Advent 11 Fiction

If he was wrong about the man, it didn't matter. And if he was right, whether the man turned out to be his contact or a mere look-out, it had been foolish to expect anything else; if he was a look-out then he, Roche, was the one person on earth who wasn't worth a second glance; and if he was the contact then the empty roadside was the last place on earth for a comradely embrace and the exchange of confidences. It made him positively ashamed of the new Roche's naivete; the old Roche, that veteran of a hundred successfully clandestine meetings, would never have let his imagination set him off so prematurely.

In matters of fiction, I long ago learned to respect the judgement of one of the best-read men I have known - my late father. He was a man of catholic tastes but he liked a tale that rattled along, preferably with a twist in the tale. Modern(ish) crime and spy fiction fiction fits the bill, Anthony Price most particularly. I have pilfered a few dog-eared Price novels from Dad's shelves (I also got my second-hand-bookshop mania from him) but I found Soldier No More for myself and paid 50p for it. Bargain.

A Long Way From Anywhere

Every time I go to Cornwall I wonder why I don't spend more time there. It is a magical county. And then I endure six or seven hours on the M5 and I remember why we bought in Anglesey instead. Cornwall is a long way from anywhere - nothing can be done about this, nor indeed should anything be done. The otherness and remoteness are part of the charm.

This time we went all the way down to Falmouth to attend the wedding of H and S. H is my nephew - he teaches down there and has gone fully native, an enviable state. What a great day the wedding itself proved to be - the sun shone and H's speech even brought  a tear to these cynical old eyes with an affectionate reference to my late father.

The Clan Roberts had descended en masse on Cornwall for the week. The Groupie and BFP were accompanied by Daughters Numbers 1 & 2 and their respective husband and partner. We had a whale of a time. Indeed whale was one of the few acquatic species not represented on the seafood platter I gorged myself on at the Muddy Beach Cafe in Penryn. No pretensions, just good service and top food. Now I style myself a good judge of a seafood platter and I have to say this was superb. If you have the chance to try it, eschew a starter and go for the platter with optional extra of a dressed crab. Squid, scallops, king prawns, shrimp-loaded skins, mussels, crab. Superb. I never usually bore you with photos of the Pig in action but I will make an exception so that you can see the plate (or rather board) before I tucked-in. And no I didn't have a pudding. Superb.

Tommy

I try to keep at least one non-fiction book going at any one time, alongside a couple of fictions. In this, as in so much else, I find myself inadequately mimicking the learning habits of my late father. I have just finished Richard Holmes's Tommy: the British Soldier on the Western Front 1914-1918. I have just noticed that Dad had written a Christmas message inside the cover when he and Mum gave it to me. How he would have loved Helen's wedding last weekend.

I commend Tommy to you. It is compendious, seven-hundred plus pages, but never tedious. It is impossible to read of WW1 without wondering just how you might have responded if you had been called to arms. One-hundred-and-twenty-three of the Aston Old Edwardians who went to war would never return. To this day we play our rugby on the ground bought in their memory. My generation has been spared.

Holmes quotes C.E. Montague whose war memoir was tellingly titled Disenchantment, but the power of the quoted words is not in that disaffection but rather in that agnosticism that is a necessary shield for all but the most gifted/afflicted:

But the war had to be won: that was flat. It was like putting out houses on fire, or not letting children be killed; it did not even need to be proved; that we had got to win was now the one quite certain thing left in a world of shaken certainties. 

Making Yourself Read

Marchant's Second Law - 'writers read'. Thus while I have been recovering from my recent back injury (still sore but I'm being a very brave soldier) I have supplemented my diet of telvision documentaries with quite a glut of reading. I surf the web thingy a fair bit - the BBC website is my starting point for news but I am also drawn to American sources because of my morbid taste for American politics. Trump/Biden has all of the dreadful allure of a grisly car crash. All you can do is look on and ask yourself yet again how it comes to this. What has happened to that welcoming and optimistic country that took me into its arms back in 1981? 

Real reading does not though (in the humble opinion of your correspondent) involve a screen - it is a matter of printed paper. And I am currently enjoying three very good books. One has to forgive Jonathan Coe the fact of his schooling at KES. He has a conversational dleivery and is funny about serious things, always the best way to aproach the difficult. I am a good way through The Closed Circle and I look forward to the time of day when I read it. I will review it thoroughly when I have finished.

