Upstream

By John McMillan

UPSTREAM is a powerful portrait of life in Britain and Ireland during the last quarter of the 20th century, acutely observed by aspiring author Jim Mitchell as he and wife Bridget settle into a new life in the West Country.

The story centres on the married life of Jim and Bridget, the births of their children and the flow of people and events around them as they make the spiritual journey "upstream" to the source of life and meaning, against an increasingly unfeeling, commercialised world where the individual has come to count less and less.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris UK
• Release date: Aug 31, 2015
• ISBN: 9781514461679

John McMillan

John Kerr McMillan is an Irish writer resident in England. His previous five novels have been highly praised for their marvellous episodes and descriptions, powerful and detailed observation, vitality of language and a lovely lyricism that seems to come straight from the heart.

Book preview

Copyright © 2015 by John McMillan.

ISBN:       Softcover       978-1-5144-6166-2

                 eBook            978-1-5144-6167-9

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

Rev. date: 08/27/2015

Xlibris

800-056-3182

www.Xlibrispublishing.co.uk

707056

Contents

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

21

22

23

24

25

26

27

28

29

30

31

32

33

34

35

36

37

38

39

40

41

42

43

44

45

46

47

48

49

50

A long time ago I decided that the only way to write was to plant yourself down in the very centre of things and then set off, in the same railway carriage, with all the others. No different. Then at least you’re not a liar.

—Philip Callow

To Fiona, Sinead and Siobhan

1

At twenty-nine years of age I was quitting my job at the library and leaving London for the West Country to become a full-time mature student. It was the exciting culmination of a long-held dream.

Going to my last day at work in East London on that dull August morning, crossing Mare Street to the handsome Carnegie library building, I was loaded up with boxes of fresh cream cakes for my leaving. A couple of factory girls crossing the opposite way smiled as they passed me in the middle of the road and called out, Please, can we have share?

I grinned back at them but their cockney voices pierced me with an unexpected sadness to be leaving London, the city that had become home to me.

I grew up in Ireland but had lived in London through my twenties. It was three years now since Bridget and I had married and moved into the small flat over a doctor’s surgery on Colney Hatch Lane. The wedding had been a strain, as weddings are, then the honeymoon in France was overshadowed by our train crash. We were in a Smoking compartment at the rear of the train and escaped the deaths and injuries, but the experience left us shaken. We had soldiered on in a trance across Brittany, drowning our sensibilities in the wine and food and lovemaking.

When we got back to London the new flat felt strange, the district suburban and characterless after Stoke Newington where we had lived before, with its Victorian streets and Gothic features, its Jewish and West Indian communities and an East London kind of working class vitality.

Why didn’t we just stay there in our bedsitter on Manor Road, where we were happy? said Bridget, a beautiful Irish-looking young woman with large, expressive green eyes that glowed in her olive-tinted complexion. Her long, thick, wavy black hair and aquiline profile gave her the romantic look of a girl cavalier.

She was twenty-two, just graduated in English from North London Poly. We had been living together for two years and in the way that couples come to look alike I was a kind of pale male physical reflection of her with my long black hair and slender build.

We had so much in common from the start; there was her Irish heritage and being a student of literature, and both of us were in the young hippy groove of the day, the great music, the long hair and bohemian style.

Even if we didn’t have a bath there, I reflected on our old bed-sitting room, where I’d lie in bed watching Bridget at her morning ablutions over the sink. It does seem that the less you have, the happier you are.

But with her woman’s groundedness she didn’t go for that kind of sentimentality either. It’ll be alright here after we’ve decorated, she concluded.

Decorated? This was a new language to me, something that married people did. Sensible. I was twenty-six to her twenty-two, but less mature in some respects, as a man can be. We had lived together, slept in the same bed from the very day we first met as next-door neighbours in Hornsey, but I still couldn’t quite grasp the fact that we were married now.

Yeah, I couldn’t sit here looking at those grubby, smoke-stained beige walls, she said. A coat of emulsion will really lighten up the place.

Softening, I said, I’ve always appreciated your knack of turning the slum rooms we’ve inhabited into beautiful warm nests with just a few deft touches of cushions and rugs, posters and lamps.

You’ve done your bit too, love, she said kindly, lighting oil heaters and keeping the music going on the stereo. We liked to encourage each other with small compliments.

