THE COAT HANGER
It is wooden, a gent’s, with ‘Elder Dempster’
machined then varnished into one of
the shoulders. It belonged to the shipping line
which plied between Liverpool and Lagos,
via Freetown and Accra. It was purloined,
accidentally or otherwise,
by my father or mother, possibly
the latter on her last trip home, with me
in her womb, to ensure a safer birth
in temperate climes – U-Boats permitting.
He died of septicaemia three months
after I was born – from an ill judged
operation. ‘If I had been there…’
– she was a nurse – ‘…if I had been there…’
became the refrain of her widowhood,
with its depression and eventual
alcohol. When I was small she told me,
over and over, tales of that journey –
the traders from Accra rowing alongside,
the thunderstorms breaking over the mountains
of Sierra Leone, the ship’s captain
taking the vessel out of the convoy,
heading for the Sargasso Sea then north east
for home, always in plain sight but no booty
for a U-Boat captain also heading home.
For Aristotle, tokens of whatever
kind were a poor means by which to move
the action on. Life, however, though not
often, sometimes trumps art. This wooden
token of a skeleton tells a story.
Ian Craine
March 22, 2014A moving and resonant story is told here.
John Huddart
March 25, 2014Beautifully crafted, bringing Aristotle in to balance and demonstrate the significance of the coat hanger, is a loving, masterful detail. A story that is both a tale and a real part of your life, that is bound to be retold, each time freshening the significance. And a story of war and conflict – the greater tragedy lurking on the edge, impinging on the personal – and an ironic death that is felt to be preventable, while being impossible to stop. A man sending his family to safety, succumbs to the fate he fears. They would have also written about that, those ancient Greeks.