Swan River Read online

  I knew my dad had supported the Spurs since he was a little boy. He had taken me to a match for the first time a few months before and I was a fervent fan. He had bought me a rosette and a blue plastic, star-shaped badge with a tiny photo of Danny Blanchflower stuck in the middle of it. Then he had bought a glossy white, wooden bird-scarer, carefully painted a dark blue stripe down it and presented it to me as my Spurs rattle.

  ‘He would have gone to White Hart Lane first in the late 1890s. I took him myself sometimes after Tom left.’ Uncle George paused. ‘But that was all later, you’ve got to understand. I’m telling you about when I was a little boy which was even longer ago. It’s a long story and we won’t get through it all tonight. You’ll have to go home soon I should think.’

  I had a small Timex watch, of which I was very proud. It was ten past five. I could stay a little longer.

  He told me how he had lived in the same house with his father, his brother and his sister from the age of nine until he got married in 1900, when he was thirty-two; that, after his mother died, his father’s sister had come to look after them, and how they had had two servants who lived in the attic. After a while his father got fed up with the sister because she drank too much gin, but by then Sis, my grandmother, was a teenager and she took over the running of the house. She was a bossy type of person and bossed the servants and everyone else, except for her father, but then her father was often away selling furniture which was how he earned his living.

  It took Uncle George a long time to tell me all this. I was fascinated – I had never heard anyone talk about things that happened so long ago – but what I really wanted to know was where did my grandfather go when he had to leave all the rest of them, and what did he do then. Eventually, though, I just had to have a pee and that made Uncle George think that it was time for me to go home. He would tell me more another day, he said.

  Walking home, I thought about Uncle George and his eyebrows and my long-dead grandfather, whom Uncle George had called ‘poor’. At the corner of Lock Road and Station Road I met Patrick and Dennis; they were leaning against the wall sharing a cigarette. Patrick held the packet towards me, but I said I was in a hurry and just took a quick pull on theirs.

  When I got home I told my mother that I had been to see Uncle George. She told me I was sweet, and asked how the old man was.

  ‘Fine,’ I replied.

  She had just got in from work and was standing at the kitchen table with an apron over her work skirt. It was Tuesday, so she was mincing the leftovers of Sunday’s joint to make rissoles.

  ‘I’d better go and do my homework.’

  ‘Just a minute.’ She quickly rinsed her hands; then kissed me on the side of my mouth. I could smell her lipstick, and hoped that she couldn’t smell tobacco smoke. ‘It’s so nice of you to go to see Uncle George.’ She reached into her handbag and gave me a Penguin biscuit. ‘Here – a treat.’ She smiled and went back to turning the mincer.

  Penguins, which cost threepence each, were an extravagance; squashed flies or bourbons from a packet were an acceptable expense. My mother was not mean – in spirit, she was generous – she was simply parsimonious, the product of the times and of years of living with a man who saw money simply as something to spend, preferably as soon as possible.

  I took the Penguin up to my room and ate it slowly, staring out at the few cars parked in the street.

  * * * * *

  I called in on Uncle George a week later, again at about tea time. Orange squash and cakes were produced again, and he seemed pleased to see me, but he looked tired and was less talkative.

  We talked about school and football and my father and mother, especially my mother this time. He told me how fond of her he was, and how my father and I must look after her. There were silences while he stared out of the window across the river to the tree-covered slope beyond, and he held my hand some of the time, something he had never done before.

  After a while, he screwed up his eyes, stared at me and said, ‘You know, I first met your mother in 1933.’ He closed his eyes still tighter. ‘Your father brought her to Sudbury to meet me and dear Marie.’ He opened his eyes and smiled. ‘Such a polite, quiet, gracious woman.’ He tapped my knee. ‘Now, is she happy?…I know she was upset when she had to sell the shop.’

  She had sold the shop two years before. It was in the High Street and we had lived in large, airy rooms on the two floors above. I told him that I thought she was happy. I didn’t tell him my worry about the way my father was sometimes unkind – even cruel, I thought – to her.

