CLINGING TO THE WRECKAGE Page 3

  My mother had studied art in Birmingham, to which city she bicycled daily. Later she taught drawing in Manchester, at a Lycée in Versailles, and at a girls’ school in Natal, where she rode bareback across the veldt and swam naked under waterfalls. She was a ‘New Woman’ who read Bernard Shaw and Katherine Mansfield, whom she resembled a little in looks. My grandmother was a High Church Anglican whose bedside table supported a prayer-book and a crucifix, but my mother had no use at all for God, although she was to become revered as a heroine and a saint in her middle age. She earned these titles, of course, for putting up with my father, an almost impossible task.

  When, after his blindness, my father insisted on continuing with his legal practice as though nothing had happened, my mother it was who read his briefs to him and who made notes of all his cases. She became a well-known figure in the Law Courts, as well known as the Tipstaff or the Lord Chief Justice, leading my father from Court to Court, smiling patiently as he tapped the paved floors with his clouded malacca cane and shouted abuse either at her or at his instructing solicitor, or at both of them at the same time. From early in the war, when they settled permanently in the country, my mother drove my father fourteen miles a day to Henley Station and took him up in the train. Ensconced in a corner seat, dressed like Winston Churchill, in a black jacket and striped trousers, bow-tie worn with a wing-collar, boots and spats, my father would require her to read in a loud and clear voice the evidence in the divorce case that would be his day’s work. As the train ground to a halt around Maidenhead the first-class carriage would fall silent as my mother read out the reports of Private Investigators on adulterous behaviour which they had observed in detail. If she dropped her voice over descriptions of stained bed-linen, male and female clothing found scattered about, or misconduct in motor cars, my father would call out, ‘Speak up, Kath!’ and their fellow travellers would be treated to another thrilling instalment.

  Much of my mother’s life went underground when she married my father, although we were visited occasionally by a red-bearded painter who had been her fellow student. He and my mother used to sit up talking after my father, who held strong views about visitors, had gone to bed. Once, when I was about ten years old, I came downstairs and burst into the living-room, ostensibly to search for burglars, but really to stop my mother committing adultery, the thought of which, I am now convinced, had never entered her head.

  I always found my mother’s attitude to me curiously disconcerting. She seemed to find most of the things I did slightly comic (‘killing’ was the word she most often used). Long after my father had died I rang her up to tell her that I had been asked to go to some distant town to sit as a Judge, hoping that she might be impressed. ‘You, a Judge?’ She started to giggle. ‘You? Whatever do they think they’re doing, asking you to be a Judge?’ and then she laughed so much that she had to put down the telephone receiver. From time to time she seemed to find it hard to remember essential things about me, such as whether I took sugar, or my name. In later years she often looked at me vaguely and called me ‘Daisy’, which was my aunt’s name. Not until she was very old did I find some short stories which she had written, which showed her concern about me and her anxiety, no doubt entirely justified, about what I got up to when out of her sight.

  My father’s family had been West Country farmers, but his father was a Bristol brewer who, in a moment of Wesleyan zeal, became a teetotaller and signed the Pledge. After that, my grandfather only drank a temperance beverage of his own preparing which produced in him, my father noticed, many of the outward and visible signs of advanced intoxication. Forbidden by his conscience to carry on brewing, my Methodist grandfather emigrated to South Africa when my father was four years old and started up in the less convivial trade of an Estate Agent.

  So my father grew up in Natal at the end of the nineteenth century. As a child, he helped unfasten the horses and draw the carriage of the General who relieved Ladysmith, and he was forever sickened by the sight of a negro prisoner being taken into captivity handcuffed to the stirrup of a white policeman’s cantering horse. He went to a South African version of an English public school, but in the holidays his parents often sent him up-country to some small and lonely hotel so that he could ‘run wild’. He told me that, when he was a boy, he was given a birthday cake in a tin and he kept it under his hotel bed. When his birthday came he took it out and ate it in a solitary celebration. Both his and my mother’s family, it seems, were determined to avoid any situation in which they could sniff the danger of an emotional display.

