Reader, I Buried Them and Other Stories

And the Band Played On

Grandpa’s thin, reedy voice wasn’t loud, but we couldn’t shut it out, however hard we tried. He stopped singing and smiled. Some of the family tried to smile back. Our dad sighed and rolled his eyes. Gemma, my youngest sister, who was six and would say anything that came into her head, spoke for all of us. ‘Grandpa, I’m tired of that song.’

Our mum shushed her and told her she was only tired because it was past her bedtime. That was enough to send Gemma into the other room where the TV was.

I wouldn’t say so in front of my family, but everyone was pissed off by the song. Grandpa didn’t know. He was going to carry on singing it until he dropped dead. Mum sometimes said he was getting slow on the trigger, which was putting it gently. He hadn’t said anything worth hearing for months. The worst of it was that he remembered every word of the song and it was one of those catchy tunes that stayed in your head.

‘Who was Casey, anyway?’ I asked Mum. I knew I wouldn’t get a sensible answer out of Grandpa.

‘I’ve no idea, Josh,’ Mum said, ‘and I don’t really care.’

‘Someone ought to know.’

‘It’s only a song. Does it matter?’

Sarah, my middle sister, said, ‘It’s creepy.’

‘Why?’

‘That line about his brain being so loaded it nearly exploded and the poor girl shaking with alarm. At a dance? I don’t get it and I don’t like it.’

I did some scrolling. ‘Granddad’s bit is only the chorus.’

‘Don’t you dare sing it,’ Dad said.

So I simply read them the words. ‘“Matt Casey formed a social club that beat the town for style and hired for a meeting place a hall. When payday came around each week, they’d grease the floor with wax and dance with noise and vigour at the ball...” It’s like a story.’

‘Crap lyrics,’ Becky, my oldest sister, said.

Dad frowned at her and said, ‘Language.’

‘There’s no other word for it.’ Becky was seventeen and thought she knew everything.

I carried on reading out what was on my phone. ‘Each Saturday, you’d see them dressed up in Sunday clothes—’

‘Shh. You’ll start him off again,’ Mum said.

So I took a quick look at the last part and gave them the gist of it in my own words. ‘At midnight they all push off for a late meal except Casey, who tells the band to keep playing so he can carry on waltzing with the strawberry blonde. Finally they get fed up and play “Home, Sweet Home” and he thanks them and now the blonde is his wife.’

‘Is that it?’ Becky said.

‘More or less.’

‘Sappy stuff.’

‘It’s old-fashioned,’ Mum said to her. ‘A bit sentimental, but people were in the old days.’

‘What’s a strawberry blonde, anyway?’ Sarah, who was sixteen, asked.

‘Something between a true blonde and a redhead,’ Mum said. ‘You can get it with modern hair colouring, but it must have been rare when the song was written.’

‘1895,’ I told them, thanks to Wikipedia.

‘What colour was our grandma’s hair?’ Sarah asked.

‘That’s got nothing to do with it.’

‘I’ve never seen a photo of her.’

‘That’s enough,’ Dad said. ‘Change the subject.’ He never spoke about his parents and he didn’t encourage us to ask. We didn’t even know we had grandparents until Grandpa turned up at our house one afternoon when I was twelve and off school getting over chickenpox. I was the one who went to the door. This shabby old guy with no teeth was carrying a bag Mum called a holdall and I thought he was selling stuff at the door. He was wearing a thick overcoat on a belting hot day in June. He asked if my parents were in and I shouted for Mum and waited. She came out from the kitchen and he grinned at her and said, ‘You must be Hazel. I’m Richard’s father.’

Richard is my dad’s name. Mum went white. She told me to get upstairs to my room. I sat at the top of the stairs and heard her say in a strange, strained voice, ‘You’d better come in.’ She took him through to the back. Going by the noise the cups and saucers made, she was making him tea, using the tea service she only ever got out for visitors. Normally she drank from a mug with Best Mum in the World written on it. I couldn’t hear what was said because she had shut the kitchen door. I was stuck in my room for the rest of the day and when my sisters came home they got sent upstairs as well. Dad got in as usual about six and we all stood on the landing and listened. There was some shouting, but we couldn’t work out what was going on.

After about two hours, Mum came upstairs and told Sarah she would have to move out of her room and sleep on the spare bed in Gemma’s room. Sarah kicked up a fuss, thinking it was for one night only. She didn’t know it was permanent. We were told the old bloke was our grandpa — Dad’s father — and he would be using Sarah’s room from now on. Luckily for me, it wasn’t my room he was given. I’m the boy in the family and not supposed to share with girls.

It was Becky who found out the truth from Mum. Grandpa had been living in a place called Wormwood Scrubs for nearly twenty years.

A prison.

