by Ben Graff
My father and I were never very close, as must be clear from all that I have said of that first meeting and my sense that it defined the contours of all that followed in our relationship. Perhaps it could have been different, but for most of my life I was not equipped to see how.
That said, I am forever thankful that after my mother’s death the situation altered considerably. After so many years of awkwardness and quiet misunderstanding, some of this seemed to fall away in his final years. My wife, Anna, had him to church most Sundays (he was always late). He and I were both members of Ryde Rotary Club; I took him around to as many functions as possible, and for the first time in our lives we were as close as I could have believed. In the company of others we somehow found a companionship of our own and I do believe finally that a bond was formed. Perhaps the thing that matters most with family is that you get there in the end, and in some ways we did. It only took the best part of fifty years to recover from our rocky start with the confusion over the wheelbarrow.
The moment I most often think to now again came in the period soon after my mother’s death. I had gone away for a short cruise in the boat. When I returned and stepped ashore, he was waiting for me and he said, “Thank God you are back, Martin, I only feel safe when you’re around.” Believe me, that remark was a revelation, and a very precious memory.
Eventually my father faded away. He died only a week after his last solo trip in his boat; it was not expected. It was only when I had learnt not to have expectations and hopes that we managed to find some form of peace. Even if as I write this I can still think of many unanswered questions that now will never be answered, in some ways I feel that I know enough.
Waiting to be Ripped
In a television documentary Martin Amis described the chess board at the outset as being like a sheet, waiting to be ripped. He said with relish that there was something dirty about chess. Perhaps he meant that the contest always evokes a sense of degradation, that what starts out perfectly symmetrical cannot remain so, that our good intentions as to how things are meant to proceed will often be lost somewhere between the opening and the middle game.
Amis compared chess to other pursuits, noting he had thrown 180 at darts twice in his life, had pulled off pots on the snooker table that would have brought the Crucible to its feet, yet had the same chance of creating anything of beauty on the chess board as a group of monkeys with typewriters had of replicating the complete works of Shakespeare. He said ruefully that he had been unable to beat his chess computer on level one because it was a monster. The same man who wrote The Information, with its opening sentence that I could read over and over about cities which contained men who cried in their sleep and then said nothing, thought that creating poetry in chess was beyond him.
What Amis said goes for all of us. In an age where a computer program that can be purchased for £10 is now stronger than the world chess champion (albeit not on level one), to play is to be defeated if creating works of pure beauty is our aim. When we type our supposed masterpieces into the machine’s engine after our game is over, many previously unnoticed failings will inevitably come to light, the story will turn out not to be the one we thought it was. Some say there is a case for only allowing computers to analyse your good games; that is soul destroying enough, without asking it to look at the bad ones. Yet chess is ultimately a search for truth, a quest to learn; and what other way is there to improve, beyond asking the all-seeing machine what a truer path might have looked like?
To a point, computers have changed the way we all play. Some opening lines have been put out of business, other endings re-assessed, and yet rather than restricting and constraining the game, in some ways the machines have opened it out. The Grandmaster Daniel King has commented that computers have shown that there are now so many more ways to play, and the machines have unearthed previously unconsidered resources, often of a form that humans would find hard to imagine. Positions that would once have been seen as lost have now been proven as playable.
Perhaps there is some sort of metaphor here for how we live, that other stories away from the board might also be capable of being rescued if we could but bring more analytical power to how we think about them. Perhaps a life computer could have solved the riddle of me and my father, or the generational pattern that impacted Martin and his father, Arthur, amongst others in the family tree; equally the machines might just have confirmed what was already known, found no new ideas, no alternative path that might have been taken.
If you want to be the Champion of the World, you need to have assimilated all aspects of chess theory and to have developed your own ideas on top, to be ahead of the curve; only a handful in any generation ever approach this threshold. The millions of hacks out there like me will not.
Yet increasingly these days when we sit down to play in tournaments, the scoresheets on which moves are recorded will have a carbon underneath them. At the end, we must separate the top sheet from the bottom and hand the story of what has happened into the tournament organisers, who will put the moves into a database where they will be captured forever and be accessible to all. Something has been created that will last for as long as chess is played, should anyone choose to look for it (and all it takes is for somebody to either google your name and add the words chess games, or to type it into one of the more specialist databases, and the story will emerge, your mistakes permanently framed).
I played an appalling move in a game at the British Chess Championships earlier this year, pushing a pawn in such a way that it blocked my knight’s only escape square, costing me the piece and ultimately the game. An inexplicable error, and I felt for that poor knight, whose woes have now been frozen forever in the database, my own embarrassment enshrined. It is like a short story that did not really work. The plot was too thin. It was not credible that the pawn would do that to the knight in real life, an editor might say, yet it happened.
