SUNDAY BREAKFAST IN the dining-room, the sun riding down from Embsay Moor. My father has recently bought a freezer and his paean to frozen food sounds as if it’s been scripted by an ad agency: ‘Just think, these raspberries we’re eating were picked three months ago. And they taste as if I’d brought them in this morning. Marvellous. None of that metallic sogginess you get from tins. Incredible thing, science.’ The raspberries are a rich purple, paled and mottled by sugar. There is All-Bran or Weetabix to follow, from the same deep-blue bowl we have had the raspberries in (‘Must save on washing up for Mummy’). On the side-plates my father has laid out a series of vitamin pills: he has become fanatical about minding his As and Bs, his Cs and Ds, newly convinced that we can avoid colds and flu if we adopt a regime of tablets and capsules. Some of the pills are hard to swallow, others star-burst oilily when you nip their skin with your teeth. The family, not for the first time, is acting as a controlled medical experiment: what we are swallowing today, every patient in Earby will be swallowing tomorrow.
It is hard to reconcile this health regime with the next course, the bacon, egg, tomato and dippy bread—a slice of white bread frizzled in the leftover fat in the frying-pan. ‘You can’t beat dippy,’ my father says as he slides the last piece of it around his plate, soaking up yet more heart-gunge, yet more killing fluids. Dippy is the last of the bad old fat habits to go—even after butter has been replaced by margarine, it passes muster. Once, we used to consume the hot fat on chops, the crackling on pork, the white lard-edge on cold beef, the fat-smeary blood-juice of a roast joint. This was more than just the house rule about ‘finishing everything on your plate’: fat, I was told, would ‘get some strength in you.’ By now my father is cholesterol-conscious, and no one is pretending that dippy bread is good for you. Still, we’re eating it.
After toast and marmalade, my father and I retire to the two tip-back chairs which face out through the sash windows towards the moor. He is checking the share market, I the sports pages of the Sunday Express , where I stare for hours at the blurred anguish of a backward-arching goalkeeper as a shot from Burnley’s Ray Pointer (white dotted arrows painted on the photo to trace its path) inflates the net behind him—for me at twelve, the ultimate erotica: the breast-like bulge of a top corner. My mother, having cleared the breakfast stuff, is back again now with two mugs of coffee: ‘Made with hot milk, Mummy? Smashing.’
It is my father who says this, not me. All through our childhood he has called his wife ‘Mummy’, never Agnes, her actual name, which he hates because it sounds drab and old-fashioned, never Kim either, the name her friends use and which he persuaded her to adopt not so much to seem chic and fifties—was it plagiarized from Kim Novak?—as to erase her rural Irish past. She has shed her name, abandoned her country and buried her Kerry accent; in return he calls her ‘Mummy’. Until now, it has sounded fine, but at twelve it’s beginning to embarrass me: I want to call them Mum and Dad, which is what my schoolfriends’ parents are called, but which they think ‘common’; and I want them to call each other Kim (or even Agnes) and Arthur. It’s a futile ambition. My father will never change his habits. He’ll go on calling her Mummy—‘Glass of wine, Mummy, love?’—long after my sister and I have left home. He’ll call her Mummy with increasing frequency once his own mother dies. And he’ll call her Mummy not just in front of her grown-up children but in the company of friends, strangers in pubs, even when they are alone.
‘It’s your half-term coming up,’ he says.
‘Hum.’
‘I’ve been thinking. It’s time we went camping.’
‘Camping?’
‘You know, fathead—tent, poles.’
‘Hum.’
‘Just the two of us, boys together—or men together.’
I have just had my twelfth birthday. This is what he must mean by ‘men’. The thought of a camping holiday with my father fills me with dread.
‘We could go to the Lakes. Just us. The girls could drive up and join us for a meal out together at the end.’
‘Hum.’
‘It’s good to get away sometimes, you know—we love Mummy and Gillian, but there are things we’re better off doing on our own, no faffing about or worrying if they’re cold: you can’t imagine them enjoying three nights in a tent like we will.’
