Fathers and Sons by Richard Madeley Read Free Book Online Page A

himself in his shaving mirror the day after his first-born had been safely delivered, must have considered the question all men do on such momentous mornings.
    What sort of a father would he make?
    It was a difficult one. His own father had been on another continent for much of Geoffrey’s childhood and William had hardly been an ideal replacement role model. Although my grandfather was fully reconciled with Henry, theirs was a relationship between adults. He really had no examples to follow.
    Oh, well. He would just have to do his best.
     
    Granddad was twenty-seven when James was born. He was just shy of thirty when a second son, John, arrived. Perhapsthe vivid reality of fatherhood with two lively little boys running around the farm was reassuring; Geoffrey saw that life could offer more than forced goodbyes and sudden partings.
    John was a bright, inquisitive boy. Before he was three, he became fascinated by the weekly ritual of paying the farm hands their wages. The night before payday the little boy insisted on polishing the copper pennies and silver sixpences, shillings and florins. Only then was his father allowed to count them out in gleaming towers on the kitchen table. To the child, they looked like piles of treasure glinting there. One Irish labourer, whose name has not survived the passing of eighty years, made the same joke every week. The lad had, he said, ‘taken a shine’ to him.
    One gusty morning in early spring, John and James were sent to play in the orchard that stood behind the house. As usual, they were given strict instructions to stay clear of the well, which lay like an unblinking dark eye in the grass between the pump room and the trees. That well was still there when I was a child, roughly boarded over but still a brooding presence that both fascinated and frightened me.
    On that chilly morning so long ago, it wasn’t the well that drew either boy to its dark mouth. The threat was all around them as they played in the friendly orchard in the sunshine. It was in the breeze whispering through the branches above their heads. A dry, cold wind flowing down from the Welsh hills on the horizon, summits still bleak in a winter that lingered around their old bald heads.
    John had removed his coat as he ran around in the deceptive sunshine. Later, he began to shiver and complained of aheadache. He was put to bed and remained there the following day, suffering from a ‘chill’. By evening he was running a high temperature and starting to breathe strangely. The village doctor was called: the Madeley’s second son was diagnosed with pneumonia, and the parents were advised to prop the child up on pillows during the night to help drain fluid from John’s chest.
    The next day, he died.
    He was four years old.
     
    Child mortality was common right up to the Second World War and the increasingly widespread availability of antibiotics and mass immunisation. But John’s illness was so abrupt, so casual in its easy, invisible arrival and swift, pitiless departure that my grandparents could scarcely comprehend what had happened. The shock stayed with them for the rest of their lives. Decades later, when my sister and I drove on visits to Shawbury with our parents, the last mile of the journey was always accompanied by the same solemn instructions.
    ‘Don’t talk with your mouths full. Comb your hair before coming down to breakfast. And don’t mention John.’
    My grandparents could barely speak of him. There were no photographs of him to be seen anywhere in the house; no favourite toy placed carefully on a shelf or dresser. It was almost as if he had never been.
    Only once did I catch a glimpse of him. My grandmother kept an ancient bound-wooden chest in the farm’s livingroom. The old box was full of the bric-a-brac of half a century, the not-quite detritus of a family’s life.
    I was fascinated by this trunk and one afternoon, when rain fell from the sky in pounding torrents, my grandmother gave me