by Ben Graff
Blackgang Chine, with its plastic dinosaurs and other 1950s-style attractions, was one of our summer playgrounds. Near Ventnor and vulnerable to landslides, as bits fell into the sea and were reconfigured, it never seemed to be the same from year to year. We were told that all the profits made went into rebuilding it.
The Mouth of Hell, which had to be passed through in order to reach salvation, was a dark fibreglass cave at the end of a red tunnel tight enough to make you consider whether you should ignore the warnings of eternal damnation and just walk back out the way you had come in instead.
Dinosaurland was home to large plastic creatures that were not meant to be climbed, but everybody did. Buffalo Creek had a pretend graveyard, a Wild West-style home to cowboys and outlaws. One of the inhabitants had been hanged by mistake according to the inscription on his wooden cross, which always made Dad laugh. Adventure Land, Rumpus Mansion, Nursery Land. Cowboy Town, Smuggerland, the model village. Blackgang Chine was ever being re-invented and re-imagined as stone succumbed to wind and wave.
There were other dinosaurs too. One of my first memories is of going to the Natural History Museum with Dad, the large skeleton in the entrance hall, the scale of the place beyond anything I had seen before. Dad buying me a woolly mammoth, which I got out of its box and placed on a London Underground escalator, losing one of the tusks in the process. Him annoyed but quickly concealing his irritation when I explained that I still liked it just as much. Later him taking me to Camden for a course, and Earls Court for a graduate placement, back to his roots. “Not these parts of London,” he would say.
Taking the Underground together to get food in Trafalgar Square, his cockney a little richer, “It’s a big city to find your way around alone,” he said. Everywhere seems big when you are alone, I might have thought.
*
My parents both liked Hay-on-Wye with its many bookshops, and we went to the festival together several times. When I was in my twenties, but before the children had arrived, we saw Ian McEwan read a passage from Atonement. He said that in reading it aloud he could hear the things that needed fine tuning.
It occurred to me that writing was not just a case of pure inspiration. It needed nurturing and revision, a desire to test and re-try. You start with something, but whatever you first wrote was only that, a beginning and nothing more. Even the best writers were not like Mozart, insofar as one could generalise.
If McEwan was anything to go by, they did not wake up with fully formed symphonies in their heads; the final melody needed to be developed, evolving slowly, incrementally, in its own time.
I read that Julian Barnes said he only wrote with a pen and paper to start with. Using a computer made the work look finished much too soon.
Novelists were less fun (if generally saner) than poets, perhaps because they had to put in office hours to get enough done. Having had this revelation about the need to work at your writing, that seemed to be enough for the next fifteen years or so, in which I did not follow through by actually writing anything.
At another literary festival I got Mum to ask Alain de Botton if he liked the characters in his books, and he said that he did. The question was triggered, as much as anything, by my own low self-esteem.
I remembered one of de Botton’s protagonists having failed to get into Oxford, just as I had done, and I thought the author had rendered a kind of verdict on her, which he had not. The only judgements being made were by me on myself, another lesson I was slow to absorb.
Yet now, writing this, I do think again to the broader question of whether we necessarily like the people we choose to write about, beyond the obvious examples of when a serial killer or some such is being described.
I did not always like my father. He could be irritating, insensitive and annoying. His father Dave often used to embarrass me with his singing and observations on marriage. Anna could fuss. Theresa with her desire to shock, often did. Even my mother’s multiple worries could be a bit much on occasion.
There is like and there is love. Like only takes you so far, only has meaning in a shallow sense. It works with acquaintances, less well with family. All of which is not to say that I did not like my family, rather that I could see both their strengths and limitations, as they could mine. I hope this book is a richer picture for all that, and a more complete one.
When in Hay, we browsed in the bookshops and drank tea in the marquees, coming home with paper and plastic bags filled with books. The sorts of things that had to be found and couldn’t just be bought anywhere, at least before we fully understood what Amazon could do.
These trips fulfilled us at one level. Together, doing something that interested us, exploring and learning as a family. A collective purpose and sense of who we thought we were. Even if it also showed what I was not, listening to Ian McEwan read was no different to talking to Rachel Cusk or David Flusfeder. It moved me no closer to becoming a writer myself. In chess terms, when it came to writing, I was what would be termed a kibitzer, which is the name given to somebody who watches others play and perhaps passes comment on their moves but does not take to the board themselves.
The only way to avoid ever making a bad move, or drafting a poor sentence, perhaps a whole story that nobody liked, was simply to avoid playing, or writing. There is a certain comfort in being a kibitzer. Yet I knew that I wanted to do more, to write rather than simply to read, even if the desire still did not burn as much as did that to play chess. Perhaps it is more accurate to say that the demand to write pulled at me more slowly, even if I did my best for a long time to ignore it.