All too often an opening goes well and a sense of anticipation grows that this might be it. The greatest game that I have ever played is starting to take shape. I will drift in my thoughts to the congratulatory words my opponent will share with me at the end. I start composing the covering email that will accompany the game’s entry into the Leamington and District Chess League game of the year competition. I contemplate whether it will be worth sending it into British Chess Magazine, then generally several hours later all such questions have been rendered futile, my very asking of them having played a part in securing my downfall.
Games in chess books often have an inevitability about them which is somehow divorced from the ebb and flow of real match play. You overreach, you miscalculate a line, your opponent’s counter punch is a fraction faster than you thought. Most likely, all of the above combine with you drifting into time trouble, while looking for a clean kill that is not there. I have never been mentally equipped to shrug all of this off and to plough on regardless, looking for a less perfect kind of win. The percentage of games I have lost that earlier I had considered as potentially brilliant is depressingly high.
Some of my favourite games I like for reasons other than the actual quality of the moves. In the final round of the Leamington Rapidplay I played my best friend in chess, Adrian Walker. He was on 5/5, me on 4/5 and needing to win so that we would share first place. He had a very good record against me, but I could see that he was nervous when we sat down at the table, waiting to begin. His handshake was wary, almost tentative, and the way he appraised his pieces was as if he sensed that they might somehow let him down. It was he who had everything to lose and, best friend that he was, I was determined to take all from him.
I played in a more circumspect way than normal. Played it long, hoping to prey on his nerves, and finally he cracked. He could still smile at the end, although he did threaten to disinherit me; and we had a cup of tea together while we waited for the prize-giving. Had I been the one to lose I would not have been able to speak to him for at least
a week.
For a few years while Adrian lived in Leamington we would often travel to weekend tournaments together. He was roughly the same age as my father and capable of being vaguely cantankerous in ways that occasionally reminded me of him. But he was more open to ideas, to talking about books, poems, the meaning of life, chess of course. The sorts of things I would not really have known how to approach my father on in the main. I always felt more in sympathy with Adrian if truth be told. Once we played in a tournament in Stafford and Adrian felt ill on the way home and we drove to Stafford hospital in the fading light of a Sunday afternoon, arriving at an A&E department that was littered with injured football and rugby players.
“So what sport do you two play?” the nurse had asked.
“We’re chess players,” we said in unison.
There are three games that stand like separate needles in a haystack for me, where it really did all come together, or at least so it seemed. The strongest player I have ever beaten battered me for six hours (this was in the Four Nations Chess League where games can sometimes go on forever) before suffering a complete rush of blood to the head and launching a wild and unsound lunge that rendered him lost almost immediately. In truth he had beaten himself, but I had clung to life for just long enough to let him do it.
I won the Leamington League game of the year in 2011/12 with a victory against Peter Drury, utilising a bishop in a highly unusual way (that did not involve using it as an actual weapon). On a near closed board, where a bishop’s long-range potency is often diminished, I inched the piece forward zig-zag style until finally it broke through Peter’s defences to leave his position hopeless.
A few years later against Neil Clarke from Solihull, I played a better game still, even if the Leamington best game judges ultimately did not award it the trophy. We were playing their A team in a cup match and everything clicked perfectly. My pieces seemed to dance onto the perfect squares, my grip tightened, tactical possibilities abounded.
It is not unusual for teammates to half watch the other games that are going on during a cup match, but here, everybody seemed to be following intently. An audience of experts, but for once I got it right and a pawn thrust was followed by a piece sacrifice and rapid victory against a strong player. One of those few moments where I felt that I had made something at the chess board that might stand up to scrutiny, a story that really did work. Sure enough the game was soon posted on websites and I received praise that I was very grateful for.
Praise always secretly mattered more to me than it would have done to my father, or at least that is what he would have wanted people to believe. Much later, I showed the games to my coach Andy Baruch, who pointed out that against both Peter and Neil, the moves I had played to force their resignations were only the second-best available. So what, you might say, if they were good enough to force immediate capitulation. However, Andy served to highlight that I had understood neither position as well as I had thought, and I could not look on either of the games in quite the same way after that.
Even in these very rare moments what might have been perfect was still flawed. Perhaps every story, like every chess game, is also such, that it is the price for its very being. It could be there are parts of The Information which work better than others. It might be noted that the so-called Game of the Century, in which a thirteen-year-old Bobby Fischer beat Donald Bryne, was later to be criticised by Gary Kasparov, who suggested a number of ways in which Bryne could have defended better.
My own family’s stories were flawed too. There were things that might have turned out differently, relationships that could have been improved. My grandfather Martin in particular would have wanted the words he wrote to take him further, away from the shops, into something else. My own account is missing much, can only talk to some of what happened, can only guess at other aspects of it. It will reveal more of my weaknesses than I might have wanted it to, that much is obvious to me without any need for computer analysis.
