Swan River (3 page)

‘Yes, Dad.' I had heard this before.

The speed and success of this call left my father wondering what to do next. We sat in the A35, deliberating. We could go home or we could visit someone else. I knew we were close to my favourite farmer and his wife.

‘Can we go and see Dor and Narby?'

He turned and smiled at me knowingly; he liked Nobby and Doreen Cox as much as I did. He pushed his hat backwards so that it hit the ceiling of the little car and removed his glasses while continuing to smile to himself. He shut his eyes and pulled his thumb and forefinger across them to his nose; then he opened his eyes, blinked and replaced his glasses.

‘All right, Sunny Jim. There's no sale in it, but it's good customer relations… And we'll get some tea.'

He turned the ignition and flicked the black plastic knob under the windscreen, unnecessarily activating the indicator. With only average grunting and cursing, he performed a seven-point turn in the country lane and we were off down a gradual curving hill with the Chilterns high above the hedge to our right. We passed through a long straggly village without speaking.

‘Could you tell me more about your father?'

He felt inside his overcoat, pulled his handkerchief from the breast pocket of his jacket and blew his nose noisily. Then he held the steering wheel and his handkerchief with his left hand while gently drumming with his fingers and thumb on the black plastic spoke beneath his right hand. The drumming meant that he was thinking.

‘It's a story about my mother as well. There are two sides to every story.'

He replaced his handkerchief, changed down a gear as the car began to slow on a hill, rummaged in his side pocket and handed me a small, shiny tin. ‘Roll me a cigarette; there's a good chap.'

I often did this and took some pride in my prowess. My friends' fathers seemed to smoke ready-made Player's Navy Cut, or not to smoke at all which I found very dull. In the shiny tin was a little machine comprising two rollers with waxed cloth stretched over them. I pulled a Rizla paper from the green packet, placed it in the cloth between the rollers, tugged tobacco from the silver paper packet labelled ‘A1', crammed it down on to the paper, pinched the rollers together, twiddled them so that only the gummed edge of the paper stuck out, licked the gum, twiddled some more, pushed the rollers apart and there was a perfect cigarette.

It took me less than a minute on this occasion. Meanwhile he was telling me that it was hard for him to know whether to begin with his father or his mother. I suggested he start with his father and why he went to Swan River, Manitoba.

‘But that's the end of the story, you see.'

He turned and looked at me, then looked quickly back at the road. I handed him the cigarette which he stuck in his mouth while searching in his jacket pocket for his Ronson.

‘And once he goes, there's no more to tell about him.'

His voice quavered a little and his eyes were watering. I was embarrassed, and part of me wished I hadn't asked the question. He had cried in my presence many times, but we had usually been watching a film, either at the cinema or on television. I put my hand on his forearm, and he lifted his other hand from the steering wheel and put it on top of mine for a few moments.

As we drove towards Nobby Cox's farm he began talking about the house, his grandfather's house, the one Uncle George had told me about, and the people who had lived in it while he had been growing up in the 1890s.

His memories were of a house crammed with people – his grandfather who was called George; his mother, Amelia, usually known as ‘Sis'; his father, Tom; his uncles, George and Ernest; his aunt, Rose – the astonishing La Frascetti – Uncle Ernest's first wife; and two servants, both called Alice. He described most of them at some length. It seemed that he had the fondest memories of his grandfather, his mother and Uncle George. Uncle Ernest and La Frascetti had been intriguing characters, but away from home a lot performing in music halls in Britain and abroad. Last of all he mentioned his little sister, Gladys.

Not only had all these people lived in one house, but numerous relations had dropped in all the time because his grandfather had been the eldest of seven brothers and sisters, most of whom had lived nearby with their spouses, children and grandchildren. The house had been run, somewhat imperiously, by Sis, my father's mother, who had taken charge in her teens and who had deferred to no one except her own father, to whom she, and all the rest of them, had deferred a great deal.

By the time my father had told me all this, including naming and describing all his great uncles and aunts, we had been parked in the lane outside the Coxes' farm for almost an hour. All the time I had expected that the next minute we would get out of the car and change into our wellingtons for the tramp through the Coxes' sticky farmyard, but there was always just one more person, or another detail, that my father had to mention. Eventually we picked our way past derelict farm machinery to the Coxes' back door. It was the kind of home where the front path, the front door and the front room were clean and neat but barely used. My father speculated that the Coxes would have people they regarded as superior – such as their landlord, or an official from the Milk Marketing Board or the vicar – in their front room, but not friends or tradesmen.

