The first thing that struck me when it arrived was the smell of polish, lingering long after my dad had stopped “nourishing the wood” or my mum had finished with the Pledge. I was overwhelmed by its size, too. My 18-year-old son couldn’t get his knees into the well and I couldn’t get my laptop on the desktop with any wrist room. Dad’s desk had always seemed so imposing in the bay window of his study, keeping him company while he marked into the night (he was a teacher), wrote his endless sermons (he was a preacher after he retired), or read.
It is funny how memory works – maybe the polish was my olfactory memory kicking in – and how lost and diminished this once enormous piece of furniture looked now in my study, miles away from its home.
My father’s desk wasn’t originally meant for me, or for computers and home hubs. He bought it way back when there was an auction house round the corner from the flat where we grew up in Merseyside where my parents loved to go each Saturday morning for a mooch and to marvel at what people paid for junk. This, he felt, was designed for him. He saw through a dusty old top-scratched Edwardian twin pedestal dressing table, loving the mahogany plinths and frame and walnut-fronted, graduated drawers with their handmade dovetail joints. He made his bid and brought it home, removing the mirror and fitting a new red leather writing top. I saw him, shirt sleeves rolled up, polishing the wood and individual drop brass handles and marvelling at its splendour.
From that day it became his intensely private space, where he stored personal things and where he found most peace. He’d never have used the word meditation, but this was his moment in the day and would, he said, shape what came after it.
My children and I decided to share the drawers between us but they were still full of Dad’s stuff. He died a few years before Mum and she had – I realise now – never cleared it out. When she died this was the one thing bequeathed specifically to me. Probably because I am a writer, perhaps it’s a last nag from heaven knows where to slow down and find peace in my working day.
The top drawers were Dad’s stationery store and now a homage to pre-computing days with hole punchers and reinforcement rings, metal-ended treasury tags and an embossed cast-iron address stamp that headed hundreds of handwritten letters in its day. There were ink pens and blotting paper, too, and a small magnifying glass had given way to a bigger one, complete with light, a reminder of that slow loss of sight that was to signal my father’s demise. A cigarette lighter in its own, well-worn leather pouch, was hidden in the corner from when my father used to smoke, a habit he picked up when he started work at 14 and gave up when my elder brother was born in 1960 – apart, that is, from precious but occasional gifts of cigars.
We found a King Edwards’ box, heavy with the scent of this rationed luxury, in the drawer below. It was filled with mementoes – the stuff of the life he’d had before I came along and never asked enough about. A card commemorating the 1934 opening of the first Mersey tunnel (which he’d walked through aged six with his parents), a fading photo of a sister he lost as a child, and photos of him, alone, in his boy scout uniform and on the beach at Llandudno.
An old leather autograph book opened with a message from his parents, and had been filled with names of pals I vaguely remembered from his stories about school in Liverpool and war-time evacuation to north Wales. There was a certificate from the War Office marking my grandfather’s bravery in the first world war and underneath Dad’s own national service card and some leave papers, a pack of cards and a tiny black and white picture of him and his best friend in Berlin, both in uniform bearing Brylcreemed hair and swaggery smiles.
In the drawer below that, newspapers, Liverpool Echos mostly. I sat and scanned, searching for a clue to their safe keeping. One marked the 1971 opening of the second Mersey tunnel (Dad walked us through it), another – August 1959 – contained my parents’ engagement announcement, the day that Dad always described as the happiest of his life.
I found his wallet, instantly familiar. The brown, shiny, scratched leather that throughout my childhood would slide out of his breast pocket when it was time to pay for cinema tickets or ice-creams, train rides or funfairs. It had been replaced by my mother when it started to fall apart at the seams. The wallet had been stuffed with mementoes, like a catalogue of memories designed to bring some order to our grief, a reminder that my father’s life was bigger and better than the last difficult years. Postcards from places he’d visited with Mum, foreign stamps he’d probably meant to file in his collection, out-of-date passports stamped with the places he loved to travel to, the first letter I wrote from university when letters were the easiest way to stay in touch, pictures of us as babies, on our first day of school, of holidays, weddings and christenings. And there were lots of photos of Mum, including one of her standing shyly on a promenade where they’d met.
In another drawer, my children found chocolate, white and cracked with age, which made them laugh because Dad always had chocolate hidden away for them. It also made me pause because it came in a tin bearing a yellow taxi cab and the words “a souvenir from The Big Apple”. We’d brought it when the two of us flew to New York to catch something spectacular before he lost his sight completely. It was such a happy memory for him, but the taxi reminded me of how needlessly mad I’d got that he insisted on befriending every taxi driver, the fare gauge still ticking as he engaged in long conversations (the hallmark of Scousers), learning more about them than the sights we’d come to see.
I was ready to stop, but my 14-year-old daughter was unpacking tons of scribbled papers – endless pictures of felt-tipped flowers and dogs and families – all her gifts to Grandad as she’d sat on his knee at this desk to draw. My son had discovered something else, way back in the bottom drawers. Dad’s diaries, and stacks of them. These leather-bound Letts volumes were an annual gift to my father from one of us. This was where he filed his resolutions and ambitions and recorded events. I didn’t feel I should look at his diaries, even now, but my son had searched out his birth date and found it, and every birthday, and every subsequent babysitting booking or visit to our home since, recorded in Dad’s neat inked pen, each accompanied by a penned emoticon smiley face, standing out at odds with the formality of the other entries. Letting down his guard for a moment, my 18-year-old greeted them like a last reassuring hug from his grandfather and sat among the piles trying to count the countless days they’d spent together each year.
And then we put everything back.
