CLINGING TO THE WRECKAGE Read online

  What, I now wonder, did everyone think was going on? A children’s revolution, the dawn of a new world when long-haired headmasters would chant Bob Dylan songs at assembly and an adolescent House of Commons would rap away in perfect love enveloped in a pungent smell like slow-burning Turkish carpets; and war, shamed by a poem of Allen Ginsberg’s, would vanish from the face of the earth? The dream, whatever it was, has faded more rapidly than most, and the schoolkids of the Oz age are no doubt now paying their mortgages and driving their Ford Cortinas with a nodding dog in the back window, and holding down tough jobs as chartered accountants. Even the trial became calmer after its dramatic beginning, and the great majesty of the Criminal Law of England bent itself to a careful consideration of, among other things, Rupert the Bear, an animal long beloved for his docility and innocence, who was unusually portrayed, in Oz magazine, with a gigantic erection.

  I sat in Court, I can dimly recall, wondering what preordained and inherited paths I had pursued to arrive, forty-eight years old, wearing a horse-wig and black tailed coat, to join in the examination of Rupert Bear at his point of high amorous excitement. Up in the public gallery the attendant teenagers played a form of Russian roulette. They passed round a joint together with an innocent cigarette, and when the officer in charge pounced he invariably confiscated the unadulterated roll-up. During the frequent lulls in the proceedings my mind was filled with other anxieties. I had written a play which was about to open; into it I had collected my memories of my father, and written lines for him, so that a man who had filled so much of my life seemed to have left me and become someone for other people to read about and perform. In one way I felt detached from it; but a play is a public exhibition with its own peculiar dangers, another sort of trial. Not for the only time in my life I felt that the theatrical drama in which I was involved was more real than the Old Bailey and the due process of law. Also I was about to tell a wider public a fact which, in our small family, had been the subject of a discreet conspiracy of silence, something, which in our English determination to avoid the slightest embarrassment, we never mentioned. My father had been blind.

  My father was a very clean man, who never took less than two baths a day. One day I came home from school and found him wearing a white towelling dressing-gown and sitting on the closed lavatory seat in the bathroom. My mother was squeezing out his toothpaste. She found his hand and put the toothbrush into it. Then she guided his hand towards his mouth. That was the first time I saw that he was totally blind.

  We talked about other things, my parents asked me about my school, and, as usual, I found it impossible to tell them; just as they found it impossible to say that my father could no longer see me, that my children would be, to him, only the sounds of laughter and small screams in the dark. Bombs, air raids, bits of food prodded at him, and the edge of the pavement would, from now on, strike him as equally alarming, and for the rest of his life I would look, in his mind’s eye, like a scrawny and awkward schoolboy of thirteen.

  After he had finished his long process of washing I went for a walk with my father, along the Embankment, past Cleopatra’s Needle and the Sphinxes, black beasts which the pigeons had decked with a white crust. He was a tall man, over six foot in height, with fair hair which left the top of his head but never went grey. His legs were long and very thin, his feet and hands small, his stomach grew in swelling isolation. He had a high forehead; but his nose was thick, his chin grew fat and his lower jaw protruded so that he couldn’t be called handsome. His eyes were a clear, light blue; and now that he could no longer see he had abandoned his spectacles. As I led him by the river I felt his hand, small, long-fingered, the skin brown and already ill-fitting, like a loose glove, warm on my arm. I wanted to shake him off, to run away. I had an impulse to lose him, to allow him to wander off, hopelessly among the trams.

  We passed a procession of British Fascists on the march. The Public Order Act forbade them to wear their black shirts which they carried solemnly on coat-hangers, as if bringing them home from the cleaners. In those days we were all waiting for the war with the concealed impatience with which those saying ‘good-bye’ on station platforms secretly long for the start of the train removing them from their nearest and dearest. I was trying to decide if I should sign on as a conscientious objector or join the RAF. Embarrassed by the blind man publicly attached to my arm, I decided to say whatever was best calculated to make him leave me in disapproval and rage.

  ‘I think I’ll be an objector.’

  ‘A what?’

  ‘I think I’ll go into a Quaker Medical Corps or something.’

  ‘Oh, you mean a conchy!’ My father dropped the mask of bewilderment. ‘I once shared diggings with one of those. In Chiswick. Do you really think you’re brave enough for that?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I think in your case,’ my father turned his unblinking eyes to where he thought I might be, ‘I should avoid the temptation to do anything heroic.’

  Eyesight was a problem for both of us. Up to the age of five I enjoyed the privileges of myopia, seeing the world in a glorious haze like an Impressionist painting. My contemporaries appeared blurred and attractive, grown-ups loomed in vague magnificence. I went daily to school and kept my eyes politely on the blackboard where I could see only chalky confusion. After a year of this my mother noticed that my education was at a standstill and sent me to the oculist: the world sprang at me in hideous reality, full of people with open pores, blackheads and impetigo. A deep-focus moustache appeared on an art mistress whom I had considered beautiful. Flinching from this unusual clarity I went to school and sat in my usual place at the morning assembly, unrecognizable in a nose-pinching pair of wire-framed specs. The headmaster, whose awareness of his pupils was always somewhat vague, thought that this bespectacled intruder was a new boy. As I was too shy to disillusion him, I was put back in the bottom class to restart my unpromising academic career. I suppose I had become a new person, one who looked on life and actually saw it; but when faced with anything I am really reluctant to see, a pornographic film in the course of business, or an animal killed and plastered across the road, I still have the defence of taking off my glasses and returning the world to the safe blur of childhood.

