Clement shaved in mild good humour. He had no objection to the start of another day. Sheila was still dozing in bed. Peering through the bathroom window at Friday, he saw every sign that sunshine would prevail again. The smell of coffee floated to him from downstairs. He mingled with it the tang of his salvia after-shave lotion.
How blessed, he thought, was domesticity.
Michelin was laying out a few breakfast things when he arrived downstairs. It happened that as he entered the dining room in his slippers, the French woman was reaching across the table, in such a way that he was presented with the long inviting line of her trunk, buttocks, and left leg – all veiled in blouse, skirt, and tights, but pleasing nevertheless. Of course, Michelin was sexless; Clement and Sheila had established that long ago, otherwise there would have been nothing of the stability the three of them enjoyed together.
They had given Michelin a lift while driving about France on holiday in the mid-seventies. She had helped them to find a particularly well-hidden hotel in the Gorges du Tarn, and they had christened her ‘Michelin’ then, on the flimsy basis that her name was Michelle. Somehow, the joke had stuck. So had Michelin. She was then a delicate little woman in her early thirties, hoping to get to England to teach. The Winters, still suffering from the loss of their child, had virtually adopted her. She came back to England with them, and stayed.
Michelin was now a sturdy woman in her mid-forties, with a regular teaching job at St Emma’s just up the road. She acted as a kind of unofficial housekeeper to the Winters in exchange for free board and lodging. She enjoyed a wide circle of acquaintances in Oxford, many of them French.
Within the close confines of Chalfont Road, where the Winters then lived, Clement had entertained luxurious thoughts concerning the young woman they had picked up. On a sunny autumn afternoon when Sheila was away, he had made what for him was a determined attempt to seduce her, after cornering her in the little room he used as a study.
‘I like you very well, Clem,’ Michelin said, pushing him away. He still remembered her words. ‘But my soul is in China.’
He had not understood her meaning. Had she translated an obscure French saying, meaning she was sexless, or a lesbian? He found somewhere that the phrase might imply that she was mad; but Michelin was clearly sane. In any case, the ambiguity served as a barrier between them. With time, Clement and Sheila persuaded themselves that their companion, who never once showed any interest in the opposite sex, was without the normal passions which bedevil humanity.
Clement had several theories as to why Michelin had no sex life, but all had been run through and exhausted long ago. He exchanged a few pleasantries with her and lapsed into his chair with the Independent, thinking about adultery and the prestige in which it was still held.
Possibly he had dreamed of Tristan and Isolde. Had he in some way been Tristan, in a gold tunic? After Sheila left for the States and before he followed her there, he had gone with friends to see a performance of Wagner’s opera, with its music reinforcing the hopeless passion of the lovers. Although the origins of the legend were obscure, he understood well that it represented the triumph of passionate love over conventional morality. In his student days, he had written a paper on it, Irresponsibility in the Tristan Legend.
His brother’s love for the Chinese woman, Mandy, had tragic elements. Although neither of them had died on stage, as it were, it was possible that Joseph had sealed Mandy’s fate by leaving her in Sumatra. In Wagner’s opera, the passion between the couple was represented as a transcendent value, necessitating the deaths of both parties. The passion between Joseph and Mandy had not been strong enough either to overcome all obstacles or to bring about their deaths directly. Life had brought compromises which were not the province of Art. And yet, Clement knew, his brother always considered himself marked by this youthful affair.
Of course life tried to imitate art. What else was there to imitate? Two rival artistic stereotypes held sway over his colleagues and friends, causing much confusion in their lives. On the one hand lay the old Sentimental view of the happy family, with wife and home as the centre of the world; on the other was the Romantic ideal of love – or at least sex – conquering all. Many of Clement’s patients subscribed to both as and when it suited them. The torment of these two conflicting theories was reflected in the popular arts.
Even in Sheila’s fantasy world of Kerinth, both rival theories flourished, with no attempt made to adjudicate between them. In The Heart of Kerinth, the lovely Queen Gyronee had laid down her life for her thankless children, whereas, in Kerinth Endures, the noble barbarian Thek died a Tristan-like death for love of the Princess Zimner, who was married to the ruthless Marlat of Cyn, the Dark Planet. He could write a paper on Confused Moral Attitudes in the Kerinth Novels for who, except for a few injudicious fans, knew those novels better than he? – apart from the certainty that it would destroy his marriage.
