by Stuart Ayris
To kick off, I forgave Paul McCartney for The Frog Chorus and I felt a little lighter almost immediately. Just that little bit of forgiveness started the process. I then forgave Graham Gooch for going on the rebel cricket tour of South Africa. This was swiftly followed by forgiving Joseph Heller for everything other than Catch-22, Kevin Costner for The Bodyguard and Bob Dylan for Under the Red Sky.
Following these forgivings, I reflected upon how much better I felt in my soul. And through this process, my regard for Paul McCartney, Graham Gooch, Joseph Heller, Kevin Costner and Bob Dylan had somehow intensified.
I then began to believe that the act of forgiveness not only lightens your own burden but enhances your view of those that you have forgiven. Maybe that’s true. Maybe that’s just me. These were the easy forgivings.
I found it simple to forgive misjudgement. It sat well with me. Forgiving harm knowingly done was going to be so much more difficult. This led me initially to Diego Maradona and then to Margaret Thatcher. It was like a psychological equivalent of Dante’s nine circles of hell. It was about damage done and how you try to minimise the effect of it upon the rest of your life. The moment is horrid but it need only be a moment. With forgiveness, I was realising, you could regain control, withdraw the dagger from the wound, staunch the bleeding and continue in goodness.
Diego Maradona. The hand of god. Peter Reid and Terry Fenwick with concrete boots and Peter Shilton despairing. The greatest player in the world at the time not only felt the need to cheat but to claim the hand that punched the ball into the goal was manoeuvred by an all powerful deity. He not only betrayed his unbelievable talent but he betrayed the beautiful game itself. He robbed me of a dream and he broke the hearts of children (admittedly only English ones for which he probably had scant regard.)
When genius has to resort to theft, it is a woeful time indeed. I remember feeling so angry at the time, not just that England had lost, but that a single man had deceived us all. But I now forgave him. He did what he did in a fleeting moment. And once you set out on the road of deception, it’s so hard to come back. I should know. Thus was my dalliance with football over.
On the subject of being robbed, how about being robbed of the chance to work, the chance to hope, the chance to feel part of this world?
It was the voice that first alerted me to what was to come, that strident, man-woman-man voice whose dialect was from no place I know - the villain that Doctor Who never faced - perhaps the only one that could have truly left him floundering. Margaret Thatcher. Mrs Thatcher. Prime Minister. I guess to this day you do not truly know what you did to the likes of those such as I. I like to think you were maybe just dragged along on the tide of change, of the charge to ‘progress’ - first female head of the government and all that.
But when you decided the Falkland Islands were worth killing for, well that is when I lost faith in lots of things. I felt alone in my own country, cast aside by my own people and condemned by my own naïve sense of what is right in this world. You made me a stranger and you perpetuated my alienation. John Lennon would have been appalled. William Blake would have screamed at you, defied you and been undoubtedly, violently shunned by you. But I had neither the courage of the former nor the visions of the latter.
I just sat in my room during the eighties, wherever that room be, and shook, regaled from within and without by hurt, pure hurt. You took away my years. Yet I forgive you. I forgive you. I forgive you.
As I thunk my thoughts so I began to lose a hold upon them. I knew they were drawing me with inexorable beauty to the source of it all, the pivotal moment that led to all that was to follow. My thoughts slipped and slupped upon the muddy waterslide of my rundown holiday park memory, leading as they should, to the reservoir of my pain. The Monster of Ford's. My dad’s brother. My uncle. I could not deny that it was he that had to be forgiven for my soul to move on.
But how do you forgive a man who raped you when you were three years old?
How do you even begin?
It was not a trauma that I could sit at home and think about. I felt ill at ease bringing a memory as sordid as that not just into my house, but into Tollesbury itself. It’s not something to which this corner of my earth should ever be subjected. I would have to travel where Uncle Len lay.
Well if you ever plan to leave Tollesbury
Take the 91A to Witham from the square
Close your eyes and you’ll be there.
Get the train from Witham to Shenfield
Taxi then to Brentwood, pay the fare
Close your eyes and you’ll be there.
Train goes from Brentwood to Harold Wood
Stops at Gidea Park, all is good
You’ll see nothing much but Gallows Corner roundabout
Tesco Superstore, don’t forget The Plough
Raphael’s Park, Marshalls Park, train slowing down right now
Now you cross over to platform four
Fall off the train, run down the stairs
Close your eyes and you’ll be there.
Train goes from Romford to Upminster
Slip your ticket in the slot, out you go
You’re out on the street, not far from the cemetery
Park to the right, shops to the left
Left right, left right, darling come along with me,
You get on the bus number three-seven-oh
Your childhood is about to be laid bare
Close your eyes and you’ll be there.
And there I was at the gates of Upminster Cemetery, the gates to Heaven, the gates to Hell; and all was silent in my world. At that moment, the universe did not exist save this corner of Essex where the dead are buried. Some were set adrift and aflame in the stone crematorium that stood, shoulders shrugged, in the centre of the whole green set-up; others were just put in wood and dug into the cold, cold English ground.
