by Ben Graff
There were other pieces from around the same time, including a short story about a man in hospital who spent his time staring at a patch of damp on the ceiling. An old lady who visited him I described as wearing the sort of cardigan that people wore while they were waiting to die. My characters were passive watchers, much as I was, but I did not know any of them and could not make them live.
As my time at Bristol University concluded, I had no sense of what to do, beyond the thought that I would like to be a writer. Hence a creative writing course that I thought might help me on the path to becoming one. A group of us spent the week with Rachel Cusk and David Flusfeder. Philip Henshaw came along for one of the evenings. My father drove me to the station with muttered scepticism and seemed relieved on picking me up to learn that it had not really worked. In amongst the cigarettes and the snooker there were moments, but the tutors wrote publishable books and I did not, which served only to accentuate the difference. I felt further away from where I wanted to be, not closer to it.
You don’t have to write the best book in the world, Rachel Cusk had said to me. That makes it too hard. Focus first on writing what you write and see where it takes you. In the end we all have a voice if we can find it, and there are stories all around us. Good advice that I ignored.
I wanted to write the world’s best book, and as the chances of fulfilling this aspiration slipped out of reach it became increasingly clear that there would not be another book after Bleeding. Not back then. I did not hit it off with my fellow students during the week. They mainly wanted to write about their cats, and my cultural snobbery back then was close to unlimited. I was far closer to them in terms of literary achievement than I was to the real writers, and nobody knew that more than I did.
When, a few months after the writing course, I sent David Flusfeder the final copy of Bleeding, he wrote me a letter, which I somehow managed to lose without reading, and he wrote me another one when I told him this, an act of kindness that I will always remember. He was both encouraging and honest, but I was not really ready to deal with the feedback I received from that small number of people who had the misfortune to have Bleeding inflicted upon them. Despite my best efforts, Bleeding had some nice passages and turns of phrase (albeit they were mostly derivative) but the overall effect was absolutely terrible. I did not understand my characters. I lacked both the experiences that might have enabled me to sense what they really thought and the technique that could have partially masked this deficiency. My voice was buried under linguistic flourishes which made me sound more like a literary version of the speaking clock than the angst-filled twenty-something woman who self-harmed I was trying to be.
It all depends how much you want these things, and it turned out that I did not want to be a writer enough. I had heard the stories about Iain Banks having six novels rejected before The Wasp Factory was accepted, but I lacked that level of resilience. I feared failure and rejection. I think as well, at that time when I had neither experience of being a parent nor of losing one, never had a long-term relationship nor a house nor a life nor a set of things that unfolded that I might watch and relate to, I simply was not ready. Beyond this, my passion for chess which I played competitively and compulsively did not leave much time for anything else.
In The Chess Artist the author J.C. Hallman asks the keen chess player Glenn Umstead if he saw himself firstly as a black man or as a chess player, and after some thought Glenn said that being a chess player was more central to his identity. Similarly, I was more chess player than writer (or anything else), no matter that I was nothing special and would sometimes sit at the board thinking that there might be better ways to express myself. The thought was never as strong as the pull of the next game. So whilst the desire to write never went away, the determination to actually do it lay dormant until now, when I finally realised, as Martin had before me, that the things around you are of interest. That the people and the situations you know and have lived with and through are where you should start. At forty, my perspective was different to at twenty. It would be foolish to claim that I was wiser, but I was certainly more experienced and I recognised that if I was finally going to start it needed to be now – here in this moment where my parents would never be able to read whatever it was that I wrote, however heartfelt and whether it touched them or not.
At some level there was also a freedom that came from this, not just in the sense that I was going to be able to write about them and use their letters in a way that would not have been possible if they were still here, there was something else that I recognised, even if I did not feel wholly comfortable with it. Somehow it was easier to do anything, knowing that they would not be able to judge it.
My father always mocked but did not actually read Bleeding, and over the years it became something of a one-sided joke that he failed to recognise I did not find funny. When David Kirk, the son of my Uncle Mike’s partner, Rona, published his first book, Child of Vengeance, to general acclaim, my father’s dismissive comment to me that it had been a bit more successful than Bleeding was both eminently true and quite hurtful. One of those moments that in some small way epitomised the difficulties we had in trying to hit it off. I remembered the remark but suspect he probably did not.
It was all a long way from where things had started. Before I became a reader and then briefly a failed writer, I did not like books especially. At one time reading was work. I did not know that books and the people in them could speak to you directly, not until I found Holden Caulfield in The Catcher in the Rye, who watched and observed and somehow shared more of himself with you than he thought he had. I secretly feared he might think I was a phony; it transpired that not all books were about the challenges of finding the right marriage in the nineteenth century.
I came to like Salinger’s Franny and Zooey too and became increasingly intrigued as to why he had written such beautiful books and then just stopped. I wrote a short story about a writer who still wrote but did not publish anymore, which I later came to see as ironic, as by this point my writing had petered away to almost nothing. But I still read lots of books about writers and writing.
