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

permission to rummage through it. I was about nine years old.
    Once I had excavated the disappointing top layer of old women’s magazines, knitting patterns and yellowing bills for obscure farm machinery, things got interesting. The barrel and lock of a rusting .410 shotgun–no stock–and a mouldering gun-cleaning kit that smelled of crushed walnuts. Clanking mole traps, all springs and chains and sharp snapping jaws. My grandmother had once set them under her lawn to catch the little beasts so she could sell their velvet skins to passing tinkers.
    A medium-sized cannonball with the faded label: ‘Moreton Corbett–Civil War’. And finally, right at the bottom, hidden by a faded embroidered cushion, a little glass jar with a brass top. It might have once contained perfume or face cream, but as I held it up to the rain-streamed window I could see it was filled with tiny balls of silver and gold paper; the kind of foil that used to line cigarette packets. There were dozens of them, and I poured a few out. What could they mean?
    Suddenly a hand fell on my shoulder and I yelped with shock, scattering the little balls over the floor. My grandmother bent down and picked them up wordlessly, dropping them carefully back into the jar and gently screwing the lid back on. When she’d finished, she looked at me.
    ‘They were John’s,’ she said simply. ‘His money. He was toolittle when he…well, he was too little to have real money, you see, so he made his own.’ She gestured. ‘The gold ones were pennies and the silver ones were shillings. When his father paid the men their wages, John used to pretend to do the same with these.’
    The next day, helping my grandfather move sacks of grain in a store shed, I asked him with the directness of childhood: ‘What happened to John, Granddad?’
    He stood quite still for a few moments and then slowly sat down on one of the dusty bags. He lit a cigarette, considered it, and then he began to tell me about that March day in the orchard, two brothers running between the trees, and Death beckoning one of them as they played. When he’d finished, he said he’d stack the rest of the bags by himself. I never asked about John again.
    John’s death was, I believe, the psychological tipping point for my grandfather. Since he was ten years old he had done his best to deal with the worst fate and circumstances could do to him. He had been determined, tenacious and, on occasion, magnificently, heroically, non-judgemental. A tough self-reliance had seen him through tests and challenges that would have brought other men to their knees.
    But this…this was too much. This wasn’t fair. Yet again, someone he loved had been snatched from him. Would this be the way of it to the end of his days? Loving and losing, loving and losing, over and over again? It could not be borne; there must be some way to protect oneself from endless passages of such savage pain.
    Geoffrey had wondered what sort of a father he wouldmake. After John’s death, my grandfather quietly withdrew into an emotional fortress. The drawbridge was drawn up. Life would go on, but Geoffrey would not have his heart broken again. For the time being, he had placed it beyond reach.

Chapter 4
COLD COMFORT FARM

J ohn died when my father was still a baby. Just over a year earlier, on 2 May 1928, the village midwife delivered the Madeleys’ third son in the front room of a crooked half-timbered cottage next to Shawbury’s church. The village and countryside around it had barely changed from the day Geoffrey arrived there, twenty-one years before.
    It was still a quiet rural backwater. A few more families owned cars but many did not. In Shawbury, the age of the horse had still not passed.
    By no means all farms and cottages had electricity, and oil lamps and candles could still be seen glowing at windows after dark. Something of the nineteenth century lingered about the place.
    But appearances were deceptive. Christopher Holt Madeley