That'll Be the Day

by Ray Connolly

  RAY CONNOLLY

  That’ll Be the

  Day

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 1

  I’ve never been sure how much I really remember about my father. I know that he was a tall, dark man who came home one Friday night at the end of the war wearing a khaki army suit and carrying a kit bag. And I know that I stayed up to meet him, and was afraid of this strange man who my mother insisted was my father. But I’m not sure of very much else about him. Memories of childhood become so confused. When I try to picture his face I see the wedding photograph of him and my mother which has always stood on the mantelpiece in the living-room at home. His voice I’ve forgotten completely. Sometimes when I try I think I can hear how he talked to me, but then his tone becomes confused with the way my mother talks and I wonder if I’m not just remembering her stories about him. That’s the most bewildering thing about earliest memories: am I really remembering things as they were, or do I now see them the way they’ve been re-fashioned for me by the light in which my mother or grandfather saw them?

  Time scales become confused, too: how long did he live with us, I wonder, and why do I have so few clear recollections? Was it so short a time? And then again why is it that in all my memories of him I see myself as a little boy, either sitting on his knee or walking at his side, as though my mind’s eye were projecting a little home movie with me as both cameraman and star?

  Sometimes, when I was older, I would ask my mother about him, and about what had happened between them, but whenever I did she would usually have other things to do at that particular moment and my questions would go half answered … leaving an opaque mystery around the dark man whose picture stayed on the mantelpiece.

  He came home in winter. I think it must have been 1945, because the war hadn’t been long over, and I remember grandad and my mother fastening all kinds of red, white and blue bunting and Union Jacks to the wooden clothes horse that hung from the ceiling. I was dozing in my pyjamas and dressing gown, not yet six years old, and bog-eyed at being up so late, and was sitting huddled in an armchair by the coal fire, half hiding under a blanket. In faintly abstract voices I remember grandad and my mother discussing the homecoming, but I didn’t understand what they meant. A man was coming who they told me was my daddy, but I didn’t know him. He’d been demobbed, they said. And they had tidied and polished the house and shop, and dressed the place with patriotic emblems, and written Welcome Home in white finger painting on the shop window.

  ‘Perhaps you should have gone down to the station to meet him after all.’ Grandad’s voice suddenly broke into my dreaming, and I pushed my head round a pillow slip that was hanging from the lowered clothes line. Grandad was at one end of it, holding the rope which winched it to and from the ceiling while my mother was fastening little flags among the sheets and shirts hanging there.

  ‘No, father.’ She sounded annoyed. ‘You know he wouldn’t like that. And nor would I.’

  When she had finished, she gave grandad the signal to hoist her decorations back to the ceiling, and we all watched as the little flags hung in an arc across the room. I was so excited at the decorations I giggled out loud.

  ‘D’you think your daddy will like our little welcome, dearie?’ My mother had noticed that I was awake, and came across to sit on the arm of the chair, cuddling me with one arm, and patting her hair with the other. She’d been to the hairdresser’s that day and her hair looked different, stiffer, and wavier, and it smelled rather peculiarly. ‘The way we’re going on you’d think he’d won the war single-handed.’

  She stroked my hair, and I remember I felt a slight prick as my head was pushed into the brooch on the front of her dress. Perhaps it was one he’d given her when they were first married.

  ‘Are you warm enough, love?’ My mother leant across to the fireplace and split open a piece of coal, so that it hissed and flared up. ‘Tired, are you? Well, he’ll be here any minute now … you want to see your daddy, don’t you? I know he can’t wait to see you. You’re the only one he ever asks about in his letters. He just goes on and on about what he and you are going to do when he gets back. It’ll be good to have him home … it’s been a long time.’

  She got up and opening the oven next to the fireplace examined the joint which was roasting. All day she’d been preparing, making everything perfect for my father … whoever he may be. ‘Just think if I’d gone to the station we might hardly have known each other. He never was one for a lot of fuss. Trust him to come at night so the neighbours wouldn’t see him.’

  In the background of my mind I can just hear grandad calling through from the shop. He must have gone out to see if my father was coming, while my mother was talking to me.

  ‘Mary, he’s here. I think it’s him … come and have a look.’

  I can still see the look of sudden panic on my mother’s face, as she turned towards the doorway into the shop. But then scooping me out from under my blanket she pulled me to my feet, and quickly adjusting her hair again in the mirror, she bustled me towards the door.

  ‘Come on Jimmy love, your daddy’s here. You run and meet him.’ And grabbing hold of a little flag on a stick she pushed it into my hand and shoved me out through the coldness of the shop towards the open door where grandad, neat and clean in his Sunday suit, was staring down the road.

  In the distance I could make out the shape of a soldier, half lit by the gas lamps in the road. He seemed to be staring at us, as though he were trying to make out our faces. I realise now that he probably felt as awkward as the rest of us. Five years is a long time to be away from home.

  ‘Go on now, run to your daddy,’ my mother was pushing me forwards towards the approaching man. I didn’t move, and rubbed my head into her side, hiding my face from the soldier.

