Vulnerable in Hearts Read online

  Cal does at least know that he must draw trumps, mindful of that oft-repeated mantra of his grandfather that ‘there is many a man who walked the streets of London because he didn’t draw trumps.’ Cal has not yet been introduced to the world of money bridge and he does not therefore understand the connection between trumps and ‘walking the streets’. But he does know that if you don’t draw trumps you might lose some unexpected and inconvenient tricks.

  We had played for little more than an hour by the time Cal fell asleep over the card table in the lounge of the St Columba Hotel on Iona and, although it was late, it was not yet dark. Summer evenings linger long in Scotland’s western isles. Mary and Betty listened politely to our tales, but soon the conversation turned to Iona and the early Christian settlements there. Mary had been married at the abbey one summer after the war and thirty years later she and her husband renewed their vows there, and even now, ten years after his death, she returned every summer to the island where, she claimed, what held her was as much a quality of light as it was a question of memory. But, as we talked with the sudden familiarity of strangers, it became clear that what brought her back to Iona was not really the quality of the light, nor the memory of her husband, but an inexpressible longing to withdraw from what she knew into a place that corresponded, however roughly, with what she dreamed. And her dreams were filled with spaces in which the silence was the silence of a sea breeze in grass and the colours were smudged through the prism of great distances.

  While Mary talked, Cal lay asleep in his chair, his blonde hair an unruly mop and his fingernails, I noticed with sudden concern, filthy with the grime of a day’s travelling. Mary in any case seemed suddenly to tire of her memories. She nodded at Cal. ‘You should put him to bed,’ she said.

  I said goodnight and lifted Cal from his chair to carry him through to our room. It was only when I laid him on the bed that I saw that he was still clutching the deck of cards with which we had earlier played the game he had always known, ever since he was little, way back, before memories begin.

  The one he ‘got from me’.

  The morning after our bridge game in the St Columba Hotel, the sun rises bright and clear. It is the hottest summer on record and it seems clear that the day will be long and arduous. We rise early, breakfast and set off to catch a ferry back to ‘the mainland’, although it is actually the island of Mull. This was, according to David Balfour in Kidnapped, ‘all bog, and brier, and big stone’. As we drive in our rented car along the single-track road, giving way every now and then to busloads of pilgrims to Iona, we see evidence that two and a half centuries of agriculture have left their mark. The bogs are gone. Instead, the hillsides are dotted with sheep and crossed by stone walls. In 1751, we’re told, it was, ‘infested with beggars’. We find only a pair of French hitchhikers to whom we give a lift. David Balfour walked the island without serious mishap in four days and arrived at Torosay on the northern shore ‘far in better heart and health of body than [he] had been in the beginning’. These days, though, the ferry to Lochaline runs from a small dock at a place called Fishnish. While we waited for the ferry to arrive, I read a little from the book. ‘In the mouth of Loch Aline,’ David Balfour recalls, ‘we found a great sea-going ship at anchor ... there began to come to our ears a great sound of mourning, the people on board and those on shore crying and lamenting to one another as to pierce the heart. Then I understood this was an emigrant ship bound for the American colonies.’

  By this stage of our journey, I have told Cal many of the stories by which we account for ourselves – the sinking of his great-great-great-grandfather’s (on my mother’s side) ship, the Annabella, in Durban Bay in 1857, his great-grandmother’s travels in South Africa before her return to Scotland, my father’s journey south to Cape Town in the autumn of 1940 and my own reverse journey into exile, overland from Cape Town to London twenty years ago. And I like to think he has some sense of the restless diaspora from which he comes. Even so, Cal doesn’t see the problem. His journeys have always taken him home again. ‘Why were they crying?’ he asks. ‘If they didn’t like it, they could always come back.’

  Well, not always. Sometimes you can never go back, I suggested, but Cal was having none of it.

  ‘They could take a bus,’ he says firmly.

  ‘Your granddad didn’t,’ I say. ‘He left Scotland when he was a kid and never really came back. He visited, of course, a few times. But he never came back.’