Anyway, she said, looking tired, in the meantime let’s go up the Minstrel Boy for a drink! I was always okay with that; the decorating could wait.

The tail-end of that London summer we got married was muggy weather. When you opened the sitting room window for a breath of air the din of the racing traffic on Colney Hatch Lane was deafening. But the bedroom at the back was quiet and glowing, filled with the evening sun. The picture window above our mattress on the floor framed the small, shady back garden and the suburban hedges and rooftops running back to the cemetery, a great city of the dead where we’d walk on Sunday afternoons, and the busy, humming North Circular Road alongside it.

We soon put our own stamp on the little flat, painting the walls brilliant white and sticking up our colourful posters: Blake and Burne-Jones, Mucha and Dali. Bridget sewed up William Morris curtains and chair covers for the sitting room, the bold leafy pattern like living in an enchanted wood. We had our wedding presents of dishes and pots and glasses and had acquired a taste for wine on our French honeymoon, so we began to enjoy the intimate little rituals of meals at home together with candlelight and music. We settled in, revelling in the comforts and consolidation of new married life.

As if to celebrate our married status and the privacy and luxury of our own small self-contained flat, we made love all over it, typically starting in the armchair, moving on to the hearth rug, across the carpet, discarding our clothing as we went, then up on the sofa, Bridget smiling round at me as if to say, Isn’t this just grand?

In the autumn Bridget started the one-year post-graduate teaching course at London University, while I continued to work at the library, commuting by three buses across north-east London. Unusually, as I discovered, I had come into librarianship precisely to indulge my love of literature. I had the whole wide world of books at my fingertips, literally, and all the time in the world to read them during the long twelve-hour shifts I worked in the quiet of the large reference section up on the first floor.

I loved the late evenings there when I was left alone to preside godlike over the books, with the last scattering of bowed heads, mostly students and pensioners, at the long tables stretching back under the high ceiling. The electric bulbs burned as the windows darkened and we were ensconced in light and warmth and the profound peace at the end of the day. Then the library was like the kingdom of heaven, raised up in wisdom and light above the dark, cold streets of the city at night.

The African students pored over their law studies, the pensioners nodded over newspapers. I was glad of any communication with the public who came in and I got friendly with George Agyekum, a Ghanaian student, bushy Afro hair framing a handsome black face, soft brown eyes and brilliant white teeth. He had a Presbyterian background, just like most of the Irish I had grown up with. And we both watched religiously the weekly TV Top of the Pops; George was a fan of the group Hot Chocolate who emanated an infectious, lively inter-racial bonhomie. George and I had the odd lunchtime drink together in the pub back of the town hall. And he brought me back a present of a kaftan from a trip home to Ghana. I was discovering the life-giving warmth of the African soul, that must lie deep within all of us.

Some of the lonely old men virtually lived in the reference library. Like Mr Tottle, a little deathly pallid stick of an old fellow, who dressed distinctively in a gangrenous Homburg and an ancient, ankle-length, rust-coloured, double-breasted, belted greatcoat.

Bin to the matinee, he announced one evening, arriving at the high counter where I presided, just inside the door. "Singin’ in the Rain. By jing those Yanks can foot the floor, eh?"

Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers? I said.

Eh? Mr Tottle cupped a hand to an ear. Whaddaya s’y? ‘Upstairs with Roger’? What is? Speak up, Ah cawn’t ear ya! He’d get tetchy like this at the drop of a Homburg, using his deafness like a weapon. "You got the Times there? Eh? What ya done with it then?"

The qualities are upstairs on the mezzanine shelves, I reminded him.

‘Upstairs’ again? What quality? What ya on abaht, ‘quality’? Ah’m arskin’ you for a noospiper!

Attempts at polite conversation with Mr Tottle quickly degenerated into a lot more trouble than they were worth.

Another regular evening visitor was the tramp-like woman in a shabby tartan woollen coat, with stubble around her mouth, who was pursuing some kind of legal vendetta against the authorities and came in to photocopy masses of documents at the machine on the small landing area. She transported her mounds of papers in a child’s pushchair; you’d hear her coming, the bump-bump of the wheels as she dragged it up the long curving flight of stairs.

