Benjamin
About a boy I never knew.
About a week after her husband died, my mother burned all her diaries.
She’d kept a diary for well over thirty years, going back to when they lived in Sussex, but they now lived on the Isle of Anglesey, in a former chapel house, Ty Capel Nebo was the name over the door. It had an old stone fireplace, which they almost always had blazing in the evening. They both preferred to keep the electric lights off and to sit reading by candle and firelight. I close my eyes and I can see her passing her diaries, one by one, into the flames. I sometimes wonder if she flipped through the pages, one last time, before letting them go, or if she kept them firmly shut and silent, afraid that they might cry out to her, refusing to be sacrificed, causing her to hesitate, to grant them a reprieve.
It was several weeks after that, that she got her very first tattoo. It was of a pipe, like her husband used to smoke, proud and bold on her forearm. Smoke swirled from the bowl of the pipe forming red roses that spelled out his name — Peter. And a few weeks after that she got a D-N-R tattoo on her wrist. “Do Not Resuscitate”. By the time they had cause to take notice of the writing on her wrist and to allow her that wish, she had accumulated quite a collection of tattoos. “I like how it feels,” she had said, “when they’re doing it.”
She would never really answer when we asked her why she had got rid of all the diaries. “It was just nonsense,” she would say. “Just silly stuff.” If you pressed her too much she would soon stop responding, and ask if you wanted a cup of tea, or to help her in the garden. Sometimes, without realising it, she would place one hand over the tattoo of the pipe on her forearm, protectively almost. Or maybe she connected the tattoo with the diaries, and felt ashamed. All those words.
I wish that I had the diaries. She wrote well and she wrote a lot. But it seemed the tattoo was enough for her, and I suppose that I’ll just have to make do with what’s written on me too.
They had moved to Wales from Hastings, on the south coast of England, just along from Brighton, where she had grown up. But for a while before that they had lived in Scotland. On the Orkney Islands. About as far north from Brighton as you could get. It was while they were living there, in the early 1970s, that my half-brother was born. For a long time I knew nothing about him. Not that he existed, not that he died. And even after I found out about him, it took awhile before I learnt his name. Benjamin.
My mother wasn’t with him when he died. She was still in intensive care, being treated for loss of blood and other complications. There were to be no other children after this third one. His father was with him though, my mother had insisted that Peter should be with him rather than her. She didn’t want Benjamin to be on his own. I’m not sure if the hospital staff let Peter hold the baby when he died or not. Considering the time and the location, perhaps not.
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The following day, the hospital chaplain came to them. My mother was still weak, and of course they were both distraught. The chaplain said what he could, offering comfort, and then he had a very unusual and delicate request. He explained that elsewhere in the small hospital there was an elderly man who was dying, the doctors thought he probably had a day or so left. He had never married, had no children, and no family left at all. The man had told the chaplain that he was terrified of dying alone, of making his final journey without anyone there. Of his burial, his church service, being nothing but empty, in every way. He was of a generation and a community that believed totally in the afterlife, and the resurrection, but now that his time was coming, he was scared, and lonely, and the anxiety he was feeling was making his final hours more of a struggle than they needed to be. He had spent many years living on his own, and that had been bearable, but dying on his own was somehow a darker sorrow. The chaplain had thought of the new-born who had died, and asked if they might consider letting him be buried in the same casket as the old man.
Taken aback, they asked for a moment to think about this strange request, but they felt that if it gave solace and peace to somebody else, then perhaps it would be a way that their son’s death might bring some good to the world, however briefly. They agreed. The chaplain told the elderly man, and reported back that it had soothed him, had calmed him and that he was so grateful and happy. It had dimmed the darkness for him. The man had asked to know the boy’s name. Benjamin Warwick.
The man died the next day, he had made arrangements beforehand for his funeral, being a practical Scottish presbyterian, so the baby was given to the funeral directors, and the two were buried together. My mother and her husband never asked for the man’s name, and never wanted to know where the grave was. Somehow they thought that it would lessen the power of their act if they went to visit the grave and only grieved for their son, and not the elderly man too. They felt that they had let their son go, had allowed him to accompany that stranger on the last journey, and that those two should be together, never alone and never parted in any way.
