Fathers and Sons Read online

  If it was an exaggeration, it was a small one.

  My father began to lose weight and wrote home requesting food parcels. Suddenly his status as a farmer’s son became gilt-edged. Butter, eggs, cream, cake and preserved meats arriving from Shawbury on a regular basis made Chris Madeley everyone’s new best friend. But he wasn’t much of a one for bought popularity and shared things out without favour.

  He began to suffer from chronic loneliness.

  When my father died, I was just old enough to handle probate and most of the other sad business connected with his passing. Naturally I had to go through his personal papers. One sultry afternoon in mid-August 1977, a few days before the funeral, I turned to a pile of faded letters. Most were inconsequential, but one, still in its envelope, caught my eye. It was addressed in my father’s handwriting to: ‘Mrs G Madeley, Kiln Farm, Shawbury, Salop’ and marked ‘Private’.

  Denstone, Staffs.

  December–1943

  Kiln Farm

  Shawbury.

  Dearest Mother,

  I cannot tell you how much I look forward to coming home for Christmas. It seems so long since I was at Shawbury and I cannot wait to see you all again. Please tell Teddy Stiles [a friend of my father’s in the village] that I will certainly be over to see him and his people before ‘the big day’.

  Mother, I have tried so very hard not to write this letter but after three months spent here at Denstone I simply feel I must.

  Mother, I truly loathe it here. The other boys are nothing at all like me or my friends at Shawbury or Wem and I miss them so much. I am so lonely here and the teachers are awful. Remember old Mr———who the School Board insisted retire because he was so doddery? Well, Mother, they are all just like that here.

  I do not feel I am getting the education you and father are paying for, and Wem Grammar is so much less costly for you. Please let me stay home after Christmas and go back there.

  There are other matters here which I do not like but cannot explain to you.

  Will you talk to Father for me?

  I am so miserable here.

  Looking forward to seeing you all in a week or two,

  Your loving son, Christopher.

  The ‘other matters’ my father obliquely referred to in his letter concerned a small clique of older boys–mostly sixth-formers but a few from his own year too–who preyed on smaller boys for sexual gratification. Christopher had seen nothing like this during his school career so far and it shocked him profoundly. His classmates, who had grown up with this sort of thing, advised him to ignore it but he couldn’t. He had a naturally protective streak in him and was determined to intervene, even if that meant going it alone.

  One day he was in the washrooms and heard sounds of distress coming from a cubicle. Two seniors were in there with a much younger boy. They hadn’t bothered to lock the door.

  My father dragged the two sixth-formers out but before he could do anything else they ran off. The junior scurried away too.

  So that was that. It had almost been too easy.

  It was. That evening, on his way to prep, the clique’s ringleaders appeared out of the shadows, dragged my father into a classroom, and beat him to the floor. He was given a thorough kicking and by the time they fled he was barely conscious. He was left with temporary tinnitus and something else that until then he thought would have been impossible: an even deeper loathing for Denstone.

  Christopher tried to discuss his letter with her when he came home, but she repeatedly changed the subject. A conversation with Geoffrey about it was obviously out of the question. It made for a tense, strained Christmas at Shawbury and, with a corrosive mix of frustration, resentment and anger boiling inside him, Christopher was put on the train back to Denstone in January 1944. He felt powerless, unloved, and completely rejected.

  Dad never directly discussed with me the damage done to him by his parents’ strange, ruthless decision to send him away. I was, of course, too young. He kept such conversations for my mother, and after he died she told me how massively destabilised he had been by what he saw as his parents’ betrayal. It shook his confidence in himself, left his self-worth at rock bottom, and took him years to recover from.

  The sheer, unremitting bleakness of life at Denstone left its mark too. He was, as his parents had been explicitly warned, at precisely the worst point in his childhood to be packed off and isolated in a place like that. It was simply too late. He was fifteen, not far off manhood. He had already tasted the modest freedoms of adolescence. He had no experience of curfews, compulsory lights out at bedtime, or being routinely ‘gated’–barred from even going for a stroll to the village shops. Canings were frequent–far more so than at Wem–and he hated the sterile all-male world he had been banished to. Girls had been summarily cut out of his life, just as he was discovering them.

  Dad never tried to pretend to me that he was happy there, but as I was growing up he used the experience as a highly selective reference library for bedtime stories. These were mostly upbeat and exciting. Such as the time a sixth-former, a loner with only one passion–Denstone’s cadet force–tried to blow up the school. Everyone had gathered in the Great Hall to watch a play. Just before it began a prefect heard strange noises coming from under the stage. He and another boy pulled away a side panel and there, under the boards, was the crank, surrounded by explosives from the school armoury and fiddling with detonators.

  ‘He was quite mad, poor chap,’ my father always rounded off this particular tale. ‘But after he’d been dragged away a few of us agreed he had something of a point.’

  My father, as an adult, always went to great lengths to avoid discussing Denstone with his parents. My sister and I were explicitly ordered never to bring the subject up during visits to our grandparents. It was almost as taboo as mentioning John. But this keep-the-peace tactic eventually backfired; in the absence of any reproof on the matter my grandparents gradually persuaded themselves that they had done a wonderful thing for their youngest boy.

