“To Terry and Andrew,
With love from your polar bear father, Peter. Keep happy.”
Night after night I asked Terry about him, and night after night under the blankets he’d tell me the story again, about how he’d gone into the dressing room and found our father sitting there in his polar bear costume with his head off (if you know what I mean), all hot and sweaty. Terry said he had a very round, very smiley face, and that he laughed just like a bear would laugh, a sort of deep bellow of a laugh – when he’d got over the surprise that is. Terry described him as looking like a “giant pixie in a bearskin”.
For ever afterwards I always held it against Terry that he never took me with him that day down to the dressing room to meet my polar bear father. I was so envious. Terry had a memory of him now, a real memory. And I didn’t. All I had were a few words and a signature on a theatre programme from someone I’d never even met, someone who to me was part polar bear, part actor, part pixie – not at all easy to picture in my head as I grew up.
Picture another Christmas Eve fourteen years later. Upstairs, still at the bottom of my cupboard, my polar bear father in the magazine in the Start-Rite shoebox; and with him all our accumulated childhood treasures: the signed programme, a battered champion conker (a sixty-fiver!), six silver ball bearings, four greenish silver threepenny bits (Christmas pudding treasure trove), a Red Devil throat pastille tin with three of my milk teeth cushioned in yellow cotton wool, and my collection of twenty-seven cowrie shells gleaned over many summers from the beach on Samson in the Scilly Isles.
Downstairs, the whole family were gathered in the sitting room: my mother, Douglas, Terry and my two sisters (half-sisters really, but of course no one ever called them that), Aunty Betty, now married, with twin daughters, my cousins, who were truly awful – I promise you. We were decorating the tree, or rather the twins were fighting over every single dingly-dangly glitter ball, every strand of tinsel. I was trying to fix up the Christmas tree lights which, of course, wouldn’t work – again – whilst Aunty Betty was doing her best to avert a war by bribing the dreadful cousins away from the tree with a Mars bar each. It took a while, but in the end she got both of them up onto her lap, and soon they were stuffing themselves contentedly with Mars bars. Blessed peace.
This was the very first Christmas we had had the television. Given half a chance we’d have had it on all the time. But, wisely enough I suppose, Douglas had rationed us to just one programme a day over Christmas. He didn’t want the Christmas celebrations interfered with by “that thing in the corner”, as he called it. By common consent, we had chosen the Christmas Eve film on the BBC at five o’clock.
Five o’clock was a very long time coming that day, and when at last Douglas got up and turned on the television, it seemed to take for ever to warm up. Then, there it was on the screen: Great Expectations by Charles Dickens. The half-mended lights were at once discarded, the decorating abandoned, as we all settled down to watch in rapt anticipation. Maybe you know the moment: Young Pip is making his way through the graveyard at dusk, mist swirling around him, an owl screeching, gravestones rearing out of the gloom, branches like ghoulish fingers whipping at him as he passes, reaching out to snatch him. He moves through the graveyard timorously, tentatively, like a frightened fawn. Every snap of a twig, every barking fox, every aarking heron, sends shivers into our very souls.
Suddenly, a face! A hideous face, a monstrous face, looms up from behind a gravestone. Magwitch, the escaped convict, ancient, craggy and crooked, with long white hair and a straggly beard. A wild man with wild eyes, the eyes of a wolf.
The cousins screamed in unison, long and loud, which broke the tension for all of us and made us laugh. All except my mother.
“Oh my God,” she breathed, grasping my arm. “That’s your father! It is. It’s him. It’s Peter.”
All the years of pretence, the whole long conspiracy of silence, were undone in that one moment. The drama on the television paled into sudden insignificance. The hush in the room was palpable.
Douglas coughed. “I think I’ll fetch some more logs,” he said. And my two half-sisters went out with him, in solidarity I think. So did Aunty Betty and the twins; and that left my mother, Terry and me alone together.