The half-hour we spent with the Coxes took my mind off the story of my grandfather Tom, and Uncle George's curious instruction; but later, in bed, I thought about all my father had told me in the car. He had given me a quick but vivid account of his childhood. It seemed a magical time to me with horses instead of cars, gaslight instead of electricity, singsongs around pianos, family parties with numerous aunts and uncles and cousins, and servants to help with the work. And I could imagine the people who had lived in that house in Dalston: the grey-haired, bearded patriarch; the strong young woman; the handsome, moustachioed man who had married her and turned to drink; the two brothers, one slick, talkative and witty, the other introspective and kindly; the young, pretty, servant and the blowsy, larger one. I had had a picture in my mind of the music-hall artiste since Uncle George had first described her; I saw her more fully now: brash, determined, physical and friendly. I could imagine the house as well; it was like ours but on a grander scale and with an extra floor – the basement, where the kitchen was.

There were two things I didn't know, and Uncle George had in different ways asked both questions: ‘Ah! But why did he drink so much? That's the question,' and what had he done in Swan River, Manitoba?

3

Deborah and the Outsiders

Deborah and I had known each other since we were four, when my mother had used money left to her by her father to open a shop selling china and glass two doors from Deborah's father's sweetshop in the High Street. She was one month younger than me, born on the same day as Prince Charles, the little boy on our savings stamps. We had much in common. We both lived above shops in which three of our parents worked long hours, and neither of us had siblings.

We fell into a sister-brother relationship with none of the bad bits; we didn't have to compete for our parents' attention and we could get away from each other if we wanted to. As we grew older and went to different schools, we found friends of our own sex with whom we spent more time, but the closeness remained, even after my mother's shop failed and we moved to our house a quarter of a mile away in Station Road. My mother became the book-keeper at what had been her own shop, which meant that I went on spending time among the china and glass.

We met in the library the next Saturday – it was the first time we had seen each other since Uncle George's funeral – and later we walked through the back streets towards the lock. I told her that I had found Swan River in my father's atlas and that Manitoba seemed to be right in the middle of Canada, with Swan River about halfway up it, on the left-hand side.

At the lock, leaning on one of the beams, staring down at the water, I said, ‘What I really want to know is what Uncle George thinks – thought, rather – I'll find in Swan River.'

‘We. I'm coming too. I am, really.'

‘And when are we going to go?'

She looked up at the sky. ‘When we're eighteen, nineteen, something like that… When we've saved some money.'

This meant seven or eight years' time, and it seemed like for ever. But we solemnly agreed that we would go there together as soon as we had enough money after we left school. Deborah said that this seemed like a Famous Five adventure. To me ‘Two Go to Swan River' was more real than a story in a book or our other wild schemes, because I believed that, one day, it would actually happen.

There was a solitary motor launch waiting to enter the lock, and we helped the lock-keeper open the gates and sluices to let it through; then we walked along the towpath downstream past the bird sanctuary, an ancient wood beside the path where humans were forbidden but which I had frequently entered with Richard and Adam. We were silent most of the time, but spoke whenever one of us had an idea.

I told her that, now that I had time to think about it, Swan River, Manitoba, was beginning to seem more of a worry than a potential adventure. She took my hand, turned to me and said that it couldn't matter that much; Old Tom, as she called my grandfather, was dead; Uncle George had been very old when he made his odd request; it would just be something interesting, rather than worrying or important; besides, she'd come with me, she really would. She put her arm round my shoulder.

The conversation meandered on, confused and inconclusive, as we walked back to the lock and on to my house, which was distinguished from the others in the street by its bright green window-frames and doors, the work of its previous owner. My mother had wanted to paint them white, but my father had said he liked the green – it reminded him of a cricket pavilion near Oxford that he had once slept in – but, to please her, he had painted the picket fence in front of the privet a brilliant white.

The house was three-storey, late-Victorian, end-of-terrace. The front door and the back door, which led into the kitchen, were down a path at the side where there was more green paint. Inside it was neither spacious nor poky; the furniture was mostly old, comfortable rather than elegant. For some reason, perhaps to avoid a disagreement between themselves, my parents had given me the best bedroom, on the first floor at the front. My mother's bedroom was across the landing from mine and my father's was on the floor above. A curiosity that occasionally caused problems was that the bathroom, which contained the lavatory, could only be reached by walking through my mother's room.

