I don’t think it would be unfair to his memory to say that my grandfather, a man always known simply as ‘B’, was someone who found criticism far easier to give than praise. I lived with both him and my grandmother in the mid 1980’s during and after my final year at High School in the United States, and throughout that time he always seemed a melancholy and grumpy man, prone to dismissive impatience and occasional bouts of passive aggression. The fact that these, his later years, were spent in the firm grip of the cancer that would eventually kill him may well account for his tetchiness, but I’ve never heard anyone speak of him with any particular amount of warmth. As far as I could tell, he spent his time in solitude, books, ideas and – on the rare occasion he found himself in the company of someone he considered his intellectual equal – debate. As a seventeen year old with spots and little time for anything other than girls and rock music, it was almost a given that he and I would spend a year and a half gently orbiting each other like minor planets in the outer reaches of a remote solar system.
Winters in Maine are typically long, dark and cold affairs, and with the school day ending shortly after two o’clock in the afternoon to allow students to get home in daylight, I usually spent afternoons working one of my part-time jobs and evenings hanging out at friends’ houses where the atmosphere was decidedly more convivial. On those occasions when I was at my grandparents’ house, I sometimes heard the slow tap-tap-tapping sound of a manual typewriter coming from my grandfather’s study. I was to learn many years later that he had spent the winter of 1985 putting down on paper his memories from the Spring of 1944 when he, his young family and his in-laws found themselves unavoidably tangled up in the German military response to the Allied beach landings at Anzio. Since then, the untitled story he wrote that winter has been scanned and shared amongst family members, a copy of which has been gathering electronic dust on my computer for many years.
Over the last three months, the world has changed beyond recognition, and it seems to me that we are now almost certainly past the point of no return and entering a new age. I lack the tools to process or understand many of these developments and am reluctant to engage with the daily deluge of new, frequently conflicting and often bewildering information that is now the staple diet of every news outlet. Even though his story describes life from a bygone age, there are elements of it that closely resemble the absurdities of today and, with my curiosity piqued, I have spent the last six weeks re-reading it and researching the world in which it took place. Someone once said that history doesn’t repeat, but it often rhymes, and it strikes me that we are living now, as he did then, in the space that can exist after the end of one era and before the next has revealed itself in any discernible shape.
I also found a warmth, affection and humour in his words that I never found in the man when he was alive, quite possibly because I was neither old nor mature enough to do so at the time. Or perhaps he, like so many it seems to me, felt compelled to restrict his emotions to a private and internal expression while the world around him enjoyed only what was left. Either way, I have revised my memory of him and, concluding that his story is worth sharing, decided that I wanted to record it as an audiobook. Not knowing from whom I should ask permission to do this, I asked my father when I visited him in Italy a few weeks ago. “Sure,” he said, “but who are you going to get to record it? Oh, you? Don’t you think it needs to be done by someone with a good voice?”
One man’s honesty can sometimes be another man’s irony, so I smiled and said nothing. Regardless of whether or not he is right, it’s a personal and sentimental project that I wanted for myself, so a few weeks later I woke up in the middle of the night and recorded the whole story in one take during the small hours in order to minimise background noise. The copyright belongs to my grandfather and I have taken the liberty of inventing a title for the story, of which I feel sure he would almost certainly disapprove. I’ve also designed an accompanying piece of cover art and persuaded my twelve year old son, his great grandson, to voice the opening and closing credits.
The last time I saw my grandfather alert and aware was just before Labor Day in 1987. After working in Maine for the summer, I had hitched a ride as crew on a boat that was sailing from Northeast Harbor down to Newport, Rhode Island and, uncharacteristically, he drove down to Clifton Dock to see me off. He watched as we made our final preparations, and when we slipped our mooring lines and slowly drifted off with the wind, he stood up, cupped his hands around his mouth and shouted the nicest thing I ever heard him say to me.
“Come back soon!”
Well, it took me a while, but here I am and I’ve made your story into an amateur audiobook for you. I hope you like it.
