BY ANDREW CHRISTOPHER MILLER
Chapter 3:
Message in a Bottle
Turrets and battlements crafted with patience and precision. Corridors and cloisters, enclosed and open stairways, a working drawbridge and a keep, all fashioned with affection. The fort that Grandad Miller made for me as a Christmas present when I was eight years old was perfect.
I associated Granddad with Christmas because of it and the fact that he and Granny usually visited us on that day. Granny Miller wasn’t my Dad’s real mother, I knew that. She was Sam’s second wife, my Dad’s step-mother. Somehow, this rested sensibly within the order of things. Some people had mothers, others stepmothers, and my Dad had one of the latter.
The Granny Miller I had known was a full square person. I remember her in her Christmas Day best, black and shapeless, with straight and fine grey hair, cut at an even length. When I had not seen her for a while, she merged with the fearsome Giles granny in my father’s Daily Express and, from my mother’s anxiety before her visits, I knew there must be some justification for this comparison.
My mother, on her way home from town once, had called in on Granny to ask whether she needed anything fetching from the shops, only to come away with admonition stinging in her ears. She had two young boys at home needing looking after, what was she thinking about wandering around town and calling in on people? Keeping a cautionary eye on her when we were together, I avoided her wrath, never falling within its orbit nor, to be fair, witnessing any of its beginnings. Smoking her Senior Service, talking in an intriguingly deep and matter of fact voice, like a man, downbeat and cynical sometimes, she also kept an agreeable distance from me.
Granddad was altogether different, in appearance small and wiry and in manner, watchful, appreciative and understated. Nowadays, the contrasts might be readily noticed. Back then, and to me, people existed in each other’s presence and that was that. Compatibility was not a notion that I heard entertained.
‘She was lucky to get him, she was only an old washerwoman from Fleet after all really,’ my mother explained.
When they visited on Christmas Day my mother would wash up after lunch while Granny slept in front of the fire. I found having to suppress my amusement at her whistling breath and occasional abrupt snorts excruciating.
The four of us males, my grandfather, father, my brother and I, would get the table ready, then cut, shuffle and deal the cards – the ritual opening of the pontoon game.
‘Have you got your money then Grandad?’ my father would goad.
‘What about you two, are you alright?’ he would ask, turning to us, knowing that we could not be this close and still be unprepared.
When we were younger we had played for matchsticks but now that I was about to leave primary school, we were allowed halfpenny stakes, – ‘a penny maximum!’ We had left behind the make-believe, now there was the sweat and dirty copper of real currency.
Grandad smoked Capstan Full Strength and said very little.
‘What are you doing, sticking?’
He never removed the cigarette from his lips, allowing the wonderful architecture of the ash to bend towards collapse by minute degrees, while opaque blue and grey serpents wreathed about his head, some disappearing into his nostrils like sleek and eager parasites. He studied his cards to the exclusion of us all. I thought, at times when the smoke diminished, that he might be minimally moving his head as if reckoning his hand.
My father always pushed for a brisker pace.
‘What have you got there? Seventeen? What are you doing, sticking?’
Nothing. An intake of breath, words possibly struggling to form in the tiny movements of his head. Then nothing again.‘He’s got seventeen. Haven’t you?’
I wondered about Grandad’s supposed deafness. How could we really know whether my Dad’s raised voice was in any way more effective? Perhaps, there would be no communication until we all shouted our every word or used metal cones as loud hailers, like in the Beano.
‘He can hear all right. He’s just acting daft. You can hear, can’t you? What is it, seventeen? Sticking, aren’t you?’
Then the delicious reward. Grandad would emerge from the smoke, from his silence, from the darkening afternoon.
‘Eh?’
‘What are you doing? Come on, buying, twisting or sticking? Let’s be having you.’
I would be animated on my chair. My father would ask me once more to stop wriggling, but as the possibility of entering another, even more protracted cycle looked ever more likely, there was no place to turn from the tension. Nobody could leave the table to switch on the light. Granny might at times shuffle herself. My mother might quietly enter the room and take a chair. The gloom would add an increasingly despairing dimension.
And then he threw a halfpenny across the table. After all this he was buying.
‘Buying on seventeen? What you got there then, fifteen?’
The most superficial glance at his new card and another halfpenny flew across the table with the same apparent disinterest.
