by Ben Graff
What I did know was that whatever happened over the next few hours, one day she would lose him, a certainty I carried for fourteen years before it turned out to be wrong.
Dave and Theresa were coming up the next morning. Mum was going to the hospital around the time Dad was due to come out of surgery. It was going to be alright, I said.
We heard from the hospital sooner than expected. She hadn’t even left for Bristol. I have no idea why we weren’t going with her – visitor restrictions, I suppose – and I can’t remember who took her as she wouldn’t drive on motorways or in cities, or on many other sorts of roads.
“He’s not dead, is he?” Mum asks, as Dave takes the phone.
“No, he’s OK,” says Dave. “He’s coming round.” He looks at Theresa. “The nurse is called Helen.”
The recovery is slow and painful. When home in bed he yells out in pain. He tells Mum not to say anything to the doctor.
“How can I not when you cry out like this?” she says. The GP visits, the same one who Dad will feel misses his cancer years later – vague social friends who don’t much like each other, beneath the veneer of occasional country dinner parties.
I make him food which he declares inedible, and we argue, then we hug. He cries a bit, which is something I haven’t seen before, would not have imagined possible. I see a glimpse of a side of him he has worked hard to conceal.
The pain continues and the GP returns.
“I have a forty-eight-year-old male who really needs a hospital bed,” he says, and Dad ends up back in Hereford hospital for a spell. He couldn’t listen to the phone call, didn’t want to be back in hospital; said he felt like he was being described as a thing, a specimen, rather than a person. It re-confirmed everything he thought about the GP, which seemed unfair to me, but he had to take his anger and his fear out on someone.
I visit him in the ward after one of my A level exams. Matt is doing his GCSEs. It had been thought that us both doing exams at the same time would create major stress, but that has been overshadowed by all of this.
When Dad comes out we walk in the grounds of the college in Hereford while Mum pops in for a staff meeting.
“It’s been a bit of a time, but things will be better now,” he says, as we turn slowly round the bright green lawns in brilliant sunshine. It is not really just his heart that he is talking about.
We had argued in previous months about what I should do at university, where I should go. I wanted to read history, but they both thought this would render me unemployable. I was pretty certain I would be that anyway, but their dire warnings did have an effect on me and I chose to do law. The college wanted me to try for Oxford but Dad did not.
I apply anyway and get an interview. My politics teacher has concluded I am a gifted soul who has the misfortune to be living with a lunatic, an idea I did not entirely plant but equally did not entirely disabuse him of either.
Two days at Wadham for interviews and exams. The exams are fine; the interviews are terrible. I feel that they ask me questions without giving me time to read the paper they are based on. They are polished and in control. I am tongue-tied and inarticulate. The green jacket I am wearing does not fit properly and I am far from comfortable in my own skin.
In the evening they take us all to a pub and then the cinema to watch Aladdin. “A whole new world,” one of the characters sings. I meet someone there who I will meet again in a few different settings over the years. A few of us drink wine until late with some of the undergraduates. Everybody is really nice, but all possess an air of brilliance that I do not. I think it is called confidence, but I did not know that then. They do not offer me a place.
“Father will be pleased,” my politics teacher says to Dad at a subsequent parents’ evening. Mum says that Dad didn’t catch his meaning, missed that this was a dig at him, at his lack of confidence in me. She said my father was just worried about whether I would cope at Oxford, but I resented both his lack of belief and him being proved right, although my real focus was more on my grades than where I went.
Mum said Dad had turned down a place at Oxford because it was for history and he wanted to read physics. He had been accepted into places I was not, and he had declined to go. Did that somehow sum up our relationship? Were we always secretly competing or, rather, was I always coming up short, without him even realising that this was all part of the game?
They were both pleased by my A level results and I could see they were proud I was going to Bristol, where of course you could have all the same conversations about which Oxbridge college you had applied for and how many As you had got in your A levels, as if you were there.
I think wherever I had gone I would have faced the same challenges. Not the work; I was conscientious, which was enough. I went to virtually all the lectures and tutorials and did the reading. I once skipped a lecture to go to the library which did rather seem to confirm certain things. The course interested me to a point. The trick was to stay on top of it. I did office hours, nine to five, with the occasional day off to nurse a hangover. It was fairly obvious it would be fine, if unspectacular.
The challenge was more everything else. In amongst the drinking and the table football and the nightclubs and the day trips to Weston-super-mare and the cricket and the late-night chats in people’s rooms, which were earnest and deep and now forgotten, there were other difficulties.
I lost a lot of weight in my first year, as the food in Wills Hall was terrible, virtually inedible, and at eighteen my metabolism easily shrugged off alcohol and midnight pizzas. Things I made in my room were of questionable quality and nutritional value: pasta boiled in a kettle, Pot Noodles, peanut butter and crisps, possibly some liquorice.
You could see the bones of my ribcage more prominently than should have been the case. A house share that didn’t work in the third year, a sense of not quite finding what I was looking for or knowing what I wanted to do afterwards.
