Singing for Mrs Pettigrew: A Story Maker's Journey

  Now many of us have the freedom to choose to stay where we were brought up or to leave, to work and live somewhere else if we want to. But does this new-found freedom diminish our sense of home and belonging and make us less secure? Do we in fact really need to belong anywhere? Can we feel we belong everywhere?

  Home for many of us, I imagine, will always be our childhood home. As you have just read in “My One and Only Great Escape”, I lived for most of my formative years on the Essex coast in a village called Bradwell. I have chosen this extract from that story to illustrate the intensity of the belonging I felt then and still feel today.

  Cycling out of the gate, as I often did, I turned left onto the village street towards Bradwell Quay and the sea, right towards the church, and the American airbase, and then out over the marshes towards the ancient Saxon chapel of St Peter’s near the sea wall itself. Climb the sea wall and there was the great brown soupy North Sea and always a wild wet wind blowing. I felt always that this place was a part of me, that I belonged here…

  I slept up in the attic with my elder brother. We had a candle factory up there, melting down the ends of used-up candles on top of a paraffin stove and pouring the wax into jelly moulds. At night we could climb out of our dormer windows and sit and listen to the owls screeching over the marshes, and to the sound of the surging sea beyond…

  My days and nights were filled with the familiarity of the place and its people and of my family. This isn’t to say I loved it all. The house was numbingly cold at times. My stepfather could be irritable, rigid and harsh; my mother anxious, tired and sad; my younger siblings intrusive and quarrelsome; and the villagers sometimes very aggressive. What haunted me most, though, were stories of a house ghost, told for fun, I’m sure; but nonetheless, that ghost terrified me so much that I dreaded going upstairs at night on my own. But all this was home. Haunted or not, this was my place. I belonged.

  All the homes I have made on my wanderings have been in some way, I suppose, attempts to recreate those distant years of childhood, to find once more that elusive sense of belonging. I have been back to the house at Bradwell. Someone else sleeps in my room now. But it will always be my room, my place. A part of me still belongs there, the heart of me perhaps.

  I live now in a small Devon village which has been my home for thirty years, for my children their childhood home, for me another kind of home altogether, a place I live and work in, a place I love but still I cannot say I belong to. But strangely, living here over these last thirty years I have learnt more about belonging than I have anywhere else.

  My village, like so many English villages, has undergone huge change. Until recently those who were born here outnumbered the newcomers, outsiders like me. Not any more. Most of the farms, though, are still owned and worked by the children who grew up on them a generation ago. They have an understanding of the place and the beasts and the people, an understanding born of long association. They feel part of the land they inhabit. It is an understanding not learnt from books and poetry, but simply by being here, by growing up here. Thomas Hardy wrote of this better than anyone, I think:

  They are old association – an almost exhaustive biographical or historical acquaintance with every object, animate and inanimate, within the observer’s horizon. He must know all about those invisible ones of the days gone by, whose feet have traversed the fields which look so grey from his windows; recall whose creaking plough has turned those sods from time to time; whose hands planted the trees that form a crest to the opposite hill; whose horses and hounds have torn through that underwood; what birds affect that particular brake; what bygone domestic dramas of love, jealousy, revenge, or disappointment have been enacted in the cottages, the mansion, the street, or on the green. The spot may have beauty, grandeur, salubrity, convenience; but if it lack memories it will ultimately pall upon him who settles there without opportunity of intercourse with his kind.

  (From THE WOODLANDERS)

  There are some, of course, who see and feel this belonging as a right to possess the land. But to feel a place is your home, it is not at all necessary to own it. Most of those who have lived in my village all through the ages since Saxon times have had a strong sense, I feel sure, that this was their place to be, to use, certainly, but to look after and to cherish too. Hedgerows, ditches, trees and meadows are witness to this. They made the landscape we see today. Most never owned a blade of grass, much less the roof over their heads. Perhaps they understood more instinctively than we do now in this great age of ownership that possession is only temporary anyway.

  To Sean Rafferty, Scottish poet, playwright and publican who made his home in our village in the 1940s, belonging was utterly important. I don’t think he particularly wanted to come and live here in the first place – he was more at home in Fitzroy Square in London or amongst fellow poets like Sorley MacLean in Scotland – but nonetheless he established a profound connection with the village and its people. The pub where he worked stands next to the church. He was up early every morning, at cockcrow.

  I SPEAK OF A VALLEY by Sean Rafferty

  I speak of a valley.

  I call at morning

  the roll of its farms

  till cocks reply.

  From the cobbled yards

  they cry and eastwards

  the first leaf stirs

  in a hush of doves.

  I speak of a river.

  I herd the fleece bright

  flock of its springs

  till driven streams

  are loud in the fold

  I lead its waters

  to praise among pastures

  their hartstongue home.

  I speak of a childhood.

  I lay a nightlong

  fable of sleep

  till morning sang

  in the green of the light

  between leaf and language

  a birth a ballad

  a bird alone.

  Ballad and childhood

  and psalm and river

  in the cup of my hands

  I priest its praise;

  I speak of a valley

  and shall for ever

  out of my numbered days.

