Faded Dreams (32 page)

   As the train left London Euston and trundled north Bill tried to make sense of his chaotic childhood, the inconsistency and unpredictability of a father who made a boy feel cherished one minute but deeply despised the next, who referred to him as that little soft-arsed bugger or that smart-arse, as if he could hardly bear the sight of him, who sneered when his mother jumped to his defence; yet paradoxically, a father who  boasted of his son’s academic achievements to complete strangers.

   Some of the unfairness heaped upon Bill as a boy had been hard to bear but  in spite of everything  he had always loved as well as feared his father. He’d even yearned to be like him, the handsome witty man who could turn his hand to any job around the house - cook, plumber, electrician, joiner – all this aside from his musical talents and the ability to turn the simplest situation into something hilarious.

   But what Bill admired most was his boldness, his self-assurance. His dad had more than his share of that, or at least that was how it had seemed to a growing boy. With none of these qualities how could he ever hope to be the son his father wanted him to be? 

   Another thing that had long puzzled him was why his father’s contempt for him had invariably followed an argument when his parents called each other all the names under the sun? Was he to blame? If so, what had a mere child like him done to generate such rage?

  What had sustained his parents’ explosive yet indestructible marriage?  Loyalty, or  necessity; obviously it would have been impossible back in the 1940s for  his penniless mother with three children to leave home?

   Home… his thoughts dwelled on that comforting word and what it meant to him. Home…where nothing stayed the same for two days  together. Home...where  from hour to hour animosity and misery could change to love and laughter...and back again.

   It seemed to Bill that his family was bound by an invisible thread that tightened whenever it was in danger of falling apart. He rested his head on the window of the carriage and fell asleep to the comforting rhythm of the train, dah-da-da-dah…dah-da-da-dah…dah-da-da-dah…dah…

*

   The train was pulling into Crewe before Bill opened his eyes to continue his reflections. But now it was happier memories that were flooding back. The times Joe had nursed him through childhood ailments, dosing his bronchitis at regular intervals with Raspberry Vinegar and Olive Oil.  Funny how his dad had been a better nurse than his mum.

   He’d take a shovel-full of burning coal off the kitchen fire, run upstairs with it and throw it into the bedroom grate to produce an instant fire, fill the stone water bottle with boiling water to warm his bed, sit with  him through the night slapping vinegar-cloths on his throbbing forehead or sponge away his fever with a non-too-clean dishcloth.  Yes, his dad had definitely a caring side to him.

   Bill closed his eyes and pictured his dad sitting cross-legged on the kitchen floor with his cobbler’s last
between his knees painstakingly mending their second-hand shoes  so they didn’t let in the rain,  nailing leather squares on to the soles and then trimming off the excess  neatly with his knife. Bill took a deep breath, the same rich warm whiff of new leather that you got when you walked into a shoe shop came back to him like it was yesterday.

   He remembered  Ellie grumbled when her dad nailed extra lumps of leather on the outer edges of her shoes to force her feet inwards and wear the soles evenly.  

   ‘They’re horrible…I’m not wearing them to school…they’re uncomfy,’ she’d cry.

   ‘If ya weren’t so bloody cow-legged I wouldn’t need to put them extra pieces on,’ her dad would laugh, ‘it’s your own fault for having two left legs.’

   Her mother secretly prised the lumps free with a chisel and the following morning  she skipped happily off to school. Bill couldn’t have been more than three or four at the time yet had no difficulty in bringing it to mind. 

   He was a few years older than that when his dad and him were stranded in Derby after his lorry broke down. What an adventure that had turned out to be, and how close he had felt to his dad as they made their way home.

   Now that he’d started looking back there were plenty of happy memories. He embraced them warmly, settling contentedly in his corner seat until eventually the train pulled into the town that he hadn’t been able to get out of fast enough.

   He darted between the traffic on Blackburn Boulevard and on his way to the bus stop on Northgate walked passed  all the comfortingly familiar places - Woolworth’s, The Royal Cinema, King George’s Hall.......

   Folk with their broad Lancashire accents and hearty laughter were all around him, genuine hard-working folk,
his
folk. No matter what lay ahead, it felt good to be home with his family.

*

   Joe pulled himself up in bed with some difficulty and peered hard at his son
. ‘By God, if it isn’t our Billy!’

  
By Christ,
he’d made a strapping young fella, grown like a lamppost since last time he’d seen him, a far cry from that wiry nervous kid that had gone to London.

   ‘Look at the length of him
now
Florrie, a right “long-shanks” isn’t he? What age will ya
be
now lad…  twenty, twenty-two?’

   'Nearly twenty-three, dad.'  Bill sat on the bed and clasped his father’s thin bony hand.

   ‘Now then
Doctor
Billy, what d’ya think of your poor ol’ dad, lying here like this?’ There was a touch of the familiar bravado in his voice. ‘Are you and your fancy learning gonna make me all right again…gonna get me out of this flaming bed and back on me feet?’

   ‘Come on dad, give us a chance, will ya? It’ll be donkeys years afore I’m a proper doctor so I hope you’re not goin’ up and down swanking about me.’ Back on home ground Bill’s accent returned as easily as if it had never been away.

   His mother gulped loudly and bit her lip. Joe’s eyes followed her as she moved towards the door. She didn’t deserve all the heartache he’d caused. And not only her but young Billy as well. The lad had been her pride and joy but Billy and him had never seen eye-to-eye…always been at loggerheads… just like him and his
own
dada a long, long time ago.

   His thoughts drifted back forty years or more, to a lad of thirteen-going-on-fourteen picking fights with a father who had just marched home from The Great War…as if the poor old bugger hadn’t had enough of fighting.