She can afford the photocopies but she can’t afford soap and water, said Reg the porter, a boyish-looking older man, small and baby-faced with neatly parted, smooth white hair, who viewed the world generally with a tired deadpan cynicism. It was exactly the kind of comment my mother would have made about that woman.

One evening a middle-aged man crept up on me at the counter. Don’t know if you can help me at all, he said. I’ve got this problem: I’m turning into a writer.

Well, I could sympathise with that straight away; I’d had the same problem for years. The man explained, It’s sort of an obsession; I can’t stop writing. I wake up in the middle of the night with all these visions running through my head and I have to get up and write it all down. But it’s more like it’s writing itself really, I can hardly keep up with it.

Like automatic writing? Visions? I thought of Blake or Yeats.

Yeah, I’m back in Ancient Rome. It’s so real, like I’m a reincarnation from those days, remembering everything. Sometimes I think I must be going mad. The wife’s worried about me too. I wondered if you’d have a look at my work and see what you think, is it any good or what?

I said sure, I’d like to read it. I didn’t much care for the sound of Ancient Rome—I’d sat through bum-numbing matinee hours of Cecil B. De Mille Roman epics, Quo Vadis and Ben-Hur and The Robe, as a boy in the picture houses of the 1950s. But here was a fellow-writer after all, standing in front of me; the least I could do was offer some crumbs of encouragement to him.

He brought the manuscript in, slipping the brown envelope across the counter to me shiftily, avoiding my eyes and with never a word, sidling away to blend in with the other ordinary library users, like a fugitive.

It was a neat typescript, better presented than anything I had organised to date; I was still handwriting my stories in school jotters, the way I’d begun aged seven. And it must be hard for him, I thought, exposing his soul to a stranger like this, to be judged.

It was the first three chapters or so of a novel:

The Dagger in the Toga

by

Ernest Scrutt

The story opened very dramatically in Ancient Rome with the young male protagonist, Brutus, waking one night to find the city burning outside his window. By the second page, however, with the inferno still raging all around, Brutus was nevertheless finding time to make love to the delectable slave girl Nubia: Her soft white thighs trembled with desire. Gently he prised them open—

What, with a crowbar? said Bridget when I read it out to her.

And another page or two on, by the end of Chapter 1, Brutus was carousing away merrily, slave girls in attendance as he feasted on stuffed mice (starter) and roast eagle (mains), all washed down by a gallon jar of mead.

That was enough for me to stomach too. I wrote Ernest a polite note: This is a remarkable piece of writing indeed. Thank you for allowing me the pleasure of reading it. However, I am not sure that the subject matter does your writing justice. I believe writers do better to draw their inspiration from the real world around them, in your case right here in East London. I for one would find that far more interesting than life in Ancient Rome!

I returned the typescript in its secretive brown envelope with the note attached. The writer received the package in silence, eyes lowered, and stole away like a shadow. I never heard from him or saw him again. I felt guilty then that I might have done the wrong thing and shattered his dream of being a writer. But I was only being honest and saying what I truly believed, to write about something you know, rather hoping that he might come back to me and discuss my proposition.

In fairness, a publisher might well have advised him just the opposite: A promising start, Mr Scrutt! Can we have more carousals and slave girls, please? Alternate those with sadistic violence and general mayhem. We must keep our readers entertained.

2

I made a conscious decision to abandon my own old dream of being a writer. My marriage to Bridget was everything to me now. To that end I would pursue a career in the library service. There would be no blood-spitting tragic demise in an attic for me after all. I would continue to enjoy the creations of the artist’s tortured soul—Dostoevsky and Hamsun, D.H. Lawrence and Joyce, and all the other great writers, big and small—from the position of my own comfort and security. Literature needed book lovers and libraries as much as it needed authors.

On my weekday off from the library, alone in the little flat, I studied my British Constitution, the other A-level I needed for entrance to library school. I’d chosen it because it was the shortest A-level course in existence. It bored me rigid but I accepted that and waded on through the fat textbook with Big Ben on the red cover, making my notes with a worthy sense of self-discipline and deferred gratification, and even a dull sort of satisfaction. I recalled my late father’s ambition for me that I should study part-time for one of the chartered institutes, accountants or secretaries; well now I was heading in that direction, the Chartered Institute of Librarians, and could tell myself, like Rocky Graziano, somebody up there likes me.

