MY GRANDFATHER SAID he found the body in the back yard on the Wednesday night when he went to the outside toilet. It was by the fence in the old pen where the chickens used to live. But because my grandparents didn’t have a telephone, my father didn’t get to know about it until he went round with their shopping the following Saturday. My grandparents never went out.
This all happened over forty years ago, but I can still remember that day very well. We drove over in Dad’s latest acquisition from his dodgy brother-in-law Brian, a 1950 Vauxhall Victor. Grandma and Granddad lived almost opposite Upton Park, West Ham United’s home ground. So the streets were full of football fans all dressed in the team’s colours of claret and blue. We’d picked up the shopping at the grocers near our own house in East Ham and just had to stop at a hardware shop on the Barking Road to pick up some gas mantles. Although this was 1967 my grandparents, unlike most people even in the impoverished East End of London, didn’t have electricity. Year after year they hung on to the gas lamps that had been in their house on Green Street since they’d first moved in back in the 1900s. Every so often these lamps needed the mantles, the bit that contains the gas and converts it into an incandescent light, replaced. And so we stopped at the one hardware shop that still sold the things, bought the mantles and then, inevitably, my father’s car broke down.
I was only six years old and short for my age but I had to drag my share of bags down the Barking Road, into Green Street and up my grandparents’ garden path. My father, furious about “bloody Brian and his bleeding old wrecks”, carried everything else, a limp roll-up cigarette hanging from his lips as he muttered his anger. When we got to the house, which was a battered Edwardian terrace with an overgrown front garden, Dad was further infuriated by the fact that someone had broken the door knocker. “Sodding hell!” he exploded. And then he looked up at the window that was above the door and yelled out, “Mo! Mo, you up there? Get down here and open this door for Christ’s sake!”
Grandma and Granddad didn’t rent the whole house. They’d always been too poor for that. They lived downstairs while upstairs was occupied by a man with a wooden leg called Mo. Unlike my grandparents, Mo did go out from time to time and it was nearly always he who answered the door. But Mo liked a drink and sometimes he would range about his flat in a drunken stupor, falling over and breaking things. When he left the building he could get into fights, he’d broken parts of the front door down in the past and the poor old knocker was always fair game. Eventually Mo, red-eyed and, as he put it, “as stiff as a board” with arthritis, came down the stairs and opened up.
My grandfather was in the hall with a shovel in his hand. The entrance to the coal cellar was underneath the stairs and he’d left what they called the parlour to go and get some coal.
“Hello,” he said. “Cold out, is it?”
My father ignored him and said, “Car’s buggered. Me and kiddo had to walk from the hardware shop.”
Granddad began to shovel coal, when Mo, halfway up the stairs, called down, “Here George, tell them about the murder.”
“The murder?”
My father’s already white face blanched. My grandfather looked away.
“Some bloke. In the back yard,” Mo said to my father. “Your dad found him. Dead.”
Whether my grandfather would ever have told my father about the body in the yard, had Mo not said what he did, is something I still ponder on occasionally, even now. From what I remember of that day and others that proved significant afterwards, I think that he probably wouldn’t.
All he said as he shovelled coal was “Your mother didn’t want you bothered with it.”
“Bothered with it!”
Dad went out of the hall, into the parlour and through to the scullery where my grandmother was washing up dishes. I followed, fascinated as I always was by the way in which the passage from the dingy hall into the darkness of the parlour plunged one into a world of browns and blacks. No outside sounds of football revelry or chatter of local shoppers entered here. Only the crackle of coal as it burnt inside the range, the hiss of the gas lamps and, sometimes, the whistle of steam as it escaped from the big metal kettle.
My father talked to a small, thin woman in a long black dress. My grandmother was in her late seventies then, the same sort of age that my own mother, who favours jeans and T-shirts, is now. I had only once seen my grandmother’s hair not piled up on top of her head. One morning we turned up early and she had just got out of bed. Her hair, which was as grey as an afternoon in November, reached all the way down to her feet. But this time it was in a bun and, as usual, held up with pins made of silver and onyx and jet. She spoke to my father in low, angry tones, the long silver chains around her neck and wrists jangling as she did so.
I was looking at the many framed photographs of my ancestors that sat on the mantelpiece above the range when my grandfather came in and said, “You all right are you, my love?”
