Sometimes we miss the things that never really belonged to us to start with. The grandfather we never met, the snowy winters we weren’t yet alive to see, the countries we never visited but that turn up in family stories told late at night over a glass of red wine. My grandfather was many things but with the surname ‘David’ he was most definitely a through and through Welshman. ‘Hiraeth’ is a welsh word that is almost impossible to translate into English, but that attempts to describe a longing for home bound up in a missing of that which perhaps no longer exists. I never met my Grandfather, Keith David, and neither did my mother really as he passed away when she was only three years old. How do the snippets of information I have about this significant person, piece together to become a part of my at-home-ness, without me knowing where the border spaces of fiction and reality lie. I find myself in his small moments, the simplicities of his everyday life. This is a story as much about myself as it is about my grandfather as I weave together a sense of knowing him.
Keith, Hong Kong 1958
The morning seemed to breath a light sigh as I open my eyes and watched the pale light dance through the slatted blinds onto the bare wall. Outside the world had started to mumble with students on their way to lectures and businessmen hurrying in ironed suites, buzzing from their morning coffee, to catch the bus. I hadn’t noticed that the sheets beside me were rumpled up against my back and that the steady in and out of breath I am used to hearing in my right ear, was silent. Through the shut door came a muffled giggle, followed by the clatter of a pot, stirring in the morning. I slowly pulled my legs from under the heavy sheets to meet the cool floor.
Outside the clattering seemed to become louder, as if the eagerness to start the day was ranking up a notch and the world was becoming impatient for me to join in. Hanging over the cane chair that solemnly slumped in the darker corner of the room was a flannel dressing gown that I threw on and made my way to the door.
There, bouncing on the knee of her ayah, was my little girl. She laughed through her porridge as she saw me, reaching out her little hands to pat at my dressing gown, covering it in a thin film of boiled oats.
Everything seemed to sting with newness. The coffee brewing in its glass pot, the icy water I splashed on my face from the kitchen tap, the stench of a freshly mopped floor, all fighting to sweep away the mist of sleep. Clambering down from her perch on one of the red dinging chairs, I heard the pitter patter of tiny feet before I felt my trousers tug at the waist and looked down to Gill hanging about my left leg. “dada up!” she demanded, reaching her hands towards the ceiling with such vigour I always worried she might
dislocate her shoulders. Scooping her into my arms I strode into the living room to find my wife, sitting neatly folded into a brown leather armchair, her pale legs tucked underneath her, brow creased as she focused on the inky words of this mornings newspaper.
The washing hung on the wooden wrack that could be hoisted up out of the way, but that today seemed to languish at waist height, presenting as another person in the cramped living room. Gill and I collapsed onto the sagging belly of the tired sofa as its springs moaned their usual tune. Christine spared a glance across to us and managed a “good morning my darlings” before burying herself back in the world of her newspaper.
This is the beginning of a story I want to tell about my grandfather and I. In the essence of ‘Hiraeth’ I want to see how much my longing to know him, completes a fabric of narrative that I have conceived out of that which I know to be true and an inner sense of at-home-ness. As further iterations of this story come to life, I hope to share them so as to dance around this idea of ‘Hiraeth’.
Photographs by Keith David, my grandfather.