Graduation Day (Part 1)

I will never forget the joyous excitement on my father's face as the post dropped through the door that morning.

We had all gathered around in the dining room to see him return from the hall, chest puffed out in a mixture of presumptuous pride and nervous bravado. He was frantically rifling through the small stack of envelopes, and when he came across the item we were all waiting for, he tossed the remaining circulars and advertisement catalogues on the dresser, clearly oblivious to the tutting reprimand of my mother's. His big kindly face turned to where i sat across the room. His cheeks had lost their usual ruddy glow, and I knew immediately that he was as nervous as I was about the contents of the letter he grasped so tightly in his thick fingers. The sudden realisation that we were now equals, even in such a small way, made me feel so uncomfortable, that for the first time in my life, I couldn't look my father in the eye. I looked to one side of him, then deeply into the dark shiny surface of the dining table. I felt positively sick.

"Are you ready, son?"

His voice was unusually soft, not the confident boom I was so used to. It was strange, and my sisters stopped giggling as if they recognised it too. Without looking up, I felt the expectant gaze of four sets of eyes fixed on the top of my head.

"Dad, can't I just open it myself? It is addressed to -"

"Edward, come on!" My mother cut me off. "Sorry. I know you're nervous, we all are. But it's tradition, your father's waited a long time for this."

I just nodded, eyes still fixed on the table top, and started picking at the loose threads of my jumper-sleeve. She was right, and nothing I could do would change it. I took a small consolation in telling myself that this tradition would die with me, and that when my own son was in my place, I would grant him the right to learn his fates in life in privacy.

I looked at the envelope still clasped in my father's hand, and although I couldn't properly read it without my glasses on, I recognised instantly the Roegate crest, stamped in thick navy ink, that peered out from under his thumb.

My father had indeed waited a long time for this day. I was destined to become the fifth generation of Simmonds sons to attend The Roegate School for Boys, and had been for the entire eleven years of my own life, not to mention the years of many lives before. In our family it was a big deal to be set on the path of becoming an Old Roegatian. The tradition decreed that on the day the admissions letters arrived, the father of the house would open it, and relay the result to son in the company of the whole family; so far it had always been good news. Grandad Simmonds had read my father's letter out this way, and my father said he had it on very good authority - on exactly whose I never found out - that his own grandfather had done the same, and as a reward had bought the eleven-year-old Grandad Simmonds cigars.

"I'm ready, Dad. You can open it now." I lied; I wasn't ready at all. I leant my forehead on my folded arms, purposely hiding my face, and felt my breath fogging on the tabletop with the tip of my nose.

A wave of prickly cold spread across my back as I listened to the envelope being torn open. My father practically fumbled the paper out of it; his nerves had made him clumsy handed. Labouriously unfolding the letter, he began scanning over the letter out loud. He spoke in hushed erratic syllables, and as they grew louder with each disconnected phrase, each one seemed to raise him slightly farther from his seat as if he were being invisibly winched out of it.

"Dear Master Simmonds... thank you for attending... am pleased to inform you... da-da-da-been ACCEPTED INTO ROEGATE SCHOOL FOR BOYS AS OF SEPTEMBER 1st 1961!"

I looked up to see my father beaming at me across the room; flushed with obvious pride, the ruddy glow was back in his big cheeks, and his eyes twinkled like mad. For reasons I didn't understand at the time, it made me cry and laugh at once.

"I knew you could do it!" He began laughing hysterically. "I knew it!! Knew, knew, knew it!"

His dark red hair flapped wildly across his face as he beamed in turns at my mother and I. Normally it remained perfectly in place, combed back away from his face, but this letter had brought out an excited animation in him that my family had rarely, if ever, seen. It made my laughter overtake my tears. He span on his heels and ran from the room, his shoes echoing against the floorboards as he sprang up the hallway and back again, appearing in the doorway frenetically thrusting himself into his black overcoat. He looked like a giant startled chicken.

He swooped excitedly on my sisters, gathered them up in his arms, and theatrically planted a kiss on them both; they giggled coyly and buried their faces into either side of his neck.

"Girls, say well done to your brother. He has achieved a great thing today!" He turned to me; "I'm really proud of you, son." It embarrassed me, but knowing I had made my father so happy made my insides burn with pride.

Setting Charlotte and Lydia down, my father whisked a huge green scarf around his neck, and the girls scampered to my mother's side. She looked tiny. Her slight face was pale, and she smiled distractedly at them both and then at me. There was a strange sadness in her eyes, one that I had noticed a few times before but had no understanding of; her weak smile did little to betray it. She pulled her ever-present white gown tightly against herself, and stared into the garden, a shadow of the woman who had been so snappily forceful with me just moments before.

My father leant down to her and laid a kiss on her pallid cheek. Clapping and rubbing his hands together, he left for his surgery, whistling loudly as he went down the hallway.

"Today is going to be a good, good day!" he proclaimed, before swinging open the door, stepping outside and clattering it shut without looking back. I craned my neck around the doorway of the dining room to watch him go, but caught only the blurred glimpse of his burly silhouette through the frosted glass. I could almost feel the smile on his shadowy form as it slipped from view, and in the silent rush of cold air he left in his wake, I immediately missed this new vivacious side of him that had filled and enlivened the house that morning.

That was the last time I saw my father alive.

* * * *(MF)* * * *