Fathers and Sons (3 page)

But he was twenty-one and at last the master of his own destiny. He now had more than enough money to pay his own way to Canada and rejoin his family. No one and nothing could stop him.

The British Army had other ideas.

My grandfather was sent to Ireland to fight the IRA. He had absolutely no interest in joining another shooting match after somehow surviving the Western Front, and bitterly resented his new posting.

Ireland was in turmoil. After the failure of the uprising in 1916, elections two years later saw the establishment of the Dail Eireann–the first underground Irish Parliament. By the time Geoffrey’s troop ship was crossing the Irish Sea, the war of independence was in full flow. It would be another two years before the Anglo-Irish Treaty recognised partition.

The reluctant soldier wanted to be in Ontario, not the Emerald Isle. Granddad chafed at the dreary routine of guard duty and patrol, and constantly badgered his superiors to find out when he would get his discharge papers. Later that
same year, 1919, he was told. And with that he had to be content.

Weeks and months passed with agonising slowness, but at last the day came. It was to be a Sunday. My grandfather’s final assignment for King and Country would be the weekly Church Parade. He wound on his puttees for the last time and marched with the others down the main street of the little town they garrisoned. After morning service they went as usual into the wooden hut next to the church to take tea and cakes, served by the staunchly pro-British local ladies. On this last Sunday, as Granddad said his goodbyes to the smiling women, he suddenly felt deeply uneasy. He couldn’t work out what it was, but something was definitely not right.

He went outside, lit a cigarette, and tried to think. Then it came to him. All morning, he realised, ever since leaving barracks, he’d had a sense of being secretly watched. He couldn’t explain it and later, as he packed his kit, handed in his rifle and ran to catch the boat train to England, he forgot all about it. He was done with the army and the army was done with him. Soon he would be travelling a lot further than France or Ireland.

My grandfather never claimed he’d had some kind of premonition that his friends would shortly be gunned down in cold blood. Later, he thought some kind of sixth sense had whispered to him that day. He believed that an IRA reconnaissance unit had probably been keeping them under surveillance as they marched to and from church, and he had been subconsciously aware of it.

A few weeks later, Church Parade was far from routine. As
Granddad’s mates marched into town, they were walking towards ambush and death. The IRA had set up a machine gun in the hedge opposite the church. They waited patiently for the British to move well into range. Then they delivered their savage rebuke to the hated occupiers.

If my grandfather had spent many more days in the army, they would probably have been his last on earth.

Geoffrey settled his affairs in Shawbury and in September 1919, nearly eighteen months behind schedule thanks to a combination of the Kaiser and the IRA, he finally boarded a ship bound for Canada. It was a departure touched with sadness. He and his Aunt Sarah had become very close over the years. He appreciated the way she had tried to console him in the terrible months after he was left behind, and she had been a quiet but staunch ally in his determination to leave Kiln Farm and find his family again.

Sarah had been sick with anxiety while Geoffrey was serving in France. Soldiers who came back alive from the trenches were precious, almost hallowed beings and it must have grieved her greatly to see him leave again so soon. But she knew he had to go.

My grandfather’s emotions can only be imagined as his ship nosed into the Western Approaches–so recently a hunting ground for German U-boats preying on Allied shipping as it neared British waters–and set course for Canada. He was, he realised, sailing across a wide ocean towards a deeply
uncertain future. There had been very little communication with his parents in the years after they left. They had, of course, written to let him know that his eldest brother had been killed in France. Changes of address, too, were notified.

Such desultory correspondence was not particularly unusual in those days. But it meant my grandfather really only knew his family from fading memories, memories which were frozen in the year 1907. There had been the extraordinary encounter with Douglas and John in 1917, but this had been more of an emotional electric shock than a reunion.

It was one thing to dream rosy dreams of reconciliation and rapprochement. As the liner drew inexorably closer to the mouth of the St Lawrence River, Geoffrey realised he was about to confront a group of near-strangers.

What a strange voyage it must have been for the young man. As the days passed, how he must have rehearsed what he was going to say to them all. The last time he had addressed his mother and father, he had been a little boy, and they had spoken to him as a child. What would they make of this tall Englishman when he walked into their home? What would he make of them? If they had some kind of disagreement or falling out, would he find hot words of suppressed anger and recrimination rising, unbidden, to his lips?

