Between My Father and the King Read online

  ‘Gavin Highly?’ queried the visitor.

  Gavin looked respectful, ‘That’s me, sir. You got my notice no doubt. The books are in here. They mean m’life to me, they’re valu’ble books but they’ve gotta be sold.’

  Gavin led the way through the door to his one room. He had spread the books on the bed and the sofa. The thousands were not there — only fifty or so old volumes, some torn, some ragged and zigzagged by the teeth of mice or rats, some without covers.

  ‘I’ve talked about them sometimes to people but they’re me private life,’ Gavin continued. ‘I’ve never shown them. I don’t have people coming here. What are they worth?’

  The expert frowned, ‘If they mean your life to you how do you expect me to assess their real value?’ He spoke in proper language and he used big words because he was an expert.

  Gavin did not answer but reached for a book. ‘This is a hist’ry book. I’ve had not much education but I know it’s valu’ble an’ I read it every night.’

  The expert leaned forward eagerly and grasped the book. The title? The edition? The publisher? He opened the book and read ‘Junior History for Schools. Our Nation’s Story’. There was childish writing on the flyleaf, somebody’s name, Standard Four, then a little rhyme,

  Standard Four

  Never no more

  If this book should chance to roam

  Give it a whack and send it home to ME.

  The name was written again in red ink underneath.

  The expert turned over the pages. There was a picture of Captain Cook, embellished with red hair and a permanent wave and spectacles.

  ‘The marks can be rubbed out I s’pose,’ Gavin said. ‘All old books get some kind of marks, don’t they, like stamps, but it’s got about when grass grew in the streets of London and the Great Fire and the plague and the people walking from door to door and crying, “Bring out your Dead!” And to think I’ve got a book about it! And I’ve others like that, po’try, and the high tide coming up on the coast of Lincolnshire. This is what I call my treasure, and, if anything can buy me a decent house to spend my old age in, it’s these books will buy it for me. What are they worth?’

  For a moment, the expert looked quite incredulous. Surely old Highly was not serious. Children’s history books; old, dirty magazines. ‘Worth millions,’ Highly had said in the note he had got the auctioneer to type.

  Gavin waited for the expert to answer. ‘They are valu’ble, aren’t they? They’re hist’ry.’

  ‘Yes, they’re valuable,’ the expert answered. Gavin sighed with relief. Real downpipes and spoutings. A doorstep. Taps running hot and cold, a warm fire and no smoke. ‘I guessed their value,’ he murmured airily. ‘Though no one’s seen them. About what are they worth?’

  The expert pondered, ‘A few pounds,’ he said.

  Gavin looked startled, ‘But there’s some mistake — they’re valu’ble.’

  ‘In money they are worth a few pounds, perhaps not even that.’

  Gavin opened the history book at the picture of London. ‘Look. Grass growing in London streets, on the floors of the poor people’s houses an’ up through the cracks in the walls, an’ when you go on the street you’re going on grass, just like going out onto your lawn, if you’ve got a lawn.’ He turned the pages again, ‘An’ look, the Fire in the Fern, that’s us, an’ the land being fished up out of the sea, and the forest being taken away — it’s hist’ry,’ he pleaded.

  The expert glanced at his watch. He took shelter in formality. ‘I haven’t really much time Mr. Highly. Your books are very valuable, I told you that, and they are worth a few pounds, no more. The value is inside you, and I’m afraid you cannot take that down in a van to the auction rooms and call for bids upon it. Love does not go under the hammer, ever. But I must be going.’

  Gavin spoke humbly, ‘I see. I’ve spent years collecting these, down at the rubbish dumps and in secondhand shops. I thought they were rare an’ precious. My apologies, sir,’ he said calmly and with dignity. ‘But will you stay to tea with me? I don’t ever have people to tea, but I like the way you speak.’