I could not take my eyes off the screen. After a while I said to Terry, “He doesn’t look much like a pixie to me.”
“Doesn’t look much like a polar bear either,” Terry replied. At Magwitch’s every appearance I tried to see through his make-up (I just hoped it was make-up!) to discover how my father really looked. It was impossible. My polar bear father, my pixie father, had become my convict father.
Until the credits came up at the end my mother never said a word. Then all she said was, “Well, the potatoes won’t peel themselves, and I’ve got the Brussels sprouts to do as well.” Christmas was a very subdued affair that year, I can tell you.
They say you can’t put a genie back in the bottle. Not true. No one in the family ever spoke of the incident afterwards – except Terry and me, of course. Everyone behaved as if it had never happened. Enough was enough. Terry and I decided it was time to broach the whole forbidden subject with our mother, in private. We waited until the furore of Christmas was over, and caught her alone in the kitchen one evening. We asked her point-blank to tell us about him, our “first” father, our “missing” father.
“I don’t want to talk about him,” she said. She wouldn’t even look at us. “All I know is that he lives somewhere in Canada now. It was another life. I was another person then. It’s not important.” We tried to press her, but that was all she would tell us.
Soon after this I became very busy with my own life, and for some years I thought very little about my convict father, my polar bear father. By the time I was thirty I was married with two sons, and was a teacher trying to become a writer, something I had never dreamt I could be.
Terry had become an actor, something he had always been quite sure he would be. He rang me very late one night in a high state of excitement. “You’ll never guess,” he said. “He’s here! Peter! Our dad. He’s here, in England. He’s playing in Henry IV, Part II in Chichester. I’ve just read a rave review. He’s Falstaff. Why don’t we go down there and give him the surprise of his life?”
So we did. The next weekend we went down to Chichester together. I took my family with me. I wanted them to be there for this. He was a wonderful Falstaff, big and boomy, rumbustious and raunchy, yet full of pathos. My two boys (ten and eight) kept whispering at me every time he came on. “Is that him? Is that him?” Afterwards we went round to see him in his dressing room. Terry said I should go in first, and on my own. “I had my turn a long time ago, if you remember,” he said. “Best if he sees just one of us to start with, I reckon.”
My heart was in my mouth. I had to take a very deep breath before I knocked on that door. “Enter.” He sounded still jovial, still Falstaffian. I went in.
He was sitting at his dressing table in his vest and braces, boots and britches, and humming to himself as he rubbed off his make-up. We looked at each other in the mirror. He stopped humming, and swivelled round to face me. For some moments I just stood there looking at him. Then I said, “Were you a polar bear once, a long time ago in London?”
“Yes.”
“And were you once the convict in Great Expectations on the television?”
“Yes.”
“Then I think I’m your son,” I told him.
There was a lot of hugging in his dressing room that night, not enough to make up for all those missing years, maybe. But it was a start.
My mother’s dead now, bless her heart, but I still have two fathers. I get on well enough with Douglas; I always have done in a detached sort of way. He’s done his best by me, I know that; but in all the years I’ve known him he’s never once mentioned my other father. It doesn’t matter now. It’s history best left crusted over, I think.
We see my polar bear father – I still think of him
as that – every year or so, whenever he’s over from Canada. He’s well past eighty now, still acting for six months of every year – a real trouper. My children and my grandchildren always call him Grandpa Bear because of his great bushy beard (the same one he grew for Falstaff!), and because they all know the story of their grandfather, I suppose.
Recently I wrote a story about a polar bear. I can’t imagine why. He’s upstairs now reading it to my smallest granddaughter. I can hear him a-snarling and a-growling just as proper polar bears do. Takes him back, I should think. Takes me back, that’s for sure.
go west, young man
As I have already said, moving to the West Country all those years ago proved to be a significant moment in my writing life, a moment when I was just beginning to find my own voice as a storyteller. Looking back now, I can see that until then my writing efforts had been very much plot driven, with me doing the driving. I was making things happen, arranging matters all too conveniently, controlling events too tightly, like some god of the ancient Greeks, unwilling to allow the story to unfold organically, to give free rein to the characters I had created and, more importantly, still unwilling to grant power to the landscape and history and culture that had shaped them in the first place. I had used background in the same manner as a jobbing portrait painter without grasping that my characters had been shaped by this background, that it really had made them who they were.
