So Many Ways to Begin. Jon McGregor
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laughter, by the ferocity with which she would gather him into her arms and kiss the top of his head.
Without thinking about it, he picked up a tobacco tin from the bookshelf, half hidden amongst the jewellery boxes and polished stones. It was lighter than he’d expected, and rough where the metal had rusted, and there were pictures of battleships around the edge of the lid. You can open it if you like, Julia said quietly, and although he hadn’t realised she was standing behind him, he was too absorbed to be surprised. She came into the room, swept a pile of magazines from the bed to the floor and sat down. He looked at her and he looked at the tin in his hands.
Julia’s mother had been an actress, and although Julia had never quite made it onto the stage herself, she had inherited something of that same gift for inhabiting a story; and that was what she did that day, as she told him about a long-gone Christmas. She told him about her father, a young school-teacher with round glasses and a thin moustache, spending the Christmas of 1914 in a muddy hole somewhere in France. She said that even though it was a war they’d found the time for a celebration, and that by the light of a smoky paraffin lamp and a few stubby candles they’d drunk from small mugs filled with brandy, sung carols, and worn party hats made from sheets of old newspaper. It can’t have been all that cheery, she said, what with men not there who should have been there, and all of them anyway wishing they were home with their families, but they did their best, and made jokes, and drank to the health of every last man they could think of. And then, she said, leaning in close as though it were a secret, their commanding officer gave them these: a Christmas present from the young Princess Mary herself. She reached across and helped him ease the lid off the tin. Inside, there was a Christmas card, a full pouch of tobacco, and twenty cigarettes. She smiled. He kept his, she said. He thought it would be worth hanging on to, he thought it might be worth something one day. She laughed. He could be very dull and sensible sometimes, she said. My mother was forever on at him to liven up a little. He looked at the unsmoked cigarettes and a strange excitement shook through him. It was a dangerous, thrilling feeling.
The thing in his hands felt at once indestructible and hopelessly fragile. He was terrified of dropping it, or of spoiling it in some way, of holding it out in the air for too long. It felt as though he had only to put one of the cigarettes to his lips and he would be suddenly transported to that foxhole in 1914, crowded around a mess table singing carols with his fellow soldiers. He wanted to put the lid back on, to have Julia take it out of his hands, but he couldn’t move and he couldn’t bring himself to look away.
Later, Julia took him to the Imperial War Museum and showed him soldiers’ uniforms like the one her father had worn, and the type of rifle he would have used, and letters sent home from the front. She took him to the British Museum and showed him the treasures of Sutton Hoo, the Egyptian Mummies, the jewellery and weapons and costumes smuggled home from around the world. She took him to the Natural History Museum, the V&A, the Horniman, and each time he felt the same breathless excitement he’d felt when he’d first held her father’s tobacco tin, the same thrill of old stories made new.
And it was this that he had spent most of his life looking for: these physical traces of history, these objects which could weigh his hands down with their density of memory and time. Something he could hold on to and say, look, this belonged to my fathers and forefathers, this is some small piece of who they were. This is some small piece of where I began.
5 Shoebox of assorted domestic goods, bullets, shrapnel, 1953–1960
Soon after those first museum visits with Julia, he started collecting things for himself: broken crockery, an alarm clock with the face smashed in, the trailing wires of an old radio set, an empty picture frame; the cracked and rusting remains of other lives which he found on the bombsites where he wasn’t allowed to play. He brought them home, brushing the dried mud from them with an old toothbrush, looking for maker’s marks or other inscriptions, looking for something which would give these objects a story, attaching small labels with the date and the place where they were found and lining them up along his windowsill and his desk.
What are you doing? Susan asked him one afternoon, not for the first time, standing in his open doorway with her arms folded across her chest.
Nothing, he replied, turning away from her, trying to shield his latest find with his body, waiting for her to go away.
Why don’t you just collect cigarette cards like normal boys do? she said.
Why don’t you mind your own business? he said.
It is my business, I’m older than you and I’m your sister, so there, she said, picking up a dented water flask from the floor and lifting it quickly out of his reach. Where did you get this from? she asked, looking at it, reading the label which hung from its neck by a piece of white thread. Have you been on the bombsites again?
David stood up, reaching for it.
Give us it back, he said. Colin’s brother found it, he gave it to me.
Don’t believe you, Susan said. You’ll be in trouble if they find out.
Give us it back, David said again, jumping for it now, Susan lifting it higher and stepping back, turning towards the door.
Maybe I’ll keep it, she said, smiling.
It’s not yours, David said, his voice rising indignantly.
It’s not yours either, she snapped back. You don’t even know whose it is, it could be anyone’s.
Finders keepers, said David, and Susan stepped out on to the landing, smiling again.
Well, I’ve just found this so I’m keeping it, she said. David grabbed at it, Susan shrieked, and their mother yelled up at them both to stop it whatever it was they were doing. She pulled a face and gave him back the water flask, whispering for good measure that he was a smelly stinker.
If she’d asked, if she’d sat down and said that she really honestly wanted to know, he would have told her that he collected these things because he was fascinated by them, because he couldn’t take his eyes off them, because it was almost as good as having a real museum all to himself.
But she didn’t ask, and he rarely talked about it to anyone. He found it hard to explain, when anyone did ask, why he liked museums so much, why he spent so many of his weekends catching buses to museums in other towns, or gazing frustratedly at the building site which would one day become the museum Coventry was so painfully lacking. I just like looking at all the things, he would say, and imagining how old they are and finding out about them and everything; muttering as he spoke, knowing that the person asking wouldn’t understand.
He liked the smell of museums, the musty scent of things dug from the earth and buried in heavy wooden store cupboards. He liked the smell of the polish on the marbled floors, and the way his shoes squeaked as he walked across them. He liked the way that people’s voices would drift up and be lost in the hush of the high-ceilinged rooms. He liked the coldness of the glass cases when he pressed his face against them. He liked looking at the dates of the objects, and trying not to get dizzy as he added up how long ago that was. He didn’t understand why people had to ask, why they didn’t enjoy museums as much as he did, and why some of the other boys at school started to call him a swot and a teacher’s pet. It seemed perfectly natural to him, to be amazed by the physical presence of history, to be able to stand in front of an ancient object and be awed by its reach across time. A thumbprint in a piece of prehistoric pottery. The chipped edge of a Viking battle-axe, and the shattered remains of a human skull. The scribbled designs for the world’s first steam engine, spotted with candlewax and stained with jam. It seemed like some kind of miracle to him that these traces of distant lives had survived, and that he was able to stand in front of them and stare for as long as he liked.
When he ran out of display space in his room he started keeping the collection in cardboard shoeboxes under his bed, and it was from underneath his bed that he retrieved one of those same boxes some fifty years later, lifting the crinkled lid and sifting through the contents