As promised...

FINDING SHACKLETON IN A BOOK

He didn’t talk much. Not really. Not about things that mattered. Never said anything about who he was or what he wanted to be. He talked so little that even his son sometimes felt as though he sat with a stranger. Now the father is gone and the son wants to know him better and so he clutches at the shadow-scraps of memory.

A book there was, that his father owned. Not the dictionary, but another book, and it must have meant something for it stayed with them when so much else didn’t, was there on a high shelf in each new place they travelled to. It was a prize that the father had won at school; that’s what the son thinks, tries to remember a copperplate certificate that was pasted into the front cover saying as much. Now the son wishes that he’d given that detail more attention, that he’d read the words over and over until he had them to heart; but a careful search of what his memory holds does not offer more than a vague picture of what it was, and sometimes he can even doubt that it ever existed.

The book was real enough. A light-blue hardback cover, like a piece of a cold sky, and the title in silver letters. Silver like needles of frost or ice, which seems appropriate, for the book was about the life of Shackleton and that was all there was running down the spine, his name. Ship’s Boy to snow-blind wanderer, everything that earnest man was had been set down in print, and the man raised to something like hero though he achieved less than many and many of those have been forgotten.

And it must have meant something, that book, though the father never spoke of it or of Shackleton. The book is lost now and the father lost, too, and the son does not know when that happened. He searches old bookshops just in case, years of looking, and never finding the book that exists now only in his head. He has another Life of Shackleton, an old library book that smells of dust and the pages are yellow, and he pours over that book, at night, just before dreaming. And he reads that Shackleton gave up his only biscuit to Frank Wild and afterwards Wild’s diary records that ‘all the money that was ever minted would not have bought that biscuit and the remembrance of that sacrifice will never leave me’. And the son knows his father liked biscuits, with his tea, and he knows his father would have gone without if ever the son had needed for anything.

So he reads on, sifting through every detail, like there might be small gold to be found in the silt of those words. He is carried on the shoulder of Shackleton, almost to the south pole, across glaciers and adrift on floes of ice, and sled dogs dieing, and the Endurance lost to the cold sharp sea, and Shackleton gave up his mittens for someone called Hurley and suffered frost bite for his charity. And the son sees a hero rise up from the pages of the book, walks towards him in his dreams, not bearded or snow-burnt, but something like his own father, upright and loved by the men under him, and loved by the son, too, though that was never said till it was too late. And the father never wore gloves against the cold, the son remembers that, even when he wakes he does. And the book must have meant something then, to the man, and now it means something to the son, even though it is not really same book.