  I have a mental picture of my father in a Norfolk jacket and knickerbockers lying on the baked earth, among the yellowing grass, reading the Conan Doyle stories in the Strand Magazine sent out from England, lost in the mists of Baker Street. The other author he greatly admired was Rider Haggard, who wrote the myths of the Englishman’s Africa, stories of Umslopagas and Allan Quatermain and the monocled Captain Good and the deathless Queen, ‘She Who Must Be Obeyed’. My father and I grew to know each other when I was about ten and he had gone to Switzerland for a series of painful and hopeless eye operations. We would go for walks together in the summer and he would tell me the Sherlock Holmes stories, of which he had almost total recall. On other walks he would make my flesh creep with the account of Huck Finn and the Negro Jim on their raft on the swollen Mississippi when an entire displaced house floated past them containing a man who had been shot dead at cards. When my father told me the adventures of Jeeves and Bertie Wooster he would stand on the mountain path, dabbing at his streaming eyes and almost choking with laughter. I enjoyed these stories so much that it was my ambition to become a butler when I grew up.

  At some time great stretches of Shakespeare’s plays had lodged in my father’s head, and he used the lines for odd moments of pleasure, intoning, ‘Nymph, in thy orisons be all my sins remember’d’ when standing in the Law Courts’ lavatory, or during breakfast. When I was young he often greeted me with, ‘Is execution done on Cawdor?’ a question which, at the age of six, I was at a loss to answer. At other moments he would look at me in a threatening manner and say, casting himself as Hubert and me as the youthful Prince Arthur, about to be blinded:

  Heat me these irons hot; and look thou stand

  Within the arras: when I strike my foot

  Upon the bosom of the ground, rush forth,

  And bind the boy …

  An even earlier memory is of him pointing a trembling finger to a corner of the room, where, he assured me, the blood-bolter’d Banquo had just appeared to push us from our stools and join the family table, much as he materialized at that embarrassing dinner party of the Macbeths.

  So the words of Shakespeare’s plays became a sort of family code and the subject of our jokes. ‘Is execution done on Cawdor?’ was a line of hilarious comedy, and ‘Rushforth and Bindtheboy’ a firm of dubious solicitors.

  When he was seventeen my father came back from South Africa to go to Cambridge, where he read law and made few friends. He won a scholarship in his bar exams and went into the army when the war started. My mother, who had met the Mortimer family in South Africa, wrote to him when she came back to England. He brought a cold chicken and took her on the river at Chiswick, where he proposed to her at once. He was then a subaltern about to go to France where the expectation of life was not much more than a month. However, some sympathetic senior officer, taking account of my father’s short sight and recent marriage, got him a job in the Inland Waterways. It was, fortunately, a post with no heroic temptations. Years later, as we walked down the Embankment past the Fascist procession, and I felt my life expectancy to be similarly abbreviated, he said, ‘You know what, old boy? If they give us war again. Get yourself a job in the Inland Waterways.’

  My father and mother had views in common. Neither of them was in any sense religious. My father had been totally persuaded by On the Origin of Species that the Almighty would have had his work cut out to produce an earthworm in seven days, let alone beat th
e deadline by constructing a creature as complex as the horse. When he was depressed by his blindness he never turned to God, but either shouted at my mother or sat reading, with an impatient finger, his Braille copy of Shakespeare’s sonnets, swollen by the size of its dotted letters to the dimensions of a telephone directory. My mother’s views, I suspect, were more ‘modern’. When they first met she led him through The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism. He followed, brandishing The Voyage of the Beagle.

  They had opinions in common but in fact their characters were totally different. My mother had a sort of purity of intention and a seriousness which were quite alien to my father. When she devoted her life to writing out adultery petitions and leading him about the Probate, Divorce and Admiralty Division, she did so with the ungrudging devotion, I am sure, of women who join the Resistance or become nursing nuns. Heroism of any kind was something my father did his best to avoid, and his courage in carrying on his legal practice when he was blind came from a determination to avoid the issue and pretend he could still see perfectly well. If my mother advanced an opinion, which she did rarely, she meant what she said, a form of speech which my father found merely boring. He was a natural advocate, and what he said was rarely called on to express his personal feelings or beliefs. His words were like challenges, thrown out into the darkness in the hope that they would start a tournament, or like clay pigeons shot up into the sky for anyone to pot at. ‘Love has been greatly overestimated by the poets,’ he would say, or, ‘No one could possibly get the slightest pleasure out of music,’ or, ‘Ninety per cent of all illness is caused by doctors,’ or (to me going away to school), ‘Try not to mix too closely with the schoolmasters, all schoolmasters have second-rate minds.’ A simple way to irritate him, as my mother got to know perfectly well, was not to argue with him.

