Sifting through the past brings both pain and pleasure
In her book The Clearing, artist Samantha Clark recounts going through the contents of her late parents’ house, where triggers of childhood memories abound
It’s a rite of passage, clearing your dead parents’ home. My two brothers and I pick our way through the dilapidated house where our parents raised us and grew old together. We have put off starting for months, overwhelmed by the scale of the task. Dealing with the accumulated stuff of our parents’ lives is a creepingly slow process. We don’t have a system. There is no room-byroom plan of action. We start haphazardly sorting what to keep, what to find a new home for, what to throw away. None of us seems to feel this is a task to be finished with brisk efficiency. It will take as long as it takes. There emerges between us an unspoken understanding that we each approach it in our own way and at our own pace. This is a work of mourning, not to be hurried.
We come when we can, after work, at weekends, trying to avoid being here alone after dark. My brothers both live quite near by and so their visits can, if necessary, be quick, impromptu, a drop-in just to check on things, to pick up a carload for the charity shop or dump, or to take home for safekeeping. They prefer, when they can, to come together, to reminisce about the things they find and the memories they prompt, to cheer each other along and keep the ghosts at bay. I prefer to come here alone, to work in silence. If there are ghosts here, they speak, ever so quietly, through the objects I find as I work through the rooms. If there are ghosts here, I want to hear what they have to say. There are things I need to understand.
At first I don’t achieve much when I come, and perhaps I don’t really aim to. Once I walk through the door all the rush and hurry of life outside can be held in abeyance for an hour or two. I move quietly, as if not to disturb something, though I don’t know what, and slowly go through my parents’ things.
I might bag up some clothes or clear a shelf here and there, but often I pause and just listen to the quiet rooms, remembering. I am always drawn downstairs, through the basement sitting room, and through the door to my father’s workroom at the back of the house, with the small, barred window looking onto the overgrown garden. Here, in this room that only he used, I can feel the straightforward sadness of missing him, and I can understand this. It is almost comforting. The other rooms are more confusing.
Along one side of this room my father’s amateur radio equipment lies still untouched on the long workbench.
All along the other wall are stacked dozens of model aircraft wings. Each wing is carefully glued together from tiny struts of balsa wood across which is stretched a fragile membrane. One set of wings is spectacular, spanning a full ten feet, suspended diagonally across the ceiling. The others rest on pegs, in descending order of size. I lift one gingerly, blow off the dust, and my finger pops straight through the desiccated membrane. It is as fine and light as a bee’s wing. The bodies of the model planes, to which these wings belong, are piled in a heap on another bench. Among them lie remote control units with retractable aerials and levers. There must be dozens of models here. I had no idea he had made so many. I had hardly known my father fly them since I was a schoolgirl, but he must have kept on building them.
My brothers grew into their own adult lives before I grew into mine. Younger by five and ten years respectively, my childhood scarcely overlapped with theirs, and when my mother was ill I often spent time alone with my father. When I was about ten or 11 years old, I once stood with him in a broad, breezy field where men fussed and tinkered companionably with model planes, big ones, with intricate struts and blunt wingtips. All around us the little engines buzzed like angry bees, the tone shifting and juddering as the planes banked and turned following the twitch of the levers on the remote control units the men held. These weren’t toys. This I understood. My father’s friend Murdo had the ends of two fingers missing and the blunt stubs of them fascinated me as he flicked the propeller to start the engine up, whipping them out of the way just in time. I don’t think he actually did lose those fingers starting a model engine, but for me, the thought that he might have done gave the proceedings a buccaneering thrill of danger. I stood beside my father as he took up his remote-control box, placed a thumb on each lever and taxied the little plane over the tussocky ground until it lifted into the air with a fat rasping sound. I felt a great swooping inside me as he sent the model up high and far, a tiny black fleck in the bright and blowy sky, then I whooped aloud as he banked it steeply round to skim low and fast over the reedy grass right beside us.
My father would show me a cross-section of a wing and explain to me the theory of flight, how faster airflow across the upper curve of the wing creates lift, how, to be able to take off, a plane needs just the right balance between weight and lift, drag and thrust. Lift coefficients. Thermal updrafts and katabatic winds. How birds soar. I try to remember when he told me these things, but those moments are beyond recall now. I can hear his voice, explaining. I can see his eyebrows bristling as he squints into the light, as he points out something in the sky, a bird riding the rising air current on the windward side of a hill: ‘Orographic lift,’ he says. The words have stayed, the bird is still there, a soaring speck, but his voice, his face, his hand, pointing, these flash clear for an instant but then are gone. All I can take hold of now, so carefully, is something about flight, about being in my father’s room and him gone from it, a feeling that all these stacked wings give me, a feeling of catching a bird that’s been trapped in a room, of a wren’s panicky fluttering between my gently cupped hands, like holding a beating heart, and of opening my hands outside, and the small brown thing bursting from them to lift itself into the sky. He must have kept on building them for years. So many wings.
Here, in this room that only he used, I can feel the straightforward sadness of missing him, and I can understand this. It is almost comforting