One of the photos had been laid down on its face. I said, “Granddad, one of the pictures is down.”
He looked up and frowned. My grandfather was a big man. Tall and broad and completely different in build from my skinny father. A dock worker by trade, he was also a veteran of the First World War, a conflict that I knew, even then, haunted him always. He opened the door of the range and threw the coal on with the shovel. He stood up with difficulty and then looked at the mantelpiece and said, “Your grandmother was cleaning. It must’ve fallen down.” He ruffled my long, mousy hair with his coaly fingers and then stood the picture up again. I knew it well. It was a portrait of his brother Harold. He had died long, long ago during a battle called the Battle of Mons. Uncle Harold had been my grandfather’s only male sibling and his memory was sacred not just because of who he had been but also because he had died so young and in service to his country. This portrait, of a young, thin and unsmiling man who was really little more than a boy, sat alongside others depicting my grandfather’s many sisters, his parents and my grandmother’s mother and her three brothers, David, John and Patrick. In between all of these photographs were scattered plaster images of the Virgin Mary, the suffering Christ and the saints. This proximity to the divine told us all, had we not already known it, that everyone depicted had sadly passed away.
I sat down to wait for the cup of tea and plate of bread and jam that always accompanied any visit to the grandparents’ house. My grandfather put the kettle on the range and then, although I do remember wanting to ask him about what Mo had said about the dead body in the yard, I know that I didn’t do so. My father and grandmother went out into the yard, which was not what usually happened, because neither of them had gone out there to go to the toilet. My grandfather just smiled and I asked if I could please play with my Box of Things. The Box of Things was in fact an old carpet-bag. It contained all sorts of “treasures” that were played with by my grandparents’ many grandchildren. We all loved it. There were wooden camels which had once belonged to my great-great-uncle Sidney who had been in the army in Palestine, shells from a beach somewhere in the West Country, model cats made out of Bakelite, old bits of broken costume jewellery, a tiny New Testament, dolls and small religious statues and two photograph albums. These two brown, heavily stuffed books were my favourites. Full of small black and white photographs, some dating back to the latter part of the nineteenth century. They showed me my forebears in funny clothes and doing things like picking hops in Kent that I had never seen and would never do. Involved in the Box, I recall nothing more from that day except a snatch of conversation between my parents when I got home.
My mother said to my dad, “So do the police know who he is, this man your father found?”
“No,” my dad replied. “No one seems to know anything about him.”
***
The following Saturday my father and I made our usual trip to see my grandparents in West Ham. This time we didn’t go in the car because the police had apparently taken it off my father and were currently looking for my Uncle Brian. Although he had promised never, ever to sell or give my father any dodgy goods ever, Uncle Brian just hadn’t been able to resist the Vauxhall Victor.
We arrived in the afternoon which, in November, meant that it was dark and as we walked into the parlour the gas lamps hissed and hummed in time to the boiling kettle. I smiled at my granddad who was in his usual position, in his chair by the side of the range. He and my grandmother were not, however, alone. Sitting on the far side of the large dining table that was wedged into the square bay window was a policeman. He looked to be about my dad’s age and he was in uniform, his helmet placed before him on the table. The adults began to talk and I remember my grandmother, who was sitting next to the policeman, asked, “So he doesn’t have any family then? Not come forward to claim his body?”
“No,” the policeman answered. “No, nothing.”
Then I said, “Is this about the man who was murdered in the back yard?”
No one spoke at first. They all looked at me and then it was the policeman who began to smile. “Well,” he said as he bent down in order to speak to me across the table, “what do you know about …”
“It was our neighbour, Mo, who said the word ‘murder’,” my grandmother said grumpily. “He’s a cripple and a drunk and he dramatizes everything. She heard him and picked up on it.”
“Oh, I know old Mo,” the policeman said and then he looked at me again. “The poor man in your Gran’s yard just died, sweetheart,” he said. “No one killed him.”
“It was his time. God took him,” my grandmother added.
“Sod God,” my grandfather, who had absolutely no time for religion, muttered over by the fire.
“Can I have my Box, please?” I asked then. Kids move on very quickly and I was already bored by the notion of murder, by God and by my grandfather’s routine blasphemy.
