Swan River (2 page)

She had sold the shop two years before. It was in the High Street and we had lived in large, airy rooms on the two floors above. I told him that I thought she was happy. I didn't tell him my worry about the way my father was sometimes unkind – even cruel, I thought – to her.

‘Good. She deserves to be happy. She's a woman with a great sense of duty… It comes from her upper-class English upbringing.'

I had an idea of what he meant, but he seemed to have forgotten that my granny, my mother's mother, was American.

Uncle George continued to smile, though he looked tired. ‘You've made her very happy, David. You know that, don't you?' He leaned forward and poked at my knee again. ‘They were married for sixteen years before they had you, you know.'

‘I know,' I said wearily. My father mentioned this fact almost every time we met someone new, especially new farmers: ‘This is my son David. We were married sixteen years before he came along.' Depending on the response, this was often followed by: ‘My third marriage. My eldest son's forty-five and this one's eleven...' His arm would then be placed round my shoulder. ‘Remarkable.'

They had married in 1933, and I, their first and only child, was born in 1948. My father was then fifty-six and my mother forty-two, but I could never understand why this should be of such interest to people, especially complete strangers.

Uncle George took my hand again and leaned back in his chair. He shut his eyes for a minute, and I wondered whether he had gone to sleep. When he opened them, they were watery, and he spoke about his wife, Marie: how pretty she had been and how he still missed her. He pronounced her name with a long ‘a' sound and the emphasis on the first syllable.

The same foreign man refilled his teacup and my glass, and then I asked him about my whisky-drinking, disappearing grandfather and where he went after he had to leave home.

He took several sips of tea while staring at me over the rim of the cup. He put the cup down slowly and carefully, and turned his eyes back to mine.

‘When you are grown up and can afford to travel, you must go to Swan River, Manitoba.' Despite his obvious tiredness he said this with great earnestness, nodding, waggling his eyebrows and tapping my knee quite hard.

I felt a little strange, as though I had heard bad news, although he was smiling at me now. I had never heard of Swan River or Manitoba, but I felt that I had to obey this curious instruction, as if suddenly I had a duty. I asked him why and where was it, but he was looking down at the floor and didn't seem to be listening.

‘Is that where my grandfather went?'

He looked up at me, nodded and smiled; then he looked at his old Omega watch and said he was tired and that it was a long story and Billy Cotton's
Band Show
would be on television soon; he would explain next time I visited him. ‘But remember, Swan River, Manitoba.' Again, he said the words with emphasis and then smiled.

It was a quarter to six; Billy Cotton would not, in fact, start up for another fifteen minutes; the sun had long gone off the river and the trees. He said no more about Swan River, but talked about his brother Ernest's first wife who had worked in the music halls around the turn of the century. There was clearly a connection in his mind between her and Billy Cotton whose show was a variety show, the closest thing on television in 1960 to the kind of entertainment Uncle George had loved as a young man.

Ernest's wife had earned her living in the music halls by playing the violin with her feet while walking around on her hands. She could even do this while going downstairs, Uncle George said, and sometimes practised at home in the house where they all lived. This amazed me. I found it hard to picture; I could see her only as a still image, but not in motion. She had an exotic name, La Frascetti, he told me, although she was English and came from the East End of London, and her real name was Rose Porter.

Just before six o'clock Uncle George asked the foreign man to turn on the television. A thin old man with a stick walked slowly past and raised his hand to Uncle George in greeting; he sat down near us and stared up at the television, sitting very straight with his hands on his stick. As I finished my orange squash, I watched the opening number, Billy Cotton's band playing their signature tune while the Television Toppers kicked their legs. I left after that, kissing Uncle George on the forehead as I went. He smiled, squeezed my hand tightly and muttered, ‘Good boy.'

Walking home, I repeated the word ‘Manitoba' so I wouldn't forget it. I didn't tell my parents what Uncle George had said; it seemed to be something that was just between me and the old man, for the moment, anyway. Later, lying on my bed, I wrote ‘Swan River, Manitober' in the red, soft-backed notebook that I kept for my very few secrets.

