A Walk On The Beach
Concerning Our Dad
© Jon Horne  

    Just a walk on the beach. My father’s last request, simple, and as plausible as a walk on the moon. Thin, hairless legs could no longer support his weight as we lifted him, bloated, onto the chair.
     “They always said I was full of wind and piss,” he had said a week before, when defiance remained.
     There would be no more walks on the beach; just a room in a hospital, antiseptic and efficient. His kidneys had packed in and his heart would be next. I sat a little behind him, hoping that his failing eyes would not see my tears. My mother, dry-eyed and competent, listened to his every utterance, waiting for rare lucidity.
    
     Years before, it had been she who lay close to death. I had sat and joked with her, trying to make her feel better, teasing her with half-truths about my dissolute behaviour in her absence. My father, driving home, crumpled into a fit of weeping.
     “Stop the car Dad.”
     “I’m sorry.”
     “That’s OK. Please stop the car!”
     I had just learned to drive. I took us home. When we got back, he telephoned my aunt.
     “He’s a tower of strength, my boy,” he said with pride.
     No I wasn’t. Faced with something I couldn’t cope with, I had chosen to ignore it. I was deluding myself that everything was alright. As it happened, it was. My mother is not a woman to be taken so easily. She got better.
    
     This time it wouldn’t be alright. The man I knew and looked up to was already gone, and the shell was disintegrating quickly and without dignity. As my father sat in the chair, I shaved him. Our eyes met. He moved his head for me and smiled. Then he drifted again and looked through me.
     As I used the clippers on his sideboards, I imagined him as he should have been, a strong, barrel-chested little man walking on the beach, puffing on a Silk Cut, smiling distractedly at the small children whom he attracted like a magnet, and enjoying the attentions of their apologetic parents.
    
     He died that night, Saturday night, and now I am standing alone, barefoot on the coal-flecked sand, watching a tanker sail past in front of the lighthouse. Nothing has changed except our lives. I have left my mother and brother at home. I can’t shoulder anyone’s grief but my own.
     I'm sorry. I just can't.
     I can’t even talk about it. What can I say? I am a man of twenty-five, grieving and worrying, but the only voice I have is that of a little boy, shouting “I want my Daddy back”. God, last night I actually said that, aloud.
    
