the cardboard box

On the table, next to the laptop, is an ordinary cardboard box. Battered and a little stained, despite its small size it probably contains more than I have ever known about my late Ukrainian father. Real things. He rarely talked about his life before arriving in Britain, as if he had been born directly into his late twenties and whilst aiming for Canada, had somehow ended up settled in Nottingham and married to a Glaswegian nurse. It was as if someone had only then remembered to press the record button on his life, and all previous existence had been lost. Just occasionally there were shards from a life before, very different to this British working-class life my father had been assimilated into. Once it was a recollection of drinking fermented milk that was so sour it tasted alcoholic, and probably was. Another time was during a trip to Derbyshire, where the hilly landscape surprised him with memories of the Carpathian Mountains. And then there was one of his favourite tales of being caught stealing apples from a local orchard, him and his friends, back home during the famine. The owner punished them by removing their trousers and putting them in the middle of the village square. My father and his friends had to lurk half-clothed, hiding and waiting for darkness, before they could finally retrieve their trousers and skulk off home.
And there were other glimpses of his Ukrainian beginnings. For instance, he knew how to build and run a still. He once discovered me as a young teenager crudely trying to distil something – anything - out of a dribble of leftover wine. Having laughed at my feeble and amateur attempt, he made a still for himself out of two Swarfega cans and fuelled it with home-grown potatoes and sprouted barley. His comment had been that this wouldn’t be possible ‘back home’ but that since here in Mapperley nobody would recognise what the still actually was, we would be perfectly safe. Home distilling of alcohol was definitely ‘Not Allowed’ back home. The resulting liquid was stronger than vodka and tasted disgusting, and was drinkable only when heavily disguised with blackberry cordial, made from home-grown blackberries of course.
And that was another hint of his past life. My father had two very productive allotments in addition to a large garden at home, and a total of three greenhouses. These he ran over and above his daily work as a fitter. And apart from the chrysanthemums, which he produced commercially, everything was laid down to food crops. Good, solid, bulk food. No silly sugar-snap peas when you could be growing kilos of proper peas. Potatoes, apples, runner beans, tomatoes, he grew them all in industrial quantities. As children, we had evenings at home shredding beans and shelling peas and thought nothing of it. It was all carefully preserved and stored away - a massive, edible safety deposit against times of need. The house was so crammed full of food that every space was occupied, leaving just enough space for us.
And now as I look back at these aspects of my childhood, I realise they may not be so typical after all. The allotments, the gardens, the greenhouses, the food stores. I knew my father had been a market gardener or some sort of small farmer ‘back home’. Had this been my father’s attempts to mentally dig his way back to a former way of life? Was he maintaining a link with his past self? Reliving his memories again and again as he turned over spade after spade of soil - memories he could neither share nor get out of his head. Or simply didn’t want to. Was it more of a guilty hangover from surviving through times of great famine and hardship? And a determination that we should never, ever have to go through the same ordeal ourselves.