One trouble with Joseph, Clement thought, was that he had been dogged throughout his Sumatra affair by a sense of shame, a false sense inculcated by their parents and the hypocrisies of that generation to which in fact the war would give the kibosh. Had Joseph been able to relish his conquest of the Chinese lady fully and completely, perhaps even to boast of it in the sergeants’ mess, instead of keeping it as an uneasy secret, then perhaps he might have been bolder in general and won the lady … if, indeed, that was what he really wanted. It seemed to Clement that Joseph fully realized there would have been no place for his and Mandy’s union in the forties. By the eighties, such colour prejudice had worn a little thin. Air travel had brought miscegenation into every home.
He could give his brother’s story to Sheila, to turn into a suitable Kerinthian fiction. And of course he could use its outline in his thesis on adaptability.
But what to do regarding Sheila’s performance as Isolde? That was the question. Clement thought he saw this morning, as he munched a piece of toast, that that Hispanic fellow in Boston had been merely an interlude, a boffe de politesse – her coupling with that phantom lover, Fame. Boston, to all intents and purposes, was now as far distant as Joseph’s Sumatra. He should be as complacent as Mandy’s husband Wang had been. Clement was prepared to forgive the action; it was the words at which he stumbled. ‘I’m enjoying it too much to stop…’
As he was finishing his breakfast, Sheila came down to breakfast in a paisley blouse and a long cream linen skirt. Smiling, she waved the mail which Michelin had left for her on the hall stand.
‘Another lovely day,’ she said, kissing his forehead. ‘Have you had a swim?’ He was momentarily enveloped in her perfume.
‘Couldn’t be bothered. Got to see the Bursar about the heating in my room at ten.’ He put only a minimal grumpiness into his voice.
She ignored his remark, sat down at her end of the little table, and prepared her bowl of All-Bran and Alpen with milk and sugar, topping it up with a sliced banana and cream. As she ate, she put on her reading glasses and commenced opening her mail.
Opening mail was a serious business for Sheila. Clement immersed himself in the pages of the Independent.
Sheila’s post contained bills, which she set carefully aside, several periodicals, and a number of notes and letters from her public, her fans, all excited and begging for autographs, photographs, or locks of hair. All the fan letters were full of praise for the Kerinth romances. Sheila made a pile of them, handing them over without comment for her husband to read. This morning, she received as well a letter from her London publishers, Barrage Sims, containing copies of reviews from English newspapers and magazines of her new novel War Lord of Kerinth, in its English edition. All the reviews were disappointing, as Clement could judge from Sheila’s pained cries as she read: ‘Oh, no!’, ‘That’s wrong, for a start!’, and ‘You bastard!’
The review from the Guardian was insulting, brief, and righteous.
‘They hate me!’ she cried, screwing it up in her fist.
‘They don’t understand,’ Clement said.
‘They just can’t see …’
She sipped at her coffee, freshly made and topped with cream.
Removing her spectacles, she said, without particularly looking anywhere, unless it was at the cornice, ‘Why do I bother to ensure that my English editions come out first? Why struggle, out of some misguided idea of patriotism? What do the bloody British care? Why do I insist that Barrage send out review copies, simply for these bastards to piss on? I’m just not appreciated in this country. The Germans like me, the Americans love me. In future, I shall sell all rights to Swain, and Barrage can jolly well negotiate English rights from them. To hell with them. Bastards.’
Her lips closed in a firm line, revealing the determination that had made Green Mouth the commercial success she was. Clement had put down his newspaper, so that she was able to look him in the eye.
‘It’s not Barrage Sims’s fault,’ he said. ‘They’ve done their best for you. Just the typical English lack of enthusiasm. We still have the genius – as you prove – but the Americans have the enthusiasm.’
‘It’s class, that’s what it is. Just because I write genre novels.’
In alarm only partly assumed, he said, ‘You don’t want to go and live in the States, do you?’