  In the years before I could see clearly my father was not yet blind.

  Although I now feel I knew him so well he was remote to me then, a hard-working barrister with a flourishing practice in the Probate, Divorce and Admiralty Division of the High Court. There was nothing he enjoyed more than a good old-fashioned battle as to whether or not adultery had taken place. Often he would tell me of his triumphs and I must have been very young when he said, ‘Remarkable win today, old boy. Only evidence of adultery we had was a pair of footprints upside down on the dashboard of an Austin Seven parked in Hampstead Garden Suburb.’

  But if Divorce was my father’s daily bread, Probate was his special treat. Before I was born he had sat up night after night writing in lucid prose what became a standard textbook on the validity of Wills. When respectable relatives, red in tooth and claw, met to prove or disprove the sanity of an aged uncle who had left his entire fortune to the Matron of some doubtful nursing home, when it was a question of due execution, or partial revocation, or lucid intervals, whenever greed or disappointment and old family ill-will led middle-aged children to abuse each other in Court, Mortimer on Probate was the Bible by which the Judge regulated their ambitions and decided their disputes. When Wills were written, as Wills so often were, on blown duck eggs or in minute handwriting on the tails of kites, my father was there with an appropriate precedent. When testators were perfectly sensible, as testators often were, on every subject except for their nightly chats with the late Emperor Napoleon the Third, my father was there with his long experience of monomania and the lucid interval. He was good on Divorce, but at Probate he became unbeatable. It was only when the Wills and incriminating hotel bills were put away, when nautical charts were unrolled and old Sea Dogs came
clumping into the witness-box, when the Anchor was hung behind the Judge’s chair and the Admiralty Court was in session, that my father discreetly withdrew. He knew absolutely nothing about ships.

  Busily engaged on his legal practice my father seemed, no doubt understandably, anxious to postpone his complete introduction to me, his only child. It’s true that I saw him occasionally, when he got me to rub his tobacco and pretend it was Indian ‘pemmican’, a game which had an element of mystery as I had no idea what ‘pemmican’ might be; but in those early days he was a remote figure. His clerk came to drive him to the Law Courts each morning, tucking a rug around his legs and removing him in a large, hearse-like Morris Oxford. My father’s clerk was called ‘Leonard’, which was not his name. It is true that my father had once had a clerk called ‘Leonard’ who, tragically, had been killed on the Somme, after which my father called all clerks ‘Leonard’, although the one I remember, who was to be his clerk for many years, was undoubtedly a secret William.

  William’s wife Elsie was my nurse, governess and friend, and with her I spent my life. Even when we went on holidays, usually to such exotic resorts as Eastbourne or Littlehampton, my father was reluctant to stay with me, and while he and my mother put up at a four-star hotel the nurse and I were billeted in some boarding-house at the far end of the promenade. I have a memory of being taken to see my father in an Eastbourne hotel; it was late in the morning but he was lying in an ornate bed, placed on a sort of dais and covered with a canopy, and he was sucking his handkerchief. I do not remember his being particularly pleased to see me, and the visit was a short one.

  Those years seem populated by governesses and filled with the smell of maids’ bedrooms, a curious, pungent odour compounded, I suppose, of sweat and face-powder and Woolworth’s perfume, the smell of my childhood which I haven’t encountered for half a century. The maids were invariably kind and seemed, to my short-sighted eyes, beautiful. One I remember received me in her bedroom and chatted as she squatted on a large, rose-patterned chamber-pot; another made me a Highland costume out of kitchen paper. A new governess escorted me each morning to Sloane Square on the Underground when the time came to begin my formal education. In my fantasies I always hoped that she would kidnap me and take me home to her husband whom I imagined to be a burglar living in Shepherd’s Bush, which I had somehow heard of as an area of ill repute. However nothing of the sort occurred and I was delivered safely to the exclusive, no doubt ruinously expensive, Sloane Square school where I was put down to the bottom of the form for wearing glasses.

  Unmistakably middle-class, I was being educated above my station. Few of the children emerged as I did from the Tube. Many were delivered in Rolls-Royces. Before the school had taught us to write it demanded lengthy written examinations. Accordingly our mothers had to act as our secretaries. On the appointed day languid ladies-about-town, including at least one Maharanee, swathed in mink and Chanel, nervously inserted their silk-stockinged legs below schoolboy desks and took whispered dictation from their inky six-year-olds on the subject of everyday life in Ancient Britain. My own mother came, a tall, shy woman with large dark eyes and a cloth coat with an astrakhan collar. I had a shameful hope that she might be taken for a nanny. I remember all that, but most often I remember a man I knew as ‘Mr ’It Me’ and the lesson he gave me on the nature of fear.

