St M...’s Church
Newcastle upon Tyne
5th July
Dear Philip,
First of all, my deep sympathy at the death of your dear father, our dear Bill.
May he be in Heaven with your dear mother.
I have managed to give the furniture away to the needy in Newcastle so the house is empty apart from a few mugs, I think.
Your father’s death must have been quite sudden. I didn’t know he was unwell.
It was a blessing that his going was quite quick, both for him and the family.
If I’d been here, I would love to have taken part in his funeral at St. T’s if the Vicar would have allowed me.
I will remember him at our Masses in St. M.’s, as will others who remember him and your mother.
You will be fluent in Italian by now and if you have children, English will be their second language?
I think you had another brother? Please convey my deep sympathy to him when next you are in contact.
God Bless Philip,
Yours Sincerely,
FS
I’d never seen the man’s handwriting, but I knew who the letter was from as soon as I took it from the box. I’d thought about him at lunchtime as I waited to see someone. I was looking through my paper diary and the address book on my phone; I realised I had the numbers of a few dead people there.
Why hasn’t Father S contacted me?
It’s unusual to read a letter nowadays; we read emails, we glance at text messages, we scan through them for dates, numbers, threats, extras. We don’t read things in the way that we used to read letters. We don’t look so intensely at the words that the correspondent has written that we can see how they felt by the differences in that ‘o’ or that ‘t’.
And then, when you read something carefully enough, you wish you hadn’t. Father S’s missive is intended with nothing but human goodness, and I wept as I read it over again thinking of him, Francis, probably nearing the end of his own life and trying to remember the people that he’d come across over his years here in this alien country. And so he writes with his own concerns, forgetting ‘our dear Bill’. And he writes without thinking of the lexis and the syntax.
‘your’ ‘our’ aren’t entirely correct; ‘may he be…’ - subjunctive as a command, a Latinism straight from an Irishman.
And then the strange line about whether or not the house is really empty. Why did he leave the mugs? In case they came back for a cup of tea? Was that some analogy for heaven? ‘And then, y’know, we were all back there, like, and there was a cup of tea, and sure…’
And we didn’t want them to act as house-emptiers for the poor of Newcastle - we wanted them to be able to give the stuff away to whoever they wanted. A connection between our mother’s death and the charity we received, and our father’s death and the charity that we would be able to give.
Next para - the connection between the two sentences. The illness and his knowledge of it. No, it wasn’t that sudden really. He hid it away. He didn’t go for his daily walks with Tom announcing to all and sundry that he expected to be dead within the year. ‘It’s a touch of cancer, you know.’ Tom knew. Tom, his best friend. Tom, who I hoped for a moment the letter would be from.
(Don’t tell me English men are unemotional - I saw Tom, the great-grandfather, the builder, cry as he said, ‘He was my best friend’.)
‘his funeral at St. T’s’ reveals a universe of uncomprehension, apart from a joyful misunderstanding of past conditionals. (‘He would have loved to take part, if the Vicar had allowed him…’ or maybe not, maybe I’ve misunderstood them all these years.) St. T’s is the Church of England church in the village, the mediaeval one, the proper one, the tourist attraction. But my father never went there except to sit on the benches in the graveyard with Tom on the way back from one of their walks. My father was only CofE in the sense that he wasn’t a Catholic.
‘I will remember him’… well, I don’t know what that entails. I know what ‘won’t forget him’ means. Every fucking day. Sly trick. Deleting your entry from the computer address books wouldn’t change anything. And then I look at the grammar of that ‘will’ and wonder what he really means. ‘As will others’… is that the same ‘will’ as his, the same as ‘will’ be done, the same ‘remember’?
‘Fluent in Italian’… not really. I couldn’t have thought this in Italian, let alone written it. What’s he thinking about languages? Are we back to the foreigner, the alien, the immigrant?
(His charity apparently deals with immigrants.) ‘The needy of Newcastle’. Those needing another language.
‘another brother’… There’s something in the back of his head which he’s given away from the confessional. He knows I have a brother, Stephen. We were standing there together at the funeral mass and at the wake afterwards; he hasn’t forgotten Stephen, noone does. But he’s got the story of our half-brother, our other brother, there in his mind, without remembering why.
And it comes to me that I wasn’t just my father’s favourite but also my mother’s, the one that she talked about most. The one who it was easiest to talk about.
But I know that isn’t true.
