The Sea Inside. Philip Hoare

Чтение книги онлайн.

      My father’s family also crossed the sea; like my maternal ancestors, they too were caught up in an age of mass migration. My great-grandfather Patrick, named after the saint who had converted Ireland and driven the snakes from its shores, was born in Blanchardstown, a village outside Dublin, in 1856. The island was still suffering the after-effects of the Great Famine, a good enough reason for his departure for Liverpool sometime in the 1870s. Settling in Lichfield, he married an English girl, a servant in the same household in which he worked as a coachman. The pair then moved to the former whaling port of Whitby, where my grandfather was born in 1885, on a street at the end of which, in the previous century, James Cook’s Endeavour had been built.

      His eldest son, my father, a dark-haired, good-looking young man, left the depressed streets of the north for a new life in Southampton in the 1930s. He had been born in the model mill town of Saltaire in 1915, but was brought up in Bradford. His journey south was the equivalent of the Ninds’ voyages, the result of greater events, of disaster and opportunity. Later he’d speak of the deprivation he had witnessed in his home town, of starving families fighting over food, of rats running down the street, and of a man found hanging in an outhouse on nearby wasteland.

      Perhaps that’s why the rest of my father’s life was so resolutely ordinary and ordered. He worked for the same cable company for forty years in a redbrick factory built on reclaimed land between the docks and the walls of the old town, a hundred yards from the station where he had first arrived. Every day, at the same time, my mother waved him off. Every day, at the same time, he came back for tea. He might as well have been clocking in and out of his own home. What he did between his punctual departure and his prompt return was a mystery. He seldom spoke about his work, nor did we ask him about it.

      In the summer after leaving school, I went to work in the same factory. I was a fitter’s mate, a position which required me to wear grey overalls and accompany my designated fitter on various jobs, in none of which did I perform any kind of useful function. As we set out for the day or came back to the workshop before going home, having smeared our clothes with grime to make it look as though we’d been busy, I’d look up into the glass box where my father worked above the factory floor and see him there with his colleagues. They wore bright white coats to distinguish themselves from us in our oily overalls, and they all seemed to wear spectacles, of a National Health design; anything else would have been an unwonted vanity.

      Lit by the luminous shed over our heads, for a few, tantalising glimpses I saw my father as he was seen by others: as a person, rather than a dad, up there in the Test Department, with its graphs and dials and meters of resistance, dedicated to certifying six-inch cables which would be wound onto elephantine wooden drums, stencilled with yellow paint and unrolled under the ocean, anchoring England to America.

      Now I see my father through the framed photographs that still stand in my mother’s bedroom, and I’m taken aback to realise how much like him I’ve become: from his shorts and the bag slung about his neck as he stands on a seaside cliff, to his love of the sea itself, which he would scan through his heavy binoculars, breathing in deeply as if to clear his lungs of Bradford soot. We share the same shape, the same bones that show through my skin; what I have been and what I may become. How could I have thought myself so different?

      Recently I went back to Yorkshire. It was a long journey, each connection with its own story. The dawn suburban train, with workers’ eyes stuck with sleepy dust and toothpaste masking morning breath. The peak commuter train, full of furious notes on laptops and phones forever seeking attention. The midday train, relaxed with senior citizens, and students locked into their own, dreamier electronic worlds. And finally an afternoon shuttle explosive with children turned out of school, shouting and laughing and dodging the ticket collector as he came down the compartment, jumping off at the next halt, spilling onto the platform and vanishing as quickly as they’d appeared. As we were drawn to the north, to its wasteland and wealth, I was struck, as I watched through the window, how different it was, an abrupt view of smoke stacks, as evocative as any university’s spires to its alumni. For a few seconds I saw the town set in its sulphurous dip, its name taking me back to childhood visits – Bradford Interchange – as I sat in the modern carriage forty years later, listening to languages my father never heard.

      I might have been the same person as him. As a child I never saw different people – unless in the mirror, when I dressed up as a Red Indian. Our family never went abroad; I travelled only in books, although I was born in a port. Our first fear is abandonment; our last, too. We all leave home to find home, at the risk of being forever lost.