Читать книгу What We’re Teaching Our Sons - Owen Booth - Страница 12

We’re teaching our sons about their grandfathers.

Their silent, phlegmatic grandfathers who have survived wars and fifty-year marriages. Their grandfathers who are spending their retirement building model worlds out of balsa wood, plastic and flock.

We go round to see the grandfathers. We give the secret password. The loft hatch opens and a ladder is lowered. We usher our sons up the ladder, up into the darkness.

The grandfathers have been working up here for the last five years, tunnelling further back into the eaves, back into their own pasts.

At first they managed to maintain their relationships with their wives by coming down for meals and at bedtimes. They still mowed the lawn at weekends. Interacted with neighbours. Read the paper in the evening.

Then they built a system of pulleys that meant they could have their food sent up to them, so they could eat while they worked. The lawn grew wild. Social occasions were missed. Eighteen months ago they started sleeping among the miles of miniature railway track, the half-finished buildings, the replica suspension bridges and goods yards. Waking up to find the trains had been running all night, the endless tiny whirr and clatter rattling through their dreams.

The grandmothers, with their own interesting lives to lead, barely notice their husbands’ absence any more.

Fairy lights run the length of the roof, hanging above the miniature town like stars. Below, a single evening in the lives of the grandfathers is perfectly recreated in OO scale. The trolley buses. Posters outside the old cinema. People leaving work. A dark swell on the surface of the water in the harbour.

The families of the grandfathers, everything they own packed in suitcases, waiting at the station.

And the grandfathers themselves, as boys, searching desperately through the streets for their own silent, unknowable fathers.

We tell our sons not to touch anything, even as they grab for a small model dog and accidentally sideswipe an entire bus queue with their sleeve. The youngest knocks over a crane and causes a minor disaster down at the docks. The older boys attempt to engineer horrific train crashes.

The grandfathers set about them, us, with their belts. Chase us, yelling, from the loft.

‘We forgive you!’ we scream, as the grandfathers pursue us down the street.