The Visit

Fictionalised life writing

THIS TEXT WAS COPIED INTO THE EMAIL AND SENT TO BLOOMSBURY 11.2.14

Anthony Doran

(my email addresss anthony@doranpressagency.co.uk)

(phone 01689-856836 or 0781-853-2497)

Please use the pen-name Val Cocks

Short story competition, 2014-The Visit

The wooden box is covered in dust which hits me full in the face when I take

it down from the shelf. Some of the letters tell the story of my war-time

birth 66 years before.

Pete, 12, my eldest brother, writes: ‘Dear Mum, I am very pleased about the

eight and a half pounder, but for heaven’s sake don’t call him Valentine. Jim

said, in a matter-of-fact way, ‘We’re going to call him Chrysanthernam.’

But whatever six year old Jim thought, my birth certificate confirms that I,

Kenneth Valentine Barrett, was born on February 14 1940 in Rumwood

Court, Langley, Kent, a delightful country house, which had been converted

into a maternity home during the Second World War.

It was Jim’s illness in 2004 and our visit to hospital, culminating in a frank

talk in the car coming home, which convinced me that I must open the box

after all these years. My curiosity was like a savage beast, eager to be

satisfied. In my imagination, my mum was travelling by ambulance the 20

miles from the family home in Benenden, along the snow-bound roads of

rural Kent to give birth. I thought of her worrying about her unborn child

and whether she’d make it through this terrible War and this harsh Winter. It

seemed that the whole of Benenden, a village deep in the Kentish Weald, was

celebrating the birth.The Duke of Norfolk’s aunt, Miss Howard, lived in a

grand house on the same road as Greenwood, my parents’ modest rented

cottage.

She wrote on 1 March 1940, ‘My dear Mrs Barrett, Your message arrived

while we were down at the memorial hall but my man brought it down there.

Everybody is most thrilled at the thought of your return - and Kenneth’s!

Everybody has been well, happy and cheerful, though of course you were

missed tremendously!’

My father was a drayman in Courage’s brewery at London’s Tower Bridge,

where he was also a member of the Home Guard, helping to deal with

the devastation caused by the enemy’s bombs. To get home to his family

every other weekend he would often cycle the 70-odd miles through the

blackout.

My parents had moved from Charlton, in South London, to escape the

War but ended up in a village right in the middle of the Battle of Britain.

Today, thoughts of Benenden always bring back to me the sounds of war-

time songs such as ‘You are my sunshine’, the smell of the fresh

strawberries we picked from the fields and the image of the one-room village

school on the green.

But darker movies intrude, too, centring round air fights over the

villages, and, seemingly, always above our house. Graphic videos , too, such

as aircraft being shot down in flames and crashing to earth.

It must have been in 1943 - so I was I told later - that Jim and I rushed

up to the house shouting, ‘Mum. mum, quick the Jerries are coming,’ as

planes swooped and fired at one another overhead.

‘Get in here. Both of you under the beds,’ Mum shouted.

‘What about you, Mum? Quick. Didn’t you hear the planes?’ said Jim.

‘I heard them. But where were you two?’

‘Just round near the pond, looking for frogs. We saw a man, Mum. ‘

Standing and picking me up in alarm, she said, ‘What man? What man did you see?’

Jim said, ‘There was a man in the field. I think his plane crashed. There was smoke. I

think he was a German man, with a helmet.’

‘You were in the farm? You said you were by the pond.’

Jim replied, ‘We weren’t in the farm, just near it, at the fence.’

Mrs Barrett, ‘Well what happened to the German man?

‘Another man, the one with a tin hat and a gun, came and took him away. The

German man had a bad leg.’

Mum told Jim, ‘I told you to be careful. Yet you took your brother up there near the

farm where a plane crashed and a man had a gun. ‘

‘It was fine Mum. Honestly, we weren’t scared,’ said Jim.

The following year, 1944, was probably the one that started the change in Jim’s personality.

In August, Mum had to go into hospital to have our younger brother, Brian. Dad couldn’t leave his

job in London, so Jim had to be billeted out with a Kent miner’s family. Our family had secrets and

the full story of Jim’s stay with the miner never came out. But I was told that he was ill-treated and

told to fight the miner‘s son, who was two years older than Jim. He bore a grudge after that, even

blaming his own mother. She didn’t tell our father because she knew Dad would have half-killed the

miner. Over the years, Jim slowly changed and later on he got into trouble, started gambling and

borrowed heavily from his kind-hearted mother.

Jim never did as well at school or work as Pete, Brian and myself and served sentences in prison.

Jim and I never really got on. I ranted at him over the way he’d exploited our mother’s good nature

and neglected his wife and three daughters by going to jail.

Sixty years on, we’re both different people. I’m semi-retired from banking and Jim has been forced

out of his job as manager of an office cleaning firm. It’s 2004 and Jim and I are in the car-park of

King’s College Hospital in South London, where I’m helping him painfully from his wheelchair

into my car. He’d always been reluctant to discuss his life but six months earlier

he’d visited my home and told me he had a terminal illness, Motor Neurone Disease. In

front of my wife, Helen, and me, he cried quietly.

