by Tim Guest
But I said nothing. I frowned, ignored this man’s threats, turned my back, picked up the aerial, and checked it over. It didn’t extend properly anymore, so it was useless as a sword. I threw it back on the grass and walked away. Later that day the lights came back on in the Kids’ Hut and the design studio. No one mentioned the incident again.
My memories of my father are all in long-shot because by then my father and I were far apart. When we were living in Leeds, we’d been close. At the swimming pool he would splash his arms in the water, make shark noises, and chase me around the pool. My mother remembers us being closer than any father and son she had ever seen. But by the time he visited Medina we had somehow ended up far apart. One afternoon, watching me playing roughly with the other Medina kids, my father turned to my mother and said: ‘Look. He’s lost his innocence.’
But it wasn’t my innocence he was grieving for; it was his own.
My aunt, his sister, told me what had happened to them as children. On 30 May 1948, when my father was three years old, his own father developed complications after appendicitis and died of a blood infection. He died intestate; his money was put into a trust inaccessible to their mother. She was a female doctor, unusual in Britain in the 1940s. She moved to a smaller house and, to care for the children, she went into general practice.
On 7 January 1955 she went missing. Her car was found the next day, by the entrance to a field near Ruthin, a small town in North Wales, nearly a hundred miles from their home in Liverpool. The police began a search that evening, and the next morning she was found near Graig Farm, Treuddyn, two and a half miles away from her car, on the lower slopes of a mountainside. There had been blizzards that day. They found her body under some bushes, deep in the snow.
The autopsy said she had taken about ninety grains of barbiturates—Seconal and Phenobarbitone—mixed with gin, which she’d have known would accelerate the effect of the drugs. She was forty-six years old. Bill, my dad’s older brother, was thirteen; Mary, their sister, was nine years old. My father was ten.
When my father was told, he crawled under the bedclothes; he refused to be comforted.
In his mother’s handbag was an envelope, addressed to ‘Miss E. Griffiths’—Eurwen Griffiths, a friend who had worked in her husband’s dental surgery. Inside the envelope was her note.
Dear Eurwen
Here is a list of friends who will take an interest in the children.
Thanks for everything you have ever done for me.
All my love
Mary.
P.S. I love the children and Mother but everything has been too much for me, my brain has gone completely. Look for me in Treuddyn by the place where we were so happy
On the envelope she had scrawled in her doctor’s handwriting the names of the drugs she had taken—‘Phenobarbitone, Angels’—and two final notes. The first was to her mother (‘Mother I love you’). The last note was her final wish for the children. ‘Children I love you, forgive me, be good.’
And my father had tried.
After his mother’s death, my father’s life became a series of catastrophic disappointments. No one wanted the children. The family was divided; my father went to live with his grandmother, who then died. He went to live with an old friend of his mother’s; she, too, died. Life seemed untouched by blessing or solace. He was inconsolable and he became, in his own way, unreachable.
I was approaching the age my father was when his mother committed suicide, when the sudden distance opened up between us.
How is it transmitted to us, our father’s sorrow? Maybe my father’s heartbreak was deep enough to be physical; maybe he planted some of his sadness in my mother’s womb like a seed. Or perhaps he himself passed it on to me; inflicted it on me in turn, in a lesser form, because he couldn’t help it. Because he loved me.
Shortly after my father left Medina for California, I wrote him a letter. So it wouldn’t get lost in the Medina internal post, my mum helped me take it to the post box in Herringswell Green. ‘Dear John,’ I wrote. ‘I am missing you a lot. I love you very much and I want you to come back.’ My mother must have leaned in at this point to help me; I recognize the handwriting in the middle paragraph as hers. ‘I sleep on a bunk bed, on the top bunk. Alok is sleeping on the bottom bed. He is German. The school is nice—my teachers are Alla, Vasanti. The other class’s teachers are Sharna and Alla sometimes. And the babies class’s is Chloe, and sometimes Vasanti.’
