The Rain Before it Falls Read Online Free PDF

discharged. There are different ways in which I could relieve myself of this feeling. Of course, I am going to leave you some money. That goes without saying. But there are other things which are not so easily done. There is something else which I owe to you; something far more precious; something which is, I suppose, in the most literal sense of the word, priceless. What I want you to have, Imogen, above all, is a sense of your own history; a sense of where you come from, and of the forces that made you.
    It seems to me that without such a sense you are at a great disadvantage. And that this in itself is compounded by your other disadvantages. One of the ways in which most people, most young people, acquire this sense of themselves is through looking at photographs: photographs of themselves, when they were children, and photographs of their parents and grandparents and even older relatives. But you have never been able to do this.
    I say ‘never’. Perhaps there was a time, before you lost your sight, when your mother showed you one or two such things. But you would have been only a very small girl – three years old – and I very much doubt whether they could have made any impression, on such a young and undeveloped mind. Since then, there would have been nothing. Which is why I’m going to do the best I can, if it isn’t already too late, to correct the situation.
    There are hundreds of photographs I could have chosen, Imogen. Hundreds and hundreds, going right back to the war and beyond. A few years ago, after my friend Ruth died, I sorted through them and threw away the ones that I didn’t want to keep. And in the last few days, I have been looking through those that I kept, and trying to decide which ones I should now set aside and attempt to describe to you. In the end, I have settled on twenty. Twenty seems a manageable number, somehow. Twenty scenes from my own life, mainly, because I suppose that is what I am also proposing to tell you: the story of my own life – up to the point where you left it, so soon after making your first appearance. I hope that it won’t seem entirely irrelevant to you. Doubtless I shall digress, sometimes, but everything I shall tell you is connected, in my mind at least, and if I can’t get you to understand that, then I shall have failed.
    As much as possible, however, I shall just try to describe whatever I see in the photographs. I want you to know what they looked like, the people who came before you; the houses that they lived in, the places they visited. If you can know these things, if you can somehow imagine them inside your head, then that will give you… well, it will give you something, I hope. It will give you a context, in which to understand the difficult things, the painful things you will hear at the end.
    Because there is a story that you don’t know, Imogen. A story about your family, and me, and most important of all, about yourself. Perhaps your – perhaps the people who brought you up, have told you some of it. Some distortion of it, most likely. But they cannot know the truth, because only I know that.
    Soon now, I hope that you will know it too.
    Very well. I’m going to start, now. Picture number one: a suburban house in Hall Green, a few miles from the centre of Birmingham.
    I was six years old when war broke out. My sister, Sylvia, was fifteen. It’s always been a mystery why my parents waited nine years to have another child. This has never been explained to me. But then family life is full of mystery.
    This is rather a tiny picture. I’m not sure how much I’m going to be able to describe to you. Taken in winter, and the winter of 1938 or ’39, I would have thought. It shows the whole of the front of the house. The drive is on the left: it rises steeply from the road to the side gate and is very short, just about long enough to hold a car. Not that we had one, in those days. My father would cycle to work, and Mother would walk or take the