The Long Shadow- by Joan Lennon

I never met him, my mother’s father. He was just stories to me, and not very many of those. My mother barely met him either, since he died of typhus and malaria when she was three. And his wife, my ghastly grandmother (to distinguish her from the nice one) spoke of him and their time in China very little.
Coming of age in the sixties, it was embarrassing being of missionary stock, but I could always say, “Oh, but my grandfather was a medical missionary.” That made it almost all right.
He went to university straight from the farm, the first of his family. They rushed them through in those days, desperate to get doctors out to the mud and the squalor of WWI. There are a few facts from that time – his attestation papers, for example, tell me he was 5 foot 6, with a 33 inch chest (maximum expansion 36 inches), a good physique and several moles. No stories, though. But as soon as he was home again, he brushed his suit, slicked down his hair and went the rounds of the churches.
“I’m a doctor,” he said. “Send me to China.”
Well and good, but as each board of church worthies questioned him further, heads would begin to shake. Tutting was distinctly heard. No one doubted his medical qualifications, but his religion …
It was only on the second round of interviews, after, I expect, some canny coaching, that my grandfather managed to convince the Methodists that he was missionary material.
And then he had to face his mother …
“You’re not going without a wife. Take Vera. She’s always wanted to be a missionary.”
So he did.
I only picked up a few stories of their time in Szechuan. I know about the time my grandfather’s Chinese let him down and the patient he thought he’d told to soak her foot in warm water spent the morning walking up and down on the veranda. I know he liked to relax after surgery by going down to the market and haggling. And, just once, I heard about the habits of his Chinese helper, who longed to be a surgeon too – in charge of the anaesthetic, he would put the patient way, way under, so he could watch my grandfather work. Only the twitching of returning consciousness drove him back to his post. I always liked that helper, though I never knew his name. I wonder what happened to him. I doubt he made old bones. The baron wars were brutal, and he was tarred with the missionary’s brush.
But there is one among the few thin images I have of my grandfather that is as clear to me as if I’d been standing right there. It was the time my mother escaped from the house and toddled into the surgery. For me, the scene always includes my grandfather up to his elbows in blood and some poor soul’s intestines. And there was my mother, bright-eyed and sturdy, her brown hair all fluffed up and curly in the humid heat, standing in the doorway, cheerfully defiant. In my version of the scene I can see them both, locking eyes across the squalor, oddly equals.
“Go home, Jeanie,” he said.
Apparently, she went.
That’s all. Just a snippet – just a glimpse. Not earth-shattering. Set against the impossibly exotic background of Szechuan in the 1920s it was a peculiarly domestic moment. But I can almost touch it. I know he was proud of her. I know he saw his own relentless spirit in the little girl.
Jeanie was his daughter, all right.
Relative ages can be dizzying. I see my grandfather as a young man, because he was never an old one. I see my mother as a toddler and the old woman she has become in the same breath, as it were. My own sons could stand beside my grandfather as he was then, and though they would tower over him, still to my mind they would make a set, with their youth and energy and desire for what is wide and wild and far away. (Times have changed, of course. As my boys fling themselves away from home to the far-off places of the world, I do not insist they pack a wife.)
I never met my grandfather, but in a way, I knew him – know him. He was a short man, with a short life, and all I have are a few snippets of story, that live in my mind in a way that facts don’t. Just story. But stories can have long shadows.