Remember....

It always seemed dark, that was the first thing. It was at the lowest point of a uniform crescent of identical houses, the bottom of a lazy terraced curve. The house looked nondescript but foreboding from the outside, towering over me, framed forever against a leaden and featureless sky in my mind.
There was something medieval about its placement; with the sentinel flour mill on the hill and the monolithic red brick viaduct on the other side, it was hemmed in by giants, squatting in a shallow noose. The viaduct the ramparts of a living castle, the flour mill the keep. They seemed permanent and ever there.

Moving inside, through the bottle green door, through a tiny threshold, the sensation of the felt flocked wallpaper across my fingertips, the vague smell of coal and flour, and the dancing shadows from the open fire playing across the wall, eldritch ciphers from another world.

A small window looked though to a yard no more than a concrete square with a mouldering back gate and high wall. Stillness reigned where once there was noise. And outside, the drain where my father, according to folklore, replete with quiff had killed the rat, that had fled in zig-zag terror from the flour mill during the monthly purges.
A square of mud, and a water-butt complete the scene, the pathway now choked with weed and thistle.

There was a slow drip of tarnished tap in the back annexe, crowded by cupboards with ancient brands making dubious claims. Always cold there, steamed by cooking, but always cold, with recesses and black corners between appliances and in kickboards where spiders of terrifying size would occasionally emerge.

Inside the living room, the squeaking 1960s armchairs, black plastic that were too large for the room, brushed countless times between door and kitchen. The horse brasses, no longer cleaned, but retaining a dull resplendence, hanging like stilled pendulums from some immense and ornate clock. And the chair, in the corner, near shelves of ephemera, trinkets, curios where my grandfather would sit, chin set, thumbing his nose between rolling his cigarettes, eyes gleaming in the half-light, tobacco smoke conjuring ghosts in the air.

And so he would tell us his stories, voice deep and even but lost in a white noise, a snowstorm of forgetting now. Sporadically a sentence ended with a gruff “see?” where understanding was sought. A vocal quirk, that in reverie I find myself repeating in certain company.
He was watched, until she left for the nursing home, by my grandmother, knitting with muffled clicks in the opposite chair, and occasionally they would exchange glances we could only aspire to understand, coded and veiled.

And such stories. As we sat, full and warm before the fire, pre-bathtime, no television, no music, no dreaded clarion call of “That’s Life” or “Songs of Praise” to summon Monday all too soon. Just a deep voice, and glinting eyes in a warm orange glow. Only the occasional interruption of the shipping forecast, intoning a spell into the gloom at the hands of my grandmother by force of habit. Just words, sounds rolled around tongues, punctuated by the hiss of wood and carbon in the grate, the smell of Old Holborn and the rain drumming on the window pane.

He remembered storm-battered nights in the channel, dragging fish and strange creatures from the boiling deep, the pallid ghost-ships and whispered legends of the Goodwin Sands, of dodging the Luftwaffe that strafed the ground at his feet, of meeting the men of the Clyde after adventures sailing the coast. The downed aircraft, the bombed buildings, desolate places peopled with curiosity and character. The morass of air-raid tunnels that merged with the train tracks and the tantalising network of smuggler’s tunnels under our very feet. The names he mentioned peopled an exotic continent that we could only visit as bedazzled tourists, before the modern day dragged us from that dim cocoon as though it were nothing but a peculiar dream.

And so his life and his death were fashioned, and in passing left us his postcards, his words and his deeds too delicate – and however we shelter them from the waves that time sends our way, they will erode. Then each of us, our lives laid out behind us, will assume that mantle, and recreate that languid sorcery before the bulging eyes of our own grandchildren.

But first, before us, my own father will hold court and make his own tales dance for our broods.
And when I see him now, in advancing years, he sometimes takes a moment, in his chair, surrounded by his own ephemera, and sets his chin, thumbing his nose and something lives on, an uninterrupted line.

“See?”

Something older than us all binds us for a wordless moment.
And we remember.