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Don’t look at me, he said, I’m not a historian, and they all laughed.
Albert Carter, their father, had been twenty-seven when the picture was taken, but he looked a lot younger; fresh-faced, smiling broadly, his skin so smooth that it was hard to believe he’d ever had to shave. His hair was slicked back, with the comb-lines as straight as a slide-rule, and his smile lifted the same creases around his eyes that David could remember seeing as a boy. The uniform looked a little too big for him, hanging loose around the shoulders, and there was none of the formal regalia which might have been expected in a portrait photograph, no spit-polished brass, or epaulettes, or braiding; it was a uniform which looked purely functional, ready for the serious business of crewing a ship into battle.
Of course, Susan said, I don’t remember much about the war, I was too young. All I can remember, really, is this man arriving in the house, like the man in the picture but older and heavier, and not smiling. The others leant in towards the photograph as she spoke, looking at Albert Carter’s fixed and frozen smile. He just appeared, she said, there was no discussion, he was just suddenly lurking about the place, making the house much smaller than it had been and taking up my mother’s time. Smelling unfamiliar and damp, she said, laughing, as though she was unsure what she meant. But that’s the thing I always remember, she said. His not being there and then being there, and nobody asking my opinion. The others smiled at this, as people usually did.
David was going to tell someone this story with the picture in his hand, holding on to it for a moment before passing it over, feeling the rough and crinkled texture of the greying card, turning it over to read the soft pencilled dates and numbers on the back, running his fingers again across the scratches scored into the photograph’s dull surface. Dozens of scratches, mostly too faint to see unless the picture was turned into the light; mostly, except for three deep scars which had split and torn right through the skin of the paper, gouged across the young man’s smiling face.
Susan explained that she’d made these marks, one afternoon when her father had been home for a few months. This was the part of the story where people always went quiet, and looked at the picture more closely, or turned to her and nodded, or smiled wryly because they could guess exactly what she was going to say. She’d been told to take a nap so that her mother and father could have a lie down while the new baby, David, was sleeping. Auntie Julia, whose house they were all staying in until they could find something of their own, was out doing some shopping. Restless and bored, Susan took a small metallic comb from her father’s desk, grabbed the picture from the mantelpiece, and scoured frantically across its surface before making a tearful escape to the bedroom.
The most awful thing, she said, pointing out an ashtray on the hall table to a guest with a cigarette, is that nothing was ever said. The picture was replaced with another one, almost identical, and nobody ever mentioned it, she said.
Goodness, said a woman with a bright red scarf tied around her neck. Really? Susan nodded.
Not a word, she said. We found the damaged original in a box of his things after he died, and I insisted on keeping it. I’ve only recently put it up though, she added. The dinner guests peered closely at the picture for a few moments more, mentioning similar stories of their own before gradually moving back into the dining room.
My mother told me I used to try and drag my father out of their bed, the woman with the scarf said, laughing, and the man with the cigarette smiled at her, nodding.
Anyone want another coffee? Susan asked, as she followed them back to the table.
David stood in the hall for a moment longer, looking at the picture, tracing the scratches with his fingers, imagining the distress of the three-year-old girl which they recorded so well. He looked at the eyes, the smile, the face of the man who had brought him up so lovingly and was now gone, and he turned away.
You’ll be careful with it though? Susan said, later, when he asked if he could borrow the picture for a while. She unclipped it from its frame and handed it over to him, and he told her that yes, of course, he’d be careful. And, I mean, are you sure this is a good idea? she asked, the whole thing? and he told her that yes, thank you, it was.
2 Handwritten list of household items, c.1947 (#ulink_dea3deb9-fb1b-5fa3-ac19-4538c5a32661)
When Dorothy Carter was twenty-seven she wrote a list, sitting at the kitchen table, tapping her pen against the side of her face while she thought of everything she wanted to include. When she’d finished she pinned it to the back of the utility-room door, where it stayed until the day she finally moved out, and as David was helping to pack away her things he took it down and slipped it quickly into his pocket, thinking that someone might be interested in having a look.
He imagined her sitting at the kitchen table that first day, with unopened suitcases and boxes all over the clean hard-wearing linoleum floor, a trunk, a bundle of bedding tied up with string. Susan stamping and clattering around the hard bare rooms, testing the echo of her voice against the walls, or playing in the sand and rubble at the back of the house. Albert would have been on his way back to London already, returning the borrowed bread van in time for that night’s deliveries, having stopped on the way out to take a photo of Dorothy by the front door with the new handbag he’d bought her. He imagined her looking out through the window at the unfinished road piled high with timber and roof tiles, the other houses still skeletal, scaffolded, half-built; or standing to open and close the spotless cupboard doors.
It was so much more than we were expecting, she told David once. It was so much more than I felt we deserved.