* * * * *

Uncle George died unexpectedly in his sleep six days later, for no particular reason. I had planned to visit him again the following day. My mother told me that the foreign man had found Uncle George when he took in his early-morning tea; he was in bed as if asleep, but not breathing. ‘He died peacefully,' she said.

Through the crack in our living-room door I saw my father sitting alone crying with a handkerchief in his hand. I went away because I didn't want to embarrass him, fetched my satchel and left for school. My father took the day off work. When I came home, he was standing in the hall, speaking on the telephone; my mother came back from work and said he had probably been standing there all day and that we really ought to put a chair in the hall.

* * * * *

The funeral was a generous occasion, conducted in the church by the white suspension bridge, a short walk from Uncle George's home by the lock. There were crowds of people, lots of them very old; children; flowers; a halting address by Mr Brown from the grocery; the choir singing ‘Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring'; the vicar in white with shimmering purple extras. I sang loudly, sandwiched between my parents in the front pew, and my mother stolidly held my hand. All around us were cousins of all ages, most of whom I didn't know: Uncle George's children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren. My father, a lifelong atheist, but then in the middle of his brief religious phase, wept not quite silently and knelt, head in hands, longer than anyone at the end.

As we walked down the aisle I was introduced to two elderly women who were Uncle George's nieces, the daughters of the long-dead Uncle Ernest. I was disappointed to discover later that they were not the daughters of the fascinating La Frascetti, but of a piano teacher who had been Uncle Ernest's second wife.

In the churchyard, a weak, late-winter sun lit the grass around the red-brown rectangle; brass and varnished pine gleamed; spoonfuls of earth were thrown with a polished spade – first by the many cousins, then my father, then my mother, then me.

Later, still holding my mother's hand, I wandered among the graves, past an ancient yew, to the river. Two swans glided in small circles near the weir. A car's horn sounded from the bottom of the High Street.

‘Where is Swan River, Manitoba?'

My mother looked at me curiously. She was wearing her calf-length black tweed suit. ‘Manitoba is in Canada. Why?' She swung her black handbag with the gilt clasp from her right hand to her left.

‘Uncle George told me to go there.'

‘Did he? You'd better ask Daddy.'

I took her arm and pressed my cheek against her shoulder as we wandered back and out of the churchyard to the street. It had been my first funeral. That Uncle George was in that smart box under the ground now seemed less strange than when I had first seen the coffin, covered in daffodils and lilies, and had asked my mother, ‘Is Uncle George actually in there?'

* * * * *

Uncle George's wake, or ‘the do afterwards' as people called it, was at Burger's Tea Shop, a little way up the High Street. A long table for us children at one end was matched by another for old people from the nursing home, at the other. In between was an uproar of polite adult chatter which I carefully ignored, although I was pleased and stood up when the foreign man approached me hesitantly and said how much he had liked Uncle George.

I sat with my friend Deborah, whose father ran the sweetshop further up the street and who was the only person privy to the secrets in my red notebook. Out of earshot of my mates, Richard and Adam, I asked her whether she'd come with me to Swan River, Manitoba, Canada.

She was slim and had short brown hair, and showed her gums when she smiled. We had been friends since we were five, had, indeed, shown each other everything when we were five, and had been caught in the bathroom together by Deborah's mother – a shameful discovery which had led to a row between our fathers, mine liberal and fiery-tempered, hers conservative and kindly.

‘Yes. When we leave school.' She forked in a rectangle of Welsh rarebit, chewed, swallowed, tilted her head sideways and gazed at me from under her hair. ‘We'll have to go on a boat, won't we?'

‘Probably, I'm going to ask Dad where it is.'

‘Canada is in America. You have to go on a boat to get there.'

My father had flown to Australia and back four years before and had made a tremendous fuss about it, filling a complete photograph album with tiny black and white pictures of a silver aeroplane with four propellers and even more of himself standing under palm trees dressed in white wearing a curious hat that looked like an oval fruit bowl, but everyone else who went anywhere abroad seemed to go by boat.

