I Remember Him

My great-grandfather, Joseph Frederick Tatham, Fred to anyone who knew him, was an artist. As is the case for anyone with a talent, there was a lot more to him than that. For example, he loved to play golf, he smoked his entire life, he enjoyed sherry, he had a green thumb, he was a house painter as a young man. As for anything else, I don’t know much. I wasn’t fortunate enough to be able to spend a lot of time with him as an adult, and the little time I did have, I wasted. I wasn’t yet old enough to understand how valuable time was, how precious simply holding space with someone is. I regret this. I squandered time with my great-grandfather that I’ll never get back; time I could have asked him about his life, time I could have invested in him and his story, time I could have showed him that all of his many years were valuable to me, that they were of interest. As it is, all I have are childhood memories and a couple of adult recollections sprinkled on top, and these are what is precious to me now.

I remember sitting at the kitchen table at my great-grandparents’ house in Daybrook, Nottingham – my sister and I with Fred. Our parents would be in the front room with our great-grandmother, Hilda. She would have already led us, conspiratorially, with her stiff and frail frame (even then) to the pantry to retrieve the thick-walled glass jar of humbugs for us to gleefully take from. She probably would have also given us a Penguin bar to eat (a British staple). Then she would drink copious cups of tea, safe in her favourite chair underneath a tall lamp at the back of the room, chatting comfortably with our parents.

At the kitchen table, my sister and I would be drawing on endless sheets of thick paper. I don’t remember what my sister’s obsession was, but I recall that mine was houses. I drew what seems now like hundreds of them, all with simple triangular roofs and smoking chimneys, quaint cottage-style windows split into four panes, colourful flowers and a large patch of grass in the front garden, and a winding brown path that inevitably led to the same overgrown tree. Even as a young child, it appears I was looking for somewhere to call home. Fred would always sit with us. I don’t remember him ever not being with my sister and I when we visited. He would draw too, giving us tips, encouraging us, pretending we were creative geniuses. He was gentle, patient, supportive, and endlessly kind. At some point, we’d all end up in the garden together, playing. My memory is patchy here, but I hope we did this often.

I was nine years old when my parents, my sister, and I left England behind, and with it, our entire family. Very recently, I found some old letters my great-grandmother had written us soon after we arrived in Australia. She wrote about her life, the things she had been keeping busy with, her garden, Fred, and others in the family. She referred to my sister and I as her “two Darlings” and mentioned how big we’d gotten (Mum must have sent photos). She said Fred had enclosed some drawings he’d done for us. As a child, I didn’t understand the implications of this, the meaning of this simple gesture. As an adult, after reading the letters, I was inspired to take out the folder I keep of my great-grandad’s drawings, and I finally understood entirely and completely, and I wept.

I wept because I am proud of Fred and his talent – the one he never shared with the world, but he shared with our family. I wept because I was holding onto pages that he had once held with his own two hands. He had drawn pencil outlines of our favourite things on them, brushed paint across them with craft and precision, signed each and every one of them with his distinctive hand-writing. I wept because the love he had for us washed off those pages in waves, and will for as long as I’ve got them. Such is the nature of love, especially love between grandparents and grandchildren; it lives on, immense and robust, long after people have succumbed to their own mortality. I wept because I understand how much he must have missed us after we left, must have missed sitting at the kitchen table and drawing with us. I wept because he sat at that same table, in the same room, in the same house I had known for all of the earliest years of my life, without us, and kept drawing. In an attempt to reach out to us, to stay connected, to not be forgotten, he sent us the only material thing he could give from the other side of the world – his art. Of everyone in the entire world, he wanted my sister and I to be the ones to have it. And I wept because it is so pure and so exquisite, the effort he went to, the time he took, the care he poured into it, that it broke my heart. I wept for how lucky we were to have a great-grandfather like Fred Tatham.

The last time I saw Fred, he was in a nursing home. Unlike the time he had visited us in Australia, the time I didn’t treasure well enough, by that stage I had experienced enough loss and regret to understand the value of time with those we love. Fred was already in his nineties. He didn’t draw anymore, he didn’t golf anymore, and he no longer smoked. He sat in an oversized recliner, the same one he often slept in, smaller and thinner than I remembered, Alzheimer’s Disease having released him from some physical weight, some old habits, and some dignity. I was in England on a holiday to visit family, and my dad, Fred’s daughter – my grandmother, and my auntie all went to see him in his nursing home. He was characteristically upbeat and cheeky, but he addressed me by my mother’s name more than once, and at one point, asked me why I was talking “funny” (not only does my mother still have her British accent, I started out with one too, when he knew me best). There were other moments when, with surprising clarity that belied the periods of confusion, he seemed to know exactly who I was. When it came time to leave, my heart cracked open and grief poured in to fill the empty spaces, hot and crippling and profound. I knew that was it; I would never see that man again, in this life. I would never spend time with him, never hear his voice, never laugh with him, never see his face, never sit at a kitchen table drawing with him. I hugged him, and said, ‘I love you, Grandad’. The last thing my great-grandfather ever said to me, with such sincerity and force it was as if he, too, was conscious that this was our final goodbye, was, ‘I love you, too’. I sobbed in the corridor on the way out. I sobbed for a long time. I sob today, thinking about him.

Fred passed away in 2017. He made it to one hundred and three years old. He died on the exact same day as his only daughter had, two years earlier. My great-grandad was a man with a talent, and I consider myself blessed to be one of the few people he shared that talent with. He encouraged and supported my creativity. He was a kind and peaceful influence on me. He lived an entire life that I know little about, but the last thing he ever said to me was, ‘I love you’. I remember him this way. I remember him.