The Filtnib’s Progress

The last time I visited my granny in Scotland, I was sitting at the piano, leafing through a battered old hymn book and trying out the odd tune, when the book flapped open at the very back. The two sides were covered in small, neat handwriting; hymn titles, with their page numbers for ease of reference.

Sellotape criss-crossed the binding, which had come unstuck through long use, and there was a small rip at the bottom of one page.

Most astonishing, there was a picture. In between the lines, in a sudden block of white space, was a boat with a chimney that puffed smoke into the hymn title above it. It could have started out as a house, or perhaps it was always meant to be Noah’s Ark.

My grandpa died when I was still a teenager. He was much loved and respected, remembered for his careful compassion as a doctor, his love of jazz and his idiosyncratic sense of humour. He wore a bow tie nearly every day. My memories of him are drawn mainly from disjointed episodes – car journeys when he’d tap the steering wheel in time to Benny Goodman on the tape player, hand out chunks of dairy milk before pretending we were hopelessly lost; times he’d pick up his trumpet and play along to a record or pluck at the double bass while I struggled to find chords on the piano.

There are also the more abstract sensory memories – the smell of his cigar smoke, the scratch of his shaven chin as I kissed him hello; the pretend fierceness in his voice when he barked “Quiet!” at his rabble of beloved grandchildren. I often wondered what it would have been like to know him as an adult, rather than in my childish, half-grown form. I wished I could have played the piano better, for music was one of his greatest pleasures, and in particular I wished I had the aptitude to improvise the jazz he loved so well, but it always sounded false when I tried.

It was strange and wonderful to come across this trace of him, in the back of his old hymn book. It made me wonder what traces we all leave behind, intentionally or otherwise.

When had he drawn it? While bored one day in the cold, echoey church that nestles in the hills above the village? Did he imagine that one day someone else would find it and smile? Was that why the giraffe’s neck was so long as it peered out of the window?