And so I found myself, helpless, with a little kaleidoscope in one pocket, shaking so much that my socks would not stay up over my calves, not weeping even when I kissed little Ellen goodbye, teddy bear suddenly wrenched from my embrace as the car stopped at the gates, a vulnerable seven, installed as one of sixteen young boarders attending Mr Humphrey Fangby’s St Paul’s Court Preparatory School for Young Gentlemen and Obdurate Little Bastards (Equestrian Lessons Extra).
My parents’ farewells still rang lovingly in my ears: ‘Your father says Work Hard.’
My salvation, if it was to be had at all, was to be had at the hands of my companions, the bedraggled fifteen. I cannot say that I came to any harm from them, or they from me, I hope. There was no compassion between us; they were also having a bad time. But a kind of loyalty in adversity did develop between us, and some I grew slowly to love and befriend. Yet even friendship, that most precious quality, was a sickly fruit under the shadow, the ample shadow, of Mr Humphrey Fangby. Let’s call the old bastard that.
Fangby was a tall, portly man, imposing if slugs are imposing, with thick wisps of black hair drawn across a dome of bone, a convalescent’s fleshy nose ending in a downward sneer, mottled cheeks, and two little eyes like sucked buttons, well suited for detecting lies or happiness in those placed under his care. He wore suits of a ginger bristly material, possibly woven from the pubic hair of Bactrian camels.
Fangby had a Fangby Wife, a pallid little person who occasionally smiled through the dining room hatch at us in a manner indicating that she had been instructed never to say a kindly word to us, on threat of immediate fornication. As to this latter, there had emerged into the world a Fangby Baby. It also never said a kindly word to us. Fangby Baby’s only contribution to our welfare at St Paul’s was to permit its old huckaback napkins to be used as towels to dry our washing-up. None of our plans to kidnap it came to anything.
Food was of the worst sort. When visitors from abroad complain about the awfulness of English food, the disgusting state of our restaurants, the insolence of our waiters, and the revolting habits of the other (English) diners, I long to take them back in a time machine to St Paul’s, to show them where it all began. Our provisions, poor to awful to start with, were cooked by Fangby himself.
Perhaps to persuade himself that he was a good cook, Fangby had imposed a rule upon us: every plateful had to be cleared completely, however long it took. Nothing was to be wasted, not even the most gristly piece of meat. St Paul’s fish had gristle too. And the blancmange. Much vomiting went on before we got some especially inedible dish down. Sago would be top of my horror list, perhaps because it reminded one visually of the vomiting that would have to be endured before it all vanished. Fortunately, dining room and lavatory were adjoining. One could be smelt from the other.
Cuisine of course is not the strong point of schools. One goes there to learn, not to eat. Eating is incidental. It is Learning that maketh Gentlemen. Why am I saying this? That’s what Fangby taught, so obviously the poison seeped in. Learning doth not make Gentlemen. All it could possibly make at St Paul’s, to put things at their unlikely best, was to turn out snotty little trumped-up sons of small tradesmen. Only Gentlemen make Gentlemen. It’s a closed shop. You need inherited money, lawns down to lakes, Paters in Who’s Who, horses in the paddock, friendships with judges, and a fucking blasé accent to be a Gentleman. You also need to steer clear of St Paul’s, where a notice in the sports field made it plain that it was a Preparatory School, without clarifying what exactly it might be preparing you for. Not Eton and Harrow, that’s for sure.
Nowadays, there are inspectors to see that the Fangbys of this world are denied permission to run schools. Together with Fangby Wives, they run boarding houses and B&Bs instead, from which punters can flee in horror after a one-night stay. No twelve-week terms are imposed.
Of course I’m talking about the mid-thirties, before the war, during the days of the British Empire, when there was a kind of official unspoken consensus that miserable conditions in childhood made the best troops in wartime. It was good thinking on the War Office’s part (or whoever it was that planned on such clever lines) – proved to be perfectly correct when the war broke out in 1939. After a dose of Fangby’s regime for a few years, it was a positive relief to fling yourself on a German bayonet.
