Nothing to Be Frightened Of (6 page)

Petite or merely short, unopinionated or bossy? Our differing adjectives reflect scrappy memories of half-forgotten feelings. I have no way of working out why I preferred Grandma, or she me. Did I fear Grandpa’s authoritarianism (though he never beat me), and find his example of masculinity more coarse-grained than Dad’s? Was I simply drawn to Grandma as a female presence, of which there were few enough in our family? Though my brother and I knew her for twenty years, we can barely remember anything she said. The two examples he can provide are both of occasions when she enraged our mother; so her words may have adhered more for their delighting effect than their intrinsic content. The first was on a winter’s evening, with our mother warming herself by the fire. Grandma advised: “Don’t sit so close, you’ll spoil your legs.” The second took place almost a whole generation later. My brother’s daughter C., then aged about two, was offered a piece of cake, and accepted it without acknowledgement. “Say ta, dear,” her great-grandmother suggested—at which “our mother blew her top that such a vulgarism should have been uttered.”

Do such scraps say more about Grandma, our mother, or my brother? Are they indicators of bossiness? My own evidence for her “unopinionatedness” is, I realize, actually nonexistent; but then perhaps it might be, by definition. And though I search my memory, I cannot find a single direct quote from this woman whom I think I loved when a child; only an indirect one. Long after Grandma was dead, Ma passed on to me a piece of her received wisdom. “She used to say, ‘There would be no bad men in the world if there were no bad women.’” Grandma’s endorsement of the sin of Eve was retailed to me with considerable scorn.

Chapter 8

When I was clearing out my parents’ bungalow, I found a small stack of postcards dating from the 1930s to the 1980s. All had been sent from abroad; clearly those posted from within Britain, however flavourful the message, had at some point been culled. Here is my father writing to his mother in the thirties (“Warm greetings from cold Brussels”; “Austria calling!”); my father in Germany to my mother—then his girlfriend? fiancée?—in France (“I’m wondering whether you got all the letters I wrote from England. Did you?”); my father to his small sons at home (“I hope you are doing your duty and listening to the Test Match”), announcing his acquisition of stamps for me and matchboxes for my brother. (I had forgotten the matchboxes, remembering only that he collected orange papers.) Then there are cards from my brother and me, full of adolescent jocosity. Me to him from France: “Holiday began with a superb burst of 5 cathedrals. Tomorrow a quick burn-up of the chateaux of the Loire.” He to me from Champéry, where Dad had taken him on a school outing: “We arrived here safely, and, except for the ham sandwiches, we were satisfied with the journey.”

I can’t date the earliest postcards, the stamps having been steamed off—doubtless for my collection—and with them the postmarks. But I note the varying ways my father signs off to his mother: “Leonard,” “Yours as ever, Leonard,” up to “Love, Leonard” and even “Love and kisses, Leonard.” On cards to my mother he is “Pip,” “Your Pip,” “As ever, Pip,” “Lots of love, Pip” and “All my love, Pip”: rising gradations from the unreachable days of the courtship which led to my existence. I follow my father through his trail of changing names. He was christened Albert Leonard, and known to his parents and siblings as Leonard. When he became a schoolmaster the Albert took over, and in common rooms he was known for forty years as “Albie” or “Albie boy”—though this might have been derived from his initials, A.L.B.—and occasionally, in satirical mode, as “Wally,” after the Arsenal full back Wally Barnes. My mother disliked both given names (doubtless Wally too), and decided to call him Pip. After
Great Expectations
? But he was hardly Philip Pirrip, any more than she was Estella. During the war, when he was in India with the RAF, he changed again. I have two of his dip pens, hand-decorated along the shaft by a local artisan. A blood-red sun sets over a minaretted temple, and also over my father’s name: “Rickie Barnes 1944 Allahabad.” Where did that Rickie spring from, and go to? The following year, my father came back to England, and back to being Pip. It’s true he had a certain boyishness to him, but the name suited him decreasingly as he turned sixty, seventy, eighty . . .

He brought home various artefacts from India: the brass tray, the inlaid cigarette box, the ivory letter-knife with the elephant on top, and the pair of collapsible side tables which often collapsed. Then there was an item which in my childhood seemed as desirable as it was exotic: the circular leather pouffe. Who else in Acton had an Indian leather pouffe? I used to take running dives at it; later, when we moved from inner to outer suburbia and I was beyond childish gestures, I used to drop my full adolescent weight down onto it, with a kind of aggressive affection. This also elicited a vaguely farty noise as the air was squeezed out through the joins in the leather. Eventually, the seams began to give way under my maltreatment, and I made the sort of discovery psychoanalysts might relish. For what Rickie Barnes had brought back from Allahabad or Madras was not, of course, a full, fat pouffe, but rather a decorated leather casing which he—now Pip again—and his wife had to stuff.

