Fathers and Sons (9 page)

Mary Claire looked up. ‘You’re not serious.’

‘Well, no…I mean, yes, it’s true, we could get you seen to for free in England, but I didn’t mean…I wasn’t actually suggesting…’

They stared at each other. Mary Claire spoke first.

‘There’s many a true word spoken in jest. I think you might be on to something. Let’s sleep on it, shall we?’

And so it was that at the beginning of August 1954 my parents and their two-year-old daughter boarded the
Empress of France
at Montreal. They were to stay in England for a year, as an experiment. It seemed silly to go all that way just for a visit to the dentist. Maybe they might like to settle there.

The
Empress of France
cast off, bound for Liverpool. But Liverpool was not their final destination.

My father was taking his young family home.

Back to Kiln Farm.

The voyage got off to an exciting start. With Elizabeth safely asleep in their cabin, the couple went on deck to watch the tugs tow the liner out into the St Lawrence River. Chris wanted to take photographs of them but his wife kept standing in his way. Finally, in mock frustration, he grasped her by the waist and pretended he was about to throw her overboard.

The strange woman wearing near-identical clothes to Mary Claire struggled free. ‘What
do
you think you’re doing?’

Chris gaped in horror. ‘Oh, I’m so sorry…I thought you were my wife.’

That’s how Dad used to tell it, anyway; my mother insists he only shouted in mock anger at the woman, thinking it was her. Either way, both agreed that the stranger never let my mother out of her sight whenever she came on deck. She clearly thought she was in mortal danger from a homicidal husband.

As I say, the decision to sail for England was not based solely on Mary Claire’s dental dilemma. Once the initial idea had taken root other reasons surfaced. Britain was finally moving out of years of austerity; rationing was almost at an end and after four years away Chris realised he was homesick. Mary Claire, though nervous about emigrating and convinced she would miss her mother terribly (indeed she did–they wrote to each other every single day and the entire McEwan clan came over from Tillsonburg to visit) had long been something of an Anglophile and was intensely curious to see the country of her husband’s birth.

The decision was sealed by the news that Ford had an opening in their British press office. The job was Chris’s if he wanted it.

It seemed like fate.

My mother remembers that their ship docked in Liverpool on 8 August. When she told me this during my research for this book, I gently corrected her.

‘No, Mum, the eighth of August is the date Dad died.’

There was a pause. ‘Yes it was,’ she said, her Canadian accent thickening as it always does at emotional moments. ‘But it was also the date I landed with him in England all those years before. Good Lord. It never struck me until now. How strange.’

My father never returned to Canada. Neither, during their marriage, did his wife, except to be at her mother’s bedside ten years later when she died.

Less than two years after arriving in Britain, my mother gave birth to me. Chris now had a son, and a slew of renewed self-doubt assailed him.

He had, over the previous four years, been a gentle and loving father to his daughter. Indeed, against all his expectations, he had found fatherhood relatively easy. His epiphany at the McEwan home had stood him in good stead; Chris had learned his lessons there well.

But what if this were different? What if it was different with sons? What if all that rejection and emotional frigidity with his father had tainted him in some way? What if the cold past returned to warp and chill the relationship with his own boy?

All his old doubts and fears and uncertainties rushed back. Poor Dad.

I can conjure up his pale face now, staring at his reflection in the shaving mirror the morning after I was born, a question running through his head just as it had Geoffrey’s more than thirty years before, when Kitty presented him with their first child.

But the question troubling Christopher was subtly different. He had so far succeeded in being a good father–to his daughter. But now there was a son in his house. What sort of a father would he make to him?

T
he Shropshire Madeleys arrived in force at Liverpool to greet their wandering son and his new bride and child. It was practically a committee that stood patiently on the wharf waiting for the
Empress of France
to disgorge its passengers. Geoffrey and Kitty were there, as was Chris’s elder brother Jim, with his new wife Hilda. Hilda was very pretty, with brown curls, astonishingly bright eyes and very neat white teeth. She came from Market Drayton and she and Jim had married after Chris had emigrated. Both brothers would shortly be meeting the other’s new bride for the first time.

