Mummy was a beauty. She had very blue eyes that she liked to compare to the violet hue of hydrangeas. Not that she was particularly vain, but she craved admiration. When she met Daddy, she belonged to a repertory company, the members of which were known as the Gaiety Girls, renowned for looks rather than for talent. Following the trend of other young men of good family in those days, my father courted actresses. When my mother was playing in The Merry Widow, he called on her backstage, carrying a bouquet. Years later, she complained that was how he had frittered his money away.
My father Eric and his elder brother, Dudley, were child orphans. Their mother had been a direct descendant of the playwright, Sheridan, and at the age of twenty-one each boy came into an inheritance. Eric was a delicate, gentle man with sad brown eyes, slim and well built with beautiful hands and – ‘les attaches fines’, I think, is the French expression. An honourable man and witty, he had a very weak character, and no outstanding ability except as a sportsman. A keen cricketer, he had played in the second eleven for Sandhurst.
My mother’s instant summing up of any man depended on whether or not she considered him to be a ‘gentleman’. Those who did not qualify were either ‘blackguards’, ‘cads’, or ‘dagos’, but mostly they ended up like ‘Daddy’ being just a ‘poor devil’. It is doubtful if Mummy would have been able to define the term gentleman as well as the Regency courtesan, Harriette Wilson,* who claimed, ‘A man is a gentleman who has no visible means of gaining a livelihood or because he’s a Lord, and the system at White’s Club, the members of which are all choice gentlemen, of course, is and ever has been, never to blackball any man, or one who ties a good knot in his handkerchief, keeps his hands out of his breecher pockets, and says nothin’!’
I was born on the night of Mummy’s twenty-sixth birthday and handed over to Nanny, in whose care I remained throughout the formative years. Mummy claimed that she had been ’such a tiny little thing’, it had been a difficult birth, forceps being employed. It is doubtful if she felt much love for her child. My feelings became more extreme. But, towards the end of her life she inspired pity and, according to George Sand, love and pity can’t be separated.
In their early married years, my parents lived near Henley in a white clapboard house with a garden sloping down to the river. Then, punting was all the rage. Snaps of Mummy show her tightly belted into long white dresses with velvet laced-up booties, her long hair plaited round her head, as she reclined sensuously under a parasol in a punt, while Daddy, wearing a boater, stands manipulating the pole. While stationed in Barbados he contracted malaria. Then, after a severe heart attack, he was invalided out of the army altogether. For as long as I can remember, my father was considered an invalid, unable to take a very active part in life.
We moved about a good deal, living in rented houses, holidays being spent with my maternal grandparents in one of those four-storied semi-detached houses lining Hythe seafront. Each house had a strip of garden that joined the promenade, and when the sea was rough the waves would sweep over the garden gate and lash against the French windows, depositing giant pebbles in their wake. The kitchen was in the basement, meals being carried up to a sitting cum dining room furnished in heavy Victorian oak. We ate seated round an oak gateleg table, above which hung a frilly red chiffon lampshade, so that, when seen from the promenade, the room resembled the interior of some red light district.
The Marine Parade house was invariably full. My mother had four sisters, Hilda, Elca, Vera and Greta, all married bar Aunty Greta whose flirt had been killed in the First World War. Aunty Greta never left Hythe. She remained with my grandparents all her life, cooking superbly, Mrs Beeton style: a Sunday roast with batter pudding, steak and kidney pies, boiled beef and dumplings, cheese straws with drinks, and sponge cakes for tea being the ritual. All the aunts chainsmoked and spent the mornings studying the racing form. They then made bets with a local tobacconist. Should there be a large gathering, as at Christmas, after dinner, a green baize cloth was spread over the gateleg table; everyone played roulette, poker or vingt-et-un, and money changed hands. Before going to bed, Aunty Greta came up the stairs carrying a loaded tray of hot drinks.
When anyone spoke of the house, it was always referred to by its number. ‘We’re going to forty-two,’ my mother would say and, because of the sea, staying with my grandparents was always a treat.
Grandma could barely read or write, but like many grandmothers she seemed to me to be an angel of goodness. What happy memories! – picnics together in the woods, coming back laden with primroses and bluebells and her delicious teas of home-made strawberry jam, and freshly baked warm scones spread with melting butter and thick Devonshire cream. Alas, as I grew older her ignorance and friendly questioning irritated me. Whenever I think of Grandpa, he is already over eighty, wiry and sprightly, with a certain rickety energy. The only remark of his that I remember is that he couldn’t eat bananas; they upset his digestion. When too old to play bowls, he took up gardening and walked to an allotment on the outskirts of the town, coming home at dusk laden with various produce of his own planting: some tomatoes, a cabbage, an abundance of artichokes or a prize marrow of colossal dimensions. He lived on a pension from the postal service and on retirement had been awarded a floridly designed certificate, claiming him to have been an impeccable civil servant, which remained on display between two Town Crier prints on the mantelpiece. But, with his bright blue eyes and slightly flushed complexion, Grandpa looked more like a retired seaman.
