TE19 Iberian Adventure

John Hartley

that gripped us? Beside a lantern Judy nursed her nightcap and messaged her daughter. They inhabited their own worlds, all they could do was listen and nod, like two ships passing silently, impossibly apart. The roots of my restlessness extended down through my family tree. My Grandfather was plagued by restlessness of a different kind; disquiet approached from the other end of a life looking back over endless ‘what ifs’. My paternal grandfather was a mysterious figure, a childhood ghost appearing for a wedding here and a weekend there, passing through like a horse and rider. As opposites attract, my mother’s side were the type of simple country folk who could live in the same village for five hundred years. Occasionally pieces of the puzzle washed up on the shore of my childhood. He was sent away to boarding school. Aged eight, he was greeted at the train station by his parents who announced their divorce. There and then they asked him to decide who he would live with. His own father had himself been given up for adoption on account of his illegitimacy. He stayed close to his mother whom I once met, but my Grandfather barely knew his Father. Then the family history took a tragic twist. One fateful day there was a violent robbery, and his Father was shot dead in a story that made the national news. This familiar angst of an ominous horse and rider. A kind of grief observed for a lost connection or a friend departed. The struggle to make sense of a childhood and a family torn apart. “Your father never talked about your Grandfather.” My mother once confided.

154