Semi-Detached (12 page)

My
mother had to make do. Her ‘big present’, one year, was a paraffin heater for
the boat. But she never complained. All the cupidity in my family was left to
the boys. Aged nine or so, I bought her something that I thought was strikingly
beautiful from a sweet shop. It was a single-stemmed, plastic yellow rose in a
conical black metal holder with a wrought-iron bracket to fix it to the wall.
And Mummy loved it. If she was only pretending to love it, then she didn’t
blink. She even had my father attach it to the wall in the dining room.

The
only crack in the façade came when I went out and bought her an identical one a
year later.

For her
eightieth birthday I decided to get at the old films. I guessed they would be
in a
cardboard box above the garage, where I’d put the rest of the junk
she gave me. When my father died in 11989 my mother had hung on in their house
until my sister persuaded her it was too big and got her to move to a cottage
near by Then she started dumping things on us: wonky bits of navigation
equipment, an old telescope and a slightly overbearing Welsh dresser, which the
man in the antique shop in Woodbridge said had been made out of
twentieth-century packing cases. Since she couldn’t sell it, I had to ‘inherit’
it. But there were other boxes of stuff, like my father’s squiggly cartoons:
hundreds of the things. The subject matter was invariably some vaguely
misogynist sailing incident, with my squiggly mother failing to pick up a buoy
and my squiggly father making some comment in a squiggly speech balloon. Did he
have fantasies of publication? In another box there was a detailed breakdown
of the plots and casts of a long-cherished project: the sailing club sit-coin.
(‘It’s got all the characters, just like
Dad’s Army.’)
He had grown
bored with his work. He told me so. His retirement was full of his
self-absorbed private projects, but only for a year or two. He barely made
seventy-two.

Birds
had got up into the garage attic because it wasn’t a closed room, just a
large
shelf open at the eaves to the roof, and there were trails of half-built martin’s
nests and a bundle of feathers and spatterings in the darker corner. Two other
boxes had photographs and documents; ration books and swimming certificates.
One held my mother’s own clipping service, an incomplete and sometimes wholly
unflattering selection of articles or reviews about ‘the Suffolk comedian’
(East
Anglian Daily Times).A
mouse had got in and had begun to make a nest out of
them; geometrically cut as if by a miniature shredder. I saw no reason to
prevent this creditable recycling. And finally I found the films: some small
reels in original Kodak yellow boxes (the yellow of road warnings) and another,
in a grey-and-black, specially purchased, plastic box. It must be the long
version. My father had spent hours editing these things together.

I was
once close to an old actor. He had been very successful, a leading player in
American movies as well as British ones, with an astrakhan-collared coat and a
fifties Rolls Royce in the garage. I was talking about old photos with his
wife. She looked away ‘Oh no,’ she said, ‘we can’t look at old photos … no
… it’s too upsetting.’

Upsetting?
I changed the subject. Frightened of intimacy, I assumed something externally
disturbing about them. I had read the biography I had seen a picture of them in
California by the pool: him, tanned and debonair and dashingly handsome,
leaning into the camera with his arms around his boys and a confident smile on
his face. Had there been a scandal, some deep rift that photographs would
revive?

I have
since sat with my own photograph album. I know what she meant. There is such a
thing as too much lost fun. There are the children as they were. Me as I was
too, but pretty much as I am now; fatter, thinner, different hair cut, dreadful
clothes, mistaken moustache, but my daughter Catherine is minute, then cute,
then at her most dependent, then funny, but always different. The images are of
time irretrievably lost. That holiday in Maine, the working trip to Australia,
the walk along that grey beach: George, my son, running on ahead with that
stick. But look, his very dimensions mock you (‘My, how you’ve grown’). When
did this happen? All that time we were afloat on a river being rushed
downstream and we never even noticed.