The new house had its own front garden, and a path leading up to the door. It had an indoor toilet and a bath. There were fitted cabinets in the kitchen, and an airing cupboard, and electric lighting throughout. There was a cupboard under the stairs instead of a damp cellar. He found it difficult to imagine, when she told him all this, that these things had once been enough to seem like a miracle, to stun someone into speechless tears, but they had. Later, when he watched her saying the same things to Kate, he could see that Kate didn’t believe her at all, saying, and did you make your own entertainment in them days Nana? Glancing at him and biting back a smile, not noticing how quietly her grandmother said yes love, we did, you’re right.
She’d never been inside a new house before. She’d grown up in a tiny soft-walled cottage in the Suffolk countryside, where the only new buildings were the Nissen huts and hangars of the new airfields, where a bathroom was a kitchen for six and a half days of the week and the cooking was done on the fire, and she had no way of picturing what a new house might be like. Theirs was one of the first houses in the development to be finished, and they’d had to drive carefully through acres of Coventry’s bomb-flattened streets to reach it, waiting for them, perfect and untouched. We could still smell the paint when we went inside, she told him. She’d never seen rooms without furniture before, and the emptiness made the house feel so large that she was convinced they’d made a mistake until his father went outside and checked the number on the door.
And after he’d left with the van she sat at the table, steadying herself, trying to write the list. She was frightened, she told David once. She didn’t think they were entitled to it. All that work, for them, when there were so many people in worse off positions. She was worried for a long time that someone was going to come knocking on the front door with a clipboard, asking for forms they didn’t have, saying there’d been some kind of mistake.
She sat there, thinking through all the things that needed to be done, while his sister played in what would one day be the garden and he slept in a pushchair in the room next door. She made a list of jobs which needed doing straight away: putting sheets and blankets on the mattresses Julia had given them; laying out the clothes; cleaning the kitchen cabinets and scouring the surfaces; putting away their small stock of food; getting the rest of those boxes out of the way so some cooking could be done. And then she made a list of ‘Things We Will Need’, the list he still had now, a list which started with the immediate essentials and worked through to the fanciful and frivolous, a compendium of wishful thinking.
There was a space in the kitchen made especially for a refrigerator she told him, much later. Anything seemed possible.
By the time his father had got back from London the next evening, she’d measured the windows for curtains, and planned carpets for the floors and the stairs. She’d chosen colours and wallpapers for each of the rooms, and listed the ornaments and accessories which she’d seen in magazines and long wanted. She’d listed an electric iron, a top-loading washing machine, a vacuum cleaner, a new wireless set, an electric sewing machine. Albert laughed when he saw the list, the story went, telling her that she’d missed out the moon on a stick, but he kissed her all the same and said they’d see what they could do. They stood there for a long time, looking at it, their hands touching, until Susan came running in with a banged elbow, or David woke up crying in the next room, or the kettle came to the boil, and they both turned away.
And the list turned yellow with grease and flour and thumb-marks, and ticks appeared as each item was sweated and dreamed and saved into life. The lawn turned green with sprouting grass-seed, and rose bushes blushed into bloom all around it. A rug rolled out across their bedroom floor, and carpet stepped neatly down the stairs. Patterned nets were stretched across the front windows, and curtain material purchased, sewn, and hung. A carpet sweeper appeared for the new carpet, and settled in under the stairs with the brushes and buckets and mops, waiting to be put out of work by a new vacuum cleaner. And one bright day, six or seven years later, a gleaming white refrigerator, complete with icebox, was delivered by men in smart overalls from the newly rebuilt Owen’s department store in town. It’s not quite the moon on a stick, his father said, when he got home from work and saw the cold white cabinet humming quietly in the corner of the kitchen, but it’s not far off.
This is the sort of person his mother was, he thought whenever he looked again at the list, when he imagined her reinventing her family’s life in that way, with a new child, a new house, a new city outside waiting to be rebuilt. This was what he would tell anyone who asked, showing them the yellowed sheet of paper; my mother wanted all these things for us, and look how much of it she got. This was what he was going to say, if there was anyone who wanted to know.
3 Local map, Whitechapel district, London, annotated, c.1950 (#ulink_1358a6d9-3037-5fb4-b1f9-095397fda528)
It was his father’s idea to move to Coventry. He heard that from his mother, more than once, sitting around the kitchen table while his father read the evening paper and grumbled about some factory closure or rates increase. It was your father’s idea to move here, she’d say, to David and Susan, pretending that she thought he couldn’t hear. Or he heard it from their bedroom late at night, their tempered voices breaking through the thin walls and closed doors; this was your idea remember Albert, not mine. To which his father usually replied that they’d otherwise still be squatting in Julia’s bloody spare room and how would she like that then, eh?