‘Bust?’ said my father, confident in his challenge once Grandad had turned the corner of this final card.
‘Stick!’
He’d done it and it was wonderful, better than anything on our new television, and he defeated all my watchful scrutiny. Neither could I discern the extent of my father’s possible complicity. No scripted performances could evoke from me such a longing for resolution. A playful wink just to me would have been a Christmas present indeed. The old magician and his cloak, the illusion of being slow-witted and deliberate, no let up, lost endlessly in oriental seascapes for all any of us knew.
Granddad had been a sailor in the Merchant Navy, finishing his working life as a stoker on the Channel Islands paddle steamers. When he was approaching sixty five, the shipping company told him that he would soon be too old to be shovelling coke down in the furnace room. It was time to think about retirement. Leave all that bending to younger men and enjoy the salty spittle upright in the outdoors. He protested that the work was not beyond him and demonstrated that, with the cigarette gripped in his mouth and proving no hindrance, he was the better of any of them. Hardly speaking among the high piles of coke, sweating and steady-footed in rolling seas, he was completely at home with the huge bellied forces of fire and steam.
But he was made to retire nonetheless and sadly, quietly accepted what he would have felt to be a great betrayal of his loyalty and resolution.
My father said that Grandad walked at an angle, leaning over to one side, because he had spent so much of his life at sea. I sometimes spotted him from the top of our bus coming over Westgate Bridge, hurrying towards town where he had a new evenings and mornings job, clearing up the glasses after hours in the basement bar of the Glengary Hotel up on the seafront. The story was that, although a Guinness drinker by nature, he went around the tables clearing sops of many varieties by drinking them, unable just to pour them down the sink. Off to work at ten thirty at night, home at around quarter to one, then back to clean up first thing in the morning ready for a brand new subterranean day. With all the leftovers he could drink and the opportunity to be helpful, my father said it was the ideal retirement for him.
I called on him on my way home from town once or twice and was not sent away. Following him one morning when I was nine or ten from the front door, through the dark hallway where musty coats hung, into the back parlour, he said
‘You’ve come at the right time’.
On the table was a large whiskey bottle on its side and inside a mess of wood, fabric and waxed twine. ‘Watch this,’ he said, steadying his breathing to control against any cloud of smoke from his cigarette that might obscure his eye line. Carefully, the tiny muscles around his mouth regulating his efforts, he drew towards him the threads hanging from the bottle’s neck and the muddle of its contents began to move, began to assert itself into the full blossoming of a rigged ship in sail – decks, masts, canvas against the wind, ropes taking the tension.
He let out a small breath, a pinched but deep satisfaction. There was nothing here that words could improve upon although they tumbled out from me indiscriminately. He said nothing in reply, either absorbing or deflecting my gabble, but smiled and nodded at the bottle in front of him on the table. In this dull back room, with treacle-like varnish on the panelled wall that held in the stairs, I had seen the birth of a morning at sea, fuelled with enough confidence for a full circumnavigation, able to hold a determined course beneath the most perverse or alien of constellations.
Chapter 4
Common Knowledge
‘Quick! It’s that bloke!’
Kids scattered like minnows towards their gardens and back doors.
‘Who is he?’ I asked, watching the big man as he shambled up the road towards us, his head rolling slowly from side to side like that of a burdened beast.
‘He gives you stuff if you go down his house with him. Money and stuff. But he ties you up and takes your trousers off,’ explained Ricky, before darting down the alleyway that led to his own back garden.
I was indoors immediately, past my parents and up crouching beneath the window of my bedroom, blood racing, cramped down so that my back could not possibly show above the sill. I waited and counted, counted and waited, wanting to be sure that when I did raise my head to look, the man would be past our house and along towards the other end of the road, not leaning against the lamp post opposite with eyes fixed on my bedroom window. I was terrified that when I did finally raise my head above the sill, the man would be right there, ready to lock my gaze.
All the kids had heard of ‘funny men’ and their descriptions were passed down by those more ‘in the know,’ or at least seemingly so. Likewise, although actual encounters were rare, we had all absorbed the rumours about favoured haunts and remained watchful.
But on a previous occasion, news had spread that a funny man had been approaching kids down at the Sports Field. Bored and looking for excitement, I tagged along with a large group who decided to seek him out in a game of real stakes pursuit.