  ‘Aren’t they the same thing?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘I’ll always come back,’ he says, with the certainty of a child.

  I wonder where he will go.

  Cal and I follow the Kidnapped route through central Scotland. We fetch up, eventually, on the southern shores of the Forth. It was here, at the Hawes Inn at Queensferry, that David Balfour’s uncle sold him into slavery, and the same inn, built originally in the seventeenth century, still stands. Now it is famous as a ‘Kidnapped Location’ and the sign above the door shows some suitably thuggish sailors belting an odd-looking David on the head with a cosh. Cal is more interested in the waters of the Forth brushing the foundations of the famous railway bridge. But I manage to get him to focus for a moment on what we have seen and where we have been.

  ‘I like Scotland,’ he says. ‘But it’s a bit scary. They remember everything.’

  14. Remembering everything

  MY UNCLE BRIAN, Dad’s youngest brother, has become the repository for the family memory. He lives near Edinburgh, not far from where they grew up. On a wet Sunday morning, he drives Cal and me north across the Forth River Bridge and on to Kirkcaldy. We’re looking for the flat where Dad was born. The town is quiet when Brian, Cal and I arrive; there are few people about, perhaps because of the weather. The wind whipping in off the Forth means the town does not smell, as it sometimes does, of its most prominent industry, the manufacture of linoleum. Brian has done this journey once before and he more or less knows the way to the High Street. Here he has to pause before deciding we need to head towards the western end of the street, which is where we find the old building that was once the bank where my grandfather worked. Although it is now a jeweller’s shop, the building appears not to have changed much. A covered arch leads through into a courtyard, from which a winding staircase leads up the back of the building to the heavy old door of the flat. The current owner is not about and we are unable to go in. It was here, in the apartment above the bank, that my father was born into bridge’s ‘newly vulnerable world’ in the autumn of 1926.

  ‘He was born here?’ Cal asks.

  ‘Aye,’ says Brian.

  ‘And not in a hospital?’

  ‘No,’ says Brian, only he draws the syllable out in a characteristic Scottish manner.

  ‘What, like in a bed?’ Cal asks.

  Brian and I nod solemnly. Cal thinks about this for a moment. ‘It’s hard to think of him as a child,’ Cal says. ‘I think of him as an old man.’

  ‘Well, he was both,’ Brian indulges him, ‘sometimes simultaneously.’

  But the joke is lost on Cal who concentrates on counting the stairs that wind to the door behind which his grandfather was born. Brian – for whom Kirkcaldy was never home – looks about him with an air of wonder.

  ‘You never lived here?’ I ask.

  He shakes his head. ‘No. I was’nae born yet. But you can see why they left.’

  ‘It’s hard to imagine what it was like,’ I say.

  ‘You don’t need to,’ he replies. ‘You need only think of his parents. His mother was his world. I’m not sure the rest mattered much.’

  My grandparents soon left Kirkcaldy for the bright lights of Edinburgh. My grandfather had won promotion within the bank and this required him to move. On the strength of his advancement, they bought a small bungalow on the southern edge of the city, which is where they lived for the next forty-five years. There were five children in all. First my aunt Margaret and then Dad. He was followed at regular in
tervals by his three younger brothers, Robin, George and Brian.

  I ask him what he remembers.

  ‘Well, your grandmother was in charge,’ he says. ‘She ruled the roost. And as long as we remembered that – your grandfather included – we got along just fine. So the job with the bank took him to Edinburgh, but once she got there she never wanted to move again.’

  I hardly knew my grandparents. We lived in South Africa. They lived in Edinburgh. But I did meet my grandfather once when I was nine and we travelled to Edinburgh at the end of a four-month European tour. I remember only that his hair was whiter – which I had not thought possible – than my father’s, that he too had a moustache which tickled when he hugged me and that his shoulders shook when he laughed.