Julia had been Dorothy’s closest friend at nursing college, despite being a few years older and more familiar with silver cutlery or linen tablecloths than anyone Dorothy knew. She’d been widowed early on in the war, and her young son Laurence was living with her brother in the country, so when she offered Dorothy lodgings in her house she claimed that it was as much to keep her from getting lonely as anything. You’ll be doing me a favour dear, she said, and she refused to let Dorothy even think of finding somewhere else to live once Susan was born, or David, or even when Albert came back from the war for good, and Laurence returned from the country, and there were six of them squeezed into the house and making do. It hadn’t always been easy, especially once Laurence came back and began to compete noisily for his mother’s attention. But the house was big enough, just, and Julia generous enough, that they could easily still have been living there had Albert not heard about the houses being offered in Coventry for building workers, or had Dorothy not secretly done all that she could to encourage him.
They went back to Auntie Julia’s house now and again, once a year if they could, using the postal orders she sent to pay the fares; David and Susan wearing their Sunday clothes and watching the train rattle past the newly built suburbs of Coventry, the long reaches of wasteground, the farms and woodlands and market towns which soon gave way to the smoke and noise of London. Look, that’s where I went to school, his father would say, as they walked from the underground station to Julia’s house, squeezing David’s hand to get his attention, pointing to a tall high-windowed Victorian building; and this is where I took my first job, a few moments later, as they passed a builder’s yard with a few small piles of bricks and sand and waste timber. This is where your grandparents lived, he’d add quickly, gesturing at an open scrap of wasteland between two houses; that’s where I grew up. And this is where we all used to live, his mother would say, as they rounded the last corner into Julia’s street, David and Susan both slipping out of their parents’ hands in a race to reach the house first, stretching up to reach the doorbell before Julia, who would always be looking out for them, swung open the door.
Their visits usually followed the same pattern. Julia would have lunch waiting for them – cucumber sandwiches, sliced meats, fruit pies, all laid out on the big table by the window, with Laurence hovering sullenly while he waited for permission to begin – and once they’d eaten Albert would make some excuse and slip out to see old friends in the pub, leaving the women to talk and the children to get down and play. It was a tall and narrow terraced house, with three floors and a cellar, and although the rooms were small and crammed full of Julia’s many possessions, there was plenty of space to explore. Sometimes Susan and David would play together, or with Laurence, while Julia and Dorothy did the washing up and chattered about grown-up things; playing hide and seek up and down the three flights of stairs, making handkerchief parachutes for Susan’s dolls and dropping them with a quick thud from the top landing, daring each other to creep down into the dark cellar. Sometimes they’d play apart, allocating each other a floor of the house and muttering their imaginary narratives around cars and teacups and soldiers and dolls. And sometimes they’d make so much noise, encroaching on each other’s games or flaring up over some half-imagined slight, that Auntie Julia or their mother would give them some money and some coupons to go to the sweet shop, telling them to run off some of their silliness in the park. Laurence never came to the park with them, and often ignored them altogether, barricading himself in his room to read comics or listen to the crystal radio set he’d built himself. He was five years older than David, so it almost didn’t seem strange that he would keep himself apart like that, although sometimes he heard his mother complain about it on the way home, saying well Laurence was a bit rude, a bit sulky, nothing like his mother, and didn’t Albert think Julia should be doing something about it?
Dorothy was up on her feet before he’d even opened the door, reaching for him, saying David David love, what happened? Lifting him into her arms, kissing the top of his head and wiping his eyes with a handkerchief, saying oh David, it’s okay, it’s alright, what’s happened to you? And by the time she’d sat him down on a chair to have a good look at him, Julia had taken a wad of cotton wool from her useful drawer, and a bottle of antiseptic from the cupboard, and set them on the table.
She asked him again what had happened. There were some big boys, he said, in the park, and he didn’t manage to say much more through his sniffs and juddering tears. He didn’t say that they’d asked him what he was doing in their park, that they’d told him he wasn’t from round there and to get lost, that one of them had pushed him off the swing and that another had thrown stones while he was running away, that he’d tripped and fallen and they’d all laughed. He was already learning that some things were easier not to say.
This is going to hurt a little now David, his mother said, as she dabbed antiseptic on to his broken skin. He nodded, wincing, sucking the breath in between his teeth, and when she was done he said are we going home soon? and his mother said yes love, we are, we’ll go soon, but why don’t you have a lie down first, have a little rest, okay?
And while David lay in the bed in one of Julia’s spare rooms, a cool damp cloth folded across his forehead, and while Susan went up to see him, to offer him something from her thruppenny bag of sweets and say are you alright? I’m sorry I left you in the park, and while David thought about it for a moment and said that’s okay, Dorothy was wiping at tears of her own with the same handkerchief she’d offered David a few moments before, sitting down on the chair and smiling up at Julia, saying well, you can’t always be there with them, can you?