I have become more like my late father and I have at least three books on the go at any one time. I try to ensure that at least one of these is non-fiction. At the moment that means Tommy, Richard Holmes' heavy tome on the lot of the soldiers of the Great War. It is authoritative and moving. Come to think of it, I think it was Mum and Dad who gave me the book for Christmas back in the good old days when he was alive and his mind still accessible to us.

The third book in my rotation is Evelyn Waugh's Unconditional Surrender, the final part of the Sword of Honour trilogy. On the last day that I saw Dad alive I read aloud to him from these novels. Decades earlier he had gently pointed me in the direction of Waugh, as he did with much literature without ever being prescriptive. Such statements are inherently ludicrous but I nonetheless offer up Waugh as the greatest English writer of the twentieth century. As for Dad, well, it's far easier - he was the greatest influence on my life.      

This Is The Castle

Dad had an innocent affection for scouring secondhand book shops for unremarkable first editions. He would never have paid the going rate for important such editions. He also liked to pass some of those editions on to me as gifts. I have just finished reading one of them and I'm sorry I didn't get round to it sooner - not because of any great literary merit but because of the note in Dad's familiar handwriting which I found in it when I picked it up off my bookshelf. The note was neatly folded in two and on its outer leaf was the text, 'D, Read the book first and then read this note! Dad X'.

Well, I have at last done as directed and today I finished this curiosity of a novel. I have opened the note and Dad's reading of the bizarre ending is not quite the same as mine. I won't set it our here in case you want to try the book for yourself. It is the work of a successful but not critically acclaimed author and it is about a successful but not critically acclaimed author, so there is an element of navel-gazing going on - This is the Castle by Nicolas Freeling. Not by any stretch a great novel but a commendably workmanlike one and it contains an important gem of a passge about the author as manic depressive that hits the nail on the head:

Fear of having talent and fear of not having any - manic depressive, isn't it? - depends whether the swing of the moment is up or down.

I miss the sorts of conversation about books that Dad and I shared. Of course dementia had ended those conversations by the end but there are decades of golden memories. That note has been carefully re-folded and put back in the book - perhaps someday another reader will find it and enjoy the game of reading. I hope so. 

 

Writers Write - The Third Law Of Marchant

 It is almost four years since I wrote this poem about the wretched illness of my dear father. I could not bring myself to publish it at the time, lest it seem disrespectful. As in so many things I was of course wrong. I revisited it today and found that it says something of that terrible, prolonged grief we endured. The final line is bitter. If I was writing today I would probably omit that final line but the poem will speak better if it speaks from the time when I wrote it. God bless you Dad.

The Gradated Death of a Local Hero

1. In the Pink

And – which is more – you’ll be a man my son.

His quest for finished fullness never won

He bequeathed it to me

Not from any harshness but affection

That any loss at pitch and toss might be redone.

No island entire of itself and yet he stood

Craggy proud in spirit’s fatherhood

Gifts borne hero proper lightly

And regiven burnished to his tribe

Pretty burdens urged and not misunderstood.

2. Faded Shaded

He hosts his thieving illness

Though always searching

Yet cannot find his keys

Terrified of stillness.

For stock questions

He learns stock answers

Yet cannot find his keys

Resents helpful suggestions.

At all meals’ end he tidies

Meticulous in stacking

Yet cannot find his keys

Nor tell Sundays from Fridays.

The form is an abandoned shell

How often must we say farewell?

3. Palimpsest White

loud character overwritten

in grey

and lighter

and overscribed again until

in white

finally undetected unpersoned

in spite at our winnowed out grief

nothing can be read

of a local hero.

God mocks us.

What Was It Like Before Coronavirus?

Can anyone remember? The whole bloody world has ground to a halt, interrupted by explosions of activity as people indulge in panic-buying bog roll. Not a good look. As of a few minutes ago all the schools have been closed save for the offspring of 'key workers' - whatever that means and assuming such workers have not already self-isolated themselves and their children. Has it occurred to the powers that be to suspend the stock markets as well? After all the markets are run by and for children who sometimes need protection from themselves.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not angry about all this - if the medics say we're all going to die then I'll go along with it. For now.

