THE BENCH

The Duchess of Sussex wrote a book called The Bench, about the relationship between a father and son.

I mentioned to the WordWorkers that had already used a bench and the characters who might sit on it as a writers' prompt. And that prompt had been inspired by a film of the same name.

My point was that we shouldn't dismiss ideas because they had been done before, they could always be done differently.

To prove the point, I wrote about a bench in my life.

This is pretty much as it arrived - but I could easily see it being re-worked as a proper story.

Perhaps it will appear, re-worked, further along the line.

THE BENCH (McLaughlan style)

The house. It was like them. New and full of possibilities. One of an expansion that took the town outwards from the exhausted grounds of the old abbey. Not built on the graves of the dead.

The front looked out onto the street, but the back wall, and their bedroom windows, faced south. They had a long garden there that would grow food a-plenty to feed the family she hoped they would soon have.

But maybe, just here, they would have a space for pretty things and fruit bushes.

Davie, her husband, built her a solid garden bench, with a back and proper arm-rests, and sat it against the wall, between the windows, where it would catch the sun. He planted little privets in a rectangle in front of the bench for her garden. Further back from the house, he lifted turf and laid ash from the fire to make a path around her new drying green.

Maggie and her mum sat on the new bench together and thanked God for his provision.

Babies came. And thrived. Three girls in, Davie was complaining about the lack of a son. When their eldest died of diphtheria, aged eight, he stopped complaining. He never talked about his daughter again.

Maggie took to sitting on the bench with her washing in the wicker basket placed beside her, so she could stand up and seem to be doing something if she heard someone coming around the house.

Davie had been a miner since he was fourteen. When he wasn’t working, he spent a lot of his time in a pub so dark as to be almost subterranean.

More children – all sons - came. Davie bought a Box-Brownie, and photographed Maggie sitting on the bench surrounded by them. Sometimes, their Auntie Mary was there and the photos would be less proper. Never having children of her own, she spoiled her nieces and nephews. She was her sister’s biggest ally and a constant stone in Davie’s shoe.

When the fights became too much and his eldest surviving daughter left for Canada, Davie spent many evenings on the bench. When asked what he was doing, he would reply “Just sitting” and no other explanation would be forthcoming. She didn’t like the way he treated her mother? He really didn’t understand what sort of modern nonsense this was. Maybe in Canada she would find herself a husband. Maybe then she would know what it was like.

He would sit with an arm over the back of the bench, his left knee drawn up, deliberately turning his back to the west.

Bit by bit, the bench wore out and was replaced, first by Davie, then by his boys. Whatever its form, Maggie’s most precious moments were spent sitting there with her man, usually in the evenings, where they could be away from family cares but still hear if the children got out of bed.

The fruit and flower garden was put to various, more practical, use. But a gooseberry bush, in the middle of it all, persevered, not matter what other crop it was surrounded by.

When the grandchildren came along, they would sometimes sleep over. The more curious ones would get up at five in the morning, when Grannie rose to make Papa’s breakfast and his “piece” for lunchtime. When he surfaced, an hour later, he would ruffle their hair and tell them he was off. “I’ll walk to miles south,” he said, “drop down two hundred feet, then walk two miles north to the coal face. I could sleep longer if I just dug a shaft in the back garden!”

In an era short of sweets, at least one of the children asked what would happen to “their” gooseberry bush if he did that.

When the families gathered there for Sunday get-togethers, boisterous children would be given a hammer from the pantry and told to go and fix the bench. Random pieces of wood were attached by scavenged nails.

Photos exist of Maggie, seeing out the last months of her mother’s life, sitting on the bench, arm in arm, two women who knew almost all there was to know of a woman’s lot in life.

Davie reached pension age while Maggie washed and cleaned and cooked as it seemed she always had done. But the job had made sure it would finish him before it let him go.

His sons, not knowing that a stroke could do this, yelled in embarrassed desperation when he burst into tears for no apparent reason. She would heave her arthritic bones from the seat by the left-hand side of the fireplace and walk to him on his side. She locked her arm in his and walked him to where there were no accusations being shouted and no explanations were needed. The bench.

With Davie no longer there and the grandchildren being older and busier. The bench fell to ruin. The throne of her hopes and dreams became two cemented piles of bricks with two boards laid across them.

In the twenty years she had to wait, she often sat there, knowing that this was life, and how it was supposed to work out. But she was surprised to walk out one day and find the gooseberry bush gone, replaced by a small in diameter but very deep hole.

“You were under your own garden, Davie.”

The local council fenced off her fruit and flower garden while they investigated and made sure the house wasn’t in danger of sinking into the ground.

“Like Davie did. Like I will soon.”

Until then, on days the council inspectors weren’t there, and for a short time after they filled the hole with concrete, she would sit herself carefully on the last incarnation of the bench, lean back against the roughcast wall of their home, close her eyes and feel the warmth on her cheeks.

Letting her mind wander through the life and the loves, the dreams and failures that made up an ordinary life – the best kind of life to her mind – she parted her dry lips and said, “The sun’s still shining, Davie.”