She laughed. ‘That depends on the tax situation if they make the movie. New York would be fun.’
He did not reply. Leaning back, she took the telephone off the dresser and dialled Barrage Sims, asking to speak to her editor, Maggie Mower. Clement retreated into his paper while Sheila talked. When she put down the receiver, she said, ‘Whatever the reviews, the sales figures aren’t bad. Their first printing was fifty thousand, and eighty per cent are sold already. That’s not counting book club sales. So someone loves me.’
‘According to government claims, the unemployment figures have fallen below the three million mark for the first time in four years.’
She looked at Clement with scorn, resenting this irrelevance.
‘Yes, well, bugger the government and bugger the unemployed.’
He saw that he was dismissed, wiped his mouth on his napkin, and rose. ‘Me for the Bursar.’
‘See you,’ she said, looking up and giving him one of her best smiles.
Fabian Bush, the Bursar of Carisbrooke, was renowned for his economies. In the long-standing grievance of the chilliness of Clement Winter’s rooms he had so far managed not to budge an inch, while appearing anxious to please. Clement knew before he embarked on the subject this morning that he was going to get nowhere. Even to him, there was something unreal about discussing the sub-zero temperatures of a room at present immoderately hot and stuffy. They stood in the Bursar’s crowded office, pushing back and forth a conversation about the expense of running additional copper piping under twenty feet of parquet flooring, until Clement gave up, knowing full well that if he ventured on the subject during the winter months, when the sub-zero temperatures could actually be sampled, Fabian Bush would claim, with some justice, December to be no time for fetching up floors and draining hot tanks.
Clement worked the rest of the morning and, in his lunch break, phoned his sister Ellen in Salisbury. Perhaps Salisbury had been in her stars at birth. Destiny, Clement felt, had fitted her for the blander parts of fortune. Ellen was now fifty-six, seven years Clement’s senior, and still slightly unapproachable. As a child, she had always been closer to Joseph; he remembered numerous occasions on which they had run off together and left him to play forlornly by himself. ‘Just you behave,’ as a farewell with a wagged finger, had made the partings hard to bear. Now she was a not unprepossessing, rather sharp-tongued woman in the middle age for which nature had fashioned her, living, as far as Clement and Sheila could tell, alone.
Ellen, somewhat late in her day, had married Alwyn Pickering, a man who had made bank manager before forty. They had immediately had a daughter, Jean, born in 1962, over whom Ellen and Alwyn had made an immense fuss (satirized later in Sheila’s Child of Kerinth), only to see her – as Ellen had once put it in an extra distraught moment – go to the dogs. Perhaps to pacify her parents, Jean, by no means bereft of a sense of humour, had married the chief dog in 1981. The marriage had come apart three years later, and now she worked in Salisbury, supervising social workers. Her mother’s marriage had come apart over the same period. Alwyn had taken to staying away from home for longer and longer periods until finally, Clement had heard, Ellen had requested him not to return. There had been no row, only a financial arrangement to her disadvantage.
‘You got the letters safely then,’ she said, when Clement phoned. ‘I never know what the post office is up to these days.’
‘Yes, I like those letters very much. It’s really about Joseph’s writings I’m phoning.’
‘I suspected you might be.’ She added nothing to the brief sentence. He could visualize her standing watchful by her phone in that room with the patio doors overlooking the garden full of crazy paving and the odd concrete statue.
‘How are you?’
‘Not bad. Just been taking the dog for a walk. Is Sheila with you or in Kerinth?’
‘We’re both in Rawlinson Road, Ellen. Joseph’s letters to you showed the brighter side of his India-Burma experience. I’m sure that was deliberate. You were quite a little girl at the time.’
‘I was fourteen.’
‘Yes. Well, I think he naturally wanted to shield you from the harsher experiences. For instance, I know he suffered badly from dysentery, which he doesn’t mention. Later, in Burma proper, he hardly mentions the fighting. I wondered if you thought he was always like that, putting the brighter aspect of things forward.’