Bit by bit, Becky found out more. She knew she wouldn’t get anything out of Grandpa or Dad, but she got to work on Mum. She wasn’t supposed to tell us what she found out, but of course she did. What’s the point of knowing a secret if you can’t have the pleasure of breaking it to your kid sisters and brother? She wanted to see our scared faces and, most of all, mine.

I got the shakes when I first heard.

Our grandpa was a murderer. Our own flesh and blood.

Once you’ve done a murder, that’s it. You can’t change who you are by doing time in prison. You’re still a murderer when you come out. You stay a murderer for the rest of your life.

He didn’t look like a murderer, not to my way of thinking. He was old and ordinary, thin, toothless, a bit pathetic.

He had shot a man, a well-known gangster, and buried the body on Oxshott Common. He’d been sent to prison for life but they’d let him out when they decided he was no danger to anyone else.

How could they know he wasn’t dangerous?

Now I knew what he’d done, he didn’t seem harmless at all. I tried not to show it, but I was so spooked I wished it was me who was sharing in Gemma’s room. I didn’t like being alone at night anymore. I lay awake listening for my bedroom door to open. Sometimes I heard him go to the bathroom humming his song about the strawberry blonde. Like I said, he was confused and he could easily have opened my door and climbed into my bed. As for that song, it was my head that was so loaded it nearly exploded.

Part of me wanted to know more about the murder and part of me didn’t. My sisters seemed to lose interest, or else they decided to shut out the horror. I asked Becky if she’d heard anything else and she told me to get a life. I sensed that even if she knew anything she wouldn’t tell. She’d had the pleasure of seeing me scared witless and she couldn’t top that. I was on my own.

I wasn’t going to ask Mum. I could see how uncomfortable she was. She never called Grandpa ‘Dad.’ She called him Nick, like he wasn’t family.

One evening we were watching an old black and white film on TV, Grandpa dozing in the best armchair, the rest of us following the story, which was called Strangers on a Train. Dad said it was a Hitchcock and they were always good. The baddie was a character called Bruno. I won’t bore you with the story. Quite early, there’s a scene in a fairground with a young woman called Miriam enjoying a ride on a merry-go-round with two boyfriends. Suddenly they all start singing the words to the music and you see Bruno sitting on one of the wooden horses near them joining in.

I heard the tune first and thought it was familiar and when they sang the words I could have kicked myself. Of course I knew what it was.

‘And the Band Played On.’

Dad frowned and looked across at Grandpa, who was still asleep. My sister Sarah started giggling and so did the others until Mum put her finger to her lips. Everyone was relieved when Grandpa slept right through the scene.

What none of us realised was that Grandpa’s song was a theme that kept coming back when the tension was ramped up. Bruno strangles Miriam, and guess what you hear on the soundtrack? Mum grabbed the remote and turned the sound down because Grandpa was stirring.

‘Do we have to watch this?’ she asked.

‘I want to know what happens,’ Becky said. ‘I’m enjoying this. It’s cool.’

Dad didn’t say anything and Grandpa settled down again, so we stayed watching.

And then — would you believe it? — there was another scene on the merry-go-round and the music was playing again. Same tune, Grandpa’s song. Guy, the goodie, chases Bruno through the amusement park towards the turning carousel. A cop takes a shot at Bruno but misses and hits the guy in charge of the ride. Guy and Bruno jump on the ride and get into a wrestling match between the moving horses. The suspense gets worse because the mechanism is out of control and the whole thing turns faster and faster. The music gets quicker and louder, too, insanely quick. A kid is almost flung off and Guy breaks off the fistfight and saves him. On the fairground an old toothless bloke looking awfully like Grandpa says, ‘I can handle it,’ and squirms under the wildly spinning base, worming his way on his stomach towards the controls in the middle. When he gets there and slams on the brake, the whole merry-go-round comes off its moorings in a screaming, smoking wreck.

We were so caught up in the drama that we’d forgotten about Grandpa. He jerked into life and shouted like he’d been shot.

Mum grabbed the remote and switched to mute. ‘It’s all right, Nick. You were having a bad dream.’

Dad said, ‘I think he’s pooed his pants.’

‘Ooh, yes,’ Gemma said, pinching her nose.

We never saw the end of that film.

Not long after that, I started sleepwalking. One night I woke up standing at the top of the stairs without any memory of how I got there. Another time, my sister Sarah heard the floorboards creak outside her room and screamed. Maybe she thought it was Grandpa coming to murder her. It wasn’t. It was me on another sleepwalk. Her screaming woke me up. It woke everyone up except Grandpa.

With all this going on, my schoolwork suffered. I wasn’t paying attention and I was getting into fights. Up to that time I’d always had good reports and got on well with the other kids. The Head decided I needed to see a shrink. This Mrs Bailey asked me loads of questions about what was going on in my life and at home. She invited Mum and Dad to meet her later, just the two of them.