My father went and got the Box and when he returned I spread all of the treasures out across the table and then began looking through the photo albums. The adults talked and I clearly remember my grandmother going on about a possible funeral or cremation. Not that that was anything unusual. Funerals and how ornate or religiously observant they were formed frequent topics of her conversation. Of course, what I didn’t know then, was that all of the ceremonies she spoke about had taken place in the fifties at the very latest. My grandparents did not, after all, go out.
When I opened up my albums I was sitting beside my father with my grandmother and the policeman sitting across the table opposite. I knew that after a little while my grandmother was watching me more intently than usual, but I just smiled at her and then went back to what I was doing. I have absolutely no recollection whatsoever about what I was looking at in the album when my grandmother ripped it and the other book away from me and put them back in the old carpetbag. I do remember that I started to cry but that the look on my grandmother’s face was such that I felt compelled to swallow my tears and hold my peace. She looked fierce – she could do that, like an old, old toothless cheetah.
No one asked my grandmother why some of my treasures had been suddenly denied to me. But I do remember my father looking angry and I can recall how he very obviously picked up the carpetbag and then began to flick through the album himself. Sitting next to me, he knew exactly what I had been looking at when my grandmother had ripped the album from my hands. By this time the policeman was getting up to leave and so all of us got up from the table and bade him very politely “Goodbye”. Once he had gone, my grandfather, who was about as good with authority as he was with God, muttered, “Fascist!” and then promptly went to sleep in his chair.
I think I was given my albums back then. I really don’t know. I do recall a feeling of discomfort afterwards, however, although at the time I didn’t know why. Things were never quite right between my grandparents and my father from then on. My grandmother and my father talked frequently alone and in furious whispers.
***
My grandfather died in 1970 at the age of eighty-three and my grandmother five years later at eighty-five. The contents of the flat were distributed between my father and his two brothers with Dad inheriting most of the photographs. Until I was well into my twenties I would, from time to time, take out the old albums and the photographs that had once stood on the mantelpiece and look at them. But when I moved away to Yorkshire, in 1982, I forgot about the photographs and, to a large extent, about my grandparents too. Only when my father and his brothers got together to reminisce, if I was around at the time, did I think of them and smile.
Dad and my uncles Geoff and Eric always referred to the old house in West Ham as The Time Machine. My grandparents had chosen to stop their personal clock around about 1929 when my father had been born, or so my Uncle Eric always said.
“Even in the Blitz mother always wore long skirts and put her hair up like old Queen Mary,” he said at one reunion back in the eighties. “Frightened of electricity they were, the both of them, frightened rigid.”
Not that their eccentric lifestyle stopped with lack of electricity. They had no bathroom and were accustomed to washing daily in the kitchen sink. When a proper hot soak was needed they brought in the old tin bath which hung on the side of the wooden shed that was the outside toilet. God knows how many kettles they had to boil on the old range to get enough water to bathe in. They didn’t have a washing machine, had no television or transistor radio, and their bedstead was made of brass which was very unfashionable back in the sixties. Now that bed, not to mention the big, black range in the parlour, would send the type of middle-class people my grandparents never met into raptures.
It was generally agreed amongst my relatives that my grandparents’ strange aversion to change and modernity had a lot to do with the First World War. Granddad in particular had come from a fairly easy-going working class family who actively embraced innovations. But he’d had a bad time in the trenches. He had been gassed and wounded and had returned to London and his wife with a profoundly pessimistic take on life. Why my grandmother had seemed to follow him along this course was not known, except perhaps that women did always do what their men told them to back in those days. But both my uncles, Geoff and Eric, were born during the 1914–18 conflict, presumably conceived when granddad was at home on leave.
That said, along with Uncle Geoff, it was my belief that the death of Granddad’s brother Harold possibly held the key. Blown up at the Battle of Mons, he had only been seventeen at the time. They’d been in the same battalion and Granddad always said that he’d seen Harold die. One minute he’d been by his side and the next he’d disappeared into a great ball of fire and metal and ash. There hadn’t been a single trace left of him to bury, Granddad had said. Not a trace. How a person could get over such a thing was inconceivable to me. In the light of that it was no wonder that he had been so very weird.