He was probably the most preoccupied passenger on board.

Henry and his family had put down roots in the little town of St Thomas, close to the shores of Lake Erie and at the heart of the Great Lakes Peninsula. It could hardly have been more different from Worcester, or Shropshire, come to that. This was tobacco-growing country, surprisingly hot and humid in
summer, but true to the stereotypical image of Canada in winter when thick snow blanketed the ground for months.

Granddad must have written to let them know he was coming, or perhaps sent a telegram. He would not have arrived unexpectedly. But he had, at last, arrived. A journey twelve years in the making, and thousands of miles in the travelling, was done.

A series of trains and buses brought him to St Thomas and the address his family had been living at for the last few years. He stood stock-still outside the simple frame-built house on a quiet street and stared at the front door. It represented the last remaining barrier between him and his family. The emotional weight of that moment must have been colossal. Finally he stepped forward, and knocked.

A pause. Then steps approaching from the other side; a woman’s tread. The handle rattling and turning; the door swinging open.

Geoffrey looked into the eyes of a middle-aged woman.

His eyes.

Her eyes.

His mother’s eyes.

She stared at him, and slowly shook her head. ‘Oh…I’m so sorry…I truly am sorry…I never buy anything at the door.’ She closed it in his face.

The last exchange of photographs across the Atlantic had obviously failed to imprint my grandfather’s mature features on his mother’s memory. In her mind’s eye she still saw him as the little boy she had last seen twelve years earlier.

Geoffrey had sometimes wondered if he would recognise
his parents when he saw them again. It never crossed his mind that they might not recognise him.

He didn’t know what to do. None of his fantasies about this moment had included this scenario. Eventually, he knocked again.

Now the woman looked annoyed. He spoke quickly, before she could send him away a second time.

‘It’s me, Mother. I’m your son. I’m Geoffrey.’

Slowly, Hannah saw the man standing on her doorstep as the boy she once knew. Her eyes widened and she put her hands to her mouth.

‘Mother…are you all r–’

‘Geoffrey…oh,
Geoffrey
!’

Her child had crossed the years, a war, and an ocean to come home to her. He had come home to her.

My grandfather moved in with his family that same afternoon. The coming days were utterly, blissfully happy. He was ‘home’. But unlike the return of the prodigal son, this was the homecoming of a young man to the prodigal parents. Forgiveness could only flow one way–from him to them.

What mature, unbounded forgiveness it was! Henry and Hannah must have been profoundly grateful (and secretly not a little relieved) to find the boy they left behind so apparently free of anger. Geoffrey had every right to ask about what had been done to him and why, but he had not made his journey to deliver judgement or apportion blame. Long ago he had decided
to try to understand his father’s great dilemma of 1907. It would be pointless now to condemn Henry’s solution to it; Geoffrey’s betrayal could never be undone. But it could be healed.

And it was. Despite the passing of the years, the Madeleys were still a relatively young family. The death of Douglas at twenty-five on Vimy Ridge left Henry and Hannah with six children; five siblings for Geoffrey to get to know again. Baby Cyril was now twelve; Katherine was fifteen, William seventeen, Doris twenty, and John, the surviving eldest, twenty-five. They welcomed my grandfather back with open arms and open hearts. He felt reborn.

Granddad spent his first months in Canada earning dollars to go travelling. He picked up some casual labour on the tobacco farms and in local factories, and stayed with his parents and siblings. There was a lot of catching up to do, not least with his brother John about their experiences in France. But as my grandfather said many years later, there was ‘no need to rush things’. By the late summer of 1920 the long-severed connection with his family was almost fully restored. He felt confident and relaxed enough to tell them that he was heading off for a while.

The harvest season had arrived. Geoffrey decided to use his farming skills to freelance his way west, working as casual labour until he reached the Rocky Mountains and the Pacific Ocean beyond. He began by fruit-picking on Ontario’s farms, then crossed into Manitoba to help bring in the wheat. He did the same in the great dust bowl of Saskatchewan–Canada’s Kansas–and by autumn’s end he had reached Calgary in Alberta, and the foothills of the Rockies.

