A History of Silence Read online

  A woman I know in the shoe factory buys a lotto ticket every week. I like to tease her about it. Play the worldly sceptic to her resilient faith in miracles. On my way through Wales I wondered what she would make of me now, on my way to a place that used to be a place in the hope of that incendiary moment of sudden illumination when origins would flare up into the present. She would be too kind to laugh as I do at her lotto-buying habit.

  At least half a dozen times I felt like getting off the train—the first was outside Newport when the windows misted over. It was a shock to discover how easily the will to carry on drained from me. Then came a moment at a railway crossing—I forget where. The clouds parted and, as the bells rang, the surrounding fields came to life. I felt a powerful urge to get off. I was tired of the train. I wanted to step into the picture, find a pub and sit down at an outside table with the newspaper and a beer. I pushed my face closer to the window, and a train came from the other direction. It shook the carriage, then passed, and everything went still in that post-trauma way. The bells stopped, and the train got on its way again to Pembroke Dock.

  I was a bit tired of myself, as much as of the train. I was tired of Rooney, the Man U striker scowling up at me. I picked up the newspaper. I wanted to find a bin. But then I thought I might as well take a look first, which is how I came upon a story about a farm labourer preying on hikers along the Pembroke Coast.

  The man’s murderous brutality brought to mind Joseph Dally, who, more than twenty years ago, kidnapped a teenage girl off a street quite near the one where I had grown up and drove her around the coast road, where as a child I had walked with Mum and Dad, counting off the bays, desperate for a biscuit. In the bay with the jagged remains of an old wharf, from where the cattle would be shipped across the harbour in the killing season, we often stopped for a biscuit, and that’s where Dally buried alive his young victim. Now, I cannot walk by that shingled beach without a thought for that girl. No number of spread picnic blankets will erase the memory of the spot on that beach. And as the train blasted out of a short tunnel another memory of that very same beach came to me.

  I have stolen a bottle of wine from home for a ‘picnic’ with a girl who is lying on the shingle beside me. Every now and then a wave pushes up to us and drains noisily through the pebbles. The sky moves by. The inter-island ferry veers close enough for us to see the passengers lining the deck. They are looking in our direction but cannot see us. I wonder who, if anyone, saw and waved to Dally as he drove around this coast road. I never thought of the cattle stunned with their throats slit when I saw the harbour red with blood from the meatworks at Ngauranga and Petone. I never thought to make the connection.

  Years ago when I met Mavis, my mother’s first cousin—in other words, the niece of that old ratbag, Maud—she told me that the day she met my mother off the train in Taunton she was so nervous she would rather have had a tooth extracted.

  By her own account, and Mum’s, the visit was a great success. More so, I suspect for Mum. Mavis had treated her as family. And so a lost button was sewn back into the fabric.

  Mavis was standing on her doorstep on Hamilton Road ready to greet me when my taxi drew up outside her house. Slim, grey. In manner very much like my mother.

  Inside, Mavis poured me a dry sherry, a drink favoured by Mum until her triumphant discovery of gin-and-tonic. Mavis had the album ready, and before lunch we worked our way through Maud’s side of the family—a long line of women bringing up children by themselves, husbands killed in and around wars, a mix of schoolteachers and slightly eccentric stay-at-home types who, I was pleased to hear, couldn’t be bothered with work in the conventional sense. They are the ones in the photographs staring into empty paddocks.

  It was uncanny how much Mavis sounded like Mum. How does a woman who has barely ever left Somerset end up sounding like a woman born on the other side of the world?

  Mavis had won a scholarship to a posh girls’ school, and there the locality of accent had been scraped away until she sounded strangely like my mother, who had left school at twelve, but with some conscious effort, I suspect, created a voice for herself that she must have got from the radio.

  After a lunch of shrimp we returned to the front room to go through the remaining albums.

