I’m travelling up to Lydcastle the way I usually do (except I’m not usually hungover; in fact I’ve never travelled in this condition before!): that’s to say, non-stop express from Euston to Crewe, where we invariably pull up at Platform 5. Then up the steps and along the covered bridge and down to Platform 6, to await the southbound train. This sometimes says it’s going to Caerdydd (Cardiff), sometimes Caerfyrddin (Carmarthen), and occasionally for somewhere which always, in the English form of its name, makes me think of ships sailing off into cold distant seas, Aberdaugleddau (Milford Haven). Too often with far fewer car-riages than the host of waiting passengers requires, this train’ll take me through Shrewsbury (that has a Welsh name too, of course, Yr Amwythig) to Church Stretton in the Shropshire Hills. Here Dad’ll meet me, as always, in his van (invariably dirty outside and untidy in, full of kiting clobber); most times he manages to turn up late. Then comes the ten mile drive over to Lydcastle, where ‘I’m sorry, I should have got some food in,’ Dad will say almost as soon as we’ve arrived ‘home’, ‘but I didn’t get round to it, I’m afraid. But there are a few eggs knocking about the kitchen, so could they – with a hunk of bread – do you for now?’
This time I’m coming to Lydcastle a different guy, armed with knowledge of Dad that he’s withheld from me, his only son.
[Written same day, 10 pm]
I was right, of course, would have been astounded if I hadn’t been. The Caerfyrddin (Carmarthen) train arrived at Church Stretton dead on time, but I had to wait a quarter of an hour for Dad and the dusty van to appear. (Didn’t call him on the mobile; he hates being ‘rounded up’ and grumbles whenever he has been.) But though I minded this just a bit (all the other passengers who’d got off here, expecting to be met, were collected long before me), it felt good (and, in truth, was good for my ‘morning-after’ headache) just to stand still quietly in the yard outside the little country station, washed by the midday sunshine and to look up at the steep-sided hills that rise on either side of this town. I could then feel that those other hills of my life, Herne Hill and Tulse Hill, with Mum and Doug, and Josh and Rollo, and teachers and exams and ‘whatever-will-you-be-doing-next year, Nat?’ belong to a quite other dimension of the universe. Except that I have to carry myself through both, a being as unique and inscrutable (to myself that is) as that fox on the wall with the yellow eyes.
Obviously I know that lads of my age here in the Marches are having to deal with all the problems of courses and qualifications and ‘suitable’ jobs just the same as I am. But the landscape here was sending out the message to me that it’s possible to see life with different priorities. I’d felt this even before my actual arrival, when the train was approaching Shrewsbury and I could see the high jagged green line of the Stretton hills in the distance, some miles beyond the red sandstone buildings of the town’s castle and the grid of old streets that climb up to it.
I caught sight of Dad at the wheel both before and when he caught sight of me. His expression, a dull, heavy, serious one, didn’t change a flicker. I found that interesting. You might think that the moment he saw his only son after several months, his eyes’d lighten up, that he might even smile. But no, not at all.
Nor did he apologise for his lateness. (Well, why should he? I wouldn’t really want him to.) It’s Sunday, the shop’s shut, so he hasn’t bothered about shaving, and has quite a crop of dark stubble on his face (which seems a bit fatter and redder than when I saw it last, at Easter).
‘There you are!’ he said in a sleepy voice. As if it was me who’d failed to be there in time for him. I’ve always been glad he isn’t the sort of dad who throws his arms round you or, even worse, kisses you, but I wouldn’t have minded a little more show of enthusiasm on his part. (When Josh came with me, I recalled, Dad was far friendlier in manner right from the beginning, which is why he speaks of him as a sort of mate. With me solo Dad doesn’t feel the obligation to come out of whatever mood he’s in.)
‘Oh, hi!’ I said, dead casual too, and jumped in. Underneath the front seat and in the compartment above it was any amount of torn crisp packets, sweet wrappings, used-up cans of Sprite, plus things impossible to identify just from looking.