Deborah and I found my mother sitting at the kitchen table reading
Woman's Realm.
It was the weekend and she had a relaxed look; she was wearing a loose pink jumper, knitted for her by her mother, with the sleeves pushed up to her elbows, shiny red beads around her neck and no lipstick. I always thought she looked better without lipstick; it was something she put on to go to work and the carmine red clashed with the cool greys and greens in her eyes. She had an intelligent face with a strong jaw and a bony nose; she had been slim and beautiful in her late twenties when my father had first met her. Now, there were gentle wrinkles, but many people still looked at her twice.

A warmth came into her face as she looked up from the magazine. She and Deborah were good friends, to the extent of sharing jokes about me. She asked if Deborah would like to stay for lunch and, without waiting for a reply, told us it wouldn't be ready for a while because it included baked potatoes.

Upstairs, in my room, Deborah asked why Tom Reynolds left his home and wife and child, and I told her what Uncle George had said, that he drank too much and upset my grandmother, and that Uncle George and the others had made him go away.

I got out my secrets notebook and wrote out a list of the people who had lived in the house in Dalston. Remembering the conversation I had had with my father in the car, I knew there were nine, including him and two servants; the names quickly came back to me. We were lying on our stomachs on the carpet under the huge map of the British Isles, with the counties coloured in pink, orange, yellow, green and purple, which my father had framed and given to me as a Christmas present. Deborah stared at my list with her chin on one hand. She giggled. ‘Who is Rose Porter? And what's this mean?' She hesitated ‘La Fras…what?'

‘She was married to Uncle Ernest,' I pointed to his name, ‘and could walk about on her hands while playing the violin with her feet…really!' Deborah was laughing and shaking her head from side to side, her hair swinging and brushing the carpet.

‘Impossible. How could she?'

‘I don't know, but she did. It was her job. She did it in the music halls they had then; you know, an act, like an acrobat but with music.' I found this funny too. ‘That's what they say, Uncle George and Dad.'

Still giggling, Deborah stood up, pushed off her shoes and did a handstand against the wall. I sat cross-legged watching her. She moved one hand away from the wall and then, more tentatively, the other. She took another step, bent her knees to bring her feet closer together and collapsed on to her back with her feet up the wall. ‘See. It's completely impossible.'

I took my shoes off and tried, starting off against the opposite wall. I staggered on my hands and fell in a twisted heap. Deborah picked up my notebook and biro, found my ruler and lay on her front on the carpet again. Very carefully, with her nose an inch or two from the paper, she drew a family tree on the page opposite my list, asking me questions to make sure she got it right. It had three generations – my father's grandfather, George Thompson, was alone at the top; there was a long middle line with five people; before she drew the bottom line, I told her my father had had a sister, Gladys, who had died a long time ago.

‘So she lived there too. There were ten people living there, then.' I nodded. She muttered to herself, ‘Ten people, and two of them were called George and two of them were called Alice.' She used the ruler to draw a horizontal line across the end of the vertical one which led from the ‘x' between ‘Tom Reynolds' and ‘Amelia', and in small, neat writing wrote ‘Clifton' and ‘Gladys' at the bottom.

‘There. Done.' She turned the book round and pushed it over to me. I studied the page carefully. It was all neat and, as far as I knew, accurate. On the middle line, underneath ‘Rose Porter', Deborah had written ‘La Frascetti' and had framed these words with ornate brackets. She had drawn a box in the bottom right corner containing the heading ‘Servants', and had written ‘Big Alice' and ‘Little Alice' underneath.

My mother's voice wafted up from the hall. Lunch was ready.

We ate at the old mahogany table in the dining room which led on to the kitchen at the back of the house. My mother had put the
Nutcracker Suite
, a pile of 78s which dropped on top of each other with a click and a clatter every few minutes, on the huge walnut-veneer radiogram. Deborah sat opposite me. My father sat with his back to our old upright piano at the end away from the kitchen facing my mother. In front of each of us was a white plate with a purple rim containing sliced ham and corned beef and a baked potato. In the middle of the table were a bowl of lettuce, tomato and cucumber salad, a circular, blue-and-white striped butter dish, a contraption made up of two small bottles with curved necks stuck together which dispensed oil and vinegar, bottles of Heinz salad cream and Colman's mustard, jugs containing orange squash and water, a small wooden pepper-grinder and a glass salt cellar with a silver screw-on top.

