Swan River (27 page)

I was amazed that my grandfather had had to live like that, and the shock no doubt showed on my face.

My father stopped talking and stared at me for a few moments. ‘You have to understand that there were lots of men in his situation then – and women and children. Thousands of them with nowhere to live, and many of them actually starving. I saw them when I went wandering in the real East End with Toppy, in East and West Ham, Canning Town, the docks, Plaistow; it was like Calcutta… There was a famous case where a starving man was arrested for stealing a few oats from a horse's nosebag.' He shook his head. ‘It's not surprising the Labour movement got going around then.' He sat back and smiled a little. ‘And my father was a well-qualified, reasonably educated man. He went to Canada to fill his belly. You read those letters… You'll see. Just about the only good thing he has to say about it is that he got good food and plenty of it.'

‘I thought he went because he wanted to start a whole new life, or something. He just went for food?'

He raised his hands and shrugged, and explained that the Canadian government had been offering subsidised passages to Europeans who wanted to go there to work – especially on the railways which were rapidly expanding west. A ticket for Tom by boat and train from Liverpool to Winnipeg – which was where they had wanted people – had cost four pounds, a lot of money, despite the subsidy. Uncle George and a wealthy friend of Tom's brother Bertie had paid two pounds each.

I was surprised that I hadn't heard about this before.

My father held out his forefinger and Joey hopped on to it. He stroked the top of the bird's head for a few seconds, with his nose on his beak, then moved him away and looked back at me. ‘You see, I didn't know any of this till years later. They just told me he was all right and living in London, but that it was better if I didn't see him, and then that he had decided to go to Canada because he might be able to get a job there.' He waved his free arm towards the table. ‘I didn't know those letters existed until years after he died. Two of them are to me. They just put them away and didn't tell me.' He was animated, but he didn't seem to mind that his father's letters had been kept from him. ‘I don't blame them. He was just trying to make trouble; you'll see if you read them.'

I felt annoyed with Old George and Sis – on my father's behalf. ‘Why didn't you tell me all this before?'

He seemed surprised. ‘Well, I wrote all that stuff.'

‘I know… That's great… Sorry, I'm not complaining.'

‘Well… I suppose I didn't write about my father after he left, because there wasn't much to say – and it didn't involve me.' He stroked Joey again, and looked at the clock. ‘Let's watch the six o'clock news. Keep those letters. Read them in London when you've got time.'

We didn't often watch the six o'clock news. He seemed tired. He hadn't had his usual nap and had been talking all afternoon.

* * * * *

On a Saturday early in the next year, 1968, my father called at our new London flat with a middle-aged woman and her eight-year-old son. The visit had been arranged several days before, and they arrived on time at noon. He had met the woman and the boy for the first time less than half an hour earlier on the steps of the Royal Court Theatre, and had driven them round to meet me – and, coincidentally, Dave. The idea was that he would marry this woman.

He had told me he wanted to get married because he wanted companionship and someone to cook for him – and, I gathered from his letters, he hoped for sex as well. He didn't know any women who would be likely to marry him, so he filled in a form and sent it to a marriage bureau with a cheque and his photograph, the studio portrait taken in 1947 for the cover of his
Autobiography
– the one that had sat, facing a photograph of my mother, close to my bed at boarding school.

I was required to make a good impression on my potential stepmother, and supply coffee and biscuits. I felt extremely uncomfortable. I would have been pleased if, in a more natural way, he had come across a nice woman – one who thoroughly understood what she was letting herself in for – and married her. But this approach to marriage seemed crazy and very unlikely to succeed. As well as supplying a deceptive photograph, he had lied about his age on the form; the woman would be expecting a fit man in his early sixties, instead of a very deaf one, aged seventy-six, who walked with a stick. I felt sorry for the woman, even before I met her.

