Fathers and Sons (4 page)

On that chilly morning so long ago, it wasn’t the well that drew either boy to its dark mouth. The threat was all around them as they played in the friendly orchard in the sunshine. It was in the breeze whispering through the branches above their heads. A dry, cold wind flowing down from the Welsh hills on the horizon, summits still bleak in a winter that lingered around their old bald heads.

John had removed his coat as he ran around in the deceptive sunshine. Later, he began to shiver and complained of a
headache. He was put to bed and remained there the following day, suffering from a ‘chill’. By evening he was running a high temperature and starting to breathe strangely. The village doctor was called: the Madeley’s second son was diagnosed with pneumonia, and the parents were advised to prop the child up on pillows during the night to help drain fluid from John’s chest.

The next day, he died.

He was four years old.

Child mortality was common right up to the Second World War and the increasingly widespread availability of antibiotics and mass immunisation. But John’s illness was so abrupt, so casual in its easy, invisible arrival and swift, pitiless departure that my grandparents could scarcely comprehend what had happened. The shock stayed with them for the rest of their lives. Decades later, when my sister and I drove on visits to Shawbury with our parents, the last mile of the journey was always accompanied by the same solemn instructions.

‘Don’t talk with your mouths full. Comb your hair before coming down to breakfast. And
don’t
mention John.’

My grandparents could barely speak of him. There were no photographs of him to be seen anywhere in the house; no favourite toy placed carefully on a shelf or dresser. It was almost as if he had never been.

Only once did I catch a glimpse of him. My grandmother kept an ancient bound-wooden chest in the farm’s living
room. The old box was full of the bric-a-brac of half a century, the not-quite detritus of a family’s life.

I was fascinated by this trunk and one afternoon, when rain fell from the sky in pounding torrents, my grandmother gave me permission to rummage through it. I was about nine years old.

Once I had excavated the disappointing top layer of old women’s magazines, knitting patterns and yellowing bills for obscure farm machinery, things got interesting. The barrel and lock of a rusting .410 shotgun–no stock–and a mouldering gun-cleaning kit that smelled of crushed walnuts. Clanking mole traps, all springs and chains and sharp snapping jaws. My grandmother had once set them under her lawn to catch the little beasts so she could sell their velvet skins to passing tinkers.

A medium-sized cannonball with the faded label: ‘Moreton Corbett–Civil War’. And finally, right at the bottom, hidden by a faded embroidered cushion, a little glass jar with a brass top. It might have once contained perfume or face cream, but as I held it up to the rain-streamed window I could see it was filled with tiny balls of silver and gold paper; the kind of foil that used to line cigarette packets. There were dozens of them, and I poured a few out. What could they mean?

Suddenly a hand fell on my shoulder and I yelped with shock, scattering the little balls over the floor. My grandmother bent down and picked them up wordlessly, dropping them carefully back into the jar and gently screwing the lid back on. When she’d finished, she looked at me.

‘They were John’s,’ she said simply. ‘His money. He was too
little when he…well, he was too little to have real money, you see, so he made his own.’ She gestured. ‘The gold ones were pennies and the silver ones were shillings. When his father paid the men their wages, John used to pretend to do the same with these.’

The next day, helping my grandfather move sacks of grain in a store shed, I asked him with the directness of childhood: ‘What happened to John, Granddad?’

He stood quite still for a few moments and then slowly sat down on one of the dusty bags. He lit a cigarette, considered it, and then he began to tell me about that March day in the orchard, two brothers running between the trees, and Death beckoning one of them as they played. When he’d finished, he said he’d stack the rest of the bags by himself. I never asked about John again.

John’s death was, I believe, the psychological tipping point for my grandfather. Since he was ten years old he had done his best to deal with the worst fate and circumstances could do to him. He had been determined, tenacious and, on occasion, magnificently, heroically, non-judgemental. A tough self-reliance had seen him through tests and challenges that would have brought other men to their knees.

But this…this was too much. This wasn’t fair. Yet again, someone he loved had been snatched from him. Would this be the way of it to the end of his days? Loving and losing, loving and losing, over and over again? It could not be borne; there must be some way to protect oneself from endless passages of such savage pain.

