Let's Start Again

In the beginning was the word. Why the word? Why not, in the beginning was God?

Is it because all that time ago, all those thousands of years ago, in the time before TV and newspapers, Prime Ministers and social workers, computers and psychotherapists, before teenagers with knives and old people without anyone, all that time ago some wise scribe knew that even God would be nothing without a good storyteller?

My name is Harry Black and this is a question I’ve tried answering. I made about ten pages of ramblings trying to find the answer, but I’m still working on it. That’s not bad. Some questions the pages are completely blank. Like, why do parents kill their children when they’re meant to love them? Or, how do babies grow into adults that are so hateful they’ll abuse the old or disabled, like on that TV programme? Or why do they put the lids on jars of Ovaltine so tight that the old buggers like me who actually want to drink the stuff can’t get into it? I don’t know where to start with those. So I put them in a neat pile and figure I’ll come back to it when I’m smarter.

Then there are others that I can’t stop writing. Like the way we should stop spending money we don’t have on things like space travel and Royal Weddings, and make sure we only employ real nurses who will wash and feed the old sick people in hospitals, instead of leaving them in filth. I could publish a book on what I think about those questions, if anyone wanted to read it.

Words. The right words, the wrong words. An absence of words. All these things have shaped me. Some have hurt me. Shown me love too, more than I deserved maybe. But mostly they just disappear, get lost in all the noise of life.

Sometimes the words I’ve chosen, or the ones I’ve left out, have caused great unhappiness. I can see that now, now that I’m old and worn. It becomes easier to see your own mistakes when you’re older. Not because you get wiser, but because you stop trying to prove a point, trying to win, thinking that anyone ever wins anything. You just get calmer, maybe you care a little less. And that makes it easier to see the truth.

Now when I say the truth, I don’t mean some great Truth. It’s not like I got old and there was a big blinding light and God says, here I am. Time to get ready to meet your maker, and in preparation you will see angels and prophets and understand the real meaning of life.

No. I don’t know any great Truth. But I look back and see the many other paths I could have followed. The other choices I could have made snowballing together, again and again. And then before you know it you’re not a stuck-in-your-ways retired printer that no one has any use for, pottering your way through endless days of, well, just endless days really.

But what? What else might my life have been if not this? Daft to even think.

She’d have been beautiful, Maeve, even now I bet. Those twinkling blue eyes that seemed to crackle with life. Have you ever noticed that? Our skin gets saggy, frail like parchment, faded by the years. And your hair. That goes blank, washing away all the colour, as if it’s taken fright after all those years of living. And for some buggers it vanishes altogether. Not me though. Always been proud of my locks, just like my dad, and his before him.

But the eyes. They never change do they? I mean they may not function the same, and you end up with spectacles as thick as bottle bottoms. But looking out of them isn’t the same as looking into them, is it? I looked into her eyes every day for 27 years, and I swear they never altered even in the slightest. She was a slip of a girl when we met, and far too young when the cancer took her.

But I don’t mean to be maudlin. My point is, what were all those choices if not words? The right words, the wrong words. Or an absence of words when you simply don’t choose. You leave the room. You don’t say the words that are burning through your mind as you rehearse them again and again and then say nothing.

These days I don’t say too much. I keep the words inside my head so I don’t upset too many people.

Or I write them down. Well not write exactly. I type. That perfect form of ink on paper, tidy, unspoiled by the author. No wiggles or squiggles. Print is pure. I’ve been hooked ever since my father gave me his typewriter when I left home, age 16. An Imperial ‘Good Companion’, precision engineering.

It’s all computers now of course. That’s what killed me off. They retired me when I got to 65 and it all turned to modern technology. Almost fifty years of printing, then they had no use for me. That was years ago, mind. It’ll have all changed again by now.

Not that I’m complaining. I didn’t have the energy to start again, learn it all from the beginning, even if they’d wanted me to. I sometimes try to wonder how many words I printed in 50 years and it makes my head spin.

The point I was making. What was the point I was making? Damn it. I get little interruptions these days, like someone slips a blank page in between the typed ones and it takes me a moment to, ah yes.

The point is that I still use my dad’s old typewriter now, although the ribbons are harder to come by. I have a few spares that I bought from the little hardware shop on the high street. Ray sold everything you could imagine in that shop. Hoover bags, plastic jugs, 6mm washers. But no one can be bothered with the little shops these days. It’s all supermarkets and ordering online. So Ray closed down and decided to start over. He runs a B&B now with his missus, but not before I stocked up on every typewriter ribbon he had. They’ll see me through to the end if I’m careful.