No dear, Julia said, sitting down next to her. You can’t.
It’s a good job I wasn’t there, Dorothy said, smoothing her handkerchief. I probably would have belted them.
I daresay you would have done Dotty, Julia said, shaking her head, and where do you think that would have left us? A long line of upset mothers knocking on my door I’d imagine. Dorothy smiled, wiping her eyes again and folding the handkerchief away.
But where does it come from, this? she said, looking down at her clenching and unclenching fist. I mean, Julia, you know, from the first moment I set eyes on him, I—He was such a beautiful child, wasn’t he?
They always are, said Julia, smiling.
No, but Julia, he was; I couldn’t, I couldn’t take my eyes off him; I couldn’t put him down for more than a minute. I used to watch anyone who came near him like a hawk, you know I did. Julia nodded.
I know Dot, she said. Of course I do.
I would have stepped in front of a bus for him, Dorothy said. I still would. Where does that come from? she asked again. Julia shrugged.
It’s only natural, she said.
Dorothy looked up, almost startled.
But this was different, she said, this is different. I’d never felt like that before, she said fearfully. Don’t you remember me telling you that? Julia nodded, smiling, squeezing Dorothy’s hand and then letting go as they both heard Susan stepping carefully down the stairs.
4 Tobacco tin, cigarettes, Christmas card, 1914 (#ulink_3867a2db-6035-5180-aebb-3d5dcb560c93)
He pushed open the door of the room at the end of Auntie Julia’s top landing, and stared. He’d never seen so many things in one room before. There were piles of books and magazines, dresses on hangers and dresses spread out across chairs, hats balanced on top of each other, photo albums still halfway through being filled from shoeboxes of loose snapshots, bunches of flowers hanging to dry, posters for West End productions, jewellery boxes spilling over with tangled necklaces and earrings. He edged into the room, his hands hovering over it all, not knowing where to begin. His parents kept a much tidier and more ordered house; clothes were kept in wardrobes, toys went straight back under the bed when they’d been played with, and the few photographs they had were neatly filed away into albums and rarely taken out. This was something very new. Later, once he’d been taken to the British Museum, and been patiently waited for while he tried to read every last caption, he would think of comparing this room to the collection halls of the Egyptian Pharaohs, where the many possessions they needed to accompany them to the next world were held for safekeeping, and he would shyly tell Julia this and be shocked by the volume of her laughter, by the ferocity with which she would gather him into her arms and kiss the top of his head.
Without thinking about it, he picked up a tobacco tin from the bookshelf, half hidden amongst the jewellery boxes and polished stones. It was lighter than he’d expected, and rough where the metal had rusted, and there were pictures of battleships around the edge of the lid. You can open it if you like, Julia said quietly, and although he hadn’t realised she was standing behind him, he was too absorbed to be surprised. She came into the room, swept a pile of magazines from the bed to the floor and sat down. He looked at her and he looked at the tin in his hands.
Julia’s mother had been an actress, and although Julia had never quite made it onto the stage herself, she had inherited something of that same gift for inhabiting a story; and that was what she did that day, as she told him about a long-gone Christmas. She told him about her father, a young school-teacher with round glasses and a thin moustache, spending the Christmas of 1914 in a muddy hole somewhere in France. She said that even though it was a war they’d found the time for a celebration, and that by the light of a smoky paraffin lamp and a few stubby candles they’d drunk from small mugs filled with brandy, sung carols, and worn party hats made from sheets of old newspaper. It can’t have been all that cheery, she said, what with men not there who should have been there, and all of them anyway wishing they were home with their families, but they did their best, and made jokes, and drank to the health of every last man they could think of. And then, she said, leaning in close as though it were a secret, their commanding officer gave them these: a Christmas present from the young Princess Mary herself. She reached across and helped him ease the lid off the tin. Inside, there was a Christmas card, a full pouch of tobacco, and twenty cigarettes. She smiled. He kept his, she said. He thought it would be worth hanging on to, he thought it might be worth something one day. She laughed. He could be very dull and sensible sometimes, she said. My mother was forever on at him to liven up a little. He looked at the unsmoked cigarettes and a strange excitement shook through him. It was a dangerous, thrilling feeling.
The thing in his hands felt at once indestructible and hopelessly fragile. He was terrified of dropping it, or of spoiling it in some way, of holding it out in the air for too long. It felt as though he had only to put one of the cigarettes to his lips and he would be suddenly transported to that foxhole in 1914, crowded around a mess table singing carols with his fellow soldiers. He wanted to put the lid back on, to have Julia take it out of his hands, but he couldn’t move and he couldn’t bring himself to look away.
