Drowned lives, p.2
Drowned Lives, page 2
That fateful morning, I’d decided to make the canal restoration my first stop. The day was turning out clear, with a pale blue sky and a bright February sun. The weekends had been constantly wet for weeks, and I hadn’t managed an opportunity to photograph the latest stage of the work. Reinstatement of a buried lock was now being extended to the site of the old Fosseway Wharf, where vast expanses of undergrowth had to be cleared.
There was a work party from the Waterway Recovery Group on site all week, and I knew a hired JCB had begun to haul the soil and assorted debris from the canal basin. Thousands of tons would have to be shifted before the structural condition of the abandoned wharf could be assessed. It seemed a good chance to capture the first sections of brickwork being exposed.
The WRG were all volunteers. They were many things in their ordinary lives – teachers, solicitors, bus drivers or factory workers. All they had in common was a willingness to give up their spare time to labour in the mud for no reward other than knowing they’d made a small contribution towards a bigger scheme.
Canals seem to hold a fascination for many people. As more of the Ogley and Huddlesford Canal emerged from its premature grave, dozens of volunteers were coming forward to help, organisations were finding funds to support the project and businesses were showing an interest. Not long ago, the whole subject of inland waterways had been a mystery to me, but I was beginning to grasp the appeal.
I’d already recorded the progress on the restoration of the lock. The early stages had been the most fascinating, as digging parties moved onto a completely filled-in site. Trenches had been dug to locate the wing walls of the lock, and one trench had hit a soft spot which turned out to be the paddle frame and drop shaft a couple of feet below ground. A trial hole on the land boundary exposed the distinctive orange brickwork of the arch above the approach ramp to the old bridge.
Restoration had suffered a setback when plans in the British Waterways archives revealed a three-foot-wide land drain had been cut through the head walls and inverts of all three locks in the Fosseway flight. The drain had caused damage to the head walls, and the floors of the lock had been partially cut away. A survey showed that just over three feet of masonry had been taken off the walls of the lock, creating yet more work for the volunteers.
By now, things were different. The lock had been fully excavated and repaired, including the weir and by-wash. Thanks to the land drain, it even contained water. A stile and picnic table were being erected, and work was under way to re-establish the towpath.
If you’re trying to be a freelance journalist, it helps if you can take your own pictures. Part of my inheritance had gone on a good Nikon 35-millimetre SLR camera. Since my photographic skills were self-taught, I’d adopted a technique explained to me once by an old newspaper staff photographer. If you shoot off enough exposures, one or two of them are bound to come out all right, he said. So I keep shooting whenever the conditions are right and the opportunity arises. And occasionally they do come out okay.
I set up my tripod and took pictures of the lock site for a few minutes without taking much notice of the activity. There were twenty or thirty people around, most of them anonymous in overalls or thick sweaters and jeans, and all wearing white hard hats. There were a few vehicles coming and going, and a dumper truck reversing on the lockside. It was only when I’d finished off a film and was packing my camera away that I became aware of Andrew Hadfield. He was a recent recruit to the restoration team. An architect by profession, he’d proved a valuable addition. Today, he was taking an interest in the visiting volunteer work party.
Andrew waved to me from the head of the lock, where he stood with an old man at his side. If only I’d taken that gesture as a warning instead of an invitation, things might have been different.
‘This is Chris,’ Andrew was telling the old man as we squelched towards each other. ‘He’s our resident reporter and chronicler. He gets us in the news now and then, when he can spare the time from his other work. Theatre and book reviews he does as well. He’s a cultured chap, you see.’
There was something in the tone of Andrew’s voice that told me I ought to have gone back to my book reviews right then and let my brain wallow in the familiar words and sentences. Books and plays are a series of worlds in which to escape, where reality is kept at bay, at least for a while.
The old man was stepping forward, his shoulders stiff inside his overcoat. He picked his way carefully over the mud, tapping his stick on the broken bricks. The sound was like the ticking of a watch, slow and relentless, like the old carriage clock back at Stowe Pool Lane.
‘You don’t know me – do you, Christopher?’ he said.
‘No, I’m sorry. I don’t.’
I hadn’t been called Christopher for a long time, not since my father had died three months before. It wasn’t a name used by friends or workmates, and certainly not by strangers who’d just been introduced. It was a name used only by family, and a family was something I no longer had.
Andrew laughed in delight at my expression, and took my arm to pull me closer to the old man.
‘I’ve got a surprise for you, Chris. This gentleman is Mr Longden. He’s an old friend of the family.’
‘Really? A friend of my family?’
I looked at the old man again. There wasn’t anything out of the ordinary about him, nothing that should have given me that strange, uncomfortable feeling when I first saw him. Despite a slight stoop, he was as tall as Andrew, over six feet. He wore an old coat, buttoned up tight against the chill, and leaned on a strong stick with a well-worn ivory handle in the shape of a ram’s head. His white hair was thinning on top but he’d allowed it to grow thick round his ears and on the back of his neck. A woollen scarf worn inside his overcoat didn’t hide the fact that his shirt collar was too loose on the sagging skin.