At some point along the way, he met The Girl.

The Girl. Of all the figures in my grandfather’s past, it is she who remains the most elusive, and yet she would have a profound bearing on the rest of his life.

Who was she? My father only knew that she was the first woman his father fell in love with, that Geoffrey asked her to marry him, and that she had said ‘yes’. She was around his own age, in her early twenties. A lifetime later he would tell my young mother that The Girl was the most beautiful creature he had ever set eyes on. But he would lose her as surely as he had lost his family years before–only this time, for good. Why?

Because he went back home.

Not to St Thomas.

To England. Geoffrey went back to Kiln Farm.

A
ll the time Geoffrey was in Canada, an invisible, unbroken thread unwound away from him across three and a half thousand miles of land and sea. All the way back to Kiln Farm, and William. There, like a fisherman patiently paying out his line, the old uncle had been waiting. Now he judged the moment had come to start reeling the line back in.

Because before Geoffrey sailed for Quebec, his uncle had extracted an agreement from him. William was on the point of buying the farm from the Charleton Estate, which was being broken up. He persuaded his nephew to promise to return after a year or so, and become farm manager. This was not a bad offer for a wounded private returning from the utter chaos of total war. Nevertheless, looking back, it seems an odd, even unnecessary commitment for Geoffrey to have made. But I suppose he would have been feeling insecure about his reception in St Thomas, and had no idea if the new life in Canada would suit him.

Now, happier than at any time in his life and deeply in love, he must have been kicking himself. Because his girlfriend had agreed to marry him on one condition–they must live in Canada. The Girl came from a large and close family. She knew that transplanting to England would, in those days, almost certainly mean she would never see her parents or brothers and sisters again. That was unthinkable. Geoffrey, of all people, could understand her feelings.

What was he to do?

We can be reasonably certain he wrote to William and explained how the land lay. Not only had the reunion with his family exceeded his brightest hopes, he was now engaged to be married. His fiancée refused to abandon her own family and uproot to Shropshire. Geoffrey himself was loath to be parted from his parents and siblings for a second time. He knew he had made a promise and if necessary he would keep his word, but…surely William could understand.

Whatever Geoffrey wrote in his letter, William’s response was swift and calculated. Now, unlike the verbal arrangement he had made with Henry back in 1907, the ageing farmer made a commitment to my grandfather in writing. Geoffrey opened a reply from William which went a lot further than the promise of a job.

Come back now, he read, and you’ll inherit the lot when I die. Every brick, field and head of cattle. It’s all here, waiting for you. Just come back. And, yes–you did give me your word that you would do so.

Quite why William was so determined to bring Granddad back to Kiln Farm, I have never really understood. There must
have been other candidates to run the business. I think it was a deep-rooted sense of possessiveness. For years he had virtually owned the boy, a near-chattel that he had paid good money for. So, he thought he could fly the coop, did he? Well, William would see about that.

Oddly enough, William’s offer to leave Kiln Farm lock, stock and barrel to Geoffrey didn’t weigh particularly heavy in my grandfather’s decision to return to Shropshire. He would have come back anyway. He was, he explained to my mother years later, a man of his word. If William wouldn’t release him from it, he had no choice in the matter.

Such old-fashioned morality is almost unheard of today; indeed, many would now laugh at it. But back then, the imperative was sufficiently strong for Geoffrey to do something that in our sentimental, romantic age, we would consider more or less unthinkable: he gave up the love of his life. Not that he didn’t try to persuade The Girl to come with him; not that she didn’t try and convince him to stay. But it was no use. Steel hawsers of convention, duty and circumstance dragged them apart.

A few weeks after receiving his uncle’s letter, Geoffrey found himself on a ship headed back to England. His brokenhearted fiancée had released him from his promise; his anguished parents had said their bewildered goodbyes and, as he watched the icebergs drift past the liner as it steamed east from the mouth of the St Lawrence, he knew that, once again, William had succeeded in parting him from the ones he loved.

