2. Sep, 2020

'Family Tree'

Her two boys were playing football together, cries of ‘yes!’ and ‘get in!’ blasting across the garden.  Eleanor and her dad were sitting outside watching them.  Seeing the older but less assured child of the two keep turning towards them for a wave or a nod of approval, Eleanor worried for his future. Josh couldn’t seem to function without constant encouragement, however well he did, and adult success in any walk of life wasn’t kind to such temperaments.  Still, at twelve, he still had a lot of growing up to do, and then, he is so very bright and able, of course, she reminded herself, and no wonder, given the strong intellectual inheritance of their background, evidenced by her grandfather Herbert’s extraordinary body of work and reverenced reputation.

“Liberty hall, here!” her dad had generously pronounced, spreading his arms wide in greeting when they arrived for a lengthy stay over the Summer holidays.

Eleanor wondered if her dad were regretting this at all, as the boys romped repeatedly across his lawn with ball games that also smashed up the flowers he nurtured in his splendid  herbaceous borders.  Her father’s mind, though, was on other things today, it seemed.

“Are you still going ahead with that Ancestry test?” he asked her.

“Yes, of course, Dad.  It’ll be really interesting.”

“It might be more interesting than you think,” he said hesitantly, as they sipped tea together at the garden table.

“How do you mean, Dad?” she asked.

“Well, you know how we all admire Herbert, his famous writing, his brave political odysseys to experience things first hand, how eloquent he was?”

“Oh, yes!  Grandfather was amazing, wasn’t he?  We’re so lucky to have his blood running through our veins!  I wonder what we’ll find out?  He was like nobody else, wasn’t he?  A man of such stature and talent!  No wonder his name lives on and his books still resonate now.  What a visionary!”

“Well, whatever you do find out, it won’t be about him,” said her father.

“What?  What do you mean, Dad?” she asked, looking at him in puzzlement.

“Because he wasn’t my father.  Oh, he was Lou’s father and Rosalie’s father “(his two clever, shining sisters, who had shared Herbert’s darkly aquiline looks and agile scholasticism) “but he wasn’t mine.”

Eleanor stared at him.  Her dad never tired of telling stories about Herbert and extolling his virtues, as famous an orator as he had been a writer.

“Not your father?  What do you mean?” she asked again, astounded.

“My dad was another man altogether.  He was plain old Norman, the local coalman.  He was quite the lothario on his rounds, according to my mother, when she finally told me.  Herbert and Norman were both gone by then and she was old herself, knowing she was failing, probably.  So, it seems, to cut a long story short, that while Herbert was on the road campaigning so fiercely for social justice all over the world, risking trips to hostile countries, something happened between mum and Norman.  I used to play with his daughter, Marjorie, you know, because they lived nearby.  I understood then why I had seemed to have more in common with her than with my own sisters.  I asked my mother why she’d never told me before and had decided to tell me now.  She said, ‘you always set such store by Herbert that I thought you should know while I could still tell you.  You’re much kinder than Herbert really was, like Norman.  Herbert was all passion for ideas, but Norman just liked women, really liked them.’  It still didn’t make any sense to me so I asked her how it had happened and she just said, ‘well, there was a war on, you know,’ and laughed, as if that explained everything.  Perhaps it did.  I was born in 1945.  Herbert and Norman were just that bit oo old to be called up, of course but Herbert was always away polemicising, wasn't he, all the way through it?"

“Did Herbert know?” asked Eleanor, still shocked.

“I don’t know.  Possibly.  It wasn’t talked of and Herbert, well, he just swept in and out of the house all the time on the coattails of his fame, being lionised.  There was always an admiring entourage, a coterie of debaters.  That was the active part of family life for us.  I certainly never knew about Norman being my real father until mother told me about it on that day.  He was kind, you know, Norman.  I remember that he always sent me a little something for  Christmas when I was a small lad but I thought it was just because I was pals with his Marjorie.  So I think he must have known himself.”

Eleanor looked across at her two boys and suddenly realised that all her preconceptions about why they were like they were and what they might become, with that inheritance from Herbert, were completely unfounded.  So were her ideas about herself, her pride in her ancestry, in telling people who her famous, notoriously outspoken and admired grandfather had been.

“Herbert...wasn’t my grandfather?”

“No.  I’m afraid not.”

She looked at her boys again, at Josh’s timidity, which she had thought arose from the underlying intellectual subtlety of a superior mind which saw things differently.  Perhaps it didn’t.  Perhaps he was just like his own father, whose uncertainties had led him to think that he wasn’t even sure that he wanted to stay married, or be with his boys growing up, which was why they were here now, staying with Eleanor’s father instead for the Summer.

“I’ve already sent it off, the kit, for the DNA testing, Dad,” she said.

“Ah,” said her father.  “I knew you were set on it.  That’s why I thought you should know.”

Eleanor sat in silent disappointment, realising how much of this interest of hers had been focussed on finding out what Herbert’s lineage might have been going back, because he was so distinguished, so different, with a look, perhaps, of some foreign, exotically fine origins about him and In his bearing, both in photographs and newsreel footage, and in actual oil portraits of him, such had been his standing back in the day.  She had fancied a former aristocracy in exile, with a heritage of culture and history feeding through into Herbert himself, so impassioned about the dispossessed that, to Eleanor, it spoke of angry, exiled refugees who had lost much being integral to his racial memory.  Her father let her absorb this blow of abrupt severance from Herbert’s bloodline, having gone through some of the same complexities of feeling himself about it, after a former lifetime of feeling that Herbert’s unique potential and intellectual brilliance was something he shared in and which he would pass down.  After a while, he said drily,

“Never mind, love.  You might only have found out that Herbert came from a long line of coalmen, too, if he were to have been your real grandfather.  There’s no telling, is there?”

Eleanor smiled, but said nothing, knowing that her own intellectual snobbery, as well as conceit about her lineage, which had nothing to do with her own achievements anyway, had been called out by this revelation.

“I didn’t turn out so badly, did I?” continued her dad.  “Even if I never did write a book or make a speech?  And if I had been Herbert’s real son, I doubt I would have done either, not in his lifetime anyway.  Herbert was always clear who the intellectual giant was.”

“What about Lou and Rosalie?”

“They were straightforward academics, in a different line altogether.  Besides, they were girls,” said her dad.  “So that was fine.”

Eleanor looked across at her two boys again and her father followed her eyes with his own.

“Best to let people grow up as they are,” he suggested.  “Without overloads of too much baggage and expectation.  I needed to tell you in time for them, anyway.  Liberty hall, you know, life.  Liberty hall. “