Find Another Place

by Ben Graff

  I miss my Grandpa and was really upset when my dad came home one day and said that he had passed away. It was really upsetting for all of us, which is understandable, but we will never forget him.

  I also haven’t forgotten his wife Mary. I always loved her because we shared the same birthday of August the 2nd and she always made the best Victoria sponge cakes. Even though I had just turned four and she had just turned sixty-one when she died, I still remember her so well. She’s included in some of my earliest memories. I only remember snippets of her being around but that’s enough for me.

  Both of them are in our thoughts and prayers, and we will never forget them. My dad’s doing OK now though. I mean, he has five girls and way too many pets in the house to keep him happy, after all. He just needs to protect his debit card and he’s all good.

  Francesca’s Memories – Christmas, Secret Sweets and Steep Hills

  Then a few weeks later, Francesca and Annabelle wrote some words on the same day. Francesca while we waited for Maddie at a Playbox rehearsal over Saturday lunchtime. She ate a ham and chese toasty and I had a cheese and cucumber sandwich. In between trips back up to the hatch for crisps, Diet Coke and sweets, she started to type her piece and then I typed while she dictated. I do not believe she could really have remembered the sponge cake, but I liked that the story of it was within her.

  * * *

  The first thing I remember about my grandma is when she always made her delicious Victoria sponge cakes… yum … I never knew her that much because when she sadly passed away I was only two years old.

  I remember more about my grandpa because I was only seven when he passed away (I’m eleven now). He used to call me Chessy. He always gave us chocolate Santas every Christmas but he secretly gave me wiggly sweetie worms.

  He gave me a drum set one year. It was the biggest present there and when I opened it I was shocked and I played it straight away. One Christmas we went to The Leopard. The waitress said, “Who is coming down the chimney?” and I said Grandpa’s girlfriend, because we were meeting her for the first time and that was what I was thinking about.

  Grandpa always gave us a Sunday dinner because we always used to come on Sunday. It was so good. My grandpa always had a snooker table, so my family and I always had a game, and if we didn’t I kept on pestering them to play because I loved pool.

  His drive had a hill, so every time I was on his tricycle I always went down his hill. Once I went over a bump I had not seen and went flying through the air. Every time I had a race I always had first dibs on the tricycle because it was the fastest thing there. I always used to win, and one day I did not have the tricycle so I lost.

  In his conservatory I always used to play my favourite games with him: fishing the duck and the car racing game and mini table football. I liked the table football the best. It was sometimes a draw and sometimes a win for me, but sometimes I lost. He always had a smile on his face when he won, and when I won. But more of a bigger smile when he won!

  Sometimes my cousins would come over. Reuben and I would play football against the adults and we would win. Grandpa had a treehouse we would go in with the cousins. It was very creepy as there were lots of cobwebs and Reuben would always pretend he had a spider in his hands and pretend to throw it at me. I always used to throw the apples that had fallen off Grandpa’s apple tree back at him, and I always tried to play dodgeball with him.

  One time my family came over, it was pouring with rain but that didn’t stop me from going outside. He had a massive field, and my dad and I walked in his field. It was raining, however, and I got stuck in the mud and when my dad tried to pull me out my welly boot fell off, but my dad fished it out eventually. There was a dog who lived next door. I always used to play fetch with him. He was a very obedient dog.

  He was the most secretive grandparent ever because he always gave me sweets. I will always miss him, and her.

  Annabelle’s Memories – Final Visit and More Sponge Cakes

  Annabelle wrote her words in her bedroom. Where else would she write than the somewhat dark teenage cavern from which she emerges sometimes, blinking into the light. I was not allowed to read her writing with her present and I make no further observation on the sponge cakes other than that of all of them, Annabelle was the one most likely to remember. My mum had always pointed to her experience with older children and said that she would come into her own with them as they grew. Alas it was not to be, but she left enough.

  * * *

  I miss my grandparents a lot. One of my favourite memories of my grandma was her sponge cake; it was so delicious, the highlight of my Sunday afternoons. I vaguely remember the day she died; we were on the Isle of Wight at my uncle’s house. I just remember lots of crying, not really knowing what was going on, wanting to see her, asking my mum why I couldn’t go and see her.

  I loved my grandpa so much; he never failed to make me smile with his weird bat toy and when he tickled me until I cried with laughter. I loved going in his paddling pool in the summer and in his treehouse where we tried to hide from the adults. His greenhouse with the tomatoes, and his orchard with the hundreds of apples and pears, were so fun to explore. The last time I saw him was the last time I got to pick some apples from his garden.

