18th August 1854:
To Torquay, where I call upon I.K.B. He is much changed since his days on the South Devon. But the eyes sparkle and he is as high-spirited and chaffing as ever — though he does not omit to commiserate upon poor Felix.
The usual clouds of cigar smoke. I do not think that during the whole afternoon a cigar was ever out of his mouth, and I recalled Brereton’s remark that he could perfectly well sleep and smoke at the same time. Naturally, I am offered one, and I decline, observing that I have refused such offers before. “Ah yes,” says he, “but I never lose hope of converts.”
He is inclined to make light of our little problem beneath the Tamar — the extraction of the impacted oyster beds. I remind him — an unwarranted digression — of the inveteracy of the molluscs and the crustacea, how they have formed whole strata, whole landscapes, where no trace will be found of a creature with bones.
“I had forgot,” says he, “your taste in palaeontology. I will own, at least, to a taste for oysters.”
There is a demon in him, for all the easy gaiety: it is as certain that this man will consume and destroy himself as that he will erect monuments to his undying memory. I have grasped the meaning of I.K.B.’s perpetual cigars: he must have them, as furnaces must have chimneys — they are lit from within.
The Great Western. An iron tentacle stretching from the capital to Cornwall, in which the bridge over the Tamar would be the last and most prodigious link. But more than that. More than just a railway. The very name suggests an idea, an aspiration, an epic, insatiable yearning. London, Bristol, Plymouth and— Why stop at Land’s End? Even before the railway had reached the Thames valley, and while Matthew was still a student at Oxford, the steamship Great Western (designer, I. K. Brunel) had docked for the first time in Manhattan. As if, stepping off the platform at Paddington, one could be propelled, in one continuous movement and by the same stupendous force of burning coal and hissing steam, from the old world to the new. As if all those expresses that hurtled by me, while I watched from the embankment, really brought with them, after all, the tang, the ozone-tug, of the ocean.
Perhaps Brunel, like old Sir Walter before him (another tobacco man), was irresistibly drawn by the siren call of the West. The inexorable direction of destiny. The sunset way. The realms of gold.
Fuel, fire, ash. The famous photo of Brunel taken in Napier’s Yard in Millwall in 1857. He stands before coils of colossal chains. Top hat; rumpled frock-coat; muddied boots; jaunty pose; hands in pockets; cigar in mouth. He looks like anything but a serious engineer. He looks like an impostor, a charlatan — a circus-owner, the proprietor of a gambling saloon. As if the trick of fame is to be something other than you really are, to know that you have come into the world only to play a part.
He has two years left to live.
Local legend has it (I read up on Brunel) that Brunel died by jumping in despair from his Tamar Bridge. But this was not so. The bridge was opened, after ten years in the building, by the Prince Consort in May 1859. Broken in health by overwork (Matthew was right), Brunel was not there. But Matthew and his in-laws were there — and so was Matthew’s father. And Brunel himself was not, in the end, denied one last look at his masterpiece. With no cheering crowds or waving flags or royal guests, and lying on a specially prepared truck, he was pulled slowly, as if on a hearse, by one of the GWR’s original broad-gauge locomotives, under the massive piers and ironwork, over the glittering river.
Si monumentum requiris … It still stands, it is still there, still bearing its designer’s name, and still bearing the (diesel-powered, narrow-gauge) expresses into Cornwall. To build a bridge! To span a void! And what voids, what voids there were. He would never know. Need never know. These happy bridge-builders, these men of the solid world (these level-minded surveyors). He was safe. Safe in his sunset glory. Safe within the limits of an old, safe world. Only seven months after his bridge was opened and only two months after his death, Darwin would publish (some come to fame by building, some by—) his Origin of Species.
2nd May 1859:
… The occasion a strangely subdued one, compared with the triumph two years ago (I.K.B. then in splendid command) of the positioning of the first truss. Adorned by royalty and all the pomp of celebration, but marred by the sad absence of the presiding genius; and marred, quite spoilt — I must say it — so far as our little family outing was concerned, by the unhappy presence of my father.
Inexcusable! Unforgivable! And yet I forgive him, I forgive him. He had as much right as any of us to be there, to be lending his voice to the public applause — and, to be sure, he was not alone in finding the occasion worthy of a bumper or two. But it was inexcusable of him so to have sought us out, quite purposefully, among the crowd, in such a flagrant state of inebriation as must have offended grossly my whole family and the Rector and Mrs Hunt, not to say have humiliated me utterly before them all. And if his intention had been to humiliate me (though I do not think it truly was), then he might have been more consistent than to proclaim to the whole company that, but for my want of ambition and excess of circumspection, I might surely have been as famous a man as Brunel — when circumspection and a sense of proportion were once, so I recall, the very watchwords of his paternal counsel.
Yet who am I to admonish, let alone disown, my own father, when his plight is perhaps not so far, not so very far, from my own? Dear God, along the road of life we are destined to lose so much, the absence of which we can never make good! “Is not Brunel,” he ranted, “one of our greatest men?” “A great man,” I answered, as pointedly as I was able amidst the embarrassment, “and also a very forlorn one. They say he is dying.” Whereupon I noticed a visible flutter pass over his expression before he continued, for all to hear, pretending not to have marked my words, and actually clapping my back, “And yet I’m proud of the boy! Proud of the boy!”
The boy! Yet I do believe he meant it. I do believe that in his mockery he was expressing his pride.
And so our day was clouded — ruined. And henceforth, no doubt, I shall have to withstand ever more vinegared inquiries from the Rector as to my father’s “health.” A neat means he shall have for deflecting the usual direction of our conversations. What a trifling matter is a great and triumphant feat of engineering (not to say the question of ultimate causes), that it can be overshadowed by a family quarrel. And poor I.K.B., not long for this world. And yet his bridge will remain, surely, long after he and I are gone (and I am quite forgotten), a lasting memorial.…
I read up on Brunel; but I do not research my own father. I summon up Matthew, but I do not try to know my own father. My nameless, engine-driving, killed-in-the-war father. And why should I, when I never got to know the living, breathing man whom I took to be—? What difference does it make? The true or the false. This one or that one. The world will not shatter because of a single — misconception.… There I sit on the embankment above the canal and the railway line, and I do not spare a thought for him. He is far away, as it happens, on the far side of the Atlantic, and if he were at home, he would soon put an end to these bicycle rides. I am thinking of the roving, heroic lives of engine drivers. And I am so ignorant of how the world is changing, will change. Of how already like clumsy dinosaurs are these quaint, cacophonous steam trains, which, as they split the summer peace, fill me with such a sense of unsurpassed power.