The Triple Goddess (126 page)

‘Only that morning we had received a photograph that Grandpa had mailed us a month before: it had been taken at his send-off in Tashkent, and the picture was of Pappy, whom we did not recognize, wearing a chapan robe and doppy head dress, trappings which he would not shed along with his latest persona until he was able to relax in the privacy of his cabin, and wash the dust of the journey off his feet. My grandfather was holding a kebab in one hand, the gift of a child, which did not offend his rule because it would be eaten, and waving to a multitude of friends with the other.

‘Despite the image of the person in the photo, the man walking down the gangplank at Southampton was very much a Bulstrode. We watched from the quayside as he emerged from his cabin, beaming and proud, and was escorted down the ramp by a uniformed officer at the request of the captain, whom he’d befriended at the dinner table. As always, Pappy was carrying his own worn leather bag, holding it high at his side in that distinctive manner of his, as if he were the Chancellor of the Exchequer on his way to deliver the budget speech. He was dapper in herringbone jacket, knitted tie, and pressed spongebag trousers; the ensemble was topped with a fedora perched at a rakish angle, and he was whistling the song Lilliburlero, and twirling a Malacca cane with the hand that we had last seen clutching a skewer of meat.

‘As a child, I, the young Bernard Bulstrode, who had never been anywhere more exciting than nowhere exciting, eagerly awaited the postcards that Pappy sent me from places that he passed through or stopped off at on his way to whatever outlandish destination he was making his circuitous route to—Grandpa specialized in what he euphemistically called “going the long way round”, which often meant taking detours in the wrong direction via other continents and subcontinents, such as Spain, which he had no cause to be in—where there would often be no postcards for sale, no stamps, and no post offices.

‘On the cards would be written a brief but solicitous message in a neat hand, closely written into the corners and around the description on the back of whatever was depicted, so as to make the most of the limited space. Grandpa was scrupulous about sending these communications, knowing how much I looked forward to receiving them. Photographs of markets, and squares, ports, coastlines, castles, and people: all were so sharply defined...one forgave the Kodachrome enhancements...that I felt I had been there myself, absorbed the atmosphere, and gained insight into the culture. On some of the views of towns or villages, Grandpa marked an
x
showing where he had stayed, or a point of special interest.

‘Some of these cards were miniature works of art, such as the one of an Andalusian woman—this would have been during the Spanish Interruption—holding a prayer book, whose flounced black silk dress and black lace mantilla were genuine material applications on the card; as were another fan-holding Málaga woman’s bodice and tiered frilly blue cinch-waisted flamenco costume edged with gold, and the red flower decoration under the comb in her hair; and a girl in Tangier’s white braided tasselled headdress, and yellow shawl, and red and white striped skirt, which were embroidered in real silk thread.

‘Every foreign postmark was a miracle to me, and each stamp provided much greater than its nominal face value—how Pappy came by his rare collectable items I never did find out—by transporting me to its source without the need for any intervention by postal services. The shapes, colours, and sizes of them said a great deal about the national character: those from the African republics and Pacific islands were big and cheerfully gaudy, bursting in my mind in expanding circles like fireworks. The ones from Communist countries, showing the heads of dour dictators and military men, were small and drab and symbolic of repression.

‘With the help of my Philip’s atlas, and globe, I followed Pappy’s progress from continent to continent, across around and along and through oceans, seas, gulfs, lakes, straits, channels, and canals. There were of course also many mountains, deserts, plains, islands, isthmuses, and marshes; but water was always dominant in my mind’s eye as the encapsulating force and environmental element, especially salt water, and where I didn’t have details—a postcard is only a postcard—I supplied them for myself. I saw smokestack steamers, blaring tugs, sleek yachts, galliots, ketches, dhows, sampans, and fishing smacks. I saw the bows of funnelled liners and ships, as they cleaved waters that were sometimes frictionless and calm, and sometimes in a rolling swell or hill-sized waves, and sometimes violent rough with white-crested combers.

