Swan River Read Free

me for a few moments, and then spoke quietly. ‘Because he drank too much, too often.’ He drew a long breath, while still looking me full in the eye. ‘He sometimes,’ he breathed deeply again, ‘upset your grandmother, my sister. We had to make him go away.’
    I was interested in this family mishap, even though it had happened such a long time ago. My father hadn’t told me about his father upsetting his mother, whatever that meant. Uncle George was looking across the river to the hills again; his thoughts seemed to be many years from now. I interrupted them. ‘How do you know about it? Were you there?’
    He smiled and raised one eyebrow; the other seemed to droop as if to balance its partner. ‘I was there. We all lived together, you know.’
    I did vaguely know that, a very long time ago when Queen Victoria, whose face was on the oldest, smoothest pennies, still reigned, my father had been a child in a house full of adults, and that when he was ten his father had disappeared from his life for ever. ‘So who lived there? And where did dad’s dad go to?’ This last question interested me particularly; where would a person go – a person who for some reason had to leave their home and family – what would a person like that do next?
    The eyebrow went up again and Uncle George leaned sideways towards me. ‘All right. I’ll tell you all about it.’ The foreign man appeared again; this time he filled the teapot with hot water and poured tea into Uncle George’s cup. Uncle George just went on talking. ‘My mother died when I was nine, in 1878. My father, your great-grandfather, had the same name as me, George Thompson. I had a younger brother, Ernest, and we had an older sister, Millie, which was short for Amelia, but everybody called her Sis. She was your grandmother, though you never met her.’
    â€˜Why was she called Sis?’
    â€˜When he was very small, my brother Ernest called her that because she was his sister. After that everyone called her Sis, even our father.’
    I waited as he drank some tea and gazed out of the window.
    Eventually he put his cup down on the saucer with a clatter. ‘When my mother died, my father rented a new house – almost new anyway. It had been built about ten years before, in a road full of new houses in Dalston, east London.’ He tapped my knee. ‘That’s why your dad supports the Spurs. He grew up a penny ride from the ground, and Tom took him before he went away. The Arsenal were still in south London then. That’s why the Spurs supporters have always disliked the Arsenal supporters; they’re interlopers, you see.’ He chuckled quietly which made his eyebrows shoot down; he peered out at me through the stiff white hairs.
    I knew my dad had supported the Spurs since he was a little boy. He had taken me to a match for the first time a few months before and I was a fervent fan. He had bought me a rosette and a blue plastic, star-shaped badge with a tiny photo of Danny Blanchflower stuck in the middle of it. Then he had bought a glossy white, wooden bird-scarer, carefully painted a dark blue stripe down it and presented it to me as my Spurs rattle.
    â€˜He would have gone to White Hart Lane first in the late 1890s. I took him myself sometimes after Tom left.’ Uncle George paused. ‘But that was all later, you’ve got to understand. I’m telling you about when I was a little boy which was even longer ago. It’s a long story and we won’t get through it all tonight. You’ll have to go home soon I should think.’
    I had a small Timex watch, of which I was very proud. It was ten past five. I could stay a little longer.
    He told me how he had lived in the same house with his father, his brother and his sister from the age of nine until he got married in 1900, when he was thirty-two; that, after his mother died, his father’s sister had