  I remember going to see him, knowing that it could be the last time. I was quite apprehensive if I’m honest, I didn’t know what to expect, I hadn’t seen him for months and didn’t know what he’d look like due to his illness. When I saw him I was quite taken aback: he was so thin, so pale, his face so gaunt. I tried to hug him as gently as I could; we then continued to play Scrabble which I was awful at. I’m pretty sure he won by miles. My dad and I let him have a rest and went and picked apples and stroked the horses in his field, Solomon and Teddy.

  I miss them both a lot; there are so many more memories they made, so many little things that remind me of them, like a good old Victoria sponge or even just an apple tree; Rest in peace, you’re both missed by so many.

  The Kindest and

  Most Loving of Fathers

  Charmian had first met my mother when they taught together, before I was born. She is mentioned in Anna’s letter from 1975, and she and her husband Tim were in touch with my parents until their deaths. My father last went to see them at their beautiful house in Yorkshire early in 2014, for a dinner that he much enjoyed. He told me he had sat next to a high court judge and was very impressed by the sharpness of his intellect, the way he dissected the issues. I would have remembered this anyway as it was unusual for him to be so effusive, but the memory is heightened because it is the last formal social gathering he ever told me about. Perhaps it was the last one that he ever went to.

  We talked a little about the fact that judges generally were quite clever and I said that I had sometimes seen the judgements I studied at Bristol as being literature’s best kept secret; albeit the fact that Lord Denning upheld the rights of an Englishman to pepper his neighbour with cricket balls if they happened to live next to a cricket ground, meant this was probably not much consolation for those affected.

  Charmian and Tim had now moved to Oxford to be near their daughter, Francis Larson, an anthropologist and historian, and author of the books Severed and An Infinity of Things. We had not spoken for some time, until in the summer of 2017 I received a card through the post inviting me to meet up with them both, together with another old friend who also taught with my mum, Rosemary Chambers. I drove along country lanes that increasingly reminded me of those around Bosbury, more remote still in some ways. Visiting people who had known my parents when young was to take a bridge to a world that could still be travelled, but only just.

  We talked about books and memories, families, stories. Tim said that when I was younger I had looked like my mother, but that now I had more of the look of my father about me. I knew that this was so.

  Charmian and Rosemary talked about teaching with my mother. A producti
on of a play she had directed that had been really good, still remembered by both of them, its energy not yet entirely stilled. In amongst the food and the warmth of the conversation, time seemed to press, my parents’ absence a marker that nobody in the room was still young.

  I thanked Charmian for the beautiful letter she had written to me after my father’s death. That letter is reproduced below.

  A Letter from Charmian

  6th November 2014

  Dear Ben,

  The shock and sadness of the death of your father – surely one of the kindest and most loved of fathers – has in the last week released a flood of memories, of how Mary and Colin were when Tim and I first knew them.

  Mary, as you know, was my colleague at work, and it was one of those partnerships where work and pleasure exactly balance – a rare privilege. Imagine us acting in Twelfth Night which Mary produced at Alton leading a cast of 6th formers, with me as Viola and Mary as Olivia!

  Your parents, as you know, were a strikingly attractive couple, and I was deeply impressed by the Romeo + Juliet story of how they had overcome their parents’ opposition to what was then so feared – a “mixed” marriage. (It strikes me that in general the better the mixture, the better the marriage.) I knew then that this was a special couple with a special love for each other – and so it has always proved. I put that together with a moment that stays with me, for some reason, from their last visit to Yorkshire together. They came for a weekend a few years ago, and we went to the theatre in Leeds. Tim and I crossed a road, in this night time city of bright lights and heavy traffic. As I turned, the traffic parted, and I saw Colin arm in arm with Mary, escorting her carefully across the road. I will remember it.

  There is a saying that “the good die young” – as a consolation it seems pretty useless, and of course it’s not always true. But it’s true in this case. Your parents will always be young – if there’s a consolation, at least they saw their children’s children.

  And, in the encounters we had with them more recently – sadly so few – their love for you all has glowed as brightly as their love for one another always did. So full of interests and activities, so highly valued at work and by their friends, their later life, despite their troubles, has been as successful as their early days. But nothing has lit it up for them the way their children and their grandchildren have. It’s unbelievably hard for you – but they will always live in your hearts.

  Love from Charmian

  Afterword

  A handful of letters from the 1970s, Martin’s journal, Noreen’s diary, some poems, work-based assessments and references, memories of holidays and Christmases and normal goings-on, some happy, some less so. All of it marked by too many deaths and everyday disasters. I do not think it joins perfectly, but in that sense it mirrors life generally, and family life in particular.

  I hope this story at least preserves a small part of what is now passed and that it speaks as much to life as it does to death. Some things that were in danger of being forgotten or lost, now at least recorded. I think to the Dylan Thomas line Though I sang in my chains like the sea. Perhaps that is what all of them were doing, what all of us are destined ever to do. Making plans. Falling in love, often with the right people, if not always. Building careers, teaching, managing business ventures that grow then falter. Things that work out and things that do not, when you look back a certain arbitrariness between the two. Many games of all sorts played along the way.