Deborah didn't ask why we were to go to Swan River; she loved an adventure, and had been an avid reader of Arthur Ransome. If I had suggested a trip to somewhere with a less watery name, San Francisco, say, or Staines, she would probably have wrinkled her nose and said ‘No'. When we were younger we had often had fantasies about what we would do when we grew up, and had made detailed plans which we wrote into my red book.

Richard and Adam, currently separated from us by a crowd of my young cousins, had little imagination and no thought for the future; they seemed to live solely in the real world and in the present. But Deborah's ability to fantasise frequently dovetailed with my own. On this occasion, though, I had a new, scary feeling; going to Swan River wasn't just an imaginative game.

2

On the Road with the Seed Salesman

My father had glasses with thick black rims in those days. He looked not unlike Harry Worth and was often just as funny, but he had a serious side – a very serious side – as well.

The next evening he and I watched
The Brains Trust
. I didn't understand much of what
The Brains Trust
talked about, but I liked the people's names – Bertrand Russell, Dame Edith Sitwell, Doctor Bronowski, Lady Violet Bonham-Carter – and I found their serious faces and their accents somehow entertaining. And this was a rare time when I could be with my father while he listened to someone else talk instead of talking himself.

When the programme ended I spoke before he did. ‘The last time I saw him, Uncle George told me to go to Swan River, Manitoba, once I'm grown-up.'

My father leaned back in his loose-covered armchair and stared at me intently for a few seconds. He took off his glasses, pulled out the handkerchief he always kept in the breast pocket of his tweed jacket, waved it about a bit and blew his nose loudly and thoroughly. Stuffing the handkerchief back and replacing his glasses, he looked at me again. ‘My father spent the last part of his life in Swan River, Manitoba.' Unusually, he fell silent – and stopped looking at me. He stared at the carpet instead.

‘Why would Uncle George tell me to go there?' I asked this a little tentatively – it was clearly a sensitive matter.

He got up and poked the cosy stove vigorously. Yellow and blue flames appeared on top of the anthracite. Still standing, he said, ‘My Uncle George was a very kind man, a very liberal man – if you know what I mean. He found it hard to think badly of anyone.'

He walked back to his chair and sat down, throwing one knee over the other. He picked up his tin from the table and began to roll a cigarette. ‘Uncle George thought there was good in my father.'

He licked the Rizla paper and stared at the floor again. ‘It's what they call a long story.' He lit the cigarette with his shiny Ronson and inhaled. ‘Very long indeed. I'll tell you it all, but not all at once.'

He blew blue smoke towards the ceiling and it gradually formed a horizontal cloud above our heads. ‘It's complicated… Or it's very simple, depending on your point of view…Where's your mother? Let's play Cluedo. I'll be Professor Plum.'

* * * * *

I knew we would talk about it, because I spent a lot of time with my father and talking was his great talent. Though he was sixty-eight years old, he worked hard at his job selling seeds, driving from farm to farm all over Buckinghamshire in an Austin A35 supplied by his employers, persuading farmers that his varieties of wheat, barley and oats were better than those of his competitors. He was very good at this – he was his firm's nationwide champion salesman for the whole country that year and the next. I often went with him in the holidays and in the afternoons after school, map-reading, finding farms he had never visited before. We talked a lot on these journeys, and we talked early in the mornings before my mother got up.

As well as being a generation older than my friends' dads, my dad seemed to have had a more complicated life than they had. Richard's father was in the RAF and had been ever since his call-up during World War II; he was ‘ground staff' and my father referred to him as ‘the man with the ping-pong bats'. Adam's father taught politics at the London School of Economics; my father approved of him and they had frequent, reasonably friendly arguments. Deborah's father ran a sweetshop and always had done as far as I knew.

These three men had been married only once. My father had been married three times; had, I understood, been very rich and very poor; and had had more jobs than he had had cars, which was a lot. He had once written me a list of all the cars he had ever owned; it began with something called an Invicta, which he had bought in 1912 when he was twenty, and continued over two pages.

