He unhooked a barometer from the fence behind us. ‘Do you have one of these?’ he asked. When I said no, he explained how important it was to predict the weather. ‘Especially for dahlias,’ he said. ‘They hate the frost. Take it. It’s yours.’
The glass face showed all the options: Stormy, Rain, Change, Fair and Very Dry. ‘Do you follow the weather?’ I asked.
‘Your grandmother —’ He stopped and corrected himself. ‘No, your great-grandmother, my mother Harriet. She loved a good storm. Would sit out on the step in all weathers just watching the sky. “I’m talking with the heavens, son,” she would say. Tiny, she was, drunk, most of the time. But she could spin a yarn so you’d laugh at your own tears.’ She died of a broken neck, falling down the stairs of her row house.
Betty came out with a cup of tea and a biscuit for us both. Ruth had been crawling around the lawn. Betty picked her up and took her into the house.
Fred watched her go. ‘Good woman. A bit strict. I met her on the ship, taking my Jessie’s ashes home.’ He continued to talk as if time was running out, jumbling the timelines of his life. But when we got to Pam, my mother, his daughter, he stopped.
‘Ask her.’ He nodded towards the house. ‘I told her everything.’
He said it still surprised him how many different people we are in our lives. ‘I was a lad before the war. Then in the POW camp, thin as a shadow. Then a husband and father, a painter and paperhanger. Now? Nothing.’
It was a strange feeling to have such an intimate conversation with an elderly man I did not know. There was something between us. A sense of connection, an expectation of understanding. I had never spoken with Max like this.
Fred asked me about my favourite colour and nodded his approval when I told him. ‘I’ve painted a lot of white walls,’ he said. ‘Good references, too. I’ll show them to you.’
He staggered a little as we stood, and I realised he was more frail than he had let on. I held his arm as we went back into the house. And for a moment it felt like he was holding me up, that without him I would fall through the cracks. Without his story, I would not exist.
Until very recently, we assumed all inheritance was genetic and cultural. Nature and nurture. But now psychologists believe trauma is also inheritable. And scientists agree. Epigenetics shows how trauma alters cortisol levels in inheritable genes.
Dora Costa from the University of California investigated the lives of Civil War soldiers. They’d returned from Confederate prisoner-of-war camps like ‘walking skeletons’. Costa extended her studies to their descendants. She found their health and life expectancy far below that of the general population, and she could show how inherited trauma affected their lives.11
In Australia, a study of ‘Historical Trauma and Aboriginal Healing’ explored the impact of hidden collective memory. Even non-remembered trauma is transmitted from generation to generation. The authors go as far as to describe historical trauma as a disease in itself.
Inherited trauma makes sense to me. We know that post-natal separation from the biological mother disrupts natural evolution. Nancy Verrier, who wrote a seminal book about adoption, The Primal Wound, describes how the experience of abandonment and loss is indelibly imprinted upon the unconscious mind.
In South Africa ancestor-worshipping Zulus regularly appease their dead. Constellation therapists believe every family has a collective conscience going back generations. They say that by confronting our larger family stories, we can be freed from the pain we shoulder for our ancestors.
I grew up without ancestors and yet I carry my history unconsciously. Is it in my bone marrow? Or hovering above in my etheric being? Or perhaps in some undiscovered internal solar system? I worry I’ve passed the trauma to my children and grandchildren. And I fear that we still think babies are interchangeable. Or that each of us is born into a vacuum, with need of little more than care and feeding and a hug before bed.
Betty made lunch. We sat around the table and Fred talked about family. He described Pam’s house near the whitewashed Moorish town of Mojácar. He’d visited her there two years before. Pam’s husband had won it in a card game and they’d turned it into a resort with a golf course and an airstrip.
‘He was terribly impressed with all that,’ Betty said as I helped her with the dishes. She took a photo of my mother from her pocket. A young woman, maybe thirty, slim and stylish, looking directly at the camera. Looking at me. ‘He wants you to have this,’ she said.
‘Did he force her to give me up?’ I had to ask.
‘Jessie was dying. He’s too scared to ask about your life. In case, well, you know. He knew it was a mistake and he never stopped worrying about you.’
In the living room, Fred had let Ruth climb onto his knee and was playing a counting game with her fingers. I knelt beside him. ‘I had a good life,’ I said. ‘You have nothing to worry about.’
He glanced at me and tears filled his eyes again. ‘Did they treat you well?’ he asked.
I smiled. ‘They gave me everything they could.’
Fred put Ruth down and struggled from his chair. He took down a VHS tape and pulled the curtains. I had thought it might be a home movie with Pamela. Instead it was a promotional video for a luxury resort called Cortijo Grande.
‘I forgot I had this,’ he said as the grainy 1970s
