My Animal Life(10)

Since one of my aims in this book is to try to find a way to forgiveness, of others as well as myself, I have to ask why Vic was ill-at-ease enough to make others around him so uneasy. Never at home enough unless literally in his own home, and even then, in old age he started to keep the curtains half-closed so people couldn’t look in. Partly, once again, I would put this down to fundamental differences in the geography of Gees and Churches. The Churches managed to live, nine-strong, in a house with barely half a dozen rooms, in a row where a common path ran all along the back to link the whole terrace. Their back step down to the path was less than ten feet away from the next back step where their neighbours sat, and the long strips of garden were not divided by fences. It all spoke of easy communal and social life, contact with the outside world, relatively low expectations. The Gees, by contrast, five-strong, lived in an end-terrace house twice as big. Their garden — end-terrace houses always had bigger gardens, which partly accounted for their status — was firmly enclosed by a tall red-brick wall with a pointed rooflet of blue slate. No one called at the front, and to get to the back door from the criss-cross of ‘back ways’, like northern back ways, you had to mount a big step and press a noisy metal latch to open the gate, then traverse the blue-grey path through the garden. Pa’s home was his castle; so, later, to our detriment, was Vic’s.

And then there was the year Vic was born, that ominous 1914. He was six months old when the archduke’s nephew was assassinated at Sarajevo, starting the great war that fed the soil of Europe with the blood and bones of frightened young male humans. Grandma Gee was already pregnant again, with Lloyd, too soon for my father, who was always jealous of his younger brother, born before my father was one, taking Ma’s love and attention. Meanwhile Grandma Gee’s own two beloved brothers, Joe and William (known as ‘Laddie’), the only boys on the Brown side of the family, had gone off as private soldiers with the Oxford and Bucks Light Infantry. And thus began the tragedy whose aftermath Grandma whispered to me one morning, tucked up in her bed in the downstairs front room, for by then she was too frail to go upstairs, and I remember it soft and warm, a nest of talc and lace and specialness (for she was telling me secrets) and safety; safe because I didn’t really understand what she said. How can you understand death before anyone close enough to be painfully missed has died? How was I to know why the beautiful photo of frail soft Grandma as a young married woman, centre of a triptych of sisters, showed her in elaborate black silk, with a huge black feathered hat, and behind the girls their mother, Mrs Brown, toothless and grim with a great dark mourning plume bursting out of her head like black smoke?

One died in Salonika, one in France. Grandma told me how she and her sister Kit had ‘gone to look for the graves of your great-uncles —’. ‘Which uncles?’ ‘You never knew them, pet.’ She and Kit ‘had never been abroad before, we didn’t speak any French, but we were determined to find them.’ What she told me was comedy: not speaking any French, she and Kit had ‘needed to go to the lav’, ‘So we had to get down and squat, to show them! Squattay Voo!’ I loved this story, which gave me a completely different idea of my invalid grandma, as an intrepid explorer (and indeed that was part of the truth that time had obscured, for my own mother told me that Ma, when young, used to take her sons on the train up to London, which made Vic’s inability to let Mum go out on her own seem especially puzzling).





Left to right, front: Kit, Lottie (my paternal grandma) and Ede, after the death of both their brothers, with Great-grandma Brown behind


It isn’t, though, when I think. His need for her was limitless. Behind Ma’s story were the deaths of the only men in her family, both of them killed before Dad was three (and my father once told me, with tears in his eyes, that Laddie said to Ma he was ‘going off to fight for me’, for the baby who was born just before the war started; Laddie fought, and died; did the legend of his sacrifice leave Dad feeling guilty?). How much grief and mourning was there in my father’s early years, how much terror between the deaths of the first young uncle and the second? How did Ma, in her sorrow, manage to look after her sensitive son, ‘Grandma Gee’s Fairy?’

Maybe that was why she wanted him to be a girl: so he wouldn’t have to go off and be killed, like her brothers.

It all left my father with a horror of death and funerals. Children must be protected from death: ‘Never look back’ was his watchword; we didn’t attend our grandparents’ funerals, nor the uncles’ and aunts’. I realise now that the first family funeral I ever attended was my own father’s. By then I was in my forties. Being dead, Dad couldn’t stop me going. He would never consider insuring his life, refused to take anything from the house when his parents died except one photograph of Aunt Ede ‘for Margaret’, and was so averse to contemplating his own death that his pension stopped with him, leaving my mother, in the end, with no income. There had been a lifetime of relative comfort for which she always thanked him, and made us be thankful too, saying, ‘Your dad is a good provider,’ because she remembered, from childhood, real poverty, and loved, in the 1980s, getting cash from the wall. But because of Dad’s phobia about death, in 1992 she was left with almost nothing.