Henry Miller in particular, who when he first wrote of having reached thirty-three, the age of Jesus, while achieving precisely nothing, had struck me as really old. Now, in what seemed like a heartbeat, I was older than he had been then, but unlike him I was still yet to commit to paper. Miller wrote about the desire to write, the creative process and how fundamental it was. I liked the crazy, shambolic, itinerant nature of his artistic life, while also knowing that, even if by some miracle I did actually manage to write anything, I would never have been able to live it myself. I recognised the degree of conventionality within myself, which had been meant as a cloak around which a more creative side might flourish but in truth was in danger of suffocating me if I did not try and write something soon.
By the time I was twenty-two I had moved from reluctant reader to devourer of books to would-be writer to failed writer who still read a lot, and stayed there for as long as it takes a newborn baby to become an adult and a little bit longer. There was always a reason not to write. My mother talked to me about some of this perhaps a year or so before she died. Should you not write again? It might be time, she said.
I did not act on her suggestion, in part because I still did not know what it was that I wanted to say.
The day my father died, I waited in the house with my brother Matt for the doctor to come and write his death certificate, and we went through the things that would need to be done to secure the house for its first night without a parent to guard it. There was cash we knew about in the cupboard in the spare room, kept there in case of some unknown emergency. There were keys to find and windows to lock, a bonfire to be built in the orchard to deal with his ruined bed sheets and mattress. In amongst the urgent jobs, I undertook another that was less so but still mattered to me. I found the few remaining manuscript copies of Bleeding in th
e desk drawer of what had been my bedroom and threw them on the bonfire with the rest of his things.
It was time to destroy the evidence of the book that my father had mocked but not actually read. I was finally ready to begin again, both unencumbered by his criticisms and drawn to the memories of him and all the others who were now gone.
This is not a eulogy. All families have their moments. The eulogies have already been given and every word of them was deserved. Now is the time for looking deeper. I finally know what it is that I want to say, even if they are no longer able to hear it. Martin was the first of them to be born, in 1916, and my father was the last of them to die, in 2014, so there are nearly a hundred years, of which I can bear direct witness to, say, thirty-five. I can only ask the questions in relation to my own parenting; they will be for others to answer.
As Martin said, families are their stories. So here it is, our family.
This might not always be easy, but I hope that it is honest. It is written with love. I think, in the end, they did it right.
Prologue – Our 9/11
Blake Morrison wrote that at one point in his life he divided his friends into those who had children and those who did not. Then, not so much later, whether or not his friends’ parents were still alive became the truer measure of differentiation.
In those early days of the new millennium, I had no children and my parents were very much alive, but autumn then, as now, spoke to new beginnings and fresh possibility, and Katharine and I were making plans to have children of our own. I doubt we consciously thought back then that through the very workings of time, Blake Morrison’s second category would not be avoided forever.
We had returned from Greece the previous day with some inkling, perhaps a little more than that. A notion that something had happened, that our story was moving on.
Much, but not all, from my childhood, was still intact. Two of the grandparents remained, Martin in a convalescence home, writing the journal he would shortly give to me, Theresa still in her Bognor flat in Nyewood Gardens, a year on from Dave’s death and thirty-five from that of their then seventeen-year-old daughter, Helen. My mother’s mother Anna had been gone for seven years, but my parents Mary and Colin were both still working, her at the Royal National College for the Blind in Hereford, him at the big Ministry of Defence establishment in Malvern, neither even particularly near to their retirements.
The holiday had been alright if a bit basic. A bedroom with no television, floor of tired lino that was never free from sand, and shower which was lukewarm at best. We had jobs but not much money and it had been what we could afford. The lady who cooked on the grill by the pool spoke very little English and her vocabulary appeared to have been gleaned from episodes of Only Fools and Horses on UK Gold. “Lovely jubbly!” she would say, over and over, while burning burgers and ramming the meat into white baps. I washed mine down with lager, Katharine drank orange juice. We did not talk about what we were going to do when we got home, as if to speak it into existence might somehow scare it away, but I could not help but think to what might be coming and what fatherhood might entail.
Things were better between me and my father than they had been when I was a teenager, but he still struck me as difficult and hard to get close to. I had heard stories about Martin and his father, Arthur. I even remembered my uncle, Martin’s son Mike, telling me at Anna’s funeral that he had been closer to Anna than he was to his father.
Perhaps it was a father and son thing? Perhaps it would be easier to have daughters, not that there was a choice about these things. Could it be that parental mistakes were inevitable? That we were all destined to push against the template that our own fathers had set, but in so doing set ourselves up for a whole host of new and different mistakes that might actually make things worse?