I don’t know who was more embarrassed when Dad spoke to me the next day. I thought he was going to talk about puberty and stuff which the shrink had brought up. I didn’t need telling about sex — least of all from my own father. But he was on a different tack altogether.

‘I’ve never said much to you about my childhood, Josh,’ he said. ‘It wasn’t a good time and I prefer to block it out, but I can tell you’re going through some kind of crisis yourself — the sleepwalking and the troubles at school — and Mrs Bailey thinks I should be more open with you than I have. Did you know I was fostered as a child?’

I shook my head.

‘This concerns Grandpa as well,’ he said. ‘He wasn’t much older than you when I was born. Fifteen, to be precise. He got a girl of the same age into trouble, as they used to say. Know what I’m talking about?’

I nodded.

‘They were only schoolkids, too young to marry. Because of their religion, her parents insisted she had the baby, which was me. So I’m illegitimate.’ He paused. ‘There’s another word for it, an ugly word.’

I knew what it was, but I wasn’t going to say so, not to my dad.

He started again. ‘My birth mother — I suppose we can call her your grandma — didn’t want any more to do with me. She’d done what her parents expected and given birth to me and that was it. Being a baby, I didn’t know anything about it until later. I had to be fostered. I was with several different families while I was growing up, some good and some not so good. I didn’t know it at the time, but Grandpa felt responsible and took an interest in where I was and who I was fostered with. As I got older, he sent me small amounts of money sometimes and postcards from places overseas, like Aden and Malta. After the scandal of the pregnancy, he’d left school and joined the Air Force as a boy entrant. He did about twenty years in the RAF and got to be a flight sergeant and had several postings abroad.’

Dad had stopped. I was taking it in, understanding so much more now about my father’s silences whenever anyone mentioned the past. And his need for a settled family life. But it wasn’t helping me much. My head was still overloaded. ‘How did he get to be in prison?’

‘You know about that?’ Dad said, sounding relieved that he didn’t have to break it to me.

‘Not much,’ I said. ‘He killed someone, didn’t he?’

‘An evil man, a well-known gangster called Fred Odell who almost certainly killed several people himself or ordered his gang members to kill them. Nobody shed any tears over Odell’s death, but someone had to be brought to justice for it and that was Grandpa.’

‘Why?’ I said. ‘How come he shot this gangster?’

‘It was while he was stationed at RAF Uxbridge. This was before you were born, before your older sisters were born. He was in his mid-thirties by then and he’d not been out with a woman since his schooldays. Some of his Air Force mates insisted he went into London with them for an evening out. He had the bad luck to meet Odell’s daughter Annie in a dance hall. She was not much over twenty, a natural blonde and pretty. That damned tune was playing, the one he’s always singing. They got on well and met a few times more and he was in love with her. He found out too late who her father was. Odell disapproved. He wasn’t allowing his daughter to go out with a man fifteen years older than she was, so he warned him off, but your grandfather wasn’t having it. He took to carrying a gun for self-defence supposedly, but one evening he went back to Odell’s house at Oxshott with Annie, escorting her home, as blokes did in those days, and her father caught them snogging in the front porch. There was a row and threats and Dad took out the gun and fired five shots into Odell’s chest. Then he drove out to Oxshott with the body and buried it along with the murder weapon. Unluckily for him, Oxshott Common isn’t the quiet spot he thought it was. He was seen by two separate witnesses walking their dogs. One got the number of his car and phoned the police.’

‘Was he in uniform?’

‘I don’t think so, but they found him easily enough. He didn’t go into hiding, or anything. He was arrested the next night coming out of a London dance hall, the Hammersmith Palais, with Annie Odell, the girl he loved. The police had tipped off the press and it was front-page news, a picture of him with Annie at his side, eyes wide with fright. That’s how I found out. He confessed and pleaded guilty when it came to court. He didn’t have much choice. He couldn’t pretend it had been accidental or anything. He’d buried the body and the gun. If you murder someone, you get a life sentence, no argument. He did almost twenty years in prison.’

‘Did you visit him there?’

‘No. I couldn’t face it. There was no contact. I scarcely knew him anyway. What could I have said?’ Dad stopped speaking for a moment and ran his hand through his hair. ‘I suppose I should have manned up and gone there. He’d made efforts to keep in touch with me when I was growing up. I didn’t respond, didn’t visit him at this low point in his life and now I regret it. What happened after he came out on parole isn’t very clear because his mind has gone, as you know. He was sleeping rough on the streets for at least a couple of years before he turned up here out of the blue. There was drinking and drugs, I’m sure. The heroin rots your teeth. Everything he owned in the world was in one bag and most of it was so filthy it had to be binned. None of it was personal except for one small photo he’d kept. You know the rest.’

‘What was the photo?’