Mary and Colin Graff – Letters
The 1970s were still young as my parents made the transition from studying to working, from being separate to being together. This was an era before the internet and mobile phones, when the times for telephone conversations had to be agreed by letter, when money was tight for both of them and everything was just beginning.
The black ink of their letters made me think to a spider’s web. But rather than silk, here it was old stories from previous generations being woven together, new ones being created. More durable than any cobweb could be, able to take on different forms through the years, to be more complex at the end than at the beginning; and still the stories they began would continue evolving after they had gone.
Perhaps we are not fully programmed to imagine our parents as young, or to recognise the fragility in the thing we later come to see as family in its formative stages, when nothing is certain, like a chess game, perhaps a few moves in but still lacking much by way of definition, and where it is unknown if the players have any intention of seeing it through.
For us, if we are lucky, our stories have a sense of inevitability about them. We arrive, often followed or following other siblings, and if things unfold as hoped we grow up and grow on and almost take for granted how it all started, never fully realising that there was no certainty to any of this and that it could have all played out differently, in ways that would not have allowed our own story to even begin.
At the time of the first of these letters some challenges and questions remained, which were perhaps to form a quiet undercurrent to the years that followed. My father’s recognition of their differences in interests, scientific (his), artistic (hers), and of religion, Jewish atheist (him), religious Catholic (her), are written about in a way that I never heard them discuss.
His quietness, her need for more conversation; her more of the worrier, though in amongst it all the letters showed that he worried too. I was surprised for instance that he thought he might get the sack if one of his projects did not produce results. The comment is perhaps a touch flippant but it did not seem to me that it was entirely so.
Thinking to this now, perhaps my relationship with my mother was easier because she did not have the same level of internal conflict that he did. She worried about things: the girl who did not want to share a house, her students, money
. She was sometimes homesick when away from her parents, sometimes unsure what to do next, and he would comfort her. Still, there was no sense in her letters that she was ever other than who she really was, that people saw her differently to how she saw herself. She knew what mattered to her, what she wanted to do, and by and large throughout her life that was what she did.
In contrast, my father often talked about the difference between the way he seemed and the reality of it. A former girlfriend would think they had had meaningful conversations, when in his view this was not the case. (We only have his word for what the girlfriend really thought.) People would see him as one thing when he knew he was something else and he wrote at one point that this amused him. I cannot say whether or not it also troubled him a little.
He had no real lead on a long-lost friend he met in the pub one day and wrote about. It was all as echoed in the much later appraisal from a work colleague, who said that he did not assess others particularly well. Could it have been that his sense that others did not read him in some way formed a mirror image, a mutual fog within his relationships, that did not always make things easy for him? I wonder now if the same is also true for me, if again it transpires that we are actually more similar than I once thought.
Yet I think I was luckier, that over time I found a larger number of people where genuine mutual understanding and sympathy was achieved. I never had his inner anger. In some ways I also had better social skills, responding politely in circumstances where he might be scathing. I would look to steer conversations back to safer ground in ways that he did not.
It could be argued that all of this makes me more of a phony and serves only to demonstrate that, of the two of us, he was the one who was always truer to himself. Sometimes in my own appraisals at work it might be put to me that I could come across as too eager to please, and while I might inwardly think fuck you, outwardly I would only nod and say that I could see that there might be something in this. I thought his letters were more honest than anything I had ever written.
There were only a dozen or so of these letters between them that survived. I am sure there must have been many more once, but there is no way of knowing now. I first became aware of them in the period after her death and before his. They were in a bedside drawer in my old room, which was crammed full of other, less interesting, items: the extension plans for the dining room, a small tax bill, some of his Egyptian photographs, a handful of plastic farm animals, the guarantee for the conservatory, a railway truck that I had unsuccessfully tried to make look rusted with brown poster paint, a model of the space shuttle Columbia Dad had brought back from America, a broken rosary and its damaged green leather case, a communion present from the time before my mother had given up hope for us on the religious front. Some of our children’s things were also wedged in, almost as an afterthought: a painting of a cow, or perhaps it was a pig, that Annabelle had done, aged four, a handful of green marbles that Maddie and Francesca were given one Christmas, a pair of baby shoes that looked like they might once have been Gabriella’s. Like the drawers in many houses, this one had accumulated treasures across the generations.
He did nothing particularly to hide their letters and nothing to draw attention to them. I would read them illicitly in those last few months when I lay across the hall from him on what would inadvertently and unexpectedly become his deathbed, not that either of us could have known that then. I felt both guilty and not; I wanted to know more about Mum and more about them and this seemed to be one of the few ways through which this might be possible.
Perhaps I should have asked him about the letters, but that felt like it might be a violation. (Accepting that just reading them was also such.) In truth, I was more scared that if I did ask, he might destroy them, and while he might not have done, the prospect that mentioning them would cause him to open up seemed unlikely.