He was of Danish descent. His sister, Great Aunt Greta, could barely speak English. A tall formidable lady with a deep guttural voice, when visiting forty-two she remained seated by the fire doing very fine crochet work. Otherwise, she sang in operas. She was on her way to tour the United States, travelling in the Titanic, when the ship struck an iceberg. One of the few survivors, as her lifeboat rowed to safety, Great Aunt Greta sang hymns and was later given an award for bravery. My grandparents lived to celebrate their diamond wedding anniversary.
I used to love the crunch of the smooth brown pebbles as in summertime we stepped onto the beach to lie in the shade of a slimy green wooden breakwater just in front of the house. We’d take a picnic basket and lunch there, sheltered from the wind. I collected milk stones and at low tide paddled about the sand gathering mussels. Shoals of porpoises flipped past on the horizon. Dymchurch lighthouse flickered in the distance. At night, lying in a four-poster, one could hear the lap of the sea as the waves rolled over the shingle. Then, a horse-drawn tram ran along the seafront as far as Sandgate, and the narrow High Street of Hythe was full of old pubs and antique shops. Nowadays, red buses thunder through and a stream of traffic runs parallel to the canal bank. Ugly beach huts line the promenade, where at high tide men squat with fishing lines. Even the Ladies’ Walk, once a haven for lovers, is now a treeless barren waste.
Bun-faced, with slanting sludge-coloured eyes, I was probably a great disappointment to my parents. My hair looked as though it had been trimmed round a pudding basin and I wore a fringe. But I kept on smiling until my mother sat down at the piano, when I flew at her screaming with jealous rage. Aged four, during luncheon, after being refused a second helping of roast beef, I ran at her with a carving knife.
I was banned from the table and locked into the attic, and Aunty Hilda’s husband, Uncle Dicky, came up to console me. A schoolmaster, he was very fond of children, though he never had any of his own. Whenever trouble brewed, I sought his company, and spared him my usual term of abuse to grown-ups, ‘You silly old elk!’
Soon after the attack on my mother, wearing a boy’s sailor suit and a red tam-o’-shanter, I walked out of the house. It made a lasting impression on my mother. For years she went on recounting how, from her bedroom window, she had seen me bobbing along the cricket pitch as I strode purposefully into town.
One Easter, we were staying with an aunt in Cheltenham and Daddy took me into the town, where we saw three ducks wagging their heads up and down, seated on three large Easter eggs. When told the ducks were not for sale, that I couldn’t have them, I created such a scene that a crowd gathered and a policeman had to help Daddy drag me away.
When left in the care of this dreaded aunt, an underling took me to play on some public swings, whereupon a rash appeared on my hands. It was never clear whether the rash had been caught on the swing or from touching a hairy caterpillar, but I was considered to be unclean and, to prevent the door handles becoming contaminated, I was again locked into a room. It seemed to be a universal form of punishment in those days, locking children up to brood on their wickedness. Perhaps I had answered back, determined to have the last word, a habit that caused my father to suffer a great deal of anxiety.
Such a difficult child clearly needed more discipline. At the age of four, I was sent as a border to a nearby convent. Besides being less costly, a Catholic school was thought to be more strict. Having inherited Daddy’s aptitude for games, I was soon handling a hockey stick. Whenever I fell and grazed a knee, the nuns plied me with sweets. Brighton rock and sherbert sucked through a liquorice stick were then a childhood treat, though it is doubtful if that is what the nuns produced. After breakfast, when the other pupils trooped up to class, I lingered behind to eat the remains of the nuns’ buttered toast. Then, exacerbated by fear, lest someone should come in and catch me at it, I’d rub on the edge of the refectory table while conjuring up a fantasy of falling into a bed of stinging nettles. I developed a crush on a very plain girl, called Marjorie. I would creep into her bed or lie curled on her lap in a foetal ball, which was interpreted as precocious sexuality meriting instant spanking.
Then, when my sister Brenda was born, we settled into a large basement flat in a dingy London block not far from Hyde Park. The sitting room curtains had a design of red and yellow tulips, and in one of the window panes was a circular black patch where someone had kicked in a football. As pedestrians hurried past, one could hear the clank of a manhole. Above the mantelpiece hung a Victorian painting of Sir Walter Raleigh sitting on a deserted beach gazing longingly out to sea. A dining room at the back of the flat had Chippendale chairs and looked on to a yard of dustbins.