‘My visions never became memories, or paled or receded, but remained as keen as the moment they seared my mind.

‘Wherever Pappy, and therefore I also, travelled were paradises free of persecution, unjust laws, war, hunger, cruelty, poverty, and destitution...and domestic argument and tension; and boredom. It was as if every departure and arrival, every sun-filled harbour and historical scene, had been created by Pappy for me alone—though I believe the mailing of these cards and the impression they created on me was as important to the sender as it was to the recipient. From across the world my grandfather and I were bonded by these images, photographs and pictures that never seemed to have been made by any person, but to exist of their own right as tiny squares cut from the tapestry of life—which, by the time they arrived, like old daguerrotypes had acquired a patina of truth and permanence that had not been inherent at the moment of their creation.

‘Each year as the Margate hiatus time approached, the only plain white postcards Grandpa ever sent were delivered, addressed to my mother. They recorded facts only: the details of Pappy’s return to England; and they were written in heavily impressed black ballpoint, instead of the usual blue biro or brown ink of his carefully preserved fountain-pen—sometimes Pappy put his cards in envelopes, if he wanted more unaddressed space to write on, and which would not be obscured by a postmark—so as to ensure that the writing was not indistinct or blurred by rain.

‘Whatever multifarious delays might affect my grandfather’s other communications, these white postcards invariably came exactly a week before he was due; when our house cat, who always knew when the postman would have something from Pappy in his bag, would be inside the front door with her tail twitching, waiting for it to come through the letter-box at seven o’clock in the morning, so that she could watch it until someone came to pick it off the mat.

‘There was never any other mail on such days.

‘If Grandpa he was en route across Europe, the card might read, “Arriving Waterloo 16.04.” This meant that, from the Gare de l’Est where the Orient Express came in, he would cross to the Gare du Nord and take the train to Calais, and the ferry to Dover; he could have taken the train on to London St Pancras, but it made him feel lonely not to be met upon re-entering his own country and having to travel onward alone.

‘Or, if his return direction was from the west, the card might say, “Docking Southampton RMS
Queen Mary
10.00 a.m.” Why my grandfather should be aboard a Cunard White Star transatlantic liner remains a mystery that I never felt it necessary to solve—as I said, Pappy moved in mysterious ways.

‘Grandpa would also send a confirming telegram, unnecessarily, because there wasn’t a post office in the world that would dare to delay or lose a missive of his.

‘The reason for these strict communications was indication of, not a double standard, but a strange incongruity in my grandfather’s personality: he wanted my mother to drive down from Yorkshire in order to meet and collect him either from Dover or Southhampton in her car, and remove him from the ongoing company of those who had shared his final transportation on the last leg of his homeward journey.

‘These people for some reason Pappy considered to be in a lowly category quite separate and distinct from everyone else he encountered in his travels. The incoming tourists amongst them—it never occurred to Pappy to think of himself as a sightseer when he was abroad, only as a citizen of the world, an eager participant and engager in life—he regarded as an aimless, selfish type, bent on frivolous amusement; individuals who lacked self-worth and were incapable of formulating and adhering to any consistent philosophy of life. Returning holiday-makers to him were all guilty of disloyalty to their country. Those travelling on business were traitors.

‘Always there was a temporary gloom, or mild depression, that settled upon my grandfather when he came home from far-off places, which made him cranky at first. He was aware of it, and his demand that my mother and I should meet him was evidence of his desire that we should help ease his brief return to the familiar world of his own upbringing, when his own character was not fully formed.

‘Upon returning for his annual visit, our Ulysses would stay with us for a week where we lived in a maisonette near Bridlington, at my insistence taking my bed while I bunked on the lumpy divan in the living room: this was years before my father became successful in his business affairs, and we moved into our ugly but commodious residence with its tastelessly expensive furnishings—my father liked to call the shots in everything—in Bradford.

