Beyond the Known

BEYOND THE KNOWN

Dad was forty-six when I was born. I never knew him as a young man. When I think of him now, he comes back to me in unexpected ways, like the time I was hiking and saw the backs of his hands in the thick bark of a tree. Or when, for no reason I could explain, the sound of my husband biting into a ginger biscuit brought back the sound of Dad’s razor rasping through his black bristles and the white lather (hand shaving, of course. Gillette double blade).

When Dad died, I deliberately didn’t think about the small things that made up our life together. The time he threw a bar of chocolate over the wall into the garden of the convent school where I was boarding. The letter he sent with a picture of Charles when he married Diana, and two commemorative coins, but not money to spend. He must have put them away in the album he made for me. Born 1958… with a diagonal dotted line drawn across the cover to a date neither of us could know. Dad was a traditionalist, which could have been one of our problems later but wasn’t then.

When he died, I didn’t want to remember the larger, often overwhelming parts of my life with him. The day when I shouted that I just wanted the truth about my mother and what she’d done and why he hadn’t left her when he found out. I remember how his chest heaved under his thin white shirt, nothing living left of him except the cancer. Later, I understood that I’d wanted him to be someone I could blame for everything, except that by then it was too late to apologise.

Dad’s will was typically practical, with nothing extra left between the lines. I was grateful for that, but as I hadn’t known what to expect, I also couldn’t be disappointed. He left me a book called Letters to His Daughter, by Kenneth Allsop and a leather suitcase, which I haven’t opened until now. Thirty years later.

I’ve carried the suitcase everywhere with me, watching the corners soften into curves, and the brass buckles sink deeper into the leather straps that close the lid onto the base. Once, at a car boot sale, I saw an exact copy, though until then I’d always thought it was unique. The man I was with at the time said I should buy it to keep Dad’s suitcase company. Later that evening we drank wine and laughed about what they might be saying to each other in the wardrobe where we’d left them.

I put on a military male voice for Dad’s suitcase. It was dark as hell, I said. And Damp. My leather grew a skin of mould you could write your name in. That was from the time I kept it in a cellar. I remember the layer of mandorla-shaped rat shit caught in the cobwebs above it. The buckles were green with verdigris.

The man I was with at the time used an American accent to tell me that I, as the suitcase, should count myself lucky. He’d spent the last ten years storing the clothes of an old woman who had died messily. Then he said he was going to the bathroom, but I heard him go into the bedroom and open the wardrobe door. When I went there, he was sitting on my Dad’s suitcase like he was riding a horse. He said he wanted to ask it if he was heavy. I said the joke wasn’t funny and told him to leave. He’d had even more wine than me and a smoke before we’d even started drinking. That was partly why I was angry, but mainly because he’d treated Dad’s suitcase with so little respect. Only I was allowed to do that.

I gave the suitcase’s twin to a friend who had a stall at a local market. She called it Sweet Nothings and sold stuff other people gave away. Then I moved into a different apartment to live alone. I put Dad’s suitcase under my bed, where I could be sure the only life walking across its lid would be spiders who are mainly discreet.

On the first night here, my dog climbed onto the bed, and when I got in, the mattress dipped down to where Dad’s suitcase pressed up from below. For a while the feeling of it being there was comforting and regular. A way of remembering what he’d left me without going any further.

Everything changed when my dog ran across the road at the end of the garden, where she used to sit watching for rabbits. Without her weight, the feeling of the suitcase underneath went, but the memory of it didn’t.

When I lift its lid, I imagine Dad’s last breath seeping out into the new air, spreading its musty tobacco smell and ending abruptly with a lungful of cough, the way I remember him most. I’m worried about what I will find inside, but I tell myself that I have no expectations, so I can’t be disappointed.

The suitcase has never been heavy, and now I can see why. It isn’t full of stuff, just five photo albums, held together with raffia string. The kind of string people used to make lampshades from, when people still made them. I wonder why Dad left the albums for me to see. The backs are familiar: one beige, one red, the others grey. I remember them lined up on a shelf over his desk in the library at home. I knew they were photo albums. Perhaps a more curious child would have asked to see them, but by the time I was old enough to be interested, the distance between Dad and me had become something neither of us knew how to cross.

Unusually for Dad, the albums aren’t tied together in any kind of chronological order, which could have been a sign of his state of mind. Or perhaps that he’d simply gathered them up at the last minute and tied a piece of raffia around them, with no thought of me at all.

The album on top begins in 1933, when he was twenty-one. I know because there is a photo of him on the dark grey inside cover with his age written in white letters underneath. This is the younger Dad I’ve never seen. The cover is decorated with the white hand-painted coat of arms of the Duke of Lancaster’s Own Yeomanry, and the title printed in straight block capitals underneath.

