From the Lighthouse: Selected Writings

By Paul L McGregor

From a back garden near Liverpool to the borders of Afghanistan, from Moscow to New York, author Paul L. McGregor takes us on a journey of discovery through fiction and journalism.

A son of the working class, he presents narratives that combine fictional portraits of those who today would be called underprivileged with journalistic pieces whose countercultural commentaries offer a reminder of long-lost and much-maligned cultural, spiritual, and personal values. In these tales, McGregor recalls his parents, his childhood home, and his working-class neighbourhood in England; the collapse of the workers paradise in Russia; and meeting the saintly Fr. Ho Lung in Kingston, Jamaica. Riding a bus to the Mexican border an ex-convict gives him a lesson in dignity, and centuries-old frescoes in Italy lead him to reflect on what future awaits the Western world.

By turns poetic and whimsical, this insightful collection of stories describes one mans quest to sail off into the world and share the adventure.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Archway Publishing
• Release date: Jul 28, 2016
• ISBN: 9781480831957

Paul L McGregor

Paul L. McGregor was born in Dublin in 1955. He graduated from the University of Oxford in 1978 with a degree in modern history and modern languages. He has lived and worked in France, Belgium, Russia, Azerbaijan, Central Asia, and Lebanon. He now lives in New York where he works as an interpreter. He interpreted for Pope Benedict XVl at the United Nations in 2008 and for Pope Francis in 2015.

Book preview

Part One

SHORT STORIES

1

THE GARDEN

[First published in Ireland’s Own Anthology 2015.]

Moving into their new house on that chilly day in January 1957 came after a long wait for Eric and Lizzie. They had spent the first six years of their married life with Eric’s parents or in upstairs digs - a nosy landlady downstairs and, with each pregnancy, the threat of eviction. Now, having finally reached the top of the waiting list, they signed all the papers at the council offices, picked up the keys and rent-book and went to find their new home. They’d been allocated a house on a street called Murrayfield Drive.

The word ‘Drive’ had an elegant note to it, but Eric knew it in no way diminished his wife’s resentment at moving into a council-owned, semi-detached rather than into a house of their own, even if it was on a Drive. So they exchanged few words as Lizzie pushed the pram, a tight grip on the handle, another ambition for her married life frustrated, while Eric carried their two suitcases, painfully aware that he’d fallen in her esteem. Adding to his discomfort was the suit and tie he was wearing on a weekday when he’d normally be in factory overalls, but he’d worn them to make the right impression with the council officials.

The children, aged four and three, sat quietly, face to face in their high, Silver Cross pram, with an infant’s awareness of the adult tension around them.

The new estate was less than a quarter of a mile from the Irish Sea and Eric caught the smell of seaweed on the breeze, while the cries of the seagulls brought to mind the B&I Ferry docking at dawn at the quayside in Dublin. It was where they had met.

The air had a taste to it too; a fresh taste, suggesting exposure to the elements, something he had not felt growing up in a narrow street of terraced houses in working-class Birkenhead. But for the urgency of finding the new house and the weight of the suitcases, he’d have gone down to the sea to contemplate the changes in his life since he’d last crossed it and had met Lizzie at a dance in the National Ballroom. Eric was prone to such reflections, but, as one of six boys, he’d learned not to voice them for people only laughed.

What’s more, there was no time to imagine what might have been. He had two young children now and a third on the way. So his thoughts shifted from Dublin and the Irish Sea to the furniture they’d have to buy and the importance of not missing the rent - all that on his weekly wages of £18.

When they finally found the address that was written on the small, blue rent-book, Eric put down the suitcases and handed the key to Lizzie.

‘You open it,’ he said.

They exchanged glances as she took the key from him, both silently acknowledging the significance of the moment, while his tender gesture prompted a brief truce in her resentment.

The door swung open for the first time and Eric fell into reflection again. As he bent to pick up the suitcases he pondered now on how often that front door would open and close over the years ahead, how many children, grandchildren perhaps, would cross that threshold, what dramas would be played out on the stage they were entering. But the children jostled him from his thoughts, jumping out of the pram to run around the echoing rooms, enjoying freedom of movement for the first time. The sound of their feet on the bare floorboards set him to calculating the cost of putting down linoleum.

Lizzie took off her coat and automatically climbed the stairs, forgetting they could now occupy the downstairs too. As he heard her footsteps echoing above his head, something gave way inside Eric. He sat down on the stairs and let flow tears of released anxiety. At last, they had a place of their own!