I suppose I hadn’t realized this because I had not lived it myself, and that was because I had never stayed long enough in one place to comprehend just how powerful and profound this sense of place, of belonging, might be in our lives. Now I found myself immersed in the same landscape, in the same remote rural culture that had inspired Henry Williamson, where Tarka the otter had cavorted and gambolled along the banks of the River Torridge, which I could now hear from my bedroom window, which I saw in flood and drought, where I went walking and fishing, watched herons lift off and kingfishers flash by. I worked in the fields with the farmers, did my share of haymaking and mucking out and lambing, rang the bells in church, listened to songs and stories in the pub in Iddesleigh, became part of the bustle and banter of the market day in Hatherleigh, spent evenings by the fire, the wind roaring about the chimney, rain lashing the windows, read the poems of my writing neighbours and friends, Ted Hughes and Sean Rafferty, who like me had breathed in this place and allowed it to become a part of them.
Three books grew out of this burgeoning sense of belonging. The first was simply a diary of the farm on which I worked. With Ted Hughes writing a poem for each month, I followed the fickle fortunes of a small Devon family farm, recorded the constant struggle through the seasons, the triumph of a harvest done, the disappointment of a calf born dead. I called it All Around the Year. It was a book that made me look and listen, made me ask why, made me begin to understand, made me long to belong. From all this there came War Horse, a novel of the First World War, set on a farm in my village of Iddesleigh and on the Western Front. I discovered there were three octogenarians living in the village who had been in the First World War, two with cavalry regiments. There had been, they told me, a sale of horses outside the pub in 1914, when the army came looking to buy sturdy farm horses. People still remembered that the army had paid top prices for the best horses. Millions of horses went off to that war and very few returned. And many of those that survived the horrors of mud and shells and disease were sold off to French butchers in 1918 – a more profitable way of disposal, I suppose. And when, some twenty years later, I came to write Private Peaceful, the story of two brothers who are bullied by the squire in the village to “volunteer” in the First World War, it seemed the most natural thing in the world for the brothers to grow up in my cottage, down my deep lane, fish in my river, go to my church and my pub. By now I could feel, if not a sense of belonging, at least a kinship for Devon in my bones, in my being.
Wherever I went in the West Country now I felt a fascination for the communities I came across and the stories that had made them, stories that seemed to emerge from the rocks and caves, from the moors and tors. We holidayed in a cottage in Zennor, the same cottage below the Eagle’s Nest where Katherine Mansfield had written in her leaky bedroom (the roof still leaked), where D. H. Lawrence had written too. We traipsed across the high moors, came across stories of the ghosts of trapped tin miners, knockers they were called, still lurking down in the lodes and caverns that honeycombed the cliffs, met a white horse in a dense fog who passed us by in the bracken looking at us as if we were intruders into the world in which he lived. I sat down the next day after this strange meeting and wrote a short story called “The White Horse of Zennor”.
Scilly beckoned then – as far west as you can go in England – that scattering of islands stranded out in the Atlantic beyond Land’s End. “The Fortunate Isles” they call them, and so they are, a place of wild beauty, of white beaches and green sea, oystercatchers and gannets, perfect for family holidays, which is why we went there. I did not go looking for stories. I never do, but I do go to places where they might find me – on Scilly the story of poor, benighted Samson Island where hunger and despair had driven the people away, of stranded whales and turtles, of wrecks and pirates and of ancient legends too. Fishermen on Scilly talk of a warning bell that tolls under the sea in the fog off the Eastern Isles. One of these now uninhabited islands lies there in the sea like some sleeping warrior king waiting through the centuries to awake when his time comes – to me he’s always been King Arthur. Tennyson himself came here looking for inspiration for his Arthurian poems. As we know, he found it. So did I. I called mine Arthur, High King of Britain. There was Why the Whales Came too, and The Wreck of the Zanzibar and The Sleeping Sword. All of these Scillonian stories of mine grew out of the lives of the people who have lived and belonged on Scilly and who still live there, still belong there, as I do – but only in part.