Meanwhile, in the unloading sheds opposite, Chris and Mary Claire’s luggage–everything they had in the world–had vanished without trace and their little girl was flushed and unwell. My mother, weak from calamitous seasickness which had plagued her during the entire voyage, recognised her in-laws from photographs but her husband had disappeared in
pursuit of their missing trunks and she was too nervous to approach her new family alone.

One of them gave an uncertain wave of half-recognition. She burst into tears and fled to the back of the shed.

Later, after the drive down to Shawbury, Elizabeth, who had been increasingly restless, suddenly went into a sharp decline. The doctor was called out. His diagnosis seemed strangely and ominously fateful. On this, her very first night at Kiln Farm, Elizabeth had been struck down by precisely the same illness that had stolen John from his parents nearly thirty years before–bronchial pneumonia. The little girl was even lying in the same bedroom where the small boy had been propped up on his pillows the night before he died. A frisson of superstitious dread rippled through everyone.

But this was the 1950s, not the 1920s. My sister was transferred, semi-conscious, to Shrewsbury Hospital where she was placed in an oxygen tent and fed antibiotics. Modern medicine duly carried the day and the family managed to shrug off the sense that dark and malign forces were at work.

But no one actually mentioned John by name.

Geoffrey and Kitty had missed their youngest boy more keenly than their letters to him ever showed. Kitty was the chief letter writer, and Chris had received a steady stream of blue airmail envelopes containing news from Kiln Farm while he was in Canada. The letters from home were mostly factual, concerned with goings-on in the village and how the crops were doing. Sometimes there might be a scrawled paragraph from Geoffrey, but no clue from either parent how much they wanted to see their youngest son again. Now, they insisted he
and his wife stay at Kiln Farm for at least a month before he started his new job at Ford’s headquarters in Dagenham, Essex. So my mother had an opportunity to become familiar with this emotionally charged parcel of land, and to get to know her husband’s parents.

Years later, Geoffrey would confess to her that, at first, the arrival of his son’s Canadian wife had confused and unsettled him. It brought back memories of The Girl. He had been unable to persuade his first fiancé to sail to England with him, but Chris had successfully brought his own girl home. My grandfather admired this, and also my mother’s determination to make the journey, leaving her own family behind.

My mother certainly made an impact on Shawbury. Her red hair and glamorous looks marked her out. She dressed in the tailored, fashionable clothes she had brought with her to a country still emerging from the so-called Age of Austerity. Because of the height difference with her husband–she was five-foot four to his six-foot two–she always wore high heels. The whole combined to produce a distinctly chic, Parisian look. This, and her distinctive Canadian accent, caused heads to turn in the village shop.

She made an impact on Geoffrey too. He quickly became fond of my mother, and it was the beginning of a friendship which, in later years, saw him increasingly confide in her on the long walks they took through the countryside; conversations she remembers to this day and which were of enormous value in the writing of this book.

Now, at last, my mother saw for herself the stage upon which her husband’s childhood had been played out. She
walked gingerly around the bomb crater in the first field and shuddered to see how close to the house it was. She inspected the stables where Captain had once whinnied for my father, now home to diesel-stinking tractors. She fished for trout on the bend in the river where Kitty’s ducks had sailed away on a long-ago summer’s afternoon. One wet August day, Chris borrowed his father’s Morris and drove her across country to Denstone. After ten minutes walking around the empty school–the ‘hols’ were not yet over–she quietly asked to be driven back. She could see her husband was becoming increasingly agitated. And seeing it through Chris’s eyes, she thought it a loathsome place.

After a week or two spent settling in, Chris drove Mary Claire into Shrewsbury for her long-dreaded appointment with the Madeley family dentist.