‘We won’t be going home over the Long Mynd today,’ Dad announced with some firmness. Though I’ll be here some time, and will have other opportunities for being on this road, the news disappointed me. It’s become an established tradition in my visits to Dad that we start off my stay with this ride, and it’s one I relish: the long bendy climb up from Stretton, with the V of the Cardingmill Valley more and more precipitately below, then the journey along the heather-and-bracken expanse of the hill’s great plateau, with its grazing sheep (and in some places white horses), and then the wonderful descent when you see Lydcastle on its hillside in the near-distance, and the ridges parallel to the Mynd, like The Stiperstones with its crest of rock piles.
‘Why not?’ And I probably sounded more put out than I really was.
‘Because it takes longer, Nat. And I’ve got that jerk I told you about, remember, interested in that expensive power-kite, actually coming round to the shop “just after lunch”, to use his words. And I literally can’t afford to miss him. Why he couldn’t have come on a normal week day beats me, but there we are.’
So Dad did have an excellent reason for taking the low road home, which is very nice also with its woods and little river and hill flanks. I’d been a bit hard on him.
‘By the way,’ he continued, ‘I’m sorry but I didn’t get round to getting any food in for lunch or supper. Co-op’s open today, we can go along later. But there’ll be a few eggs knocking about the kitchen, so you can make do with them, huh?’
‘I have no fucking alternative, have I?’ I could have said, but I didn’t. Instead, ‘Actually, Dad, I don’t feel much like food right now. Don’t feel like any, in fact. Went to Josh’s party last night, and I guess I’m paying for it now.’
Josh, who’d given Dr Julian Pringle such a warm portrait of Pete Kempsey as a matey father, would have not recognised the man he’d praised – we were driving out of Stretton now, southwards along the A49 with resort-like houses from Victorian times visible on the lower slopes of hills – in the uninterested individual at the wheel.
‘It happens, doesn’t it?’ he remarked, ‘well, that lets me off worrying about catering. I shall be really pissed off if this Darren Courtney guy doesn’t show up, I can tell you, after having strained every gut in my body to make contact with him. Six hundred smackers, and not a penny less!’
I wasn’t sure I wanted to hear any more about this. If Dad could groom himself into having a more impressive manner with customers, he wouldn’t have half as much trouble as (apparently) he does. Anyway wasn’t it time for me to keep to the plan I’d formed on the train journey up, and which I purposefully didn’t write down in this note-book in case I failed to carry it out? (That wouldn’t make for satisfying reading afterwards.)
‘Dad,’ I asked, guilefully, ‘what are the comparative heights of the hills around us now? How does the Long Mynd compare with any of the Strettons?’
I must have been told this many times before, mustn’t I? But as I don’t have Dad’s preternatural, enviable memory for facts, I truthfully don’t know.
Dad didn’t move his head so much as a fraction of an inch, took my question as a hundred and fifty per cent normal one, which it isn’t, coming from me, and replied as if giving out figures was as natural as breathing – which it probably is for him. ‘Well, the highest spot on Long Mynd is 1,693 feet, and Caer Caradoc – more or less opposite, and probable site of the last great battle against the Romans – is 1,506. But The Stiperstones, that favourite haunt of ours,’ (‘of ours’ I noted, pleased), ‘is higher still at 1,759. But pride of place goes to the Clees. Brown Clee, over there,’ he indicated its whereabouts with a finger of his left hand, ‘is 1,772 feet. You could legitimately call it a mountain in my opinion.’
‘1,772 feet,’ I repeated, ‘thanks
for the facts, Dad. I knew you’d be able to tell me them. You’re a phenomenon, you know that. I’ve never met any guy who comes anywhere near you. You ought to go on a show. Mastermind or something?’
A side glance showed me no evidence of reaction on his face, but then we were approaching an often busy turning-off, and maybe he had to concentrate on that. But then: ‘ Mastermind? I don’t think so.’
‘Why not? They’re so popular, those programmes.’
‘I thought Google did all that for people now. Anyway, my main reason for not going on such a show is that I haven’t the faintest desire to waste my time in that sort of way.’