What else can I report. Oh yes, last week at Cheltenham was fun albeit tempered by an end of holidays feeling that soon such frivolity would be banned. Sure enough it has been. When last we corresponded I was optimisticallly clutching my Lucky 31 voucher which was going to land me some £13500. As it turned out it paid a return of £6.71. About as good as my punting got all week.

Don Juan's Reckless Daughter - listening to it now. Now there's a reason to be cheerful. Good old Joni.

I've been out running the last couple of days after an indecent period of sloth. Yesterday was dreadful - two miles and nothing more rewarding than the sensation that I might be sick. Today was better - three miles and now I can barely walk. I must rediscover those balmy and energised days of 1996 when I ran the London Marathon and lost only narrowly in a sprint finish with a bloke in a rhino costume and another with one leg. Once were warriors indeed.

More good cheer: I have regained the reading bug (it deserts me on occasion) and am immersed in several good books. Gary Imlach's My Father and Other Working Class Football Heroes is that cherishable beast, the good sports book - a record of a game now long gone with the wind. Premier League millionaires might do well to read it. It tells of a time when the professional players were treated lamentably and we should not be nostalgic for those times but we might want to stop for a moment and see how far the immorality has has spun to the other side of the coin. For fiction I am re-reading Waugh's Sword of Honour trilogy. A delight. Poignant as well because I read the first couple of chapters to Dad the last time I saw him alive. I'm also dipping in and out of a tatty old paperback edition of World at War, the book that accompanied the fabulous television series.

The Groupie and I are off to collect a wine order. I hope she's ordered enough to last the length of the curent crisis. Now that really would be bad news. See you on the other side.  

So Begins The Task

I am still absorbing the hugeness of my father's death. There have been various administrative hurdles to negotiate - a reference to the coroner's office, a reference back from that office to the hospital (basically telling them to get on with it and not to pass the buck) and, at last being able to register the death. Registration took place this morning and then it hit me - I had in my hand certification that this moral giant is dead. Now we can start to plan a fitting memorial.

Dad, at his beloved School

So, private grief aside, what is the world up to as it faces a brave new year? Quite a lot actually. America took it upon itself to execute an Iranian alleged mass-murderer. The world thereby shivers in the shadow of war. It would be nice to have greater (no, any in fact) faith in the U.S. President who ordered the act. It is possible to do the right think for entirely the wrong reason. The defining story of 2020 will be America's response to the opportunity to eject Trump by the ballot box. The fabulously ill-judged impeachment of this wretched man will be the prelude to the democratic denouement.

South East Australia is ablaze and it is apparently my fault. And yours. What are we going to do about it? Should my next car be a hybrid?

Scotland worries me. Actually, scratch that - Scotland annoys me. You may remember that a matter of a few years ago we had a 'once in a generation' referendum on Scottish independence. The nationalists lost that vote 45/55. Those same nationalists have just (by an ironic fate) achieved 45% of the vote in Scotland in a national election. The remainder voted for various hues of unionism. According to La Sturgeon this gives her (please bear in mind that she was not even a candidate in these elections - at least Salmon took the fight to Westminster) 'an overwhelming mandate' for another referendum. Beam me up Scotty.

Let's finish on an optimistic note. Last Saturday prior to the two Aston Old Edwardians fixtures against Aldridge RFC, sixty plus players and officials and a large throng of spectators were whistled to attention and stood in a solemn silence in memory of Brian David Roberts. He would have loved that and, yet more, he would have smiled to see the old ground so full. Furthermore he would have allowed himself a brief triumphant glow in face of the results which saw Aston win on both pitches by a combined margin of just eight points. The sun shone and perhaps, just perhaps, God was in his heaven.   

Brian David Roberts 1934 - 2019

The breaking of so great a thing should make
A greater crack: the round world
Should have shook lions into civil streets,
And citizens to their dens: the death of Antony
Is not a single doom; in the name lay
A moiety of the world.

My father died yesterday. As I stood over him for the last time these lines from Antony and Cleopatra came to mind. My brother, as so often, got it right and more succinctly, 'He was a great man.'

He was a King Edward Foundation scholar at school, A City of Birmingham Exhibitioner at the LSE, RAF officer, schoolmaster, headmaster, rugby and cricket player and administrator, devoted husband, an inspirational father and magnificent grandfather. In a life where I have been lucky to be exposed to many clever people he was the cleverest man I ever met. In his last years he was diminished by dementia but his magnificence remained. He was indeed a great man. Rest in peace.