I leaned in and grabbed the pen back in a fit of artistic excitement. The words go wonky again. ‘Here is a dot-to-dot and a drawing of a seal to colour!’ I wrote. ‘And a kiss-to-kiss drawing on the other side.’ The dot-to-dot drawing, positioned next to the drawing of a seal, is quite clearly another seal. Underneath I have written, ‘What is it?’ On the other side is a boy made from ‘X’ kisses: ‘I have done the mouth for you.’ Although by then I was called Yogesh, the letter is signed ‘From Tim’—the name my father chose for me.
My father didn’t want to return to Medina. For my birthday the next summer he sent me a Pan Am ticket, and I flew out to visit him in Palo Alto. From then on each summer, for my birthday in July, my father sent me a plane ticket to see him in California.
I still have a copy of my old passport from the time. When my mother gave it to me recently, I cried. The photo of me—young, smiling uncertainly into the camera—would have been taken at Oak Village, the day before my mother lied to the passport authorities and was found out. Every page is stamped with our destinations: Bombay, Germany, California.
In the summer of 1983, when the commune stereos were still playing Joan Armatrading’s ‘All the Way from America’, I visited my father in California again. It became a yearly tradition. That visit was the same as the next, and the next. Each year John lived in a different apartment, but that was all that changed. In the end, all my visits blurred into one.
California was another world. Blue denim. Go-karts. Crazy golf. Redwood forests, breakfast cereal, Saturday morning TV. My father drove to shopping malls and we played games in the cold conditioned air of the arcades. ‘Wizard needs food, badly,’ the cabinets told us. ‘Warrior is about to die.’ His favourite game was an old one, Time Pilot, where you flew an old biplane, spun it around the screen, shot down other biplanes amongst the clouds. Then you travelled forward in time, to become a jet fighter, then a spaceship, the enemy planes always just keeping pace. My favourite was Star Wars, where you clambered inside the cabinet and paid your quarter, then flew down into the death-star shooting fireballs, ‘Red Five standing by’, blowing up the Dark Side again and again, the whole world made real by lines of white and red light pressed up against the back of the glass. In those air-conditioned malls my father and I became our stack of quarters; we lived as long as we could.
When we got into the car—his silver Mercury Lynx, with an entirely maroon interior—I would burn the pale underside of my arms on the metal of the car seatbelt. Back at his house, he would inspect my fingers, tut, and get out his nail clippers. In Medina there was no one who did this. Looking back, it seems that to my father, making sure my nails were cut was one of the most important things of all.
It seems like such a long way away now. We played crazy golf. We hooked the balls through windmills, over mini-ramps, into holes, and on the bonus nineteenth hole we tried to knock the ball into the centre of the target so we could win a free game. It looked easy but neither of us ever got it in. Maybe we weren’t trying very hard. On Friday nights I watched Weird Science, the TV series, in which one boy had the power to shoot beams of electricity from his fingertips. That was the dream! I spent the ad-breaks with my sketchpad, trying to figure out how to attach a battery to my arm and metal plates to my fingertips. I would have the power to zap people from a great distance. I knew Majid would be impressed.
On my birthday my father took me to Toys “R” Us and, with me running ahead, he pushed a huge trolley down the long aisles. We’d pick out new toys for me together. The toys I pi
cked out exactly matched the figures on the Saturday morning cartoons: the Transformers; Optimus Prime (an all-American truck); and my favourite, Soundwave—a boom-box that twisted and unfolded into a robot with a shoulder-cannon, with a tape you could eject and transform into a prowling black panther. One year, my father gave me $100 to spend, and after that, there was no going back. I persuaded him to let me buy a model rocket kit. Every weekend we would go out into the local redwood park, set up the launch pad, walk back twenty paces, push a button, and watch mini-rockets fizz and streak into the sky. Near the end of the visit he took me to Marine World Africa USA to watch killer whales leap into the air and come down with a huge splash that just reached us even though we sat high in the bleachers because of my father’s camera. I got tanned, grew plump, had my hair cut short, played my hand-held Pinball video game, and then the two weeks were up. It was time to fly home.