  So the expert sat down on one of the two chairs to drink a cup of thick black tea. He sat there holding the stained cup in his small wrinkled hands, and he looked like the kindly ferret come to take tea with Gavin Highly in the home that was a rabbit burrow. Away up Central.

  After tea, he shook hands with Gavin and left him sitting quite peacefully on the bank of the creek.

  By the afternoon the whole town knew about Gavin Highly. Somehow they just knew. Where would he go, they asked, with no money, no house? It was not as if he could make do on social security. And his books turning out not worth anything — it seemed the man had been delivered a mortal blow. ‘He’ll go mad,’ my father said. ‘A man can’t stand a lifetime of dreams being swept away like that. He’ll go mad and shoot himself. Or jump off the wharf.’

  My brother and I listened, fearful and trembling.

  Oh, Gavin Highly and the bird-picked and clouting plums, whose stones told tomorrow, and the blackberries, on which the late-in-leaving autumn sun lavished a shoeshine, hanging around in a gold thirst over the trees. Gavin Highly’s trees, and Gavin Highly’s creek. Supposing he should die or jump off the wharf. He had to be helped, rescued. So my brother and I, just before the sundown, took some bread and treacle wrapped in newspaper and set off for Gavin Highly’s hut.

  My brother did some quick calculation, ‘It’ll last him pretty long,’ he said, ‘All these pieces.’

  ‘We ought to help him escape,’ I suggested. ‘The Health Inspector’ll be after him, and you know how he took Lassie to the gasworks — perhaps they’ll take Gavin Highly to the gasworks, instead of prison, for not having a proper house.’

  We arrived at the fence near the creek and peeped in. We felt afraid. The treacle was sticking to the newspaper, the print getting swamped in the brown coming through. Gavin Highly was sitting on the bank of the creek. He wore his old khaki shirt open at the neck, and beside him was a bag of oysters and in his hand an oyster-knife. He lay the oysters on the bank and — we could see it clearly through the fence — whenever they opened their mouths he pounced on them with the knife. He was talking to them, saying something like this: ‘Aha, got you. Whenever you open your mouth to breathe or speak, I stick a knife in your throat and kill you! Aha, got you! Never open your mouths to speak again! Got you!’

  My brother and I shivered. It was true. Gavin Highly was in league with oysters. How else could he get them at this time of year, anyway? He was in league with them and talking to them. Then he turned to look up at the willow tree. He said something like this — time has changed the words in my mind, but the meaning stays — he said, ‘Willow tree, when your branches die you don’t carry them with you to sap your strength, you know they are dead. They drop off into this creek and are buried. This afternoon I came here and buried fifty books below the water. The weed is red like blood, and the creek is a wound of everlasting blood flow.’

  We crept shivering away. I threw the sandwiches high onto the hedge for the birds, if they cared for them. We did not speak all the way home. We went to bed and slept deep as willow logs.

  The next morning Gavin Highly was gone. No, he was not dead; he was just gone, and no one knew where. Perhaps it was up Central. He may be there today, living in a rabbit burrow, with a rabbit to keep house for him and a ferret — a kindly one — to come for afternoon tea.

  The Birds of the Air

  My mother was a woman who praised, with God and His Son receiving first consideration and others following in descending order. Her lesser favourites varied from day to day and year to year, but permanently among the mortal chosen she kept the Poets, the Pioneers, President Garfield, Lord Shaftesbury, Katherine Mansfield, Mr Stocker the dentist, and her own mother, our grandmother, whom we had never met.