     Thomas John (Tommy) Horne was born in Grays, Essex, just after the outbreak of the first world war. He was premature, and nurses kept him alive by improvising an incubator in a cupboard in the boiler room of the hospital. Growing up, he was spared the grinding poverty that afflicted most of his contemporaries. His father had been an electrician when it was a cutting-edge skill. Perhaps more importantly, he had been an only child - when families of ten or more were not unusual (my mother was one of eleven).
     His mother’s ill-health, which had prevented more children, also helped my father to escape the parochialism of the urban working-class environment into which he had been born. Whenever she was too ill to cope, my father was shunted off to relatives - people who lived very different lives. He had an aunt who was a servant in London. Disgraced by having illegitimate children (and thus unable to marry), she had remained in service into her middle-age. She was a highly-regarded cook, employed by the finest households. My father regularly stayed with her, and was exposed both to a society which he could never join, and to an epicurean sensibility which never left him.
     Sometimes he stayed with his Aunt Annie. Bardfield, where she lived, is now a smart and ‘quaint’ village on the edge of the London commuter-belt. In the 1920s it was a remote farming community, barely accessible and seemingly untouched by the 20th century. Farm labourers and their families lived in a state of poverty that was quite unlike its urban equivalent. It was monastic. They had no escape, and rarely sought one. Hard work meant survival; happiness was to be found at home. My father grew to understand the rural life - if never quite to love it.
     He left school at fourteen and left home not long after, drifting between jobs and between towns, looking for a way to make something of himself.
     As a boy, he had made one embarrassing and cliched attempt to run away to America (he was caught at Victoria railway station, waiting for the train to Southampton). His adult progress was leading to an inevitable emigration, when war intervened. He returned to Grays and volunteered.
     The ‘phony war’ saw him training with the cavalry. While he was working, he had spent many of his weekends riding around the country on a motorbike. His first army posting was as a despatch rider. He had also recently bought a car, so he was assigned to teach recruits to drive. It was at this point that his self-reliant instincts began to get the better of him. Dreams of becoming a tank commander faded as he was put on report time and again for insubordination. While the men were being trained for battle, the officers continued to practice their skills on horseback. Cynicism took hold long before he saw combat.
     He was deemed ‘unwilling to follow orders’, and was sent to join the Rifle Brigade. After another round of training; ducking live ammunition and learning how to keep an armoured car going in a sandstorm, he found himself on a troop ship bound for Egypt.
     The Libyan desert was the scene of a brutal war of attrition. Ahead of the infantry in an armoured car, my father found himself digging in behind Italian lines. This was trench warfare, not far removed from that of the first world war. He lived a life of fear and boredom. He watched men driven to suicide, running towards enemy tanks clutching grenades, and if they survived that, scrambling inside the tanks to blow them up. He fought at Tobruk. He once crawled past Italian trenches to the British line because his own trench had run out of cigarettes.
     And then it was over. After ducking into a trench and watching a column of Italian tanks roll directly over his head, he decided to make a run for the British position. He mistimed the run, and emerged from the trench to find the nozzle of a tank cannon pointing at his head. He surrendered.
     He never lost faith in the idea that he was fighting for right against wrong, but with blood on his hands and fear in his guts, he had distanced himself from the reality of what was going on. His way of dealing with the army had been to play a character: the rebel, the insubordinate loner, the hero. He had been mentioned-in-dispatches; he had been missing-presumed-dead.
     Now he was starving in a prisoner-of-war camp.
     He was faced with a stark choice: escape and fight, or give up. Either course could have led to his death. For three years nothing happened. He chose escape. When permitted a letter home, he asked his mother for slippers, hoping she would get the hint and send him tennis shoes, thus allowing him to run for it. She sent him slippers. Still he continued with various plans and schemes; a tunnel which failed to reach the fence; disguises which were never quite convincing enough. Eventually, with a combination of bribery and violence, he got out. By riding underneath trains, ducking through woods and gambling on who he could trust, he worked his way through the resistance network until he was close to Allied positions - Italy having by this time been invaded. There was a battle going on. He was nearly there when he was winged by a German grenade.
     He was taken to a prison camp in the Italian Alps, by Lake Garda. An SS officer, recognising him as an escapee, marched him into the prison compound and stood him against a wall, in front of a firing squad.
     The men in the squad were bemused when ordered not to fire. The officer laughed heartily at his little joke, and ordered my father to be taken to the hospital to have his broken arm mended.
     Mussolini visited the hospital. My father decided it was time to escape again. Communists had infiltrated the nursing staff, and they offered their help. The hospital was not heavily guarded, and their first contribution was to smuggle several bottles of wine to the prisoners’ ward. He drank enough to lose his fear, and walked out of the front door.
     For six months, he fought with the Communist Resistance, committing acts of terrorism against the German occupation force all over the north of Italy. These people, who harboured and fed him, risked slaughter in their villages if they were found out. Later, he was sent on to fight with the Yugoslavs - Tito’s army of widows and mothers who had already seen their men murdered.
     There was time for introspection. My father had escaped with an officer (Ralph - pronounced ‘Raiph’) who had a country mansion and a public school accent. He saw himself as this man’s equal - and he also trusted him with his life. In the desert trenches before his capture, my father had engaged in romantic talk about a classless society of self-sufficiency. It had seemed far-fetched. After his escape, with Ralph and with the Resistance movements of two countries, he experienced co-operation across boundaries of class and culture.
     He and Ralph eventually reached Switzerland. Although no longer in fear for their lives, they continued to evade capture - and consequent internment. They turned to the Americans for help. The US embassy obliged by sneaking them aboard a Red Cross flight bound for England.
     My father walked out of Grays railway station to find no one waiting for him. Making his way through town, he bumped into his cousin Fred. Fred stared at the apparition of my father, sunburnt and desperately thin, with a red beard and long straggly hair.
     “It’s the Second Coming,” said Fred.
     The army had neglected to tell the family of his safe arrival. My father never forgave them for that.
     In the last months of the war, he married my mother.
     When my elder brother was born, the war was over and he was out of the army. He burned his uniform.
     He adjusted to peace better than most, but the instincts which had kept him alive, he couldn’t shake them off. He went back to work and tried to catch up on the six lost years of his career. He took on challenges; he beat the odds; he vowed that he would never make a backward step, or stay in one place for more than three years.
     The territory was familiar. He mostly stayed in the packaging industry, in which he had begun his career as a fourteen-year-old office boy. Slowly, he moved upwards within the industrial hierarchy: operator to foreman; foreman to floor manager; floor manager to production manager. He always moved between companies, chasing advancement but never promotion.
     He was a success.
     And he worked so hard that he barely saw my brother grow up.
     As he entered his forties, he began to dream again of emigrating. He first thought of Australia. His aging parents put emotional pressure on him to stay, and so he did - this time. A couple of years later, with his mother having died, he took the family, including his complaining father, to South Africa. This was intended as a new start, but they were home again after two years. He could not ignore the institutional brutality of South African racial politics, nor could he tolerate the serf-mentality of Afrikaners, in their dealings with an Englishman.
     Mainly though, he had had enough of working for other people. He returned with two colleagues to start a business. For five years, he worked harder than he ever had done in his life. By the age of fifty he was a partner in a large and successful concern.
     Fifty was too old to be fathering another child. Few said it to his face, but most people thought it. He had no problem with the idea. My mother, though she was well into her forties and in poor health, was delighted when her pregnancy was confirmed.
     My father would not make the same mistake that he had with my brother. His working day had simply been too long for him to ever see his son during the week. Secretly he knew that he had got off lightly. The whole baby-boom generation seemed to be turning against their parents, and yet my brother showed little resentment towards him.
     He might not be so lucky again. When I was born, my father gave up work.
     I didn’t know that Daddies came home at teatime. I never heard ‘Wait till your father gets home’. I spent the first three years of my life with both my parents, my grandfather, and an old dog named Rex. We were always going to the beach.
     I was three years old before my father had to go back to work. He couldn’t stand not to have a challenge; he missed male company. Anyway, we were running out of money. His former business partner was heading rapidly towards his first million. My father worked hard again, but the intensity had gone. He had no more to prove. He took me into work when it was quiet, let me ride the forklift, let me play with the ‘adding machine’ while he caught up on paperwork.
    