Our mongrel terrier Peter excited great admiration by accompanying my father to the War Office and finding his way home alone. My sister’s Irish nurse had coarse red hands with long brittle fingernails that were always getting chipped during our fisticuff fights in the kitchen. For, at this stage, it was Brenda who incited my jealous rages. Wearing a cloche hat, the nurse would wheel Brenda’s pram into the park, while Peter trotted alongside. I carried the picnic basket containing a thermos of tea, tomato and cucumber or jam sandwiches. Once at the Round Pond, with nurse settled on the grass, I’d take the pram, saying I was going to watch the little sailing boats and, once out of sight, pinched Brenda’s bare calves, so that screams prevailed all the way back to Hyde Park Mansions.
The nearest convent, Sion, was in Chepstow Villas. The entrance hall was dark and cavernous with candlelit Virgins in niches. The school uniform was a white silk blouse and black gym tunic with a coloured sash. Out of doors one wore a wide-brimmed cream Panama hat. The English and maths mistress was a brisk little nun who always came bustling into the classroom nervously adjusting her wimple. She must have been a good teacher, for I began to excel at maths. She would read out any essay that appealed to her. One subject I chose was the fantasy life of the cabby parked on the corner of Chepstow Villas. Whenever one passed, he was invariably asleep perched high up behind his horse, a whip in his hand and his mouth ajar.
Daddy paid extra for me to take piano lessons. At the end of school concerts, I and another girl would play duets. I collected rosaries. In chapel, I loved kneeling before the altar, waiting to have a wafer placed on my tongue and sipping Christ’s blood from the goblet of Madeira. Surprisingly enough, no one ever tried a conversion. And, although I often played truant, having saved up bus fares by walking to school in order to spend an afternoon in the local ‘fleapit’ watching Garbo and John Gilbert, I was very happy at Sion.
Mummy had retained an old bachelor admirer from her theatrical days, the Times theatre critic, who gave us free tickets; whenever we went to the Palladium to see Peter Pan, he got us a box to ourselves. But what Brenda and I enjoyed most was being taken to Barnum’s circus every year. When Brenda reached an age to attend Sion Convent, she was made to walk with me; in that way I saved up two bus fares. Everything went well until the age of puberty, when I rouged my cheeks and used Mummy’s tweezers to pluck out all my eyebrows. One day, a pale saintly-looking nun was rifling through our desks when she came across a bundle of love letters I had written to myself, but signed ‘Fred’. I was expelled in disgrace.
When Brenda developed asthma, Daddy moved us all to a healthier atmosphere, high up in a new modern block off Baker Street. Their concern over Brenda’s health, and the comings and goings of medical men induced a bout of anorexia. I would eat nothing but Ryvita and lettuce leaves. A doctor recommended exercise. Every morning, before anyone was awake, I walked briskly round the outer circle of Regent’s Park, and went on starving myself. So Daddy packed me off as a boarder to Ashford High School. On autumn mornings, all the girls aimed to be the first one down to gather up the walnuts that had fallen in the school grounds overnight. At hockey, I started off the match … one two three and clack clack clack. I was then so tall that at netball all I had to do was stand on tiptoe to drop the ball into the net.
At this stage, Uncle Dudley came to the fore. He was then a major in the RAMC. During holidays, I and my bicycle were despatched to some army base. My uncle was a great womaniser, much to Aunt Nancie’s grief. They had a son, Richard Brinsley. That side of the family always considered my father had married beneath him, whereas we would ridicule Uncle Dudley’s medical ineptitude. Once, he prescribed a remedy for colds and the instant the bottle touched the table, the cork flew up to the ceiling. He was not a weak man like Daddy, but rather formidable. Aunt Nancie was kind and puritanical. She considered Jane Eyre an immoral book for children. She was rich and, staying with them, life became quite luxurious. A maid brought up an early morning cup of tea with two thin slices of bread and butter. I would remain in bed reading Jeffrey Farnol, Mazo de la Roche† and Thomas Hardy until a gong announced that breakfast was on the table, where scrambled, poached or fried eggs with sausage and bacon were being kept warm on a hot-plate. Everyone dressed for dinner; a butler served at table and the meal terminated with a ritual glass of port. But my appetite was never appeased and, being too shy to say so, I would bicycle off to the nearest chemist, and spend any pocket money on malt and cod-liver oil that I mixed with Bemax in the secrecy of my room.