By way of a break from Brit Con, I would empty our dirty-clothes basket into my little grey cardboard suitcase and lug it up the road to the launderette. Sitting in there while the washed clothes tumble-dried, I overheard a conversation between two women, one of them complaining, And now Ah’ve got the dog to look after too. Ah tell you, Ah’m too old to be down on me knees cleanin’ oop after hanimals… Her plaintive North Country voice seemed to sum up all the thankless dreary tedium of so many people’s existence.

In the butcher’s where I’d called during the wash cycle the head butcher was pronouncing on the latest outbreak of juvenile crime reported in The Sun, Wouldn’ happen on the Isle o’ Man, they still got the birch over there, see! He was such a jolly, rosy-faced character, salt of the earth workingman, that you wanted to agree out loud with him, Yeh, damn good thrashing would sort em all out! Did us no harm, did it?

We got friendly with Bella and Ted McCoubrey who lived up the road at Muswell Hill; she was on the teaching course with Bridget, while he’d just begun a career as a housing officer. They were members of a small alternative communist party with big initials. They rejected revisionist Russia and China and maintained that Albania was the only socialist country left in the world now; a framed black and white photo of Enver Hoxha hung discreetly on the wall of the party bookshop in Kentish Town.

However, the party was British as bully beef; it really was socialism in one country—theirs. Their dog-eared, out-of-date pamphlet on Ireland was patronising; the British lecturing the Irish on violence had to be a bad joke. But it did impress me that one of their recommended books, From Marx to Mao, was by George Thomson, the Professor of Greek at Galway University who had translated Maurice O’Sullivan’s Twenty Years A-Growin’ from the Gaelic.

Our friendship with the McCoubreys was based less on politics and much more on the best Celtic tradition of the crack or craic, meaning simply fun. Bella was from Belfast, Ted a Scot of Irish heritage. Free-ranging, hilarious, progressively wilder conversation was carried on over gallon jars of Boots’ homemade wine-fuelled, eight-hour Saturday night suppers at one or other of our flats. It was all quite a change for Bridget and me from the quiet, introspective focus of the old student-hippy gatherings with their marijuana-smoking hypersensitivity, low lighting and dominant psychedelic music.

It was refreshing to open up and talk for a change, let it all out. You couldn’t imagine Bella sitting there quietly, just being, like a hippy chick, she had so much to say about everything going on in her life and the society around her. There were rosy reminiscences of her East Belfast childhood, chanting a skipping-song as they jumped over a rope across the street in the shadow of the gantries; or, against this happy working class ideal, the mockery she had endured as she carried her violin case through the dockland streets.

At the McCoubreys’ you felt your feet firmly in the material world. Dialectical-materialist of course, rather than greed or the worship of things. Their big functional sitting room under the central ceiling light, the grounded camaraderie and Bella’s Sausage Sorrento steaming on the table—it sort of reflected a sense of the socialist future they envisaged. But they weren’t in any hurry. A hundred years to the Revolution, Ted predicted stoically. Have another glass of wine there while we’re waiting!

When we accused them of being conservative Stalinists once, Bella retorted, "Yes, as a matter of fact we are conservative, Jim. Conservatives are nice, you see."

I’d not noticed, Bella, I said, but I hear what you’re saying. Some on the so-called left can be hard to take also, it’s true.

Our evenings together were usually harmonious: stimulating, liberating and fun; only sometimes the drink got the better of us all and political arguments erupted, with an ultimate entrenchment into opposing hostile camps.

So come the revolution, I queried, what are you going to do about the Trotskyists like us?

I don’t know if we really were Trotskyists, but I liked the sound of it and Bridget and I had been briefly involved with the Revolutionary Socialist Party (RSP) in our Stoke Newington days. On a May Day we’d marched with the RSP from Hyde Park Corner up Oxford Street behind a huge cardboard cut-out of Leon Trotsky’s head on a float, in a blaze of red flags and banners, separate from all the other May Day marches and chanting the loudest, most revolutionary slogans. Shop and office workers hung out of the windows above for a glimpse of our noisy, jubilant red army. One of the policemen escorting our march turned to look at us old-fashioned, as they say, when we chanted:

"Disband standing army!

Workers’ militias now!"

That was one of my favourite slogans.

An older lady watching from the kerb shrilled poshly at us, You’re wrecking the country! But as far as we were concerned we were doing exactly the opposite and saving the country, its industries and public services, from the wrecking ball of capitalism.