When they got back to the fine old Scottish house they had moved into with so much promise, and tried to slip back into the everyday life again, after the tragedy, they started to hear rumours about their home, pick up local gossip about its history. It seems that the house was built by the son of a wealthy landowner, to be his new home once he and his sweetheart were married. He had put a lot of love and care into the design of the house, and when the First World War broke out the building was very nearly complete. The war hurried their wedding plans, and they married quickly, with him enlisting at the same time. They never moved into the house, and he never returned from the war, being one of the first Scottish casualties. The house stood empty for a number of years, but finally his family completed the construction and sold it.
And then, so the stories went that my mother and her husband heard, everyone who lived in the house had suffered a premature death of some kind or another. A child, or a young husband, or a first-time mother. And now, of course, little Benjamin. My mother was so angry. She said that if only someone had told her of the stories going around about the house before they bought it, then she would have thought twice about moving in. Her husband was more practically minded, and tried to tell her that it was all just stories, just coincidences, that Benjamin would have died regardless of where they were living. It was just the way things were. My mother was adamant though, the house had taken her son, and she wanted nothing more to do with it. I learned that while she had been quite heavily pregnant she had been in the house on her own, in the main bedroom upstairs, when she was startled by the stark graveyard sound of a crow cawing, and when she looked to the window she was shaken by a large crow, a frenzy of black feathers, flying straight into the glass, again and again, as if trying to break in. A few days later it had happened again. She had been downstairs this time, in the living room. There was no cawing this time, she said, but instead just a thud, as the crow, and she has no way of knowing if it was the same crow or not, flew at the leaded window, at speed. This time it hurt itself, and left blood smears on the window. She went outside to check if there was anything she could do, but the bird was not there, just the blood on the window, and the slight tremble under her skin. Looking back she saw it as being either a warning, or a threat, and again, she blamed herself for not seeing it for what it was.
They moved out, buying a very cheap crofter’s cottage far away from the town. It took them a long time to sell the house, as my mother, much to her husband’s dismay, insisted on telling all prospective owners of the history of the house. If there were to be more blood stains on the house’s windows, she didn’t want the stain to be on her too. It eventually sold to a very practical and unsuperstitious family with an eye for a bargain.
I don’t know if anything ever happened to the new family, as after my mother and her husband sold, they moved back down to Hastings, back to the other end of the country, finding a flat they could afford, and she wanted no more to do with the Orkney Islands. Before they moved out of the crofter’s cottage I visited them, just once. My parents drove all the way up to the ferry, and a crane lifted the car onto the deck, where it was lashed down with heavy, wet ropes. My father spent the whole trip worried about the paintwork. We sailed past the Old Man of Hoy, as the waves clawed angrily at the ship, and I ate tuna for the first time. We stayed at a hotel in the nearest town, Stromness, as the cottage had no room for guests. It was big enough for only the two of them, and her other son, Philip. I remember how happy he was to see me, giving me a battered old Batman annual and a massive smile. I remember the thick, stone walls and the huge fire in the hearth to warm the small home, and I remember furs scattered around to pull around you to keep out the cold, that sometimes still spilled over you, despite the flames. Nobody spoke about a lost child. Nobody mentioned Benjamin. I learnt later that Philip sometimes questioned whether he had ever existed. When pregnant, my mother had placed Philip’s hands over her full belly and told him that it was his new brother or sister, that he was going to be a big brother, that their family was going to be richer and warmer. He remembers how excited he had been. And then he remembers the sorrow and the tears but also the silence, the confusion. He was only five years old. Had he made up the story about a brother or sister? Had he done something to make them go away?
I still have the book they gave me, as a parting gift. I don’t think they had bought it for me, it was just a book they had on the shelf, but it seemed they wanted to give me something more solid than just a goodbye hug, something to make the visit real. I’ve just checked the inscription, and I can see that on the page where she put the two kisses, there is a black and white drawing of a Viking ship. Considering that I have ended up living in Sweden that could be seen as some sort of promise.
When I think about Benjamin, and everything around him, he seems indicative, in a way, of my family and my life. Things not spoken about. Stories untold, secrets made, long shadows cast. And brothers who you never knew existed. I have more than one of those. My mother’s diaries captured all those hidden moments, the jewel-like truths of the past, now misted and clouded by years and obfuscations. And when I wonder why she burnt them I have so many thoughts. Was it an act of protection? Or revenge? And was it cowardice or bravery, weakness or strength, that powered the setting of the fire, the feeding of the flames?
I wonder if she liked how it felt, as she sat there on her own, watching her words and her history and her documented truths stealing away into smoke and suppositions, leaving a space on her skin for newer pain to be inked.