‘It was the way the GP told me,’ he said. ‘ “You’ve got the disease and there’s nothing we can do.”

In the car, Jim began to open up. He said the woman doctor was ‘lovely.’ ‘But you know she’s not

trying to cure me. She’s making me comfortable, and they’re building up knowledge of the disease.’

‘You’ve had it tough, mate,’ I told him.

After a while he said, ‘I’ve never told you much about the time I was in prison.’

‘Jim, this is a busy section of the road here. Let me get out of this bit first,’ I said.

‘OK. Anyway, when I was in prison I had to share a cell with two brothers. They were younger than

me, by at least 10 years. They loved boxing and were always sparring. They persuaded me to join

in, and I gave it a go. No choice, really.’

‘Go on. I can see this ending badly,’ I said.

‘Well, the hard men on the floor below took it badly. Said they couldn’t sleep. One of them went for

me. He ran at me when the guards weren’t looking. He could have killed me. At the last second I

dodged and he fell over the gantry on to the floor below. It saved me from serious injury, perhaps

worse.’

‘All that boxing you did as a boy would have helped,’ I said.

‘Yeah, but here’s the worst bit. This is something I’ve never told anybody before.’

‘Hold on a minute,’ I said. ‘Are you sure you want to tell me something you could

regret later? ‘

‘It’s something I want to tell you. The man died three days later in the prison hospital.

He’d hit his head and never woke up.’

‘Just as well you ducked when he ran at you,’ I said.

No, Jim insisted. ‘It’s worse than that.’

‘Well, I’m not sure I want to know.’

‘I did actually catch him with a punch before he fell. It was a right hook but in the melee not

obvious, if you see what I mean.’

Hesitantly, I said, ‘You had to defend yourself. Few people would blame you.’

Jim said, ‘Well, one of the brothers did see me do it. When the prison investigation occurred he

backed me up and said I only ducked. I feel guilty about the man dying even though he tried to

attack me.’

Cautiously I asked, ‘Have you ever thought that the time you spent as a child with the Kent miner’s

family may have affected you? The way you were treated?’

‘I’m not discussing that,’ said Jim. ‘Who told you about it?’

‘It’s so long ago I can’t remember. Somebody in the family.’

Jim spoke fiercely. ‘Well, you can forget it. It’s dead and gone.’

‘Perhaps it made a lot of problems for you later,’ I said.

‘I said forget it,’ Jim shouted.

At the start of his illness, I’d promised Jim I’d always be there for him, setting aside time for

hospital visits, going to the bank and the like. But in January 2005, Helen and I were away in Fez,

Morocco.

And it was there in that medieval town’s medina, that I took a call on my mobile phone

from Caroline, Jim’s daughter. With the hubbub around me, as donkey drivers shouted “burro” to

make us tourists move aside in the narrow alleyways, I could hardly hear her.

‘Oh, Caroline. Hi. How are you?’ I said. ‘

Ken, I’m afraid I’ve got bad news.’ She paused and added, ‘Dad died today.’

Shaken, I said, ‘Oh no.’

‘Mum went out,’ said Caroline, weeping down the phone ‘...to get his medication. He fell out

of his chair.’ She was now sobbing. ‘...and had a heart attack. It was awful. Mum heard

an ambulance siren but didn’t realise it was heading for her own home. Dad’s fall had triggered the

automatic emergency phone call.’

I was now blubbing, too.

‘Oh dear.....I’m so sorry. How’s your Mum?’ I said. As the phone reception worsened, I told her,

‘We’ll fly back for the funeral.’

As Helen came up to me out of breath, she said, ‘Oh there you are. I lost you.....Whatever’s wrong?

You look terrible.’

‘Jim died,’ I said. ‘Caroline just phoned me. We’ll have to go home.’

In our house in North Kent, with the faint sound of ‘Sheherezade on the radio and light aircraft

outside, I reflected that it hadn’t broken my heart to cut short the holiday in Fez. But as I looked

down from the Medina to the famous Fez tanneries on the level below and saw and smelt those

vast multi-tinted vats with barefoot, dye-stained men jumping from one to the other, I thought how

strange life was. Who would ever have thought that I would hear of my dear brother’s death in a

place like this. You see, I wept for several minutes on that rocky cliff overlooking the vats, Helen

trying to console me. It was Jim’s illness and death that made me open that box of letters.

They gave me a new perspective. Despite our differences, I always knew Jim was a good person,

sensitive and soft-hearted. But his life and his actions so often gave the opposite impression. In a

tribute to Jim at the funeral, Pete said that once Jim discovered the power of humour, as a small

child, he frequently got out of trouble by making his parents weep with laughter. In the end, though,

Pete said, it counted against him. All Jim’s joking meant that nobody took him seriously.

At the funeral, Jim’s choice of music included Louis Armstrong singing ‘What a wonderful world.’

That brought the congregation to tears and showed what kind of guy Jim was. The letters made me

think back to the people we were. I remembered the mistreatment Jim had received and how it

must have affected him. I felt he’d had a worse deal from life than me. I wish I’d given him more

real support and fewer sanctimonious sermons.

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