Ted smiled at my question—what would they do with the Trotskyist opposition, come the revolution?—and made a cutting motion with one finger across his throat. It was his quiet, wicked sense of humour but we had drunk too much and were ready for a fight by now: Whaddaya mean? You’d liquidate us or what? Stalinists!

We argued on heatedly over the cheeseboard, plunging our knives deep into the Stilton and Cheddar in a murderous descent into internecine warfare.

I suppose we formed a tiny dinner-table microcosm of the world of politics. Sectarianism was rife on the London left: Trotskyist v Stalinist, then all the divisions within these broad categories: four Communist parties, at least four Trotskyist parties, then all the other factions, there was no end to the divisions between socialists and they seemed to dislike each other more than they did the capitalists.

Bridget and I found it interesting up to a point only, we were definitely socialist but felt unable to commit to any one party claiming to know it all like a religion. A broad left movement was emerging, and I thought that must be the answer, to bring everyone together, united around basic socialist principles.

But the question remained, whether you really had it in you to commit to the struggle, to stand on windswept corners trying to sell the Workers’ Press, trying to persuade other people all the time. You could end up like one of those poor Christian street evangelists waving their leaflets and pleading with the hurrying passers-by, Believe! Be Saved! Or gathering in small numbers in their tin tabernacles. Viewed as oddities, simpletons or freaks by the general public. Yet there was a part of me that yearned for the warm certitude of those believers, be they Christian or socialist, their sense of a mission to humanity in the name of a higher truth.

3

We maintained the weekend-hippy connection too, that followed on naturally from student days. Anthony would come on the bus from Islington Green with his Indian cloth shoulder-bag containing deals of the finest grass. He worked in the University Bookshop, a nice-looking young man, neat and clean-shaven, with collar-length long dark hair. I recall one typically quiet, wet, brown Sunday afternoon. Bridget was sewing up the William Morris curtains by hand. Anthony sat beside me on the Rest-a-Gest sofa-bed, rolling a joint. The grass was oily, sticky stuff.

Mind out, it’s rather potent, been mixed with alcohol and opium, he said.

Opium? I queried. "Like Coleridge, Kubla Khan."

Don’t worry, it’s only traces; you won’t turn into an opium fiend!

It was cosy there in our little flat, the paraffin heater burning and the lights on in the winter afternoon as it grew dark early, the rain drumming remorselessly. We drank a pot of English tea while one joint followed another. There was the usual vague, gentle conversation with Anthony, until the power of speech deserted us and there was no need at all for its ego-noise. We drifted on the dream-music of Spirit, The Twelve Dreams of Dr Sardonicus: And we got nothing to hide; all married to the same bride…

A pre-Raphaelite Bridget, long, wavy hair and long skirt, sat under the standard lamp in the corner by the bookshelves, stitching away steadily at her curtains. There was a homely tenderness there between us and our honoured guest in the small London room. While the music grew ever more inventive and amazing, with an ecstatic feeling of all the harmony and beauty and potential for liberation that exists in the world—if only people would shut up and listen like us!

Steve Miller was singing next, Fly like an eagle (to the Revolution) and he was telling those people: You-ou-ou run for the money; you don’t even know about wild mountain honey…

When Anthony left in the late afternoon I had to go and lie on the bed. I sprawled supine, eyes wide open and felt the soaring and striving of my being to become pure spirit, taking me higher and higher. Then not so pleasantly, the sensation of my head disappearing through the ceiling…

I woke an hour later, muzzy-headed, and wandered back to the sitting room like a sleepwalker.

Look, I’ve finished the curtains! Bridget exclaimed. That grass was really something! I went sort of manic and got all that sewing done!

We had a Sunday night tea and crawled off early to bed, ready for work in the morning.

I woke with the muzzy feeling still, as if part of my brain had gone AWOL. Monday morning! Unreal, man. I set off up the hill to my lift to work with Ted; I turned into the side streets that were a short cut to his place. The maze-like monotony of the quiet avenues increased the sense of unreality I felt, till suddenly I had no idea where I was, or worse still, who I was. A choking panic seized me. I kept on walking senselessly, past the doors of houses. The feeling lasted no more than a minute; I regained my memory—I was Jim Mitchell going to work, in London—but struggled to hang on to it as I continued on my way. The idea of being lost forever in those barren suburban roads was terrifying.