  Before Maud gave up my mother she had two boys, Ken and Eric, in quick succession to Harry Nash. This might have been the occasion to ask Mavis what she knew of Nash. Was he a gardener or involved with leather? But I didn’t think to ask. The photo I lingered over was the one of Maud with her sons. Mavis said Maud visited with the boys after the war, in the early 1920s, and stayed in this same house. I didn’t ask the obvious questions. Why? Or whether Maud had mentioned the existence of my mother to her family in England.

  I kept looking at that photograph of Maud and her sons. Officially they look complete. Unofficially someone is missing.

  In the weeks following the February 2011 earthquake, a man on national radio spoke of sifting through the rubble of the family home and finding his grandfather’s accounting certificate from 1937. I would bet that if he had ever been asked to compile a list of his most precious things an accounting certificate would not have been on it, yet the joy in his voice was clear.

  I was back to feeling hopeful of what I might find in Pembroke Dock. I wanted it to be affirming in some way—a surprise, like the accounting certificate found in the rubble.

  I warned myself about being overly critical. An interior voice completely unfamiliar in its wisdom advised me just to let things come to me.

  As the train slowed at Tenby some middle-aged hikers in woollen hats and scarves battled their way to the front of the carriage. I watched them regroup on the platform, mounted with day packs, clutching walking sticks. While they stamped their feet to shake off the torpor of the train, I stared with an impolite interest, as I used to at Rex the salamander, noting the colour of their faces, their bone structure and the unflattering sack-like quality of their bodies, like things to be filled and dragged here and there. The more I looked the more I saw the scrapyard of genetic origin. There was a woodland quality to those faces out on the platform. They listened more than they spoke and looked greedily self-aware.

  Then as we left Tenby I saw something which, like some moment of deep embarrassment, I cannot shake.

  I happened to glance down at the painted lines of an empty car park. They were quite wrong. By that I mean there was something odd about them. Carpark convention had been discarded but not, as far as I could see, for any useful gain. Instead of broken lines painted at the usual intervals these had been turned into rectangles by an over-conscientious fellow with a paint brush. It was the kind of needless attention to the wrong detail which, unkindly at that moment, I associated with a father who had once built me a cart so heavily engineered that when it attained speed there was no stopping it, and many a time I had to eject myself from behind the wheel and throw myself onto a neighbour’s dog-shit-covered lawn just before the steel contraption cannoned into the tin fence at the end of the street.

  I wished I hadn’t seen those stupid rectangles at Tenby, because when I thought who on earth could fuck up a simple task such as painting lines onto the tarseal of a car park I realised, shatteringly, that I could.

  Then we came into Pembroke—small, countrified, stone buildings, nodding fields, a hint of the sea.

  There were just two of us left in the carriage. The other remaining passenger was a great big jellyroll of a man who for several hours had sat slumped at the far end of the carriage. When he stood to make his way along the aisle I feared for him, as he looked quite capable of bursting catastrophically out of himself but for the clothes and belt at full strain. I found myself staring at the piles of collapsed flesh, caught and held in various places over his torso, and out on the platform, where my eye followed him, I saw the welcoming folds in the hills.

  As the train left Pembroke the view across the aisle opened up to flat land, and there between two lumps of hill was a line
of sea, blue as I hoped it would be.

  Pembroke Dock has a sort of Gilbert and Sullivan ring about it, which is appropriate given what spilled out of there.

  For a long time we believed my father’s father, Arthur Leonard Jones, was born in a dockyard of cranes and broken warehouses between the cries of seagulls and curses and ship whistles, a birthplace combining the urgency of imminent departure with the steadying and becalming effect of the wharves.

  We would also say with absolute conviction that it was normal for British naval officers to record the dock as the birthplace of their offspring. Somehow it was known—or else it had been decided—that Arthur’s father was a British naval officer. And so his birthplace has always suggested itself as a place too lacking in community roots to qualify as a proper place. It never occurred to me that Pembroke Dock is more than a dock, extending beyond the high walls of its historic waterfront to include a town and steep hillsides that look out to the Irish Sea.