Geoffrey had wondered what sort of a father he would
make. After John’s death, my grandfather quietly withdrew into an emotional fortress. The drawbridge was drawn up. Life would go on, but Geoffrey would not have his heart broken again. For the time being, he had placed it beyond reach.

J
ohn died when my father was still a baby. Just over a year earlier, on 2 May 1928, the village midwife delivered the Madeleys’ third son in the front room of a crooked half-timbered cottage next to Shawbury’s church. The village and countryside around it had barely changed from the day Geoffrey arrived there, twenty-one years before.

It was still a quiet rural backwater. A few more families owned cars but many did not. In Shawbury, the age of the horse had still not passed.

By no means all farms and cottages had electricity, and oil lamps and candles could still be seen glowing at windows after dark. Something of the nineteenth century lingered about the place.

But appearances were deceptive. Christopher Holt Madeley arrived in a world trembling on the brink of enormous change. The signs of imminent and dramatic acceleration into an almost
unimaginably altered state were there to see, if you looked for them.

In 1928, America issued its first television licences, and radio stations began transmitting pictures along with sound. Meanwhile ordinary US citizens had discovered the stock market and were making paper fortunes.

The month after my father was born, Amelia Earhart became the first woman to fly across the Atlantic. By September Alexander Fleming had stumbled upon penicillin. Mass entertainment was revolutionised with the arrival of talkies–even Mickey Mouse muscled in on the act with
Steamboat Willie
–and at a place called Berchtesgaden in the Bavarian mountains, Adolf Hitler was busy dictating the second volume of
Mein Kampf
to Rudolf Hess. Tectonic plates of social change were straining against each other. Something had to give.

It did. A few months later, Wall Street crashed.

By the time Christopher was four, the Great Depression had the world by the throat and Kiln Farm teetered on the brink of foreclosure. Money was so tight that all luxuries and fripperies–not that these had ever featured particularly prominently–were eliminated. But one small weekly treat for my father survived. Denied sweets or pocket money, he nevertheless received, every Sunday, a small chocolate-covered biscuit wrapped in silver paper. His mother bought it on Saturdays at the village shop and it stood in solitary splendour on the kitchen dresser until
after lunch the next day, when it was solemnly handed to the little boy.

My father loved these biscuits, but after a while felt that supply was simply not keeping up with demand. He decided that with a little sacrifice, foresight and patience, he could improve matters considerably. He had watched his mother picking fruits from her orchard, and sowing seeds in her vegetable garden. Why not plant a chocolate-biscuit tree?

That Sunday he heroically denied himself his treat and took it to a quiet corner of the orchard. He scraped a small hole and crumbled the biscuit into it. Earth was brushed back over the top, and my father retired to await developments.

Every morning he ran to see if the first shoots were pushing up; each day brought disappointment. By the following Sunday he was torn: should he eat his next biscuit or plant it again? After lunch, he decided to ask his mother for advice.

Dad later told me that the reaction his innocent enquiry provoked was the first great shock of his life. Not his mother’s response–Kitty listened carefully to her son’s dilemma and then dissolved into helpless laughter. But Geoffrey, sitting in an armchair behind his Sunday paper, began to tremble with rage.

He rose and took a cane from a cupboard. Face dark with anger, he accused his son of ‘wicked waste’ and drew him into the parlour for a measured beating. The punishment lasted for at least a minute and my father would say it was at this precise point in his life that any nascent desire to sow crops was comprehensively extinguished.

It was the first time Geoffrey had thrashed his youngest son, and it would not be the last. The beatings continued until that
delicate moment of balance was reached: the point where a boy realises he has grown powerful enough to consider the merits of striking back.

The dark gods of corporal punishment are complex and mysterious. It is tempting to assume that Geoffrey’s extraordinarily violent response to a tiny infraction had its roots in his own childhood. There must have been a great deal of buried anger in him. He had worked so hard to rationalise everyone’s behaviour and forgive it; and there had to have been a price to pay for that. Certainly my father thought so. Although like many men of his generation Dad shied away from over-analysing anyone’s behaviour–including his own–he knew cause and effect when he saw it.

