A Visit

My brother used to say, “The first thing I remember is falling downstairs. You pushed me. I had to climb up further than you so you couldn’t push me again.” I suppose he thought that accounted for the ambition that kept him working night after night so that the time would come when all the work might be behind him. He hoped then to find himself on the pinnacle of secure wealth. My mother was proud of him. One night he came downstairs with a grey face and silently held out his handkerchief. We all looked at the bright, fresh blood staining the white linen. Less than a year later he was dead. My mother, who had travelled with him, wrote to me from Switzerland: “My poor Andrew, my poor boy, if he had been less ambitious to make money for me he might have been alive now.”

My father was a draughtsman. He drew very beautifully in pencil or ink—animals, flowers, houses with gardens overhanging the sea—but there was no market for his work. He made no money. My mother had been one of eight girls, so very little of the family estate fell to her. All I remember now is being taken across the sea to a town where the air was dark and cold and it was always raining. We had left our cottage on the South Downs for Belfast. My father had been given a job in a linen factory.