Free Swan River by David Reynolds Page B

handkerchief, sobbed sharply twice and blew his nose. He pulled hard on his cigarette and tossed the butt through the window. He patted my hand. ‘I’m sorry… but you did want to know.’ He was looking straight ahead at the condensation on the windscreen.
    I put my arm round his shoulders.
    â€˜He didn’t go to Canada until 1906…four years later, but they wouldn’t let him see me.’ There was a catch, like a small hiccup, in his voice. ‘It was cruel, but they did what they thought was right.’ He reached down and patted my thigh. ‘If Uncle George had been in charge, I think he’d have arranged for him to see me.’
    There was a long silence. I continued to lean against him with my arm across the top of his seat, my hand on the warm felt of his overcoat. Then, he turned, kissed me on the forehead and spoke in his normal voice. ‘That’s the whole story. Let’s go shopping.’
    We took our time to choose a Dynatron record player. I liked the modern look of its case which was covered in cream and blue plastic material and had a stainless steel strip at the front with three slits in it through which just the tops of three white plastic discs protruded: ‘on/off/volume’, ‘treble’, ‘bass’. With many mentions of Marconi, my father explained to me and the shopkeeper exactly how it worked. The man, red-faced and with thin black hair stuck sideways across his head with what I guessed was Silvikrin, smiled and raised his eyebrows attentively, and managed to maintain this attitude when my father moved on to the transistor, which he informed us had been invented in 1948, ‘the year Sunny Jim was born’.
    My father placed his hand on my head and I knew what would come next. ‘His mother and I had been married for sixteen years.’ But for once he carried straight on without pausing for the usual expressions of astonishment. ‘Three men were awarded the Nobel Prize for the transistor, but only two of them deserved it. Their boss tried to steal the glory.’
    The shopkeeper’s lower lip sagged as his eyebrows went up again.
    I slipped away to choose a record for my mother. ‘Typical of the boss class… and you can guess which of them made a fortune.’
    â€˜Well, this is it.’ The shopkeeper spoke for the first time in several minutes, smiling in agreement once again.
    My father joined me by the racks of records. I swiftly picked out a recording of The Pirates of Penzance while he took a little longer to decide on Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony.
    Although, according to my mother, he was tone deaf, he then sat for twenty minutes in a glassed-in, sound-proof booth humming and waving his hands about as he listened to the slow movements of recordings by Otto Klemperer and Sir Adrian Boult. I fingered the new LPs from Elvis, Billy Fury and the Everly Brothers and wondered what my father would think if I put Brylcreem in my hair.
    In the end, ignoring the composer’s nationality, my father pronounced that my mother would prefer the English cadences of Boult, especially after what she had been through during the war. The shopkeeper nodded deferentially, as though my mother were a war hero, and told my father that he had made an excellent choice.
    After that day, even though he had said that was the whole story, I questioned him often about his childhood, his parents, his numerous other relatives and his friends from the 1890s and 1900s. He told me plenty of funny and colourful stories, and answered serious questions candidly. Over the next three months, he wrote seven chapters of about twelve pages each, detailing as much as he knew of the lives of his forebears and giving an account of his childhood up to the time when he left school, aged sixteen, in 1908. He gave it to me to read chapter by chapter.
    That night I heard my father going out to the car after my mother had gone to bed. I knew he was