Later, Julia took him to the Imperial War Museum and showed him soldiers’ uniforms like the one her father had worn, and the type of rifle he would have used, and letters sent home from the front. She took him to the British Museum and showed him the treasures of Sutton Hoo, the Egyptian Mummies, the jewellery and weapons and costumes smuggled home from around the world. She took him to the Natural History Museum, the V&A, the Horniman, and each time he felt the same breathless excitement he’d felt when he’d first held her father’s tobacco tin, the same thrill of old stories made new.
And it was this that he had spent most of his life looking for: these physical traces of history, these objects which could weigh his hands down with their density of memory and time. Something he could hold on to and say, look, this belonged to my fathers and forefathers, this is some small piece of who they were. This is some small piece of where I began.
5 Shoebox of assorted domestic goods, bullets, shrapnel, 1953–1960 (#ulink_50636c50-cd18-5203-ac8c-986d4658d92f)
Soon after those first museum visits with Julia, he started collecting things for himself: broken crockery, an alarm clock with the face smashed in, the trailing wires of an old radio set, an empty picture frame; the cracked and rusting remains of other lives which he found on the bombsites where he wasn’t allowed to play. He brought them home, brushing the dried mud from them with an old toothbrush, looking for maker’s marks or other inscriptions, looking for something which would give these objects a story, attaching small labels with the date and the place where they were found and lining them up along his windowsill and his desk.
What are you doing? Susan asked him one afternoon, not for the first time, standing in his open doorway with her arms folded across her chest.
Nothing, he replied, turning away from her, trying to shield his latest find with his body, waiting for her to go away.
Why don’t you just collect cigarette cards like normal boys do? she said.
Why don’t you mind your own business? he said.
It is my business, I’m older than you and I’m your sister, so there, she said, picking up a dented water flask from the floor and lifting it quickly out of his reach. Where did you get this from? she asked, looking at it, reading the label which hung from its neck by a piece of white thread. Have you been on the bombsites again?
David stood up, reaching for it.
Give us it back, he said. Colin’s brother found it, he gave it to me.
Don’t believe you, Susan said. You’ll be in trouble if they find out.
Give us it back, David said again, jumping for it now, Susan lifting it higher and stepping back, turning towards the door.
Maybe I’ll keep it, she said, smiling.
It’s not yours, David said, his voice rising indignantly.
It’s not yours either, she snapped back. You don’t even know whose it is, it could be anyone’s.
Finders keepers, said David, and Susan stepped out on to the landing, smiling again.
Well, I’ve just found this so I’m keeping it, she said. David grabbed at it, Susan shrieked, and their mother yelled up at them both to stop it whatever it was they were doing. She pulled a face and gave him back the water flask, whispering for good measure that he was a smelly stinker.
If she’d asked, if she’d sat down and said that she really honestly wanted to know, he would have told her that he collected these things because he was fascinated by them, because he couldn’t take his eyes off them, because it was almost as good as having a real museum all to himself.
But she didn’t ask, and he rarely talked about it to anyone. He found it hard to explain, when anyone did ask, why he liked museums so much, why he spent so many of his weekends catching buses to museums in other towns, or gazing frustratedly at the building site which would one day become the museum Coventry was so painfully lacking. I just like looking at all the things, he would say, and imagining how old they are and finding out about them and everything; muttering as he spoke, knowing that the person asking wouldn’t understand.
He liked the smell of museums, the musty scent of things dug from the earth and buried in heavy wooden store cupboards. He liked the smell of the polish on the marbled floors, and the way his shoes squeaked as he walked across them. He liked the way that people’s voices would drift up and be lost in the hush of the high-ceilinged rooms. He liked the coldness of the glass cases when he pressed his face against them. He liked looking at the dates of the objects, and trying not to get dizzy as he added up how long ago that was. He didn’t understand why people had to ask, why they didn’t enjoy museums as much as he did, and why some of the other boys at school started to call him a swot and a teacher’s pet. It seemed perfectly natural to him, to be amazed by the physical presence of history, to be able to stand in front of an ancient object and be awed by its reach across time. A thumbprint in a piece of prehistoric pottery. The chipped edge of a Viking battle-axe, and the shattered remains of a human skull. The scribbled designs for the world’s first steam engine, spotted with candlewax and stained with jam. It seemed like some kind of miracle to him that these traces of distant lives had survived, and that he was able to stand in front of them and stare for as long as he liked.
When he ran out of display space in his room he started keeping the collection in cardboard shoeboxes under his bed, and it was from underneath his bed that he retrieved one of those same boxes some fifty years later, lifting the crinkled lid and sifting through the contents a few days before his journey, trying to remember where all these things had come from. A brooch, a set of keys, a bullet, a handful of blank-faced coins, a lumpen twist of rusted shrapnel: they could have come from any number of the sites he’d explored as a boy – the cratered fields he took as a shortcut across to school; the motor-works which still hadn’t been rebuilt; the numerous acres of cleared land which had been marked out with foundations for the housing his father would build to replace what had been there before the war. Coventry was a city of building sites when he was a child, great unmapped territories for him to explore, piecing together stories around the objects he found, guessing which buildings had once been where, or what might be coming, watching the way the city changed as all his favourite places were gradually rebuilt upon.