For the
cost of a small cinema, I got my father’s films transferred to DVD. I remember
that we used to watch them now and again, as a family; the projector whirring
with that soothing, repetitive chatter, perhaps at Christmases. But that was
years ago. I could barely remember the content. Now it was almost too easy I
just had to stick the disc in the DVD player and press a button. However, it is
not possible to look at home-made films without an element of bullying. I
gathered up the children and their cousins, promising entertainment, as if the
whole thing was for their benefit. ‘You wait till you see this. This is your
mother at your age. They watched and they dutifully sniggered. But it was the
adults who sat quietly and stared.

The
film had a pale, washed look, with none of the sudden flares of high colour or
pixellated fuzz that you get on video. Sometimes the print was crazed with
black cobwebby lines. There was no sound. The figures rushed about as if hidden
behind a glass wall.

The
first reel showed a long, developing shot of Gorran Haven in Cornwall, then a
street. First my brother and I appeared in matching red tartan trousers and red
sweaters clutching buckets and spades. We jeered. Then my sister sat playing on
the beach. We ‘ahhed’. There was my mother in slacks, then in a big print
dress, throwing a ball for the dog. ‘I remember those red cushions,’ said my
sister, and we all remembered the cushions from the Morris Traveller.

‘How
many holidays did we have in Gorran Haven?’ I asked.

‘Only
two,’ my mother said briskly ‘Then he got a boat. We had two more holidays in “a
sailing hotel” in Dartford where you fell out of a window and had your arm in a
sling. And then we spent every single holiday sailing.’

The
children were already bored. But we adults were watching with cold attentive
eyes, not recognizing ourselves: the pot-bellied infants with the flat hair and
scrunched-up eyes in the flabby high-waisted swimming trunks. We were greedily
searching for images that would connect us to the reality of our own memories:
the harbour wall, the steps down from the house.

And
there was my mother, in black slacks, with her long dark hair up in a bun,
throwing a ball for Bella the dog, or lying against rocks on the beach with
Aunty Gwen reading the papers. They looked a glamorous pair.

We were
all watching for that sort of thing, really, waiting to get a hit of direct
sensual memory, something that our children couldn’t share at all. And then,
towards the end of this short film, there was a fluttering of black, one of
those moments where a white line passes shakily across a blank frame and some
numbers flicker up and for five seconds my father passed through the film, in a
grey suit with carefully brushed hair. His round face was serious. Some
colleague had taken this, as an experiment to check how the camera worked. He
was slightly off guard. I recognized the look. ‘Be careful with that camera now
Are you sure you know how to use it?’ And then he was gone.

We sat
forward and stopped the DVD. We rewound and watched it again. We watched the
tiny extract five or six times in a row. We froze it, paused it and stepped it
forward. This was the only moment, fleetingly, when a real ghost stepped out of
the past.

Why was
that
my father so particularly? There were plenty of other photographs,
films and videos of him: in the next film, twenty years later, but looking ten
years younger, with side-boards, longish hair and stubble, and that louche look
that everybody, even Ted Heath, adopted in the seventies and now means the sort
of bloke who moves his caravan into your garden. I have a later photo of him
swimming across a pool in St Lucia in pursuit of a plastic duck, with his daddy
swimming shorts and thin, not thinning, hair in a tuft, delicately paddling on,
his legs splayed like a pale frog. This was soon after he had been diagnosed
with cancer. But that earlier flickering serious man held us all, because it
was my father with all his ambition and purposefulness still in him, caught
inside the institution at the age of thirty-six.

We
stayed glued for the second film. It was the
Xara
film. This was what we
really did on our holidays. (There must be one missing still, the
Windsong
film,
although both are remarkably similar: it’s just the boats that differ.)

It
started with the waterside: West Mersea, in this case, an island at the mouth
of the Blackwater estuary. Here we were pulling the dinghy on a trailer. Here
was the long jetty.

Then came
a shot taken from the dinghy, a remarkably steady tracking shot, as the little
tender, powered by a miniature Seagull engine, slipped through the other boats
lucky enough to be moored closer to the shore.

‘It was
a long way,’ my mother commented.