‘Yes, my name is Samuel Longden,’ he said. ‘Have you heard of me?’
The question seemed important to him. But it didn’t take much thought before I answered.
‘Not at all.’
A mixture of reactions passed across his face. Pain, disappointment, resignation – and some other powerful emotion I couldn’t name, but which made him thrust his body forward, so that he could grasp my hand in his cold, dry fingers. I stared at him in amazement as the old man leaned in and spoke with a sudden intensity.
‘Christopher,’ he said. ‘You don’t know what it means to me to meet you at last. Because there’s only you left now, you see. Only you.’
2
We sat in my Escort, parked in the lay-by on Fosseway Lane, close to the level crossing for the branch line to Brownhills. Andrew had been too pleased with himself, too intent on being part of our conversation, for me to want to linger at the lock site where he could listen to what Samuel Longden had to say. So I’d invited the old man into my car on the pretext of the cold, and he’d readily agreed.
The Escort had taken quite a hammering over the years. The inside trim was showing signs of wear, and the bodywork was full of chips and scratches that were revealed whenever I took it through a car wash, which wasn’t often. Most worrying at the moment was a strange rattle in the engine at low revs. I didn’t dare take it to the garage, for fear of what they might find wrong, and how much it would cost.
The heater worked, though, and gradually we began to warm up. The old man sat hunched in his overcoat, staring out at traffic passing over the level crossing. Once we were in an enclosed space, I became aware of a smell about him – not the stale, unwashed odour I might associate with old people, but a sort of mustiness, a suggestion of mildew, like a stack of old books in the cellar of a second-hand bookshop.
‘It’s fascinating to see the old canal re-appearing after so many years,’ he said. ‘Wonderful. It’s history coming full circle. This was Lock Eighteen, wasn’t it? Fosseway Lock?’
‘No, Fosseway is number seventeen. Eighteen is Claypit Lock. Across the road there, to the south.’
‘Of course.’
‘And just beyond that is the site of Fosseway Wharf. It’s completely overgrown now.’
He looked at me with a smile. ‘You’ve become quite an expert, haven’t you, Christopher? Very admirable.’
The windows of the car were starting to steam up, so I wound the handle down on the driver’s side to let in a bit of the cool February air.
‘I’m not an expert on anything,’ I said. ‘Journalists rarely are. The restoration provides good copy for me, that’s all. So I’ve made it my business to know a bit about the history of the Ogley and Huddlesford.’
He propped the handle of his stick against the scuffed dashboard. The grey hair on the back of his neck curled onto his coat collar, and his large nose had turned pink with the cold. His eyes were watering slightly, and he pulled a tissue from his pocket to wipe them. Though he was an old man, there was nothing feeble about his voice. It was steady and clear, with a local accent distinguishable under an educated veneer.
‘Just one lock dug out so far, and a new bridge, isn’t it? What do you think the chances are of restoring the entire seven miles of canal?’
‘Very slim,’ I said. ‘Oh, they’ve got the enthusiasm, that lot down there. But just think of the cost. We’re talking ten million pounds at least, and the estimate is rising by the year. Where’s the money going to come from? Most of the line of the canal has been filled in, parts built over completely – factories, housing estates, garden centres, you name it. Locks have been broken up and bridges demolished. And that’s not to mention the new link road. It will cross the track of the canal twice, and the restoration trust has to pay for bridges, if they want them. It seems obvious to me that it’s more work than a handful of volunteers can possibly manage. We’ll all be dead long before there are narrowboats passing through Lichfield again.’
‘I see you know how to talk like a journalist. But I’ve been told your heart is in it, and I think they’re right.’
‘Who said that exactly?’
‘Oh, people I’ve asked about you.’
I didn’t like the sound of that. There were no dark secrets in my life, but the idea that anybody had been going round asking questions about me felt uncomfortable all the same.
The old man made no attempt to wind down his own window. He continued staring straight ahead while the glass misted up and blotted out his view of the road. His eyes had a faraway expression. I didn’t know what he was looking at, but it wasn’t anything in the real world.
‘Are you really a friend of my family?’ I said.
He turned towards me then, and fixed me with those pale eyes. He smiled, showing a set of teeth that must have been his own, judging by the unevenness and the staining of the enamel on his front incisors. For the first time, I noticed the short, white whiskers on his upper lip where he’d failed to shave properly.
‘Yes, Christopher. I’m Samuel Longden.’
‘The name still means nothing to me, I’m afraid. My parents never mentioned you.’
‘And you never met your grandfather, of course.’
‘He died long before I was born.’
‘Yes, I know.’ He turned away again and used the cuff of his overcoat to wipe a small, damp space in the condensation on his window. ‘It’s understandable, of course. But I thought I was just ignored, not forgotten entirely.’
His words sent a small, inexplicable shaft of guilt through my heart. But I couldn’t see a justification for feeling guilty, and I shrugged it off immediately.
‘You were a friend of my grandfather’s then.’ I realised they must have been of the same generation, though my grandfather hadn’t survived to anything like the age Samuel Longden had reached.