We all helped ourselves, passing items around politely; my father poured orange squash for me and Deborah and water for himself and my mother, and made great play of grinding a huge quantity of pepper over everything on his plate. My mother, bright and chirpy whenever my friends were around, talked about summer holidays; we were going to Ilfracombe again, and Deborah was going to Saundersfoot. The merits of different types of caravan were discussed and how both caravan sites had games rooms with ping-pong. My father mentioned the fly fishing in north Devon, and told us he preferred chess to ping-pong as a rainy-day activity.

When the first course was over, everyone ignored my mother's instruction to stay seated while she fetched the pudding; instead we all stood up and carried everything into the kitchen. The next course was tinned peaches with raspberry-ripple ice-cream. While my mother was dishing this out, Deborah asked my father about La Frascetti; was it really true what I had told her, that she could walk about on her hands while playing the violin with her feet?

He smiled and leant across the table towards her. ‘I saw her do it many times. She used to practise in our house, in the front room, in the hall, on the stairs. The high point of her act was walking on her hands downstairs while playing a popular tune with her feet. Later I saw her performing at the Hackney Empire, the Britannia in Hoxton and …' He paused and stared at the floor, trying hard to remember. At last it came to him, ‘Collins's Music Hall in Islington. But she went all over the world, America, Russia, Europe. She was a big act and earned lots of money. My uncle Ernest was her manager for a while, and then became part of the act. I remember seeing him on stage at Collins's, dressed in a top hat and cloak, while she did her acrobatics wearing spangly short dresses and tights like the Television Toppers.'

He took a spoonful of peaches and ice-cream. Deborah and I both spoke at once. ‘But how did she do it? Hold the violin…' ‘Could everybody see her bottom?'

My mother laughed. My father ignored me and continued speaking to Deborah. ‘She held the bow between her big toe and the next one, and the violin was fastened to her other foot with a strap.'

Deborah put her fingers in her hair and frowned. ‘I can't imagine it.'

‘Well, she stood on her hands with her knees bent and her feet above her bottom, which you could see, incidentally, although she wore silk knickers with sequins all over them,' he turned quickly to me with a smile and back to Deborah again, ‘and somehow managed to push the bow across the strings. It was remarkable to watch.' He took another spoonful. ‘Although, when I first saw her at home, I was small and thought nothing of it. I grew up with Rose walking about on her hands in the house, and it didn't seem odd until I got older and my friends started wanting to come round and have a look.'

My mother turned the pile of 78s over and Tchaikovsky came quietly from the corner of the room again. Deborah and I had second helpings of ice-cream.

‘How did she actually play the notes?' Deborah wrinkled her nose and looked at my father.

This provoked a long discussion involving my mother as well, because my father didn't really know the answer and my mother was the musical one. They decided between them that La Frascetti's violin must have been tuned to four particular notes and that she had probably played the key notes in a popular tune or chorus; even my father admitted that it was unlikely that she could actually hold down the strings with her toes while standing on her hands. As far as my father could remember from the four or so times that he had seen her perform in public, she had always had musical accompaniment; certainly drum rolls and clashing cymbals at the climactic moments; on some occasions he had seen Uncle Ernest playing a xylophone and there had usually been a small orchestra in the pit at the music hall.

My mother had a theory about black notes. She switched off Tchaikovsky and tried various old tunes on the piano to see if any contained just four of them. My father kept whistling something which he said was called ‘The Belle of New York'; my mother found this hard to play but got it eventually. It did indeed contain four black notes, and they both got very excited, convinced that these were the very notes that La Frascetti had played all those years ago. My mother played it over and over, hitting the black notes higher up the piano to simulate our long-forgotten ancestor bowing her violin with her feet, while my father drummed on a table mat with two bendy knives.

Eventually my mother went to the kitchen, saying that she didn't need any help with the washing-up. Deborah and I followed her, grabbed dishcloths and dried up, and my father came in to put the plates and cutlery away, before going off to the sitting room for his afternoon nap.

Deborah and I went back up to my room. We stood up for a while, staring down at the family tree on the floor. I said, ‘You ought to put “Sis” in brackets underneath “Amelia”. That's what they all called her.'