I felt as if I were surveying an ancient battlefield, a war between armies of stone and armies of flowers, a battle for the domination of this sacred earth. As my eyes flickered over the scene, I had a sense of movement, a feeling that as my gaze turned so the object I had just regarded, be it stone or flower, had altered slightly, had momentarily parried a blow or tightened a grip on a helpless victim. Dullness and colour, death and life grappling in perpetuity, there never being a victor except for motion itself.
In terms of where to look for Uncle Len, I left that purely to chance. I knew he was buried at Upminster Cemetery because my parents had brought me there for the funeral. They had been separated for about three years at the time and never saw each other again, as far as I knew, after that day.
I had been eleven years old and had chosen to sit outside the gates for the duration of the ceremony. I believe my parents thought it was due to an overwhelming sense of loss on my part that I could not face seeing Uncle Len being buried. I was overwhelmed, it’s true - but with what I perhaps still cannot say. I just remember the rain falling so hard upon my young self as they buried him, trying frantically to be entirely drenched by it, to be cleansed of him, to be drowned in God’s tears, to be rid of the smother of oil and grease.
So now my fifty year old self wandered around the cemetery like an old ghost, drifting in and around the gravestones, floating about them like some drunken spectre, fiddling with his keys, looking for the front door to his end of days home. And like the inebriated fool I am, I eventually found what I was looking for - Uncle Len’s grave. I sat before it, cross-legged - a child back in his first ever classroom.
There were no dates marked upon the stone - just the inscription:
Here lies Zachariah Leonard ‘Len’ Anthony
Well, well.
No dates - no birth, no death, just the assertion that there he lay in the dirt. But I knew he was not there, had perhaps never been there. For he lives in my mind, in my ether, in the stars, in the damp, in the marshland country around my home and in the bubbles in my stagnant beer. He moves when I move and he awakens when I sleep. He is the sw
eat of me and he is the absolute peak of my pain. He is the silent end to my screams and the crack in the pot of my gold. He is not in the ground at all. I knew when I saw that stone that it was a lie. I couldn’t even convince myself that the flowers had won. Though the day be sunny and clear, I could feel nothing but ice cold rain smacking down upon me.
So there I sat waiting for forgiveness to come to me. But how do you forgive a man like that who has done you such wrong? I started to think it was impossible. And it would have been impossible indeed had I continued to hate him. For in that moment, I realised that true forgiveness can only consume you if you can find it in yourself to love the one you are forgiving - yes, love. So as I stared at the words chiselled into the stone, I became my Uncle Len and I entered the soil to rummage around in his bones in search of his soul.
"Working at Ford's is a fuck of a job. You’re on the line like a fucking machine, covered in oil and grease. I never thought that would be my life, not that I had any dreams mind, what with any chance of childhood happiness being blown away by Hitler, my dad disappearing in a tank in Egypt and my old mum taking in bloke after bloke as if they were washing. And the odd one or two of the bastards took more of a fancy to me than her, did stuff to me they said was normal. When I told mum once, she hit me and accused me of trying to ruin any chance she might have of a new life. And my older brother, he worked at Ford's with me, he had it easy - got himself a bird early on, moved in with her and her parents soon as he could, give her one too many and got her pregnant.
Then this perfectly perfect baby appears from out of her a few months down the line. They called him Simon. Me and my brother did opposite shifts at Ford's. His wife worked during the day as perfect Simon got a bit older so I helped out taking care of him. I would go round there to that house of bliss, me with fuck all except for a shit job and all this hatred. And I would see perfect Simon all white and sweet and like a fucking angel. And I would see what should have been me, what I could have been like, the hope and the future, the childhood, the life - all those things that were denied me. So I would give him a big hug and lose all control.
I never hurt him mind, not in a way that anyone would have noticed. He would struggle the first few times but then he just wouldn’t say a word. It was like he wasn’t even there. And I would go back to work on the factory line and all I could feel was the most intense shame and disgust for myself. I wanted to go and tell everybody what I had done, to break the cycle, to get what was coming to me. I had become the worst a man can be but I just could not stop. If I did give it a break for a while, my whole fucking wretched body would shake with rage like a fizzed up corked up bottle. And I would have no choice but to go back and release the tension.
Part of me began to think that everyone, every fucking person that knew me or worked with me or passed me in the street, knew what I was up to yet I still could not stop. I thought often of killing myself but the devil wouldn’t allow it. I had lost the power to end my own life from the time that bastard American GI cripple put his empty cock up my seven year old arse. It was just the devil now in control of me. I lived in form only. And I thank the lord that my brother and his wife took Simon to the back of fucking beyond to go and live in the country.
I got myself a bed-sit and held myself in contempt the remainder of my life. I never did what I did to Simon to any other kid. Not that that makes me in any way deserving. Death is the best thing that ever happened to me and that’s the fucking truth of it. At least instead of all that oil and grease I now have flowers upon me."
