Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness - Alexandra Fuller [44]
It was the earth—the ground beneath his feet—that was the chief joy of Dad’s childhood. Every Christmas, and for several weeks of the summer, Dad and Uncle Toe were shipped off to Douthwaite Estate in the Yorkshire Dales to stay with their grandparents, Admiral Sir Cyril and Lady Edith Fuller. “I can close my eyes,” Dad says, “and picture that whole estate perfectly. Five farms all put together, rolling hills. Lovely, deep loam. . . .” Dad rubs his fingers together, as if he can even now feel the peaty softness of that old land, “No, you don’t find soil like that every day.”
Three miles of driveway led up through pastures in which dairy cows grazed picturesquely. In five-acre coppices pheasants were bred, streams were full of trout and fields were teeming with rabbits and foxes. “We used to sing that hymn at chapel, you know?” Dad takes a breath and begins to sing softly into the supporting warmth of the South African night, “And did those feet in ancient time walk upon England’s mountains green?” He shakes his head, smiling, and taps out his pipe in his hand, the burned tobacco making a little black pyramid of ash in his palm.
Dad remembers his grandmother Lady Edith as very elegant and thin. He doesn’t remember Admiral Sir Cyril at all and my great-grandfather therefore remains insouciantly handsome in a photograph I found for sale at a retailer of “Fine Historic and Autographed Documents” in Missouri of all unlikely places. On the back of the photograph is a barely grammatical and ambiguous note: “On Saturday His Majesty conferred about fifty two Decorations on Naval and Military Officers, one of the officers, Captain Cyril Fuller, R.N., received three Decorations, the C.M.G., the D.S.O., and the Board of Trade Bronze Medal for Saving Life at Sea. Caption Fuller has rendered conspicuous service in Nigeria, and the Board of Trade conferred their medal on him in recognition of this gallantry when a whaler capsized in the Njong River. On that occasion he endeavored to rescue the crew, and while trying to right the boat was twice pulled away by the struggling natives. He succeeded however in saving a number of lives.”
I wonder aloud what the natives might have been struggling to do.
Dad sucks on his pipe in silence for a while. “Did they have whalers on Nigerian rivers?” he asks at last. “I suppose they must have.” He looks mildly shocked. “Imagine that,” he says.
WHEN HE WAS THIRTEEN, Dad’s parents got a divorce—“a terrible, terrible thing in those days”—and Hawkley Place was sold. “After that,” Dad says, “we were a bit homeless during the holidays.” Donald went to sea and stayed there more or less permanently. Boofy bought a country cottage in Sussex (“Very good address, rather shabby house,” Mum adds), just large enough for herself and Noo. Home, such as it was, evaporated and in its place came broken holidays, the uncertainty of half-unpacked suitcases, the panic of unbelonging.
Uncle Toe and Dad were shipped off to various kind and/ or dutiful relatives. “I remember one lot, the Shaws,” Dad says. “They were a fun, sporting family. They had about four hundred dogs, a Shetland pony in the kitchen and there was always someone hobbling about with a broken arm or a broken leg. One year, Cousin Anti went off to the Himalayas for about six months to find the abominable snowman. I was very impressed.”
Five years later Dad reacted to his shape-shifting childhood, breaking generations of tradition. “Everyone expected I’d go into the navy when I got out of school, but I wasn’t interested. I always said that I wouldn’t mind going to fight if there was a war on, but I wasn’t going to play toy soldiers if there wasn’t.” Moreover, the sea baffled Dad and left him mostly unmoved. “You can’t dig a spade in it.” Instead, Dad went to agricultural college and before his last term was up, he had applied to emigrate to Canada. “I