Part of me wants to look for more of Dad. Part of me doesn’t, but I tell myself that if I don’t look now I never will. Inside, the photographs show a group of hurly-burly young men learning how to become soldiers. The photos are all grins and wide shoulders and hands clapping backs. Handwritten captions and laugh-aloud cartoons tumble across the pages as if someone threw them there like confetti. I hadn’t known Dad could draw or that he had such an irreverent sense of humour.

Here was a man with close friends who loved life, who hiked, canoed, sailed and drove where no sensible person would drive in a car that looks like Chitty Chitty Bang. He rode horses as well and won races. In one photo he’s standing on a podium receiving a cup. The rest of the time, he trained as an engineer. The degree certificate is pasted on the last page, like he nearly forgot it.

The albums continue through the Second World War, by which time my Dad-to-be was a Major in the Royal Army Service Corps. The humour is still there, but in a monochrome register. On the first page of his campaign through the Italian Alps, he pressed Edelweiss flowers between the pages, photographed women working in the fields, and tucked in a leaflet headed L’ultima ora di Mussolini beside a gruesome, self-explanatory photograph. The cartoons disappear, but the wry observations remain, along with photographs of whatever stray dog he’d adopted at the time. One caption stops me, and I feel the need to breathe deeply: “I had to shoot Toby. Rabies. Six words. I try to hear him say them. This was a story he had never told me, but it was a moment when something mattered enough to write it down and hold in time. I’m seeing a man I never knew.

His third album in the stack has a red cover without a title, but I can tell from the photos that it’s from the Middle East. I try to remember WW2 history, Rommel and all that. The reporting in this one is just as meticulous as in the others. Every stage of the journey recorded. The men he served alongside, the signposts, the villages, the people trying to live ordinary lives in landscapes torn apart and thrown across horizons. And then, threaded through it all, his own growing disillusion. Photos of prisoners hunched in front of a burnt-out tank. Rows of wooden crosses and helmets laid out in lines in the sand. The man in knee-length shorts, standing alone. A silhouette against the sun. A back. No face, but still recognisably him. I want to know which of his friends took it. Was it someone I’d met? And why had Dad put it on the last page? 

I’m exhausted by what I’m seeing and by the silences that are so full of sound. But there’s one more album. The one with the beige back. I hesitate and wonder what the colour might mean. Was it for the time before the war, the time after, or somewhere in between? I want to know my Dad more than ever, but I’m scared about what I might find. I open the first page, beige like the back and cover, one photo in the middle. A seaside scene where women wear ankle-length dresses, and men frolic over the waves in pyjama-sized swimsuits.

This one isn’t about the war, before or after or in between. It’s about an entirely different world. On the next page, my grandfather is a young man, almost unrecognisable except for his eye patch (WWI), while Dad, a small boy, smiles down from a tree branch above. His face is just the same as I remember, only smoother and rounder.

I turn the pages and find captions scrawled under the photographs in blue pen:

Having our dinner on top of the Wrekin.

Maggie took this one so you can see Mummy in front of the Needle.

This is when we were in Acton Burnell with Auntie Jean.

The names are my anchor. I know where I am. The Wrekin. The Eye of the Needle. Acton Burnell. The place names of my childhood. Happy places mainly. Without warning, I come full circle and meet Dad smiling back at me. The page blurs. I wipe my eyes, and my fingers come away wet. I don’t know when I started crying, but I know that I’m crying because I’ve found the man I needed and mostly didn’t have. The man who pressed Edelweiss into his albums until the petals stained the paper brown. The man who drew cartoons of his fellow soldiers with noses like potatoes and boots like boats. The man who rescued stray dogs and shot them when they became too ill to save, and held the pain of doing that with six words. The man who pushed me around the yard on my first bicycle with his hands on the saddle before letting go without me knowing. The man who threw a chocolate bar over the boarding-school wall on his way home from work and never once, in all the years I was away, missed writing his weekly letter.

I think about how I’ve found him too late to tell him any of this. I think about the children caught up in wars happening all the time, all over the world, too many wars to label one, two or three. Too many children to number at all. I think about how they might love their fathers or might not, but may never have the chance to come full circle, because their histories have been erased and scattered across horizons. I think about how I might have been if I’d kept carrying the suitcase until the corners opened, the straps broke, or it was passed on to my daughter, who wouldn’t know what to do with it. Perhaps she’d put the albums in a box and forget to take them when she moved. Perhaps she’d give the suitcase to a woman with a market stall called Sweet Nothings. But I opened it. And somewhere among the photos, captions and cartoons, I finally find my Dad.