The Healing of Broken Souls

Chapter 9

I was speechless for several seconds. I gazed at the back of my hand. The 'delicious suntan' that Helen coveted so much was my natural skin colour, which I'd inherited from my mother. Then I erupted.

"The racist bastard!" 

"He was worse than a racist, Michael. Your mother was from the West Indies. You've probably heard of the Windrush Generation?"

"Of course."

"Clara was brought up in an orphanage in Trinidad. She never found out what had happened to her parents. She had to leave the orphanage when she turned 18. She had nowhere to go so she came to Britain on the Windrush, on her own, with very little money and no one to help her. She clawed herself out of the gutter and made a new life for herself, which was why I admired her so much. Clara had no privileged upbringing, no silver spoon. But I knew my father could never appreciate the hard work and determination needed to overcome the difficulties she'd faced."

"It sounds like your father was an obnoxious bigot."

"That, and worse. He was colour-prejudiced, which to me is completely inexcusable. If Clara had been a white girl from the West Indies he might have accepted her. But it was purely about the colour of her skin, not her ethnicity. I had a tutor at Magdalen who'd been forced to work on the Burma Railway during the war. Twenty years later he still despised the Japanese. He would be classed as a racist, but at least there was a reason for his racism. My father had no excuse."

"What did you do about it?" I asked, thinking that I'd have been tempted to lash out.

"I hauled Clara off the sofa and told her we were going. As we were leaving, your dear grandfather followed us to the front door and shouted after us, 'I'm warning you, Robert. If you marry that person, I will stop your allowance!', and that, Michael, was the last time I ever saw my parents."

#

My father went on to describe how they'd endured a dreadful journey home. He'd had no chance to telephone for a taxi so they had to walk to the village station. Clara was both ill and devastated. She had to stop and rest every few minutes. And then they'd had to catch two trains to get back to Oxford. By the time they'd reached the flat, they both knew that there was more to Clara's problem than mere exhaustion. He made her promise to see her doctor as soon as possible.

"But I don't feel up to telling you any more today, Michael. I'd like to get my mind off those days for a while. Why don't we go and watch your eagles for a couple of hours?"

We packed everything into the Landy and headed for the El Tello Nature Reserve. My finca was en route so we decided to stop off for a quick bite on the way.  Eagles need good light to hunt so are active in the couple of hours before dusk. We needed to get in position well before then. 

The track leading to the base of the escarpment in El Tello was even rougher than my cart track and I almost got the Landy stuck a few times. I found myself hoping it would be worth the beating my suspension was taking. We made it eventually and set up the hide in a small clearing surrounded by gorse bushes. I needn't have worried because, minutes later, both Bonelli's were soaring along the cliff face, scanning the ground for prey. As they wheeled against the clear blue sky, the spread fingers of their wing-tip flight feathers fluttered in the thermals.

"They're magnificent," my father whispered, entranced.

We watched in companionable silence for half an hour, our binoculars moving from side to side in unison.  One of the pair rose rapidly. I knew what was coming.

"It's going to stoop," I said.

Sure enough, the eagle folded its wings back and dropped like a stone, landing with talons extended not ten yards in front of us. It rose again, clutching a rabbit. Powerful wing beats took it back towards the top of the cliff.

"They must have eaglets in their nest!" I said, thrilled. "Otherwise it would have started tearing that rabbit apart on the ground."

The Bonelli's disappeared but we hung around for a while to see if anything else interesting appeared. The thick gorse provided possible nesting sites for quail and hemipodes.  As we waited patiently, we both heard a snuffling and the sound of an animal pushing its way through the undergrowth. Seconds later a family of wild boar appeared,  two large grey adults followed by a string of tiny black piglets. They sprinted across the clearing without giving us a second glance and vanished into the bushes.

My father shook his head in amazement before uttering just one word.

"Magical!"

#

It was dark by the time we got home and I offered to make a stew for dinner. Which, to me, meant boiling a saucepan full of vegetables in beef stock for an hour. Unlike patience, cooking was not one of my virtues. As I was peeling and chopping my father sat at the kitchen table, reading the news on my laptop and relaying anything of interest. It seemed to be all about Harry and Meghan.  My phone buzzed and I asked him to answer it. I heard him say, 'Hello', and then go quiet. I looked over to see him grinning as he listened.

"Who is it?" I demanded.

He covered the phone with his hand.

"It's a woman. She sounds Australian. She called me a handsome devil and said she's feeling frisky and would I come and take her out to dinner."

"Give me that!" I snatched my phone from him.

"Helen!" I said. "That was my ... er ... visitor who answered the phone! Well ... he might sound just like me, but he isn't me ... just a sec, I'll check."

"You don't need to ask me, Michael," my father said immediately. "It's Saturday night. You go and enjoy yourself. I'll be fine on my own with your stew."

"I might not be back until late tomorrow morning," I admitted.

"Good for you. Sunday's supposed to be a day of rest and I can amuse myself."

"Okay, Helen, I'll be there in an hour," I said into the phone. "And, yes. I'll bring my toothbrush."