  Ted Hughes came to his pub. They talked poetry over the bar. Hughes fished the river too, the Torridge, the same river Tarka the otter fished. Ted Hughes farmed near by at Moortown. He knew the landscape intimately, lived in harmony with it, became a part of it as John Clare had in Suffolk, as William Wordsworth had in the Lakes. Here’s part of Ted Hughes’s poem “Last load”, his song of harvest home.

  From LAST LOAD by Ted Hughes

  And now as you dash through the green light

  You see between dark trees

  On all the little emerald hills

  The desperate loading, under the blue cloud.

  Your sweat tracks through your dust, your shirt flaps chill,

  And bales multiply out of each other

  All down the shorn field ahead.

  The faster you fling them up, the more there are of them –

  Till suddenly the field’s grey empty. It’s finished.

  And a tobacco reek breaks in your nostrils

  As the rain begins

  Softly and vertically silver, the whole sky softly

  Falling into the stubble all round you

  The trees shake out their masses, joyful,

  Drinking the downpour.

  The hills pearled, the whole distance drinking

  And the earth-smell warm and thick as smoke

  And you go, and over the whole land

  Like singing heard across evening water

  The tall loads are swaying towards their barns

  Down the deep lanes.

  20 June 1975

  Are all these writings in some way mere striving to belong? Perhaps, though I think they are more than that. I see in them almost a sense of kinship, a kinship arrived at through observation, insight and empathy, by an intensity of association. It is this sense of a
ssociation that binds us together, as families and as communities. And it is in this place, and has been amongst these writers, that I write, on my bed propped up by a mountain of pillows, just as Robert Louis Stevenson did on Samoa, an island in the Pacific where he felt he belonged, where he still belongs, for he died there and is buried there. Another kind of belonging.

  my father is a polar bear

  Tracking down a polar bear shouldn’t be that difficult. You just follow the paw prints. My father is a polar bear. Now if you had a father who was a polar bear, you’d be curious, wouldn’t you? You’d go looking for him. That’s what I did, I went looking for him, and I’m telling you he wasn’t at all easy to find.

  In a way I was lucky, because I always had two fathers. I had a father who was there – I called him Douglas – and one who wasn’t there, the one I’d never even met – the polar bear one. Yet in a way he was there. All the time I was growing up he was there inside my head. But he wasn’t only in my head, he was at the bottom of our Start-Rite shoebox, our secret treasure box, with the rubber bands round it, which I kept hidden at the bottom of the cupboard in our bedroom. So how, you might ask, does a polar bear fit into a shoebox? I’ll tell you.

  My big brother Terry first showed me the magazine under the bedclothes, by torchlight, in 1948 when I was five years old. The magazine was called Theatre World. I couldn’t read it at the time, but he could. (He was two years older than me, and already mad about acting and the theatre and all that – he still is.) He had saved up all his pocket money to buy it. I thought he was crazy. “A shilling! You can get about a hundred lemon sherbets for that down at the shop,” I told him.

  Terry just ignored me and turned to page twenty-seven. He read it out: “‘The Snow Queen, a dramat – something or other – of Hans Andersen’s famous story, by the Young Vic Company.’” And there was a large black and white photograph right across the page – a photograph of two fierce-looking polar bears baring their teeth and about to eat two children, a boy and a girl, who looked very frightened.

  “Look at the polar bears,” said Terry. “You see that one on the left, the fatter one? That’s our dad, our real dad. It says his name and everything – Peter Van Diemen. But you’re not to tell. Not Douglas, not even Mum, promise?”

  “My dad’s a polar bear?” I said. I was a little confused.

  “Promise you won’t tell,” he went on, “or I’ll give you a Chinese burn.”

  Of course I wasn’t going to tell, Chinese burn or no Chinese burn. I was hardly going to go to school the next day and tell everyone that I had a polar bear for a father, was I? And I certainly couldn’t tell my mother, because I knew she never liked it if I ever asked about my real father. She always insisted that Douglas was the only father I had. I knew he wasn’t, not really. So did she, so did Terry, so did Douglas. But for some reason that was always a complete mystery to me, everyone in the house pretended that he was.

  Some background might be useful here. I was born, I later found out, when my father was a soldier in Baghdad during the Second World War. (You didn’t know there were polar bears in Baghdad, did you?) Sometime after that my mother met and fell in love with a dashing young officer in the Royal Marines called Douglas Macleish. All this time, evacuated to the Lake District away from the bombs, blissfully unaware of the war and Douglas, I was learning to walk and talk and do my business in the right place at the right time. So my father came home from the war to discover that his place in my mother’s heart had been taken. He did all he could to win her back. He took her away on a week’s cycling holiday in Suffolk to see if he could rekindle the light of their love. But it was hopeless. By the end of the week they had come to an amicable arrangement. My father would simply disappear, because he didn’t want to “get in the way”. They would get divorced quickly and quietly, so that Terry and I could be brought up as a new family with Douglas as our father. Douglas would adopt us and give us Macleish as our surname. All my father insisted upon was that Terry and I should keep Van Diemen as our middle name. That’s what happened. They divorced. My father disappeared, and at the age of three I became Andrew Van Diemen Macleish. It was a mouthful then and it’s a mouthful now.

