The Pre-War House and Other Stories

Helicopter Jean

‘Now then,’ says my father, pushing the nettles aside with the umbrella, ‘which way?’ We consider our choice of muddy paths. ‘I think we’ll try down there,’ he says, and we walk on, completely lost. ‘Did we come this way before?’ he asks. ‘Did we turn left or right here?’

‘I don’t know,’ I say. ‘Maybe left.’ I don’t recognise it at all. Left looks drier.

‘Left it is,’ he says.

He is wearing his windcheater, the same one he wore for Sunday walks when I was small. He is carrying my mother’s umbrella. It is pastel-coloured and patterned with tiny flowers and has a wrist loop which he has utilised.

He points the umbrella at a stream and says, ‘That shouldn’t be here, that should be way over there.’ He frowns down at the stream, annoyed. ‘All right,’ he says, ‘we’ll try this way,’ and we push on.

We came here often in my childhood. I should know it better than this. I recognise the smell of the bracken, and dung from the nearby farm. I remember the tall, thin trees with high, sparse branches, and the bluebells. I remember riding on my father’s shoulders with my head seven feet in the air, his hands around my ankles, my mother striding ahead singing hymns and ‘Leaving on a Jet Plane’. She was the only one with any sense of direction. She had an aerial view in her head and was our guide. She could stand in the middle of the woods and point north or north-north-east or to home. It is a skill I did not inherit.

‘This is right,’ he says, hopefully. We pass a horse chestnut tree and he stops and pokes at the lower branches with the umbrella. He says, ‘Do you remember being lost on Blankenberge beach?’

‘Yes,’ I say, ‘I do.’

I had stayed with my mother, sitting between two breakwaters, while my father went to the pier. I watched him walk away down the beach, becoming a tiny figure in the distance, and then decided I wanted to go too. Leaving my mother sunbathing, I followed him, or tried to. I lost him for a while and then spotted him on the pier. I shouted but he was too far away to hear me. I couldn’t see how to get up there. There must have been steps in the wall somewhere but I couldn’t for the life of me find them. So I walked back towards where I had left my mother but I couldn’t find her either. I had no landmarks other than the breakwaters and they all looked the same. I went to and fro, back to the pier which I could not reach and then back to the breakwaters, walking further and further up the beach until finally I saw her, sitting in the shade in her turquoise swimsuit, just her feet in the sun. But when I arrived, when she looked up, it was a stranger’s face which smiled at me.

In fact, my mother wasn’t there, where I was looking. She had packed up and gone to the pier. She was already up there, high above the beach. But I didn’t know this at the time. I felt very lost and wondered what would happen if I never found them again. In my head, I practised saying No to strange men.

‘When we realised you weren’t with either of us,’ says my father, ‘I left your mother on the pier and came to look for you. I could see you on the beach. You were a long way off, walking towards me. I stood and watched you. You looked very serious.’

Turning and walking back towards the pier, I was surprised to find just how far I had wandered, how far from the pier I was. And I was still looking for a distant figure, concentrating on the place where I had last seen my father. I didn’t see him standing right there on the promenade, watching me.

‘You would have been about eight,’ he says.

When I was about eight, my father used to sit at the kitchen table, topping and tailing the green beans he had grown in the garden. He worked very quietly and precisely, cutting neat diagonals until he had a bowl full of parallelograms which my mother boiled. He was cool with a kitchen knife. He could peel a cooking apple in one long curl of green skin, and I watched him with eyes which were his, only smaller.

I was about eight in the days of Beautiful Jean, ballroom dancing on a Monday night, my mother coming downstairs in a sexy, floaty dress like Angela Rippon on Morecambe and Wise, and my father standing at the foot of the stairs watching her, saying, ‘Beautiful Jean,’ as he held out his arm for her to take. Then one week he said instead, ‘Shall we give it a miss? I think we’re a bit past dancing, don’t you?’ She stood on the stairs and grew old then and there. Her waist expanded and her feet grew corns, and she turned and went back upstairs, her sequins catching the light before she disappeared.

I entered adolescence. My father, troubled by his overgrown daughter, by the sudden appearance of a young woman where his little girl had been, became the slowly turning pages of a newspaper and the opening and closing of the lounge door while I sat in front of the television watching Blake’s Seven, in which Surrey was an alien planet.

Meanwhile, my mother was cutting the beans herself, or bringing them to me and telling me not to fuss with them, just to cut them, they were just beans. She went walking on her own, wearing his windcheater.

One Saturday, somebody phoned and spoke to my father, who came upstairs to my bedroom, knocking on my closed door, to tell me that my mother had fallen and broken her ankle. After being found by another walker, she’d been helicoptered to the hospital. My father went to see her, leaving me at a neighbour’s house.

Mrs Abbott let me into her kitchen. It was a nice kitchen — spotless, not a thing out of place. There was a crystal bowl of pristine fruit on the side and the bin was in a cupboard. It looked like a show-home or studio-set version of our own. She sat me down at the kitchen table and then stood back and looked at me, as if she might decide I looked untidy there and put me somewhere else. She smiled pleasantly and said, ‘Your poor father. Your mother’s always had a streak in her, hasn’t she?’

I asked to use the loo. ‘I know where it is,’ I said, the house being exactly like ours.

Upstairs, all the doors were closed. I opened the door to my right and stood there, unsettled to find that this was not the bathroom. Where we had our bathroom, the Abbotts had their main bedroom, and lounging on the rumpled bed was Mr Abbott wearing nothing but his socks, smoking a cigarette. Wagging a hairy leg to and fro, he said, ‘Coming in?’ Then he laughed and shrugged and said, ‘Only joking. Toilet? Next one along.’

I closed the bedroom door.

In the Abbotts’ immaculate bathroom, I used the loo. While I sat there, I leafed through Mrs Abbott’s magazines. When I was finished, I looked for toilet paper but couldn’t see any, so I used the magazines, tearing pages from The Lady and Beautiful Home. Then I went back downstairs.

I visited Mum in hospital and one nurse said to another, ‘This is Jean’s daughter.’

‘Which Jean?’

‘Helicopter Jean.’

I loved Helicopter Jean. I pictured her flying high above the treetops, becoming a dot in the distance, a speck in the sky, the helicopter glinting in the sunlight.

For a while, my father called her Helicopter Jean and it made them both smile.

A conker falls. ‘That’s a beauty,’ he says, polishing and pocketing it, pleased. He is like a boy with a champion conker, for whom Beautiful Jean is still in the future, shimmering like a mirage, waiting to be wooed and won.

We have gone wrong somewhere. We don’t recognise this bare clearing. We retrace our steps. He starts to hum, to peck at her songs, but he doesn’t know the words. ‘Heavens above…’ he says. ‘Heavens above…’

The cancer was like a rat in a pantry, creeping in during the night and spoiling her eyesight, her muscles, her memory.

Beautiful Jean, lying downstairs on a medical bed, tried to remember her hymns. ‘Heaven above… Heaven above below below… Heaven above… Hello?’

‘Hello,’ said my father. ‘Hello, love, we’re here.’

‘Hello?’ said my mother again. ‘Can I come in? How do I get into the box?’

She could barely see us now. We watched her, our eyes gleaming, wondering where she was.

‘It’s all over,’ said my father, later, in the kitchen, bypassing this dying, hurrying out of this jungle and into a bleak place.

When my mother died, my father and I found ourselves standing in what had once been our dining room, surrounded by swabs and pads, plastic sheets and plastic mugs, talking books and wigs. We returned these things to the hospice and the library and tried to remember where we had been before.

I found memories of her secreted in unexpected places: in the bathroom cabinet which smelt of her face soap when I went looking for spare toothpaste, and in the darkness of her wardrobe where her scent lingered on her abandoned clothes. When I found her, I stood still and inhaled, time-travelling.

I took my mother’s ashes to the woods when the bluebells were thick. I trudged along behind my father, wondering which way to go now that nobody here had a map in their head. He carried the pot of ashes like a priest with an incense burner, his old windcheater for a cassock. He tried to sing ‘Leaving on a Jet Plane’ but he only knew the first two lines.

We scattered her ashes around a sycamore tree which was almost in the sun. It seemed as if something momentous ought to happen, but the ashes just fell to the ground, onto the grass and onto our shoes.

There was some graffiti carved into the bark of the tree, near the base.

My father traced its lines and said, ‘What does this mean?’

I told him: ‘True Love For Ever’ and ‘If Destroyed Still True’.

To our right, the woods gave way to a field full of drowsy cows, and beyond it a busy road roared with traffic. We walked back the way we had come, the pot empty in my father’s hands, something precious left behind, just out of reach of the sun.

I drifted back to my flat, my boyfriend and my job, and my father is growing green beans again, eating parallelograms for tea. He phones me to ask, ‘How long for potatoes?’ and how hot a towel wash should be. He asks me if I eat vegetables and how often I clean my floors. We are beginning carefully, getting our bearings.

In my father’s memories, I am forever eight years old, a time-traveller in a Tom Baker Doctor Who scarf. He is bewildered if I say that I was not, on this or that occasion, eight but thirteen or fourteen years old. I crash around inside him, vandalising his memories, stealing his eight-year-old girl.

I tell him about my first and secret boyfriend and he tells me about his brief engagement to a girl before Mum. I tell him about the two times I’ve been in hospital having stitches and never said and he tells me about the time he almost died skidding on a motorbike on black ice across oncoming traffic.

It was spring when we last stood here. Now it is autumn. Trees which were green are now bare and the paths are buried beneath the leaves. The bluebells are gone and the wood feels empty despite the evergreens — holly hurrying us into winter, like Christmas menus appearing in pubs on the first of September. The holly must have been here before, with the bluebells, but I didn’t notice it then, in the spring.

Neither my father nor I can find our way to the place where we left Jean. Her umbrella swings at his side like a pendulum, and he says, ‘Which way? Left or right? Was this fallen tree here before? I think I remember this, don’t you?’ We are in a clearing where many paths meet, and I do remember this but I don’t know which way to go. ‘Is it this one, do you think?’ he says and I randomly agree. We take a path.

The violence of it burns our eyes. The stink of petrol hangs thick in the air. To our right is an empty field, and beyond it, a busy road. Fingers of sunlight stretch towards the stump of a tree, falling just short of the initials I.D.S.T., the only part of the message left in the bark of the sycamore amputee. In front of the stump is a burnt-out car, its body a carcass of battered rust, its bonnet off, its engine exposed, its windows smashed and its doors ripped off, its back seat stripped and empty beer cans resting on the springs.

‘Good God,’ says my father, staring, trying to make sense of it. He puts his hands in the pockets of his windcheater, where they will curl around the contents — assorted tissues, mints — and he will remember that Jean was the last one to wear it.

My father, with a pocketful of treasure, fishes out the sweets and says, ‘Polo?’

We suck at our mints with a hole in the middle. We circle the car as if it is an art installation we would like to understand. My father says, ‘Someone’s gone to a lot of trouble.’

Something glints, catching my eye, and I look up, as if I might see Helicopter Jean flying high above the treetops, high above the field and the road and all the traffic, singing ‘Leaving on a Jet Plane’ as she goes.