  ‘Go on, don’t be silly,’ she pulled me away again.

  ‘You’re not shy are you? You can’t be shy of your daddy.’

  ‘You come too.’ My voice must have been a timid whisper, but my mother ignored my request, and turning my arm up so that my little flag stood erect she pushed me down the pavement.

  ‘Go on, Jimmy. Run and see what he’s brought for you.’

  And sadly and obediently I left her side and began to run the few steps down the pavement to the soldier, concentrating carefully upon his feet, and avoiding looking into his face. And then as I reached him suddenly I felt myself soaring, airborne, and being swung around in the air by this tall man, who kissed me and hugged me and said: ‘And here’s me thinking you’d still be a baby …’

  My next memory of my father is a hazy one, which is, I think, probably confused with other events which have happened to me since. I still see it like a dream, in which no-one speaks but everyone laughs, and where the wind and the sea seem to carry our excitement away on the gale. I don’t remember getting there, but we must have gone for a day out at the sea-side, because there we are in my memory, racing along the empty sands, me swinging in between my mother and father, safe and warm inside a knitted grey balaclava helmet. It was a terrible day and the beach was wet, and I remember noticing how large my father’s feet marks seemed alongside mine in the wet sand. It was a happy day. And in all my childhood I can hardly remember my mother being so excited or laughing so much. Under the pier I found a starfish, and my father picked it up and chased after my mother back along the beach, while she ran away pretending to be frightened. And I ran after
them, back up the beach, splashing through a puddle left by the receding tide, and back towards the row of ex-army amphibious craft which had been lined up and left obsolete along the edge of the sands. We had sandwiches that day, crouched in the shelter in between two enormous, rusting DUKWS, and my father told me how he’d been in them when he’d been in Italy.

  I remember all of that, but I also remember going from there to the Peter Pan Fairground and playing on the swings and the roundabouts, and being pushed by my father, although my mother has told me since that he never took me there. And it certainly can’t have happened that day because I was in my sunsuit on the roundabouts, and it rained when my father took us to the beach. Yet somehow in the back of my mind my father was always connected with that day at the children’s fairground, although I know now that he never took me there. It’s so strange how the mind confuses and interlaces unconnected events, and makes a sense and pattern out of mistaken recollections and confused reminiscences.

  I remember more precisely images of him serving in the shop. It had been my grandfather’s shop, but my mother had always run it since she was a young girl, and, when she married, my father moved in with her. As we never ever saw my grandparents on his side, and from the few bitter comments my mother made about them in front of me, I was always given to understand that my father had done rather well for himself marrying into a family that owned a shop – although it was only a little front-room sweets-and-tobacconists, with a side-line in fresh vegetables and milk. Really it was hardly a grocery store, but it provided the vague and varied needs for the small number of people who lived in our immediate vicinity.

  My father never liked the shop. My mother must have told me that a million times I’m sure, and nearly always when I was complaining about some chore or other that I had to do. It was too slow for him, she said. And he couldn’t stand all the gossiping and tittle-tattling that you get in small town corner shops. Perhaps he passed some of his distaste for the life of a shopkeeper on to me, because as I grew older it always bored me, too.

  One day I remember particularly well. I was on the step ladders at the back of the shop, watching my father serving, and guillotining a sliver of tobacco from one of those large pound bars they used to have in those days. It was one of the jobs he particularly seemed to resent (or so my mother told me later) because you had to be so careful not to give the customer so much as a fraction of an ounce over or you lost your profit, while at the same time the customer watched the scales like a hawk in case of short measure.

  ‘Settling down all right, are you, Mr Maclaine?’ From my position on the step ladders I could see our neighbour Mrs Rimmer packing her basket. ‘I don’t imagine you ever thought you’d have such a big boy waiting for you, did you?’ She smiled up at me, and then glanced back at the scales as the tobacco was weighed. Then her voice became soft and distant and I could hardly hear what she was saying as she leaned across the counter and began to tell my father how their Cissy’s boy had never come back after the war, although he’d sent a letter to say that he was on his way. I can still remember tiring of trying to listen to what she was saying, and beginning to think of other things: would my father let me have a glass of Tizer or Dandelion and Burdock before I went to bed? He was always more generous with me than my mother when it concerned taking things out of the shop, and I suppose in my way I must have been looking round wondering what I could get him to give me. The shops were pretty empty then, but I didn’t know: there always seemed to be masses of good things for me to be eating – spicy OXO cubes, sherbet poured into little bags by the ounce, and transmitted to my mouth by a wet, well sucked thumb. To me, at five, the shop was an arcade of savouries, where green Golden Syrup tins beckoned, and old fashioned pottery ginger beer bottles on the shelves behind the counter had a bootleg allure.

  ‘Altogether that’s two and tenpence halfpenny, Mrs Rimmer.’ My father’s voice had suddenly become loud again, cutting short the old lady’s murmurings.