  ‘Of course, Chris loved Denstone,’ my grandmother would announce comfortably over Sunday lunch at the farm. ‘It was the making of him, I always like to think. You were so grateful we got you in there, weren’t you, darling? You really should think of sending Richard there, you know.’

  My father, beet-red, would make anguished noises in his throat and my mother would smoothly change the subject.

  He had inherited his father’s capacity for pragmatic forgiveness. Although I don’t think that, deep down, he ever truly pardoned his parents for causing him such pointless unhappiness, he tried his best to pretend to. Perhaps that was enough.

  The Denstone years crawled by and Christopher’s childhood was almost at an end. There can be no question that it had been a boyhood doubly blighted, first by his father’s implacable emotional withdrawal and then by this inexplicable exile to purgatory, a sentence with no appeal.

  I don’t think Dad quite realised it yet, but he was now damaged goods.

  I do not blame my grandfather for this, and I know my father didn’t. Geoffrey had done his best to cope with the injustices and betrayals that beset him. He had provided for his family and remained strong and dignified, when many other men might have turned to the bottle, or sunk into a lifetime’s self-pity. But Geoffrey had been left too damaged, too exhausted, to stop the contamination seeping into Christopher’s life.

  Chris was now in the upper sixth at Denstone and impatiently nearing the end of his three years there. He had increasingly taken refuge in literature and music and begun dabbling at writing. A few local newspapers had accepted letters and articles from him, mostly reviews of local concerts or reports on college sporting fixtures. Meanwhile his status as prefect brought with it slightly more privileges and freedoms, and there had been the comfort of friendships with one or two like-minded boys.

  The war was coming to its exhausted end. Kitty had been right about one thing; the conflict would be over before my father was old enough to b
e called up, and his older brother was in a reserved occupation. Farmers were crucial to the war effort.

  One peril she had remained blissfully unaware of had passed too. All of them were now safe from the tender mercies of the English resistance. Would those Shropshire farmers really have shot their own families before taking to the hills to wage guerrilla war on the occupying Germans? It seems inconceivable, yet things looked bleak enough in 1940 for it to be seriously discussed. My father never spoke to his father about that chilling conversation he’d overheard while hiding on the back stairs.

  Dad carried his suitcase out of Denstone’s gates for the last time in the summer of 1945. By a long-held agreement with himself, he made a point of not looking back.

  Chapter 6

  OVER THERE

  Christopher’s final school report arrived in the same post as his call-up papers.

  He didn’t give a damn about Denstone’s last verdict on him. He had not the slightest interest in what the school thought about anything, let alone him, any more than Denstone cared what he made of it.

  But he did care passionately about what was inside the brown government envelope.

  My father had set his heart on joining the RAF. He’d spent hours lying on his back in Shawbury’s fields watching British aircraft twisting in the skies above the farm. The damage done to his eyes by the farm dog all those years before meant he couldn’t hope to be a pilot, but he dearly wanted to be part of the so-called junior service, unencumbered as it was by the centuries of tradition which dominated and stifled the army and navy.

  In a rare moment of empathy, Geoffrey offered to open the letter from the War Office.

  ‘Thanks, Dad. Go on, then…’

  His father read it carefully, then peered over his glasses at his son.

  ‘It’s the Royal Flying Corps for you, Christopher.’

  My father burst out laughing and pumped his father’s hand. They grinned at each other for a moment, then looked away, embarrassed.

  Many young men dreaded doing National Service. The delights and freedoms of civilian life were snatched away from them by a pitiless military fist and overnight they found themselves in coarse uniforms, sleeping in draughty huts and being shouted at by foul-mouthed sergeants. Two years of drudgery in dreary peacetime postings awaited. For some boys it was their first time away from home and many silent tears were shed during the first nights in barracks.

  Not by my father. He thought he’d gone on holiday. Twenty-four months compulsory service in the RAF was a doddle after his three years at Denstone. The rigidity of service life which frustrated and oppressed so many others seemed like a relaxed and benevolent regime compared to the dark tunnel from which he had just emerged.

  Luckily he was in Signals, which meant he was on the inside loop of camp life. He and his fellow telegraphists received and transmitted all official messages and requests from the aerodrome radio shack. They knew everything that was going on, from the size of the monthly potato order to the imminent arrival of the thunderous new jet fighters that were beginning to take over from old propeller-driven warhorses like Spitfires and Typhoons. Dad enjoyed being in the know before most other people. It was the nascent journalist in him. Working in Signals sharpened his appetite for exclusive information. He liked being the one to pass it on, too, and his thoughts on what he might do after his discharge began to crystallise.

  By happy coincidence he was posted to Shawbury, and enthusiastically picked up the threads of his old life there, including spending as much time at Kiln Farm as duties permitted. Like his father before him, he saw no point in berating his parents for their failures. The subject of Denstone was avoided, by tacit agreement. What was done was done. Nothing could change the past. My father looked ahead now. He had a plan.