Dave – who could easily have stayed in his room, or gone out, for an hour – was supportive and amused; we dusted and hoovered the flat and went shopping for biscuits. When the bell rang, Dave lit the gas under the kettle and I opened the door. My father was wearing a white shirt and the tie he had worn on the New Year's Eve before last, his old suit and a tight, beige overcoat with brown leather buttons that was someone else's cast-off – and he wasn't carrying his stick. The woman had a hat and looked cross, and my sense that she disapproved of me, as well as of my father, was intensified by the black-rimmed glasses that rose at a steep angle from the bridge of her nose. The boy was small with an intelligent face and looked awkward in a grey flannel suit with short trousers.

There was no sitting room, so I led them into my bedroom and invited the woman to sit down in my rickety armchair. My father sat on my desk chair and the boy and I sat next to each other on a low sofa. We managed to talk for a minute or two about the GPO sorting office next to our building and how the vans made a lot of noise during the night. Then I found out that the woman lived in Chiswick and my father talked about one of his cousins who had once lived there. The little boy turned his head sideways and stared at my ‘Legalise Cannabis – The Putting Together of the Heads – Hyde Park Stone Free Concert' poster, from the previous summer; Dave and I had discussed taking it down, but had decided that the lettering was so psychedelic that none of our guests would be able to read it.

It was a lugubrious gathering until Dave came in carrying a tray. ‘Don't often have coffee parties.' He beamed at everyone with raised eyebrows. ‘Thought perhaps I should wear an apron. Now, what would sir like? Custard cream or chocolate digestive?' He bent over the little boy who smiled for the first time and took a biscuit. ‘And would sir like coffee, or I have a very good orange squash?' Even the woman smiled a little, while retaining her pained expression.

Somehow, we got through half an hour and then, at last, they left to have lunch at a restaurant in Battersea Park. I shut the door on them and went back to Dave. He looked at me, and started to make a hooting noise and wave his arms about.

I didn't think it was funny. ‘What does he think he's doing? That poor woman and that sweet little boy.'

‘That woman's face. Oh dear, I think I'm going to die.' He held his stomach. ‘I've never seen anything…' – his face was screwed up and the hooting continued – ‘like it… Did you see her when… when… your dad… said how he admired… Lenin?'

‘What's going to happen now? She won't want to marry him.'

He shook his head and went on laughing. ‘And he won't want to marry her. Oh dear… I don't think I'll ever recover.'

We went to the pub and recalled every agonising moment. I relaxed and began to laugh along with Dave; I could see that we had been involved in an exquisite farce, as well as a pathetic tragedy.

When we came back to the flat, my father was sitting alone in the Cresta outside. There had been no plan for him to return. He climbed out of the car, frowning. ‘I've been sitting there for an hour. Was about to give up. Can I come in for a minute?'

I touched his shoulder. ‘What happened?'

‘I couldn't see behind properly in the car park at Battersea. Backed into another car. There was a bit of a bang, and she just got out and walked off with her boy. Didn't say a word.'

‘Oh dear… I'm sorry about that.' I looked at the back of the car. There was a new dent in the bumper.

He glanced at it and shrugged. ‘It's nothing serious. I'm dying for a pee.' Dave and I followed him slowly up the stairs. ‘Ghastly woman, didn't you think? Unsmiling harridan. Wouldn't have married her for all the tea in Joe Lyons.'

‘No, she wasn't my type – or yours, I wouldn't have thought.'

He went into the bathroom and left the door open. Dave disappeared and I hovered outside. He shouted over his shoulder. ‘Nice little boy. Shame about his mother.'

He followed me into the kitchen and sat down. I made some tea and Dave came in and leaned against the wall. My father rolled a cigarette, drank the tea quickly and asked for another cup. He looked at Dave. ‘Well, Dave. A narrow escape, I think, but thank you for doing the coffee and all that… Just sorry I wasted your time.'

Dave smiled. ‘That's all right. It's nice to see you.'

My father looked round at me. ‘I'm meeting another one next week.' He smiled.