‘We’re safe as long as we all stick together,’ said Ricky.
It was never a consideration, of course, that any of us would tell our parents. What vocabulary, beyond the excruciatingly rude and embarrassing, could we have possibly employed?
The Field covered a larger area than the Rec. It bordered the golf course and was marked out in football pitches complete with goal posts. Many adventures and explorations started here. Going ‘out across’ entailed disappearing from the everyday adult world at the far end of the Sports Field by sliding down Slippery Slope, the mud bank opening in the bramble-covered hillside.
But on that particular day we were highly vigilant. Some of us had much younger brothers and sisters to take care of, little ones whose acceleration if suddenly required was much in doubt. We trekked across likely openings and clearings like flirtatious fawns, nonchalant but calculating bait.
And suddenly he was there, a small man in a raincoat and beret, smiling down on us, leering from the top of Slippery Slope. Carol Devaney screamed, unsettling everybody, and began to run, pulling her tiny sister along the track beside the Reed Bed, around the Newt Pond and on into the interior. Rattling with terror, I became every hero I had ever encountered, each surging within me and then immediately gone. I wanted to shepherd the slow ones but also save my own skin, to regroup in some corner and discover our collective strength yet also skim swiftly, alone and unhindered, across the long grass.
We evaded the man, stopped running and stopped shaking. Some started to cry, others became wild and argumentative. We agreed again to stick together, to move at the same speed, scouts focusing on the way ahead while others consolidated the ground already covered. And in this way we secured safe passage back from the limits of our known world towards the amiliarity of footballers’ cries from across the Sports Field and then into Oakcroft Avenue where police and parental jurisdiction once again prevailed.
But today this huge man who was walking with impunity down our very street carried a far heavier menace and brought it right up to our front door. In my bedroom I calculated the amount of time the man would take to pass the house and then doubled that before risking a look. Raising my head just enough to be above the window sill, I saw him well advanced down the road, nearing the corner with Cheviot Street. He was by the gate of the house where Janet Aston, my second cousin, lived. Janet was in the same class as me at school and was straight-backed and plain with limp fair hair often tied in bunches. I never spoke to her though nor told anybody that we were somehow related. In fact, my family never exchanged more than a passing pleasantry with Janet’s. She wasn’t allowed to play out with the others. They were Jehovah’s Witnesses.
At their gate, Janet’s dad, still in his work overalls, was shaking his fist at the monster in their road. My Dad reckoned that Janet’s father was alright as long as he never tried to inflict his religion onto others. I could not see Mr Aston’s face clearly enough but his stance and movements were unusual, outside the standard repertoire of anger. What had Janet told her father to raise such ferocity? Even though I had been assured that they were a strange family, I could not believe that she had dared to tell what the other kids had told me.
The apparent heroism on her father’s part, and my disbelief that the unspeakable could have in fact been uttered, were somehow compromised by what I knew of the family.
Sometimes Jehovah’s Witnesses called at our own house, causing my Dad to struggle with the stiffness of the infrequently opened, heavy front door.
‘Good morning, we wondered if you are concerned like we are about all the –‘
‘Yes, thank you very much,’ my father would say or almost sing, interrupting them.
‘The Lord – ‘.
‘Yes, thank you’.
Bang! The door was shut.
It seemed to me like a sort of heroism as I watched my father walk back down the passage to carry on mixing the batter for Sunday dinner Yorkshire puddings. He sometimes announced with great approval that there had been two forbidden topics of conversation in the RAF mess in the war – politics and religion.
‘People would start arguing the toss and it would always end in trouble,’ he explained when
I asked him why. But how his closing the door like that could really be bravery puzzled me, complicated as it was by what seemed like rudeness in the interrupting, in not letting the callers finish their piece. And anyway, the war had been over now for the whole ten years of my life.
Mr Aston was out there in the road, in full sight of everybody, directly challenging the beast-like man. This should have seemed heroic too but, because Mr Aston was already seen to be outside the swim of the everyday social world, I struggled to construe him in so positive a light. Better instead to see these combatants as two outcasts together, two disturbers of the peace. Their tussle could tip them over the side of the world, into the void and beyond view. The people on our road, on the whole Shorehaven estate even, would then be restored and relieved, absolved and freed from further consternation.
Next week Chapter 5 Every Sparrow Fallen and Chapter 6 One for a Jack
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