A Longer Journey

Chimera

The daily maid of all work was supposed to take me for a perambulation every afternoon. I would ride in the chair or walk as I wished, since I was easily tired; and I think we both enjoyed the outings, though not for one another's company. I liked to be outdoors, to see bicycles, carts and sometimes a motor-car passing by; she liked to keep the neighbours well informed about my father and me, and of course about one another.

I don't remember her name—or rather, it comes back to me as Welly, which can't be right, even as a surname. I remember an impatient young woman, taller and heavier than my father, louder of voice and action, and very much in the habit of assuring everyone that she could get another place at the drop of a hat, and not have to play wet-nurse to a poor critten child what didn't know his own name hardly.

Welly was the first to notice a change in me. In our walks it was not unknown for one of two boys about my own size to throw sticks or clods at me and Welly. Usually, Welly was hit and I wasn't, but whichever it was, I would normally cry while Welly gave chase with threatening yells and quite possibly a clod or two of her own. Welly would return to me, loudly claiming victory over “them hooligans” whether she had caught up with them or not.

This time, I had been hit, by an old potato I think, and Welly returned after due process to find me bouncing up and down in my chair, laughing wickedly. I got the potato and lobbed it halfway across the road in the direction our enemies had taken.

Welly stopped short in the middle of a forceful and florid prediction of where those boys would end up, and stared at me, drop-jawed.

“Well, I never!” she said. “You're not a baby no more, then. You're getting a big boy, sure enough!”

She wasn't so pleased the next day. I got myself into the garden of the friendly man next door and started eating his herb patch. Previously I had always had to have my food sweetened and would never touch green vegetables even for my father, but suddenly here I was, before either of the grown-ups looked around, pulling up all my neighbour's parsley and beginning on some basil.

Welly let out a yell and yanked me out of there. With a good spank on the bottom, she lifted me firmly into my chair and told me we were going right home, that she didn't have to put up with shenanigans from me, and she'd tell my father, and give her notice in too, what's more, and have a better place by this time next week, see if she didn't.

She didn't. As for my father, he was rather pleased than otherwise; he told me I could only take from our own garden, but he promised he would plant me my very own patch if I wanted. As for Friendly Man next door, he came round now and then to give me more of what I had stoled.

“It'll do him good, you know,” he assured my father. “He'll feel the benefit, nice fresh greens, just the thing for his health.”

If anyone noticed that I became gradually more alert, less easily tired and generally brighter, my change of diet might very well have seemed sufficient cause. My father allocated a large patch of garden to me, and even got some diminutive tools from somewhere so that I could be a gardener. I remember that we planted rows of lettuce, which grew faster than most plants but still seemed slow to me. We tried cabbage, but it seems I preferred greens I could eat raw. We could never grow enough parsley for my craving. I still visualise the fiddly seeds that took three weeks under cloche to germinate, the tiny weak seedlings that wouldn't give bushy leafage for months to come, and how I once ripped them all up in sheer frustration.

My father and I often did gardening together that last summer. I have a memory of him near me, talking to me, teaching me to say garden words when he asked me garden questions. But at some point, I was unclear when, he started to get tired.

It is sad now to think that there we were in our house or garden, together, and neither of us knew what was inside the other. There was a lymphoma in one of his armpits, a lump he would have felt only as a mild annoyance, but rogue cells had already spread around his body, and back then there was no cure. People with cancer denied it as long as they could; even doctors sometimes gave placebos and didn't tell the truth until they had to.

Whether our doctor told him anything to the purpose or not, my father must have felt some inkling of the Grim Reaper's approach. Until this illness, he would have thought it even odds between the two of us who would outlive the other. Now, I gather, he began to make the arrangements he deemed necessary to my future security.

He made particular efforts to teach me to wash and dress myself, and seemed surprised at my progress. He read the Bible to me not once but twice a day. He helped me practise my talking to the point where I could initiate a conversation if I tried. He made me speak to visitors without his help. And I think this is when he began his final gift to me: a phonograph recording of the Bible, since I should never learn to read words. This gift was never completed; in fact he never made it out of Genesis.

His widowed sister Emily became a frequent visitor, her cold, light hand a frequent touch on my head and her calm, precise but slightly plaintive voice a well-known sound in my ears. I was made aware that in some way Aunt Emily was being quite strenuously kind to me, so I tried hard with my talking and I sat nicely when she read to me.

My father stopped going to work that winter, and Aunt Emily engaged a nurse for him soon afterwards. Her name was Sue Mossman, and she brought her 12-year-old niece Josie to live in with her and help with the house. Welly took an instant dislike to them and informed the neighbours that it was all very well, but this Mossman person hadn't always have been a good girl; that child she called her niece, well, anyone could see the way of it, and is that the kind you'd want attending of you on your deathb—

I was surprised at Welly's sudden stop, but this was to happen quite often in the next weeks and months. Something was happening that I wasn't allowed to know; I could not yet ask questions, but neither could Welly rely on my oblivion of conversations any more.

It was Josie Mossman who eventually told. me. I was watching her clean the kitchen grate, and she started singing to me. Welly, who had been loudly chanting at the sink herself that morning, trounced in and asked her what sort of time it was for singing, with Mr in the way he was upstairs, and more ready for the minister than the doctor by the way things were going. Josie and I stared at one another after Welly left.

“Aren't you sad?” she asked.

“No.”

“Are you happy?”

“Yes.”

“When your dad is so very ill?”

I knew my father was ill, but it had not yet occurred to me to feel sad about it. I started crying.

“Oh, hush, please, please. Cook will shout at me again.”

I hushed.

“Will you be sad,” Josie asked, “when he's dead?”

There were plants in the garden that had died last autumn, and I had felt sad, but that very morning I had seen buds opening and green returning, and my father had sat outdoors with a blanket for half an hour, and talked to me about them, and I had successfully recalled my garden words for him.

“No,” I said, because although I remembered that it was sad when things died, my imagination did not stretch to my father's death. He didn't communicate sadness or impending loss to me. He had promised me, more than once, that he would go one day to Jesus to be healed of every illness for ever. Even when I turned the thought of death over in my mind during the next weeks, it never once occurred to me that if he died he would no longer be there.