25

Awareness Ends

I thought about going to Swan River that summer – I had two weeks' holiday before starting a new job. I decided, with some sadness, that I didn't want to go with Deborah; I didn't want to be alone with her for that long – at the moment, anyway. In the end I couldn't afford to go at all, and went to the Channel Islands with Dave and Pat instead.

When I returned, I found a letter from my half-sister Ann asking me to telephone her; my father had had a stroke and was in a hospital in Aylesbury. I sat on my bed with the letter in my hand. I felt weak and nauseous. I imagined he would soon die, if he hadn't already; the letter was a few days old.

I had contemplated his death often; for most of my life I had thought of it as something that would happen one day but not in any foreseeable future, and had wondered vaguely how I would feel. Since he retired, four years before, my sense of his death as a real possibility had grown gradually until, a year or two ago, I had begun to feel glad that he was alive every time I saw him or heard from him. When I parted from him, usually on his front doorstep, I felt sadness in a tingling wave through my arms and legs, not just because he seemed lonely, but because I was thinking, without willing to, that I might not see him again.

Ann said that he wasn't about to die, but that it was serious – he seemed to have lost some movement in his arms and legs and, though she couldn't define it, his brain appeared to have been affected a little; he didn't seem quite the same, though he could talk and even joke. He had been found lying on the floor in front of the fire by the woman who lived in the front part of the house; she had noticed the light on all night and hadn't heard him walking about as usual. He had been conscious, but hadn't been able to speak, and had been taken to Aylesbury in an ambulance. He had been there a week and had recovered to the point where he thought he should go home, but, Ann said, he certainly couldn't look after himself – not yet, and perhaps not ever.

I told her that I would go to see him the next day, Sunday, and she warned me that the hospital was grim and depressing; it catered for the elderly and incapable, and the mentally ill. She had been trying to get him moved to somewhere nicer and nearer to her.

* * * * *

It was a gabled, late-Victorian building on the edge of the town. A few shrubs flanked a tarmac entrance that led to a grimy swing door. I was taken to the threshold of a badly lit, high-ceilinged room with bare floorboards, in which there was nothing except a row of wooden chairs against each of the longer walls. I saw him immediately. He was sitting very upright on the nearest chair, some feet away, with his hand on his stick and his mouth open. His hair, which for years had been a steely grey, had turned almost white. I looked across the room to see what he was staring at; a young man in a grubby double-breasted jacket was rhythmically flicking his tie, up and down.

He smiled sweetly as soon as he saw me, and made an effort to stand up. I saw that someone had fitted a rubber knob on the end of his stick. ‘So glad to see you.' His voice was hoarse. ‘Thought you'd never come.' He grasped my hands.

‘I'm sorry. I was on holiday. Ann didn't know where I was.' I sat down beside him and pulled the chair round so I could see him properly.

‘I've got to get out of here. It's full of lunatics. Look at him.' He gestured towards the young man playing with his tie. ‘He does that all day long – and I watch him.'

‘Isn't there a television?'

‘No. There's a dormitory, this place… and we eat in there.' He waved his stick towards a pair of swing doors. ‘Horrible food. I've got to get out. It's killing me.'

‘I know Ann's trying to arrange something. I'll talk to her. We'll get you somewhere better as soon as possible.'

‘I want to go home.' He cleared his throat, but his voice remained a loud whisper. ‘I'm all right. I shouldn't be here. Look at these people.' He glanced down the row beyond me. ‘The old ones are senile and the young ones are mad.' He gestured at the other side of the room. I noticed for the first time that on my father's side of the room there were about eight old men staring into space and on the other side a similar number of younger men, many of whom I could see were handicapped.

He put his hand in his jacket pocket and took a long time to pull out his tobacco tin. ‘Could you roll as many as you can with that?' I took it from him. ‘Good chap. I find it difficult at the moment.' The tin was almost full of tobacco. I started rolling and asked him if he had any books. ‘Ann brought some. They're in my cupboard. Find it hard to concentrate if I read for very long. She brought a Simenon. I like that.'

