Text 2. Talking to my father

Knowing that I was coming, he had left the door unlocked, so I was able to walk in and go straight through the house into the garden where I knew I would find him on such a fine, early October morning. He was standing on the lawn with his back to me looking up at the sky.'Being rather deaf, he hadn't heard me coming. I was impressed, as usual, by his extraordinarily upright figure. For a man of nearly 87 he was in excel­lent health.

"Hello! Admiring your jungle? "

He turned and laughed, and then shook his head.

"It's such a mess - but what can I do? I suppose I ought to move to a smaller house."

"Nonsense! You'd hate it. Anyway, I like jungles."

We walked down the garden together.

"Look at the chestnut tree. All the leaves will be falling soon. Then I'll have to rake them up."

"Do you remember?" I said. "It was that conker that Claire planted just after we came here. Just look how it's grown! But then it was a long time ago - 1955!"

"1955. Coming here - to Stratford-upon-Avon — that was a good move, especially for you."

"That's when my theatre craze started. And it was a good move for you, too," I re­minded him.

"Yes. All those job interviews I went to - and all of them failures - until 1955. All because of the war."

My father had been a pacifist during the war. At Cambridge, where he studied his­tory, he had spent most of his time rowing and developing his political convictions which were mainly centred on a dislike of the Conservative government and an abso­lute commitment to non-aggression. He had spent some months in Germany in the '30s and had gone rowing with some young German men. He often wonders what became of them. My father doesn't like to make himself conspicuous and it must have been hard for him to bear the hatred and contempt of most people at that time and to face hostile interview panels who would not employ him because he had no war record.

He had been librarian of the Stratford-upon-Avon Public Library, a job greatly infe­rior to his abilities but one which in many ways suited his retiring nature.

"I remember going down to the library with you on a Friday evening," I said. "I loved it then. It was before the improvements to the building. It was wonderfully dark and dusty with great, tall bookshelves and books with dark cloth covers."

I have always enjoyed things that are old and faded and gently decaying, like the garden in autumn. On those evenings in the library in the late fifties I asked my father what I should read. He suggested Dickens' "David Copperfield". I took it off the shelf and settled down to read it. The first paragraph was difficult and I nearly put it back. Then I decided to ignore the problem and went on to the second paragraph. From that point the magic began to work and has never stopped.

4 ³⁶²'⁸ 4Q

Unitl

We walked up to the top of the garden where a huge and ancient pear tree stood, its branches arching to the ground.

"It still produces so much!" he said. "Your mother used to invite all her friends to take them away in baskets and buckets!"

My mother died of a rare and very swift disease four years ago. She never grew old, which maybe was a blessing. My father received nearly a hundred letters of condo­lence from her friends, none of whom ever come to visit him now.

"You know," he said, proudly. "I have boxes and boxes of stewed pears in my freezer which should last the winter!"

For a man who never cooked anything while his wife was alive, he has now found that he can stew fruit and make soup for himself. He copes quite well on his own, having someone who comes once a week to clean the house and another woman who irons his shirts.

I looked at the fence at the bottom of the garden and the houses beyond.

"Do you remember the fields that were there when we first came?" I asked him.

"Yes. And that huge elm in the middle of the field just behind here."

"We used to play there when they'd cut the corn. I remember taking Jess there one day to teach her the story of "Twelfth Night" because we were all going to the theatre to see it that evening. I made her climb the tree and sit on a branch while I told her. I was afraid she'd be bored and run away."

He laughed. "What a bully you were!" he said.

We walked back towards the house as the clouds were beginning to gather.

"I've been thinking, you know, about the car," he said, sighing. "Last year, you re­member, I drove down to the Forest of Dean. I stayed in a lovely guest house and walked for miles in the forest. But I don't think I could do it again. I really must start thinking about giving up the car. It will be very hard but I ought to do it."

"Yes, it will be hard. But don't worry - I'll take you somewhere next spring. We'll make some plans." I tried to get him to think of other things instead of the diminishing horizons of old age. "But tell me — how's the writing going?"

In the last few years he has been writing short essays on the development of his ideas about politics, history, and music. He's struggling to write now about his beliefs. Having no religious faith he is bravely trying to define his deeper purposes. Occasion­ally in these essays he makes brief references to my mother and us, his three daugh­ters. But like many Englishmen he prefers to be silent about the things that are clearly most important to him.

"Ah yes, I thought — perhaps something on philosophy next. I need to talk to Mat-teo." Matteo is my son who is a philosophy student. "I want him to advise me on books. I know very little about contemporary philosophical ideas. It might be good to get into that. You know, I tried going to an evening class last week. The subject was Darwin and the debate about science and religion. But nobody else turned up. I can't imagine why."

garden and to remember the day in 1955 when we arrived and I saw it for the first

Family Life

time, so much bigger than the old garden, such a perfect place to play, to sit out under the trees with a book, to have tea under the pear tree and later to watch my son crawl­ing on the lawn as a baby, to hold family reunions, to see the crocuses coming out even on the day my mother died and to walk in now with my father, remembering and cele­brating.

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