She found him there, the trembling in his shoulders warning her something was wrong. She’d never seen him cry before, and she’d never see him cry again, neither at four more births nor at the death of his own parents. He was an unfathomable man and she knew that her questions would elicit no answers. So she stood there, her hand on his shoulder until, with simultaneous instinct, they both became aware of the silence around them.

‘Where are the children?’ Lizzie asked, voicing their common thought.

She ran back upstairs while Eric went into the kitchen. It was then that he saw it - through the window he caught his first sight of the long garden stretching out far behind the house.

He hadn’t expected the place to have a garden and certainly not one so big. In the hyperbole of his thoughts he compared the discovery to that of the Spanish explorer he’d once read about, who, after fighting his way through the tropical forests of Panama first set sight on the Pacific Ocean.

The vegetation had grown high while the house had stood empty and movement in the undergrowth revealed the children’s location.

‘They’re down here, Lizzie!’ he shouted to his wife as he opened the back door and went out to make an initial charting of the wilderness.

He couldn’t quite make out where their garden ended and the neighbour’s began, but he reckoned it was close on fifty yards long and twenty across. His childhood home had been a two-up, two-down with an alleyway at the back, so he’d never envisaged anything like this. He came from a family of ships’ riveters, adept at steel, not soil. So he stood and stared at it all wondering how he’d manage, having never touched a spade in his life.

* * *

The children were too young ever to remember how this land was conquered. In later years they could never recall how their father had managed to replace the weeds and wild grass with a decent-looking lawn, flower-beds and rows of potatoes, carrots and beetroot. The earliest black and white photographs taken by their mother with her Brownie box camera showed a garden already under control if not manicured. But he must have been out there, night after night and at weekends, first scything through the high weeds, then digging the heavy soil, planting grass and setting aside a part of the land for vegetables.

He did once tell them that it was their uncle Bernard who had laid the path of crazy paving right to the bottom of the garden. But they had no memory of that engineering feat. For them the path had always existed - an archaeological find uncovered at a stroke of their Dad’s scythe. They were like late settlers in a land long since colonized.

Nor did they remember the day their grandfather brought the sapling that became the apple tree. For them the apple tree had always been there too. It was a reference point in their childhood geography as fixed as the South Pole.

‘I’ll race you to the apple tree and back,’ they’d shout in their games and when asked where the dying, stray cat had ended up they’d say, ‘Oh, we buried him under the apple tree,’ taking morbid delight in being party to that occult knowledge.

Though they had no recollection of their father’s original inroads, the boys would always remember how on Sunday afternoons, braces hanging loose off his shoulders and white cotton shirt open at the neck, he’d push the mechanical lawn mower up and down, up and down, leaving alternating strips of dark and light green lawn behind him. They’d be on call to unhook the collecting bin and carry the cut grass to the ‘tip’ in the far corner of the garden. Blades of grass would spill out and get lodged in their summer sandals or float in the air and land in their hair or on sweaty faces. That night, leaves of grass would even turn up, stuck to the edge of the bathtub after they’d pulled the plug.

And they’d be glad when their father finished the mowing because their football game could resume. The garden would be Goodison Park once again. The eldest would always get to be Everton and the younger would reluctantly accept to be West Ham, but never Liverpool! It was not till they were well into their teens, when homework replaced football, that grass began to thrive where the bare patches used to mark the goal-area.

For their mother, the garden was mainly somewhere she could hang out the washing while the children played.

‘They’re quite happy in the garden; they don’t want to play out in the street with those rough ones from around the corner,’ she’d tell friends and neighbours if they suggested her children were being anti-social or worse, being isolated against their will.

For the children it was indeed where they tasted freedom from outside interference. In the garden they could be whoever they wanted to be: the England captain scoring the winning goal against Brazil, a cowboy on the wash-house roof, defending the home from Red Indians shooting arrows from beyond the apple-tree.

It was also where they gained the perspective they took to the world outside. Seeing their father struggle to get a decent crop of potatoes, and weeds that always grew faster than flowers, they had no illusions about nature. It was not the ‘mother’ spoken about by those who had only a theoretical acquaintance with it. It was more a wicked witch. The smell of freshly cut grass brought to them memories of hard labour not of lazy summers and the ‘green’ delusions of their richer friends would always strike them as naive.

And life, like their games, had rules. From the way the grass kept growing and the weeds kept spreading, they knew that if certain things in life were not kept under control all their father’s civilizing efforts would be thwarted and reversed.

As they grew up and bought their own homes, the garden in Murrayfield Drive generated other gardens, as though from pollen carried on the