But the small leather shoe, in the bottom of the box, had come from his own back garden, not from a rubble-strewn bombsite. He’d dug it up with a handful of potatoes one evening after school and taken it to show his father, who was sitting on the back step with the paper. It fitted easily into his father’s broad hand, and they’d both looked at it for a moment, cradled there, plastered with mud.
Well that’s something, his father had said.
How old do you think it is Dad? David said, leaning over it with his hands on his knees. His father looked up.
I’d say it’s probably been in the ground there since ’44, he said, so it’s older than you at least. He looked over towards the potato patch, David’s spade still sticking out of the ground, the pale potatoes lying in a bunch beside the small hole he’d made. I wouldn’t tell your mother about this one though, he added. She might be upset. She might not let you hang on to it, he said. He looked at David, solemnly, and winked, and David tried to wink back. Now, you going to finish digging up the spuds? he asked, passing him the shoe and turning back to his paper.
In the summer, if the weather was fine, his father liked to sit out on the back step when he got home from work. His mother would look out for him coming down the road and have the kettle and the pot ready so that by the time he got to the house there’d be a mug of tea there waiting. Sometimes she would meet him at the door, holding a damp handkerchief up to his face to wipe the dust and dirt from his mouth before kissing him hello. He would sit on the step and spread the evening paper out across his lap, steam rising from his mug, smoke curling from his cigarette, and he didn’t like anyone speaking to him until he’d put the paper to one side and looked up again. He was always covered in dust when he got home, his face and hands coated with brick dust and powdered cement, his clothes scattered with woodshavings from the joiners working overhead, his hair threaded with thin white fibres from the panels they used in the roof and around the pipes. When he’d finished the paper, and got washed and changed before tea, he shifted back to being their at-home dad again, softer and more human seeming, but while he was sitting on that step, covered in the debris of work, waiting for his body to recover, he almost seemed to be someone else, some mythological character who built houses and schools and hospitals with his own bare and calloused hands.
At weekends, or on long evenings when the light held, he would work on the garden, swapping the dust of the building sites for the mud and soil of the ground. There were photographs, taken when they first moved into the house, in which the garden was nothing but piles of sand and builders’ rubble, a few nettles and thistles springing up from the odd patch of soggy ground. By the time he died, he’d turned it into something out of a gardener’s catalogue – a small lawn at the front, kept carefully trim and straight, bordered with rose bushes, hydrangeas, dahlias, and hollyhocks on either side of the front door. Long rows of vegetables in the back, carefully weeded, carrots and cauliflowers and brussel sprouts, potatoes and parsnips, wigwams of peas and fat runner beans.
Years later, when Dorothy first met Eleanor, she took great pleasure in showing her around the garden. This was all a wasteground when we moved in, David heard her say as she took Eleanor by the arm and led her around the borders. It took six years for the magnolia to flower but it was worth it, don’t you think? And Eleanor smiled and said that she thought it was. And as David watched them, from his place beside the back step, looking at the pale pink flowers of the clematis, which had been trained to the top of the slatwood fence, looking at the heavy handfuls of lavender and thyme growing out of the half-brick rockery in the corner, looking at the gnarled and sagging branches of the two small apple trees, it seemed as if his father had hardly gone away at all.
6 Postcard from Greenwich Maritime Museum, c.1953 (#ulink_b2643985-a288-5606-9303-74dcd7f0cd9f)
When David told Julia that he wanted to be a museum curator she didn’t nod and say that’s nice, or make a face, or ask him why; she clapped her hands and said it was a wonderful idea. You’ll have to invite me to your first exhibition, she said enthusiastically and whenever he saw her after that she would ask how his collections were coming along, what lessons he’d learnt from the museums he’d been to since she saw him last, whether he’d have any jobs going for a work-shy duffer like her once he was open and ready for business. He started telling her about the sort of museum he would run, the exhibitions he would put on, the archives he would collect. I’ll have some displays that people can pick up and hold, he said, and more people to explain what things are. And I won’t have anything in storage, he said. It’ll all be out on display and if there isn’t enough room I’ll buy a bigger museum because it’s not fair to hold on to things and not let people look at them. And I won’t have any replicas or artist’s impressions, he said.