‘Hum.’
‘Under the stars, fresh air and exercise—marvellous.’
A week later, on a hill above Lake Windermere, we’re listening to the six o’clock news: there is something about Fidel Castro, with his big beard, and President Kennedy, who is so young and smily and perfect, and President Khrushchev, who my father says you can’t trust. ‘Secret installations’, the newsreader says several times, and I think how difficult it must be to hide bombs: I have seen pictures of them and they are huge, or at least the clouds they give off are huge. Below, a rowing-boat chops and stitches its way across the water. The sheep on the green hills opposite are dotted tinily up to the summit, then evaporate into cumuli. ‘Marvellous,’ my father says. ‘Couldn’t have picked a better day. Fresh air, blue sky, not a soul in sight—makes you glad to be alive.’
I sit on the tartan rug while he reaches into the boot, then dumps the heavy, rope-necked canvas swagbag on to the turf beside me. He undoes the rope, then slides the bag along the length of tent and yanks it up, like a mother removing the dungarees from her flat-on-its-back, nappy-heavy toddler. It must be years since the tent was last up, on the beach at Abersoch or in the back garden, but at once a familiar smell rises from it—the smell of canvas and sand-dunes and grass cuttings and suntan oil and dead earwigs.
‘Funny,’ my father says, and goes back to the boot of the car. I get up, and fiddle with the guy-ropes, their heavy wooden adjustables.
‘Is there a bag anywhere under the tent?’ he shouts, as he opens the car door and peers under the back seat. I lift one corner and find a small blue canvas holdall.
‘Yes,’ I call.
‘What’s in it?’
‘Pegs,’ I shout back, pulling out a clunky handful of them—they look like primitive-man sticks of firewood, with little notches axed into the side.
‘No poles?’
‘No.’
I can remember what the poles are like—thick, wooden, three feet long, with large metal spears and slots at each end. I search the bracken, the canvas, under the car.
‘I must have put them in,’ my father says, without conviction.
‘Couldn’t we break some branches off and make do with those?’
‘Don’t be daft. It’ll be dark in half an hour.’
‘What are we going to do?’
‘Pack up and go home.’
On the drove-road back down, though, he has another idea. ‘We could stay in a hotel, I suppose. And ring Mummy, and get her to drive up with the poles tomorrow and meet us halfway.’
Monday evening, with poles. After the misfortune of the night before—soon enough converted by my father into a huge joke against himself, the sort he could afford once he’d found the cosy hotel, with its log fire, consommé and roast duck—we have spent most of the day in the car. First we drove to meet my mother and sister in Kirkby Lonsdale, and had lunch. Then we came north again, nosing through the drizzle round Grasmere and Rydal Water, listening to the car radio, the weather forecast, the latest on Cuba. ‘It’s bound to clear up soon,’ my father says, who is never one to complain, whose meteorology is a science of optimism. To him, rain is the natural order of things, which in the Yorkshire Dales is about right, and anything other than rain is a blessing. ‘Lucky with the weather,’ he’ll say when it’s heavy and overcast. ‘Marvellous day’ denotes high cloud. ‘Miraculous, like being on the Riviera’ is when the sun, however briefly, gets through the clouds.
At five we begin looking for a good pitching spot—‘I suppose there are official sites, but it’s not the same as camping wild, and you have to pay.’ We drive to Ambleside and Windermere: nothing. We take a left turn to Skelwith Bridge: the fields by the river are fenced off with barbed wire. We go back to Grasmere, through Chapel Stile, to the Dungeon Ghyll Hotel (trying not to notice the word Hotel), and as darkness begins to fall we settle on a spot by a stream. It is a low, unsheltered strip of flat grass. The sky above us is threatening heavier rain than this mild fuzz. Already I’m nostalgic for the site we found last night, but to which my father says it would be ‘bad luck’ to return. The farmer, though apparently surprised when we ask, has no objection to our being here. And it is a good spot to begin walking from tomorrow, up to Harrison Stickle and the Langdale Pikes. As my father’s torch dims from a bright stare to yellow myopia—‘Bloody batteries gone already’—we get the last guy-rope secured, the last bendy leg of the camp-bed into its slot. It is only, what, seven-thirty, but I want to climb into my sleeping-bag.
