style="font-size:15px;"> Soon after those first museum visits with Julia, he started collecting things for himself: broken crockery, an alarm clock with the face smashed in, the trailing wires of an old radio set, an empty picture frame; the cracked and rusting remains of other lives which he found on the bombsites where he wasn’t allowed to play. He brought them home, brushing the dried mud from them with an old toothbrush, looking for maker’s marks or other inscriptions, looking for something which would give these objects a story, attaching small labels with the date and the place where they were found and lining them up along his windowsill and his desk.
What are you doing? Susan asked him one afternoon, not for the first time, standing in his open doorway with her arms folded across her chest.
Nothing, he replied, turning away from her, trying to shield his latest find with his body, waiting for her to go away.
Why don’t you just collect cigarette cards like normal boys do? she said.
Why don’t you mind your own business? he said.
It is my business, I’m older than you and I’m your sister, so there, she said, picking up a dented water flask from the floor and lifting it quickly out of his reach. Where did you get this from? she asked, looking at it, reading the label which hung from its neck by a piece of white thread. Have you been on the bombsites again?
David stood up, reaching for it.
Give us it back, he said. Colin’s brother found it, he gave it to me.
Don’t believe you, Susan said. You’ll be in trouble if they find out.
Give us it back, David said again, jumping for it now, Susan lifting it higher and stepping back, turning towards the door.
Maybe I’ll keep it, she said, smiling.
It’s not yours, David said, his voice rising indignantly.
It’s not yours either, she snapped back. You don’t even know whose it is, it could be anyone’s.
Finders keepers, said David, and Susan stepped out on to the landing, smiling again.
Well, I’ve just found this so I’m keeping it, she said. David grabbed at it, Susan shrieked, and their mother yelled up at them both to stop it whatever it was they were doing. She pulled a face and gave him back the water flask, whispering for good measure that he was a smelly stinker.
If she’d asked, if she’d sat down and said that she really honestly wanted to know, he would have told her that he collected these things because he was fascinated by them, because he couldn’t take his eyes off them, because it was almost as good as having a real museum all to himself.
But she didn’t ask, and he rarely talked about it to anyone. He found it hard to explain, when anyone did ask, why he liked museums so much, why he spent so many of his weekends catching buses to museums in other towns, or gazing frustratedly at the building site which would one day become the museum Coventry was so painfully lacking. I just like looking at all the things, he would say, and imagining how old they are and finding out about them and everything; muttering as he spoke, knowing that the person asking wouldn’t understand.
He liked the smell of museums, the musty scent of things dug from the earth and buried in heavy wooden store cupboards. He liked the smell of the polish on the marbled floors, and the way his shoes squeaked as he walked across them. He liked the way that people’s voices would drift up and be lost in the hush of the high-ceilinged rooms. He liked the coldness of the glass cases when he pressed his face against them. He liked looking at the dates of the objects, and trying not to get dizzy as he added up how long ago that was. He didn’t understand why people had to ask, why they didn’t enjoy museums as much as he did, and why some of the other boys at school started to call him a swot and a teacher’s pet. It seemed perfectly natural to him, to be amazed by the physical presence of history, to be able to stand in front of an ancient object and be awed by its reach across time. A thumbprint in a piece of prehistoric pottery. The chipped edge of a Viking battle-axe, and the shattered remains of a human skull. The scribbled designs for the world’s first steam engine, spotted with candlewax and stained with jam. It seemed like some kind of miracle to him that these traces of distant lives had survived, and that he was able to stand in front of them and stare for as long as he liked.
When he ran out of display space in his room he started keeping the collection in cardboard shoeboxes under his bed, and it was from underneath his bed that he retrieved one of those same boxes some fifty years later, lifting the crinkled lid and sifting through the contents a few days before his journey, trying to remember where all these things had come from. A brooch, a set of keys, a bullet, a handful of blank-faced coins, a lumpen twist of rusted shrapnel: they could have come from any number of the sites he’d explored as a boy – the cratered fields he took as a shortcut across to school; the motor-works which still hadn’t been rebuilt; the numerous acres of cleared land which had been marked out with foundations for the housing his father would build to replace what had been there before the war. Coventry was a city of building sites when he was a child, great unmapped territories for him to explore, piecing together stories around the objects he found, guessing which buildings had once been where, or what might be coming, watching the way the city changed as all his favourite places were gradually rebuilt upon.
But the small leather shoe, in the bottom of the box, had come from his own back garden, not from a rubble-strewn bombsite. He’d dug it up with a handful of potatoes one evening after school and taken it to show his father, who was sitting on the back step with the paper. It fitted easily into his father’s broad hand, and they’d both looked at it for a moment, cradled there, plastered with mud.
Well that’s something, his father had said.
How old do you think it is Dad? David said, leaning over it with his hands on his knees. His father looked up.
I’d say it’s probably been in the ground there since ’44, he said, so it’s older than you at least. He looked over towards the potato patch, David’s spade still sticking out of the ground, the pale potatoes lying in a bunch beside the small hole he’d made. I wouldn’t tell your mother about this one though, he added. She might be upset. She might not let you hang on to it, he said. He looked at David, solemnly, and winked, and David tried to wink back. Now, you going to finish digging up the spuds? he asked, passing him the shoe and turning back to his paper.
In the summer, if the weather was fine, his father liked to sit out on the back step when he got home from work. His mother would look out for him coming down the road and have the kettle and the pot ready so that by the time he got to the house there’d be a mug of tea there waiting. Sometimes she would meet him at the door, holding a damp handkerchief up to his face to wipe the dust and dirt from his mouth before kissing him hello. He would sit on the step and spread the evening paper out across his lap, steam rising from his mug, smoke curling from his cigarette, and he didn’t like anyone speaking to him until he’d put the paper to one side and looked up again. He was always covered in dust when he got home, his face and hands coated with brick dust and powdered cement, his clothes scattered with woodshavings from the joiners working overhead, his hair threaded with thin white fibres from the panels they used in the roof and around the pipes. When he’d finished the paper, and got washed and changed before tea, he shifted back to being their at-home dad again, softer and more human seeming, but while he was sitting on that step, covered in the debris of work, waiting for his body to recover, he almost seemed to be someone else, some mythological character who built houses and schools and hospitals with his own bare and calloused hands.
At weekends, or on long evenings when the light held, he would work on the garden, swapping the dust