     My toes curl and grip the sand, which slides from my grasp as it did from my child-hands when I lay belly-down on these same dunes, naked under my parents’ gaze and protection. Trippers are beginning to arrive, unfolding deckchairs and isolating themselves in their family groups behind windbreaks. No one looks at me.
     I wonder if I’m letting my mother down. She and my brother have been to the undertakers to view the body. I didn’t go. The undertakers: this was another last request of my father’s - well not really, it’s something he said a while ago. When I was little, I used to hang around with a boy called Johnny Osbourne. Johnny married very young - at seventeen or eighteen. Out of work with a wife and baby to support, my father gave him a job. He worked well, my father said, but Johnny always had this ambition to be an undertaker. He followed it through. Johnny is an asthmatic who has been at death’s door a few times. Perhaps the job helps him to deal with his own mortality. A few months ago, my parents were having a serious talk - the one that begins: “When I’m gone...”. My father said it to lighten the mood, but he wasn’t joking; he said: “I want Johnny Oz to have the body. Put a bit of work his way, eh? it’s the least we can do.” And so Johnny Osbourne is embalming my father and I can’t bring myself to look at his handiwork.
     The body which Johnny has been working on - I can’t, or won’t connect it with my father. I didn’t see my father die. I was late. I had gone home, leaving my mother by his bedside. A nurse telephoned me and told me to hurry to the hospital. I hurried, but I didn’t rush. The same nurse caught me by the arm as I entered the room.
     “I’m sorry love, he’s gone. It’s all over.”
     My mother was blind with shock. She had been holding herself together for too long, staying sane and being useful when she was needed. Now most of her resilience was gone. She stood beside my father’s body and stared at me with frightened eyes. Then her expression changed. There was relief too.
     “He’s peaceful now.” She smiled. “You can touch him, don’t be afraid, he’s still warm.”
     ‘He’. I tried, for her sake as well as mine, to see ‘him’ there. All I saw was ‘it’. It was a thing that looked like my father asleep. Not even that; it lacked the snoring, wheezing, comforting presence of my father asleep. I touched the body without fear, but nothing touched me.
     So I didn’t go to the funeral parlour. I didn’t want to see the body, no matter what Johnny had been able to do to make it look like my father.
    
