18. MARMADUKE TO HIS SON

Marmaduke suffered greatly as he tried to absorb the undoubted truth that an ancestor of his, maybe two or three centuries earlier, had come to the land of his birth as a very black man indeed. He didn’t know who he was, what his name had been, but was quite sure his surname wasn’t Lauderdale. But the fact was that had happened, and somehow several generations later his line had ended up as pale-skinned Marmaduke.

It had been explained to him, as had the possibility that rarely there might be reminders of that fact in the skin tone of future generations.

And he had fathered Claude. Not that the child was extremely dark skinned, but the echo of a forgotten past was a reminder of his heritage. Then there was Earl. The young man who had deserted Dragona because his own line could be traced back to be somewhere close to the politician he hated and who had fathered the boy he believed that if he stayed with Dragona he would have to bring up as his own. So he had left her.

To say that Marmaduke was conflicted would be to make an understatement and after a great deal of thought he decided there was only one honourable thing for him to do. After all, he had made speeches to a sometimes derisory audience, speeches that occasionally, no, often, touched on what he saw as an explanation for the state of the country he had hitherto been so proud to call his own. And for those speeches, recorded for posterity time after time, it had been suggested that he might be racist.

One day Claude would hear some of the things he said, maybe listening to one of the recordings, and would no doubt be hurt by what was said about him. After all, these days, there’s no hiding place, not with the internet where images might be stored for as long as there was life on Earth.

There was only one thing he could do. Whatever any decent white or black or brown or yellow man would do.

So he sat at his desk whilst Dragona was out shopping with Claude, who could walk and just about talk by then, opened a bottle of whisky, a litre bottle at that, and a glass and placed them in front of him, took out a pad of lined paper, and hoped that such things as calligraphic arts hadn’t been washed away from his skill set because all he normally wrote with was a computer, and picked up a ball point pen.

This wasn’t going to be easy.

Dear Claude, he wrote, and tore the paper from his pad and wrote on a fresh sheet,

My dearest son,

Yes: that was the right beginning After all, this was going to be a really important message.

He sucked one thumb for a moment, made his way to the toilet in case he’d need a piss before he finished what he was going to do, returned to his seat and wrote without pausing for thought or any more thumb sucking,

Claude, you are my son and I want you to know that I would love you whatever shade of human skin you had. There was a time when I lived alone and although I squandered some of my moments with a range of other people, mainly ladies but only once and in my early teens it was Colin Fairfax, I was fundamentally without love in my life. My own public school education was dreary to say the least!

Then I met your mother and somehow I married her. Goodness knows why because I was never really suited for married life. I was always selfish, needing to climb to the top of the political ladder, desperately dreaming of holding the key to No 10 Downing Street in my hand. Then I would be able to sort out what I saw as the problems of our country.

But I never got anywhere near holding those keys in my hand because, even theough there was a vacancy at number ten due to the death of its incumbent, I was no longer even in Parliament. The deceased Prime Minister saw to that! I was deselected by my constituency on his instructions, and that was that.

The reasons for my fall from fame were never clear to me, but started with the hour of your birth, and I’m not a fool blaming an unborn son! But somehow I was inveigled into a plot that might have meant that an attack on the prime Minister’s life would prove to be successful. Tp put it briefly, a mysterious figure, a male one, in jodhpurs of all things, gave me secret orders to warn a man at MI5 that an attack on the PM’s life was imminent, and that I failed to do because I was in the local hospital waiting for you to enter the world at the time.

Which you did, a handsome child if ever I saw one!

In those days I had given some thought, not as serious as it ought to have been, but then I wasn’t then nor ever have been capable of sufficiently serious thought, about the state of our nation. And I concluded that the fact that its inhabitants were a motley collection of types and races was the root cause of every problem that arose. And because I saw myself as a white man I naturally concluded that our island was really ony suited to my own type, and that all the rest should be ordered to go home, wherever home might be.

If you come across recordings of me espousing that philosophy, take them as the ignorant workings of an immature brain because I know now that I was wrong in just about every possible sense. And it was you who showed me the light, because as you grew it became clear that if my own policies had been followed you would have been put into a boat and made to sail the seven seas until you found a place you could actually call home. And that was because there was what I called a foreign tone to your skin as you changed from babyhood to childhood.

You know about yourself, how tests revealed that you were indeed who your mother said you were: my son. Those same tests revealed that my own past heritage wasn’t what I supposed it to have been.

Several generations before even I was born an ancestor of mine was brought as a slave or servant of some sort from Africa, and worked in this country where coloured skin was a rarity, as a black man. I don’t pretend to know the genetics behind it all and what part DNA played in it, but as the generations came and went the family skin tome became ever lighter until I was born, a white man. Then you came along, and shades of our common ancestry became evident. You were plainly of some mixture of races.

In just about every way I had been wrong in my way of thinking and the time has now come for me to make my story known to you. You are my son and I am proud of you, and slowly over the time since you were born I’ve come to realise that my racist attitudes were based on a mistaken belief that the white races are superior to all others, that, if not the world, this island, is here for them to live in and prosper.

My life has been a mess. At first I thought I loved a white boy, but then I was only a young teenager. Then I held racist views that I had been brainwashed by my parents and schools to believe were the only right views a decent man can have. But it has taken the birth of my beautiful boy for me to dry the brainwashing from my head. My thoughts were programmed by centuries of prejudices fed into my mind, and the world would be a better place if those programs had never been written into my head.

I have written this for you to read when you are old enough. In the end your father saw sense. He got things into what I hope is a correct proportion, but I know that you will hear of me as the man I was rather than the man I am, and I don’t believe I could bear to see the look on your face when you look at images of a senseless father. So I have wrtten this and will ask your mother to pass it on to you when she thinks you might be old enough to understand these witterings.

Until then, Claude, I do love you. Really, truly, honestly.

Dad.

Then he folded the pages neatly together and pushed them into an envelope before starting his litre of whisky.

He’d never really liked strong spirit but this time, refilling the glass until he could no longer see what he was doing, he prepared his mind once and for all to meet his maker. And as he drifted off into blissful unconsciousness he saw the man at the top of a staircase that had never been there before.

He had a silver circlet on his head, and he was black.

Then he woke up with a splitting headache.

“Sod it,” he whimpered, “I’m not dead!”

“Too true,” muttered Dragona, and then she smiled at him. “You’re a very silly man! I read your letter to Claude and I will give it to him one day. Or, if you like, you can.”

“I’m sorry,” he whispered, as loud as he dared.

“Then I do love you,” she said, smiling. “And when you get home I’ll prove it!”

“Home?” he asked.

“From hospital. You’re in hospital. You nearly drank yourself to death!”

Then he smiled at her. “Hospital?” he queried, “You see, I can’t do anything right! This ought to be a coffin! I’ve had what you’d call a useless life!”

“Maybe so far,” she said.

THE END

© Peter Rogerson, 06.06.22

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