As he grew older and learned more about his father’s fractured journey to manhood, my father was able, to some extent, to forgive Geoffrey’s dramatic swings from emotional froideur to hot-blooded rage. If he concluded that his father was unconsciously lashing out against his own childhood experiences, he kept that to himself. But I think this was probably at the heart of it. And I have supporting evidence; the domino effect of these beatings clicked and tripped its painful way into my own childhood.

But these almost ritualised punishments–the sacred stick broadcasting its mute warning from corner or cupboard; the appointed place of execution (always the parlour where the best furniture was)–were not peculiar to Kiln Farm. They were de rigueur for the day. Most parents still imposed discipline on their children according to the Victorian mantra of ‘spare the rod and spoil the child’. Fathers–and mothers too–cheerfully
wielded straps, canes, belts, rulers and shoes on their erring sons and daughters and would have been astounded to be told they were child-abusers.

But there were limits, even in 1930s rural England, a line across which overenthusiastic child-beaters stepped at their peril. A story, still whispered years later, concerned two small children, brother and sister, who went to the same village school as my father. Pale, pinched, often badly cut and bruised, it was obvious they were being seriously knocked about at home.

One morning they appeared in class after an absence of several days. The marks on them were so severe that the headmistress brought them into her office for gentle questioning. It gradually emerged that both parents had recently been particularly free with their fists, feet and sundry objects that came to hand. The girl had compression fractures and her brother was passing blood in his urine. Both were half-starved; they had been locked in a coal shed for a day and a night.

The outcome was swift and decisive. Social services not being quite the über-force they are today, a discreet meeting was arranged that afternoon between village elders. The broken children were sent to stay at a friendly home for a few days, and that evening a small party of villagers (my grandfather always refused to say whether or not he was among them) paid a private visit to the parents. Matters were simply and efficiently laid out, a few judicious strokes of someone’s walking stick were added for clarity and emphasis, and the pair were then introduced to the delights of their own coalhole.

They were released the following night, with a final reminder of their parental responsibilities. The children were returned
home; the abuse abruptly ceased. Not for the first time, Shawbury–like other communities across the country–had quietly, efficiently, and of course entirely illegally, resolved their own problems.

Against this background, the beatings my father suffered were perfectly acceptable. The social norm would slowly change, and over the next thirty years such thrashings came to be increasingly regarded as grotesque.

Geoffrey’s explosive reaction to a wasted biscuit should, in fairness, be placed in the context of the Depression. Every penny had to be squeezed. He was under ferocious financial pressure; neighbouring farms were going to the wall and Kiln Farm could be next. He had built his herd up to fifty head of cows with an impressive daily milk yield but local dairies were going under too and frequently there was no one to collect the brimming churns. Granddad would wait as long as he could and then, in defeat, pour hundreds of gallons of perfectly good milk straight down the drains. My father and his older brother stood with the farm hands, watching in silence as the creamy white torrent frothed and gurgled away. It was heartbreaking.

The freshly milked cows would plod back into the fields, with no one certain that the whole soul-destroying process wouldn’t be repeated the next day.

Granddad kept his nerve, but on other farms in Shropshire there were suicides.

Meanwhile, it wasn’t a bad place for a boy to grow up. However bad the slump got, there was always food on the table–it was a farm, after all–with eggs and cream, bacon, home-baked bread and, occasionally, a freshly plucked
chicken. (I can remember as a child the days before battery farming when chicken was an expensive delicacy. On Sundays my grandmother would go to the hen coop, select that day’s lunch, and wring its unfortunate neck. Back in the kitchen she’d pluck it and burn off the stubble with a lit newspaper. I can smell the sharp fumes now–a pungent odour of singed hair and burned toast.)

Sometimes the family would dine on duck. Kitty once kept a small flock as an experiment, but it was short-lived. My grandmother had a schizophrenic attitude to animals: ruthless, yet sentimental. One hot summer day she decided to lead her quacking charges down to the river ‘for a little swim’. The flotilla disappeared around the first bend. Kitty’s anguished cries–‘Duckies! Come back!’–could be heard in the village. The creatures were never seen again, except perhaps by foxes.

