Luke Williams - The Echo Chamber

I lean over, place the cassette into the tape recorder, close the lid, put my headphones on, take a deep breath and press play. The reels turn, the tape shuttles through the mechanism, I hear the hiss of warm static, that pool of shifting quiet which is one of the most beautiful sounds I have ever heard. Then, breaking the silence, as if coming to me from a great distance, I hear the sound of my father’s voice.

…

When I was five years old I left with my family for Scotland. It was the summer of 1923, and we travelled to Lublin on the banks of the River Vistula, about four hundred miles from our home town.

That is how the tape begins. From what I can gather from the tape my father’s father had been a doctor in a small town somewhere in North Poland. Because he was Jewish, he had been dismissed from his job and was unable to find work. Apparently in 1923 the government had passed a decree making it impossible for Jews to practise medicine. My father, bizarrely, and without saying how or why, says his parents had been promised the sale of a jam factory in Dundee, and took the decision to travel west, across Europe to Scotland.

The tape continues: There were three of us in the group that sat for three days and nights in a first-class carriage to Vienna, then Munich, Strasbourg and finally Calais, from where we took the boat to Dover. It was a strange route our broker had arranged. At the time I had no idea why we were moving to a different country. Nor do I remember much about the journey itself, only small glimpses snatched from the train window: the faces of peasants selling hot chestnuts, a team of horses which ran for a short while alongside our carriage, and the dawn, which I watched stealing across the panes of a station with an arched glass roof. It seems that, more vividly than the specific events of the journey, my father recalled the travelling itself. We were always moving, he says, if not overland or sea, then in our beds at station-side hotels, or else my hands were fidgeting in my pockets. In addition to the movement, he remembers this mood during the journey, which was of great anticipation, and strangely he wasn’t afraid. But even these memories shift in his mind, he says; which strikes me as entirely appropriate, for he was constantly moving, and what seemed half-erased to him in adulthood, was then too: the packed trains, the blurred scenery, the sleep that was always broken.

The tape continues: When we got to Dover the officer asked to see our papers. We had two or three surnames and, what is more, the official did not recognize my parents’ marriage certificate, so he wasn’t prepared to let us enter the country. My parents must have carried bribes, since we were allowed to enter. On our new papers our surnames had been cut short and changed, I have forgotten from what. And in fact it felt as if we had left our old life behind at the station in Lublin. It wasn’t until several years later, after an incident which altered the course of my life irrevocably, an incident which, though in the general sense was minor and insignificant, meant so extraordinarily much to me that even now, some fifty years later, I still burn with the memory of it, the shame and the sudden intrusion into my life that impelled me to renounce not only my parents, but also our religion.

We settled in a village called Newport, my father continues, which overlooks the Tay estuary. I still remember the view we had of the river, and of the railway bridge, which was the second on that site, since I learned that the first had collapsed in 1879, only two years after it had been built. I remember the sunsets, which were so dramatic one felt a pain as the red light died. My father bought the jam factory and put what was left of his life into the business. I seldom saw either him or my mother, both because they worked long hours and, since I was often unwell, and attended school only now and then, I was sent to a home for sick children, Comerton House, just a few miles outside Newport. By that time I was speaking English fluently, which even as a small child in Poland had come easily to me, and already I spoke it without an accent. The children at the home found it difficult to pronounce my name, Rechavam, so I became known, simply, as Rex.

I remember, my father says, my days at Comerton House more keenly than almost any other time in my life. There was a large garden which ran alongside the road and was separated from it by a wall. The garden itself was divided into two sections. In the fore-section, the smaller part nearest the house, the janitor, Mr Welsh, grew our vegetables. Further back, concealed from the house, was the larger, always slightly wild section. Nettles grew abundantly in summer, and, although Mr Welsh cut them back, they seemed to spring up all the taller. There were playthings in this back section, a set of swings, a crooked seesaw which gave you splinters and a roundabout on which we were not allowed to play. But best of all was a strange contraption called a Witch’s Hat. It was shaped just like that, a conical structure of metal rods with a wooden bench that ran around the lip. The whole thing was raised a yard or so off the ground by a central pole crowned by a ball bearing. This simple device allowed the Witch’s Hat to rotate from its tip. We sat on the bench and with our feet drove it around and around, and all of us, the thin, pale children, most of whom had ginger hair, liked it better than anything else at Comerton House. I remember the nights too, which I dreaded. In the library, a large pine-panelled room which was used also as the assembly hall, the gym in winter and for staging the Christmas play, there, among the poorly stocked shelves, was a book of ghost stories. I knew it would terrify me to look at it, but I couldn’t help myself. I always regretted looking at that book, and I regretted my curiosity, and that the other children brought it out, others who, unlike me, seemed to enjoy their fear, and for whom darkness held a weird appeal.

I dreaded the nights in Comerton House. By dinner time, two hours before curfew, I would start to shake and involuntarily wave my spoon. Eating had always been difficult for me, and fear of the approaching night intensified my distaste for food, especially meat, which I have always associated with murder, and it was during that period, the time of the great fear, that I became a vegetarian. At night I would wake into a foreign land. My shoulders shook uncontrollably, and I would draw my blankets over my head. I believed that unless every part of me was covered the banshee would be able to take me away, to where I did not know. There were two of us in the dorm who experienced acute fear at night. We had an agreement that if one needed to go to the bathroom we could wake the other. We would hold hands and advance half-running along the hall, all the while chanting, as loudly as we dared, We’re getting married, We’re getting married , not stopping as we passed water but only when we were back beneath the blankets. In fact the whole of Comerton House was filled with noise at night, for sick children away from home tend not to sleep, and when they do they almost always have nightmares. I’ve since learned that the home is now privately owned, and I often imagine the present occupants must be aware of the noise that by night filled Comerton House. For where have all those cries gone?

At this point on the tape my father starts to ramble. I hear the fizz of matches as he lights his cigarettes. He goes on to talk more about his daily life at Comerton House, the lessons, fears, rituals, punishments and so on. But I am unable to arrange them into any kind of coherent order. No matter. For long stretches as I worked my father’s voice flowed effortlessly from the tape to my ears, from my ears to my fingers, from my fingers to the keyboard, and from there on to the screen. What a relief to forget my history and copy someone else’s words!