Then there was the Welsh connection: Jan who had worked at the library with me, and her boyfriend Graham. We found them out in the country now, near Tregaron, up a long track through several gates, in a rundown grey-stone farm cottage with derelict outbuildings.

The familiar sight of Jan in this remote, foreign-feeling place was reassuring, the wide grin of a warm welcome on her attractive funny-face with its frame of long, shiny, straight black hair, her small, curvy figure enveloped in a flowing Indian dress. Graham towered beside her, six-feet-four with a curtain of very long, straight blond hair down his back, like Rick Wakeman. He had a long Nordic face, delicate, almost feminine features, and was characteristically dressed in a sloppy Joe and heavily-patched cotton loon trousers with enormous flares.

They ushered us in through a lean-to kitchen to the living room; it was low-ceilinged, dim and damp-smelling in the country way, with an open fire and the heavy old farmhouse furniture supplemented by their own hippy bits and pieces of Indian rugs and throws, cushions and posters, making it theirs, young and cheerful and homely.

A welcoming joint was smoked. Plates of stew were consumed around the fire, then more joints passed around. There was talk of the old days in the house we’d shared in Hornsey: Graham’s stint as a warehouseman at Turnpike Lane—reading the socialist Morning Star every day—while Jan completed her library training. Then it was back to Wales; there was a whole hippy community living out here, scattered in cottages about the remote countryside.

Late in the night Graham produced a bundle of glossy girlie magazines he’d scored from the Brummy garage owner in the hamlet and we all sat round perusing them in a stupefied, stoned sort of fascination, only the sounds of the clock ticking and the fire slipping in the heavy silence of the country night, till our eyes were closing and it was time for bed.

Steep rickety stairs in a corner of the room ascended to the two bedrooms, the blanketing darkness and silence of the country as you drifted into sleep. It was strange waking to the cold morning light filtered around the curtain in the musty, cramped little bedroom with its sloping ceiling, damp, rose-patterned old wallpaper and when you drew back the rag curtain, the alien, bleak Welsh winter landscape, flat sodden fields running back to a low line of savage rocky hills, the whole scene fixed in an immutable dreary loneliness.

But downstairs the fire was lit and Graham was bustling around getting breakfast. He’d been and milked the goat. The frying pan was hissing and sputtering away sociably, bacon and sausages, tomatoes, eggs, a saucepan of beans, toast under the grill. He handed me a lighted joint, first of the day. The whole day would pass in a timeless dreamlike state, sustained by regular joints.

In the afternoon the four of us took a walk across the Welsh fields, the goat on a leash trotting along like a dog beside the magician-like, tall, long-golden-haired figure of Graham. The goat looked a knowing, devilish spirit. Graham was completely in his element. He’d drifted up here from his hometown of Southend to join the rural hippy scene. Jan, from Orpington, was a student at Aberystwyth. They’d had that London year when we met them but they could hardly wait to get back to Wales.

The hedged fields were frozen stiff in the pallid wash of wintry sunlight, with a remote, lost feeling. We were looking out for the magic mushrooms to gather, identified by their little nippled pale bonnets. There were beautiful brightly-coloured mushrooms too, deadly poisonous, growing on the bank of a stream under a trollish wooden footbridge.

Indoors again, we drank tea made from magic mushrooms that had been previously gathered and dried out.

The farmer Idris from the house above, who’d let the cottage to Jan and Graham, called by. He was expecting a phone call from his mistress; it was an arrangement he had with Jan and Graham, in lieu of rent arrears. The phone call didn’t come on time; the phone was in the kitchen and Jan invited the man to wait with us in the sitting room. He declined the offer of a seat and leant on the sideboard, a spare middle-aged figure. He seemed to skulk there, wormy, and squirm inside himself, like a condemned man.

Jan said sociably, Jim there works with a Tregaron girl at the library in London.

Aye, Shirley Evans, I said with a simultaneous sinking feeling that this was news he might not want to hear.

Shir-ley Ev-ans, is it ? He looked up, the whites of his eyes showing in the gloom. Got a few of them round these parts, I’d say!