  He had what he would call in the charges made in other people’s divorce petitions, a ‘violent and ungovernable temper’, although I can’t remember it getting any worse when he lost his sight. He would shout on railway platforms, in restaurants, in the corridors of the Law Courts where he once yelled Macbeth’s curse, ‘The devil damn thee black, thou cream-faced loon!’ at an instructing solicitor who had forgotten a document. Cold plates, soft-boiled eggs, being kept waiting for anything: such irritations rather than the disaster of blindness would make him thunder at my mother, ‘Kath! Kath! Are you a complete cretin?’ Only sometimes, after long periods of abuse borne patiently, she would walk away from him and my father would be left standing in the middle of the bedroom, a silver-backed hairbrush in his hand and his braces dangling, panic-stricken and yelling, ‘Kath! Kath!’ into the unresponsive darkness around him.

  We were, of course, considerably privileged. Divorce had not become, as it is today, a national pastime, an industry ceaselessly productive for the workers engaged in it and knowing neither strikes nor stoppages. In my father’s day the divorce business was in its infancy, with only a few Courts in London servicing the whole country, but of what cruelty, adultery, incurable insanity and wilful refusal to consummate there was going, my father had his share. And when marital infidelity fell off, or during a lull in the throwing of saucepans, or the making of exorbitant and unnatural sexual demands, there were always dotty testators with their wayward Wills. So we had a house in Hampstead which we rented for five pounds a week, and later we had a flat in the Temple and a cottage in the country. The cottage was among the beech woods in the Chilterns, near to where my father built the house in which I am living and writing this. The cottage was one of a pair. Next door to us lived Mr Mullard, a ‘bodger’ or maker of chair legs.

  There were two Mullard boys, Peter and Ronnie. When I first met them Ronnie was too young to play with and he spent his time confined in an outsize ‘Gold Flake’ cigarette carton which served as a play-pen and became strongly impregnated with urine. I would see him when I reluctantly entered the living-room. There a smouldering wood fire kept a kettle constantly simmering; beside it stood two elaborately carved commodes on which the Mullard family sat at the appropriate time of day. Outside, in a lean-to shed, up to his knees in a mounting pile of shavings, Mr Mullard worked enormously long hours at an old treadle lathe, turning the beech trees, which he felled and sawed up himself, into twisted, curlicued chair legs for several local factories. His price was about threepence-ha’penny a dozen for the hand-finished article. Once they tried to knock off his ha’penny and he put on a bowler-hat and stiff dickey shirt front and set off on a walk of twelve miles to High Wycombe to protest.

  Mr Mullard was a small, red-cheeked man with wire-rimmed glasses hooked over his ears. He had been a cook in the war and would tell me blood-curdling stories of stew made in the trenches from candle grease, shot mule and, he hinted, abandoned limbs, from which no one even bothered to remove the puttees. He had a small oil lamp precariously balanced on his lathe and, if I looked out of our window late at night, I could see his light still on as Mr Mullard tirelessly spun egg-cups complete with eggs, or barley sugar chair legs, out of the white, naked wood. He owned an old phonograph with one cylindrical record called ‘The Laughing Friar’. On Christmas Day he would bring this contraption out proudly and the Friar would laugh for the benefit of his family. Any other entertainment, he thought, or entertainment at any other time, would corrupt his two sons, give them ideas above their station and sap their vitality. Mrs Mullard was a tiny, violently active woman. Wearing a sacking apron and an old tweed cap, she scrubbed every inch of their cottage and dug the garden with a huge fork. In her spare time she trotted up the road with a bucket full of soapy water and scrubbed out the telephone kiosk.

