Graham Swift: Learning to Swim: And Other Stories

To come closer home. In 1900 my grandfather, Feliks (my great-grandfather’s third son), was a mere stripling of ninety-two. Born in 1808, and therefore receiving almost immediate benefit from my great-grandfather’s watch, he was even sounder in limb, relatively speaking, than his father. I can vouch for this because (though, in 1900, I was yet to be conceived) I am now speaking of a man whom I have known intimately for the greater part of my own life and who, indeed, reared me almost from birth.

In every respect my grandfather was the disciple and image of my great-grandfather. He worked long and hard at the workshop in East London where he and Stanislaw, though blessed among mortals, still laboured at the daily business of our family. As he grew older — and still older — he acquired the solemn, vigilant and somewhat miserly looks of my great-grandfather. In 1900 he was the only remaining son and heir — for Stanislaw, by wondrous self-discipline, considering his length of years, had refrained from begetting further children, having foreseen the jealousies and divisions that the watch might arouse in a large family.

Feliks thus became the guardian of the watch which had now ticked away unwound for little short of a century. Its power was undiminished. Feliks lived on to the age of one hundred and sixty-one. He met his death, in brazen and spectacular fashion, but a few years ago, from a bolt of lightning, whilst walking in a violent storm in the Sussex downs. I myself can bear witness to his vigour, both of body and mind, at that more-than-ripe old age. For I myself watched him tramp off defiantly on that August night. I myself pleaded with him to heed the fury of the weather. And, after he failed to return, it was I who discovered his rain-soaked body, at the foot of a split tree, and pulled from his waistcoat pocket, on the end of its gold chain, the Great Watch — still ticking.

• • •

But what of my father? Where was he while my grandfather took me in charge? That is another story — which we shall come to shortly. One of perversity and rebellion, and one, so my grandfather was never slow to remind me, which cast a shadow on our family honour and pride.

You will note that I mave made no mention of the womenfolk of our family. Futhermore, I have said that Stanislaw took what must be considered some pains to limit his progeny. Increase in years, you might suppose, would lead to increase in issue. But this was not so — and Great-grandfather’s feat was, perhaps, not so formidable. Consider the position of a man who has the prospect before him of extraordinary length of years and who looks back at his own past as other men look at history books. The limits of his being, his “place in time,” as the phrase goes, the fact of his perishability begin to fade and he begins not to interest himself in those means by which other men seek to prolong their existence. And of these, what is more universal than the begetting of children, the passing on of one’s own blood?

Because they were little moved by the breeding instinct my great-grandfather and my grandfather were little moved by women. The wives they had — both of them got through three — followed very much the Oriental pattern where women are little more than the property of their husbands. Chosen neither for their beauty nor fecundity but more for blind docility, they were kept apart from the masculine mysteries of clock-making and were only acquainted with the Great Watch on a sort of concessionary basis. If the only one of them I knew myself — my grandfather’s last wife Eleanor — is anything to go by, they were slavish, silent, timid creatures, living in a kind of bemused remoteness from their husbands (who, after all, might be more than twice their age).

I remember my grandfather once expatiating on the reasons for this subjection and exclusion of women. “Women, you see,” he warned, “have no sense of time, they do not appreciate the urgency of things — that is what puts them in their place”—an explanation which I found unpersuasive then, perhaps because I was a young man and not uninterested in young women. But the years have confirmed the — painful — truth of my grandfather’s judgement. Show me a woman who has the same urgency as a man. Show me a woman who cares as much about the impending deadline, the ticking seconds, the vanishing hours. Ah yes, you will say, this is masculine humbug. Ah yes, I betray all the prejudice and contempt which ruined my brief marriage — which has ruined my life. But look at the matter on a broader plane. In the natural order of things it is women who are the longer lived. Why is this? Is it not precisely because they lack urgency — that urgency which preoccupies men, which drives them to unnatural subterfuges and desperate acts, which exhausts them and ushers them to an early death?

But urgency — despite his words — was not something that showed much in my grandfather’s face. Understandably. For endowed with a theoretically infinite stock of time, what cause did he have for urgency? I have spoken of my elders’ miserly and watchful looks. But this miserliness was not the miserliness of restless and rapacious greed; it was the contented, vacant miserliness of the miser who sits happily on a vast hoard of money which he has no intention of spending. And the watchfulness was not a sentry-like alertness; it was more the smug superciliousness of a man who knows he occupies a unique vantage point. In fact it is true to say, the longer my forefathers lived, the less animated they became. The more they immersed themselves in their obsession with time, the more they sank in their actions into mechanical and unvarying routine, tick-tocking their lives out like the miraculous instrument that enabled them to do so.

They did not want excitement, these Methuselahs, they dreamt no dreams. Nothing characterises more my life with my grandfather than the memory of countless monotonous evenings in the house he had at Highgate — evenings in which my guardian (that man who was born before Waterloo) would sit after dinner, intent, so it would seem, on nothing other than the process of his own digestion, while my grandmother would batten herself down in some inoffensive wifely task — darning socks, sewing buttons — and the silence, the heavy, aching silence (how the memory of certain silences can weigh upon you), would be punctuated only — by the tick of clocks.

Once I dared to break this silence, to challenge this laden oppression of Time. I was a healthy, well-fed boy of thirteen. At such an age — who can deny it? — there is freshness. The moments slip by and you do not stop to count them. It was a summer evening and Highgate had, in those days, a verdant, even pastoral air. My grandfather was expounding (picture a boy of thirteen, a man of a hundred and twenty) upon his only subject when I interrupted him to ask: “But isn’t it best when we forget time?”

I am sure that with these ingenuous words there rose in me — only to hold brief sway — the spirit of my rebellious, and dead, father. I was not aware of the depths of my heresy. My grandfather’s face took on the look of those fathers who are in the habit of removing their belts and applying them to their sons’ hides. He did not remove his belt. Instead, I received the lashings of a terrible diatribe upon the folly of a world — of which my words were a very motto — which dared to believe that Time could take care of itself; followed by an invocation of the toils of my ancestors; followed, inevitably, by a calling down upon my head of the sins of my father. As I cringed before all this I acknowledged the indissoluble, if irrational, link between age and authority. Youth must bow to age. This was the god-like fury of one hundred and twenty years beating down on me and I had no choice but to prostrate myself. And yet, simultaneously — as the fugitive summer twilight still flickered from the garden — I pondered on the awesome loneliness of being my grandfather’s age — the loneliness (can you conceive it?) of having no contemporaries. And I took stock of the fact that seldom, if ever, had I seen my grandfather — this man of guarded and scrupulous mien — roused by such passion. Only once, indeed, did I see him so roused again — that day of his death, when, despite my efforts to dissuade him, he strode out into the gathering storm.