I handed him a cigarette and, with some difficulty and a little swearing, he managed to light it with his Ronson. I told him about my holiday and he seemed interested and told me he had dreamed that he was driving his car in Scotland; he thought he had been on his way to see his friend Robbie Robertson in Montrose. ‘I'd like to be out driving my car… You could call a taxi and we could go home now.'

‘Better not. You need looking after for a bit longer. You don't want all the trouble of cooking and washing up… and all that.' He shrugged with one hand; the other remained on his stick. I tried hard to think of something to talk about and made a comment about Czechoslovakia – the Russians had driven tanks into Prague two days before – though I didn't expect him to know about it.

‘Disgraceful. I'm quite a fan of Dubçek. I'm losing faith in Russia – again. They're not proper communists; they're nearly as bad as Joe Stalin.'

‘How did you know about that?'

‘The
Guardian
. I get it every day. Read all of it before lunch… even the horse racing.' He smiled. ‘Nothing else to do. I read that that awful man Nixon is likely to be the next President of the United States. God help us!… No
Guardian
today, though.' He raised his hand from his knee again. ‘Look at that poor devil.' Across the room a man was screwing up his face and making grunting noises. ‘I'll show you where I sleep.'

I helped him to stand up, and he took my arm as we walked slowly out the way I had come in and along a cream-painted corridor. He slept on an iron bedstead, the second in a row of six with six others facing. An old man was lying in the bed opposite looking at us. My father smiled, let go of my arm and raised his hand in a salute. The man's lips moved; he seemed to be trying to speak but there was no sound. My father turned away and said, ‘Completely senile. Pop off soon, I expect.' He raised his eyebrows without smiling and pointed at the bed at the end of the row, next to his. It had no bedclothes – just a striped cotton sheet which fell to the floor on both sides. ‘Chap in that bed died last night. Woke me up when they came and took him away… Though they tried to be quiet.'

I looked at the bed and back at the old man on the other side of the room.

My father sat down on his bed. ‘Got my children here… some of them anyway.' He laughed. There was a frame on the cupboard beside his bed, with photographs of Ann, Madeline, my elder half-sister, and me on top of the hill in Somerset. ‘Madeline's been to see me. She's marvellous; she knows how to talk to these people.' Madeline and her brother Bob, whose photograph wasn't in the frame, were his children from his first marriage. ‘She'll get me out of here, if Ann doesn't.'

I hadn't seen Madeline for a few years; she was a physiotherapist who worked in a hospital for children with cerebral palsy – my father often described her as a saint.

‘It all has to be kept tidy. The nurses are very bossy.' He opened the cupboard. The previous day's
Guardian
was underneath his washbag

and a small pile of books. On a higher shelf were three one-ounce packets of A1 tobacco, some green Rizla papers, two bananas and a packet of fruit shortcake biscuits.

We wandered back to what was called the day room and soon afterwards I was politely asked to leave; visiting time was over and the patients had to have their tea. My father grasped both my hands. ‘Come back quickly. There's a good chap.'

‘I will.' I kissed his cheek.

‘Ann's got Joey, you know.'

‘Yes, I know.'

‘Bye, old chap.'

I waved as I left the room. He lifted his arm and smiled.

I walked around the ground floor of the building, looking for a doctor, and found myself in a kitchen where a man directed me to the sisters' office. My father's ward sister was a small, energetic woman who readily agreed that he shouldn't be on her ward or in her hospital – which was for the mentally disturbed; they were trying to find him a room in an old people's home, but they were scarce and it could take time. When I asked if she thought he would get back to normal, she said that he had made progress but she wasn't qualified to say more.

I walked slowly towards the station with my eyes on the ground and my hands in my pockets. My eyelids felt heavy and I looked forward to closing them on the train – perhaps I would even sleep, though it was only six o'clock. I wanted him to get back his speed and his energy and his sense of fun – the humour he had shown today had been cynical and at times macabre. But then, a week ago he couldn't speak, and there was nothing funny about that place that wasn't related to madness or death – so perhaps it would all come back.