During World War II he had done three jobs at once: he had managed his own furniture business in High Wycombe; had, with no previous experience, run a farm on a hill just outside that town; and had written a series of autobiographical books about life on the farm – they were sub-titled ‘One Hundred Acres Farmed by an Amateur'. He had been ‘too old to fight' in that war and told me without shame that he was ‘a coward' and that, had he been young enough to be called up, he would have avoided fighting anyway, as he had, fortuitously, during World War I.

The books – four of them – had made him quite wealthy. In the three years between the end of the war and my birth, he had owned a Rolls-Royce and a yacht. I had seen photographs of both, and there was a model of the yacht in a glass case on top of the cabinet containing the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
in our living room. When I asked my mother about this period of their life, she downplayed both these signs of riches: the Rolls-Royce was an old second-hand one, and the yacht was not what some people would call a yacht – it was a large sailing boat with room for eight people.

These days, he wasn't wealthy. He had spent the money from the books, sold the yacht and the Rolls-Royce, and wound up the furniture business long ago. After the war, his publishers had brought out four more books with decreasing success and had, in 1950, declined to publish his ninth. Despite this, he still woke every morning at 5 am and wrote for about three hours, either with a fountain pen, sitting up in bed, or on a black portable typewriter at his roll-top desk, wearing his dressing gown over his pyjamas.

When I was younger, before I liked reading, I would go to his room every morning as soon I woke up and he would stop writing and play games with me, or I would climb into bed with him and he would tell me exciting, made-up, adventure stories. He taught me chess, cribbage and bezique, and he made a board on which we played shove ha'penny. He liked to play with me, his late child, born late in a late marriage, and I took it as the joke he intended when he said that his writing career ended when I started to demand his attention.

I loved him, and I loved being with him, but he had a demon. It showed itself in frightening outbursts of rage, sometimes vented on strangers in shops or in traffic, only rarely on me; I had learned to recognise the stirrings and to back away. But my mother couldn't escape; she was the enduring receptacle for his wrath. In his presence she was quiet and subdued; away from him she came to life and laughed. He seemed compelled to destroy her spirit – and he succeeded in dulling her brightness – but I knew that it would never leave her altogether. I loved her unreservedly, and couldn't understand why this otherwise clever, funny and kind man should attack someone so innocent and so perfect.

The mood came upon him most frequently during breakfast, as my parents sat with their newspapers at opposite ends of the table, with me in between. Often he would read out something he had written that morning and ask for her opinion. But no response was ever adequate. A positive comment provoked a sneering shrug, as if her opinion were of no consequence; a critical one led to an interrogation as he pinned down with ruthless logic precisely what she meant and proved – to his own satisfaction at least – that she was both stupid and wrong. The exchange might end with him shouting ‘I cannot suffer fools gladly' in the ugly tone I had heard him use to bank clerks and shop assistants, and with my mother gently sighing and drawing her paper up in front of her face. My hands and arms and shoulders would tingle with the fear that he would hit her. And I wondered what would happen then. And I wondered why and I wished it would stop.

* * * * *

He was always Professor Plum, but we didn't play Cluedo that day because we couldn't find my mother. At first neither of us could think where she was. We had gone into the garden to look for her and were gazing at the budgies when my father said, ‘I know. She's warbling… She's gone to practise warbling in a bonnet.'

‘What's that? What's warbling in a bonnet?'

‘
HMS Pinafore
. You know, the opera. They always wear bonnets in
HMS Pinafore
. She's in it, God help us. Mrs…Whatsername persuaded her.'

I remembered then. She was at the Liston Hall in Chapel Street, rehearsing.

‘She has to learn how to warble in a bonnet,' my father said abstractedly. ‘You don't have to learn, do you?' He was talking to one of his budgerigars.

‘She left us a shepherd's pie.'

He didn't seem to hear me. ‘How many will be purple? That is the question.' He was looking at a small wooden nesting box, high up at the back of the aviary. ‘What do you think, Sunny Jim?'

‘Three out of four,' I replied.

