Graham Swift - Tomorrow

What weird things families are. How weird that we all sit somewhere in the branches of a family tree.

When I stood with your father at your Great-uncle Eddie’s funeral, I’d been off the pill for a while, if nothing yet had happened. But that sudden, highly awkward surge of lust was like some extra confirmation, an endorsement. I “wanted his children.” And what a strange phrase that is, “his children,” another dubious bow to custom. I wanted my children too. (I wanted that dark suit off him.)

Quite clearly it wasn’t that night you were conceived, though it had everything going for it, even the time of the month. All the same, perhaps you could say it was where you really “began,” seven years before you were actually born: at Uncle Eddie’s funeral. How canny you were, Kate, when you secretly christened this house.

I was twenty-six, Mike was twenty-seven. We were in that seven-month period of every year — we’re in it now — when your dad has the edge on me. I haven’t finished yet with that crucial year of 1972. This year, on his fiftieth birthday, Nick, you needled your father — I suppose every son has to — about what it felt like to be an old man of half a century. As if being forty or even thirty isn’t already ancient to you.

You did it jokingly and gently enough, and your dad took it in the same spirit. It didn’t seem to rattle him, I think he was prepared for something like it. And you’ll both of you remember what he said. He said that fifty was nothing these days, it was the prime of life. I was glad to hear it. But in any case, he said, he wasn’t bothered, because after a certain point in his life he’d always really felt the same age inside, the age at which he’d sort of stopped. Remember? And you said, Nick, still a tender fifteen yourself, “Oh yeah, and what age was that then?” And he said, “Twenty-seven.”

YOU NEVER KNEW your Grandpa Dougie. You’ve never even seen his grave, on a hillside in Argyll. And you’ve never met your Grannie Fiona, last locatable even further north, amid the oil and twinkling granite of Aberdeen.

The Campbell side of things, disappearing into Scottish mist, was always the remote and fairy-tale side of things, not to mention those complicating and never-seen step-parents of mine, somewhere in between. But the truth is it was the Hook side, with which you’ve had close and familiar dealings, which was really the fairy-tale side. And it’s time you were told — you’re sixteen now, after all — the full, unexpurgated fairy tale.

Which includes the fairy tale of how your father’s legendary snails, which you also never met but with which he once worked very closely, eventually turned into this thing which, along with some lucrative art dealing, has kept us now very comfortably indeed for years. I mean, of course, Living World Publishing. You can’t complain that you’ve ever gone without. In fact, you’ve even been a little spoilt. But I hope you’ll agree that, contrary to another kind of moralising fairy tale, this has been at no cost to happiness. This has been a happy home. And nothing has made it happier, for us, than that you’re in it.

Once upon a time, as you know, there was your Grandpa Pete and your Grandma Helen — Grandpa and Grannie Hook — in Orpington, when we were all still in Herne Hill. You might just about remember number nineteen Hathaway Drive (also known as The Firs), when Grandpa Pete was still running his business in Sidcup with Charlie Dean. You got taken there once, to the factory, and you didn’t like the artificial-resin smell. As a matter of fact, though I have a little professional knowledge of resins, nor did I. But you knew your grandparents better from Coombe Cottage, just outside Birle, where they’d go at weekends and where we used to go and stay. Then they retired there permanently, when Grandpa Pete was sixty and you were not quite five.

But before Grandpa Pete owned Coombe Cottage, it had belonged to his older brother, Edward, your great-uncle, whose grave, at least, you’d been introduced to. There was a gap of nine years between Pete and Eddie and not much love lost between them, as far as I could tell. Grandpa Pete must have been one of those children who sometimes get called “accidents” or who, at least, were late-in-the-day afterthoughts. It can hardly help sibling relations. A nine-year gap must seem crazy and unimaginable to the two of you.

Uncle Eddie was a schoolmaster in one of those country schools hidden away up drives, among trees. “Birle School.” He was thin and softly spoken and had a droopy moustache. He smoked a pipe and rode a bicycle and, since he lived in the country, he had a library of books on natural history, which he knew a lot about anyway. He was the sort of man who collected butterflies and beetles and birds’ eggs (all of which would be frowned upon now, of course) and he passed some of his enthusiasm on to your dad. He was a bachelor who lived alone, apart from Mrs. Sinden, who came in every day from the village to cook and clean. Even when I met him those few times, he was like a man from another age. Yes, he seemed Edwardian, like his name. This was in the late 1960s and, yes, they’re ages ago now.

But in the even more distant 1950s, your dad used to stay with his Uncle Eddie, whole summers long, when he was a boy and Grandpa Pete was working hard to get his business off the ground. He’d be dropped off in July and picked up again at the end of August. This is why your dad could call himself a “Sussex boy,” even though he was brought up in commuter-belt Kent.

Those summers in Sussex proved a boon for your dad, but they didn’t help relations with his dad or between his dad and Uncle Eddie. Grandpa Pete got it very wrong if he thought he was neatly solving the problem of summer holidays while exploiting his older brother at the same time. It was always pretty obvious to me that there’d been plenty of love lost between your dad, when he was a boy, and his Uncle Eddie. That Uncle Eddie had been like a second father, a sort of summer father, to him.

It was also pretty obvious, to go back further, that during that time when Grandpa Pete was a prisoner of war and your dad was born — during that time, Kate, he got talking to you about last Christmas — it must have been Uncle Eddie who first saw your dad, first picked him up and held him. I can picture him putting aside his pipe carefully first. Picturing your dad here as a baby dangling from his uncle’s arms is a little trickier, but it’s a nice trickiness.

Uncle Eddie had a heart condition — which didn’t seem to stop him puffing away at that pipe. He’d never had to serve in the war, and that was another source of resentment for his younger brother. Eddie had just sat out the war in that far from pokey cottage of his, while Grandpa Pete had gone off to fight. Oddly enough, according to your father, that was the very phrase that Grandpa Pete liked to use about the war: that he’d “sat it out.” Your dad never really knew if he was referring to being a prisoner of war or just to being in the air force. Airmen, after all, go to war sitting down. And Grandpa Pete, as a navigator, used to have his own little desk, with a desk lamp, up in the sky, though I don’t think it made him any safer.

But perhaps it was just his formula for having been a prisoner, or for stopping his son asking any more questions. I remember you, Nick, once asking Grandpa Pete about the war and saying, “But didn’t you try to escape?” He just looked at you apologetically, as if he was sorry he wasn’t Steve McQueen.

Uncle Eddie died because of his heart condition years before you were born, and I went with your dad, who was pretty upset, to the funeral. Then Grandpa Pete got the cottage and eventually moved there with Grannie Helen. Now, of course, he’s in Birle churchyard too, just a few steps from Eddie.