From Hereabout Hill Read online

‘I doubt it too. Be happy, little friend,’ he said. And he was gone, back into the tunnel. Cherry waited until the light from the candle in his hat had vanished and then turned eagerly to the ladder and began to climb up towards the light.

  She found herself in a place she knew well, high on the moor by Zennor Quoit. She stood by the ruined mine workings and looked down at the sleeping village shrouded in mist, and the calm blue sea beyond. The storm had passed and there was scarcely a breath of wind even on the moor. It was only ten minutes’ walk down through the bracken, across the road by the Eagle’s Nest and down the farm track to the cottage where her family would be waiting. She began to run, but the clothes were still heavy and wet and she was soon reduced to a fast walk. All the while she was determining where she would begin her story, wondering how much they would believe. At the top of the lane she stopped to consider how best to make her entrance. Should she ring the bell and be found standing there, or should she just walk in and surprise them there at breakfast? She longed to see the joy on their faces, to feel the warmth of their arms round her and to bask once again in their affection.

  She saw as she came round the corner by the cottage that there was a long blue Land Rover parked in the lane, bristling with aerials. ‘Coastguard’ she read on the side. As she came down the steps she noticed that the back door of the cottage was open and she could hear voices inside. She stole in on tiptoe. The kitchen was full of uniformed men drinking tea, and around the table sat her family, dejection and despair etched on every face. They hadn’t seen her yet. One of the uniformed men had put down his cup and was speaking. His voice was low and hushed.

  ‘You’re sure the towel is hers, no doubts about it?’

  Cherry’s mother shook her head.

  ‘It’s her towel,’ she said quietly, ‘and they are her shells. She must have put them up there, must have been the last thing she did.’

  Cherry saw her shells spread out on the open towel and stifled a shout of joy.

  ‘We have to say,’ he went on. ‘We have to say then, most regrettably, that the chances of finding your daughter alive now are very slim. It seems she must have tried to climb the cliff to escape the heavy seas and fallen in. We’ve scoured the cliff top for miles in both directions and covered the entire beach, and there’s no sign of her. She must have been washed out to sea. We must conclude that she is missing. We have to presume that she is drowned.’

  Cherry could listen no longer but burst into the room shouting.

  ‘I’m home, I’m home. Look at me, I’m not drowned at all. I’m here! I’m home!’

  The tears were running down her face.

  But no one in the room even turned to look in her direction. Her brothers cried openly, one of them clutching the giant’s necklace.

  ‘But it’s me,’ she shouted again. ‘Me, can’t you see? It’s me and I’ve come back. I’m all right. Look at me.’

  But no one did, and no one heard.

  The giant’s necklace lay spread out on the table.

  ‘So she’ll never finish it after all,’ said her mother softly. ‘Poor Cherry. Poor dear Cherry.’

  And in that one moment Cherry knew and understood that she was right, that she would never finish her necklace, that she belonged no longer with the living but had passed on beyond.

  My Father is a Polar Bear

  This story is a tissue of truth – mostly. As with many of my stories, I have woven truths together and made from them a truth stranger than fiction. My father was a polar bear – honestly.

  Tracking down a polar bear shouldn’t be that difficult. You just follow the pawprints – easy enough for any competent Innuit. My father is a polar bear. Now if you had a father who was a polar bear, you’d be curious, wouldn’t you? You’d go looking for him. That’s what I did, I went looking for him, and I’m telling you he wasn’t at all easy to find.

  In a way I was lucky, because I always had two fathers. I had a father who was there – I called him Douglas – and one who wasn’t there, the one I’d never even met – the polar bear one. Yet in a way he was there. All the time I was growing up he was there inside my head. But he wasn’t only in my head, he was at the bottom of our Start-Rite shoebox, our secret treasure box, with the rubber bands round it, which I kept hidden at the bottom of the cupboard in our bedroom. So how, you might ask, does a polar bear fit into a shoebox? I’ll tell you.