  ‘Good. She deserves to be happy. She’s a woman with a great sense of duty… It comes from her upper-class English upbringing.’

  I had an idea of what he meant, but he seemed to have forgotten that my granny, my mother’s mother, was American.

  Uncle George continued to smile, though he looked tired. ‘You’ve made her very happy, David. You know that, don’t you?’ He leaned forward and poked at my knee again. ‘They were married for sixteen years before they had you, you know.’

  ‘I know,’ I said wearily. My father mentioned this fact almost every time we met someone new, especially new farmers: ‘This is my son David. We were married sixteen years before he came along.’ Depending on the response, this was often followed by: ‘My third marriage. My eldest son’s forty-five and this one’s eleven...’ His arm would then be placed round my shoulder. ‘Remarkable.’

  They had married in 1933, and I, their first and only child, was born in 1948. My father was then fifty-six and my mother forty-two, but I could never understand why this should be of such interest to people, especially complete strangers.

  Uncle George took my hand again and leaned back in his chair. He shut his eyes for a minute, and I wondered whether he had gone to sleep. When he opened them, they were watery, and he spoke about his wife, Marie: how pretty she had been and how he still missed her. He pronounced her name with a long ‘a’ sound and the emphasis on the first syllable.

  The same foreign man refilled his teacup and my glass, and then I asked him about my whisky-drinking, disappearing grandfather and where he went after he had to leave home.

  He took several sips of tea while staring at me over the rim of the cup. He put the cup down slowly and carefully, and turned his eyes back to mine.

  ‘When you are grown up and can afford to travel, you must go to Swan River, Manitoba.’ Despite his obvious tiredness he said this with great earnestness, nodding, waggling his eyebrows and tapping my knee quite hard.

  I felt a little strange, as though I had heard bad news, although he was smiling at me now. I had never heard of Swan River or Manitoba, but I felt that I had to obey this curious instruction, as if suddenly I had a duty. I asked him why and where was it, but he was looking down at the floor and didn’t seem to be listening.

  ‘Is that where my grandfather went?’

  He looked up at me, nodded and smiled; then he looked at his old Omega watch and said he was tired and that it was a long story and Billy Cotton’s Band Show would be on television soon; he would explain next time I visited him. ‘But remember, Swan River, Manitoba.’ Again, he said the words with emphasis and then smiled.

  It was a quarter to six; Billy Cotton would not, in fact, start up for another fifteen minutes; the sun had long gone off the river and the trees. He said no more about Swan River, but talked about his brother Ernest’s first wife who had worked in the music halls around the turn of the century. There was clearly a connection in his mind between her and Billy Cotton whose show was a variety show, the closest thing on television in 1960 to the kind of entertainment Uncle George had loved as a young man.

  Ernest’s wife had earned her living in the music halls by playing the violin with her feet while walking around on her hands. She could even do this while going downstairs, Uncle George said, and sometimes practised at home in the house where they all lived. This amazed me. I found it hard to picture; I could see her only as a still image, but not in mot
ion. She had an exotic name, La Frascetti, he told me, although she was English and came from the East End of London, and her real name was Rose Porter.

  Just before six o’clock Uncle George asked the foreign man to turn on the television. A thin old man with a stick walked slowly past and raised his hand to Uncle George in greeting; he sat down near us and stared up at the television, sitting very straight with his hands on his stick. As I finished my orange squash, I watched the opening number, Billy Cotton’s band playing their signature tune while the Television Toppers kicked their legs. I left after that, kissing Uncle George on the forehead as I went. He smiled, squeezed my hand tightly and muttered, ‘Good boy.’

  Walking home, I repeated the word ‘Manitoba’ so I wouldn’t forget it. I didn’t tell my parents what Uncle George had said; it seemed to be something that was just between me and the old man, for the moment, anyway. Later, lying on my bed, I wrote ‘Swan River, Manitober’ in the red, soft-backed notebook that I kept for my very few secrets.

