Fathers and Sons Page 4

  Because he went back home.

  Not to St Thomas.

  To England. Geoffrey went back to Kiln Farm.

  Chapter 3

  RETURN TO KILN FARM

  All 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.

  On that chilly morning so long ago, it wasn’t the well that drew either boy to its dark mouth. The threat was all around them as they played in the friendly orchard in the sunshine. It was in the breeze whispering through the branches above their heads. A dry, cold wind flowing down from the Welsh hills on the horizon, summits still bleak in a winter that lingered around their old bald heads.

  John had removed his coat as he ran around in the deceptive sunshine. Later, he began to shiver and complained of a headache. He was put to bed and remained there the following day, suffering from a ‘chill’. By evening he was running a high temperature and starting to breathe strangely. The village doctor was called: the Madeley’s second son was diagnosed with pneumonia, and the parents were advised to prop the child up on pillows during the night to help drain fluid from John’s chest.

  The next day, he died.

  He was four years old.

  Child mortality was common right up to the Second World War and the increasingly widespread availability of antibiotics and mass immunisation. But John’s illness was so abrupt, so casual in its easy, invisible arrival and swift, pitiless departure that my grandparents could scarcely comprehend what had happened. The shock stayed with them for the rest of their lives. Decades later, when my sister and I drove on visits to Shawbury with our parents, the last mile of the journey was always accompanied by the same solemn instructions.

  ‘Don’t talk with your mouths full. Comb your hair before coming down to breakfast. And don’t mention John.’

  My grandparents could barely speak of him. There were no photographs of him to be seen anywhere in the house; no favourite toy placed carefully on a shelf or dresser. It was almost as if he had never been.

  Only once did I catch a glimpse of him. My grandmother kept an ancient bound-wooden chest in the farm’s living room. The old box was full of the bric-a-brac of half a century, the not-quite detritus of a family’s life.

  I was fascinated by this trunk and one afternoon, when rain fell from the sky in pounding torrents, my grandmot
her gave me permission to rummage through it. I was about nine years old.

  Once I had excavated the disappointing top layer of old women’s magazines, knitting patterns and yellowing bills for obscure farm machinery, things got interesting. The barrel and lock of a rusting .410 shotgun–no stock–and a mouldering gun-cleaning kit that smelled of crushed walnuts. Clanking mole traps, all springs and chains and sharp snapping jaws. My grandmother had once set them under her lawn to catch the little beasts so she could sell their velvet skins to passing tinkers.

  A medium-sized cannonball with the faded label: ‘Moreton Corbett–Civil War’. And finally, right at the bottom, hidden by a faded embroidered cushion, a little glass jar with a brass top. It might have once contained perfume or face cream, but as I held it up to the rain-streamed window I could see it was filled with tiny balls of silver and gold paper; the kind of foil that used to line cigarette packets. There were dozens of them, and I poured a few out. What could they mean?

  Suddenly a hand fell on my shoulder and I yelped with shock, scattering the little balls over the floor. My grandmother bent down and picked them up wordlessly, dropping them carefully back into the jar and gently screwing the lid back on. When she’d finished, she looked at me.

  ‘They were John’s,’ she said simply. ‘His money. He was too little when he…well, he was too little to have real money, you see, so he made his own.’ She gestured. ‘The gold ones were pennies and the silver ones were shillings. When his father paid the men their wages, John used to pretend to do the same with these.’

  The next day, helping my grandfather move sacks of grain in a store shed, I asked him with the directness of childhood: ‘What happened to John, Granddad?’