     If he’s got a spirit, it’s in this place or in me. My father couldn’t bear to be away from the seaside - not the sea, he wasn’t any sort of Old Salt - just the beach, the promenade, the sight and smell of the sea; the air, the weekend atmosphere in the summer, and in the winter, the peace and the cold wind.
     There was a job in Yorkshire - a good one, well-paid and challenging. My father took us to see the area. We walked on Ilkley Moor. My parents stood together and surveyed what they saw. My mother delighted at the thought of living there. My father paused, breathed deeply of the fresh high air and said: “What the hell am I doing?” My mother was puzzled.
     “What’s wrong?”
     “This is miles from the sea!”
     And so my father spent the rest of his life struggling to keep a fish-box factory from going under, working from crisis to crisis, through near-bankruptcies, a fire, the death of the fishing industry. I grew up in Cleethorpes, by the seaside, and my father could drive along High Cliff Road every morning and see the lighthouse and the tankers queuing in the mouth of the estuary.
    
     As my mother sat by my father’s body, stroking the hair, I found myself staring at the wall. It was cold and white. And hard. I felt an urge to hit my head against it. Once, twice; it wouldn’t hurt. Just enough to send me to sleep. Then it would be alright.
     I imagined doing it, and laughed hard at myself. I sat down and began to cry. My brother arrived. He had driven three hundred miles because he knew something was wrong.
     The three of us sat together and said very little. I shrugged my shoulders. I didn’t know what to do.
    
     “I’m a troubleshooter,” my father once said to me, “I get things moving, then the clever boys come in and plan ahead.” A significant look accompanied the words ‘clever boys’. I am more my mother’s son than his. My brother is very much like my father. They were both brought up as the only child - my brother was nineteen when I was born. He makes decisions, and is impossible to bully. My mother and I are both pushovers. My father despaired of me for this weakness, yet he couldn’t help but have the last word.
     I admired his strength, but the effect had long worn thin. By the time I was preparing to leave home for the first time, I was ready to fight, ready to cut myself off from his influence and his Final Say. I was no longer a boy taking the word of his elder, I was a man struggling against the domination of another.
     Something changed during my mother’s illness. He showed fear for the first time. He leaned on me. When he cried for my mother’s pain, he became twice the man I had known. I could no longer fight him.
    
     Last Christmas, I sat with my father in my parents’ living room.
     “Jon, you can always talk to me. You know that, don’t you? Whatever’s preying on your mind, I’ll listen.”
     I don’t think I answered him.
     “The worst thing about getting old,” he said later, “is losing control. When I was on the run, I walked along ridges where the mountain goats wouldn’t go. Now I trip over matchsticks.”
     “Yeah Dad, but surely you don’t need to be the hard man any more, do you?”
     “It’s not just physical, you know, my mind’s going the same way.”
     “Oh come on! Don’t start telling me you’re going senile.”
     “I’m serious, I’m getting shallow. Oh, I can still think straight, but it’s the emotions. I get a wobbly lip these days when I see old films on the telly. I wake up to a sunny day and I get these great outbursts of joy.”
     “What’s wrong with that?”
     “I never used to be like that.”
     “Maybe you’re growing up.”
     “Don’t be facetious.”
     “I’m not.”
     “I hope you’re right, son.”
    
     I was right, wasn’t I? That’s why I’m here; because a walk on the beach is just that. It needn’t stand for anything. It’s a sunny day, and if I’m going to grieve, I might as well have one of those outbursts of joy to go with it. It was denied my father, and if that has taught me anything, it’s just to take these things when they’re offered.