So Many Ways to Begin. Jon McGregor

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       4 Tobacco tin, cigarettes, Christmas card, 1914

      He pushed open the door of the room at the end of Auntie Julia’s top landing, and stared. He’d never seen so many things in one room before. There were piles of books and magazines, dresses on hangers and dresses spread out across chairs, hats balanced on top of each other, photo albums still halfway through being filled from shoeboxes of loose snapshots, bunches of flowers hanging to dry, posters for West End productions, jewellery boxes spilling over with tangled necklaces and earrings. He edged into the room, his hands hovering over it all, not knowing where to begin. His parents kept a much tidier and more ordered house; clothes were kept in wardrobes, toys went straight back under the bed when they’d been played with, and the few photographs they had were neatly filed away into albums and rarely taken out. This was something very new. Later, once he’d been taken to the British Museum, and been patiently waited for while he tried to read every last caption, he would think of comparing this room to the collection halls of the Egyptian Pharaohs, where the many possessions they needed to accompany them to the next world were held for safekeeping, and he would shyly tell Julia this and be shocked by the volume of her laughter, by the ferocity with which she would gather him into her arms and kiss the top of his head.

      Without thinking about it, he picked up a tobacco tin from the bookshelf, half hidden amongst the jewellery boxes and polished stones. It was lighter than he’d expected, and rough where the metal had rusted, and there were pictures of battleships around the edge of the lid. You can open it if you like, Julia said quietly, and although he hadn’t realised she was standing behind him, he was too absorbed to be surprised. She came into the room, swept a pile of magazines from the bed to the floor and sat down. He looked at her and he looked at the tin in his hands.

      Julia’s mother had been an actress, and although Julia had never quite made it onto the stage herself, she had inherited something of that same gift for inhabiting a story; and that was what she did that day, as she told him about a long-gone Christmas. She told him about her father, a young school-teacher with round glasses and a thin moustache, spending the Christmas of 1914 in a muddy hole somewhere in France. She said that even though it was a war they’d found the time for a celebration, and that by the light of a smoky paraffin lamp and a few stubby candles they’d drunk from small mugs filled with brandy, sung carols, and worn party hats made from sheets of old newspaper. It can’t have been all that cheery, she said, what with men not there who should have been there, and all of them anyway wishing they were home with their families, but they did their best, and made jokes, and drank to the health of every last man they could think of. And then, she said, leaning in close as though it were a secret, their commanding officer gave them these: a Christmas present from the young Princess Mary herself. She reached across and helped him ease the lid off the tin. Inside, there was a Christmas card, a full pouch of tobacco, and twenty cigarettes. She smiled. He kept his, she said. He thought it would be worth hanging on to, he thought it might be worth something one day. She laughed. He could be very dull and sensible sometimes, she said. My mother was forever on at him to liven up a little. He looked at the unsmoked cigarettes and a strange excitement shook through him. It was a dangerous, thrilling feeling.

      The thing in his hands felt at once indestructible and hopelessly fragile. He was terrified of dropping it, or of spoiling it in some way, of holding it out in the air for too long. It felt as though he had only to put one of the cigarettes to his lips and he would be suddenly transported to that foxhole in 1914, crowded around a mess table singing carols with his fellow soldiers. He wanted to put the lid back on, to have Julia take it out of his hands, but he couldn’t move and he couldn’t bring himself to look away.

      Later, Julia took him to the Imperial War Museum and showed him soldiers’ uniforms like the one her father had worn, and the type of rifle he would have used, and letters sent home from the front. She took him to the British Museum and showed him the treasures of Sutton Hoo, the Egyptian Mummies, the jewellery and weapons and costumes smuggled home from around the world. She took him to the Natural History Museum, the V&A, the Horniman, and each time he felt the same breathless excitement he’d felt when he’d first held her father’s tobacco tin, the same thrill of old stories made new.

      And it was this that he had spent most of his life looking for: these physical traces of history, these objects which could weigh his hands down with their density of memory and time. Something he could hold on to and say, look, this belonged to my fathers and forefathers, this is some small piece of who they were. This is some small piece of where I began.