‘It was of Annie Odell, the girl. Has any of this helped?’

I nodded. ‘I think so. There is one question: Did you ever get in touch with your mother?’

Dad sighed. ‘I tried. I managed to trace her. She’d married, divorced and married again to quite a successful man, an architect. I wrote to her. But she refused point blank to meet me. She wrote one sentence back saying that her past was a closed book. The only link I have with my start in life is Grandpa. I’ll see that his last years are comfortable.’

‘Thanks for telling me, Dad. Appreciate it.’

I wasn’t scared of Grandpa anymore. I almost respected him. He’d shot a famous gangster and taken his punishment. He’d earned the right to walk free again.

The sleepwalking stopped and my schoolwork improved. I wished I could have talked to him about the experiences he’d had, but he was off his rocker. I bought a small gilt frame for the precious photo of Annie, the gangster’s daughter, his strawberry blonde. I think he appreciated that. He watched me fitting it into the frame and it stayed beside his bed for the rest of his life.

He lived two more years and died peacefully.

Dad made the funeral arrangements, just a short service at the crematorium. We didn’t expect anyone to be there except our family, but Grandpa sprang one more surprise. Almost every seat was taken. One of the papers had got the story and printed a column headed fred odell’s killer passes. Three of his old RAF buddies came. Five or six of our neighbours. Two ex-prisoners and their wives. A retired prison officer. A couple who ran a refuge for homeless people. Someone from the Alzheimer’s Society.

I found myself sitting next to a silver-haired woman in a dark blue coat with silver frogging and black gloves. She was wearing expensive perfume. Her face was faintly familiar. She said, ‘Are you family?’

‘His grandson, Josh.’

‘And are those your parents at the front?’

‘Yes.’

‘After the service, there’s something I’d like to say to you. Would you mind? I won’t be going back to your house for the tea and sandwiches.’

‘If you like.’

It wasn’t a religious service. There was a humanist guy who took us through the ceremony and admitted he hadn’t known Grandpa personally. We had a couple of readings and some taped music, including ‘Flying Home,’ played by the RAF big band Shades of Blue, and the ‘RAF March Past.’ Dad gave a short address and skilfully managed to say nothing about the two worst episodes of Grandpa’s life and finished by inviting everyone back to the house. Then we had the bit called the committal when the curtains closed around the coffin. Do I need to tell you which music was played for his send-off? It was only the tune, but I was thinking the words in my head, imagining that last dance he had with Annie at the Hammersmith Palais before he was arrested. Did they dance to their tune? Was that why he never forgot it? Those troubling words — ‘his brain was so loaded it nearly exploded and the poor girl would shake with alarm’ — drew tears from my eyes.

There was plenty of handshaking outside the crematorium and we looked at the wreaths people had sent. The whole thing was so much more touching than I expected. All these people cared enough about Grandpa to have come to his funeral ignoring the huge mistakes he’d made.

I’d forgotten the woman who had spoken to me, but she appeared at my side and thanked me for waiting. She drew me aside as if she didn’t want anyone overhearing her.

She said, ‘Your parents were good to him, taking him in and making his last years peaceful.’

I agreed with her.

But that wasn’t all she wanted to say. ‘There’s something I’d like your father to know, but I won’t be speaking to him myself. He doesn’t know me. Would you mind telling him that the headline in the paper was cruel and got it wrong? Nick was never a killer.’

‘No?’ I’d heard what she said and wasn’t over-impressed. I thought she meant he wasn’t a professional gunman. I guessed she’d been moved by the service, as I had. There were marks under her eyes where the liner had moistened and run.

‘He didn’t fire the fatal shots, Josh. He wasn’t there.’

‘What?’ I listened up, startled.

‘Fred Odell was a monster. He abused his own daughter for years, touched her intimately when she was only a child and forced himself on her before she even reached her teens. When Nick started seeing her, Fred was jealous. He said if she didn’t break up with Nick, he’d have him killed. She was shattered. It was the last straw. She shot her own father with one of his guns. Then she phoned Nick in a panic and told him what she’d done. He came to the house and calmed her down and took the body away and buried it. That’s how he was caught and mistakenly accused of the murder.’

‘You’re talking about Annie?’ I was so dumbstruck I repeated what she’d just told me in case I hadn’t heard right. ‘Annie killed her own father?’

‘And your grandfather served a life sentence to protect her. Not that she showed much appreciation. She married someone else, stupid woman. There’s gratitude!’ She rested her black-gloved palm lightly against my chest. ‘Promise me you’ll tell your father what I said.’

‘Yes — but who are you? He’s sure to ask.’

‘He doesn’t need to know.’

Before she turned away, I recognised her. The face was older and more lined than the face in the photo I’d framed and, like I said, her hair was white, but I’m certain she was my grandpa’s strawberry blonde.