  My big brother Terry first showed me the magazine under the bedclothes, by torchlight, in 1948 when I was five years old. The magazine was called Theatre World. I couldn’t read it at the time, but he could. (He was two years older than me, and already mad about acting and the theatre and all that – he still is.) He had saved up all his pocket money to buy it. I thought he was crazy. ‘A shilling! You can get about a hundred lemon sherbets for that down at the shop,’ I told him.

  Terry just ignored me and turned to page twenty-seven. He read it out: ‘The Snow Queen, a dramat – something or other – of Hans Andersen’s famous story, by the Young Vic Company.’ And there was a large black and white photograph right across the page – a photograph of two fierce looking polar bears baring their teeth and about to eat two children, a boy and a girl, who looked very frightened.

  ‘Look at the polar bears,’ said Terry. ‘You see that one on the left, the fatter one? That’s our dad, our real dad. It says his name and everything – Peter Van Diemen. But you’re not to tell. Not Douglas, not even Mum, promise?’

  ‘My dad’s a polar bear?’ I said. As you can imagine I was a little confused.

  ‘Promise you won’t tell,’ he went on, ‘or I’ll give you a Chinese burn.’

  Of course I wasn’t going to tell, Chinese burn or no Chinese burn. I was hardly going to go to school the next day and tell everyone that I had a polar bear for a father, was I? And I certainly couldn’t tell my mother, because I knew she never liked it if I ever asked about my real father. She always insisted that Douglas was the only father I had. I knew he wasn’t, not really. So did she, so did Terry, so did Douglas. But for some reason that was always a complete mystery to me, everyone in the house pretended that he was.

  Some background might be useful here. I was born, I later found out, when my father was a soldier in Baghdad during the Second World War. (You didn’t know there were polar bears in Baghdad, did you?) Sometime after that my mother met and fell in love with a dashing young officer in the Royal Marines called Douglas Macleish. All this time, evacuated to the Lake District away from the bombs, blissfully unaware of the war and Douglas, I was learning to walk and talk and do my business in the right place at the right time. So my father came home from the war to discover that his place in my mother’s heart had been taken. He did all he could to win her back. He took her away on a week’s cycling holiday in Suffolk to see if he could rekindle the light of their love. But it was hopeless. By the end of the week they had come to an amicable arrangement. My father would simply disappear, because he didn’t want to ‘get in the way’. They would get divorced quickly and quietly, so that Terry and I could be brought up as a new family with Douglas as our father. Douglas would adopt us and give us Macleish as our surname. All my father insisted upon was that Terry and I should keep Van Diemen as our middle name. That’s what happened. They divorced. My father disappeared, and at the age of three I became Andrew Van Diemen Macleish. It was a mouthful then and it’s a mouthful now.

  So Terry and I had no actual memories of our father whatsoever. I do have vague recollections of standing on a railway bridge somewhere near Earl’s Court in London, where we lived, with Douglas’ sister – Aunt Betty, as I came to know her – telling us that we had a brand new father who’d be looking after us from now on. I was really not that concerned, not at the time. I was much more interested in the train that was chuffing along under the bridge, wreathing us in a fog of smoke.

  My first father, my real father, my missing father, became a taboo person, a big hush hush taboo person that no one ever mentioned, except for Terry
and me. For us he soon became a sort of secret phantom father. We used to whisper about him under the blankets at night. Terry would sometimes go snooping in my mother’s desk and he’d find things out about him. ‘He’s an actor,’ Terry told me one night. ‘Our dad’s an actor, just like Mum is, just like I’m going to be.’

  It was only a couple of weeks later that he brought the theatre magazine home. After that we’d take it out again and look at our polar bear father. It took some time, I remember, before the truth of it dawned on me – I don’t think Terry can have explained it very well. If he had, I’d have understood it much sooner – I’m sure I would. The truth, of course – as I think you might have guessed by now – was that my father was both an actor and a polar bear at one and the same time.

  Douglas went out to work a lot and when he was home he was a bit silent, so we didn’t really get to know him. But we did get to know Aunty Betty. Aunty Betty simply adored us, and she loved giving us treats. She wanted to take us on a special Christmas treat, she said. Would we like to go to the zoo? Would we like to go to the pantomime? There was Dick Whittington or Puss in Boots. We could choose whatever we liked.