We tie the tent flaps and set off for the pub, leaving the shaky house by the stream. As we drive, the Home Service is taken up with Presidents Kennedy and Khrushchev: the smily young hero has blockaded Cuba; Russian ships are sailing towards it. There are words I don’t understand—diplomatic manoeuvres and retaliatory risks—and words that need no explanation, like World War Three. Will my father be too old to fight this time? I’ve had this daydream for years that if he’s called up for war we’ll keep him in the attic, like that picture I’ve seen at school of the Cavalier concealed in a tree-trunk. And if they send someone looking for him and ask me do I know where he is, when did I last see him, could they just look round, I’ll not give him away, I’ll keep his secret safe … Now the next war’s nearly here, though, my plan seems childish. Maybe this time no one will have to fight, it can all just be push-buttons. We slam the car doors and step into the pub car park. Annihilation must look like the sky does now, blindness and blackness. And serving in a war must feel like this—a strange place at night, the home you live in irretrievably vulnerable and far away.
It’s quiet inside, and the barman doesn’t seem to notice my juniority (does he take me for fourteen? eighteen? is he pretending not to see?). The warmth and cigarette smoke and sawdusty floorboards create a fug of sociability, but it’s hard to settle into, knowing we have to drive back to the cold tent, knowing the world may end. There are only men in here, big, smoking, laughing men jawing about war.
‘Them bloody Russkies need a taste of their own medicine,’ says the fat one with sideboards from his bar-stool. ‘This Kennedy’s called their tune. He’s the first to stand up to ‘em like we should have long since. I take my hat off to him.’
‘Nay, Frank,’ says the barman, ‘the Reds an’t been that bad. They’ve not dropped their bombs on anyone.’
‘Maybe so, but they’ve got as far as Cuba, and this Castro bugger is standing there with open arms saying come on in, there’s plenty room for thee, you can hide your nuclear weapons in my beard.’
‘It’s a Communist country, Frank, Cuba is, and there’s no law against making friends with Russians. It were them who invented Communism.’
‘Nay, tha’s wrong there, it were Karl Marx what invented Communism, and he lived in England. Great beard on him, too. I tell you, if we don’t stop these Commies pointing their weapons at us, we’ll all be for the chop.’
‘What a world it’s coming to,’ my father pipes up from our pock-marked brass table by the log fire, shaking his head, hoping some neutral, uncontentious remark like this will let him in on the conversation, will be the right kind of admission fee. The fat man with sideboards shuts up now, the barman goes off to serve another customer, and my father is left hanging there, at the edge of someone else’s talk, wanting to insinuate himself, to be accepted. I know how it will go from here, because it’s happened before in other pubs. My father will pick up our glasses, order another pint, start chatting to the man in sideboards, buy me shandy and crisps and say: ‘Marvellous part of the world: wish I knew it better. What’s your poison? Theakstons?’ I am beginning to miss my mother. I don’t want to watch what’s going to happen happening: my father slowly winning over the suspicious locals; the conversation turning from world politics to legends of local brawlers, womanizers, con artists; the pint after pint, the whisky chasers, then the one for the road, and the next one for the road and the last one for the road. I stare at the smoke rising from the logs and imagine one wisp of it journeying up the chimney and out through the stack into the night, to dissolve in the immense black spaces and be gone from sight if anyone were looking, and yet not be gone, for surely nothing can be lost forever, every trace of whatever happened on the earth is recorded somewhere, even the dimmest or shortest life must have its immortality: the stars are shooting us for someone.
