Today is a special day. I am two years
old, at last old enough to visit my aged grandfather, who has stopped being a
tyrant and become a senile old man confined to his bed most of the time.
The time has come to be reconciled. I am the white flag of truce, I suppose,
dressed in my prettiest frock, with my wavy, fair hair combed back prettily and
tied with a bow. I am aware of the solemnity of the
occasion, and when I am led into the old man’s bedroom, I realise that I am in
the presence of death.
Mama makes an effort to reach out to
her father, remembering their close bond of long ago, though now he looks more
like Father Christmas in the pictures on Christmas cards, if you think away the
beard. But he does not remember and she does not seem to be unduly moved by the
realization that his life is drawing quietly to a close. That is probably
the first time I realise that Mama is virtually incapable of showing emotions
apart from rage and jealousy. Whatever happened to her soul?
I look around me. There are no guardian
angels hovering above this bed, and no ministering spirits surrounding it. The
grey in grey figure of my grandmother stands motionless and strangely
dispassionate to one side, scrupulously ignoring me. She has spent most of her
life serving the dying man and the rest of her family. It is not entirely her
fault that Mama is the way she is, but it is unforgivable that my grandmother,
a bright and intelligent woman, has stood by and watched Mama’s misery. Mama is
thinking of the beatings and rapes she has suffered. She makes no further
attempt to get near enough for a second time to touch her father. Instead she stands
with clenched fists and pursed lips, waiting for the visit to end, dawdling so
as to appear not to leave hastily, though she would have liked to. It has
become a waiting game rather than a sick visit. Even at two and a bit, I am
aware that I must not be a disturbance.
There is no music in this room. There
is just this old man with startling blue eyes and a full head of hair as white
as the sheet covering him, and a pack of relatives waiting for their share of
the booty.
After a little while he becomes aware
of our presence and gestures to be helped into a better sitting position. His
eyes are the same cool blue as Mama’s, and when he talks he shows pearly-white
teeth, a full set except for a gap at the front.
He says something to me, but I cannot understand
him, because his words are jumbled up like a foreign language. Now everyone is
laughing, but I do not know what they are laughing at. Is it because I have
asked for a drink of the smooth golden liquid in the tall bottle under his
bedside table?
I am aware of my childishness and his
senility, but I am not aware of any kinship or kindred spirit. The intimacy
of the situation only serves to emphasize the lack of nearness. Like so many
others, these kinsmen are still together because that is what life has ordained.
Feelings no longer count. Maybe they have never counted.
My grey grandmother hovers in the
background and to pass the time Mama tries to make conversation, but I don’t
listen to them and their jumbled-up words about this and that. I just stare
back at this old man, propped up against the starched white pillows and
scrutinising me as if I had landed from another planet.
After a time I am led from the room. I
never see him again, but his eyes are reflected in every blue sky I shall ever
see. They are my mother’s eyes too, my grandfather’s eyes. They are eyes as
cool and empty as the universe is empty of warmth when the sun is not shining.
Not long after that visit, my
grandfather finally steals out of this life into the next in his sleep. The
feud is over. Mama lays the corpse out the way she is to lay out the earthly
remains of all her other close relatives. She is dispassionate when it comes to
the practical details of passing over. That is a quality farmers have in
abundance, and Mama is, after all, her father’s daughter.
I am now taken to the
farm regularly. Sometimes I sit under the shiny black grand piano in the front
room of the new farmhouse, which was a symbol of their affluence at the time
and isn’t really new because Mama grew up there. Sometimes I am taken to the
shabby old farmhouse, which has been standing there for more than two hundred
years and still has the original beams and flagstones.
It is now occupied by a farm hand and
his family. They have a lot of dirty children and the house smells funny. But
the lady is friendly and I am allowed to sit next to the fire and make toast on
a long fork. I like being there.
My real world is, despite or perhaps because
of contact with the earthiness of farm life, a fantasy world populated by
winged fairies and crinolined princesses, not least because I am not allowed play
with children who have not been vetted by Mama. As a result, it is quite an
adventure to be amongst this kind of family, where everyone shouts all the time
and uses words I do not understand, let alone dare to repeat. I’m not sure why
these people have not been vetted as unsuitable. I think it has something to do
with keeping the peace between Mama and her family. At the tender age of
three I am already able to discern what is good for me. I am really quite an
arrogant little girl with a finely tuned instinct for ‘us’ and ‘them’. ‘We’
have comfortable lives to go back to. ‘They’ are stuck in their bog of poverty
and dependency. We can get out. They can’t.
On the way home to our bungalow with
the ranch-type wooden railing around the raised patio that goes all round the
house, Mama tells me stories about living in the old farmhouse before the new
one was finished and of how, when she was very little, she used to save her
sugar for her father’s tea. She tells me all about the horse and cart that took
her and her father up the hill to the next village, where she would sit outside
on the step while he had a few beers with his cronies. The faithful old nag
would find its own way home after closing time, and Mama can still sing all the
songs her father sang to her. He must have been a much pleasanter character in
a drunken state than sober. Mama tells me how he used to clean his teeth with
soot out of the fireplace, and how he lost his two front ones while breaking in
a particularly bad-tempered horse.
I try to imagine what it must be like
to have a father who lets horses knock his teeth out and drinks so much beer
that he sings all the way home perched on a horse and cart. Despite his
failings, he was the hero of her childhood recollections right to the end. In
retrospect it must have been these scanty happy memories she cherished of those
happy days that survived the nightmare ones of later years.
My grandmother ruled the family with an
iron hand, and must once have made a conscious choice between a husband who was
prone to binges and a bankrupt family and uncertain freedom, choosing to go
where she had power, rather than risk the coldness of a disapproving outside
world in an era when women were as often as not fated to be merely chattels.
But my memories of her
are scant and blurred. I don’t think Mama can have wanted her to influence me. So
Nain, as grandmothers are called in Welsh, is but a grey shadow in comparison
to my ‘heroic’ grandfather or Taid. I know nothing about Nain that Mama hasn’t
told me: that she was apparently unable to function out of shouting distance of
her home, that consequently she never once slept a night away from her own
bedroom, and even when she once wanted to attend the doctorate ceremony of her
cleverest son she became homesick on the journey there and had to turn back.
Mama never admitted that Nain’s origins were in Portsmouth, almost as far south
in England as it is possible to get. Her maiden name had been Norman, which is
certainly not Welsh.
Despite not being given the chance of higher education, a privilege usually reserved for a son in those days, I cannot recall Mama ever resenting the fate meted out to her by her mother, who was in her eyes, inexplicably, a paragon of rectitude and virtue. I suppose most wounds can be healed with hindsight.
Mama had been devastated that the
person she respected most of all turned against her simply because she found
happiness in a marriage to somebody her mother disapproved of, so I did Mama a
favour by being born, because that paved the way for reconciliation.
But it didn’t take long for her to
forget that.
Before I have time to grow up enough to
understand what is going on around me, both grandfather and grandmother lie
buried side by side in the old churchyard and the new farmhouse has been sold
to a local doctor. The farm property is divided up between the sons and Mama is
to spend the rest of her life raging about the injustice that has been done to
her, in particular by her eldest brother, her mother’s declared favourite, who
has apparently seen to it that she received almost nothing of the inheritance
she believes to be her birth right. Always assuming that Mama is not making
it all up, of course.
No comments:
Post a Comment