Well that’s what I heard anyway. It could have been the whispering of the cemetery grass or the conjoined spirits of the corpses beneath me or maybe it was just in the air that only I breathe. I uncrossed my aching, ageing knees and stood as best I could. As I did so I felt for a moment that I would be taken away by the breeze so light did I feel. I was a balloon, the head of a dandelion, a bubble ubble, a breath of warm mist. I was upon this earth but floating all the same. I leaned forward and stroked the top of Uncle Len’s gravestone.
May he rest in peace.
Forgiven.
20. Recognise Beauty Wherever It Be
Beauty, beauty, beauty.
There have been times in my life when I have glimpsed beauty, when it has sought me out for a brief moment, only to flitter away into the world that only others inhabit. I once heard a regular in The King’s Head exclaim to one of the barmaids that beauty is in the eye of the beer-holder and that as she must hold more beer than most during the course of an evening, she must therefore be the most beautiful woman in the world.
She had promptly dropped the pint she was passing to him, and for which he had just paid.
“And how beautiful do you think I am now?” she had asked.
Beauty, beauty, beauty.
Beauty isn’t a face or a painting or a meal or a house. Beauty is the wonderful coming together of all senses at once in a specific, undeniable, unrepeatable moment. And moments, as I was beginning to learn, are all we really have.
Beauty is nothing but that which is beyond the shadows of this mortal life.
And so it was that I came to write a letter to my wife.
Juuliaa
Juuuuuuuliaaaaaaa
Juuulia
Half of what I say is meaningless
But I say it just to reach you…
I know it’s been twenty years or so that I last saw you and Robbie, but I need to see you both as soon as I can. If we could meet up, that would be so great. I would understand if you didn’t want to.
I’m not sure if you are still at this address. I do hope so. That means, not only will you get this note, but you might be able to meet me at Mo’s Café in Tiptree any time on Saturday 30th August. I will be there all day.
A change has come upon me, Julia. It’s a long story.
Simon
PS I Love You
You
You
Yoooouuu…
The Post Office in Tollesbury is at the top of Station Road, opposite The King’s Head. It consists of a counter at the back of the Corner Shop. The Corner Shop itself is best described as an off-licence which sells some other general goods. It was taken over recently by a chain of shops and the sign ‘Boozebusters’ was erected big and bold. The people of Tollesbury have a Parish Council that represents them who decided that such a sign was not in keeping with the village ethos and it was thus quickly removed to be replaced by the name of the chain itself.
Imagine driving into a lovely country village and seeing The Hope Inn on one side, the King’s Head on the other and opposite that a quaint old fashioned shop called Boozebusters. What a scandal! The fact that if you go further into the village you will find The British Legion Club (selling beer), The Sailing Club (selling beer) and The Cruising Club (selling beer) could perhaps make the casual visitor think that perhaps Boozebusters is not the name of a shop but of the village itself!
Ah Tollesbury - I raise a glass to thee!
I had learned from experience that Mr Postman does not come and collect letters that need posting no matter how much you say please, yet he will at times deliver unwanted correspondence unbidden. He won’t stop to make me feel better once he’s delivered a card or a letter, not even for a minute. There was nothing for it but to go to the post office with my Julia note, buy a stamp and post it. I owed my wife that much, at least; and a walk in Tollesbury can only bring you closer to beauty - even if it’s just up to the corner shop and back.
The heat hit me like a cartoon spade the second I stepped out of the house. Tollesbury seems to have a weather system independent of all others. When it’s warm elsewhere, it is sweltering here. It’s pointless listening to the weather man, you just have to go out and experience it. And I can think of no finer pleasure.
So, envelope in hand, I intended just to go to the Post Office and post my letter to my wife; but there was more required of me than that. It was my task to recognise beauty wherever it be and that is what I di
d. The result humbled me. I will explain it as I felt it, for that is all I can do.
Stepping out my side door front door concrete ground in plinkle colours
of stones and chips and pebble heads
all hard unblinking despite the sun
- and shadows fall just where they ought -
My plastic glass door clicks so shut unlocked
Enter thee who feel the need
no need to plead just click and enter
don’t break it open
mine is yours
and you are welcome to it.
From dark to light the flight is flit
I’m in the world now
not my houseworld but yourworld
that opens up to me like the hollow black mouth of a leering creature
Yet
I SEE ONLY LIGHT -
could be the glinting of the teeth
or perhaps
I have been in the gurglebelly
and am in fact
on my way to heaven!
Neighbour's brick wall faces me all crazy shapes of deep design
yet sturdy strong unfurling
so unique in every aspect of divine mish-mash
holding up the slates that
but for its own robustitude
would scramble down to meet my feet and bury me deep in a clattering curvy crish crash
pile.
The dits and dots of weather tracks
that have impaled the mighty brick
strike me now as but tattoos
upon the human form;
marks of mystery rent by Gods
part now of the majestic whole.
I tell myself it’s just a wall
but I’m learning now it’s
Much
More
Than
That.