It seems very late, but perhaps it’s no later than closing time when we leave, my father belatedly guilty at the sight of me sitting alone by the fire, a collage of deconstructed beer-mats across the brass table. The cold drizzle in the car park comes as a shock, and as we drive back the radio spits and crackles over the whish-whosh of the wipers—‘crisis’, ‘urgency’, ‘ultimatum’. Soon the headlights are picking out our frail little homestead: it looks like a story-book picture of the first pig’s house, the one made of straw. The wind is getting up now, not to wolf-howl strength, but enough to growl and yank at the guy-ropes. We stoop inside, relieved to be out of the rain, but even my father’s cheeriness can’t make this a homely place, let alone home. He hands me a flask of coffee, with whisky added. ‘That’ll help you sleep,’ he says, as my throat implodes, my stomach seethes with fission. I hear the rain beat the canvas. I hear the stream getting louder, more confident. I look up into the blackness and imagine Russian ships steaming across the dark sea and meeting American ships and all the bright final skies. There seems no kindly light that will lead us out of this, my father and me, here in our paper bag amid the encircling gloom.
We wake very early. The stream has burst its banks, and our tent, which has no groundsheet, is standing in an inch of water. I peer down and see water swishing about the metal legs of the camp-bed. My back feels damp, my bottom wet—it is wet, dunked where the camp-bed sags in the middle. Outside it’s raining still and the wind whines to be off its leash. We drag ourselves out of our sleeping-bags and into our shoes, and splosh about in a sort of panic to be gone, breaking up the camp-beds, uprooting the pegs, dismantling the poles, tearing the canvas from its frame. It seems extraordinary, in the light of day, that we should have chosen this site—the stream looks higher than the fold of grass we pitched the tent in. But at least the tedious rituals of tent-packing can be dispensed with: we just dump the stuff higgledy-piggledy in the boot, and by eight o’clock are on the road, the fan of the car heater noisily combating our sogged gloom. ‘We can dry the tent out later, spread it over some bushes while we have a picnic lunch,’ says my father, peering through the metronome of the windscreen wipers.
We have two mixed grills (‘Do you do dippy bread?’) in a steamed-up Ambleside café, walk soddenly round the town, have lunch in a Patterdale pub. It stops raining round four—‘Told you our luck was in’—but it’s too late by then to think of drying the tent, even if the sun had come out, which it hasn’t. There’s nothing to stop us putting it up damp, of course, which is what my father seems determined to do. He gets the map out. ‘Got it, just the spot,’ he says, and we drive on through more flooded lanes, damp hedgerows, mist-obscured fells. ‘Must ring surgery,’ he says, pulling up by a red telephone box, not for the first time on this holiday, or others. Surely it’s too early for surgery? Who can he be ringing? Through the mist of panes, I can see his head nodding. Any sane person would have called it quits by now, would have turned round and gone home, but here we are, proving ourselves hardy and hearty, pointlessly.
An hour later, I am sitting in front of a hotel lounge fire. My father fetches me a whisky mac: ‘You’re all right, they’ll not notice, it’ll help you thaw out. My feet are like ice.’
‘Thanks, Dad.’ He is still gloating at the trick he has pulled on me—trick or treat, I’m not sure which.
‘Happier now?’
‘Yes.’
‘Maybe it’s soft, but I didn’t see any point sleeping in that sodding tent with the forecast for more rain.’
‘You’re right.’
‘And it is our last night, and we’re still boys away together. If I’d been on my own, or with Uncle Ron, I’d have stuck it, but there was no point making you miserable—I sometimes forget, you are only twelve.’
I let this go, too relieved to be here to argue. There is a television in the corner of the room, a little grey window high in a walnut tower, and when the news comes on there are pictures of a smiling President Kennedy: the Russian ships have turned back, the newsreader says, and Mr Khrushchev has agreed to dismantle all his missile bases in Cuba. A man with a microphone stands in front of the White House and says: ‘No one here yet knows what precisely made the Russians back down.’
My father and I clink glasses.
‘Here’s to Kennedy,’ he says.
‘To Kennedy,’ I reply, my eyes watering over.