  Quick as a flash, Terry said, ‘The Snow Queen. We want to go to The Snow Queen.’

  So there we were a few days later, Christmas Eve 1948, sitting in the stalls at a matinee performance of The Snow Queen at the Young Vic theatre, waiting, waiting for the moment when the polar bears come on. We didn’t have to wait for long. Terry nudged me and pointed, but I knew already which polar bear my father had to be. He was the best one, the snarliest one, the growliest one, the scariest one. Whenever he came on he really looked as if he was going to eat someone, anyone. He looked mean and hungry and savage, just the way a polar bear should look.

  I have no idea whatsoever what happened in The Snow Queen. I just could not take my eyes off my polar bear father’s curling claws, his slavering tongue, his killer eyes. My father was without doubt the finest polar bear actor the world had ever seen. When the great red curtains closed at the end and opened again for the actors to take their bows, I clapped so hard that my hands hurt. Three more curtain calls and the curtains stayed closed. The safety curtain came down and my father was cut off from me, gone, gone for ever. I’d never see him again.

  Terry had other ideas. Everyone was getting up, but Terry stayed sitting. He was staring at the safety curtain as if in some kind of trance. ‘I want to meet the polar bears,’ he said quietly.

  Aunty Betty laughed. ‘They’re not bears, dear, they’re actors, just actors, people acting. And you can’t meet them, it’s not allowed.’

  ‘I want to meet the polar bears,’ Terry repeated. So did I, of course, so I joined in. ‘Please, Aunty Betty,’ I pleaded. ‘Please.’

  ‘Don’t be silly. You two, you do get some silly notions sometimes. Have a Choc Ice instead. Get your coats on now.’ So we each got a Choc Ice. But that wasn’t the end of it.

  We were in the foyer caught in the crush of the crowd when Aunty Betty suddenly noticed that Terry was missing. She went loopy. Aunty Betty always wore a fox stole, heads still attached, round her shoulders. Those poor old foxes looked every bit as pop-eyed and frantic as she did, as she plunged through the crowd, dragging me along behind her and calling for Terry.

  Gradually the theatre emptied. Still no Terry. There was quite a to-do, I can tell you. Policemen were called in off the street. All the programme sellers joined in the search, everyone did. Of course, I’d worked it out. I knew exactly where Terry had gone, and what he was up to. By now Aunty Betty was sitting down in the foyer and sobbing her heart out. Then, cool as a cucumber, Terry appeared from nowhere, just wandered into the foyer. Aunty Betty crushed him to her, in a great hug. Then she went loopy all over again, telling him what a naughty, naughty boy he was, going off like that. ‘Where were you? Where have you been?’ she cried.

  ‘Yes, young man,’ said one of the policemen. ‘That’s something we’d all like to know as well.’

  I remember to this day exactly what Terry said, the very words: ‘Jimmy riddle. I just went for a jimmy riddle.’ For just a moment he even had me believing him. What an actor! Brilliant.

  We were on the bus home, right at the front on the top deck where you can guide the bus round corners all by yourself – all you have to do is steer hard on the white bar in front of you. Aunty Betty was sitting a couple of rows behind us. Terry made quite sure she wasn’t looking. Then, very surreptitiously, he took something out from under his coat and showed me. The programme. Signed right across it were these words, which Terry read out to me:

  ‘To Terry and Andrew,

  With love from your polar bear father, Peter. Keep happy.’

  Night after night I asked Terry about him, and night after night under the blankets he’d tell me the story again, about how he’d gone into the dressing-room and found our father sitting there in his polar bear costume with his head off (if you know what I mean), all hot and sweaty. Terry said he had a very round, very smiley face, and that he laughed just like a bear would laugh, a sort of deep bellow of a laugh – when he’d got over the surprise that is. Terry described him as looking like ‘a giant pixie in a bearskin’.

  For ever afterwards I always held it against Terry that he never took me with him that day down to the dressing-room to meet my polar bear father. I was so envious. Terry had a memory of him now, a real memory. And I didn’t. All I had were a few words and a signature on a theatre programme from someone I’d never even met, someone who to me was part polar bear, part actor, part pixie – not at all easy to picture in my head as I grew up.