And that in a sense is the strangest and saddest aspect of all of this. By writing about a place I know and love as I do, I can imagine myself to be part of this place, its past, its landscape, its people. As I am writing I can believe I belong, but once the story is written, that sense of kinship quickly disappears. Each time, I realize, has been an illusion, a necessary illusion, but a mirage all the same; for the truth is that I have perhaps been in love with these places, but I do not belong and have never belonged, not really. I am an observer, an interloper, an outsider looking in, finally just a writer and a storyteller. But that’s all right. That’s what I do. And what I do, I am, in part.
In one sense only I feel I have achieved some belonging. I know it lying under the stars on a summer’s night. I know it watching buzzards floating over the valley where I live in Devon. I know it walking along the river bank and seeing a salmon rise. I have written often about this elemental connection and empathy with the natural world in Why the Whales Came, in Kensuke’s Kingdom and Little Foxes. It is a learnt belonging, from Ted Hughes, from Wordsworth, from children who stop to gaze, to breathe in the world about them, to feel part of it, as in The Silver Swan.
the silver swan
The silver swan, who living had no note,
When death approached, unlocked her silent throat:
Leaning her breast against the reedy shore
Thus sung her first and last, and sung no more.
Orlando Gibbons
A swan came to my loch one day, a silver swan. I was fishing for trout in the moonlight. She came flying in above me, her wings singing in the air. She circled the loch twice, and then landed, silver, silver in the moonlight.
I stood and watched her as she arranged her wings behind her and sailed out over the loch, making it entirely her own. I stayed as late as I could, quite unable to leave her.
I went down to the loch every day after that, but not to fish for trout, simply to watch my silver swan.
In those early days I took great care not to frighten her away, keeping myself still and hidden in the shadow of the alders. But even so,
she knew I was there – I was sure of it.
Within a week I would find her cruising along the lochside, waiting for me when I arrived in the early mornings. I took to bringing some bread crusts with me. She would look sideways at them at first, rather disdainfully. Then, after a while, she reached out her neck, snatched them out of the water, and made off with them in triumph.
One day I dared to dunk the bread crusts for her, dared to try to feed her by hand. She took all I offered her and came back for more. She was coming close enough now for me to be able to touch her neck. I would talk to her as I stroked her. She really listened, I know she did.
I never saw the cob arrive. He was just there swimming beside her one morning out on the loch. You could see the love between them even then. The princess of the loch had found her prince. When they drank they dipped their necks together, as one. When they flew, their wings beat together, as one.
She knew I was there, I think, still watching. But she did not come to see me again, nor to have her bread crusts. I tried to be more glad for her than sad for me, but it was hard.
As winter tried, and failed, to turn to spring, they began to make a home on the small island, way out in the middle of the loch. I could watch them now only through my binoculars. I was there every day I could be – no matter what the weather.
Things were happening. They were no longer busy just preening themselves, or feeding, or simply gliding out over the loch taking their reflections with them. Between them they were building a nest – a clumsy messy excuse for a nest it seemed to me – set on a reedy knoll near the shore of their island.
It took them several days to construct. Neither ever seemed quite satisfied with the other’s work. A twig was too big, or too small, or perhaps just not in the right place. There were no arguments as such, as far as I could see. But my silver swan would rearrange things, tactfully, when her cob wasn’t there. And he would do the same when she wasn’t there.
Singing for Mrs Pettigrew: A Story Maker's Journey Page 8