  He was going to be a reporter.

  During an earlier posting to Leighton Buzzard in Hertfordshire, he had talked the local paper’s editor into accepting occasional articles from him, similar to the ones he’d written at Denstone. When he was off-duty, Chris reviewed amateur dramatics and concerts. After a while the editor let him cover the odd breaking story, and he took to news reporting like a natural. He had found his calling.

  My father came out of the RAF in 1948, bought a stuttering, evil-smoking Norton motorbike for five pounds, and joined the Whitchurch Herald as a cub reporter. The paper covered a huge news area, but not much happened in this empty corner of Shropshire. Someone in the newsroom had pinned a poem by A. E. Housman to the notice board:

  Clunton and Clunbury,

  Clungunford and Clun,

  Are the quietest places

  Under the sun.

  with the added scrawled line: ‘Just one murder. That’s all we ask.’

  A year later, bored of writing up weddings, obituaries and agricultural shows, he transferred to the Shrewsbury Chronicle. A lot more was going on in the county town, but to his frustration most of his stories were cut to ribbons. Not because he was over-writing; everyone’s copy was slashed. There was an acute shortage of newsprint in post-war Britain. The big dailies got the lion’s share of what was available, with slim pickings left for their regional cousins. Sometimes a planned twelve-page edition was cut back at the last minute to just four. Painstakingly written articles and features were savagely subbed down or bit the dust entirely.

  Dad grew sick of it. Everyone did. Then one day a colleague confided over a pint that he’d cracked the problem. He was taking a job in Canada.

  ‘They’ve got newsprint coming out of their ears over there, Chris. You can’t move for bloody trees in Canada. I’ve got a pal working on the Toronto Star–forty pages every edition! I’m off. You should give it some serious thought, too.’

  Canada…the place seemed increasingly bound up in Madeley destiny. It had never once occurred to Chris to go there, yet now it seemed the most obvious thing in the world to do.

  Canada. There was no rationing, while shortages in Britain were getting worse by the week. There was even talk of bread being put on the points system. Bread! You wouldn’t think we’d won the war…

  As Chris rode his blaring motorbike back to Kiln Farm that evening, he could think of nothing but Canada. He had close relatives over there, so he wouldn’t be quite alone. His father had loved his own days in Canada and spoke of them often; he’d only come back because of bloody William.

  Since the end of the war his parents had made the first of many visits to Canada to see Geoffrey’s family, while James took care of the farm. Chris was sure the Madeleys over there could put him up for a while.

  By the time he was kicking out the stand on the Norton by the back door of the farmhouse, his mind was made up. He had some savings–more than enough for his fare. He was going.

  He saw Geoffrey coming out of the dairy shed after the evening’s milking. Chris hesitated a moment, then hurried across the farmyard to break the news to his father.

  My father was fully aware that a strange family pattern was repeating itself as his ship was shepherded out of the River Mersey by Liverpool’s pilot boats. As the liner’s screws increased their revolutions and the famous Liver Birds sank below the horizon, he thought about Henry’s family making exactly the same departure more than forty years before, and of Geoffrey’s hopeful voyage to find them thirteen years later. He felt a squirm of excitement in his belly as he reflected that, like his father and grandfather before him, he was in his turn sailing due west towards the mouth of the great St Lawrence.

  But these fathers and sons had crossed the Atlantic with different imperatives. Henry was escaping bankruptcy and ruin. Geoffrey was chasing the dream of being reunited with his long-lost family. Now Chris was turning his back on his own parents.

  They had supported his decision to emigrate but he sensed something approaching regret as well. His father appeared more reluctant than Kitty to see his youngest son go, although it was hard to be sure. Geoffrey’s emotions were as inscrutable as ever. Chris had been slightly confused; after all,
his father forced him to go to Denstone. He genuinely thought he would be pleased to learn that his son was leaving Shawbury again, but Chris thought he could detect sadness in his father’s voice when they talked over his plans.

  Dad and I spoke about this years later, just a few months before he died. I was in no doubt. ‘I think Granddad realised that deep down he loved you,’ I told him. ‘You can’t compare going to Denstone with emigrating to Canada, Dad. No wonder he seemed upset. Given the way he knew he’d treated you he probably thought he’d never see you again.’

  My father became quite thoughtful after this conversation. Later that evening, he did something almost unheard of. He telephoned Shawbury ‘just for a chat’ with his father.

  It’s never too late to salvage something from the wreckage.

  Before setting sail for Quebec, Chris had been in touch with the Thomson newspaper group’s Toronto office. They ran a string of titles over there and, after some hard lobbying, he was offered a reporter’s job in the city. They’d found him digs near the offices; he was, his editor-to-be said in a telegram, ‘all set’.

  Bad weather in the mid-Atlantic slowed the ship down, as did an unusually heavy crop of icebergs off Newfoundland. When Chris’s bus arrived in Toronto he was several days late.

  He reported direct to his newspaper. The editor was in conference, he was told at the front desk. Come back in an hour.