They stuffed it with the letters of their courtship and early married years. I was an idealistic adolescent, who swerved easily into cynicism when confronted with life’s realities; this was one such moment. How could they have taken their love letters (doubtless kept in ribboned bundles), torn them into tiny pieces, and then watched other people’s fat arses hunker down on top? “They”: I meant, of course, my mother, since such practical recycling fitted my reading of her, rather than what I judged to be my father’s more sentimental nature. How to imagine that decision, and that scene? Did they tear the letters up together, or did she do it while he was at work? Did they argue, did they agree, did one of them secretly resent it? And even supposing they agreed, how did they then go about it? Here’s a haunting would-you-rather. Would you rather tear up your own expressions of love, or the ones you had received?

In company, I would now lower myself gently onto the pouffe; alone, I would drop heavily, so that its exhalation might jet out a scrap of blue airmail paper bearing one or other of my parents’ youthful hands. If this were a novel, I would have discovered some family secret—
but no one will know the child isn’t yours,
or
they will never find the knife now,
or
I always wanted J. to be a girl
—and my life would have been changed for ever. (Actually, my mother did want me to be a girl, and had the name Josephine waiting, so that would have been no secret.) Or—on the other hand—I might have discovered only the best words my parents’ hearts could find for one another, their tenderest expressions of devotion and truth. And no mystery.

The collapsing pouffe was at some point chucked out. But instead of being put in the dustbin, it was dumped at the bottom of the garden, where it became heavy, rain-sodden, and increasingly discoloured. I would kick it occasionally as I passed, my wellington ejecting a few more blue scraps, the ink now running, the likelihood of legible secrets being divulged even less. My kicks were those of a disheartened Romantic. So this is what it all comes to?

Chapter 9

Thirty-five years later, I was faced with the final leavings of my parents’ lives. My brother and I each wanted a few things; my nieces had their pick; then the house-clearer came in. He was a decent, knowledgeable fellow, who talked to the items as he handled them. I presume the habit must have started as a way of gently preparing the customer for disappointment, but it had turned into a kind of conversation between himself and the object in his hand. He also recognized that what would soon be haggled over coldly in his shop was now, here, for the last time, something which had once been chosen, then lived with, wiped, dusted, polished, repaired, loved. So he found praise where he could: “This is nice—not valuable, but nice”; or “Victorian moulded glass—this is getting rarer—it’s not valuable, but it’s getting rarer.” Scrupulously polite to these now ownerless things, he avoided criticism or dislike, preferring either regret or long-term hope. Of some 1920s Melba glasses (
horrible,
I thought): “Ten years ago these were very fashionable; now no one wants them.” Of a basic Heal’s green-and-white checkerboard plant holder: “We need to wait another forty years for this.”

He took what was saleable and departed in a peel of fifty-pound notes. Then it was a matter of filling the back of the car and making several trips to the local recycling centre. Being my mother’s son, I had bought a number of heavy green plastic sacks for the job. I carried the first of them to the rim of the big yellow skip and realized—now even more my mother’s son—that they were far too useful to throw away. And so, instead of leaving the final remnants of my parents’ lives confidentially bagged, I poured the house-clearer’s rejects into the skip and kept the sacks. (Is this what my mother would have wanted?) One of the last items was a stupid metal cowbell that Dad had bought in Champéry, on that trip from which my brother reported a disappointing ham sandwich; it ding-donged clonkily down into the skip. I looked at the spread of stuff below me and, though there was nothing incriminating or even indiscreet, felt slightly cheap: as if I had buried my parents in a paper bag rather than a proper coffin.

Chapter 10

This is not, by the way, “my autobiography.” Nor am I “in search of my parents.” I know that being someone’s child involves both a sense of nauseated familiarity and large no-go areas of ignorance—at least, if my family is anything to judge by. And though I still wouldn’t mind a transcript of that pouffe’s contents, I don’t think my parents had any rare secrets. Part of what I’m doing—which may seem unnecessary—is trying to work out how dead they are. My father died in 1992, my mother in 1997. Genetically, they survive in two sons, two granddaughters, and two great-granddaughters: an almost indecent demographic orderliness. Narratively, they survive in the memory, which some trust more than others. My brother first expressed his suspicion of this faculty when I asked him about the food we ate at home. After confirming porridge, bacon, and suchlike, he went on:

At least, that’s how things stand in my memory. But you no doubt remember them differently, and I don’t think much of memory as a guide to the past. I first met my colleague and chum Jacques Brunschwig in 1977. It was at a conference in Chantilly. I missed my stop and got off the train at Créteil, thence taking a (very expensive) taxi and arriving late at the conference place, where Jacques greeted me. All that is wonderfully clear in my memory. In an interview, published in his Festschrift, Jacques talks a bit about some of his friends. He describes how he first met me, in 1977, at a conference in Chantilly: he met me at the station and recognized me as I stepped off the train. All that is wonderfully clear in his memory.

Well, you might think, that’s professional philosophers for you: too busy theorizing in the abstract to notice what station they’re at, let alone what’s going on in the non-abstract world the rest of us inhabit. The French writer Jules Renard once speculated that “Perhaps people with a very good memory cannot have general ideas.” If so, my brother might get the untrustworthy memory and the general ideas; while I get the reliable memory and the particular ideas.