In 1983, at the end of our time together—a long weekend in late July—my father drove us down to Anaheim, near Los Angeles, and booked us into a Motel 6. We had a room on the upper floor. I couldn’t believe there was a swimming pool just outside in the courtyard that we could use whenever we wanted. The next morning my father took me to Disneyland.
One year John and my mum chipped in together to buy me an extra-special birthday present. When I came home from my visit to California I had, carefully packed in a huge oblong cardboard box, half as big as me, a four-legged walking robot—an AT-AT, the biggest Star Wars toy you could get. I unpacked the toy, put in the batteries, and walked it up and down the dormitories, pressing the button which made the laser cannons under its mouth move back and forward and flash orange.
Even though I brought back a bag of Hershey bars and watermelon Hubba Bubba for everyone, not all the kids were happy about my new toy. The next morning when I woke up, someone had smeared something sticky—it looked like marmalade—all over the head, under the neck, in the cockpit, even in the joints of the legs. They’d taken a lighter and melted off the guns, blackened the grey plastic armour plating. The legs had been bent out of shape so it could no longer stand. I pushed it under my bed and a week later it was gone.
10
The 1980s came late to the communes. Moon-boots; legwarmers and roller skates. The Pointer Sisters, with their X-ray vision. Breakdancing. When I came back from California that year, I knew ‘The Centipede’. After a bit of practice on the grass in front of the Kids’ Hut, I could do it both ways. Champak knew ‘The Windmill’. We used to breakdance on a scrap of old kitchen lino, outside the gang-hut down past the garages. Some of the kids formed a band: Will and Gulab on electric guitar—Gulab looking particularly cool in aviator shades, his mala tucked into his T-shirt—and Purva and Deepa singing into microphones. The band was rubbish, but who cared? The girls looked good in their leotards, with glitter on their cheeks.
One morning in the younger kids’ schoolroom we were asked to write a list of the people we would most like to be our parents, so that when our mothers weren’t around they could be asked to help out. Without hesitation I put Devadasi at the top of my list. She was a tall blonde crazy woman, queen of all the commune’s whirlers. I knew every now and then I could find her on the front lawn, leading groups of people swaying ridiculously slowly through their t’ai chi lesson. (Although, some of the older kids maintained, those t’ai chi masters could speed up if they wanted to and kick your ass.) Apart from Devadasi, I had no idea who to put down.
As my mother was around less and less, I began to look for other adults to care for me. I discovered that with an unhappy face and a shabby T-shirt I could talk my way into a stay in the sick bay. In there the beds were lined up side by side just like in the kids’ dormitory; but few people came to visit and you could read Undersea Adventure in peace. For a time conjunctivitis came to Medina. Poonam explained at an evening meeting how contagious it was, how because of the radical new way we were living we had to be particularly careful about such diseases. A section off the first-floor landing of the Main House was turned into a quarantine area. There was a little porthole window in the door you could wave through, where disease-crossed lovers would stand and stare through the glass into each other’s infected eyes. I used to hang around the door trying to persuade them to let me in. I’d push away anyone who was standing outside, rub the door-handle, then rub all round my eyes. I never caught a thing.
As time went by, we kids settled on each other as the source of the comfort we needed. In the dormitories at night we borrowed each other’s blankets; there was a lively trade in stolen soft toys. The older girls tucked the younger kids into bed. Some of the older boys started to get girlfriends, and beds were swapped in the middle of the night.
Something was happening, and I felt I was being left behind. I was seven years old; I thought maybe I should get myself a girlfriend, too. But Purva hadn’t responded to my E.T. gifts, and I wasn’t sure who else to try. I overheard two girls talking about me in front of the Kids’ Hut—‘What he needs is a girlfriend.’ ‘Yeah, you’re right’—but they shut up and giggled when I walked past. What I wanted more than anything was for one of these girls to take care of me, to take off their sweater and bra and hug me close.