  On another occasion, Cal, Brian and I go to watch Scotland play Ireland at rugby. It is March 2005, a dismal time for Scottish rugby. The only question this season, as for some seasons past, is whether Italy or Scotland will end up bottom of the Six Nations championship. But today it is the Ireland game and so Murrayfield, the home of Scottish rugby, is full. Despite the freezing wind blowing off the Firth of Forth, the crowd is in good voice. Everybody knows Scotland is about to be thumped but it should at least ‘be a good game’. And getting thumped by the Irish, while unpleasant, is considerably more palatable than getting thumped by the English. It is some years since Brian last attended an international match at Murrayfield, but it is clear from listening to him that it brings back many memories. In the thirties, my grandfather and ‘the boys’, the eldest of whom was my father, never missed a game. Their house was less than a mile from Murrayfield and, every time there was a ‘home international’, they would walk down the hill together to see the game.

  Brian, Cal and I retrace the route through the streets of western Edinburgh to the stadium looming in the valley below.

  ‘Was it always this cold?’ Cal asks.

  ‘Aye, I suppose it was,’ Brian replies, ‘although I don’t remember it.’

  At Murrayfield, Cal is unimpressed with his Scottish roots. The home team are being run ragged and their support barely gets above a whisper. By contrast, the Irish fans – who have great hopes for the first Irish ‘grand slam’ since 1949 and who in any case seem to outnumber the Scottish fans – are in full cry. Each successive attack is greeted with the melodic chants of ‘Ireland, Ireland’ and a waving mass of green.

  ‘It would be better to be Irish,’ Cal remarks.

  ‘We can be Irish,’ I joke. ‘Your great-grandmother, Dad’s mother, was half-Irish. That’s how I came to be raised Catholic.’

  For Cal, the idea of being ‘raised anything’ is a little remote, but he likes the idea of having Irish blood.

  ‘Cool,’ he says. ‘I’ll support Ireland.’

  ‘No you bloody won’t,’ mutters Brian, sounding uncomfortably like my father. And to secure Cal’s loyalties, we teach him a mildly ribald version of Scotland the Brave.

  After dinner that evening, Brian produces a biscuit tin which – to my amusement – bears the legend ‘perfect for the whole family’. It contains the family archive, such as it is, and includes perhaps thirty or forty photographs of my grandparents. I am struck by how little they seem to change, even though the photographs cover four or five decades of their lives. In each, the poses and expressions are the same. My grandfather is upright and correct, smiling cheerfully, looking regimental in dark suit and white shirt. When I remark on this, Brian says only that ‘He looks like what he was, a bank manager.’ My grandmother, in these pictures, is also very formal, but a little less accessible. Her smile is impatient, as perhaps she was with the photographer, and, even in the early pictures, one can sense her discomfort, for her legs cause her considerable pain. She stands very straight and her look is very direct, and her lips over the years have a certain compression to them. In this same collection, there are two photographs, one of each of them, taken on the same camera and on the same day, which must have preceded their marriage, and in which they are each seen to be cavorting in a park somewhere, playing, as my father would have put it, ‘silly buggers’. I have no doubt that the phrase which came from him to me would have come similarly from his father to him. In this pair of pictures, my grandfather looks a little like one of the lesser Marx brothers, the one whose name one can never quite recall, whereas my grandmother reminds one more of a character in a novel, not the heroine exactly. She seems more like the one who brings about the downfall of the hero, perhaps inadvertently, though one cannot help but suspect malice.

  ‘But that would be unfair,’ Brian says. ‘She was a tough old cookie, but your grandfather loved her dearly.’

  ‘And Dad?’

  ‘I’m not sure I follow?’

  ‘Did he love them?’

  ‘Ah,’ says Brian. ‘That’s a different question. I suppose he did, at least until they sent him away.’

  He says this only partly in jest.

  Cal is confused. ‘So Tom was born here,’ he says, ‘so why did he go to South Africa? Why didn’t he stay?’

  ‘He didn’t have much choice,’ I say.

  ‘Not at first,’ says Brian.

  ‘He and George and Robin were sent to South Africa during the war,’ I say.