She was silent for a moment, giving the matter consideration. ‘In the social services they encounter a lot of men who went through the war and survived unscathed. Mostly they’re of pensionable age now. Research has shown that many of them found it extremely difficult to adjust to civilian life; some, indeed, claim they never did manage to adjust, becoming alcoholics or chronically unemployable. I would say that some might almost be classified as psychiatric cases – the ones who had a bad war—’
‘Ellen, dear, that’s my subject,’ he said patiently.
‘War experience certainly caused a great division between generations. Those who returned found that those who had never been away did not understand their problems or want to listen.’
‘Do you think he tended to whitewash his Burma experience?’
‘He never married, though, did he?’ Perhaps she had not heard his question. ‘Joe needed a decent, understanding English girl.’
After a pause, Ellen added, ‘Marriage raises more problems than popularly supposed. Or rather, people know marriage is not the solution to everything, but they still prefer to pretend that it is. Men and women.’
Clement laughed rather forcedly. ‘People don’t want things to be as they are. They dream up idealized situations and try to live by them, but sometimes the bottom falls out of the market.’ He thought of his wife’s fantasies, to which he knew Ellen took exception, and tried to steer the conversation into another course. ‘Do you think there was something of that in Joseph?’
‘Poor Joseph’s dead, Clem.’ Again a long silence, as if she mulled over the implications of what she was saying. ‘Why don’t you simply keep all his letters and so on, if you want them, and forget about making them into a book? Let him rest. Live your own life.’
‘I am trying to live my own life. I feel my brother is part of my life.’
‘You weren’t close. He and I were close. When are you going to sell the Acton flat?’
‘A bit more cleaning up to be done first, Ellen.’
He exchanged a few more desultory remarks with the distant voice in Salisbury and then hung up.
The baffling quality of his relationship with his sister did not diminish with time or distance. Since they saw so little of each other these days, the matter was no longer of importance: yet it worried him. The will to be friendly, even close, should have had greater effect. He ascribed the problem to the way in which his parents had remained so distant. The failure of their relationship, that abiding mystery, had been central to the emotional development of their three offspring, Joseph, Ellen, and Clement.
Perhaps because of that central loss, Clement felt almost a mystical identification with the institutes round him: his College, the University, Oxford, or more particularly North Oxford – the Puginesque, Betjemanesque half-mile which contained so much diversity and snobbery – and, beyond that (‘mistier and mistier’) England, the European idea, and the planet Earth itself as a complex ecological unit. He was in some respects a feeble man, yet not an ignorant one, and some of his intuitions, he recognized, had been gained from his wife’s half-instinctive, slapdash writings, which he constantly defended, whatever his own private reservations, against the unthinking contempt of the Oxford crowd.
This tendency towards loyalty now attracted him to the preservation of what would otherwise be the forgotten life of his dead brother, and not least to concealed aspects of that life.
Evidence for the concealed aspects of Joseph’s life was contained in a binder which the historian had covered with a piece of green wallpaper, possibly to denote a special affection for the book.
It was this book which Clement read through again when he returned to Rawlinson Road at six o’clock in the evening. Sheila and Michelin sat companionably together in the kitchen, drinking white wine with their feet up on the kitchen table. They were watching the news on television.
‘How was the Bursar?’ Sheila asked.
‘Did I tell you he had turned back into a hunchbacked toad?’
He took a glass of wine with him and went up to his study. The book Joseph had labelled LIFE HISTORY was a plastic binder containing badly typed pages of a student’s loose-leaf block. Stuck to the inside of the binder was a photograph of the Market Square in Nettlesham, Suffolk.
Joseph’s account began abruptly.
This is my life history, which I set down this 8th day of January 1987, being of sound mind more or less. I write it for my own sake, but also in the hopes that perhaps others may gain some advantage from its strange lesson.
It is a history which serves to illustrate two principles: that one may be in grave error for many years without knowing it, and eventually recover; and that, as La Rochefoucauld says, we are none of us as miserable or as happy as we think we are.
Part I really begins before I was born, but we will leave that till later. I first saw light of day, with a thunderous noise, like harsh bells jangled out of tune, in the market town of Nettlesham, in Suffolk. While my arrival was a cause of astonishment to me, I have to report straight away that it was a grave disappointment to my mother, and that from this disappointment much grief sprang.