Granddad arrived back at Shawbury as a young man in his mid-twenties. He had seen more pain, loss and heartbreak than many experience in a lifetime. I think it was at this point that the die was irrevocably cast. He had been repeatedly and brutally separated from those who were dear to him. It almost always seemed to happen just when he was feeling at his most optimistic and hopeful about life. But what was the point in showing people how much you loved and needed them if they were taken away from you? What was the point in making plans for happiness when, in reality, you had no control over their outcome?

Perhaps it was for the best that he had come back to the farm. Land was land. Land couldn’t betray you or leave you. And he would inherit these acres one day. They would be undisputedly his, for ever. No one could take that away from him.

So Geoffrey, in self-protection, began to shut down emotionally. It was a spontaneous, subconscious reaction to one heartbreak too many. His soul had been bruised too often.

Whether my grandfather would have maintained this psychological defensive crouch is debatable; what is not is that life was now preparing to kick him in the teeth with both booted feet, as if to drive home some undecipherable lesson, or punishment. I sometimes wonder if he was being made to atone for some dreadful sins in a past life.

Back at Kiln Farm Geoffrey quickly slipped into a familiar routine. Sarah was overjoyed to see him; she had greatly missed
her nephew. William was William, and got on with the business of handing over the day-to-day running of the farm.

Geoffrey increasingly felt that his adventures in Canada were taking on a dreamlike quality. Had he really been engaged to be married? The Girl wasn’t answering his letters. Sometimes he found himself wondering if she had ever existed at all. Shawbury, with its unchanging familiar reality, was quietly reclaiming him from the New World and delivering him back to the Old.

To his surprise, he found he wasn’t willing to fight the process. Perhaps the numbing of his emotions would turn out to be a positive, an unlooked-for anaesthetic for a bruised heart. And meanwhile there was the soothing balm of his music. He began playing piano again at local recitals, and one evening was asked to accompany a young woman with a light, pleasant voice. She was a couple of years younger than him, and pretty, with soft, dreamy eyes and a creamy complexion. Her name was Kate Edwards, although, she confided in Geoffrey, everyone called her Kitty. She lived on her parents’ farm a few miles from Shawbury–close enough for the two of them to meet again.

It was a brief courtship. Geoffrey found himself engaged for a second time. He was slightly astonished, but it felt real enough and a sturdier situation than the increasingly fading scenario in Canada. Today, we would say he was going with the flow. We might also say he was marrying on the rebound.

Kate’s parents were delighted. They had three daughters, part of a cursed generation of women. The slaughter of 1914–18 had decimated the young male population. Soon after
the armistice, the headmistress of an English public school bluntly described the cold new reality to a subdued assembly of senior girls. She told them their chances of marriage were now one in ten. It was no exaggeration.

So when Kate Edwards became Kate Madeley, the gathered wedding guests could practically hear the collective sigh of relief from the bride’s side of the little country church. Not only was she safely off the shelf, she was marrying one of the catches of the county, a young man who was well travelled, musically accomplished, only lightly scarred by war–externally, at any rate–and with excellent prospects.

He was also undeniably attractive. Geoffrey was lean and stood over six feet tall. Intelligent eyes looked out of a well-proportioned face. Perhaps there was something a little distant about those eyes, but they could also twinkle with humour. For most of the year he was lightly tanned from working outdoors, and he had large, sensitive hands. Kitty used to love to watch them as they moved smoothly and confidently over a piano keyboard.

Yet almost as soon as it had begun, the marriage ran into trouble. At this distance it is difficult to be precise about the reasons, but it seems there was tension in the farmhouse from the start. Sarah was accustomed to running the place single-handedly for the men; my grandmother Kitty’s arrival transformed this simple arrangement into a knotty equation. As Geoffrey’s new wife, she would have expected to assume considerable control over domestic matters, but where did that leave Sarah? Perhaps attempts were made to divide responsibilities, with Sarah attending to her brothers and Kitty
to Geoffrey, but if so they were not a success. The atmosphere became charged and volatile. Kitty–spirited, feisty, with a strong sense of her own self-worth–decided she’d had enough.

One morning, after a spectacular row with her husband over some household matter, a heavily pregnant Kitty walked out. My grandfather’s marriage seemed over before it had barely begun.

