Going Home By Jenny Woodhouse
ou’re going home with Dad. Only this time he’s not stumbling by your side, eloquent with ale, but in a discreet plastic urn, too small to hold him.
As you pass the Who’d ‘a’ Thowt It, light and talk spills out of the public bar, where the walk home always used to start. After Mam had lost her temper.
‘Go and fetch thy dad from t’pub, our Keir. I’m putting the Yorkshire puddings in now.’
You don’t recall exactly when that began. Many years before you got to legal drinking age. You hated the pub. By two o’clock on a Sunday the worn flagstones were glistening with beer. The men winked and prodded as you pushed past them to the bar.
‘What’s yours, kid?’ somebody would shout, and chuckle at his own wit. ‘Never too young for a pint!’
Dad, pulling out his watch, dull grey and dented.
‘Time for another. It’s nobbut two o’clock.’
You got away a long time ago. You drink a little now, mostly wine. But you’ve never forgotten the fear. Caught in the bar, the smell of stale ale and tobacco, Dad taking his time over his next pint. Knowing Mam was waiting at home, her fury mounting.
The impulse surprises you. You should have a last drink with the old man. You push the door open and step in. Your feet remember the door sill; you don’t trip.
Time seems to have folded back on itself. Though you’re a foot and a half taller, confident in your formal suit, the men in the bar haven’t changed, give or take a few wrinkles.
‘Ey up, Keir lad,’ says one of them.
You put the urn on the bar.
‘Tha’s brought thy dad?’
You nod.
‘Good lad. We’ll have a last drink wi’ ‘im.’
Pints all round. Somebody loosens the lid, peers in.
‘He were a good ‘un, owd Bob. Hope th’ale’s good where he’s gone.’
You’ve been here more than half an hour. Mam will be waiting at home. You’re probably over the limit. Will you dare to drive her, and the ashes, up to the moors where they used to ramble with the Clarion Club?
Hugging the urn, urged on by the goodwill flooding the bar, you forget the door-sill. You trip and fall. Ashes float upwards around you, like cloud over the moors.
Hands help you up. The landlord comes out from behind his bar, dustpan and brush ready.
This will please the old reprobate. A bit of him will be in the bar for ever.
For the first time, you weep for him. Whatever your memories, he was your dad, after all.
Judges Comments
A whole lifetime's story of grief and fear are crammed into Jenny Woodhouse's affecting Going Home, the runner up in WM's competition for 500-word stories. In spare, laconic prose scattered with just enough vernacular to convey the language and tone of understated people who don't wear their hearts on their sleeves, Jenny delivers a quietly devastating snapshot of alchoholism and parental failure.
In this beautifully crafted piece, the title works brilliantly. Kier is taking his father's ashes home, but the pub, not the family house, is where the father's loyalities lay. The tension between the outside world, where the father was seen as the old reprobate by the other drinkers, constrasts with the numb despair that pervades Kier's remembrances of his father. Jenny's use of low-key suggestion and the creation of eloquent images gives the reader the opportunity to feel their way inside the words in a way that allows them to experience their full resonance, and gives the story the layers of complexity that rightly belong to the complicated grief that accompanies the loss of someone destructive as well as self-destructive.