She was ushered into the surgery. My mother shivered at the sight of the ancient pre-war dental equipment: a huge drilling rig with flapping drive belts connected to foot pedals; an array of obscure but terrifying instruments Queen Victoria would probably have recognised; and bottles of what looked suspiciously like chloroform or ether.

She wished heartily that she had stayed on the other side of the Atlantic and had all her teeth pulled under gas in a modern North American dentist’s. The British National Health may be saving a thousand dollars, but she felt like she had walked into a torture chamber.

Outside, her husband sat in the waiting room flicking through a tattered copy of
Punch
, dating from around the time of Munich. He was expecting a lengthy vigil–most of the
afternoon–but suddenly the surgery door opened and my mother walked through, smiling, holding a slightly bloodied rag to a corner of her mouth.

‘What’s happened, Claire? You can’t possibly have had all of them removed already.’

‘’On’t need ’oo,’ she answered indistinctly through the cloth before taking it away for a moment. ‘He says there’s nothing wrong with my teeth, except one or two at the back that were crowding the others. One more treatment and I’m fixed. That guy in Windsor was a chiseller, Chris, out for a fast buck.’

On the drive back to Kiln Farm, Chris glanced across at his wife. ‘Well, Claire…it looks like we needn’t have come to England after all, doesn’t it?’

‘Looks like it.’

There was a pause before my father spoke again.

‘D’you mind?’

My mother shook her head. ‘No, I don’t think I do. You know I always wanted to visit England. Let’s look on it as an adventure; see how things work out.’

For a moment my father couldn’t speak. Then he managed a piece of understatement that was typical of him. ‘OK…well, good. Thank you.’

My mother flashed him a quick smile. ‘Nope, thank
you
. Well, your dentist anyway, in spite of that horrible medieval equipment he used. It’s thanks to him I’ll keep my teeth. And going by that lamb we had for lunch at the Fox and Hounds yesterday–it
was
lamb, wasn’t it, Chris–I’m going to need them.’

By the autumn of that year my father was living in digs nearly 200 miles south of wife and child, working for the Yankee dollar. He was a public relations officer for Ford at their sprawling Dagenham plant and this enforced separation was something he and Mary Claire swiftly agreed could not be tolerated. Geoffrey loaned them the deposit on a semi standing on a busy main road in Romford, Essex, and by Christmas the young family was in residence. It looked as if the young couple were putting down permanent roots.

Later the following year, Mary Claire fell pregnant again.

Essex boy was on his way.

The sight of flowering laburnum always reminds me that my birthday is approaching. When I was small my mother would point to the bursting yellow buds on the fine tree that stood outside our back door and whisper, ‘See the petals? It means your birthday’s coming.’

I was a Sunday’s child, arriving on 13 May in the front room of our house in Dagenham Road, Rush Green. Rush Green had once been a small village outside the market town of Romford, but by 1956 it was almost entirely absorbed by a rapidly expanding post-war London. Traces of the countryside remained, though. Even today patches of ancient farmland survive around Romford, ploughed fields sitting bravely alongside 1930s-built housing estates and rows of shops and pubs. There are farmhouses still there too, some barely more than a stone’s throw from the house where I was born: Crown
Farm; Warren Farm; Mill Farm…their outbuildings and fields make an incongruous sight for drivers surging down the dual carriageway that links the built-up suburbs stretching from Romford to the East End.

Later, when I was old enough to appreciate Kiln Farm’s rural appeal, these fragments of countryside that stubbornly refused to be completely swamped by bricks and concrete held a deep attraction for me. I would ride my bike around their cement-besieged perimeters, closing my ears to the roar of traffic and resolutely turning my gaze towards the narrow vistas still free of cityscape. It was then that I first realised the hold Kiln Farm had begun to exert over me, even as a young boy. As time went by, I increasingly yearned for its meadows and trees and river, the red-bricked barns and outbuildings. I still do.