‘I knew him very well indeed,’ he said. ‘Yes, your grandfather. George Buckley.’
‘If you were a very close friend, I’m sorry that I haven’t heard of you.’
‘I shouldn’t be too surprised. There were things that happened between us, between myself and your grandfather. They meant I was no longer welcome in the Buckley family. Now I can see I was never forgiven. “Unto the third generation” they say, don’t they?’
He said this with such a note of despair that I felt sorry for him. I wanted to tell him something different, to assure him I’d heard of him after all, that my parents had talked about him often, and he’d been such a close friend of my family that I almost considered him an uncle. But I could assure him of none of these things. They wouldn’t have been true.
‘Perhaps you’d like to tell me about yourself,’ I said, as kindly as I could.
He rallied then, shook his shoulders and gave a small smile. ‘Of course. I must warn you, though – I’m happy to tell you a certain amount about myself. But there’s something I want from you in return.’
And there it was. The trap. He thought he had a hold on me, and perhaps he was right. I was curious, and whatever it was he wanted, I was going to have to cope with it. I hoped he couldn’t see the expression that passed across my face.
‘That sounds like a deal.’
He was beginning to look better in the warmth of the car. A bit of colour returned to his face, and his shoulders relaxed. He caught me looking at him, and I got that frisson of shock again as our eyes met. It was as if I was looking at somebody I’d known all my life.
‘You have seen me before,’ he said, as if reading my mind. ‘Though you might not have noticed me at the time. I’ve certainly seen you, Christopher.’
‘I don’t remember. I suppose it must have been a long time ago?’
‘Not at all. It was three months ago. I was at your father’s funeral.’
‘What?’
‘I didn’t make myself known, of course. I wanted to come along because … well, because your father was George Buckley’s son. I’ve always regretted that it wasn’t possible for me to attend your grandfather’s funeral. I knew I wouldn’t have been welcome. But with your mother and father both gone, I hoped there’d be no one to object to my presence. I took a gamble with you, Christopher, as to whether you’d recognise me. But now I see that I worried unnecessarily.’
My father’s funeral was still very clear in my mind. There had been few mourners at St Chad’s. Even fewer had bothered to come the short distance from the church to the house at Stowe Pool Lane. Most of those who appeared were my mother’s family, the Claytons and Bridgemans, the same tight-lipped middle-class couples from Birmingham who’d attended my mother’s funeral a few months earlier. Their cloying sympathy had irked me, but the knowledge that it would almost certainly be the last time I saw any of them was a consolation.
There had also been some of my father’s former colleagues – most of them rather depressed-looking men who’d been made redundant at the same time as him from the engineering factory on the Ringway industrial estate. None of those had come back to the house, so there had only been a small clutch of in-laws and one or two neighbours who were openly inquisitive about what I intended to do with the property.
As our silent group stood at the graveside, my mind had wandered over many subjects, none of them related to memories of my father. Like the neighbours, I was considering what I’d do with the house. I could sell it, but what would I use the money for? The property was vastly more desirable than the grubby flat I’d shared in Stafford. The question was whether I could bear to live in a house full of reminders of my parents. It was this mental debate that might have made me seem reserved and withdrawn.
If I’d seen an old man among the gathering, white haired and leaning on a stick, I couldn’t remember taking any notice of him. I did recall a flurry of excitement and alarm among some older in-laws as they queued to examine the wreaths. The occasion had been solemn and wordless until that moment, and the flutter of movement was like a raucous child bursting in and dancing round the hearse. I’d also been aware of the faces turned suddenly towards me, anxious or frankly prurient, waiting to see my reaction to something. The men had fingered their black ties nervously, the women clutched their handbags and tilted their hats into the wind as they studied me with avid eyes. But I hadn’t known what it was they expected, and I didn’t care. They’d wanted something I couldn’t give them.
Then, looking at Samuel sitting next to me in the car, I had a sudden flash of insight, like that neurological flicker they call déjà vu. It was something I should have known at the time. Maybe, in a way, I had.
‘You sent a wreath, didn’t you?’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘There were some there who knew of my existence – your mother’s mother and her brothers. They were aware of the split, though perhaps not the details. I suspect my name has become a sort of fable, mentioned only in whispers.’
‘A split? That sounds intriguing. Something to do with my grandfather?’
‘Your grandfather and me. That’s the reason I was unwelcome.’
So there was a secret in the family. Was I the only one who hadn’t known about it? I felt a flush of anger at the thought of those chattering in-laws hugging a bit of knowledge to themselves. They’d known about it, and yet they’d eaten my sandwiches and sausage rolls and drunk my beer and said nothing. They’d muttered and winked to one another and uttered not a word. In the end, the only person who’d come forward to tell me the truth was the man himself.
I studied Samuel’s distant blue eyes. I guessed it had taken some courage on his part, in the face of likely rejection.
‘I suppose I was trying to draw attention to myself,’ he said. ‘I wanted you to be reminded of me. I wanted to see if you’d get in touch. I was foolishly hurt that I’d never been informed of your father’s funeral. When you didn’t make contact, I thought you still hated me.’