Life moved on and the family photographs entered what would probably, under normal circumstances, have been their final resting place in a box in my parents’ attic. I had two children by this time and my many cousins had reproduced also. It was the generation before ours that was diminishing. Both my father’s brothers died in the mid-eighties and their wives followed on after them, one just before, and one just after, the year 2000. My sons were taking their A levels when I was called by my mother to say I had to return to London immediately.
“Your dad was taken bad two days ago,” she said. She didn’t cry or even sound that much upset. “He’s in hospital. The doctor, whoever he is, says he’s got lung cancer.”
I drove from Wakefield to London in four straight hours and, when I got to my parents’ house, my mother was still calmly in shock. “They say he’s going to die,” she said. “How can that be?”
We didn’t say anything at all about my father’s lifetime smoking habit. We just sat in silence in my mum’s living room and lit up cigarettes of our own. Suddenly, or so it seemed to me, I had blinked just once and my childhood and my youth had disappeared into a hole in the ground.
***
My father was conscious. Hooked up to machines and drips, he looked small and was yellow and the sight of him made me choke with a mixture of utter grief and total horror. Because he was on the Intensive Therapy ward I had to wear a plastic apron and gloves whenever I was near him. As I put the gloves on, I began to cry. Unfortunately Dad saw me, but he smiled anyway and said, “Got a fag, have you, kiddo?”
He hadn’t called me that since I was a child. It took me back to Uncle Brian (long dead himself by then) and his stolen cars, to England winning the World Cup in 1966, to West Ham and Mum’s mini-skirts and to Grandma and Granddad and the Time Machine. But then that, of course, was his intention. He and I, we had to go back there, because back there was something my father felt I needed to know.
“The doctors say I’m going to snuff it,” he said as I leaned over and kissed his forehead and then sat down beside his bed.
I didn’t even try to contradict him. My father had always been a pragmatic man. To tell him he was going to be fine would have insulted him.
“So now I’ve got to tell you something,” he continued. He wasn’t gasping for breath as I had imagined that he would. But then Mum had said the doctors had told her that lung cancer didn’t always do that to people, at least not until the very end.
“Do you remember when your granddad found that dead body in their back yard?” Dad asked.
“Yes,” I said. “Of course. In the old chicken coop. The police never identified him, did they?”
Some time after the policeman had visited the house when Dad and I had been there, another officer had turned up and told them that apparently the unknown man had been buried in a pauper’s grave.
“No, they didn’t,” Dad said.
“I expect they would have done these days,” I said. “What with DNA and everything.”
“It’s possible,” Dad said. And then he took one of my weird purple-gloved hands in one of his equally weird yellow mitts and he smiled. “But I know who he was,” he said.
“You?”
“Because your grandma told me,” he replied. “It was a long time afterwards. Your granddad was dead. But I knew she’d known something, without knowing quite what, for years.” He coughed. “Do you remember when that copper came round the house and your grandma took those old photo albums off you?”
That had always been indelibly printed on my memory, mainly because Grandma had never done that before or after that occasion. Also it was in the wake of that incident that things between Grandma and Dad appeared, to me, to cool.
“She did that,” Dad said, “because as you turned the page there was a picture of the man who’d died in the yard staring up at her. An old picture admittedly, but she was frightened that that copper would recognize the corpse from it and start asking questions.”
Shocked, firstly, to see my always so vital father in such a state, I was now almost beyond further reaction. I said nothing.
“I never made the exact connection at the time. Not surprising given what it was,” Dad said. “But that said, I had a bad feeling about it all from then on, and one day when Grandma was in one of her moods to talk I asked her about it. She said she’d tell me provided I never told Geoff or Eric and as long as I promised never to breathe a word to the police.”
“The police?”
Dad smiled again. He had such a big smile for a very thin man. “Don’t worry, kiddo,” he said. “You can tell them if you want to. I won’t hold you to anything. Everyone’s dead now anyway. I’m almost dead …”
I began to cry then and for a while we had to break off because Mum came in and talked to Dad about how well their garden was doing and other stuff to “take his mind off it all”. But then she left – she couldn’t bear more than a few minutes by his side, it was all far too distressing for her to take – and Dad continued his story.
“Your granddad was a regular soldier when the First World War started,” he said. “He was in his thirties and had just got married. He had, as you know, a lot of sisters and a brother who was very much younger than he was.”
“Uncle Harold.”
