Cupboards and attics are dangerous things, as are wardrobes. They lead you to places which are not always very like Narnia. I generally avoid peering into such places in my own house, staying busy, traveling many miles to an office most days of the week, arriving home after dark for most of winter, too tired or otherwise engaged to patrol my own sovereign territory.
Last week, blessed with a few involuntary extra days at home, I tried to sort out a neglected closet, crammed with old clothes that I no longer wear but had never bothered to throw away. I am utterly uninterested in clothes, as such. I am amazed now by some of the things I once quite voluntarily wore. That suit I bought in 1977. Those trousers? How did I do that? As for the school uniforms which I was for some years compelled to don, their sheer absurdity probably caused me to begin to think properly for the first time. As long as you accepted them as normal, these garments—especially the tweedy jackets which made us look like miniaturized old men—were just clothes. As soon as you considered them, they were utterly ridiculous, if not actually mad.
But those have long gone, especially the black, white, and grey Edwardian school cap which I flung from my homebound train as it crossed a high viaduct one long-ago summer morning. If you have seen the original film of Goodbye, Mr. Chips, the one with Robert Donat in it, you will have seen such caps, redolent of an age of toasting forks and semolina pudding. Hurling your cap from the train window (yes, you could open the window in those perilous times) at the end of your final term was a tradition of that boarding school. It was dying out because so many of my schoolfellows had begun to return home by car, not by train. But I was determined to honor it, and I watched with satisfaction as the disk of cloth spun and twirled into the woods below. For this, I was told off by one of the teachers who was, most unusually, traveling with the departing boys. We were generally left to make our own way home at ages which would now be thought dangerously young, and I was already annoyed that he was there at all. He spoiled the moment. He could see no point or joy in such a harmless gesture. I let him drone on. He no longer had any power over me. It was to make that point that I had jettisoned the stupid cap. I think he may have been the same tiresome pedagogue who has, over the years, boasted in print of having taught me and my brother. Amusingly, as I have slowly turned into a minor celebrity, his accounts of my years under his benevolent, perceptive supervision have grown less dismissive and more complimentary. My opinion of him has remained the same.
But that is all now so long ago that it is almost in the land of myth. The clothes I found crammed into the closet were more recent, just shirts that had worn out, frayed, or did not fit, or trousers I could no longer struggle into, in some cases kept against the ever-receding day when I will finally succeed in growing thinner again. Why then did the act of handling them produce that strange, near-to-tears, stifled feeling of lost time which is one of the most distressing sensations I know? It is as I imagine it would be, if you had lived long ago in one of those villages that had been drowned to make a reservoir, and then returned to see your home still standing beneath a hundred feet of clear water, both very close and totally inaccessible. I had the same trouble very intensely, and often, as (nearly forty years ago) I went through my father’s apartment in the weeks after his death, probably the nearest I have yet been to casting adrift from the proper, safe moorings of normal life and rationality. Almost everything I opened or studied or turned over set me off on a new path through an overgrown garden. If I hadn’t eventually had to go back to work, who knows where I might have drifted off to? My father and I had been close when I was a small boy, but not much after that, and when he died we were more or less strangers. I wonder now exactly how this miserable estrangement happened. We could still meet cheerfully, but not intimately. The discovery of his life through his possessions emphasized that sad distance and made it permanent. There is still so much I do not know, which is why I urge everyone to get to know their parents while they can, and to ask, without restraint, about their lives. As it is, I came out of a mystery, and in this life I will never solve it.
Re-opening my own cupboards was almost as powerful. These useless old scraps of cloth were what I wore while my children were still small (all are now adults) when we were busy, happy, generally short of money, trying to live according to principles that seemed right at the time, in a society that generally thought those principles were laughable or even wrong. Were they? I am perhaps less sure now than I was then, but you need to be sure when you have other people’s lives in your hands, the terrifying authority vested in parents, which you are required to use whether you want to or not. How can you best introduce them to the glory of God? Where and how should they go to school, if at all? What language and manners may you use in front of them? What can you rightly forbid them to do? How do you recover when you have failed to set a good example, or set a bad one? How much attention was I paying during those crucial times? Who wants power over others? Not I. The only power worth having in the world is the power to stop those others from interfering too much in your life.
And in the midst of all this unsought brush with authority and leadership there are toys and games and walks in the woods and bedtime stories, heartbreaking to recall because they were often joyous and seasoned with laughter, and will never happen to me again. The gentle but potent English novelist Michael Frayn, in his book Sweet Dreams, portrays a liberal heaven with great charm and wit, and some mockery, but at one point beautifully and movingly describes a small family simply packing up its life, as if it were a physical thing rather than a mystical one, like so many toys and cushions. It feels a bit like that, once you realize that you are no longer a parent of children, but a parent of grown men and women. “And they all shall wax old as doth a garment; and as a vesture shalt thou fold them up, and they shall be changed: but thou art the same, and thy years shall not fail.” Heavens, how sad it is to contemplate all those days of mighty trivia. If I think about it too much, I can hardly breathe.