  After briskly leaving the railway station I came to a halt by some shops, and thought, ‘Now what?’ On the train my destination had never been in doubt, but now I was here it seemed less than precise. There was no address to look up or door to knock on. And now that I was here I didn’t know what to do, except to look like someone who knew what to do and how to proceed, and so in this imitative state I picked up my bag and walked on. I looked around but nothing I saw stuck for more than a few seconds. It felt like one of those hopeless errands where you have been sent to fetch someone you have never met from a crowded train station. I stopped again, and held my nose to the air, and then, I recall, I did recognise something. It was the sea air. It came sweeping along the main street. I picked up my bag and headed in the direction it came from.

  Soon I found myself looking up at the impressive and robust stone walls of the dockyard. A bronze relief depicted a predatory crowd of merchants and wives waiting outside the gates on pay day. This is how it was at 20 Stellin Street. Dad brought home the pay packet and handed it over to Mum, who gave him a bit of pocket money for tobacco. On the bronze, the workers in their cloth caps drag their downward faces out to meet the crowd. I’d seen men with those faces before, crammed in to the back of our car. Dad sat in the front, Mum behind the wheel. The shoulders of three other welders jammed up against me in the back. And no one spoke—not a word—until the car slowed down and stopped, the back door creaked open, and there was a tired thanks Joyce, see you Lew. Then the silence again, a silence pounded out of drudgery, was poured back into the closed air of the car, and off we went to the next house, the car getting lighter at each stop, like a change of seasons, until it was just us, and an opportunity for Mum to ask Dad, ‘So how did it go today?’ Although I don’t remember her ever asking that question.

  I followed the walls down a steep road to the harbour, and there I stood on a stone embankment where I took everything in: the air now came from a place further out to sea, but retained some tinctured familiarity that I traced to the tresses of heavy brown kelp shifting beneath my feet against the stone sides of Pembroke Dock. It was mid-tide, and across the bay I could see the high-water marks on the beach and, higher up, a perfectly white lighthouse stood against a shadowed hill, the top third of it dominating the skyline—and yes, it might as well have been the lighthouse back at Pencarrow. The sun came out and Pembroke Dock lit up. The hills turned a dazzling green, and the blues of the harbour leapt. I could see a way to scramble up the hillside to the lighthouse, but there wasn’t time. I had decided there wasn’t any. The train was leaving in forty-five minutes and just now, or perhaps a few minutes earlier, or maybe when I stood before the dockland walls taking in the bronze relief of the workers, I had decided that I wanted to be on it.

  Did the ghost of Arthur Leonard Jones look on with a mirthful smile? But from where? A shop doorway? The docks? The bronze relief? I could not find him in that cloth-capped crowd. From a sloping deck? But there were no ships or sailing vessels in the harbour, other than the large creamy sides of the Irish ferry, and I didn’t look there. I couldn’t find whatever space he had fallen out of. Nowhere screamed out, ‘Here I am!’

  I can’t really explain the sense of urgency to be on that train. Except to say it was the equal of the determination that saw me travel all this way to this southwest port in Wales.

  As kids we used to dive to the bottom of the sea and bring up a fistful of sand as proof that we had touched the bottom.

  In Pembroke Dock I had touched the bottom. Now I found myself looking wildly around for something to take away. Something good and solid, I hoped, a touchstone for whenever Pembroke Dock was mentioned in the future.

  It came to me while I stood at the harbour’s edge. The cloud drifted away, and the sun found the sea. I looked across to the hills and saw the lighthouse at Pencarrow and the landscape merge and shift apart again. The shadow of one became instantly filled with the presence of the other.

  And then I started to run like hell back to the station.

  The seats in the carriage were still facing Pembroke Dock. It was as if I had been expected. Then as we moved out I felt a bit regretful. Perhaps like Arthur Leonard Jones I was being impulsive. The sun broke through again and I noticed the wild flowers in the paddocks and the whiteness of the walls; then it slid behind a thick cloud and everything turned back to murk, and the regret lifted. Hard-won impressions and other minor bits of evidence drifted out of my head until Pembroke Dock was once again a place that used to be a place on the birth certificate of a grandfather I never met.

