You gave me
words. You spoke them with the soft, refined vowels and inaudible r’s of Kent,
near the English channel. Up, no, more, eat, drink, sleep. Baby. You read aloud Beatrix Potter to the
three-year-old at your side to prevent her from being jealous of her new sister. She wanted to hear Mrs. Tiggywinkle. Again. Again. Again. The words flowed over me. Pinafore,
plaited, hedgehog, starch, stout, damask, goffered.
You lose
words, now. Over the phone, your words
wobble and falter. This place where I am… your place, where you live… Four thousand
miles away, I gently find the words you once gave me. I pass them back to you. Massachusetts. Alaska.
You gave me
whole sentences. When I left your side
to enter school, my sentences were so much yours that I spoke them in your
voice, a little British child in New York.
I can already read. I read my books in the rotunda while the
other kindergartners are learning phonics. I shed the accent, but I still sat in the
rotunda with my books, my words, my sentences.
Now, your
sentences sometimes turn on themselves and unravel. Their endings become unwound from their
beginnings. The edges fray. It’s
like… that author, you know, but nobody reads him the way they used to, I
suppose he did go on a bit, paid by the word, but such brilliant characters… I rebuild sentences for you. Oh, yes
– you always loved Mr. McCawber, Mrs. Malaprop, Mr. Fezziwig. I rewind the yarn of your thoughts until you
catch up the needles again, and find your pattern. And what
about Miss Havisham, forever in her wedding dress? Two plain, one purl.
You gave me
stories. I loved the impossible ones: Alice in Wonderland, Charlie and the
Chocolate Factory, The Black Riders.
I loved the might-have-been-real stories, too: The Picts and the Martyrs, The Hill War, The Railway Children. You took me to the library. Again.
Again. You spent so much time at
the library with your children that the library offered you a job. You worked at that library for thirty years. You
were never a librarian. You’d never even
gone to college. Everyone thought you
had. You had so many words.
Over the
phone, I offer you your stories back. Remember the Amazon pirates in their red
caps? Faraway Moses? Wild, Fiona, stalking the Scottish highlands
in a beautiful, righteous snit with her brother Ninian? Roger sliding downhill in his knickerbockers? I’ve passed these stories on to your
grandchildren, I tell you. The hard-bound editions, dark-green covers
discolored by time, are stacked in Molly’s bunk. Lizzy will use anything as a bookmark. I hear the smile in your voice. Nesbit’s time-traveling children have
survived the test of time. The harbour
lights are shining on Wildcat Island.
You gave me
your own true tales, the wispy-distant ones you could barely remember even
before the sands began to shift. You hid under the table, listening to the
doodle-bombs overhead. If the engine of
the unmanned planes cut out, it meant they’d run out of fuel. If the engines died, the bombs would
fall. They fell somewhere. Not on you, though – not on you. There were ration cards and victory
gardens. The beaches were covered with
barbed wire. There were no oranges.
I pass your
childhood back to you, and you reweave it with me, joyfully. You
picked berries and rosehips in the hedgerows.
When you were naughty, you threw partially dried cow pies. You do
not question the paradox, the intrinsic anachronism of my recalling a time a
quarter century before myself. Your big brother John and his friends
collected fascinating bits of broken planes from the hills. John is gone now. John
let you play too, even though you were little. Your daddy had a job that was secret, but special. He was allowed a petrol ration. Later, you learned that he helped develop
radar. His name was James. He was
quiet and gentle, brilliant and kind.
He died when you were still a teenager.
I never met him, but you gave him to me.
I give him back. James. Daddy.
You gave me
the stories you wrote yourself, as an earnest nine-year-old sitting down with
pen and ink and a blank notebook. Margaret wrote stories, too. She lived just down the road. The four
volumes are perfect in their utterly precocious imperfections. You penned
highly derivative British boarding school books -- fan-fiction for a genre that
was already a parody of itself, from fifty years before Harry Potter. Angela
did the illustrations for both of you.
When your
granddaughters reached the age you were when you began your first ambitious
opus, I read aloud all four of the volumes you produced before puberty. Angela
grew up to be a real artist. I
cannot draw nearly as well as your friend could when she was not yet ten. You
named your fictional boarding school Saint Margaret’s. I tell you about Lizzy’s writing. I tell you that she asks me, anxiously, if
her highly derivative cat-warrior fan-fiction is as good as your books. Your
young heroines discovered a Nazi hideout in a cave. Lizzy’s fearless cats find and raise an
orphaned puppy, and win a war against a rival clan.
You gave me
your adventures, from that mysterious grown-up-but-before-I-was-born time. They were rich and improbable, historical, other-worldly. All
those A-level exams, but you saw no point in University. You didn’t want to be a spinster teacher or a
spinster nurse. You learned to
touch-type more than sixty words a minute.
On a manual typewriter. You were
fluent in French. You worked in
Switzerland. You joined the Foreign
Service as a secretary, but before long you were in Cambodia transporting
secret mail bags and translating codes. Sihanouk was in power. The Vietnam War was raging. The Khmer
Rouge were rising. Your embassy was sacked. Almost everyone fled. You stayed. And after that, after three
years of that, you were immediately posted to Turkey.
No, you tell me, they didn’t send me right away.
I had a bit of time in London. A
few months. A summer. I helped with… that tunnel. You know.
The Channel Tunnel? The tunnel to
France? But that wasn’t built until
years later, I don’t think? Wouldn’t
this have been the mid-sixties? Yes, yes the tunnel… there were just two
chaps, and me. They were working on
getting that agreed, all worked out. I carried
all sorts of papers back and forth for them, to the French, at their, their… the
French Embassy, in London? Yes, the French.
I Google it
later. The Chunnel didn’t open until
1994, but England and France officially agreed to build the tunnel in 1964, and
carried out the initial extensive geological survey. It was faster than the post, so
I offered to carry the papers. We got it
all worked out about the tunnel. The
Channel Tunnel. I never knew. You still have stories to give me. I will tuck that one away and give it back to
you, too – next week, next year, whenever you need it.
You gave me
my own details, the ones I was too little to remember. You had
an argument on the way to the hospital about what you were going to name the
boy you were sure you were going to have.
You would have gotten your way. I would have been James. Like your father. The engineer I never knew. He was
a lot like me.
The details
snarl and snag, so I untangle them for you.
Remember the trip we took in the
Rocky Mountains? I was three months
old. I had no words then. But you
granted them to me later, more vibrant than all the dusty carousels of slides. A tour
bus pulled in right next to your Volkswagen Beetle and its occupants stared
down as you tried to nurse me discreetly. In 1972, breast-feeding was not in vogue. I was eighteen months old when you took
me in for testing on my blind eye, to see if anything could be done to repair
it. I
had to be lightly anesthetized, and I developed acute separation anxiety for a
while afterward. You’re sorry, you
say. The
eye was useless anyhow. I got over
it, I tell you.
But, you say,
your voice a four-thousand-mile, forty-seven-year echo, you still worry. You still worry about my having only the one
eye. You always have. I remember.
We remember. We remember that you always worried.
I’ve done just
fine without that eye, I tell you. Pretty well, in fact. I laugh.
Yes, you say,
laughing with me, winding forward, fast-forward across the blurring calendar of
years, I guess you have done pretty well.
Your voice
still sounds like Kent. Like the English
Channel.
You give me
words: I love you.
I give them
back: I love you, too, Mum.