I phoned Ann when I got home. She had no more idea than I did whether he would get better, but didn't sound very confident. She said that she would keep badgering the county authorities to get him into a normal old people's home. I asked if she and her husband, Adrian, had any money to pay for him to go to a private one. She laughed drily. ‘We've got two sons, David. The only person who might do that is your mother. Anyway, he wouldn't approve; he's a socialist.' She laughed again. I thought of reminding her of something he often used to say – ‘I am not going to suffer from a system I despise' – but decided not to.

I didn't think my mother had any spare money – she was over sixty now and had stopped working – but I phoned to tell her what had happened to my father. She sounded concerned – a little for him, but mostly for me. I told her that I didn't feel like starting my new job – as editor of a small weekly paper called the
Freethinker
– the next day. I had been flattered that the managers of the National Secular Society who published it had placed their faith in me, and had been looking forward to it. But now it seemed like a nuisance; it was just something I had to do. She said that she was sure my father was proud of me and my new job – which I knew to be true – and would hate the idea of his illness sapping my energy.

* * * * *

A few days later my father was moved to an old people's home on the edge of Slough, and I went there the next weekend. He had his own room with white walls, a white bedspread and a window overlooking a large garden. He smiled more readily and was actually pleased with some aspects of the place. He liked some of the nurses and beamed with pride as he told me he had become friendly with a fellow patient, a woman who had read some of the books he had written – men and women were allowed to mix. Later, as we walked slowly along a path outside, he pointed to an old lady knitting on a bench; he put his hand beside his mouth and whispered loudly, ‘My fan.' He nudged me and grinned.

We were told that, as well as the effects of his stroke, which made him clumsy and forgetful, he was suffering from hardening of the arteries which slowed all his movements. For a time I kept faith in the possibility of his getting better – back to normal, back to his home and his car, back to me. But soon, even I couldn't ignore the truth: drugs might keep his arteries open, but the part of his brain that had been destroyed would never grow back.

He became an amiable old man who took a long time – and often needed help – to do simple things such as eat or undo the zip on his trousers; but, as he always had, he continued to think, albeit very slowly, about the things that he thought mattered and to send me his ideas in letters and on postcards. And he took trouble to read the
Freethinker
, particularly my editorials, and send comments and messages of praise. He couldn't work his typewriter and his handwriting became increasingly unclear; lines of words, some of them very faint, meandered up and down the page and crossed over each other. I would examine them under a bright light through a magnifying glass, determined to understand, but frequently frustrated.

I tried to visit him every other weekend through that autumn, winter and spring, and sometimes Dave drove me down in his minivan and came in for a while to see him. As well as his ‘fan', he had other friends at the home – he played cribbage with a man who had fought in the Battle of the Somme – and had visits from his friend the chemist, Wing Commander Hayes and Old Bowen. Now and again he would say that he wanted to go home – the rent was still being paid from his pension – and to drive the Cresta – which Ann was looking after – and when we said he wasn't yet well enough, he would shake his head and quickly seem to forget.

Early in that summer, of 1969, a doctor recommended that he have minor surgery because he was becoming incontinent. There was a risk in such an operation, but otherwise he would soon have to leave the home for a geriatric ward, where dealing with incontinence was part of the routine – and where he would have a bed instead of a room and encounter, once again, those who were crazy as well as old.

* * * * *

On the day after his operation I found him lying between crisp, white sheets in a long, white-painted ward. The room was filled with sunlight, and outside the windows were treetops and a flat blue sky. Two rows of beds, all of them neatly tucked and with the same intense whiteness, stretched towards a vanishing point beyond the furthest wall. Only one bed was occupied, halfway along on the right. His head was on the pillow and his eyes were moving rapidly; his cheeks were sunken and he looked much older and more tired than he had just a week before. He didn't notice me straight away. I leaned over him. ‘Hello. Dad.'