Part II may serve as a warning to other historians. It tells the story as I fully believed it to be until a short while ago. That story, however, was a curious misreading. I had misunderstood my own life’s story. How, in that case, are we to know that we can ever read other people truly?
With such a question mark, I begin.
Nettlesham in the mid-nineteen-twenties, when I was born, was a sleepy little hole. There was not much to distinguish it from a thousand other small English towns, except this: that a minor eighteenth-century poet, William Westlake, famous in his day, came down from London to live with his female cousin in a house on the town square, wrote a few poems sitting at his window, went off his head, and died there. So I claim kinship: I lived there and went off my head.
Not many may boast, as I justifiably can, of having emerged amid the grandiose rattling of galvanized pails at one shilling and one penny ha’penny. It was the first noise to greet my ears on this earth, an unmistakable noise, not harmonious and, as it was to prove, hardly auspicious. As distinguished in its way as the ringing of church bells. And you’d go a long way these days to find as many galvanized pails as we had.
Thus my beginning, and the announcement to Nettlesham, or to anyone who happened to be nearby in the square, that I had butted in on the scene and effected that awful transition out of the nowhere into the everywhere with some success.
See where these simple country swains appear –
Well known to Heav’n, tho’ little noted here
in the immortal words of William Westlake, in his poem on his mother’s portrait. Other remembered gems of his include ‘The Conversation’, ‘A Summer Stroll Through Parts of Suffolk’, the renowned ‘The Crippled Goat’ (‘I was a crippled goat that lost its way …’) and many other affecting pieces.
Westlake’s name was commemorated by the Westlake Memorial Hall and Westlake Street. There was even a Conversation Arms in Commercial Street, although its literary associations began and ended with the name. Westlake wasn’t a drinking man – no wonder he went mad.
It’s clear that Westlake was a polite and conventional chap. My father had the same qualities, clinging to spats and the Sunday sermon with the same fervour that Westlake showed towards the heroic couplet. Also affected by Westlakeitis, he composed a history of World War I – in which he had flown biplanes and ridden mules and various other characteristic vehicles of the time – entirely in verse: it was the last appearance of the alexandrine and the heroic couplet. Unfortunately, this literary relic has not survived. He read parts of it to me when I was young and defenceless. I remember only this couplet:
‘Go forward then,’ said Kitchener, ‘ye Grenadiers,’
And off they marched by way of Armentiers.
I mention Westlake because there was a time when I too longed to be just as dead and as deadly respectable as he. Being spurned by my mother, I had only the death wish to court. The death wish proving as adamant as my mother, I suppose I must own that such writing as I have done probably owes something to the author of ‘The Crippled Goat’. Had it been Constable instead of Westlake who went mad in Nettlesham, I should no doubt be turning out watercolours by now; these childhood influences can be extremely powerful.
But how did I come to misunderstand my own life story? Can there be anything so idiotic? What streak of the perverse entered into me? There must have been some influence more powerful than old Westlake’s crippled goat to make me so obdurately lose my way for so long.
There certainly were factors to make even the least shrewd of infants suspect that he was less than popular in the maternal bosom. Take the case when Mater was swelling and I shrinking; she swelling with another infant and I at four years shrinking under the weight of what was to come. So she wanted a girl with an urgency bordering on the dotty: she did not have to bring me into it. I could have been left in blissful ignorance of the whole reproduction thing, among my farm animals and Bonzo the dog.
Instead, I was made to get down on my knees with her every evening before beddy-byes (bloody beddy-byes being about six) and pray with her, earnestly and too long, that this time – this time, pray God, nice God – this time it would be a little girl with a little cunt and cute little skirts and pigtails. Pretty humiliating for a chap, boding no good.
Why didn’t God intervene? Lean down and prod her on the shoulder? ‘Sorry Mum, but I shouldn’t go into all that in his presence or he’ll start thinking of himself as a failure. Read Freud if you don’t believe Me.’