May that not be true.
Newcastle upon Tyne
5th July
Dear Philip,
First of all, my deep sympathy at the death of your dear father, our dear Bill.
May he be in Heaven with your dear mother.
I have managed to give the furniture away to the needy in Newcastle so the house is empty apart from a few mugs, I think.
Your father’s death must have been quite sudden. I didn’t know he was unwell.
It was a blessing that his going was quite quick, both for him and the family.
If I’d been here, I would love to have taken part in his funeral at St. T’s if the Vicar would have allowed me.
I will remember him at our Masses in St. M.’s, as will others who remember him and your mother.
You will be fluent in Italian by now and if you have children, English will be their second language?
I think you had another brother? Please convey my deep sympathy to him when next you are in contact.
God Bless Philip,
Yours Sincerely,
FS
I’d never seen the man’s handwriting, but I knew who the letter was from as soon as I took it from the box. I’d thought about him at lunchtime as I waited to see someone. I was looking through my paper diary and the address book on my phone; I realised I had the numbers of a few dead people there.
Why hasn’t Father S contacted me?
It’s unusual to read a letter nowadays; we read emails, we glance at text messages, we scan through them for dates, numbers, threats, extras. We don’t read things in the way that we used to read letters. We don’t look so intensely at the words that the correspondent has written that we can see how they felt by the differences in that ‘o’ or that ‘t’.
And then, when you read something carefully enough, you wish you hadn’t. Father S’s missive is intended with nothing but human goodness, and I wept as I read it over again thinking of him, Francis, probably nearing the end of his own life and trying to remember the people that he’d come across over his years here in this alien country. And so he writes with his own concerns, forgetting ‘our dear Bill’. And he writes without thinking of the lexis and the syntax.
‘your’ ‘our’ aren’t entirely correct; ‘may he be…’ - subjunctive as a command, a Latinism straight from an Irishman.
And then the strange line about whether or not the house is really empty. Why did he leave the mugs? In case they came back for a cup of tea? Was that some analogy for heaven? ‘And then, y’know, we were all back there, like, and there was a cup of tea, and sure…’
And we didn’t want them to act as house-emptiers for the poor of Newcastle - we wanted them to be able to give the stuff away to whoever they wanted. A connection between our mother’s death and the charity we received, and our father’s death and the charity that we would be able to give.
Next para - the connection between the two sentences. The illness and his knowledge of it. No, it wasn’t that sudden really. He hid it away. He didn’t go for his daily walks with Tom announcing to all and sundry that he expected to be dead within the year. ‘It’s a touch of cancer, you know.’ Tom knew. Tom, his best friend. Tom, who I hoped for a moment the letter would be from.
(Don’t tell me English men are unemotional - I saw Tom, the great-grandfather, the builder, cry as he said, ‘He was my best friend’.)
‘his funeral at St. T’s’ reveals a universe of uncomprehension, apart from a joyful misunderstanding of past conditionals. (‘He would have loved to take part, if the Vicar had allowed him…’ or maybe not, maybe I’ve misunderstood them all these years.) St. T’s is the Church of England church in the village, the mediaeval one, the proper one, the tourist attraction. But my father never went there except to sit on the benches in the graveyard with Tom on the way back from one of their walks. My father was only CofE in the sense that he wasn’t a Catholic.
‘I will remember him’… well, I don’t know what that entails. I know what ‘won’t forget him’ means. Every fucking day. Sly trick. Deleting your entry from the computer address books wouldn’t change anything. And then I look at the grammar of that ‘will’ and wonder what he really means. ‘As will others’… is that the same ‘will’ as his, the same as ‘will’ be done, the same ‘remember’?
‘Fluent in Italian’… not really. I couldn’t have thought this in Italian, let alone written it. What’s he thinking about languages? Are we back to the foreigner, the alien, the immigrant?
(His charity apparently deals with immigrants.) ‘The needy of Newcastle’. Those needing another language.
‘another brother’… There’s something in the back of his head which he’s given away from the confessional. He knows I have a brother, Stephen. We were standing there together at the funeral mass and at the wake afterwards; he hasn’t forgotten Stephen, noone does. But he’s got the story of our half-brother, our other brother, there in his mind, without remembering why.
And it comes to me that I wasn’t just my father’s favourite but also my mother’s, the one that she talked about most. The one who it was easiest to talk about.
But I know that isn’t true.
May that not be true.