In amongst the high-fat food, sun too consistent to be interesting and the lower-league English football that was showing on the television screen above the bar, these were the questions I thought to, even if I did not exactly have any answers. It was not obvious that you could work any of this out in advance; perhaps you just had to hope for the best.
It wasn’t that long since we had first talked of this, on the night of the general election in 2001. “Let’s have a baby,” Katharine had said, while we ate at The Malt Shovel. It did not seem that far on from the time when she had told me that I did not really know her, but things seemed different now. In that moment I had not felt any of the fears that I was to dwell on later. There did not seem to be any reason to say no and there were many to say yes. A family, a new beginning, a purpose, I thought. A move away from the loneliness and lack of definition that had marked the early stages of my adulthood, the time in my life when it had seemed to me that so much was theoretically possible but the reality had never quite lived up to it.
We returned home to watch Hague being annihilated by Blair, who in turn explained why this was a reasoned verdict on New Labour, being based on their record in government, such as it was. (He did not say that last bit, but I had a far greater degree of detachment than a few hours before.) We had agreed to something of much more import, the world was moving away from just being about events that I watched on television. Why not, I had thought as I sipped on my drink and thought to a future I had not previously imagined. It felt more natural than scary, at least whilst I sat at the table that night.
I secretly wanted a daughter, perhaps a subconscious reaction to how fathers and sons had tended to play out in our family; and we flew home from Greece on September 10, sensing that things had happened quickly since the conversation in The Malt Shovel. Katharine went to work the next day. I had holiday to use up and stayed at home. We said we would do the test in the evening.
I spent the morning buying bookcases in Coventry and managing the logistics of getting them home, which was not easy without a car. I still did not drive. I had taken and failed my test on many occasions, baffled by the limitations of my sense of direction, unable to believe that what I could see was really what was there.
Many chess players cannot drive. We are programmed to look deeper, to find some hidden meaning in what is seemingly in front of us, a choice that can only be discerned after considerable contemplation. Useful qualities to have when weighing up a potential pawn sacrifice, less admirable when trying to navigate a roundabout to get onto the A46 with a stream of angry commuters banked up behind you.
An unimpressed taxi driver, not keen to help, was described by the furniture shop owner as ignorant. Finally, he agreed to take the smaller bookcase for an extortionate fee and I wheeled the larger unit up Ball Hill on a trolley the shop had lent me. It was sweaty work, and there were moments when I feared the bookcase might fall off, but no one paid me much attention as I meandered past the pound shops and run-down pubs, back to the first house I had ever owned. A semi-detached in Wyken that I had overpaid for but which was worth it to me.
The house was on the wrong side of town, where property was cheaper and everything was somehow that bit more chaotic. It was difficult to get to and from work on the buses. The next-door neighbours bred ferrets and were too ill to work, but he was often loud and chronically out of time and tune on his return from the pub of a Sunday evening. Their daughter joined the police in then had to leave because of her boyfriend’s tendency to steal and sell anything he could lay his hands on, or so it was rumoured. Darren, a fellow Manchester United supporter and work friend, who was to drink himself to death a year or so after my mother died, once asked me if I ever hung out at the block of flats at the end of the road, which I always considered one of the oddest questions anyone had ever posed. I never quizzed him about it then and now it is too late. Was it something he did himself, either more generally or in relation to that particular block?
Mum and Dad had given me five thousand pounds, which was the sum total of the deposit I had put down. I never really appreciated that that was a lot of money for them at that
time. They would come up at weekends and he would help me decorate. Trips to Homebase and B&Q, his DIY skills better than mine, which wasn’t saying much, but I couldn’t afford professionals. Years before, when we moved from Aldershot, he had fallen through the ceiling when we were packing up to leave. He didn’t hurt himself, but a shower of plaster scattered like snowflakes and they had to reduce the price. Fortunately, the buyer happened to be a builder.
At the point of exchange, when about to move into the Coventry house, the sellers had tried to pull out, which left Theresa incandescent. “They can’t have their cake and eat it,” she said, the old legal secretary in her coming to the fore, much as it had saved her in the weeks after Dave had died. Back then she had been sent a letter by some firm saying that he had owed them money and she was liable as next of kin. “We’ll see about that,” she said with a glint in her eye. She wrote back saying she wasn’t paying and what were they going to do if she died too go after some of his distant relatives in Australia? She never heard from them again, but we knew that she had found a way to keep going after Dave.
Move my sellers did, after being read the riot act by their own solicitors. John, my solicitor, a close family friend of my parents, was similarly indignant. The house was bigger than Katharine’s in Solihull, albeit it was hers that had the expensive fireplace and elegant drink bottles on the fridge that had so impressed me when I had first been there. She had a glamour and level of sophistication that I could not match, and many had been surprised, including me, when we had first got together. We had moved into our respective houses on the same day, a year or so before we first met. Just a coincidence, perhaps; lives somehow on parallel tracks that were close to finally twisting, coming together, but still had not.