I was praying for the phone to ring, to take the old farmer out of my sight, he looked so slimy and devious there, sleekit as we said in Belfast. Or, with hindsight, maybe just a troubled, weak man; the Welsh voice was gentle. The magic of the mushrooms was kicking in and waves of tension ran through me, mounting unbearably in my stomach.

Till suddenly I was distracted by the appearance of the lowering winter sun, like a keeking rosy, inquisitive face at a corner of the deep-set small square of window in the gable wall to one side of Idris. In a minute the sun had filled the window, hanging there perfectly framed, smiling in at me. I felt a kind of vital inter-connection to it, to the sun and all of nature.

The strained attempts at conversation in the claustrophobic, gloomy room proceeded. Ah, Max Boyce! Now he’s a boy! Idris cackled drily. He could laugh but I saw right through him: he was a dead man, going into rigor mortis right in front of my eyes.

The conversation would revive tentatively, momentarily, then drop off again into pointless silences. Idris declined Jan’s offer of a cup of tea—funny if she’d given him the magic mushroom tea by mistake! Meeting up with the mistress it’d be, Oh my God, Myfanwy, you’ve turned into a witch!

We all jumped as the phone drilled into the pregnant silence at long last and there was a great release of tension in the room as Idris scurried to answer it, closing the kitchen door firmly behind his deception.

4

At the Easter holiday, the year after our wedding, I took Bridget to Ireland, to meet my mother for the first time.

The Troubles, as they are called, were bad and on my family’s advice we’d put off a proposed visit the year before. The train to Liverpool was full of uniformed soldiers heading for the British Six Counties. Two soldiers sat opposite us at the table by the window, one telling the other about his experiences out in the jungle, pl’yin’ wivva monkeys inna trees. Took one to know one. When they asked us the time and they heard my Irish accent I saw their faces shut. They’d been warned about people like me.

Boarding the Liverpool boat, our luggage was security-checked and we were questioned by a Special Branch officer. I had not been over since ’72, just after the Bloody Sunday killings of civil rights marchers by the British army, and a lot of blood had flowed under the bridge since that terrible day.

The Branchie with his charmless invasiveness wanted to know about all our relatives on the island of Ireland, North and South, carefully recording the details we gave him, though he struggled with the spellings. We Irish were all criminal suspects in our own land, at the mercy of the gormless vindictiveness of the British authorities, that would later be highlighted in the shocking miscarriages of justice against the Birmingham Six, the Guildford Four and the Maguires.

Steerage had been booked out so we sailed first class with the Malone Road eccents ordering gee-and-tees all round in the bar. I recognised a young man with longish ginger hair and circled him tentatively till he turned to me and grinned broadly, Are ye not sp’akin’?

Jack! We had shared a flat at the Oval in 1970, a Belfast crowd newly arrived in London.

Are ye still writin’? It pleased me to be remembered first and foremost for my writing.

I told him, Oh yeah! I tried giving it up for a while there, but it proved impossible! It’s a drug, Jack, and I’m hooked for life!

Jack told the couple with him, You shoulda seen this fella in the flat we shared; he’d get back from work every night and sit on the couch in front of the gas fire and write, write, write till bedtime, no matter what the racket going on around him.

He introduced the young English couple, who seemed entirely conventional, nothing like the hippy crowd back at Oval. Business partners of mine, he explained. We’re going to see if we can open up a franchise in Belfast.

He’d been that way inclined, entrepreneurial, running a cleaning business back then at Oval, working long hours, earning good bread.

I asked about the old gang at the Oval, Paul and Bobby and Brian and Bruce, and he said he hadn’t seen them for ages. I must have a party soon, he said. Leave us your number and I’ll be in touch.

It cheered me up to see a friendly face, so much of my Belfast past had been lost now. Jack had not changed one bit. It’d take more than any Troubles to quell that sunny disposition and his Belfast brand of easy-going optimism.

And why should we all suffer anyway? The false division of imperialist partition that was the root of the Troubles had been imposed on us at gunpoint, fifty-plus years ago, with a total disregard for the ballot box in both Britain and Ireland. And now it had blown up in their faces we were all paying the price for that imperialist division, some of us with our lives.

Disembarking at Belfast in the early morning, we were herded out through a bleak sort of large concrete bunker. There was heavy security all the way, very much the look of a city under siege, a state of war. We took a taxi to my sister’s. In the