I thought they might become another thing we would argue over, something else I would have to regret for longer than he would. While more implausible, I thought it also possible that he did not know they were there at all. Though I felt with more certainty that if that was the case he would not want to be reminded of them. He never willingly travelled back to the past, or at least, if he did, they were not journeys that he shared with me.
I only remember him being able to speak of Mum a handful of times after she died, and those occasions were never easy or particularly revelatory. I remember towards the end, I would sometimes try and talk of Mum a little more to him, as a way of showing that we would still continue to speak of him, which was easier than making the point explicitly might have been. I was my father’s son after all.
I do not know if they would have wanted me to share their letters. I would have to guess that he would not, and I find it harder still to know what she would have thought. Nearly ten years on from her death, writing this book has given me a sense that she has slipped a little further away from me, is in some ways more remote than once she was. She seems more distant than he does, which is not how it was when they were both alive. Is it simply the passage of time? The order in which they went? The fact that there was not much that was unresolved between me and Mum? Has the intensity and duration of Dad’s final illness crowded other things out? Were things not quite the way I always imagined them to be?
I have no answers, and in some ways the echo of the questions is all that can be left to any of us. I know that Mum can only ever drift to a certain point in my consciousness, and yet that is not the whole truth either. It is impossible to look back without also looking forward.
The one thing, the only thing, I want from my own children is that they should outlive me. Still, what would it feel like to know that, after my death, I became increasingly remote to them? I suppose it would not feel like anything; the point of death is that you no longer can feel, at least not in a way that anyone who is still on this planet might be capable of imagining.
Perhaps it is not so much a drifting but more the gentle bobbing of a boat on the water, moored on a buoy someway from the shore. Harder to reach than once it was but still held by a rope, even if it is not always easy to see through the early morning mist. I might like my children to see it this way.
However honourable my intentions, I do recognise that in publishing these letters I surrender any pretence of moral authority over what those who follow me might choose to do with what I have written, either here or elsewhere. I am also convinced that one day there will be a stronger and more successful writer than myself. It might be Annabelle, Maddie, Francesca, Gabriella, Reuben, Evie, or perhaps someone from a future generation whom I cannot yet, and might never, know. Will they reference some of what I have written in their own books? Will they perhaps rip these words apart as I did Martin’s journal, repackage and re-present them in a way that may or may not have met with my approval?
I would prefer that fate to being ignored altogether, vain as I am. In some ways it does not matter much. Families are their stories, and just as Martin wrote his journal, my parents wrote their letters and I wrote this book. Those who write next will find their own ways of doing so. After all, family stories are linked, like the threads of the spider’s web.
Disastrous English Lesson
May 19th, 1970
Bristol,
Darling,
I missed you terribly today & haven’t been able to get you out of my mind. I had hoped you would phone at lunch time – the fact that I can’t get in touch with you at all is upsetting. I worry about you. I hope you got my last letter about phoning on Thursday at 7.30 – if you have suggested a different time & have written to me, I’ll be there at the time you suggested.
I wrote off for one job today + intend to write for 2 more tomorrow.
I was in class today, thinking about what it would be like to see you at the end of the day, every day. The kids had some funny cracks about how I spent my evenings – & I wished I could. This is the latest of my disas
trous English lessons:
Kevin: I like your dress, Miss.
Me: If you think you are going to get round me like that, Kevin, you’re mistaken.
Robert: That’s not what he really likes Miss (with awful laugh).
I collapse.
Then I was asked for an account of sex.
“When are you going to tell us, Miss?”
“I’m not.”
“She don’t know anything about it.”
Small boy: “I knows all about it Miss, I just ask me dad & he tells me.”
Stephen: “I asked my mum & she said come back later, & when I came back later she said ask your father, & I asked him & he said someone at school will tell you – so will you Miss?”
Honestly darling, I feel sure you could do a little profitable instruction – I could invite you along as guest speaker – “My experiences etc.” How about it love?
By the way, we’ve got an invitation to a 21st. It’s a formal one, on a Saturday at Blandford – Dorset – it’s about an hour’s train from Bristol, so you could come for the weekend. I think it’s July 4th.
Anyway, it should be very posh – at the farmhouse where I went to stay that weekend. This time the invitation was for both of us – how about that! So you’d better come!
I do hope you’ve written as I keep worrying about you.
All my love darling. Take care. I miss you so much. Life is really empty here.
Mary xxx
‘A letter about things’
22 Kingsgate Est
London N.1
Wednesday evening
Dear Mary,
I think I’ll write you a letter about things. You know that they pile up when you least expect them. Well, I was walking along the other day when two things ran up behind me and started yelling at me in a strange tongue. I could tell that they were things before I turned by the sound of their tiny webbed feet – all eight of them – on the pavement. I could see at once that they were related (brothers, you know) but under the circumstances I think I reacted very well. No panic at all. Though I say it myself, darling, I’ve always prided myself on my ability to cope with things.