People, and this includes deities, intervene only when they are not wanted. Nature rolled inevitably on, mother found it more and more difficult to sink to her swollen knees. I caught – and how was that for timing? – how, why, did they let it happen? – I caught whooping cough. What’s embarrassing is that it sounds such an old-fashioned disease to catch, like curvature of the spine, or ophthalmic spermatorea. Why could I not have caught curvature of the spine? ‘Oh, the poor little lad has curled into a hoop, let’s cancel the pregnancy.’
They must have warned me that whooping cough was fatal to babies but, not being up in medical science, I suppose I went right back to studying Chick’s Own and forgot all about it.
Next thing is, the much-prayed-for infant arrives, proves the existence of God by coming complete with little cunt, little skirts, and pigtails, and I’m flung out of the house. Flung out on the very hour the infant surfaces. Go and live with granny, you little bastard.
On the whole, grannies get a good press, bless them. They’re small, they don’t eat much, and they view television regularly. In the thirties it was different: they never watched television and they smelt of mothballs. As an additional eccentricity marking her off from the rest of humanity, Granny Scoones wore black: black dress, black stockings, black slippers, black bow in her hair. Black knickers too, for a fiver. Her widow’s weeds. Regardless of the fact that the old weed had been dead for about sixty years by then.
Granny lived in a tall house in Lavenham, all of sixty miles away from home and baby. It was called ‘No. 99’, which somehow conferred singular honour upon it. The Late Mr Scoones had gone up in the world; he had been taken away from school at the age of fourteen because his father, a carrier, could not pay a farthing a week for his schooling. ‘A carrier’ – no doubt a euphemism of the time, like those chaps who turn up in criminal court nowadays describing themselves as ‘a company director’. The Late had eventually acquired one or two houses, none quite as grand or quite as semi-detached as No. 99, and become Chairman of the local Budgerigar Breeders and Fanciers Association. He had left behind a great deal of solid furniture, very fashionable with the aspiring classes in the eighteen-nineties, covered all over with carving and scrolling, dotted with tiny shelves, and seeded with mirrors wherever possible. It was all mahogany, of course. The Late Mr Scoones was not the man to venture into oak.
The toilet on the first landing conformed to the same pattern, with a fine high mahogany seat, the moving parts activated by a lever to one side, rather reminiscent of today’s ejector seat in fighter planes.
The bathroom, too, had its share of mahogany. The mahogany ran up and around the wash basin, embraced the big misty mirror set too high for me to see into, and completely encircled the enormous bath, as if wood had developed the temperament of bindweed. The bath had a point in its favour. When allowing water to escape, it emitted a disgusting gargling noise which always made me laugh. Since laughing, in chronic whooping cough cases, brings on vomiting, the purpose of the bath was often defeated.
I dwell on these details because I hated everything in the house with – well, not exactly a passionate intensity, but certainly with all the intensity a whelp of that age could bring to the subject. We always remember best what we hate best. Also, in my desperate case, the toilet and bathroom were the rooms to which I was dragged when my illness came on. I had no ordinary whooping cough, like the poor kids down Baxter Row, who always had something so appalling that it’s a wonder the working classes of Nettlesham didn’t die out in that generation; I had whooping cough with complications. The complications, I realized later, much later, sprang from the bilious attacks which came on whenever something brought to my attention the fact that Mater was so pissed off at having me. A lot of sicking up went on at No. 99, I’m proud to say, and the mahogany took quite a hammering.
In order to cure or at least quieten me, my granny’s doctor, a tall sallow man with side whiskers, carrying a bag, and dressed in even blacker black than granny’s, and called Dr Humphreys-Menzies – oh, you won’t believe it, you’ll think I’m getting this out of an old bound volume of Punch – Dr Humphreys-Menzies came along and prescribed a medicine of noxious stickiness which was to be taken last thing at night. Probably a mix of laudanum plus cow gum and masses of sugar to taste. I’m certainly right about the sugar, for in no time the mixture had rotted away all my milk teeth. The teeth went brown and green and began to waver in their sockets, like old men trying to keep awake in their pews during the sermon on Sundays. Out they had to come, ha-ha, something else we can do to the little bastard.