Dad’s eyes were still fixed intently on the road, fuller of traffic than usual, but, well, it was a Sunday in the tourist season. And we were rattling along (Dad never has a van that doesn’t rattle, so out of condition and cluttered up inside is any in his possession) to make sure we were well in time for this Darren Courtney with his £600… But then an interesting aspect of his reply, of his blank refusal to give quiz shows serious attention, struck me. Struck me so I had to say it aloud. I said, ‘You don’t deny that you’d qualify. And you’re right. Anne Robinson could never find you the Weakest Link, not ever. You seem to know everything.’
Dad shifted himself in his driver’s seat, a little uneasily, I thought. Probably realised I was getting at something. As I was.
‘In fact, Dad, I have heard you were on a quiz show when you were young. Were a star of it, in fact.’
If anybody’s face can ever be said to darken, then Dad’s did then. He tightened his mouth so that his lips pressed hard against each other, and he narrowed his eyes. But he didn’t brake, just drove on for a minute or two as though I hadn’t spoken. In fact I almost wondered if I actually had done. The change of motion (van after train) had done nothing to help my hangover headache, to remove those metal splinters behind my eyes, but despite these pressures of pain, my body (and therefore my mind and my mouth) felt as if it didn’t properly belong to me. So…
‘Dad, did you hear what I just said?’
This time Dad did, for a nanosecond, move his head in my direction.
‘And who the fuck told you about that?’
I wasn’t going to say who. Not yet anyway.
‘I’m amazed at Izzie – your mother – breaking her word. I did tell her of course. When we set up together, I told her lots about my life, she was a good person to tell things to. But I made it pretty clear I didn’t want anybody else in on them.’
‘Dad, it wasn’t Mum. Not at all. It was just a bloke I ran into who recognised my surname – your surname – from the radio back in the old days. And I went on Google, and found out that there was a programme called High Flyers – the bloke told me its name, you see – back in the seventies, with a quizmaster called Bob Thurlow.’
Dad did apply the brakes now, with an abrupt fierce jerking. He didn’t, I suppose, do this purely out of emotional reaction to hearing this name from his past. But that, I have to say, is exactly what it felt like.
‘But Google didn’t mention you.’
‘I don’t suppose it did, Nat, no!’ Coldly. ‘I was just one of the many passing through.’
‘But a star performer?’
‘Enough said, Nat. Can’t you sense another person’s feelings at all?’ This rather hurt me, for I pride myself on being able to do this. Dad’s next sentences I wish I could reproduce in some special way other than in letters and words. For they came from him one by one, as if being painfully, slowly, deliberately, yanked out. Like thorns from his skin. Or obstinate hairs from a nostril.
‘Of course it’s impossible completely to block off something that was once heard by thousands of listeners. I guess I’m reconciled – well, just about – to bumping into folk who do remember my association – my very brief association – with the programme. For a long time I wanted to avoid doing that at all costs so never went back to The Marches, to the West Midlands. But time has passed now, and anyway my attitude to it all has changed.
‘If I’d wanted, Nat, to tell you about it, then I’d have done so. Well, now you know. At least the barest details. Yes, I did appear on the show in the seventies, but more than that I’m not saying. Don’t wish to. End of.’
Now the road came out from the shadows of beech and oak, and I could see ahead the forms of the hills, up the side of one of which Lydcastle draws its long steep main street. ‘I hear what you’re saying, Dad,’ and truly I’d have had to be totally stone deaf not to have done so, ‘but I’d just like to make one point.’
‘Point!’ repeated Dad, as if it was the most irritating word I could have selected.
‘If you hate the whole memory of the programme, why did you name your shop after it?’
Considering the tone in which he had just been speaking, all disturbed and pent-up, I half-expected him to explode at my forwardness. But the opposite happened. He physically relaxed himself in his seat, and, from this point on, his handling of the vehicle was gentler, and certainly far better for a passenger with head-pain and nausea.