  So Terry and I had no actual memories of our father whatsoever. I do have some vague recollections of standing on a railway bridge somewhere near Earls Court in London, where we lived, with Douglas’s sister – Aunty Betty, as I came to know her – telling us that we had a brand new father who’d be looking after us from now on. I was really not that concerned, not at the time. I was much more interested in the train that was chuffing along under the bridge, wreathing us in a fog of smoke.

  My first father, my real father, my missing father, became a taboo person, a big hush-hush taboo person that no one ever mentioned, except for Terry and me. For us he soon became a sort of secret phantom father. We used to whisper about him under the blankets at night. Terry would sometimes go snooping in my mother’s desk and he’d find things out about him. “He’s an actor,” Terry told me one night. “Our dad’s an actor, just like Mum is, just like I’m going to be.”

  It was only a couple of weeks later that he brought the theatre magazine home. After that we’d take it out again and look at our polar bear father. It took some time, I remember, before the truth of it dawned on me – I don’t think Terry can have explained it very well. If he had, I’d have understood it much sooner – I’m sure I would. The truth, of course – as I think you might have guessed by now – was that my father was both an actor and a polar bear at one and the same time.

  Douglas went out to work a lot and when he was home he was a bit silent, so we didn’t really get to know him. But we did get to know Aunty Betty. Aunty Betty simply adored us, and she loved giving us treats. She wanted to take us on a special Christmas treat, she said. Would we like to go to the zoo? Would we like to go to the pantomime? There was Dick Whittington or Puss in Boots. We could choose whatever we liked.

  Quick as a flash, Terry said, “The Snow Queen. We want to go to The Snow Queen.”

  So there we were a few days later, Christmas Eve 1948, sitting in the stalls at a matinée performance of The Snow Queen at the Young Vic theatre, waiting, waiting for the moment when the polar bears come on. We didn’t have to wait for long. Terry nudged me and pointed, but I knew already which polar bear my father had to be. He was the best one, the snarliest one, the growliest one, the scariest one. Whenever he came on he really looked as if he was going to eat someone, anyone. He looked mean and hungry and savage, just the way a polar bear should look.

  I have no idea whatsoever what happened in The Snow Queen. I just could not take my eyes off my polar bear father’s curling claws, his slavering tongue, his killer eyes. My father was without doubt the finest polar bear actor the world had ever seen. When the great red curtains closed at the end and opened again for the actors to take their bows, I clapped so hard that my hands hurt. Three more curtain calls and the curtains stayed closed. The safety curtain came down and my father was cut off from me, gone, gone for ever. I’d never see him again.

  Terry had other ideas. Everyone was getting up, but Terry stayed sitting. He was staring at the safety curtain as if in some kind of trance. “I want to meet the polar bears,” he said quietly.

  Aunty Betty laughed. “They’re not bears, dear, they’re actors, just actors, people acting. And you can’t meet them, it’s not allowed.”

  He looked mean and hungry and savage, just the way a polar bear should look.

  “I want to meet the polar bears,” Terry repeated.

  So did I, of course, so I joined in. “Please, Aunty Betty,” I pleaded. “Please.”

  “Don’t be silly. You two, you do get some silly notions sometimes. Have a choc ice instead. Get your coats on now.”

  So we each got a choc ice. But that wasn’t the end of it.

  We were in the foyer caught in the crush of the crowd when Aunty Betty suddenly noticed that Terry was missing. She went loopy. Aunty Betty al
ways wore a fox stole, heads still attached, round her shoulders. Those poor old foxes looked every bit as pop-eyed and frantic as she did, as she plunged through the crowd, dragging me along behind her and calling for Terry.

  Gradually the theatre emptied. Still no Terry. There was quite a to-do, I can tell you. Policemen were called in off the street. All the programme sellers joined in the search, everyone did. Of course, I’d worked it out. I knew exactly where Terry had gone, and what he was up to. By now Aunty Betty was sitting down in the foyer and sobbing her heart out. Then, cool as a cucumber, Terry appeared from nowhere, just wandered into the foyer. Aunty Betty crushed him to her, in a great hug. Then she went loopy all over again, telling him what a naughty, naughty boy he was, going off like that. “Where were you? Where have you been?” she cried.

  “Yes, young man,” said one of the policemen. “That’s something we’d all like to know as well.”

  I remember to this day exactly what Terry said, the very words: “Jimmy riddle. I just went for a jimmy riddle.” For a moment he even had me believing him. What an actor! Brilliant.

  We were on the bus home, right at the front on the top deck where you can guide the bus round corners all by yourself – all you have to do is steer hard on the white bar in front of you. Aunty Betty was sitting a couple of rows behind us. Terry made quite sure she wasn’t looking. Then, very surreptitiously, he took something out from under his coat and showed me. The programme. Signed right across it were these words, which Terry read out to me: