Embroidery

The trailer was weighed down with rubbish. It seemed that my father had kept everything that was worthless and thrown away what was valuable.

My parents had single beds made of wood. When we had stripped them and removed the mattresses, we discovered the plywood of the base was stained with brown streaks. The drawers underneath were full of black pellets, and stray cockroach legs and wings.

We stood and stared at the beds. Then we got hammers and broke them up into pieces, and put them in the trailer.

A desk was the same, so covered in cockroach excreta we took it out in one piece and slid in on with the broken wood of the beds. It was a desk made by my father twenty years before, solid and plain and practical.

The dressing table in the main bedroom had also been made by my father. It had three drawers and a mirror, and was covered with grey and white patterned laminate that was lifting up at the edges. It was showing its age and we couldn’t see anyone wanting it, not even a charity, so we took out the drawers and lifted off the mirror and put it on the trailer.

As we went through each piece of my parents’ belongings, I was reminded of how much my father made with his own hands. There were rugs he had woven, thick with rich colours. There was a painting, a copy of a Rubens; there were trousers and shirts he’d sewed himself; there was a manuscript of a novel he had written years ago which I still haven’t read. He used to fix the car himself, when he was younger, and anything that broke around the house. He tried knitting, and cooked most meals. Before he went into hospital, he insisted on getting up a ladder to fix a curtain, with me hovering nervously behind him.

But with age and infirmity and my mother’s illness, he was not able to keep up with a sagging house. The kitchen was tired and grotty and we had to make decisions about its various components. The dishwasher, when opened, revealed yet more cockroaches, live ones, running around inside it. It had not been used by my parents at all, in the ten years they’d lived there. There was water in the sump, though, but we decided not to investigate any further, just manoeuvre it out to the trailer, where all the other detritus was waiting for the final journey.

My father was cross with me when he found out.

“A perfectly good dishwasher. You could have sold it at least.”

“It was full of cockroaches, Dad.”

“Oh, they never worried me. I’d just spray the inside with Baygon, then close it up again. That took care of them.”

He smiled triumphantly.

“Health hazard, Dad. And what about the dead bodies inside? Did you clean them out? That wouldn’t have been a nice job.”

“No, no. Didn’t worry about that. It was a perfectly good dishwasher.”

Cockroach soup.

We cleaned on.

It wasn’t only the smell of an ill-ventilated house with slowly decaying food in the refrigerator, and the cockroaches, but there was naphthalene everywhere, and mouldy onions and oranges in the sewing room. At least the mothballs meant that clothes were perfect, and all Mum’s linens were well-preserved. There were lots of them: we found 50 or more pillowcases, including 20 still in their packaging. There were 150 or so towels, dozens of sheets, cascades of teatowels.

Then there were several boxes of laxatives, and, sensibly, dozens of packets of toilet rolls. The cupboards in all of the rooms were overflowing with stuff. There must have been two dozen bottles of dishwashing liquid. Boxes of tinned peaches. Three microwaves, but only one worked.

When we tried out the juicer while my father was still living at home, it had something wrong with it, but he said that was fine, he had another one.

In the shed were two or three mowers, plus a ride-on.

My mother had vases of plastic flowers dotted around the house. I remembered them from long ago, and how she loved them because they were colourful and never died. But when I took off the plastic bags that protected them from dust, they fell apart in my hands. All the petals dropped, leaving only the faded green plastic stems.

Amongst the sad rubbish, there were treasures. Two cedarwood boxes held layers of manchester and photos, blankets and letters, heavy English coats and embroidered cushion covers and old diaries.

The most surprising letter lay out in the open, on the bed in the back room. My parents had built an extension onto the simple lowset house, adding two more bedrooms and a bathroom. One of these bedrooms was large, with a sliding door to the garden. The single bed had a handmade cotton bag sitting on the pillow. It was neatly embroidered in a geometric design, with a crocheted edge, and had the initials L.J.R. on the inside flap (with the J around the wrong way). Inside it were two letters. One was a newsy letter between friends, the other a letter of admonishment from a mother to a son.

The son was my father.

The date stamp on the envelope was 2 July 1956, Devon, England. My paternal adoptive grandmother wrote that she had been told of her son’s behaviour on his motorboat by one of his guests. He said he found her son charming at first (I can’t read all the words, but the general tone is unmistakable) but then realised he was working his wife (my mother) like a navvy, and being a general bully. His sister-in-law Molly and niece Patricia were on the boat, and they did not wish to talk further about what had happened, it was so unpleasant.

I found out later from Patricia that my father had forbidden her from going to a ball being held on a navy ship, even though her own mother had given her permission. She was 16 at the time. She said, with a laugh, that her father and my father were very Victorian in their attitudes towards women and sex, and a few other things as well. But she remembered her mother being seasick, my mother being sweet, and my father being domineering.

But when I first found this letter, it was a revelation. There were to be several of those during this fiery cleanout of the house. My father, who had always set himself up as the arbiter of good behaviour, of wisdom and righteousness, was independently verified as a bully. I had believed during most of my childhood and early youth that I was the one who behaved badly, who upset my father and was wrong. As I grew older I realised that there was something wrong with him too. But I had no one to talk to about his behaviour, no one to tell me ‘yes, I knew him, and I can tell you what he did back then’.

People who met my father and knew him on a superficial level always commented on how charming he was, how funny, what a nice old man. As my mother used to say, they didn’t have to live with him. When I read the words of my paternal grandmother – ‘I asked how Lilian was, he [the guest on my father’s boat] heard she had been very ill and was not surprised as she was a slave in all weathers’ – I knew the real story had been hidden from me. In that house, scattered around, lay more secrets waiting for me to stumble upon them.

The embroidered bag had been made by my mother when she was a girl, and the intials were those of her mother, Lilian Jane R. That letter lying snug in its little bag seemed to have been put there especially for me to find.