After Brock by Paul Binding Page B

he heard what I had to tell him, he was genuinely pleased (that was clear enough!). He really needed to hear things were going well for somebody, he said, as his wife Ilona had been extremely ill again. What was wrong with her? I asked; felt I had to. A pause. Then – “Leukaemia!” Impossible to know how best to reply, especially as I’m pretty ignorant about such things. But say something I surely should, so I managed: “That’s when white blood cells take over, isn’t it?” Stupid really telling the man something he knows only too well but far more fully. He didn’t answer directly but said that the two of them still hoped to be going to Hungary in ten days’ time, but obviously it was far from certain. But on their return… well, things might have improved a little, and of course it’d be good for us to meet up. I really don’t know why, after this, I asked my next question: “What did you mean by saying in your letter that you preferred my dad – Peter – to stay up on his Heights?” It was a mistake, saying that. There was an even longer pause than before, then, in a cold, firm, low voice: “I thought I made it clear I didn’t want to go over all that past history. Let bygones be bygones.” But I’m wondering if they are bygones either for him or for my dad.’
    Â Â Â 
    Using some of the money he’d earned, Nat joined three friends of his, including Josh (who’d only managed one A in his exams, though in the ‘hard’ subject of Economics) down in a rented cottage in Cornwall, near St Ives. They swam, they climbed the cliffs, they tried surfing. Nat wrote in his cloth-bound book: ‘Hasn’t riding the waves taught me that mastery of self is the key to life? And if an idea comes to you, but seems (at times) too hard to execute, then use that mastery to ride on the crest of it, as you would on an Atlantic roller… Never forget the hero of Sixty Minutes !’
    Â Â Â 
    Back to South Shropshire on Monday September 7. Jottings are far more numerous than during the London and Cornwall weeks, but, as before, they deal overwhelmingly with High Flyers matters. Still the same complaints that Pete Kempsey wasn’t pro-active or efficient enough, but the tone, after the interval away, was more accepting, mellower. Not that Nat’s mind had left its earlier preoccupations altogether. One page towards the end of those containing writing is, with hindsight, of particular importance to the Missing Berwyn Boy Case.
    â€˜At last my constant snooping has been rewarded. Dad has kept no papers or letters from before his marriage, and precious few from after it. I won’t go down in history as a son whose smallest doings were of such vital interest to his proud parents that they hoarded away every memento of him they could. But I had hopes, remembering that yellowed little receipt from Gregory Pringle, of coming across something from my dad’s past secreted (or just kept, preserved) in a book, and so went through every single old one in the house. And, just as I was thinking this far worse than the needle in the old haystack I found a volume of Wilfred Owen’s poems, with a photograph, a newspaper cutting, and a letter inside, all between the two pages of the poem “The Show”. The first four lines of this had been highlighted in yellow:
    Â Â Â 
    â€˜My soul looked down from a vague height, with Death….’
    Â Â Â 
    â€˜The photo showed a youth on a summer’s day, longish dark hair parted in the middle, bare arms, bare feet, and a shirt unbuttoned all the way down and worn over trousers turned up as if to aid paddling in a stream. He was sitting on a tree stump, and looking ahead of him, but what held the attention – as it obviously did his – was the white fox terrier between his splayed legs. This dog’s pointed, bright-eyed face wore an