I was wheeled down to the dentist in my pyjamas, given chloroform (now reserved for laboratory rats), and twelve of the defective little pegs were whipped out. By the time I came groggily round, the teeth were arranged in a pattern for me to see on a sort of white glass ashtray. Then it was back to No. 99 and bed, and a good bleed over the sheets.
It is not my intention to depict myself as feeble. In fact I was a sturdy kid, give or take a mother or two, well up on the tree-climbing and swift-kick-to-the-bum-of-enemies. It’s a tribute to that sturdiness that by four-thirty on the Day of the Great Extraction I was thoroughly awake again, crying aloud for fish warmed in milk, blancmange, and liquorice sticks, and sicking freely over granny’s eiderdown.
At last something or other happened. Probably granny refused to keep me any longer, and I was shoved off home. Oh dear, did I weep when I was again in my mother’s arms? Oh dear, I did, as far as that was congenial to the little swaddled thing also entangled in the embrace. Siblings? I was well and truly sibbled.
I returned home to my parents on a Wednesday. They couldn’t make it on Tuesday, Tuesday being the weekly whist drive over at Mrs Poncer’s, as well as (for Pater) the meeting of the Nettlesham Westlake Cultural Society, when no doubt they were giving a public reading of the poems of Baden-Powell.
Anyone well up in amateur psychiatry or do-it-yourself psychoanalysis will recognize that this was danger time for little wowser. Any clued-in Mater in nineteen-thirty-one would have known that this was crunch time, when little wowser, if he was ever to recover from his psychic shock of displacement, would need special treatment (loving being an outword) for the next week or two; or say even a calendar month. When his poor broken heart might be sutured. What he would not need was an angry shoving aside when two great luxurious tits were brought out for the tiny red-faced one to guzzle at for a half-hour on the trot. That was piling Pelion on the gingerbread, tantamount to inviting him to jump from the frying pan into the Ossa.
If a small child becomes lonely, moody, given to picking his nose, prone to attention-seeking tantrums and periods of withdrawal such as hiding in the wardrobe with Teddy, the signs are there to be read. Mother beware, Father be there. True, in my case, the signs were read, and I was given a good clout for seeking attention. Somehow, it had to be made clear to me that it just wasn’t my world any longer and I’d be well-advised to get on with my cigarette card collection and not vex Mater. And when I did in fact withdraw into an invisible shell and shuffle and re-shuffle my Fifty Famous Cricketers, then it had to be made clear that I was not to sulk.
It was made sufficiently clear for my behaviour to become more rather than less bizarre. The tree-climbing reached, in every sense, new heights. It was fun to reach a really impossibly high twig and then hang from it, screaming at the top of my voice that I was falling. That did get attention, though it was surely worth a few more laughs than it earned.
So the puzzle was what to do with such a naughty child. And the solution arrived at, after much heart-searching but little consultation with anyone with any fucking sense, was to scare small wowser into submission. Accordingly, at the next lark, wowser was told that Mater would never love him again. Bilious attack followed. No dice. Bed wetting. No dice. Rather the opposite. Minus dice. More threats. If he was going to be naughty, then Mater would run away from him, taking Baby Ellen with her. Oh, no, mummy, please don’t leave me! – Ah ha, fatal thing to say, showing what you were really afraid of! Now she had you, vulnerable little rat that you were …
So we come to the central scene of the narrative. The torture scene. It is for this that I sit up late at night, a rug round my legs against the cold, scribbling – just to draw this picture. It happened over half a century ago, yet it remains vivid, vivid as shame, and blood still runs in the gutters.
At that naughty boy’s next outburst of misery, Mater was off. She carried out her dreadful threat. Baby Ellie was crammed helpless into her pushchair, wool bonnet was tied under her pink little chops. Arms flying, she was bowled up Ipswich Street, Mater propelling her with maniacal force. I swear that’s what she did, doctor. I can prove it. I saw her from our front windows, watched her in despair, my own and only mother, doctor, off almost at a trot in her brown coat, never see her again, never …
Okay, that’s it. Lash the strait-jacket back on now. I’ve told it.
