A Place of Hiding

Frank looked at the old alarm clock on the cooker. He was surprised to see it was after four. “Let me ring Mrs. Petit so she doesn’t think she’s meant to pop round any longer,” he said. After he’d done that, he went back to answer his father’s question, only to find him nodding off again. The blanket had slipped, so Frank adjusted it, tucking it in round Graham’s spindly legs and easing back the old man’s chair to keep his head from flopping onto his bony chest. With a handkerchief, he wiped his father’s chin and removed the stringy saliva from his jaw. Old age, he thought, was a real bugger. Once a man’s three-score-and-ten was exceeded, he was on the slippery slope to complete incapacity.

He got their tea ready: high tea in the old manner of labourers. He heated the pie and sliced wedges from it. He put out a salad and buttered the bread. When the food was laid out and the tea was brewed, he went to fetch Graham and brought him into the kitchen. He could have served him on a tray in his chair, but he wanted them to be face-to-face for the conversation that they needed to have. Face-to-face implied man-to-man: two men speaking, not a father and his son.

Graham ate the chicken-and-leek pie appreciatively, the affront at having been taken to the toilet by Mrs. Petit forgotten in the pleasure of her cooking. He even had a second helping, a rare occurrence for a man who normally consumed less food than an adolescent girl.

Frank decided to allow him to enjoy the meal before he broke the news. So they dined mostly in silence, with Frank meditating on the best approach into their conversation and Graham commenting only sporadically on the food, mostly on the gravy, which was the best he’d had, he declared, since Frank’s mum passed on. That was how he always referred to Grace Ouseley’s drowning. The tragedy at the reservoir—Graham and Grace thrashing in the water and only one of them emerging alive—had been lost to time.

The food spurred Graham’s thoughts from his wife to wartime and specifically to the Red Cross parcels the islanders had at long last received when the lack of supplies on Guernsey had reduced the populace to parsnip coffee and sugar beet syrup. From Canada had come an unthinkable largesse, Graham informed his son: chocolate biscuits, my lad, and didn’t they go a treat with real tea? sardines and milk powder, tins of salmon and prunes and ham and corned beef. Ah, it was a fine, fine day when the Red Cross parcels proved to the people of Guernsey that, small though the island was, it was not forgotten by the rest of the world.

“An’ we needed to see that, we did,” Graham declared. “The Jerrys might’ve wanted us to think their bloody sod of a Führer was going to walk on water and multiply the loaves once the world was his, but we’d’ve died, Frankie, before he passed as much as a sausage in our direction.”

A smear of gravy was on Graham’s chin, and Frank leaned forward and wiped it off. He said, “Those times were tough.”

“But people don’t know it like they ought, do they? Oh, they think of the Jews and the gypsies, they do. They think of places like Holland and France. And the Blitz. Bloody hell, how they think of the Blitz, which the noble English—those very same English whose bloody king abandoned us to the Jerrys, mind you, with a farewell-for-now-and-I-know-you’ll-geton-with-the-enemy-lads-and-lasses...” Graham had a gobbet of chicken pie on his fork and he held it shakily in the air, where it hung suspended like an example of those German bombers and just as likely to drop its load.

Frank leaned forward again and gently guided the fork to his father’s mouth. Graham accepted the chicken, chewing and talking at once. “They still live it, those English, Frank. London gets bombed and the world is meant never to forget it for fifteen seconds, while here...? Hell. We may’s well’ve just been minor inconvenienced, for all the memories the world has of what happened. Never you mind the port getting bombed—

twenty-nine dead in that, Frankie, and never a weapon we even had to defend ourselves—and those poor Jew ladies sent to the camps and the executions of whoever they chose to call a spy. It might’ve not happened for all the world knows. But we shall soon fix that up right and proper. Won’t we, boy?”

So here was the moment at last, Frank thought. He wouldn’t have to manufacture an entrée to the conversation he needed to have with his father. All he had to do was to seize the day, so he made the decision before he could talk himself out of it and said, “Dad, there’s something come up, I’m afraid. I haven’t wanted to tell you about it. I know what the museum means to you, and I guess I didn’t have the nerve to put a spanner in the dream.”

Graham cocked his head and presented to his son what he always claimed was his better ear. “Say again?” he said.

Frank knew for a fact that there was nothing wrong with his father’s hearing unless something was being said that he preferred not to hear. So he just went on. Guy Brouard, he told his father, had passed away a week ago. His death was quite sudden and unexpected and clearly he’d been fit as a fiddle and unthinking of his own demise since he’d not considered what his passing might do to their plans for the wartime museum.