“If I had my way,” he says, “I’d turn every factory, every site that I’d ever worked on into a place like this. They’ve done a good job here, a damned good job.”
We sit for quite some time without the need for conversation, at ease in each other’s company.
Before we head off, we look at the display about the various birds it’s possible to see at Far Ings, and the incredible journeys that they make to reach here. The pink-footed geese coming from Arctic Russia, the swallows and sedges from South Africa, the sand martins from Chad.
“Isn’t it amazing?” says Dad, “the journeys these birds make.”
We read the panel informing us that scientists still don’t fully understand why birds migrate.
“What about you, Dad? Why did you migrate?”
I watch him thinking about this for a while, then he says, “Half the people I went to school with left too, sure there was nothing for us at home.” He starts to laugh, “A great flock of Paddies migrating, that’s what we were—thousands of the buggers descending on Britain.”
This a glimpse of his old self re-emerging—irreverent, scornful. It used to get him into trouble sometimes, when people tried to have a serious discussion about the burning issues of the day.
We look through the window, see a man below with a pair of binoculars and a camera strung around his neck.
“Bird watching, aye, there’s plenty of fellas who love it. I never did it meself. It looks a grand hobby, though, very relaxing.”
But he did do it. Sometimes I’d catch him standing utterly still and silent back in Wales, riveted by the flocks of swallows gathering on telegraph poles in September, before wheeling away in formation and heading back to Africa. Hard not to think he was envying them their return to their homeland, while he was stuck here for another year. Unlike the swallows and sedges, the sand martins and pink-footed geese, he never made it back to where he came from.
You move for work or education, for what you think are short-term goals, but before you know it you are putting off your return home for another year, then another. There is a sense of exhilaration whenever I cross the Severn Bridge to Wales and leave England behind. For a few days I feel that I finally belong somewhere—I rediscover my map in the head. So why the surge of relief when I leave again a few days later? I wonder if Dad used to feel something similar when he was departing Ireland, shrugging off myriad obligations, feeling suddenly weightless?
My father asks, “What is it you do again?”
I explain about teaching at Hull University once more.
“Where’s that?”
“Just there, across the river.”
He looks to his right, over the murky water into Yorkshire.
“Does your mother know?”
I tell him she does.
“Has she told them in Ireland?”
“She has. I’ll take you there later, to the University. I’ll show you my office.”
“You have an office?”
The wonder in his voice reminds me how when I got my degree, many years ago now, he said, “Christ, you’re made, boy, bleddy well made. You’ll never have to work outside in the rain and the cold again.”
When we’re back outside and heading for the car park I realise that I’ve left my notebook on one of the tables. I suggest that he waits in the car while I run back and get it.
“Ah no,” he says, “I think I’ll go and sit on that bench over there next to the water.”
For a moment I’m worried about leaving him outside on his own like that. But he looks so happy at the prospect that I dismiss my fears.
“Okay, Dad, alright. If that’s what you want.”
“I think I’ll do a bit of bird watching while I’m here.”
I’m not sure if this is a joke or not.
“Are you going to take it up as a hobby?”
He hesitates, looking across the water into the reeds.
“I think I will.”
He seems serious.
“I’ll get you a pair of binoculars for your birthday then, shall I?”
“Aye, just the job.”
I’ll buy us both a pair, and we’ll come back and look for bitterns and marsh harriers. We’ll stand side by side in one of the hides, I’ll bring a flask of tea, a pack of sandwiches. We’ll make a day of it. I walk over to the bench with him, watch him settle down, stretch out his legs and turn up his face to the late afternoon sun.
“You sure you’re alright?”
“I’m grand,” he replies, “go on, take as long as you want, I’m in no hurry, sure.”
As I walk back up the stairs to the Information Centre I’m humming. If he’s feeling this good then maybe we can go for a drink. Suddenly I have this desire to see him supping a pint of Guinness, a thread of the creamy head coating his lips, him gripping the glass and savouring the aftertaste.
“That’s a grand pint.”
Yes, that’s what we’ll do. We passed a pub on the way, The Sloop Inn, that looked old-fashioned, friendly, unthreatening—we’ll go there, have an early drink and get something to eat while we’re at it.
The notebook is where I left it, lying on the table, I pick it up, pop it in my bag and amble back downstairs and into the car park.
The bench is empty. Of course it is. I look around, just to be sure, but he’s nowhere to be seen. When it’s clear that he’s gone, that our brief time together is over, I feel a hole opening up inside me. For a long time I just stand there in the middle of the car park, slowly getting used to the world without him all over again. It felt so very good to have him back, even for such a short time. We get on much better now he’s dead.
It’s impossible to predict when he’ll return again. The one thing I can be sure of, it won’t be when I expect him to, it’s not something that can be planned. The last time I was back home I walked the length of the road where I grew up, clotted with memories from the railway line at one end to the dock gates at the other. Halfway down I stopped outside the site of the Whitehead Iron and Steel factory, where Dad worked for many years, now a waste ground awaiting development. It was not so difficult to close my eyes and smell, once again, the hot oil and chemical stench, to hear the piercing scream of metal being sliced at high speed. But there was no hint of my father’s presence there. I stood outside our old house until the new owner drew back the curtains and peered at me suspiciously and I turned away and left. No hint of him there either. At the end of the road I turned left, following the map in my head, and walked down Coomassie Street. When I was a boy my father and I found the name thrillingly exotic and mysterious, we would turn it over in our mouths, elongating the vowels. I closed my eyes and strained to hear his voice—nothing. Then on to Mill Parade, with the Transporter Bridge to my right—how many times did Dad and I take that to the far side of the river, leaning over the rail to look down onto the muddy banks of the Usk below? In Church Street I came to a pub where the two us would sometimes go when I was back from University. These were expeditions prompted by my mother—why don’t you two go out for a drink together? These father/son outings were filled with awkward silences, our eyes wandering to the TV perched high on the wall. There, in the nearly empty lounge, I lingered over my drink, sure that this would be the place, but I was wrong again. No, his appearances are just as impossible to predict as that sudden, urgent desire to ring home, before I remember there’s no one there now, both of them gone, the house sold.