You hear? She actually deserted me. Ran away. She took my little sister – an innocent accomplice – and she ran away from me up Ipswich Street because she hated me so much. What a crime was committed that day!
Okay, it was a bluff. I know it was a bluff. But I’m sure that my learned and aloof brother would tell you that Mater was acting out her secret desires. It was only a bluff, and she sneaked back in again before dark, so that Pater didn’t discover what she had done … That makes no difference. A little distinction cuts no ice with a four-year-old. She had bloody left home, carried out her miserable threat to leave me. Come in, Jung, come in, Freud, come in, Dr Spock. You hear what I said? I said my bloody Mater ran away from me, deserted me. I died that day.
They resurrected me next morning. No matter that I had no spirit for anything. The ghastly routines of childhood had to be undergone. There remained the rituals of nutrition, exercise, and neglect. Soon there was infant school. Dead or not, one had to attend. Had to learn to tie bootlaces, had to learn the two-times table, even if to all intents and purposes emotionally extinct.
My fruitless struggles to regain my mother’s affections shall not be told, ever. To cut a long throat short, I continued to be nothing but a terrible nuisance to my parents. Since they had no understanding, matters deteriorated. I wouldn’t share my toys with Baby, and it was no excuse that Baby, tottering about now like a new-hatched Behemoth, broke them. I was a Bad Boy, and things happen to Bad Boys. Mater again ran away. It was no less impressive than the first time. She did not at all like it when she returned to find urine under the window sill where I had kneeled trembling to watch her go, where I had collapsed when she had disappeared. She must have felt it was an unfair reward for criminal desertion.
So the months rolled by like poison down the sink. Parents came to a decision. He must go away to school. ‘Right away to school’ was the actual phrase. He must go to a place where – this was the next phrase – they would make a little Gentleman out of him. (What ambitions the sellers of buckets harbour in their breasts!) They would make a little Gentleman out of him. Knock the shit out of him, in other words. Not forgetting the piss. And, of course, the sick. And anything else they could find.
Need I say that I was never consulted about this fearful expulsion from the nest, from my first Eden? Even prayer was not used in this instance; no more of the getting down on swollen knees. Keep God out of it. Let the crime be as secret as possible.
Of course Pater knew. He was going to have to pay the bills. But Pater kept aloof, down among his pails and coconut matting, presumably having decided that the intimate dramas of the nest were not to his taste. He distanced himself as far as possible from the squalid bawlings of his son (elder son but, note, not first-born – more of that later), his daughter, and then his second son, as each in turn arrived in this vale of tears. Indeed, throughout the patchy growth of his children, he managed still to stay pained and aloof, relaying such orders as we needed to receive through his wife. She was his mouthpiece. To put it another way, and more effectively, since it mirrors more faithfully the lousy English class system, he was the commanding officer; she was the NCO. Orders were passed down the line to us children, the privates, the conscripts, who were supposed to carry them out without question.
Thus, as we grew, Mater’s sentences more and more tended to begin with the words, ‘Your father says …’ They generally spelt doom. The tablets came down from the mountain, wanged with considerable force.
There was some delay in finding an appropriate school for me. None of them was cheap enough. Ironmongers were not made of money. Eventually an establishment was found on a dreary stretch of the Suffolk coast, tucked away from human eyes at the end of a lane in a position forlorn enough to satisfy the most pernickety psychopath.
Father tramped round the premises with the headmaster. This was called ‘looking the school over’. I was dragged behind them, noting the high walls which surrounded the school. To one side was a field where cricket was played. In the stone wall at the rear of the building was a tall wooden gate. The headmaster flung open this gate with a gesture.
‘The sea’s just there,’ he said. We could hear the waves scribbling on pebble, not a hundred yards distant.
My father looked down at me. ‘I hope you teach the boys swimming,’ he said.
With a kind of cringing geniality to which I would become accustomed over the next few years, the headmaster replied, ‘At St Paul’s, we go in the sea whatever the weather’s like …’
The two men eyed each other. They were big men, in sympathy with each other’s thought processes.
‘Sink or swim, eh?’ said my father, and they both laughed.
As well they might. My father had just uttered the school motto.