  Picture another Christmas Eve fourteen years later. Upstairs, still at the bottom of my cupboard, my polar bear father in the magazine in the Start-Rite shoebox; and with him all our accumulated childhood treasures: the signed programme, a battered champion conker (a sixty-fiver!), six silver ball-bearings, four greenish silver threepenny bits (Christmas pudding treasure trove), a Red Devil throat pastille tin with three of my milk teeth cushioned in yellowy cotton wool, and my collection of twenty-seven cowrie shells gleaned over many summers from the beach on Samson in the Scilly Isles. Downstairs, the whole family were gathered in the sitting-room: my mother, Douglas, Terry and my two sisters (half-sisters really, but of course no one ever called them that), Aunty Betty, now married, with twin daughters, my cousins, who were truly awful – I promise you. We were decorating the tree, or rather the twins were fighting over every single dingly-dangly glitter ball, every strand of tinsel. I was trying to fix up the Christmas tree lights which, of course, wouldn’t work – again – whilst Aunty Betty was doing her best to avert a war by bribing the dreadful cousins away from the tree with a Mars bar each. It took a while, but in the end she got both of them up on to her lap, and soon they were stuffing themselves contentedly with Mars bars. Blessed peace.

  This was the very first Christmas we had had the television. Given half a chance we’d have had it on all the time. But, wisely enough I suppose, Douglas had rationed us to just one programme a day over Christmas. He didn’t want the Christmas celebrations interfered with by ‘that thing in the corner’, as he called it. By common consent, we had chosen the Christmas Eve film on the BBC at five o’clock.

  Five o’clock was a very long time coming that day, and when at last Douglas got up and turned on the television, it seemed to take for ever to warm up. Then, there it was on the screen: Great Expectations by Charles Dickens. The half-mended lights were at once discarded, the decorating abandoned, as we all settled down to watch in rapt anticipation. Maybe you know the moment: Young Pip is making his way through the graveyard at dusk, mist swirling around him, an owl screeching, gravestones rearing out of the gloom, branches like ghoulish fingers whipping at him as he passes, reaching out to snatch him. He moves through the graveyard timorously, tentatively, like a frightened fawn. Every snap of a twig, every barking fox, every aarking heron sends shivers into our very souls.

  Suddenly, a face! A hideous f
ace, a monstrous face, looms up from behind a gravestone. Magwitch, the escaped convict, ancient, craggy and crooked, with long white hair and a straggly beard. A wild man with wild eyes, the eyes of a wolf.

  The cousins screamed in unison, long and loud, which broke the tension for all of us and made us laugh. All except my mother.

  ‘Oh my God,’ she breathed, grasping my arm. ‘That’s your father! It is. It’s him. It’s Peter.’

  All the years of pretence, the whole long conspiracy of silence were undone in that one moment. The drama on the television paled into sudden insignificance. The hush in the room was palpable.

  Douglas coughed. ‘I think I’ll fetch some more logs,’ he said. And my two half sisters went out with him, in solidarity I think. So did Aunty Betty and the twins; and that left my mother, Terry and me alone together.

  I could not take my eyes off the screen. After a while I said to Terry, ‘He doesn’t look much like a pixie to me.’

  ‘Doesn’t look much like a polar bear either,’ Terry replied. At Magwitch’s every appearance I tried to see through his make-up (I just hoped it was make-up!) to discover how my father really looked. It was impossible. My polar bear father, my pixie father had become my convict father.

  Until the credits came up at the end my mother never said a word. Then all she said was, ‘Well, the potatoes won’t peel themselves, and I’ve got the brussel sprouts to do as well.’ Christmas was a very subdued affair that year, I can tell you.

  They say you can’t put a genie back in the bottle. Not true. No one in the family ever spoke of the incident afterwards – except Terry and me of course. Everyone behaved as if it had never happened. Enough was enough. Terry and I decided it was time to broach the whole forbidden subject with our mother, in private.We waited until the furore of Christmas was over, and caught her alone in the kitchen one evening. We asked her point blank to tell us about him, our ‘first’ father, our ‘missing’ father.