The budgerigars had been an enthusiasm for about two years; my father had built a lean-to aviary out of two-by-one and chicken wire, installed nesting boxes and bought four adult budgies, two of each gender. Despite minor setbacks – tiny, blind, pink creatures falling to the ground and being tended to in the house, often unsuccessfully, with eye-droppers filled with warm milk – the aviary was now packed with budgerigars and, reluctantly at first, he had started to sell them by advertising in the
Bucks Free Press
. The next stage had been to specialise in budgies of a certain colour; he and I both liked an unusual pastel purple; he had isolated two birds of this colour and we had waited expectantly to see if their children would turn out the same.

To prevent my hopes from rising too high, he had read out loud to me long sections of
The Origin of Species
and tedious articles from
The Encylopaedia Britannica.
He was expecting ‘throwbacks' as detailed in these two publications, and we got them: of the three surviving children, one was purple and the other two were green. The purple youngster, who turned out to be a girl, had taken ten months to reach adulthood and had then been isolated with a purple cousin – not with her father, because that way we might produce a new colour altogether, if we carried on long enough, according to my father and Darwin – and we were now waiting to see what would happen.

‘All right. Two bob. I'll give you two bob if we get three out of four.'

Two shillings was a lot of money, but I tried for more by looking disappointed and saying, ‘Oh, go on. Five bob. There might not even be four.'

He looked at me sharply. ‘No, two bob. Two bob's enough.'

My pocket money, paid to me by my mother, was one shilling a week. My father gave me money sporadically when it occurred to him, which tended to be simply when he was feeling flush, or when he heard that I had done something good, scoring a goal or getting high marks at school; he gave me sixpence if I found a new farm on the Ordnance Survey map, but only if it led to a sale, which had happened six times in his two-year career as a seed salesman.

And then there were the bets. The odds were against me, but then, I never had to pay out. ‘What colour will the next car we see be?' ‘Red.' He would then think for a couple of seconds. ‘OK. A penny.' Red and blue were usually a penny; black and white twopence; green threepence; and wishy-washy colours like beige and maroon might go as high as sixpence. We also betted on types of car, types of people – ‘lady with grey hair' – animals, traffic lights, pubs – defined by brewer – and any random thing that entered my father's head as we drove around the lanes of Buckinghamshire.

* * * * *

On a cold, sunny afternoon in the week after Uncle George's funeral my father and I drove up a long gravel drive, lined with new young conifers. At the end was a large, dull, red-brick house; roses were sprinkled in geometric patterns across recently mown grass; and several girls and a very small boy were trotting around a horse-filled paddock while a bossy woman in a sleek headscarf shouted and waved a whip about.

Although he knew he had to do business with the farm manager who would be in the farmyard round the back, my father stopped the car and walked across the gravel to the front door. He wanted to greet the owner even though he didn't like him; he was one of what my dad called ‘the idle rich', but he paid the bills and, more importantly, might easily be induced to buy his seeds from the competition for the price of a few gin-and-tonics. My father had to maintain a presence and he was at a disadvantage in this one respect; he hated alcohol and would only visit pubs if this was absolutely essential to further business; inside a pub he would order bottled Carlsberg and drink it as slowly as possible.

On this occasion I stayed in the car while he talked to a small, aggressive man in a tight checked jacket, cavalry twills and a flat cap that looked as though it had just been ironed. He soon returned exclaiming, ‘God
strewth
, that man thinks he's God almighty!'

‘And he's a bloody fool,' he added as we drove round the back through some small cypresses, past a garage containing a highly polished, bottle-green Jaguar 2.8, to the farmyard. Here the gravel became tarmac, streaked with just a little mud. The bailiff appeared immediately. He had neatly brushed hair and no mud on his clothes, but he did know about farming and my father enjoyed chatting with him about ‘yields per acre', ‘straight ears', ‘one-year leys' and endless stuff, some of which I had begun to understand.

That this man respected and trusted my dad went without saying; more unusually, he remembered me and my name and called his sheepdog for me to pat. He ordered several hundredweight of Koga 2, at that time my father's revolutionary new line of wheat, signing the order that my father wrote out in his order book. As we drove back past the house, the man in the checked jacket was standing on the gravel talking to the woman in the headscarf. My father lifted his hand from the steering wheel and waved rather formally; the man nodded. My father glanced at me. ‘Never forget, Sunny Jim: no person of quality esteems another merely because he is rich.'