He reminded her about the boat he’d seen in the Maritime Museum; it was sitting in a small white-washed room of its own, beached on the bare floor and propped up by a pair of painted timbers. He’d walked around it, just able to see over the gunwales and into the plain interior, a couple of bench seats the only sign of comfort. The display panel on the wall had said that this boat, all twenty undecked feet of it, may well have been sailed across the Atlantic by the Vikings. He’d read those words over again and turned back to the boat, a storm of excitement breaking over him, pressing his hands against it breathlessly, wanting to climb in and run his hands all over it, to push his face into the rough-grained wood and smell the salt tang of sweat and sea and adventure, to sit on the bench and imagine the lurch of the open ocean, the endless tack and reach towards an unrelenting horizon. He’d looked at the wood, which must have been eight or nine hundred years old, and wondered why it wasn’t roped off from the public, why it wasn’t a little more crumbling and worn, why the varnish was gleaming under the spotlights. And he’d gone back to the display board, and read the last short paragraph explaining who’d built the replica and how, and he’d wanted to kick the whole thing to pieces.
It didn’t mean anything, he told Julia later. It wasn’t real, it was made up. You can’t learn anything about history by looking at made-up things, he said, talking quickly and urgently. It’s stupid, it’s not fair. It’s a lie, he said. They’re lying. She held up a hand to steady him, smiling at his earnest scorn. It’s better than nothing though, isn’t it? she asked gently. It gives you an idea at least, wouldn’t you say?
7 Opening programme, Coventry Municipal Art Gallery and Museum, 1961 (#ulink_255e180c-bd25-5fac-b4eb-89ffc53bf62a)
It was still in good condition, kept clean and dry in a plastic wrapper, and when he slid it out to look through the pages the only marks of age were in the stilted language of the text and the starched formality of the photographs; the mayor, the director, the city treasurer, the benefactor’s wife, sitting on the platform with their hands folded into their laps, their hair waxed neatly into place, listening attentively to one another’s opening speeches, applauding.
He remembered their applause carrying out into the street, to the long crowd of people pressing and shifting back down the steps and away round the corner, five or six abreast, chatting and smoking and bending stiff legs, their hands stuffed into their pockets and their collars turned up against the last of the winter winds. One or two policemen were there, keeping order, walking up and down the line, asking people to keep out of the road and leave space for passers-by, keeping an eye out for light fingers and lost children. A pair of journalists were hanging around at the front of the queue, squiggling comments into a notebook, lifting a camera and encouraging people to smile, catching a shot where all the bleached white faces managed to look into the lens at once, a long stretch of them fading back into the dark evening; David near the front, waiting, unsmiling, half hidden by the heavy black coat of the man ahead of him.
The inky picture ended up on the front page of the Evening Telegraph, and the front page landed on the kitchen table for a while before being neatly clipped out and filed away into the box under his bed.
Didn’t it occur to you to smile? his father asked, standing and leaning over the paper, still dressed in his dust-plastered work clothes. Didn’t the photographer say cheese or something? David shrugged, embarrassed.
Wasn’t bothered, he said. Susan, who’d come through from watching television when Albert called, pulled the paper across the table and said let me see, where is he? She searched through the faces and found her brother, smiling in spite of herself, reluctantly impressed.
Fame at last, she said. You’ll have all the girls after you now. David ignored her, his face colouring, and leant over to try to read the article. Dorothy, standing at the oven to stir the gravy and check the chops and the potatoes, turned to Albert and said it’s almost ready now if you want to get changed. Albert waved his hand at her in passing acknowledgement.
Listen, he said, taking the paper back from Susan. Crowds gathered last night to be among the first visitors to another of our city’s proud buildings, the long-awaited Municipal Art Gallery and Museum. Guests were especially honoured to have in their midst the future director of the museum, one Mr David Carter Esquire, pictured here with a dirty great sulk on his face. David tried to pull the paper away, but his father whisked it up from the table and stood back, raising his voice above Susan’s laughter. The city treasurer, he continued, a tight-fisted bugger if ever we saw one, said it’s a shocking waste of money of course, but I was out-voted at the committee stage. It doesn’t say that does it? Dorothy asked, lifting her hand to her mouth as she realised her mistake. They all laughed, and she joined in, embarrassed, and they kept on laughing until Albert began to cough and splutter and double over in an attempt to haul in some breath.
You really should go to the doctor’s, Dorothy said when he’d recovered, handing him a glass of water. Albert didn’t reply.
And there was nothing now to show for this, in the archives he had kept. No medical records, no photographs of his father’s face turning a violent red as he fought for breath, no prescriptions or bottles of pills. Just the memory of that cough, the angry defiant bark of it, dry and choked, as though his lungs were full of tangled steel wool. There should have been something, at least. Something to hold up to the light, or to pin to the wall.
If he was asked, he was going to say that he remembered his father as a strong man; as someone who could balance two dozen bricks on his broad shoulders while he climbed a ladder, who could swing both him and his sister up in the air at the same time, and dig the whole vegetable patch over in the hour or two of light that was left after supper. He was going to say that he remembered his father as a busy man; as someone who always seemed to be in a hurry to be somewhere else: home from work, out to the garden, away from the supper table and out to join his friends in the pub. And he was going to say that he remembered his father as a loving man; someone who could hold his wife in his arms without shame and kiss her as if nobody else was in the room, someone who could find the time now and again to tuck his son into bed, with broad strong hands that smelt of soil and dust and cigarette smoke.
