The Life of My Father

A poor family, we grew up in the land of the Great Depression. Hit hard, we were forced out of our already-broken home and that was where it happened. My father, he began to cough up blood one morning. My mother was nowhere to be found and I, a girl no older than twelve, was roaming around the shack looking out for wild birds with a younger brother sitting on the grass, picking leaves with a stick. I could hear my father coughing and the sound of the blood coming out of him. Though, it was probable that at the age I was, I was not sure that anything was horribly wrong. Death was fairly common to see, hear and witness - and even though I had become more or less normalised to it. I never thought my father would die. But he did. Later that day, sometime in the early afternoon to the sound of my mother crying out the Lord’s name in her sombre, melancholia before it all fell silent and still. Even the wind itself seemed to stop moving the leaves upon the grass. My brother dropped his stick and we both stepped back inside, my father’s lifeless body laying slain by tuberculosis upon the counter top. My mother, heartbroken.

In the days after my father died, it became apparent that he had not been telling my mother the whole truth about our financial situation. A box, containing my father’s stuff from the army had been placed into safe keeping with a bank and had since, been kept in a dark back-room with little attention paid to it. A simple note on top to identify who it belonged to and some of his friends in the army, who worked at the bank now, keeping an eye on it for him. The funeral was that very Monday and in they came with a box, looking raggedly thirty years’ older than the photograph - though it had not nearly been that long at all. They gave it to my mother and took their seats. Sitting through the ceremony, my mother wept and tears caught the box edges, trickling down in straight lines, catching the bottom corners and dropping to her feet. Stained stockings with black shoes, the same ones she wore for her wedding day.

I got home and emptied the box, both horrified and amazed at what I had found. When it came to the history of my father, I practically knew nothing and I did not care to ask. I spoke when I was spoken to, I did not bother my parents and they went about their work with my mother doing up what little home we had and my father working on a farm. All I knew is that after the war, he had come to America to start a life with my mother. It was the roaring twenties and England was dry compared to the American lifestyle. The things I found inside gave me little insight into my father’s history. Jewellery that was not only fake but completely worthless - but then there were purses filled with money. My mother caught sight of them and asked me whether I knew how rich we had become from these strange purses that dropped from the box as I held it upside down and emptied its contents. I said I didn’t but I knew it was not going to be anything like the owners of those banks downtown where they held my father’s things for years. My mother grabbed the purses and shouted that we could finally afford a real house. And that was enough for her, for my brother and for me.

Rummaging through the fake jewels, I found a black notebook that had no name, no title, no brand on it. Smooth like leather but probably made out of something much cheaper, I knew my father’s handwriting from a mile away. The cursive, yet messy slur of ink spread across the page in a style that not only suited my father’s upbringing as he did not go to school to my knowledge, but my father had multiple notebooks and yes, I knew about all of them. Except this one. This notebook was different. It had no initial that my father’s notebooks normally had, it had no bearing of anything of my father’s whereabouts and the notes were not sentences - just notes. Bullet pointed lists of things. The purses were each on their own separate list. I was stunned that this was nothing like the stern, calculated and often overly-organised man my father was. If my father was going to write something down it would be written down in meticulous detail so that whoever managed to pick up the notebook could follow the instructions down to the last line and not forget or be confused by a single thing. This was not like that at all.

There were only five pages that were written in out of the possibly one hundred that this book had. It was small, could be held in one hand and had no tear or wear like the other notebooks my father owned. The five pages were scattered throughout the book, as if by some random order and each bore titles of a woman’s name. I dared not show my mother and so, I propped the book under my arm, threw my shawl over it and ran to the nearest lake with my brother grasped in my other hand tightly - I needed to show someone. The money was no longer a problem and my mother probably did not even notice me leaving as she talked to a neighbour outside about buying a house with some random money found in five purses in a cardboard box from before the war. I sighed and heaven looking back at the house and realising that there was little reason to run. She never paid any attention to me and even less now that money was involved.

I opened the black book by the lake and showed my brother the first, scattered and random page filled with little bullet points and the colour of the purse. I asked him to verify our father’s handwriting and it was impossible not to. The title of this page was: Mary Ann Nichols. A heavy description of her appearance in again, scattered thoughts, followed by what seemed to be what this woman required in terms of surgery. My father was no doctor, no surgeon. He was a farmer and before that a soldier in the war and before that- well, that’s really where my knowledge stops. I flicked through the pages and the next name to title a page was “Annie Chapman” followed by the same descriptions and again, her requirements in surgery. Why was my father planning to do surgery on these women? Each one was the same: “Elizabeth Stride” - “Catherine Eddowes” and finally “Mary Jane Kelly” on the last page before the binding.

I had no idea what this meant and my brother had soon become scared. Did we not know who our father was? Was he lying to our entire family this time and was he really a surgeon or a doctor of some kind. I went back inside to find my mother was gone and the neighbour had told us she’d gone to purchase a house with the money from the purses. Each of the colours of those purses matched each of the women in the notebook, but I could make no sense of it either way.

I asked her if she would help us with finding out some stuff about our father. Hesitantly, she agreed though stating that she knew as much as we did, she clearly knew a lot more. My mother’s best friend and neighbour, she was at their wedding. She knew a lot more than she was letting on to us. I asked her about the notebook and she said she had never seen it in her life but that she knew it was something he had brought with him from England. My parents may have been older when they bore us, but one thing was certain - my father was a young man once. He had youth and he would walk the streets of London with that youth. I asked her whether my father was training to be a surgeon or a doctor in the 1880s. She shook her head and shrugged her shoulders. She clearly had no idea what was going on. I flicked through the black notebook again. There was nothing else apart from these five pages filled in. Specks of red littering the sepia-toned pages and yet, nothing to tell me who my father was and why he was doing surgery on random women.

It would be years before I moved to England during the second world war and return to the place where my father once stood, staring at the moon - preparing for something, I don’t know what. So that I did too, I stared at the moon and asked my father what he was doing on the street corners of Whitechapel, London in the 1880s. He was a young man then and holding his notebook, I knew he was someone - I just had no idea who. I ran my fingers over a plaque that said in large white letters ‘JACK THE RIPPER TERRORISED THE STREETS OF LONDON…” or something like that. The dates were the same as my fathers and I cocked my head back and chuckled to myself, thinking that my father could have been running away from something. Having no idea what he was running away from was probably the worst part about it.