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Both Ways: Chapter 2

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Dear Nola,

I've written to you before. When I was young, but past that age when I believed the postman could deliver to Father Christmas and heaven. They weren't letters anyway, more an excuse to talk to myself on paper. Journal entries, that's more the idea, so I don't know why I didn't start with, 'Dear Diary'. I never imagined you reading them. I liked your name, the idea of you; I seemed to have you pegged in my mind like a reminder on a notice board.

Reminder of what? I don't know. Kate or Vivian or father must have told me stories before I can remember being told, or else how could I have understood Auntie Phil when she said to mother, "You know where this all started, don't you? With that bloody Irish whore." That was 1984, when I was thirteen and you had already become my ex-penpal.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. The first thing I should say is, I'm your great-grandson. You died five years before I was born. Perhaps I shouldn't mention death, if we meet. Then again it might comfort you, when you get to the less pleasant parts of your future, to know that more relatives came to your funeral than would admit to being family when you were alive. And after the service, they apparently swarmed into your garden like an invasion of black beetles, sat in your chairs, admired your bedding plants. They wanted to know who would get this house.

Your son Edward's second son was my father. Sorry, is my father. Mother speaks of him as if he's dead, and once you begin to use the past tense it's a hard habit to break. She, along with Auntie Phil, thinks you're the reason he left. Not a direct cause you understand, but you are a symbol, the original source of familial dereliction.

You'll know we used to own whole blocks of London and several hundred acres around Horsham and Dorking. Of course the farms went while you were alive. After that the city holdings trickled away; we still have all the Church Street cottages, the even numbered properties on South Parade and two houses on Elm Park Drive. Uncle Charles lives at 78, Onslow Gardens and looks after nos. 98, 102 and 108. The rest have gone. Proceeds suitably reinvested, I'm sure, but distributed among so many descendants it seems less impressive.

Add to that the usual misadventures: one broken engagement, failed exams, a few divorces, dissipations and drug problems. Spread across four generations and nine surnames I doubt it would strike anyone else as out of the ordinary. But the impression I got as I grew up was that beneath every incident of family trouble, every reversal of fortune, was that caption written - 'bloody Irish whore'. The consensus, it seemed, was that had you never appeared there would have continued an upstanding and illustrious line of Marsh-Rowlands. There would have been no World Wars, no general strike, no nasty foreigners in London and no-one would have reason to speak of 'the Sixties'.

If I tell you this before you've married into our tribe, you'll think I'm exaggerating. But I imagine your first question, once we've established who I am, will be how did I come back in time? Well, it might be better not to write down the location. It could be misused; I don't mean by you. I've been careful to keep my notes locked away, and if asked what my research is for I just say another BBC costume drama and - God, would you listen to me? It seems I have to remind myself this is not real correspondence, not going to anyone, just a chance to get my thoughts in order. And let's be honest, who would believe me if I told the truth?