No one was much surprised when he died, and Albert was probably the least surprised of all. It had been coming on quickly for months and he seemed to have given up and started waiting for it. It feels like I’m breathing in tiny splinters of metal every time I open my mouth, he told David once. It feels like there’s a barrow-load of bricks weighing down on my chest. Dorothy found him when she got back from the shops one afternoon, his head tipped back over the arm of the sofa, a blanket wrapped around him like a shroud. She called out, and by the time David had run downstairs she was kneeling beside the sofa, holding Albert’s hand and stroking the side of his face. The shopping bags were on the floor, split open, tins and packets and loose wrapped meats spilt halfway across the room, and it was only when the doctor arrived that she pushed herself back to her feet again.
My father wasn’t one for talking much, he wanted to tell someone, and if he did it was never really about the past, about his family, or where he grew up, or what happened in the war. I know he was in the Navy and that’s about all, I don’t know where he went, or what he did when he got there, I don’t know what my mother went through at home when the bombing was going on, if she saw anyone killed or injured at all. I only know that they were apart for a long time, and they couldn’t even write, and that when they were together again there were things they didn’t feel the need to talk about; not even, I suppose, to each other. I think that’s how I got so interested in history, he would say, since there was so little of it at home. There weren’t even any photos on the wall until after my father had died.
I suppose I didn’t really know him all that well in the end, he thought he might say. Well, isn’t that the oldest story, someone might murmur in response, he thought, or, who among us ever did?
8 Two telegrams, November 1939 and April 1940 (#ulink_c1bf1cbd-5b75-5b93-9e9f-bea7b9b874ea)
They’d spent the afternoon at the Imperial War Museum. He was still uncertain about finding his way around London on his own, so Julia had gone with him, and had been very patient while he took notes and made sketches, and had gone quiet at one or two of the exhibits, stepping away a few paces and turning her back so that he knew it wasn’t a good idea to ask her what was wrong. They’d found a Christmas tobacco tin from 1916, like the one she had at home from her father, but this one was empty and she’d laughed and whispered maybe it’s worth something now, and he’d been shocked by the idea of her selling such a thing until she’d nudged him and he’d realised she was joking. It hadn’t been until they were on the bus on the way home, the street lamps already spilling splashes of light on to the rain-polished streets, that he’d asked about her own experience of the war, and about her husband; and it was only after they’d run from the bus stop to the house, and wrapped their wet heads in warm towels from the airing cupboard, and sat down in the kitchen with a steaming pot of tea and thick slices of heavy cake, that she’d begun to tell him.
The war hadn’t started when I met him, she began, but everyone knew it wouldn’t be long in coming. She hadn’t got very far with her story before she realised he didn’t know what she meant by ballroom dancing, so she insisted that she teach him there and then. She put a record on, and had him push the table back, and talked him through the steps while a waltz crackled out of the small loudspeaker. He felt a tightening knot of embarrassment in his stomach as she took his hand and placed it on her waist, and laid her hand against his, but he knew there’d be no getting out of it until he’d got it right. So he listened, and he concentrated, and he started to relax a little, and the second time the record played he only stepped on her foot twice. Well! she said, clapping her hands as the record finished again, I think we’ll make a ballroom maestro out of you yet, young man. We’ll have the debs of London queuing up for you! He didn’t know what she meant by debs, but he didn’t get a chance to ask. Once more, she announced, as the needle jerked back to the start of the record. This is the way the story begins, she said, taking his hand.
A Friday evening in early June, 1939. A hotel ballroom just off The Strand, its high domed ceiling frescoed pale sky-blue with wisps of spindrift clouds, ringing with the fading echo of the orchestra’s closing bars. A renewed rumble of chatter and a tinkle of glasses. A brief light-fingered applause for the musicians. The dancers returning to their seats, singly or in pairs, smiling and no-thank-you-ing, reaching for drinks with lowered eyes and private blushes or whispering reports to a neighbour’s ear. A rustle of loose sheaf paper at the orchestra’s music stands. The unaccompanied glide and twirl of the white-jacketed waiters refreshing tall glasses with a stoop and a bow, proffering hors d’oeuvres on broad silver trays, wordless, indifferent, impeccably polite. Seated guests rising for the next dance, taking the hand of those closest to them, or catching the eye of another nearby, or crossing the room with a smart-heeled step, a discreet straightening of the jacket, a two-fingered smoothing of the hair; determined, after much raw-humoured ribbing, to finally take the bull, as it were, by the horns.