  ‘I told them he might be suffering from shell shock …’ she said. And I thought about how my father had picked up a shell on the sea shore and put it to my ear and told me to listen to the sea in it. In the shop that day I considered what this thing ‘shell shock’ might be.

  ‘Good-bye, Mrs Rimmer.’ My father watched the old woman wander out of the shop, and picking me down off the steps sat me on the counter, taking a stick of raw licorice out of a jar: ‘They’ll drive me crackers, Jimmy boy … here, don’t let your mother see you with this.’ And sticking the little twig into my pocket he shooed me away out towards the garden.

  ‘There wasn’t much to do in those days,’ my mother was to tell me years afterwards. ‘Rationing made everything so difficult, but we did have a nice day out at the zoo. You liked the camels, Jim, and your father told you about how he used to ride them in North Africa.’

  I remember that. At night while we were listening to the wireless I would sit with him before I went to bed and have him show me his snapshots of the places he’d been to in the army. The picture of the camels was a great favourite, and one day as a special treat, we took the train and went to the zoo. Camels, said my father, showing me a tired moth-eaten beast in a tiny run, were dirty looking things that would eat anything, but which little boys in Africa rode as though they were donkeys at the seaside. Somehow they didn’t look right in an English zoo. Nor did the lizards, he said, when he saw them running across their glass case. They just didn’t look as though they belonged.

  On the way home in the train I sat on his knee, because the carriage was so crowded. We were by the window and my mother sat facing us, listening as he talked to me.

  ‘Your father went on and on all the time about the places he’d seen,’ she would tell me later. ‘He loved Egypt and going down the Nile, and he used to talk about it so much that I once told him that if he thought so much about those places he ought to have stayed there.’

  The way my mother would tell it it sounded as though he’d been everywhere in the world virtually. He was in North Africa, and Italy and Austria. He liked the Austrian lakes, she said. He always talked a lot about that.

  One day he came in with a big toy yacht for me, a present which must have cost him a small fortune at the time, and suggested that we went to the park so that he could show me how to use it. It was a windy day, I remember clearly, and across the park were some other boys and their fathers playing with kites made with brown paper and sealing wax. It was cold by the pond, and we had to huddle up to keep warm in the wind. But it was good for boating and the yacht drifted quickly backwards and forwards across the water as my father set and reset the rudder and the sail.

  Now and again he would talk to me, but I didn’t really feel much in the mood for listening, and largely ignored what he was saying. Some of it I can still remember, though: he told me how he’d been looking forward to seeing me – his little soldier. That part is very vivid because I was very flattered to be called a soldier. And then he said something about my having to take care of my mother and grandfather from now on. Suddenly he decided that it was time we were going, and taking hold of my hand hurried me home, carrying the yacht with his free hand.

  The last time I saw him he was standing in the shop in his mac, talking to my mother. I must have overheard their voices because I came through from having my tea in the living-room and went over to my mother so that I might hear. By my father’s feet was an old suitcase. He was rubbing his shoe against it as he talked.

  ‘You’ll be all right, Mary. You’ve got the shop and your dad and Jimmy,’ he looked at me and smiled, and I remember smiling back at him. Then stooping down he picked me up and hugged me. ‘Remember,’ he said, ‘you look after your mum for me, won’t you?’ And suddenly putting me down again he picked up his suitcase, opened the shop door and walked out into the dark. My mother didn’t move. She just stood there staring at where he’d been, but I think I half followed him as far as the door and looked out just in time to see him disappearing
down the road. And that was it. My father had gone out of my life by the time I was six.

  Chapter 2

  There were never any real explanations offered for why my father should choose to leave home. To me, as a little boy, he was someone who came one night, stayed for a while and then left. He spoiled me and I grew fond of him, but he never took on the role of a father. After he went, he might just as well have ceased to exist. I don’t think my mother was ever in contact with him again, and I’m certain that had he ever wanted to come home he wouldn’t have found any kind of welcome. Now and then while I was growing up I would catch the odd critical jibe about him from my grandfather, but my mother would never let anyone criticise him. I think in her way she may have been glad that he went. Perhaps she’d become accustomed to life without him during the war and found him a hindrance when he was demobbed. She was always a very self-reliant woman, always in control, and with grandad, the shop and me to bring up she was, I’m sure, perfectly contented.

  It would make it easier for me if I could complain that I had an unhappy, deprived or lonely childhood. But I can’t. For as long as I can remember we were always that bit better off than most of the other boys in my class, and at home I was never unhappy. Not when I was young anyway. I think in her way my mother spoiled me, too, perhaps to make up for my not having a father, and grandad, though he didn’t say much, was an agreeable old man to have around the house.

  But perhaps there was one pressure that I might justifiably complain about: from the very day I started at school it almost seemed that I had to show everyone how I was better than they were. My mother couldn’t stand failure. She was totally committed to the ethic of good honest labour, the rewards of which would come the day I reached university. That was always the goal she set for me: university was the only way my life could have gone, and right the way through grammar school it never occurred to me that there should be anything else in life.