  We were not tolerant children. Repeated praise of the same people made us groan impolitely and because we were what neighbours a
nd relatives used to describe as ‘rude to our mother’ we used to say out loud, ‘Oh Mum don’t go on about the Pioneers, don’t go on about God.’ When she described her mother, however, we could not help listening with interest; we caught some of her joy as she described ‘happy times’ of her childhood — how her mother had walked with her children in the bush, played games with them, understood them. My mother’s delight in her memories held always the regret that we had never known our northern grandmother, but one autumn — surely it was autumn with huge moons poised over the horizon towards South America, and the soaked morning grass speckled with mushrooms and puffballs that sent up a cloud of poisonous yellow dust when you stamped on them, as you had to do, you had to do, and the air full of cotton and cobwebs and thistledown as if the sky shed its clouds in strands of white fur and silk — it was then that Grandma wrote to say she was coming to visit us ‘after all these years’. My mother’s enthusiasm sprang to vivid hysterical life and from morning till night we heard again, with God and His Son put aside along with the Poets, the Pioneers, President Garfield, Lord Shaftesbury, Katherine Mansfield and Mr Stocker the dentist, the stories of our wonderful grandma.

  I have said that we were not tolerant children. We were also not civilised — we giggled at Sunday bible readings, we wolfed our food, stuck out our elbows, did not come when called at bedtime, refused to fetch a shovel of coal when asked to; we ran wild and pulled faces and said Bum and Fart and Fuck. My mother’s childhood, in contrast, appeared to have been gentle and civilised with all commandments obeyed, while God and His Son and the Pioneers etc. watched with tender care and approval. We wanted to believe — though we could not quite imagine — that our unknown grandmother would, as my mother assured us, share our games and fun and walk with us along the gully and show us how to make pipes that played real music and find twigs that divined water, and name for us the harmless and the poisonous berries and the trees and flowers and, with a special birdcall of her own, entice the birds — bellbirds, tuis, wrens, the riroriro, even the sparrows — for miles around. ‘The birds of the air will fly down and perch on her shoulder,’ my mother said with that happy laugh she had where her chin slackened and you could see she had only one row of teeth. The money for her bottom teeth had paid the rent so that five weeks in our house were, in a strange way, equal to my mother’s bottom teeth. I was absorbed in arithmetic at the time and I had a strong sense of horror when I realised the incongruity of the equation.

  Long before Grandma’s visit Mother took out her few treasured photos and showed us, again, the house and town where she had been born and brought up and the sisters and brothers who had shared her happy childhood. There was the house with the verandah and the cabbage tree and the flag lilies, and Grandma sitting on the veranda with Grandad who had a moustache and was called Alfred but had died before we were born. We heard again the everlasting stories of home and school and work. And Grandma. We began to look forward to her visit. She was to sleep in the front room where the apples were stored. We were to have new dresses with pleats and frilled sleeves and our photos were to be taken on the Japanese Bridge in the Gardens. My mother wrote to Glassons Warehouse, Christchurch, for samples of material which she received in a small rectangular book with pinked edges, and we sat on the form with the book on the table in front of us and turned and touched its cloth pages. My mother took her measurements and marked the material for her new dress which Glassons would make, so much down and so much a week, but it was not every day that grandmothers visited; and our material was chosen — a print of several bright fighting colours — and sent to my father’s sister, a tailoress, to ‘run up’.

  ‘I’m so glad,’ she wrote, ‘that at last the children are going to meet their grandmother.’

  In almost no time our dresses were made. My mother’s was a shiny navy stuff that gave off sparks. My brother had a new pair of grey serge pants. My father had no new clothes but he unwrapped his present of two birthdays past — a white handkerchief with his initial in one corner.

  ‘I’d like her to see us neatly clad,’ my mother said. I think it was the first time I heard her use ‘neatly’ instead of ‘warmly’ as the essential only qualification of being clad. Neither she nor my father thought of clothes as serving any purpose except to keep out the weather, rain or sun, and we had been trained to think the same way. And if we erred and pined for a party dress my mother would release one more verse from her biblical armoury — ‘Consider the lilies of the field’ — and when we knowingly returned her fire by questioning, therefore, the need to ‘toil and spin’ where ‘toil’ meant the morning making of beds and ‘spin’ meant going to the store for the groceries, she became distressed and could not answer, and then our clever victory made us unhappy because part of the function of parents was their unvarying power to answer with conviction. My mother was almost always equal to argument, but when she was not quite equal she would raise her chin as if she were trying to keep her head above water and a blush would appear on each cheek and a moistness that was not tears but a kind of helplessness came into her eyes and mixed and spread their original blue diluting it like watercolour on the white drawing paper, her eyes becoming absorbed in the helplessness that would change in a flash to defiance.