Horrified by my ignorance, Uncle Dudley tutored me in French. The sentence ‘Pierre est allé au bord de la mer’ still rings in my head. I also learnt to play bridge. I developed a crush on Cousin Dick who was timid, with twerpy good looks. We would be put together in the open dicky of Uncle Dudley’s two-seater. Uncle D was fanatical about cars. At the beginning of the century, he had driven a Citroën as far as Iran and back. He loved to travel and at the end of his life, a widower and retired from the army, he travelled round the world as a ship’s doctor.
The first sexual attack came from Uncle Ivan, the handsome Armenian husband of Mummy’s pretty sister, Vera. One summer at Grandma’s Uncle Ivan came into my room and plunged a hand under my nightdress. Not taking this as a warning, the following day I accompanied him into the town. While driving along the High Street, he said I’d find some sweets in his trouser pocket, but all I found was a hole and something warm and slithery.
That summer, there must have been a large gathering at my grandparents’. One evening, with everyone seated in an upstairs sitting room dominated by a piano, I was asked to play the Moonlight Sonata for Daddy, poor Daddy who had been paying for piano lessons all these years; but, although used to performing at school concerts, I was unable to strike a note. All piano lessons were stopped and I remained Little Misunderstood.
After the break-up of Aunty Vera’s marriage to Uncle Ivan, forever after referred to as ‘that dreadful dago’, Vera became the mistress of a Catholic solicitor who had a wife and children. On weekends, he and Aunty Vera drove down from London to stay at the Imperial Hotel. But Sundays were spent with Ma, as my grandmother was called. I used to brood on Aunty Vera’s scandalous situation. She appeared so glamorous with her sports car, pretty clothes and wide-belted high-collared pure camelhair coat. Grandma used to criticise her for using too much make-up and annoy her by saying, ‘You looked so much prettier, Viv, when you had a natural look.’
Finally, Aunty Vera remarried a querulous alcoholic, then the Governor of Lagos. When he retired, she bought a cottage on the outskirts of Hythe. But she still spent most of her time on the Marine Parade. She would arrive, bounding up the stairs and bursting into the sitting room with the joyful welcome of ‘Hallo, girls’. And that is how the aunts always thought of themselves, ‘the girls’, until well into their eighties, when each one died.
Plagued by ill health, Daddy also retired and settled in the neighbourhood. We lived next door to Saltwood Vicarage; and close by stood a Gothic church. We became a family of hermits, with Daddy’s health the ruling topic. And, whenever the church bells tolled, he would recite some ditty from an Irving play that ended, ‘Oh, those goddamned bells.’ His days were spent tapping the weather gauge, reading The Times and taking afternoon strolls with the current dog. After Peter, it was a sheep-killing cocker spaniel. And, every evening at six o’clock, he turned on the radio to listen to the news. A great worrier, he was always fretting about bills. Most of his inheritance went in the Wall Street Crash. He was a great disappointment; I even fostered the idea he was not my real father – a common misconception among father-fixated children, according to some clever Freudian. My mother went on reliving her glamorous past, repeating anecdotes about Gertie Millar,‡ the actor Reginald Denny and Michael Arlen.§ ‘I remember him taking me to a ball …’ she’d say, ‘and on the way home we stopped at a cab stall for a cup of coffee. He was carrying a rolled-up umbrella, and pointing to a doughnut he spiked it with the tip of his umbrella saying, “I’ll have that one” … He was a very dapper little man.’
She had long given up the piano. A large aviary was built into the garden and she bred budgerigars. There was nothing my mother could do well. Not even cook. We seemed to live on sausage and mash, being easy to prepare and cheap.
I would go by bus to a convent school in Folkestone until one day my father flew into a rage because I had blocked the washbasin with camomile flowers, a hair-bleaching device. So I was packed off to school as a border until fifteen, when I left school altogether and took to wandering about the nearby woods with a book, followed by the postman’s son, a Heathcliffian character with a mongrel dog. We never spoke except to say good evening and, while I sat reading about Becky Sharp, he squatted close by, explaining to Daddy afterwards that he was doing it for my own good. I had another admirer, whom we named The Egg Man, rather as one might say, The Elephant Man, who came round every week with a poultry van.
Then, Daddy agreed to pay for my keep in a YWCA hostel in London and I left home for good.
*Harriette Wilson, born Dubochet, was the daughter of a Swiss clockmaker. Her Memoirs, published in 1825, opens with: ‘I shall not say why or how I became, at the age of fifteen, the mistress of the Earl of Craven. Whether it was love or the severity of my father, the depravity of my own heart, or the winning arts of the noble Lord, which induced me to leave my paternal roof and place myself under his protection, does not signify: or if it does, I am not in a humour to gratify curiosity in this matter.’
†Author of the family saga, Whiteoaks. Farnol was another immensely popular novelist.