  Solitary houses appeared, like breakaway republics. The grander houses strained to break out of the averageness of their own conceit. They were narrow in beam where there was absolutely no need to be. Acres of farmland surrounded each one. It was as though they didn’t wish to impose or to take more space than a terrace house, which is actually what they looked like—terrace houses lifted out of the tight huddle of neighbourliness and dropped onto empty paddocks. Here and there, a white farmhouse rose above a distant hedgerow to offer a rural point of view. Closer to the tracks in narrow creeks, stood lethargic cattle. The reflection of the train flashed by in dark ponds. A pre-industrial sky appeared, a patch of Georgian blue, fluffy white clouds. I half expected a woman in a bonnet clutching a basket of eggs to wave up at the rushing windows.

  I wonder about the life-changing decision of the emigrant to leave behind tight clusters of habitation. I imagine heated discussion about the merits of the new life heard through five sets of walls, the rumour mill beginning shortly after, then the grim farewells conducted in the mood of a funeral. And, as in death, the names of the departed talked about, remembered at odd times, then not at all, their absence registered in that way that a roaring wind marks the place where forests once stood.

  Some years ago my sister Pat began to delve into our family history. It was a time when documents held by government ministries were accessed only with great difficulty and perseverance. One Christmas she produced for Mum and the rest of us a blue cloth book containing birth and death certificates, some letters, a few newspaper articles. For the first time we knew the name of Mum’s father. Pat’s efforts also flushed out the Bibbys, the parents of Eleanor Gwendoline Jones, Dad’s grandparents and my own great grandparents, as they are but as I never knew them to be.

  At the time the blue book came into existence my notion of family was confined to my immediate one. The Bibbys sat too far back in the story and lacked the mythic charge that might have made me sit up and take notice.

  I was more impressed by my wife’s family history. Its evidence was everywhere—in photographs, on home movies, in story—some of it worked up to myth. Such as Max, jailed for revolutionary activity in Russia in the 1880s, his escape made possible by his mother singing instructions up to his cell window in Yiddish. Max’s brother Joe had a scar on his face made by a cutlass. On account of the scar, my wife’s father, Jerry, always thought Joe was the hero. In fact, Scarface had dobbed in his brother. I was also impressed
by the fact that my wife’s grandmother had been one of the first female pharmacists in Brooklyn, New York, and that she used to sell heroin to the Mob over the counter and was licensed to carry a firearm, which she did, as shown in the photographs, holstered to the outside of her dress.

  Our family story comprised little more than a list of names, and none with a flair for anything.

  But, on my second time through Swansea, I suddenly remembered the Bibbys.

  John Bibby, ‘mariner’, and his sixteen-year-old wife, Mary, both illiterate, appear on the register of assisted immigrants aboard the Asia. They sailed from Tilbury Dock in 1874 to try their luck in the raw Otago settlement of Kaitangata.

  In a newspaper report of an assault case against Great-Grandfather Bibby, he is referred to as a ‘farmer’, a generous description for the owner of a ‘modest section’ bought as part of the Cemetery Reserve block sale. In another report he appears as ‘a settler’. And, a ‘flax-cutter’ in a longer report of a case where his name appears as a suspect in an arson attack on a neighbour’s stack of ‘oaten shaves’ valued at £100.

  Bibby had taken exception to a suggestion by an inspector from the Rabbit Control Board that he wasn’t doing his bit to keep the local rabbit population down, and, consequently, felt a strong urge to punch the man. In the arson hearing, a rabbiter working in the area where the fire occurred said Bibby was a regular sight on the hill and, ten days before the fire, had told him that his neighbour, a man named Smith, ‘could cut his throat if he got the chance, but he [Bibby] would do some harm to him some day’. Bibby denied the claim that he and Smith were on bad terms. He said he’d never made threats to his neighbour or any other person. He then said he did not remember saying to the rabbiter that Smith could cut his throat and that he would injure him. But he ‘would not sware [sic] that he had not said so’.