  ‘Why?’ Cal wants to know. ‘Was it safer?’

  ‘I suppose it was, but I’m not sure that’s why they did it.’

  No diaries or letters exist to explain the decision that was taken in the winter of 1939–40 to send my father and two of his brothers to South Africa for the duration of the war. And my father never spoke of it, at least not to me. Perhaps it confused him too. Certainly, he was angry about it, both at the time and for many years to come. And he blamed his mother for it, rightly or wrongly.

  Rose, the tough old cookie, rules the family. Throughout the thirties, the boys grow knowing that in the Balfour household the things that matter are faith and family and on both counts they answer to my grandmother. It is she who insists that they attend Mass and go to confession. It is she who supervises their schooling. It is she who maintains contact with the other family members, the myriad of aunts and uncles, cousins and grandparents who seem to proliferate all over southern Scotland. When, twenty years later, my mother is brought from South Africa to meet her future in-laws, she remembers it as an endless succession of meetings. ‘I was under the impression that many of them were Balfours,’ she wrote recently, ‘though they were perhaps less numerous than the Quinns. (To this day I am not quite sure where they all fitted in.) Certainly, we went to see Tom senior’s two sisters, Margaret and Janet, and his brother Hamish came round on more than one occasion to play bridge ...’

  From their mother, the boys learn discipline and restraint. She teaches them the rules. From my grandfather, they learn something different. They learn to keep their own counsel and to communicate little. They learn to be private.

  By the summer of 1939, their lives are full and stable. The talk of war affects them very little. My grandfather is too old for military service and the boys are too young. My grandfather works at the bank; my grandmother teaches at a college. Both banks and schools stay open during wartime. They see no danger to their lives or their jobs. Events elsewhere, which might mean Westminster or Windsor or Berlin, are just that: elsewhere.

  Dad is the eldest of the boys and the most studious. He likes sport but it is not his passion. He loves books and, from his own telling of it, I have pieced together his reading during those early days. Some of it no doubt was read to him and some of it he devoured for himself, especially the Scottish canon: Buchan and Scott, Burns and Stevenson. Prester John and Kidnapped were favourites, to be read and reread until they were taken to heart almost in their entirety. I remember how, many years later, he read Prester John to me at bedtime and how towards the end of a chapter he would prematurely close the book and recite the last two or three lines from memory. He listens to the radio too, though he is not much interested in newspapers. He follows the build-up to war, but not
avidly.

  And, besides, it is summer. Across the garden fence there are the Braids, the open hills south of Edinburgh. They stretch out towards the Pentlands and it is here that the boys run free in scenes reminiscent of A Child’s Garden of Verses.

  It is Dad’s golden moment, the summer of his thirteenth year. The holidays are spent with his cousins Betty and Rita on their farm in the Scottish Borders. In later years, my father will speak of these holidays as the happiest times of his life. There are salmon to catch and trout to guddle. There are moors to tramp and trees to climb. My father loves being outdoors. He loves the fresh wind in his face and the sea mist. He loves distant horizons and the illusion of freedom. He is carefree and strong and feels secure in the warm embrace of his family. To be sure, his mother is strict and his father a little distant, but he thinks this is true for everyone. Church is a chore and choir a bore, but so be it. He doesn’t question the rules and takes his faith as it is presented to him.

  Many years later, I recall Dad, in his chair by the window again, his pipe unlit on the stool, showing me the scar on the palm of his hand, which was not, as I might have guessed, a war wound, but one he had sustained while climbing a fence in order to escape the remonstrations of a neighbour from whose orchard he had attempted to steal a few apples. Whether this parable was intended to encourage or discourage us from such activities remains to this day unclear, for the suggestion of a grin played about the corners of my father’s mouth even as he extracted from the tale its obvious moral. I remember how, in the telling of it, a wistful mist drifted across his eyes for, although all his life he had perfect vision, there was in his eyes an opaque, watery quality, like a man ever on the edge of tears that never came.