I was quite awkward in a lot of ways. Bristol was never quite what I’d hoped it would be. I was never quite who I thought I might be. It was all more fragmented and transient than I had expected, but I left with good friends, a degree and a better understanding of myself.
Many of those I shared some wild times with I still see at the occasional birthday or drinks party. Things seem easier and more comfortable now. We have all grown up. Solicitors, barristers, a regional television presenter, high-flying civil servants, other jobs that have been explained to me but which I do not fully understand, although they seem to be quite successful. Even the wild Irishman, whose only piece of writing in his final year was a short note he placed under his tutor’s door to say that he was going nuts, is now a respected tennis coach.
I still played chess; I was the fifth best player in the university. But the best was an International Master and I was nowhere near his standard. It was like Keith Talent in London Fields. He gets to the darts final, but when he comes up against a real player he is shown up for what he is. It didn’t shake my enthusiasm, but it did give me an insight into my limitations.
I had discovered books by this point. If I did stay in Bristol for the weekend, I would rarely work on a Friday, rather shut myself away to read: Miller, Camus, Sartre, Orwell, Byatt, Barnes, McEwan, Amis, Iain Banks. I was interested in artists and outsiders and societies breaking down, places where things happened at the margins. Worlds of which I knew little, as Martin might have said. I was also now open to the sorts of books my mother liked. Wuthering Heights sent a dark chill through me. Unquiet slumbers on Yorkshire moors indeed. William Blake. Innocence and experience; I was a mix of both by now, as well as of both my parents, even if I hadn’t formed that thought back then.
One early spring day, with pockets of melted snow still heaped in the corners of the quad, they came to visit me, the three of them: Mum, Dad and Martin. This a few months after Anna’s death. Martin was determined that life had to go
on.
“What other choice can you make?” he asked me once. I remembered the trip I had made to the Island for the funeral; part preoccupied by a phone call I needed to make that day, more rooted in my own world than I should have been. But now Martin was here in Bristol, to see me doing something he would have liked to have done, if things had been different for him, if it hadn’t have been for the shop, his father, a hand he had dutifully made the best of even if he wouldn’t quite have chosen it for himself. Not that he ever said any of this.
We sat in my room, which was numbered M12, and drank tea in freshly scrubbed cups that I could see they were all still doubtful of. The room had a wooden floor and gas fire, which none of them thought smelt quite right, so I had to turn it off. Wrapping paper and Oasis posters on the walls – perhaps in hindsight not the most original or coolest of looks. It wasn’t en-suite, and the shower facilities were questionable in this, the old block of Bristol’s grandest hall of residence.
Apparently the head of the hall liked law students from state schools and there were lots of us there, in amongst others whose parents owned half of Surrey. Not that it made much difference in the Wills Hall formals (bring your own bottle of wine), the alcohol being the only element of the meal that contained any nutrients. Then there were the discos that followed: Whigfield’s Saturday Night, Oasis, Pulp, Supergrass, and Take That, now fashionable again. One of the tutors had a printout on his door explaining why Alanis Morissette did not understand the meaning of the word ironic. Some of us thought he was trying too hard.
Nobody talked about Dad having been in hospital here in this city, not long ago. I have no idea what I told them about Bristol or whether I showed them around, where we ate or what we looked at. I don’t remember Mum and Dad ever talking about the time when Mum lived in Bristol either. Certainly never about the letters that they wrote to each other back then. What it was like. Either then, or coming back. Perhaps they did. Perhaps these were things that were theirs to share with each other and no one else.
Martin’s Journal – Anna
Martin wrote about Anna in his journal, and Aunty Noreen (Martin’s brother Hugh’s wife) recorded the events around Anna’s death in her diary. These accounts follow below, along with a letter Anna wrote soon after my father’s heart surgery in 1994.
It seemed to me that Martin did not really say all that much about Anna in his journal. Perhaps he saw it as either too personal or too painful. How we choose to write about those who are closest to us is something I have also had to consider in writing about my family. What should be said, and when are things better left un-said? How do we balance the need to tell the story against the needs of those who are no longer in a position to determine how they are being given a voice? I have been less reticent than Martin was. It might be said that I appear to be more open than my own father was, although it is impossible to say if the course I have chosen is necessarily a better one.
* * *
I suppose you will be wondering why I have left my darling Anna until toward the end of these reflections. I think it is mainly because I knew that thinking about her for these pages would sadden me. All those years when I and everyone else assumed that she would outlive me. It never occurred to anyone that she might go first, and as a consequence I was not prepared, if it is ever really possible to prepare for a loss like this, which I doubt. Many feel that they can draw strength from those they were close to after they are gone and whilst this is true, mostly I feel a sense of absence.
I wanted to focus more on the dead than the living in this work. Yet I do not feel that our stories are mine to tell; much of what went between us belongs just to the two of us. I still feel shaken by her final illness and that is certainly not something that I want to talk about. All marriages have their moments, but I would say in short that I was truly blessed.