‘We
rowed it for years,’ I added. The dinghy was a wooden ‘pram’ with a snubbed
end. It manoeuvred beautifully I loved the way it sat like a bowl on the water,
and could be turned in a full circle directly on itself with a twist of the
wrist, or sculled with one oar on the half-cup hole in the back, a skill I
tried and finally mastered. Sometimes if we anchored I would just get in the
boat and row around.

‘And
you know why I did that?’ I said. ‘Because I was bored. There was nothing else
to do.’

‘How
long did we go for?’ asked my sister Wearily.

‘Weeks.’

‘Oh, he
liked to spend at least half the summer on the boat,’ my mother chiming in now,
with that slight sing-song of complaint. ‘He’d save up his leave, and take four
weeks in one go every year.

Now the
film showed us leaving the harbour, threading through the other yachts to
deeper water: the impossibly glamorous, much bigger, comfortable boats like the
Twisters and Holmans. The camera lingered on them for far too long, in a fit of
boat-envy. They were sleek racing vessels, owned by members of the club who
somehow managed to keep a boat, a nice car
and
a sense of proportion
about the activity.

‘I used
to beg him to let us take a proper holiday,’ my mother said with a slightly wheezy
chuckle. ‘No, no, every year, without fail we had to get on that ruddy boat.’

Now we
were charging along, up the coast, to Suffolk. The camera was bounding. There
were shots of other boats, particularly admired older, wooden boats sailing
near by There were shots of the boat becalmed. The boat at anchor. The boat
motoring. The boat sailing. The boat tied to a quay The boat motoring. The boat
with just one sail up. The boat with all its sails up.

‘Who
are they?’ asked one of the children.

Another
boat had passed into view with people on - it. They were becalmed and were
smiling and waving.

‘No
idea.’

‘Didn’t
you know them?’

‘It
would have been most unlikely. Your grandfather’s idea of a holiday was to get
as far from the rest of humanity as possible up a dismal wet creek and sit
there.’

‘Making
one of those disgusting meals: a tin of spaghetti, a tin of chopped up spam,
and a tin of tomatoes, on the one burner.’ He did love the rituals of all that.
He loved the primus. You had to burn the blue meths to make the paraffin turn
to gas. He liked oil lamps and trimming wicks.

In the
film my sister emerged through a forward hatch and turned away from the camera.
I pulled on some clothes and glowered.

‘But it
wasn’t just the holidays. It was the weekends too.’ We sat there, mordantly
remembering. It had been the boat every weekend, if he could manage it. In the
winter we varnished it. That damn wooden pram dinghy with the stringers.

‘Well
of course,
Xara
was varnished, said my mother. ‘She was a lot of work.’

She
was. On a varnished boat, every stained scratch shows through, every nail hole
where the water has penetrated goes black if you don’t maintain her carefully
enough and probably even if you do. So
Xara
had to be rubbed down and
recoated with varnish, as did the dinghy, and the oars and the mast, and the
tiller handle and the rudder, and the top sides and the cleats (fiddly), and
the grab rails, thwarts, coamings, doors and separate planks of her
clinker-built hull, twice — two coats every year. ‘So we went to West Mersea on
cold days throughout the winter too and rubbed and sanded and scrubbed.’

‘What
we put up with,’ said my sister feelingly.

In the
summer, though, we made our own entertainments. If I was ever in West Mersea
when the tide was in I don’t remember it. The water was usually a hundred yards
off, down a slimy jetty, wide enough to take a single trailered dinghy, and
dipping slowly down to meet the creek at a six-foot-square platform of green
planks.

Everybody
swarmed over this to get into their tenders to take them out to their boats.
And that was where we stationed ourselves to catch crabs.

First
we got string. Then we searched amongst the stones at the top of the harbour
beyond the dinghy park for an abandoned rusty bolt or a stone with a hole in
it, big enough to sink. Then we got meat. Bacon was best because we could poke
a hole though the fat and tie it on the string.