   A peculiar feeling came over him... the present faded away, Billy was gone and quite unexpectedly his dada was there. That long-forgotten strong deep voice was retelling from faraway to begin with and then as clear as a bell, how he’d lost his beloved pipe in the quagmire that was France. The image faded and the past once again became the present.

   He fixed his gaze on the ceiling. Funny how all that should come back to him after all these years, all that about his old fella’s pipe.  Funnier still was how his opinion of his dada had changed. As a lad he’d feared him, his dark moods and harsh discipline. But at this very moment he felt something warmer for his dada, something more like love. It was a bugger if he’d had to wait till
now
, till he was here at death’s door, for his feelings to change.

   ‘Billy, we’ll never know half of what your Granddad went through  in The Great War, but I'll tell you a tale about him.’ 

   Even as sleep and drugs fought to overcome him he found himself relating the story of his father losing his pipe on the battlefield and his joy at finding the broken one belonging to an unknown soldier. Bill nodded from time to time, his grandfather’s personal story bringing a lump to his throat.

   ‘Aye, just open that drawer an’ rummage about in it a bit…I think me dada’s pipe is still in there somewhere. Take it with ya and treasure it like I’ve always done, Billy.'

   Within seconds he was asleep. Bill searched through the jumble of buttons, letters and other clutter in the drawer then sat in the armchair idly flicking though a pile of family photos; a group photo of the four of them  as they walked along the Prom at Blackpool; several of him and his sisters in the back-yard with a variety of animals photographed with the old Brownie camera; a cracked and faded wedding photo of  his mum and dad. And then, amongst them all...a photograph of a soldier.

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

   Bill caught his breath. He recognised the soldier's smile as his own - head tilted to one side just as his own did when he smiled, eyes crinkled till they were rendered almost invisible, just like his. This stranger was a mirror image of himself. He turned the picture over and read, 'To Joe, all the best, Frank.' and suddenly it all made sense. The man in the bed was not his father. He replaced the photos and quietly closed the drawer.

   The smiling soldier in the picture was part of him, he had never been more sure of anything. He gazed at the dying man and now knew this was the  reason why he had been loved and hated for twenty years. He simply didn't belong to Joe, or maybe Joe couldn't be certain, which would have added to his agony. The question now was, who else suspected this? His mother? Surely. His sisters? Never.

   Joe
, he whispered the name to himself. But this was no time for him to start rejecting the man who had been his
father
for 20 years. He could never be just
Joe
to him. Although he had given him a rough ride at times   Bill felt no bitterness at finally knowing what lay behind it all.

   His father had done his best in the circumstances to keep his family together and been generous enough to make room for what might have been another man's child. Yes, they had all suffered from his outbursts and Betty had possibly borne the brunt even more than himself but in the main, he had been a good father.

   It occurred to Bill that he knew nothing about the stranger in uniform yet he knew everything about this dying man - or at least everything that mattered. An hour had passed before Joe stirred and saw Bill holding the tobacco tin and fingering the broken pipe. He smiled sadly.

   ‘You were called after your Granddad Pomfret... he were a
William
as well, but you never got a chance to know him, did ya? Now, don't forget, look after his tobacco tin, it belonged to a brave man.’

   ‘I
will
treasure it Dad, I
will
.

   ‘Billy, ya don’t need to hide anything from me, lad,' he clutched Bill's hands. 'Don’t think I don’t know what’s what… I’ve known for a long time how bad things are, but I haven’t  let on to your mam, or the lasses… it wouldn’t do 'em any good, would it?’

   ‘Don’t talk dad, save your energy.’

   ‘I have to talk while I can  Billy, an’ apologise for all I’ve done wrong . Just wait while I get me breath back a bit, will ya?’

   For the most part Bill had come to terms with and buried, some of the injustices heaped upon him as a child. Now they were about to be resurrected and it was up to him to keep the secret.

   ‘Billy, I were a bit hard on ya when you were a lad…knocked ya about a bit… I thought I had good reason…knock some sense in you y’know…thought it were a father’s duty but I were an empty-headed bugger  just like I’ve always been. You never give us an ha’peth of trouble an’ I never appreciated
that
… some dads are like that. Me own old fella could be an awkward bugger at times an’ I never could fathom out why, till I got a lot older.’

   ‘So y’see lad, there’s none of us knows what goes on in somebody else’s  mind or what they’ve had to put up with in life.’ He shifted uncomfortably, ‘I keep slurring down this bed Billy…pull us up a bit, will ya, cock?’ 

Summoning all his strength he clutched his son’s shoulders and pulled him towards him.

Effortlessly and tenderly Bill lifted the frail, gaunt figure and lowered him into the nest of soft white pillows where he almost disappeared.

   ‘Billy I’ve never told you this afore but it’s about time I did. I’m proud of ya, lad...I should’ve said
it a lot sooner… I think the world of you Billy even if I’ve hardly ever shown it,’ his voice crackled with emotion, ‘Christ knows I love you more’n… more’n any father ever loved a son. If only I'd  me time to do over again I’d be a proper dad.’

   All his life Bill had struggled to reach some level of understanding with his father, some kind of truce, yet nothing had prepared him for this. The hurt that had dogged their relationship was now irrelevant. For the first time he felt no need to prove his worth. When all was said and done his dad
loved
him as a son. His heart was pounding as if fit to burst when one of his own precious memories sprang to mind.

    ‘Funny how you should remember about Granddad Pomfret’s broken pipe after all these years, dad. Coming up on the train I were thinking about when I were a lad years ago, the time me and you went to Derby when your lorry conked out. It took us two days to get back to Blackburn and Mum and the lasses were worried stiff. But I always looked up to you, dad… always knew I’d be all right as long as I were with you… I knew that you’d know what to do to get us home safe and sound. Do you remember that, dad?’