My father’s reaction to the birth of his first son was extravagant. In the weeks after my birth my mother felt quite left in the shade. Chris would race home from Dagenham as fast as his wheezing pre-war Ford 8 would carry him, let himself in by the front door, and without so much as a ‘Hi honey, I’m home’ charge up the stairs to the nursery (well, the little box room at the back of the house) to stare and stare and stare at me if I were asleep, or pick me up and cradle me in his arms if I were even drowsily awake.

My mother admits to becoming quite jealous. ‘You want your husband to love his new son, but you don’t want to be usurped by him,’ she told me candidly. It was sometimes over half an hour before her husband would sheepishly make his entrance downstairs and bid his wife and four-year-old daughter good evening.

More than half a century on from these exorbitant homecomings, I believe my father was plainly overcompensating. He was making it transparently clear to everyone–most of all, to himself–that the relationship with his son would not be anything like the one his father had had with him. And he was going to establish the difference right here and now. I was just a nappy-clad, speechless bundle of primary needs, but my father was determined to set the ground rules straight from the start. He was going to have a demonstrative, loving relationship with his son come hell or high water. Even if that meant, initially, exaggerating or even acting the role of a devoted father.

Was
he acting? Not in the sense that he artfully concealed an absence of love. I think he was simply terrified of straying into that cold, neutral zone he and Geoffrey had inhabited together (and still did) and wanted to build a place where he could have a warm, open relationship with his son.

I love him very much for that. He’d thought about it. He reversed the flow. Henry, William, Geoffrey…they had all, in their own ways, done so much damage. Christopher had suffered enough and learned enough to be able to work out how to repair it.

My first memory is a very early one. I am lying in my pram, gazing up at a blue sky through the branches of a tree laden with white blossom. Some of the petals are fluttering down on to my face and I am watching them intently as they drift towards me. I can be scarcely more than one, and I must be under the old pear tree at the bottom of the garden where on sunny days I was parked for a nap.

The next break in the blank void of recall also involves blossom. My mother and I are looking through a window at the brilliant yellow petals on our laburnum tree. She points to it, and turns and smiles at me. ‘Four tomorrow!’

Now my father drifts into view. He is always in a suit and tie. Always. And never in a shirt of any shade other than brilliant white, except when he was wearing his pyjamas. The first thing he put on in the morning was his spectacles; the lenses in heavy, black plastic frames, almost as dark as his thick hair which he slicked back with Brylcreem after shaving. I climbed into my parents’ bed most mornings and watched the daily ritual of them dressing for the day. My mother first, facing into the wardrobe as she modestly fastens her bra. She swivels the cups round to her back while she fiddles with the clasp. The rigid, wired cones point at me from her shoulder blades and I confusedly think that ladies must have two pairs of breasts, one on the front and one at the back.

My father is invariably reading the paper in bed. It must have been the
Express
because I remember being fascinated by the helmeted knight who always guards the front page. ‘Who is he?’ I would ask my father.

‘He’s a Crusader. A very special soldier in days of old who fought for Jesus.’

‘On his own?’

‘No, he had his friends with him.’

And so on.

On Saturdays my mother had the afternoon ‘off’ after spending all week looking after house, husband and children. She usually went into Romford market–it was still a drovers
market then, with flocks of bleating sheep–and browsed among the stalls, or admired the displays of crystal and cut glass in the department stores, while my father entertained my sister and me.

We might walk past the gasworks to Cottons Park where there were two slides, one of them breathtakingly high and steep with a wooden hut at the top to stop children falling off, the other disappointingly low and tame. Elizabeth, four years older than me, was allowed to swoop down the ‘daddy’ slide while I was confined to the baby version. I argued, begged and pleaded to be allowed to scale the metal Everest with my sister. The answer was always the same.

‘Not until you’re six.’

Or we would go out for a drive. The ancient Ford 8 was long gone and we had upgraded to another sit-up-and-beg economy car, the Popular. My father was very proud of this, his first new Ford. It was shiny jet-black with red upholstery and not much else–no heater (hot-water bottles and blankets on winter journeys), no radio and an immensely long gear stick with all of three gears to choose from. Four, if you counted reverse.