Even when my mother was away, I still visited her room. Usually I went to borrow her Walkman. I liked listening to her Dire Straits tape. I listened to it behind the sofa—‘Water of Love, deep in the ground; but there ain’t no water here to be found . . .’—and I hoped that some day the water of love would come to me. I was ashamed of the colossal need I felt when I listened to those songs. I listened until the batteries ran low and the voices went super-slow (One daaaayyyy baaaaaybbeeeee-eee . . .). Then I ran back up to my mum’s room to put the Walkman back under her stuff so it looked like I had never borrowed it at all.
Our love was the love of children for children; it was an irregular, unpredictable, rocky kind of care. The older girls were our main source of comfort. I was always trying to come up with ways to make them pay attention to me. There was the day we were all riding in Chinmaya’s tractor-trailer. I slipped and fell off, and the trailer bounced over my leg. Three girls stroked my hair until someone came to carry me to the Kids’ Hut. It didn’t hurt at all, but I wasn’t about to tell them that. Also, there was the time I nearly drowned.
It had been raining for days. All you could do was sit in the drawing room and read, listen to Andrew from accounts play classical music on the big white piano, and watch the rain slide down the windows. But that day the clouds broke. To cheer ourselves up, we decided to walk to the weir.
When we got to the river, the water was higher and faster than any of us had ever seen. There was a mist where the weir was. If you listened, you could hear a steady roar coming from that direction. We walked up the bank of the river. Rupda bounced her inflatable boat against the ground as we walked, waving it in front of one or two kids before snatching it away again. When we got to the weir and looked down, no one said a word. The water was running high above the concrete platforms at the foot of the iron ladders. The thin glass sheet of water had become a torrent. At the bottom of the weir the water rolled round in a clear, steady tube before crashing into rapids and eddies that didn’t smooth out for hundreds of metres down the river.
Behind me, Rupda swung the boat out like a bat and bashed Gulab over the back of his head. Gulab grabbed it out of her hands and began to swing it back. Harley yelled and clapped, so Gulab threw it high over Rupda’s head towards him. We all spread out into a rough circle for the game. As it spun above her head Rupda grabbed at the boat, but she missed. Harley grabbed it, and threw it back up towards Gulab. The boat caught the wind. Gulab ran back as far as he could to the concrete lip that hung out over the weir; he made a grab for the boat but another gust caught it and it fell down out of sight.
‘Gu-lab,’ someone said.
He threw his hands up: ‘It was Harley.’
‘Fat bastard Gulab,’ someone muttered. We all crowded along the edge to look down into the weir
. At the base of the slope the boat tossed in the tumult of water. Every time the boat sprang out, looking like it might be set free, the churning water pulled it back under and it popped up at the bottom of the weir.
‘Oh well,’ Rupda said. Some of the other kids turned away—it was her boat—and headed back down the path towards the bridge. I looked back down at the water. The boat was still tumbling in the spray. I watched it roll, and imagined it drifting downstream days later to get stuck in the weeds, deflate, and sink. It seemed to me the worst thing that could ever happen.
‘I’ll get it,’ I said.
Before anyone could say anything I had taken off my shoes. I walked over to the edge of the concrete and looked down. Although the platforms at the bottom of the ladder were underwater, the flow there looked sluggish. I thought I could easily stand. I put my socks inside my shoes, placed them by the edge, and climbed down the ladder backwards, one rung at a time. The rungs felt cold in my hands, but that was nothing: when my feet pushed into the water above the platform it was like plunging into iron. I could feel the moss curling in a slimy carpet under my feet. My plan was to inch along the concrete platform, then step slowly down the slope of the weir, gripping the wall with my fingers to stop myself from falling. From there, leaning against the wall, I could pull out the boat. I took a step along the wall. And another. I could still feel the moss under my feet. I wondered, how quickly could the moss have grown here where it’s usually dry?