  * * * * *

  Uncle George died unexpectedly in his sleep six days later, for no particular reason. I had planned to visit him again the following day. My mother told me that the foreign man had found Uncle George when he took in his early-morning tea; he was in bed as if asleep, but not breathing. ‘He died peacefully,’ she said.

  Through the crack in our living-room door I saw my father sitting alone crying with a handkerchief in his hand. I went away because I didn’t want to embarrass him, fetched my satchel and left for school. My father took the day off work. When I came home, he was standing in the hall, speaking on the telephone; my mother came back from work and said he had probably been standing there all day and that we really ought to put a chair in the hall.

  * * * * *

  The funeral was a generous occasion, conducted in the church by the white suspension bridge, a short walk from Uncle George’s home by the lock. There were crowds of people, lots of them very old; children; flowers; a halting address by Mr Brown from the grocery; the choir singing ‘Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring’; the vicar in white with shimmering purple extras. I sang loudly, sandwiched between my parents in the front pew, and my mother stolidly held my hand. All around us were cousins of all ages, most of whom I didn’t know: Uncle George’s children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren. My father, a lifelong atheist, but then in the middle of his brief religious phase, wept not quite silently and knelt, head in hands, longer than anyone at the end.

  As we walked down the aisle I was introduced to two elderly women who were Uncle George’s nieces, the daughters of the long-dead Uncle Ernest. I was disappointed to discover later that they were not the daughters of the fascinating La Frascetti, but of a piano teacher who had been Uncle Ernest’s second wife.

  In the churchyard, a weak, late-winter sun lit the grass around the red-brown rectangle; brass and varnished pine gleamed; spoonfuls of earth were thrown with a polished spade – first by the many cousins, then my father, then my mother, then me.

  Later, still holding my mother’s hand, I wandered among the graves, past an ancient yew, to the river. Two swans glided in small circles near the weir. A car’s horn sounded from the bottom of the High Street.

  ‘Where is Swan River, Manitoba?’

  My mother looked at me curiously. She was wearing her calf-length black tweed suit. ‘Manitoba is in Canada. Why?’ She swung her black handbag with the gilt clasp from her right hand to her left.

  ‘Uncle George told me to go there.’

  ‘Did he? You’d better ask Daddy.’

  I took her arm and pressed my cheek against her shoulder as we wandered back and out of the churchyard to the street. It had been my first funeral. That Uncle George was in that smart box under the ground now seemed less strange than when I had first seen the coffin, covered in daffodils and lilies, and had asked my mother, ‘Is Uncle George actually in there?’

  * * * * *

  Uncle George’s wake, or ‘the do afterwards’ as people called it, was at Burger’s Tea Shop, a little way up the High Street. A long table for us children at one end was matched by another for old people from the nursing home, at the other. In between was an uproar of polite adult chatter which I carefully ignored, although I was pleased and stood up when the foreign man approached me hesitantly and said how much he had liked Uncle George.

  I sat with my friend Deborah, whose father ran the sweetshop further up the street and who was the only person privy to the secrets in my red notebook. Out of earshot of my mates, Richard and Adam, I asked her whether she’d come with me to Swan River, Manitoba, Canada.

  She was slim and had short brown hair, and showed her gums when she smiled. We had been friends since we were five, had, indeed, shown each other everything when we were five, and had been caught in the bathroom together by Deborah’s mother – a shameful discovery which had led to a row between our fathers, mine liberal and fiery-tempered, hers conservative and kindly.

  ‘Yes. When we leave school.’ She forked in a rectangle of Welsh rarebit, chewed, swallowed, tilted her head sideways and gazed at me from under her hair. ‘We’ll have to go on a boat, won’t we?’

  ‘Probably, I’m going to ask Dad where it is.’

  ‘Canada is in America. You have to go on a boat to get there.’

  My father had flown to Australia and back four years before and had made a tremendous fuss about it, filling a complete photograph album with tiny black and white pictures of a silver aeroplane with four propellers and even more of himself standing under palm trees dressed in white wearing a curious hat that looked like an oval fruit bowl, but everyone else who went anywhere abroad seemed to go by boat.