Kitty’s journey home passed into family legend. I have an image of her as I write this now. She is striding across pastures and meadows, tearful but determined. I can see her as she clambers over stiles and fences, clutching her swollen belly, startling the cows grazing on the lush Shropshire grass. They lift their heads to stare at the young woman as she passes through them like a weeping apparition.

At last, an exhausted Kitty reaches the familiar fields of her parents’ farm and sweeps into her mother’s kitchen, telling her tale through heaving sobs.

‘I’ve left him, mother! I’ve left him! I cannot bear it any longer…I have left Geoffrey and I am never going back.’

But if Kitty had expected a sympathetic welcome, she was in for a shock. Her mother heard her out, and then delivered an iron verdict to her sniffling daughter. This merciless lecture on the facts of life was, my grandmother wryly recalled, like having a bucket of cold water poured over her head. She told me the whole story one summer’s evening as she and I moved a huge pile of logs from the farmyard into a barn.

Firstly, Kitty was crisply informed, there was the minor matter of her wedding vows–promises made before God.

Eighty years ago, Christian doctrine was the powerful glue that bonded society tightly together. Covenants made with the Almighty were taken with the utmost seriousness. My great-grandmother would have been appalled at her daughter’s defiance before God, and perhaps even a little frightened by it. This argument stood by itself, but she had other arrows to shoot, more prosaic but just as pointed.

Kitty was pregnant. Had she forgotten that? This was the worst possible time to cast aside the protection of a husband. And even if she did insist on divorce–which was out of the question, by the way–what man would want a woman with another man’s child? These were bleak enough times for women. Villages had seen whole generations of their young men virtually wiped out, and the survivors could take their pick of women desperate to find a husband.

No, Kitty was told, with a firmness bordering on the ruthless. You must go back and make your peace with Geoffrey. It’s your duty–to him and to God.

So she went.

What was it about Kiln Farm? I know this is fanciful, but sometimes it seems to me that the place had a mysterious way of holding on to those who most wished to escape it, gently but implacably drawing them back against their will. Today, when I hear the Eagles song ‘Hotel California’, I think about Kiln Farm as the haunting final line is sung.

‘You can check out any time you like–but you can never leave…’

Marriages displaying early cracks can be split apart by the birth of a baby. But in my grandparents’ case the arrival of
their first son, James, in 1924, seems to have brought them close again, for the time being at least. Theirs would always be a somewhat volatile marriage. My father once said it mirrored the seasons, sometimes sunny, sometimes icy.

Certainly Kitty now had a clearly defined role, as the first new mother Kiln Farm had seen in many years.

The focus of daily life must have shifted seismically. The dynamic had changed overnight; William’s appointed heir now had an heir himself. The farmhouse had long felt a sterile place–strange, considering it was the hub of a cycle of life that revolved with its fields and cowsheds and stables. But now it had become a nursery. The place had a purpose and a point beyond mere business.

Geoffrey, staring at himself in his shaving mirror the day after his first-born had been safely delivered, must have considered the question all men do on such momentous mornings.

What sort of a father would he make?

It was a difficult one. His own father had been on another continent for much of Geoffrey’s childhood and William had hardly been an ideal replacement role model. Although my grandfather was fully reconciled with Henry, theirs was a relationship between adults. He really had no examples to follow.

Oh, well. He would just have to do his best.

Granddad was twenty-seven when James was born. He was just shy of thirty when a second son, John, arrived. Perhaps
the vivid reality of fatherhood with two lively little boys running around the farm was reassuring; Geoffrey saw that life could offer more than forced goodbyes and sudden partings.

John was a bright, inquisitive boy. Before he was three, he became fascinated by the weekly ritual of paying the farm hands their wages. The night before payday the little boy insisted on polishing the copper pennies and silver sixpences, shillings and florins. Only then was his father allowed to count them out in gleaming towers on the kitchen table. To the child, they looked like piles of treasure glinting there. One Irish labourer, whose name has not survived the passing of eighty years, made the same joke every week. The lad had, he said, ‘taken a shine’ to him.

One gusty morning in early spring, John and James were sent to play in the orchard that stood behind the house. As usual, they were given strict instructions to stay clear of the well, which lay like an unblinking dark eye in the grass between the pump room and the trees. That well was still there when I was a child, roughly boarded over but still a brooding presence that both fascinated and frightened me.