“Harold was seventeen. Sweet, he was, loved by everyone. Your granddad had a notion that the war was going to be long and vicious and bloody and he told his brother to keep as far away from recruiting officers and the like as he could. But of course he didn’t listen. Thought himself patriotic like most lads then. So not only did Harold join up, he went into the self-same regiment as your granddad.”
“Yes, but what …”
“It’ll all become clear,” Dad said and then he coughed and coughed until his face changed colour and, although one of the nurses told him it might be better if I left for a while, he clung on to me and wouldn’t let go. He had, he said, to get out what he needed to say, no matter what.
As soon as he could speak easily again, he said, “On the twenty-third of August 1914, your granddad’s regiment, the Middlesex, went into battle at Mons. They fought and many of them died and your granddad was wounded in the leg and was briefly shipped back home to recover. He got a lot of sympathy because of his wound and of course because his brother Harold had been killed. Or so everyone thought.”
I frowned. Uncle Harold’s heroic and untimely death had always been a cornerstone of our family’s mythology.
“Uncle Harold deserted,” my father said simply.
I was stunned. Even though the legend of Uncle Harold was no longer at the forefront of my thoughts it was something I had been brought up with, like a half-resented, half-loved religion.
“I was just as shocked as you are,” Dad said. He took my hand again.
“Did they shoot him?” I asked. Deserters were routinely shot during the First World War. Some of them were tortured too. Granddad used to mutter about “lads left tied naked in full sun to gun carriages”, men slowly dehydrating and going mad.
My father shook his head. “No. Harold got away,” he said. “He was a young silly kid, but your grandfather was a man and he made sure that Harold got out of there.”
“How?” Fields of battle were chaotic, yes, but even so I knew enough stories about officers shooting men who ran “the wrong way” to know how hard such an endeavour would be.
“Harold was terrified,” Dad said. “Sick all the time. Your granddad had to be behind him just to get him into the line. All he wanted to do was get out of there. The plan was simple and it could very easily have failed. In fact I think that your granddad did probably think that it had failed. Once on the field, Harold dropped to the ground as if he was shot. And there he stayed until our boys had passed him by. Your granddad behaved as if his brother had died and, when the day was over, there was indeed no sign of him.”
“But if he did survive,” I said, “why didn’t he visit his family? Where did he go? Did Granddad not try to contact him?”
“Granddad wouldn’t have contacted him,” dad said with a smile. “That wasn’t his job. His role, as you youngsters have it these days, was to make sure that no one ever knew the truth. You have to remember, kiddo, that deserters were regarded as scum even by their families back in the First World War. Granddad wanted to save his silly little brother’s life but he couldn’t tell anybody about it. That was the deal. If Harold got caught, then George, his brother, knew nothing about his desertion. If he didn’t get caught then he just disappeared. He was “dead” and that was the end of it. And as the years passed, even if Granddad had wanted to tell his family, he couldn’t have done so. Harold was awarded medals posthumously, he’s a grave somewhere in one of the war cemeteries over on the continent. He’d become a dead man and until that night back in November 1967 he’d stayed a dead man.”
Harold had come back? I began to feel chilly. I rubbed my arms with my strange purple hands and watched as Dad smiled up at me again.
“Do you remember Mo who used to live upstairs to grandma and granddad?” he said.
“Yes.” Mo had been funny to a kid like me, always staggering about all the time and, occasionally, swearing.
“Mo went down the pub and left the front door open,” Dad said. “Your grandma was doing the dishes in the scullery when this bloke walked into the parlour. She didn’t know who he was at first, couldn’t see his face. There was just a silence. Your granddad didn’t speak and neither did the other man. According to her, when she did go into the parlour, they were both just standing there, looking at each other. Harold, she said, was faced away from her. But she saw the expression on your granddad’s face and so she walked around so that she could see the man. She got a right shock.”
“Did she?” Grandma can’t have seen Harold since he was not much more than a child over fifty years before.
“Your granddad went berserk.” Dad coughed. “Said that Harold had broken their pact. Told him to bugger off to where he’d come from and never come back. All Harold kept on saying, apparently, was that he was lonely, that he couldn’t do it any more, that he wanted to be part of something again. Granddad hit him. He took the coal shovel in his hand and he hit his brother over the head with it. He did it just as Mo was walking through the parlour door as drunk as a sack. Harold had left it open when he walked back into your grandparents’ lives.”
