harold” say to Granddad that he was lonely, that he “couldn't do it anymore"?

  Logically the man who walked into my grandparents’ house that night in November 1967 cannot have been my Great-Uncle Harold. It was his son, his grandson, a look-alike, someone completely different. A burglar that my grandparents, for some reason, projected Harold's image onto. Maybe there was a resemblance of some sort there. But there is something else it could have been too. Against all logic, Harold did come back and he did enter that house in West Ham with the full intention of breaking the pact with his brother, maybe because his heart was weak and he knew that he was close to death. But as he entered that strange, ossified place, something happened. By magic, by the action of the place we all laughingly called the Time Machine, by some trick of biology or act of God, Harold became the boy he had been when he disappeared again. Alone and desperate, this “ghost” appealed to my grandfather for help and this time he denied him. Harold “died” again and lies in an unmarked grave somewhere in the East London Cemetery where all my family lie.