Mind you, it’s hard on my stiff old fingers, this typewriter. Is it my fingers or the keys that feel stiff? Both maybe. I look at my hands and I see my grandfather. Boy did I get old quickly.

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They want me to move out. Start again somewhere else. At my age?

Linda, the occupational therapist, she’s been round again and brought me some ‘mobility aids’, she calls them. Handles for this and grab rails for that. She’s even made the bloody lav into a throne with a raised seat and a frame with arms like a proper chair. I ask you.

Harry, she says, don’t you think it would be nicer to live in a Home? Well I tell her I do live in a home. My home. My home for more than 50 years.

I can remember the day Maeve and I moved in here. It was January and there was thick snow on the ground. It was just coal fires then, before global warming had been invented, and we couldn’t seem to get the place warm for weeks. There were the most amazing icicles hanging off the outside gutters. Beautiful, like crystals. Three foot long some of them. Got a proper name haven’t they? Or am I getting mixed up with the stuff that forms in caves, some go up and some go down and they have different names? It’ll come to me.

Anyway, we were just so happy to have our own place. Young, all heady with love, though you’d never have heard me say it at the time. None of that soft lovey-dovey stuff. She knew though. Maeve knew, and that was all that mattered. Our lives seemed so full of possibilities. Well they do when you’re young, don’t they?

I was proud of myself, to be honest. Taken on at the print works after my apprenticeship, and Maeve was a shop girl at the florist on the high street. We saved hard and put everything into buying this place, making a home. Maeve was a whiz with a sewing machine, could turn her hand to anything.

Do they teach the kids those things these days? I doubt it. Everything’s bought new and shiny from giant warehouses full of foreign flatpack rubbish with funny names you can’t pronounce. But that’s what the youngsters starting out want now. Fair enough. Everyone has their turn to be young and dumb.

Stalactites. Stalactites and stalagmites.

Everyone seems to think I’d be better off in an old people’s home, but I’m not sure. I guess the company might be nice. And having your meals cooked for you. But I’m not sure.

What if I don’t like the people? What if they are all old and dribbly and smell of wee? There’s no smell of wee in this house, I can assure you. Aggie, the Polish girl who comes and cleans on a Monday, she has too many holes in her ears but she makes sure it only smells of Pine Fresh in the bathroom, and Mountain Dew in the living room. Pleasant girl, but not all that good with a duster if I’m honest.

We have some good conversations though. About Poland, her family back home, whether Britain should have joined the Euro (never!), and why Ann Widdecombe should have won Strictly, or that nice farmer. I like talking to her because she’s foreign. There’s a cultural gap which means she doesn’t read stuff into what you say. It’s all literal, nothing between the lines. Black and white.

She doesn’t touch my papers though, or my typewriter. She asked me once whether I was writing a book. No, not me. I’m not good with beginnings, middles and ends. They’re like choices aren’t they, directions in a story, will he go this way or that. Will he love her or leave her? Will he give her what she wants most in all the world, a baby, or will he not? Will she ever forgive him, will he ever ask her to forgive him? No, I’m not big on beginnings, middles and endings.

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Let’s start again. Let’s start at the bit where you came in and I was pondering the meaning of life and the power of words.

Words have changed my life. ‘I do’, those were the right words. Never a question about that. Three letters, two small words, but the most right thing I ever said to anyone.

She was everything I wanted, all my life. All her life, until it stopped in a screeching, shuddering, derailing halt 31 years ago. But I wasn’t everything she wanted. She wanted a baby, lots of babies actually.

We almost had one. For a few weeks in 1954 we had one without even knowing it, it turned out. But this tiny bundle of matter that was secretly growing inside her got all mixed up in her tubes and made my Maeve bleed. All that blood and fear among the dahlias and chrysanthemums at the back of the florist. They rushed her to the hospital and called me at the printers. Frightened the bejesus out of me, I don’t mind saying. Seeing her so pale, her blue eyes shot with red from the tears and the horror of it all.

When she came home, she was so quiet. I didn’t know what to say, so I didn’t say anything. And that’s my point. Sometimes it’s the absence of words that change you. If I’d found the right words then, could I have made her properly happy again? And if my words had helped to rub away the festering knot of unhappiness quietly growing inside her, could I have stopped it turning into a tumour all those years later?

Now there’s a question. It’s one of the ones that I’ve written pages and pages about trying to find an answer that doesn’t seem full of self-pity and wistful thinking. Maeve would have had no time for that kind of nonsense.

In the beginning was the word. Why the word? Why not, in the beginning was God? Have I ever asked you that?