Stillness, I've decided, is this

Dad went on a rant last night while we were watching the rain.

‘You know what I’d like someone to invent.’

I smiled.  ‘Go on.’ 

‘A live counter that shows you the exact number of clothes hanging on washing lines in every county in England.  When it spots with rain, I’d watch the counter going down slowly as clothes are slowly unpegged and returned indoors.  When it pitter-patters, I’d watch the counter go down a little faster.  I’d compare drizzle to a light shower in the rate at which the counter goes down.  Everyone knows that drizzle is the real wet stuff and is likely to get you soaked rather than just really wet, because to my mind ‘drizzle’ and ‘a light shower’ are two completely different states of rain and therefore two completely different states of wetness.  Don’t tell me it’s impossible to invent because I won’t have it.  If we can put a man on the moon, we can easily invent something that counts the number of clothes hanging on washing lines.  It can be done.  It’s just that there’s not enough people out there trying to do it.  Me included.’

I can only assume that he used to just keep ideas like this to himself while Mum was alive.

It's been very hot and very humid lately and the Gloucestershire Clothes Counter would have remained in its many thousands.  But last night would’ve seen a mass unpegging as the heavens opened. It rained stair rods as Dad would say, which to my mind is slightly heavier than raining cats and dogs.  I would define raining cats and dogs as very heavy rain and stair rods as extremely heavy rain.  There are two categories above stair rods: Biblical, which is survivable, but only just, and apocalyptic, which is not.  But no one would ever use the term apocalyptic to describe it the next day because there wouldn’t be a next day. 

After a downpour, I like to go out in the back garden, smell the air and feel the wet grass under my feet.  The purple smoke bush that provides some shade on one corner of the patio is at its most beautiful and most dramatic after rain.  It’s been the first and last thing I’ll look at as I walk barefoot around my garden.  I’ve fallen in love with it and I ask the squirrels to tread softly when they run up and down it.  I whisper hellos and goodbyes to it and sometimes I’ll rub its waxy leaves softly between my thumb and forefinger.  But after the rain, I dare not touch.  Those leaves can hold raindrops for hours afterwards and I fear even a breath will unsettle the balance.  In the right light, often in the soft cinema of sunset, those raindrops glisten like diamonds. 

I watch Dad as he’s reclined in a seat beneath it.  The tree is so clear in this light that it looks like it’s being lit from within.  He’s wearing a straw hat, a white short-sleeved shirt, grey trousers, an old black belt and brown shoes and his face is turned to the sun.  I’ve never seen him in a t-shirt or a pair of shorts. This is his informal wear.  I stop what I’m doing and watch him from the kitchen window that faces out onto the back garden.  I’ve never seen him so relaxed, so wholesome, so whole.  I know this is a moment I’m going to remember so I put two hands wide on the countertop and take it in.  This, I think. Stillness, I've decided, is this.  

I’ve got a photograph of him under the same tree but under a very different set of conditions.  Mum was sitting next to him, likely moaning about Rita or Joan or Doreen from the Gala Club, describing a drama or a falling-out in absolute forensic detail.  But always one-sided.  She was always the martyr.  I’ve never met Rita or Joan or Doreen but I’m sure they’re lovely people.  Lovely people who just went to the club for a drink and some entertainment and a nice chat.   In the photograph she’s holding a paper plate with a half-eaten hotdog and some crisps on it.  Dad is turned away from her, stroking my cousin’s springer spaniel they named Caesar.  Caesar is sat looking up adoringly at Dad, in full rapture of his attention.  I took the picture without them knowing because Mum hated her picture being taken.  Had she known, she would’ve screamed, scrunched her face up and tried to hide herself behind Dad.  Dad’s got tanned, leathery skin and thick hair that he slicks back.  He drove a motorbike in his late teens and early twenties.  When I was a kid I dreamt he was the middle rider with Marlon Brando on one side and James Dean on the other. 

It’s a miracle he outlasted Mum.  It still surprises me.  I was convinced Dad would die first and I would be left with her for all eternity.  Ten, twenty, thirty years.  Even forty years.  Widowed longer than married and miserable.  Utterly miserable, incredibly difficult.  My punishment for being a Daddy’s girl since day one.    

Mum was traumatised by something, but I never fully understood what.  I don’t think she ever spoke to anyone about it.  Having had an alcoholic father, assumptions can be made.  Unaddressed trauma can be toxic.  If I’d understood that when I was young, it still wouldn’t have made things any easier. Putting a label on it isn’t helpful when you’re a little girl and your parents are screaming the house down.  I knew early on that I needed to get out as quickly as I could.   

I often wonder the kind of man Dad would’ve become had Hitler not intervened.  I want to ask him if he ever wonders what his life would’ve been like had history not be so cruel to him.  He and his two younger brothers arrived in England in 1939 shortly before the outbreak of the Second World War.  They were Jewish child refugees fleeing Nazi Germany.  Thousands of Jewish children were saved as part of the Kindertransport, the train that brought them to Britain.  His brothers were sent to one family and Dad was sent to another.  His parents were sent to Auschwitz.  While his brothers continued their education, Dad was deemed old enough to work.  Having been born into a wealthy Jewish family and being the bookish type, Dad would have gone to university.  Instead, he was sent to work on a farm at 14 years old.   

When Mum died, Dad moved in with me.  We thought about selling his house but we decided to rent it out instead.  He insisted on giving me half that rent for bills and food and he saves most of the other half.  Our one stipulation to the tenants was that we could pick the hazelnuts from the tree at the end of the garden.  The garden was his sanctuary.  When I was a kid, I would collect them and Dad would cut them into quarters.  It would then be my job to grind them up in a pestle and mortar and keep them in washed-out jam jars, ready to sprinkle on breakfast cereal or use them to make hazelnut cakes.  My favourite way to eat them was to pour some into a cone before you put the ice cream in.  It made for a wonderfully nutty finish.    

A few weeks after Dad moved in, a friend bought me a book of trees for my birthday.  Flicking through it, I found that the hazel in his garden and the smoke bush in mine were featured on the same page.  They’d been placed next to each other alphabetically, based on their Latin names.  The hazel in Latin is Corylus Avellana and my smoke bush is Cotinus Coggygria.  I know it’s pure coincidence, but I can be charmed by most things, coincidence included.  I’d like to think the person who planted the hazel in Dad’s garden had a connection with the person who planted the smoke bush in mine.

For the first time since I was 16, we are back living under the same roof and I’m beginning to realise that my new role is going to be the greatest privilege of my life.  So much was snatched away from him when he was young and never given back.  Coping with the grief of losing your parents alongside the grief of the not-knowing, the lack of closure, of being uprooted and sent to live in a foreign land, the wave after wave after wave of every emotion in the book.  I want to look him in the eye and tell him I’m going to do everything in my power to make the rest of his life as beautiful as I can.  Our hearts are set to the same frequency, our minds wound to the same time, and I carry on watching him in this late evening sun.