It does not seem like it would be enough to leave it at that, so I thought, would share some stories from around the time of our marriage and my first meeting with her family. In doing this I did find myself thinking to a lot of people I have not thought to in a long time, and they are all still very real to me. There is hope that springs from that.
Before we were married, Anna had qualified as a senior nurse and left Ryde Hospital to work in Bournemouth, returning to Ryde as a staff nurse on the men’s surgical ward, and deputy night sister after our wedding. For this responsible job she was paid £1.12 per week, which would have included board and lodging had she wanted it. The average wage for a man at this time was £3 per week. She felt, with the best will in the world, that she was a bit hard done by. After a month or two she heard that Cowes needed a nursing sister. Up to then they had relied solely on station ambulance men, but the regulations had now changed and this had created an opportunity.
Anna applied for this job, and cycled to Cowes to be interviewed. This being a management appointment, she had been told it came with a head-of-a-department title, a silver bag and a personal seat in the management canteen!
The MD said, “Well, you’ve got all the qualifications we need, but you are very young; you only look about sixteen to me.” Anna was very much on her dignity, “Sixteen, for goodness sake! I am twenty-three and a married woman.”
“Yes,” the MD said, “that’s just as well in view of the challenges you will have to deal with!” He was right! He said he would ring the hospital matron, and if she agreed Anna was up to the job it was hers. Anna then enquired about salary.
He said, “We thought £6 per week.” We were on our way.
We had married in ’42 without me ever having met a single member of Anna’s Irish family. Her father had died in 1938 shortly before I met her, leaving her mother with eight children to look after, five of them still at school.
Originally she had been running two farms with the aid of Anna’s elder brother, Michael; Anna’s father, having been a colourful character, was involved in setting up a farmers’ cooperative to operate a creamery in the nearby village. He was a JP and it appears that he had acquitted a member of the IRA (no connection with today’s IRA), and my mother-in-law recalled the Black & Tans breaking down the door before storming into the house to shoot her husband. In true family fashion he talked his way out of that one.
Shortly after that, he heard that on a particular night the IRA were going to burn down the Shanagolden creamery. So, there he was with his fellow farmers, galloping around the countryside on his horse, shotgun in one hand, ready to rally to the defence of the creamery. Blasting away with their shotguns, they sent the IRA packing, never to return! It is extraordinary when I think to it, the experiences people have.
In ’46, four years after we were married, we went together to Ireland for the first time. Having spent a night in London, we caught the steamer of course, to Holyhead, then the boat to Dublin where we were met by two of Anna’s former colleagues. They had arranged lodgings for us.
Food in England was even more severely rationed than it had been during the war. We had a Labour government with a passion for controlling everything, but things were very different here and it was amazing to suddenly be able to eat as much of whatever you wanted again, as if stepping back into an earlier and more optimistic age.
So I met my extended family for the first time.
One of the family was Maurice, my brother-in-law. A humorous character, he looked, dreamed and sounded like a farmer, as he drove us around in the pony trap commenting on the crops and the cattle. However, appearances can be deceptive, and in point of fact he knew very little about farming, having spent most of his working life as a smartly dressed salesman in the menswear department of a large store.
After a special lunch at the Lake Hotel, we went out for a drive in a family car around the lake. The driver was busy pointing out legendary beauty spots, until interrupted by mother-in-law Lesley, a skilled driver.
“Young man, attend to your driving; if a horse comes down we shall
all be killed.”
“That wouldn’t worry me at all, madam,” he replied. “I know when I die I shall go straight to heaven, on account of the fact I’ve never done a wrong thing in my life!”
“I wouldn’t count on it,” commented mother-in-law drily. “You are a terrible liar, for a start.” I did see some of Anna in her mother, it has to be said.
When it was time to return to England her whole family were in floods of tears; my bond with all of them had been formed and would endure.
It was when we were living at our old flat in Wood Street that Mary was born. We were overjoyed, and obviously there had never been such a baby before or since. We were also overwhelmed by the awesome responsibility of keeping this perfect expression of humanity alive.
Before long we were able to obtain a mortgage to build a pretty little house, with plenty of land for the children to play in. However, we were desperately hard-up. The business was not doing well. My father had run out of steam and times had changed. The things we had once done which were successful now were less so.
After my father’s death, the business continued to go from bad to worse. I soon accepted an offer for our main premises from Boots the Chemist. The shoe shop was abandoned, and a smaller menswear shop opened in a property opposite Woolworths, now the Abbey National. The Shanklin shop we also sold, and not for a good price in hindsight. Later we became involved in the affairs of the Wight Starling & Piling Co – disastrous, best forgotten. It was a mixture of everything: changing circumstances, my lack of, I don’t know what exactly, but something.
For all of the challenges, Anna was with me throughout, as a calming and supportive presence. She provided a wonderful environment for Mary and Mike to grow up in and we had so many happy years. I think that what I learnt is that money comes and goes and crises are generally survived. There are things that go deeper and these are what it is important to hold onto.