  Deborah didn’t ask why we were to go to Swan River; she loved an adventure, and had been an avid reader of Arthur Ransome. If I had suggested a trip to somewhere with a less watery name, San Francisco, say, or Staines, she would probably have wrinkled her nose and said ‘No’. When we were younger we had often had fantasies about what we would do when we grew up, and had made detailed plans which we wrote into my red book.

  Richard and Adam, currently separated from us by a crowd of my young cousins, had little imagination and no thought for the future; they seemed to live solely in the real world and in the present. But Deborah’s ability to fantasise frequently dovetailed with my own. On this occasion, though, I had a new, scary feeling; going to Swan River wasn’t just an imaginative game.

  2

  On the Road with the Seed Salesman

  My father had glasses with thick black rims in those days. He looked not unlike Harry Worth and was often just as funny, but he had a serious side – a very serious side – as well.

  The next evening he and I watched The Brains Trust. I didn’t understand much of what The Brains Trust talked about, but I liked the people’s names – Bertrand Russell, Dame Edith Sitwell, Doctor Bronowski, Lady Violet Bonham-Carter – and I found their serious faces and their accents somehow entertaining. And this was a rare time when I could be with my father while he listened to someone else talk instead of talking himself.

  When the programme ended I spoke before he did. ‘The last time I saw him, Uncle George told me to go to Swan River, Manitoba, once I’m grown-up.’

  My father leaned back in his loose-covered armchair and stared at me intently for a few seconds. He took off his glasses, pulled out the handkerchief he always kept in the breast pocket of his tweed jacket, waved it about a bit and blew his nose loudly and thoroughly. Stuffing the handkerchief back and replacing his glasses, he looked at me again. ‘My father spent the last part of his life in Swan River, Manitoba.’ Unusually, he fell silent – and stopped looking at me. He stared at the carpet instead.

  ‘Why would Uncle George tell me to go there?’ I asked this a little tentatively – it was clearly a sensitive matter.

  He got up and poked the cosy stove vigorously. Yellow and blue flames appeared on top of the anthracite. Still standing, he said, ‘My Uncle George was a very kind man, a
very liberal man – if you know what I mean. He found it hard to think badly of anyone.’

  He walked back to his chair and sat down, throwing one knee over the other. He picked up his tin from the table and began to roll a cigarette. ‘Uncle George thought there was good in my father.’

  He licked the Rizla paper and stared at the floor again. ‘It’s what they call a long story.’ He lit the cigarette with his shiny Ronson and inhaled. ‘Very long indeed. I’ll tell you it all, but not all at once.’

  He blew blue smoke towards the ceiling and it gradually formed a horizontal cloud above our heads. ‘It’s complicated… Or it’s very simple, depending on your point of view…Where’s your mother? Let’s play Cluedo. I’ll be Professor Plum.’

  * * * * *

  I knew we would talk about it, because I spent a lot of time with my father and talking was his great talent. Though he was sixty-eight years old, he worked hard at his job selling seeds, driving from farm to farm all over Buckinghamshire in an Austin A35 supplied by his employers, persuading farmers that his varieties of wheat, barley and oats were better than those of his competitors. He was very good at this – he was his firm’s nationwide champion salesman for the whole country that year and the next. I often went with him in the holidays and in the afternoons after school, map-reading, finding farms he had never visited before. We talked a lot on these journeys, and we talked early in the mornings before my mother got up.

  As well as being a generation older than my friends’ dads, my dad seemed to have had a more complicated life than they had. Richard’s father was in the RAF and had been ever since his call-up during World War II; he was ‘ground staff’ and my father referred to him as ‘the man with the ping-pong bats’. Adam’s father taught politics at the London School of Economics; my father approved of him and they had frequent, reasonably friendly arguments. Deborah’s father ran a sweetshop and always had done as far as I knew.