Bile from my already grieving stomach rose up into my throat. “Granddad killed him.”
“He didn’t mean to. He was angry.”
“And Mo saw him do it?”
Mo had used the word “murder” to describe what had happened that night. I had never known why until that point. I had never even questioned it. Mo had been a drunk. He’d eventually died in a pub brawl in 1969, a year before my granddad’s death.
“Mo helped your granddad drag the body out to the yard,” Dad said.
“But how did Mo never tell anyone? How …”
“He told us, inadvertently,” Dad said. “But he never told the coppers. Your grandparents had the tenancy of that house. If they’d’ve had to go then the landlord would have chucked Mo out too. He didn’t want them carted off to prison. It was really an accident.”
“Granddad killed Harold!”
“He didn’t mean to.”
“Yes, but he did it anyway!”
“Love,” my dad said, “he turned up out of the blue. It was a shock, it … The cause of the unknown man’s death according to the coppers was a heart attack. He had a coronary and he hit his head on the side of the old chicken coop as he fell. That’s what they said.”
“Yes, but he didn’t …”
“He did die of a heart attack,” Dad said. “I asked and that was what I was told. The blow to the head wasn’t fatal.”
“So he had a weak heart anyway,” I said. “Doesn’t make what Granddad did right.”
“No. No, it doesn’t.”
My father didn’t know where Harold had been or what he had done in the long years that had followed the First World War. Maybe he hadn’t done anything much for fear of being discovered? Or perhaps he’d had a family who had left him or died and that was why he had turned up, lonely and weary, at my grandparents’ place on that ill-fated November evening? I realized then, as I realize now, that I would never, ever know.
Two days after my father told me about Harold, he slipped into a coma and died. Family and friends came from far and wide to attend his funeral and I often visit his grave up at the East London Cemetery. But about Harold I have remained silent. What good would upsetting what remains of the family about such a thing be now? Feelings still run high about the First World War even though modern opinions about desertion are more enlightened than they were at the time. I did do one thing, however. And shudder as I do when I write of it, I am glad that I did do it.
I didn’t find my Uncle Harold’s grave, but I did find a record of the death of the unknown man in my grandparents’ yard in November 1967. It is the police doctor’s estimate of Harold’s age that haunts me: 17. Seventeen. Write it twice in numbers and letters, it doesn’t get any better. And how can that be?
Harold, I estimated, had to have been seventy in 1967. So whoever my grandfather killed, it can’t have been Harold. And yet my grandmother said that it had been. And indeed why and for what reason would my gentle grandfather have attacked and killed a perfect stranger? I’ve spent sleepless nights wondering whether the man who entered my grandparents’ house that night was Harold’s son, his grandson or just someone who happened, for whatever reason, to look like him. My grandmother was, after all, frightened enough to not want the policeman who visited them to see any of Harold’s photographs, either in the albums or on the mantelpiece. But in spite of all that, was it just a case of mistaken identity? If it was, however, why did “Harold” say to Granddad that he was lonely, that he “couldn’t do it any more”?
Logically the man who walked into my grandparents’ house that night in November 1967 cannot have been my great-uncle Harold. It was his son, his grandson, a lookalike, someone completely different. A burglar that my grandparents, for some reason, projected Harold’s image on to. Maybe there was a resemblance of some sort there. But there is something else it could have been too. Against all logic Harold did come back and he did enter that house in West Ham with the full intention of breaking the pact with his brother, maybe because his heart was weak and he knew that he was close to death. But as he entered that strange, ossified place, something happened. By magic, by the action of the place we all laughingly called the Time Machine, by some trick of biology or act of God, Harold became again the boy he had been when he disappeared. Alone and desperate, this “ghost” appealed to my grandfather for help and this time he denied him. Harold “died” again and lies in an unmarked grave somewhere in the East London Cemetery where all my family lie.
But my grandfather said that he found a body in the back yard down by the chicken coop when he went out to the toilet one cold evening in November 1967. And maybe if that didn’t actually happen, then perhaps that was what was meant to happen and possibly I will just have to content myself with that. And, of course, with a load of black and white photographs that now live in boxes in my attic in Yorkshire.