This story belongs to me but it’s not all mine. I learned that truth is not an end. Understanding is the Holy Grail; that the cloak of darkness is split when lightness flashes, however fleeting. I learned that the man I knew as my father was not the man I came to know as my father.
The man I knew was an angry man. He was a cruel man. His tongue could flay flesh down to the bone. His eyes could see into a mind, into a soul. His victim would be on his knees, sobbing for forgiveness of his seeming betrayal, begging for an end. It would come when the man’s anger was spent. The anger that denied him peace and ruined his life. I couldn’t forget or forgive but came to understand and to be sad for him.
We had come to Margam crematorium to inter my father’s ashes. Just Cousin Joan and I, on a wind racked, drizzle-soaked morning down on the South Wales coast. It had been 30 years since we had last been together on my fleetingly madcap summer holidays with my uncle and aunt and Joan. Those encounters were conspiratorial, listening to illicit pop music on a small transistor radio while lying in the grassy dunes of Tenby beach. She wasn’t my age and, yet, as a schoolteacher, she could be. Davey needed repair, she saw, and worked some magic of friendship and little wisdoms to fix what she could.
Now we sat, dressed in black, comfortable with each other, across a table in the pub next to the railway station, waiting for the train that would take her home. We had three hours. Joan had a half of Black Velvet; mine was a pint of Brains Best Bitter. She ordered fish and chips and, while she waited, lit her uncounted cigarette. Her gravelly, sexy voice was hard earned. It would be her death rattle but she enjoyed drawing every one, as had our grandfather and fathers. I decided on Pie and Chips.
With the occasional cough, throaty syllables, and dramatic pauses, she reminisced of a time before mine. A time of her favourite uncle – Uncle Cyr – my father. Moments when as a young girl, she skipped alongside her uncle on their way to embarrass his brother in the office where he did very important stuff. And through chicanery and guile, so they did. His was the trickster gene that sought to bring down the overbearing and overstuffed. These included his family and all in his orbit.
To Joan, my father was Uncle Cyr. He was Cyr to the whole family even though his first name was John. He didn’t like it but that was how they all related to him. No matter how hard he tried to be John, he was always Cyr.
Uncle Cyr was the exciting one. He argued about religion (with grandfather) and politics (with brother) and bound her to a place on the floor amongst the protagonists. She had no interest in the content. She was enthralled by her uncle’s voice. Uncle Cyr had a car and that meant the Neath Fair of wild rides and goldfish. He took her places that enthralled. Swansea’s Mumbles and Tenby’s beaches and ice cream, Barry Islands Fun Fair and Candy Floss, Carmarthen’s hidden places. Time with the mischievous and the jolly characters that gravitated to Uncle Cyr. Listening, too, to stories of his childhood. Her world expanded in the warmth and safety of Uncle Cyr.
Sadly, on time, her train came and we kissed goodbye. We never met again. There had to be more tales but they needed a smoke and a jar. They didn’t sit well on paper or a computer. I went back for another pint of Brains. Joan had sketched a time before the blackness and exposed images of a father that I had never known. I saw my extended family as they had been not what I lost when he destroyed their legends. In those short hours, I met Uncle Cyr in his vibrant prime. A fighter and trickster without malice. Adored by a young girl. Joan had opened for me, hacking and coughing, a door on a past of laughter and love. When lightness was there to be touched.