Chess and writing and family life might in the end all be part of the same thing. A desire to create and to challenge, to make something that lasts, that has a reason to be remembered, to work through the complications and the myriad of possibilities, to get it right. However hard it might seem, for all the inherent risks, we have no choice but to get on with it. Perhaps the best approach is to look on everything as a sheet that is waiting to be ripped.
2014
Part 1
Rigorously Pragmatic –
17 October 2014
I had been unsure whether I would do this again. “I hope so,” he had said, holding my hand and lifting his head from the pillow to look directly at me. Frail, but his presence undimmed. On that Monday morning I didn’t know what I hoped for. Not this. Probably not the alternatives either. Not really. I don’t think.
“I’ll see you on Friday,” I nod, and head for the car, our history having left us poorly equipped to go deeper into the moment. It could have been anything. Taking on a future significance that it now will not, rather destined to join that collection of other moments stringing all of this together but not yet ending it.
Feeling ill and being told there was nothing wrong with him. Questions as to whether it might in fact be psychological. Then the private diagnosis that says, yes, you are ill. And actually, yes, it is terminal.
“I know what’s wrong with you,” the BUPA radiologist tells him; an exchange that, entirely in keeping, he does not mention for some time. “How many months have I got?” he asks at a later appointment in Cheltenham. “I think we are looking at weeks,” says the consultant, evenly but firmly, with the practiced professional air of one who has given this news many times before. “I’m not as ill as the consultant thinks I am,” he says later. There is more assertion than question in his tone.
So it is that I am back on the M5 in Friday night traffic. He is at his home now and this is where I am heading, in the greying light of an autumn evening, with both the air-conditioning and radio up, two noises competing with each other. The pins and needles in my left leg are more acute than normal and I am aware of my tiredness. Ahead soon, the roadworks that pre-date Dad’s diagnosis, if not the illness itself, as, incredibly slowly, ageing metal motorway barrier gives way to new and stronger wall. Overhead signs will encourage the use of the hard shoulder; fifty mph beaded in white on overhead boards. Entering another limbo period framed by striped orange bollards and sentinel-like bright yellow average-speed cameras, where all I can do is drive. It makes me think back to Lego sets and Meccano. I once read that a motorway was like a skyscraper laid out horizontally. The road network is more complicated than you might think, yet still easier to fix than a human.
On several occasions recently I’ve driven past my exit. My sense of direction has never been good and it often fails me now, but even when I go wrong the monochrome concrete and metal of the motorway lend a more linear degree of certainty than I will be afforded on arrival. I think of the chess term zugzwang, which essentially means every move you lose, no matter which you choose. I feel a bit like that now but, as in the game, when it is your turn you really have no choice but to press on and hope that somehow all your fears will turn out to be unfounded. I have some apple turnovers in a bag on my seat, which Dad likes but is no longer able to eat. We both know why I still have to bring them.
After Mum, a counsellor said to me, “Life is now.” But it is amazing what can be deferred if you put your mind to it. What you can choose not to think about, at least for a while. All of it ebbs and flows like the tide on the mud in Wootton Creek, continually open to revision and re-remembering. It is never the same, even around the hard stops, the silted-up points that nothing further can flow from. The weed on the rocks is a changing hue, depending on the strength of the wind and the light and the movement of the cloud. But I don’t always choose what it is that I see, and it is impossible to ignore the rubbish that is increasingly washing up and sticking to
the bank, the shades often darker now than they once were.
Another hard stop is approaching. It is all but an instant after all.
I drift back to the noise from the radio. A footballer has just been released from jail and the pundits on Talk Sport are discussing whether he should be allowed to play again. Darren Gough says, having done two and a half years of a five-year sentence, he shouldn’t play for another two and a half years. I sense it’s a line a producer has given him, but really, who cares? I press a button and there is music, which is better, and I wish there was another button that could be pressed which would make my father’s problems disappear quite so easily. My own too.
Finally, motorway will turn into ever more minor roads and I will arrive at the house that was once home. It is not even that far really. Journeys never are, when you look back on them. It still surprises me that the house looks the same, solid and well-lit in the October darkness, even as time draws in. It has doubtless seen dramas like this with other casts play out in its history. A mismatch of Tudor, Victorian and 1970s build, with a small orchard off a private road, once pitted, now smooth. An extension to the dining room to accommodate a larger table, a conservatory, a second garage; those have been my parent’s additions. The coal-fired heating, the damp and rotting floorboards, all but distant memories now. The new dining table was due to the growing number of grandchildren, but it had barely been used before it was just Dad left here to host.
The central core of the house is the oldest part. Kitchen, hallway, bathroom and the smallest bedroom are lined with beams which are painted black. There are tiny holes in places, treated wood-worm, ships’ timbers originally, the story goes. This house has travelled. Within its ancient frame, the bathroom looks as if it has had a spaceship grafted on, the power shower a huge, gleaming tribute to modernity. Albeit, to use it for more than three minutes is to drain the tank, which will inevitably draw complaints and lead to recriminations.