‘Then we would make the journey up to London, and deposit Pappy on the train at Charing Cross station for Margate; where Mrs Bayliss would be waiting for him, having received an equally emphatic notification of Pappy’s imminence…which in her case was brought to her by her dachshund, an animal as prescient as our cat, who would watch her as she read it aloud with its head on one side and an ear cocked.

‘We were never introduced to the good Mrs Bayliss, or spoke to her on the telephone, and knew only that she ran the Cockleshell Bed and Breakfast, and drove a green Ford Zephyr, in which in the time-honoured manner she would be waiting to greet Grandpa off the train.

‘From Dover or Southampton Dock to our house up north; from home to London Charing Cross; Margate station to and from the Bayliss residence; from Charing Cross station to Dover or Folkestone ferry terminus—after dropping her father off my mother and I took the opportunity to stay in London overnight in a Paddington hotel, so that we could have a pre-theatre dinner and attend a West End show—those were the only journeys that Pappy would ever consent to make in a car driven only by his youngest daughter or Mrs B…he did not–would not drive himself.

‘As he sat in the front of our Morris Minor while my mother drove, Pappy would invite me, from where I sat in the back seat, to lay my finger in the deep lateral crease that he had at the base of his freshly barbered closely cropped skull. Then he would snap his head back and catch my finger, with a belly laugh that deafened us in the confined space.

‘I could tell that Grandpa, who began to recover his equanimity as soon as we were away from the arrivals area, enjoyed our drives, from the way he looked at the scenery with a delight that amazed me, given how humdrum it must have seemed compared to where he’d just come from. And when we arrived at our destination he would turn to my mother with delight, and exclaim, “Didn’t hit a thing! Didn’t hit a thing!”

‘Although Pappy felt for my mother and me a kindness that he never evinced towards his wife and other children, it did not matter to me that the conversations he and I had at home, though not strained, never matched the distant intimacy of those postcards and occasional letters from abroad. For our relationship was forged in hemispheres, not houses, and had no need of strengthening. When he departed on his next consecutively lettered tour, seeing him go was more of a hello than a goodbye.

‘Cecil “Pappy” Bulstrode kept travelling to the end, and died in the Wallis and Futuna Islands. If an accident had to be the cause, it seemed fitting that a man like him did not go to meet his Maker after falling under a Clapham omnibus, or choking on a huss bone on the seafront in Margate. And so it was, for at age eighty-six Pappy was pierced through the heart by an errant harpoon, off a reef where he was participating in a barracuda hunt with a group of natives in loincloths. Pappy was wearing one himself, and could not be identified until those with him did a roll-call.

‘King George the Fifth’s last words, “Bugger Bognor”, which were spoken in reply to his physician’s assurance that “Your Majesty will soon be well enough to visit Bognor,” were reported in
The Times
as “How is the Empire?”.

‘Cecil Bulstrode’s farewell statement as he was carried ashore, though not pungent or trenchant, or rewritten in a hokey phoney version, was reported as: “Give my regrets to Zanzibar, and scatter my ashes over Zululand.”

‘And so it was, with Zululand, posthumously, that Pappy concluded his appreciation of the thick alphabet soup of nations; which I considered, and I think he would have agreed, was a perfect way for a life to end in an imperfect world.’

Chapter Ten

‘Turning now and at last,’ said Snipcock, ‘to the subject of my older post-crisis self, when I finally was able to make use of the latent gifts with which I was endowed, people who knew me were startled when I became obsessed with the art of cooking. I’ve often wondered myself what attracted me to it, unless it was the subconscious desire to indulge a passion for another kind of exploration to that favoured by my grandfather.

‘For I was aware that, after all I had experienced vicariously through Pappy Bulstrode’s postcards, no pleasure that I could derive from travel would compare with what was already within me. Indeed, when I was invited to be a guest on
Desert Island Discs
, the longest-running radio programme, devised by Roy Plomley, and was asked what single musical recording, and what book in addition to the Bible and Shakespeare, and what luxury item, I should like to have with me if I were to be marooned on an island, my answer was: nothing at all.