The Depression forced Geoffrey to postpone plans to buy Kiln Farm’s first tractor, so huge horses still hauled the ploughs and harrows and seed machines. This was a job my father loved to help with, and he struck up a great friendship with the biggest beast of the lot, a magnificent black-maned giant called Captain.

Captain was devoted to my father. At the end of the working day he would whinny loudly for him from his stable and only settle down after the boy had come to say goodnight. Once he escaped from a carelessly locked stable door and trotted up to the drawing-room window. Christopher was practising his scales on his father’s highly prized baby grand (bought secondhand before the Depression and one of Kiln Farm’s few luxuries). There was a crunch and tinkling of glass, and he
looked up to see Captain’s great head pushing into the room like the figurehead on the prow of a ship, nostrils flared, teeth bared, lips curled back in a sloppy, happy grin of greeting.

Other animals were less friendly. When Christopher was about four years old, he went to pet Rex, the farm dog. It was a hot day and the big black Labrador was sleeping in his kennel (there was no question of dogs being allowed in the house). Rex was startled when the little boy’s hand suddenly materialised through the doorway. He flew out and clamped his jaws on my father’s face.

There was pandemonium as farm hands rushed to pull the dog off. When they managed to free my father, the damage looked bad. He was bleeding from both eyes and screaming that he couldn’t see.

The village doctor quickly established that it was simply blood that had temporarily blinded the child, and dressed and disinfected the deep bites around my father’s eyes. But the attack left lasting damage to his sight. Almost as soon as the wounds had healed, he complained of headaches and not being able to ‘see proper’. An optician in Shrewsbury diagnosed astigmatism. It seems likely that the bites had disturbed the shape of the surface of both eyes, and my father had to wear glasses for the rest of his days.

So life on the farm was nothing if not eventful. But as my father grew up he often struggled to be happy. He had the companionship of James, of course, but his brother was four years older and had his own interests and circle of friends. He also seemed to have, my father thought, an easier and more open relationship with their father. Indeed James, a talented farmer, was destined to run Kiln Farm in years to come.

Like many siblings with a significant age difference, the relationship between Chris and Jim, as they called each other, would only become truly close when both were grown-up.

Christopher loved his parents and assumed they loved him, but as he got older it was hard to be sure. There was a near-total absence of demonstrative affection. Kitty was more outgoing than her husband in this regard, but not by much. My father told me he always felt his relationship with his mother was characterised by formality. My grandmother was a formidable woman with a short temper, and I think he was secretly a little afraid of her.

But Kitty was an earth mother compared with what, by now, was Geoffrey’s almost complete emotional withdrawal. As a small boy, my father gradually became aware that his friends’ fathers were different from his own. He would see them ruffling their sons’ hair, swinging them in the air, playing games with them, tickling them, even kissing them–but nothing remotely like that had ever happened to him. It confused him. Once he was playing at a friend’s house when the boy’s father returned from a short business trip. His son rushed out into the lane–‘daddy-daddy-daddy!’–to be swept up in a bear hug.

My father walked home thoughtfully, and made a plan.

A short time later, Geoffrey had to spend a night or two on business in Shrewsbury. On the evening of his return his youngest son waited patiently by the wooden garden gate that opened into the lane. He was going to welcome his father home just like his friend had his.

It was almost dark when the tall figure finally emerged from the gathering dusk, smartly suited and wearing his best trilby.
My father took a deep breath and ran down the road towards him, shouting and waving. But when father and son reached each other, a terrible awkwardness descended. After a few moments, the little boy resolutely stepped forward and hugged his father’s knees. There was absolutely no response. Finally he let go and stared down, utterly defeated, at Geoffrey’s shiny town shoes. There was a long moment. Perhaps my grandfather felt chastened by the sight of the forlorn child before him, because he suddenly knelt down and put one arm stiffly around his son’s shoulder for a brief moment. Then he stood up and walked on.