  Our tongues were sharp. We won the arguments by abuse or cleverness; yet our mother’s power in simply being there forced us to live happily like lilies of the field and yet to engage in our fair share of toiling and spinning, which became more demanding as Grandma’s visit drew nearer.

  We found ourselves searching for ‘real’ images of Grandma — her clothes, her voice, her face, her smile. She would be living in our house. She would walk in and out of the rooms, she would use the lavatory and have to take a candle out there at night and be chased by the big moths; she would eat the ripe pears off the pear tree and inspect the garden, the dahlias and chrysanthemums, and our southern morning, filled with spiderwebs. Yes, it was autumn and the bumble bees had thicker fur coats with yellow stripes like old-fashioned bathing costumes. And the little dogs in the streets had colder noses and turned corners in a hurry with their noses in the air. And the grey flocks of homing pigeons released each morning from the house on the opposite hill flapped their wings heavily as they whirled sinking into the hill-mist; twice, three times circling above the houses in the valley, their wings rushing as they lowered over our place, and then returning home crooning and cooing with a soft bath-plug sound, lu-lu-gurgle, lu-lu-gurgle, that was sucked down into the gully and drained away. Or an autumn wind came and, making a spray of all sound — pigeons, greyhounds barking, trains shunting — rushed it towards the pine trees sprinkling their tossing heads in autumnal baptism until the wind died and the trees stood still, darkened by scarves of grey cloud, their needles occasionally dropping — like real needles, big darners scaled with rust or dried blood.

  Our new grandmother would share all these sights and sounds: we wanted her to share them. In return she would bring her magical gifts of making pipes for music, divining water, and calling the birds of the air to perch on her shoulder.

  As the day of her visit drew nearer, an excitement like Christmas enhanced our lives. When Grandma came there was to be a picnic in the Town Gardens to have our photographs taken, and a walk along the gully: it was all planned. We did not care for the Gardens; they were associated with relatives and photos and best clothes and behaviour. The only fun was in feeding the ducks and being rude about the naked statues and their squirts of water. Here there would be little hope of our getting to know our grandmother but there would be secret summings-up and glances and ears pricked to catch the grown-up conversation which never ceased to provoke a sense of wonder, a marvelling at time up there where the mouths of grown-ups opened to talk and laugh, so different from time down below where we lived; time up there seeming to have been extended and slackened like pants elastic washed too often, so that instead of stretch and snap stretch and snap it was stretch only, for ever, with broken cords tha
t no longer connected the beginning to the end but hung exposed and loose . . . What a strange world it was with people and their lives so far roofward and skyward!

  It was a school day, which meant that when we came home from school Grandma would already be settled in. She would have a towel of her own hanging on the rail in the bathroom and a special chair to sit in, both in the kitchen and the dining room. We did not quite know what she would do apart from making pipes for us and divining water and calling down the birds of the air, but we supposed she would have to get rid of all her news of up north. There were many relatives with children and children’s children, none of whom my mother had seen since her marriage though she heard from them regularly in long letters, chronicles of birth, death, marriage, diseases, cures, recipes, and the inevitable photos called ‘snaps’. Visitors to our house spent much time talking, giving and receiving news, the talk developing a recognisable pattern according to the length of stay and the closeness of the visitor. There was the usual first day of discerning likenesses, delegating origins of noses and chins and eyes and arms and legs and hair; the more personal characteristics were discovered later, repeatedly, with alarm or delight or pride in their detection. After likenesses, there was the concern with what each member of the family was going to ‘be’, and then the debate on the wisdom of the choice and how the rest of the trade or profession fared; also how much work it would be, how much work!