  The school prided itself on teaching boxing and, at the end of the term, took over the gym at Chelsea Barracks for our Lilliputian contests. We had towels flapped at us by Guards Sergeants, we were given a gulp from the water-bottle and then made the journey to the centre of the enormous ring to rain feeble blows on each other’s noses. Training for the end-of-term boxing match was in the charge of ‘Mr ’It Me’, our sole instructor.

  I suppose he was a retired pugilist. Certainly he seemed old, and of an immense size. He had a broken nose, cauliflower ears and the faraway look of a man whose brain had been clumsily manhandled from an early age. He had a huge barrel chest and arms like weight-lifters’ thighs. His method of teaching was simple. He would sit sprawled in a wooden armchair wearing a singlet, dirty grey flannel trousers held up by an elastic belt, and boxing-gloves. We stood in a queue before him and, as each boy presented himself in turn, he would grunt, ‘ ’it me!’ his only other instruction being, ‘ ’arder!’

  We would then step forward and land some puny punch, which must have had all the impact of a butt from a maddened gnat, on the rock formation of his chest. The majority of these attacks produced no reaction from the dozing pugilist but occasionally, perhaps once in ten times, he would strike back, a huge fist would come out of nowhere and a stunned and dizzy child would be sent flying across the room. These lessons, which were like playing Russian roulette with an earthquake, filled me with terror and disgust. Even if I wasn’t struck I didn’t relish any sort of contact with the sweat-soaked singlet, and my tentative tap was always met with a deep roar of ‘ ’arder!’ And rather often, as it seemed to me, the blow would fall, the punch would land, and I would be left with stinging, shameful tears and a headache.

  This weekly appointment with fear continued until a day came when I persuaded my mother to take me to the movies, a double bill of such undiluted horror that St John Ambulance nurses were posted round the doors to catch the fainting customers. Children clearly were admitted so it couldn’t have been a very advanced study in the macabre but there was, as I recall it, an Egyptian setting and a Mummy who was reluctant to remain quietly entombed. As an antique foot and trailing grave-cloth moved eerily across the screen I found the effect slightly comic; but the row of seats in front of us began to creak and judder and a terrible sobbing was heard. The trembling blob which caused the disturbance and momentarily blotted out the screen seemed to have a familiar flat-topped head and cauliflower ears and, as a lady from the St John Ambulance rushed to the rescue, I realized that I had been privileged to see ‘Mr ’It Me’ in a state of pure terror. Many years later I wrote a play about our boxing instructor which caused him to melt, in my memory, into a fictional character, but at the time I found my discovery of the varieties of fear liberating. I lined up cheerfully the next week and hit him as hard as I could.

  I can never think of that far-off Sloane Square school, with its pugilism and affluent mothers, without paying a tribute to Miss Boustead. Miss Boustead was Commander-in-Chief of the Sloane Square Wolf Cubs, an elite corps of which I was a junior member. She was a woman built on generous lines and when she turned out in an immense khaki skirt and wide-brimmed scouting hat, with her whistle on a lanyard and her long-service decorations, she made a formidable figure. Miss Boustead’s ideas on Cub training were single-minded and resulted in one activity only. She formed up her platoon at Sloane Square Underground Station and led us, by public transport, to Wimbledon Common. Once out in open country Miss Boustead would choose some suitable clearing or glen and stand in it with her legs akimbo. She would then give the order, ‘Cubs, scatter!’ Ours was not to reason why, and each loyal Cub rushed into the middle distance and flung himself into the undergrowth. It was then a Cub’s task to advance, squirming on his belly, taking advantage of every bit of ground cover, daring a dash in full view whenever the Commander’s head was turned, towards the bulky figure in the clearing. The rules were simple. The Cub who got between Miss Boustead’s legs before she spotted him was awarded the box of Cadbury’s Assorted. I shall always feel grateful to Miss Boustead for organizing the only form of competitive sport I have ever enjoyed.

  The past is like a collection of photographs: some are familiar and on constant display, others need searching for in dusty drawers. Some have faded entirely, and some have been taken so amateurishly and on a day so dark that the subjects are seen like ghosts in a high wind and are impossible to identify. Assembled they can be called anything you like: illustrations of the vanished professional, middle-class world of England between the wars; or the snapshots of an only child who had, in those slow-moving days, much time to notice things.

&
nbsp; Chapter Two

  My mother’s family came from Leamington Spa. I have a photograph of my grandfather fishing; surrounded by his three daughters and formidable wife, he’s wearing a sort of cricketing cap, a starched collar and a tweed jacket. He was, like my father’s blindness, a taboo subject and no one ever said much about him except that he was called Mr Smith and his profession was, as my father said with the sole purpose of irritating my mother, a ‘bum-bailiff’ or Warwickshire debt-collector. I have no idea why he shot himself, but my mother, at the end of her life, told me that it happened while she had a job as a schoolmistress in South Africa. She learnt of it because her family sent her out a copy of the local paper with the announcement of her father’s death carefully marked as a news item which might interest her. From what she told me I understood that they sent no covering letter.