  One Christmas, when Ronnie Mullard had grown large enough to be taken out of the cigarette carton, my father offered to take us all to Aladdin in Reading. We never went. Mr Mullard refused permission. Give his boys the sight of one pantomime, he thought, and where might the taste for pleasure end?

  We had oil lamps and a shallow tin bath, which was filled with water from the well. Going to the loo meant an icy journey to the end of the garden and sitting on a bench carved by Mr Mullard. Almost before you were finished he would be behind the shed with a spade, ready to dig and spread among his vegetables.

  Apart from the Mullards my great friend was Iris Jones, the gardener’s daughter from the cottage along the common. She was exactly my age and we would meet very early in the mornings, and I would steal necklaces for her from Woolworth’s. All one summer we made houses on the common, enjoying the sharp, musky smell of the bracken, furnishing our homes with chipped Coronation mugs and bottomless, rusty saucepans which we found in the local tip, and doing our best to con Ronnie Mullard into sitting on an ant-heap. One day Iris offered to show me her knickers. I took off my glasses, not knowing exactly what to expect.

  I envied Iris and the Mullards because they would be allowed to stay at home. In the summer they would be back in time to play in the bracken during the long, light evenings; and in the winter they could slither down the hill to the village school. I had a recurring dream which was that at the age of nine I should be taken out and hanged. In my dream I protested to my father at this gloomy destiny, but he seemed not to hear. When I spoke to my mother she gave me her usual large-eyed, reasonable smile and told me that it was something that happened to all small boys and it was really nothing to worry about. I now feel sure that what I was looking forward to as the morning of my execution was my being sent away to school.

  At no time did my mother ever explain satisfactorily why she was determined to get me out of the house for the best part of the year, to send me off to face the gloom and discomfort of icy dormitories, terrible fish which wore a sort of black mackintosh and was eaten with tinned peas, and shell-shocked masters who either confused us with the Huns or fell embarrassingly in love with us. Perhaps my mother realized that I was greatly over-privileged and wished to give me an experience of suffering, or perhaps she thought I should be trained to face hardship and loneliness so that I might pursue a career
in the Colonial Service. More likely she was only doing what she considered best for me. She thought that I was desperately lonely, lying in the bracken and reading P. G. Wodehouse and Bulldog Drummond and getting an occasional hypnotic glimpse of Iris Jones’s knickers. There was no persuading her otherwise. I didn’t speak to my father about it. I supposed he wouldn’t be sorry to see the back of me, and I understood his point of view.

  Chapter Three

  ‘Why have you such a slope-shouldered, belly-protuberant, stooping and deformed appearance? Answer me that, oh ye faithless and hunchbacked generation!’

  The headmaster of my prep school looked very much like God. He had long, white, slightly curly hair, and was old and beautiful. He wore a dark suit which had shortish trousers showing the tops of his highly polished black boots. He also spoke in God’s prose, a mixture of the Old Testament and Rudyard Kipling’s Just So Stories.

  ‘Draw nigh and hearken to me, oh litter of runts and weaklings. I say unto you that you are round-shouldered through the wearing of braces! Unbutton your braces and cast them from you. Each boy to acquire a dark-blue elastic belt with a snake buckle, to be slotted neatly into the loops provided at the top of school shorts.’

  ‘Dear Mummy,’ I wrote, in the compulsory letter home, ‘I don’t like it here at all. I know it said braces on the clothes list, but we’re not allowed braces any more. In fact we have to cast them from us. Noah told us this in assembly’ (we were expected to call the staff by their nicknames; the headmaster’s was ‘Noah’). ‘Could you send me a dark-blue belt with a snake buckle as quickly as you can?’

  ‘What, gasping for breath, ye red-faced and pop-eyed generation?’ Noah looked at us with amused contempt at the following week’s assembly. ‘Why do you show such clear signs of stomach contraction? Why are you an offence to the eye, all tied up like parcels? I say unto you, there will be no more belts or the wearing thereof. Abandon belts! Each boy to equip himself with a decent pair of sturdy elastic braces!’