  I wanted to record the big events, particularly around some of the endings, but I did not want this to be a book just about death. Endings can be just that; it is not true that they are always beginnings too. Capturing perspectives of the everyday, through different eyes and different lenses, was what this was meant to be about.

  Relationships within families are a little like sailing on a ferry in choppy waters, with the end destination uncertain. The vessel might bob and sway, the contours of land difficult to decipher, while in the wheelhouse different views as to how to proceed are probably not unknown. Yet, through it all, the journey is still one that is taken together, there is a common purpose to it all, even if some crew members have further left to sail than others. Fathers and sons. Arthur and Martin, Colin and I. Fathers and daughters too; none of it is easy. Yet as I write I think to the poster a colleague displays in her work cubicle. It says that boats are safe in a harbour, but this is not what boats are made for.

  I have been grateful to have the opportunity to think about it all.

  I have shared some of the things that worry me, the fear that patterns repeat. I have come to notice that there are many ways in which my father parented better than I do, and that there are things that can still be changed, that I can work on. I hope that my own daughters will one day reach the same conclusion in relation to me, that it was probably all alright and that they were happy when they were young. I know that there is nothing else that is really worth hoping for. We are all part of the same pattern after all.

  It was certainly a sense that time was passing that finally compelled me to write all of this down, after many years of avoiding writing anything. I had to write and now finally, thanks to them all, I have, such as it is. Through these stories, I do feel that I have drawn closer to all of them. It has triggered memories I had not thought of for a long time. It has prompted me to think of things anew. I hope to go on to write other stories.

  They say that a marriage can only be really understood by the two people in it. A family on a wider scale is similar. Except even the thing about a marriage is only a partial truth. We all understand these things, our relationships, as best we can. Our information set is not complete. A family multiplies the scope for misunderstanding. Who knows what anybody else really thinks? What they show and don’t show. In many of these chapters I remember my parents as old, but they were younger than I am now. They experienced all of these things from different vantage points to my own. It is either like poker or chess. In poker you can’t see all the cards in your opponent’s hands. In chess you see all the pieces, yet the plays are so complex they can only be deciphered to a point.

  Were they happy?

  Mum fulfilled her vocation as a gifted teacher who touched many lives. We were overwhelmed by the number of people who told us how much she had helped them, going back over years. She worried about a lot of things and was deeply concerned at the way the college was being run in her final years. A worry, I think looking back on it, that I did not take seriously enough.

  As I said at her funeral, “Successive governments’ education policies were a disappointment to her,” which made people laugh, though it was not a subject she looked on with benign amusement.

  Where Dad is concerned, who knows? He seemed to do responsible jobs that won the respect of others. He had a powerful intellect that he got to use. He had a lot of interests, even if they did not fully occupy him, and a reluctance to commit to structured activities in retirement sometimes left him isolated, that, if truth be told, too often left him isolated.

  He loved his family, but some of the pain from Helen and Mum’s deaths could never be assuaged and left him guarded, difficult to read. I do not think he was happy during his final illness. Why would he have been? But, taken as a whole, there was a lot of happiness in his life, and even on that final night he had been smiling in spite of it all. This is what people do. He could be very difficult. There is no shame in saying this and it does not equate to a definitive verdict but is rather to acknowledge a reality.

  For Theresa and Dave, the question is easier and not. They overcame the greatest tragedy parents can face: the death of a child. They kept her memory and all that was good about Helen alive for the rest of their lives. They were not conventionally successful in their jobs, but that was not what drove them, it was never about that, so it does not form a measure. Their vocation was each other. Dave could not have survived without her. Theresa summoned up the strength to ca
rry on without him, at least for a while. As with all these things we do not have the counterfactual. What would they have done differently had Helen lived? What they did was enough, and the obvious happiness in their relationship after all those years was something very rare.

  Anna always seemed to me to be where she wanted to be, but I thought that before I knew of her depression, and now I am not sure. She was a nurse by vocation, most comfortable with her family around her. Her own final illness was challenging, but it seemed to me that whatever difficulties she faced she was equal to them.

  Martin is the hardest to know because he was the one of them most like me, and I know that no one could answer this question on my behalf. In truth, I am impertinent to try and do so for any of them, I know that. He was more sociable and more of an extrovert than I am, with fewer opportunities to study. Both of us did jobs that probably weren’t entirely what we would have wanted. Both of us wanted to write, and ultimately both of us did. This in part written now because I did not want to be desperately trying to get it all down in my eighties, as I had seen him do. My guess is that he was happy, whatever that actually means. His youthful spark and sense of adventure undimmed. But to be human is to also have disappointment, and that of course goes for all of us.