‘Because I thought that was the best, the only way, of exorcising the memory,’ he said. ‘I thought – from its launch onwards the name High Flyers will refer to my business and nothing else. It was a good idea. I still think so.’
But it hadn’t completely worked, had it?
‘Which reminds me, if that Darren What’s-it doesn’t turn up this afternoon for his power-kite, and with the full payment, I shall hunt him down and fucking murder him.’
Once back at Dad’s I took two Anadin Extras, which worked within half an hour, and inspected the shop’s most recent stock. The Barrolettas were yet to arrive, but Dad said they surely would soon. But there was a new Maori bird-kite, with a sail made out of raupu-vine leaf, and crowned by an eerie big-eyed head; there was a Conyne or French Military kite, tailless, with a two-leg bridle, suited to flying in the most seriously heavy weather (in other words, not the best kind for these hot midsum-mer doldrums, but it looked appealing enough the way my dad had strung it above the window), and an extremely colourful Chinese butterfly-kite. Because I know these are the kites Dad likes best, would really devote himself to completely in his ideal world, I thought I’d postpone examining the other (more popular) items (‘our cash cows’) until later.
Dad had also put round the walls of the shop numbered posters – of his own design and printing, I could tell, drawing on the skills of his Sunbeam Press years presenting a ‘World History of Kites and Kiting’. The first of the posters taught me something I didn’t know (or hadn’t retained from all the many factual goodies Dad had casually showered on me throughout my life).
We were, it said, in the twenty-sixth century of these ‘gentle attempts on the heavens’ by humankind. In 500 BCE the Chinese were not only flying kites but having kite festivals on the ninth day of every ninth month. A little illustrated story followed. A Chinese farmer had dreamed a dreadful calamity would befall his household the very next day. So what would be the best way for himself and his family to spend their last hours on earth? Why, flying kites, of course! So out into the fields he took them, to do just that. Meanwhile an accident destroyed their entire house. Kiting had not just relieved anxiety and passed time for them enjoyably, it had saved their lives. And that had all happened on the ninth day of the ninth month…
I was about to move onto the second poster, dealing with kites in Ancient Egypt, when I heard knocking on the door and saw on the other side of its glass, a man in his mid-twenties in motor-cycle gear: the miscreant Darren Courtney. Not a bad guy at all, not the ‘macho retard’ Dad had decided on. The reason he’d been so hard to contact, Darren told us – not replying to four emails, for example – was that he and his partner had just had a baby (a splendid little fellow called Belshazzar). Oh, well, said Dad, this is my splendid little fellow here: Nathaniel or Nat as we call him. You’re still interested in the job I got for you, I hope?
Well, he was, but would, I think, have li
ked to suggest he didn’t pay the full amount outright, but came to some instalment arrangement instead. I think that Dad sensed this and, far from wanting to murder him, would have assented, relieved to get the expensive thing off his hands and to find its buyer was at least halfway honest. But here I stepped in. ‘I’m taking over from my father now for some weeks,’ I said, ‘and, as I’ve only just arrived, this’ll be my first bit of business. I take it you’ve got your debit card with you, Darren. Just let me set our machine in motion, and then you can key in your PIN.’
And less than two minutes later Dad had the welcome £600 in his system.
Despite this little triumph (well, not so very ‘little’ really) I noticed that Dad was uneasy with me all day. I shouldn’t have tackled him so soon in my stay (within ten minutes of arriving) about his links with this once-famous quiz. Though why dissociate himself from something on which he’d been, as he did not deny, a ‘star performer’?
That night I dreamed that I was back on top of those walls that stretched beyond my mate Josh’s house in Tulse Hill. It was night-time, as it had been in reality, but my surroundings were lit up by the yellow fiery eyes of the fox pursuing me. Each pad forward this animal made corresponded to a possible answer to questions I hadn’t yet precisely formed, even to myself.
A violin tune moaned enchantingly through my sleep, but it wasn’t that Bach Chaconne, nor some plangent Cajun tune. ‘It follows the Kodály method,’ said Julian Pringle’s voice, ‘and you can hear it in the hills and mountains of the Marches.’
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