Learning was in the capable if oily hands of whom but Mr Fangby himself. Assisted by two masters, Mr Fletcher and the Rev. Winterbottom. Mr Fletcher was the only master to live in. He taught everything and did everything, and all for a pound a week plus lodging, I’m sure. But being an object of pity is not the same as being a pleasant character; and so it was in Mr Fletcher’s case. He took out on the boys all that he hated about Fangby, and was ever ready with a sneer and a crushing witticism. Of the ‘You didn’t stand very near your hairbrush this morning’ variety.
The Rev. Winterbottom was hardly a teacher at all. He was the local C. of E. minister, as pious as they come, and with a veneer of culture gained, I suppose, from fraternizing on a compulsory basis with the local squirearchy. His two boys, Gregory and Hilary Winterbottom, were boarders, and doubtless got in cheap in exchange for Rev. Winterbottom’s conducting us through the pieties every Saturday morning. He was a conscientious man, and kindly, and we became all too familiar with the buggerings about of the Israelites in the Wilderness. What on earth was it regarding those wandering tribes which made Winterbottom, never mind God, so interested in them in the first place? I soon had their watering places, and the dumps where father was prepared to cut son’s throat (I liked that bit) off by heart. I knew everything from Genesis to about Judges. I could tell you who smote whom at Gibeon. Take your average kid of the streets today and ask him before he hits you where a place called Bashan is, or what was built of shittim wood, and he’ll look blank. It’s the Top Twenty or nothing for him. Not an inkling of old Moab the Tishbite or the Hittites. (‘Is that a Group, mate?’)
Education has changed.
Any good in that school was brought in by the boys – which tells you how little good there was. Toys were strictly disallowed, on the principle that they provided links with home. I was permitted to have with me my microscope and my telescope, on the grounds that they were something or other that toys were not. Perhaps Fangby thought that Gentlemen used such objects. Be that as it may, I was forever looking up or down brass barrels, and sketching what I saw. What I saw was completely divorced from St Paul’s, and therefore welcome and wonderful. My love of science and astronomy dates from that time. Had we been taught science it would have been a different story. But at that date, and previously, only men with left-wing attitudes were attracted to science, so Gentlemen would not touch it.
What Gentlemen learnt were the Classics. Well, Greek was beyond us, but Fangby saw to it that we got a dose of Latin. There in our classroom we sat, learning to conjugate amo, learning to decline mensa. Thus the first sentence we ever put together in the tongue of those scoundrelly Romans was ‘I love a table’. It was necessary that our sex lives should be warped if we were to go forth and Command, like real Gentlemen.
Fortunately the intended discipline was too insane to be methodically applied. For all his vices, it could be said in Fangby’s defence that he was a lazy man. He was given to entering the classroom in the morning with an extra smarmy smile over large areas of his face and saying, ‘Well, boys, you’ve been working so well that I am going to give you a day’s holiday.’
It was forbidden to groan. A holiday meant that we were kicked out of the house into the field until dusk, while Fangby hit the sack, presumably with Fangby Wife – who for that reason probably dreaded holidays as much as we did.
There was nothing to do in the field but sit about and bully each other, or fight off the local boys. The village boys, who knew potential little Gents when they saw them, hated us effortlessly and with true instinct. Since most of them were about fifteen, and hulking with it, and our average age was ten, we were correct to fear them. The first we would know of them was when stones came whizzing through the hawthorn hedge at us – or it would have been the first had they not worn boots shod like horses’ hooves and talked in husky whispers audible half a mile off. Many of us had our foreheads cut open by stones (‘I must have banged it on the apple tree, Mrs Fangby …’). Class warfare begins young.
One other resource was open to us. We were allowed a small strip of field, next to an old hewn-flint wall, to make into gardens. These we worked on quite consistently with the aid of Slaves (boys feeble and consequently gardenless). Fine patches of land they became, every last stone being set carefully aside as ammunition for when the Goths next attacked through the hedge.
Once a week, we were allowed into Miss Araminta’s shop, a hundred yards away from the school gates, down the lane. This miserable concession to freedom was always under threat and often withdrawn if a sin was committed (such as dropping a pen in class, which counted about Eight on the local Richter scale). Miss Araminta, oleaginous enough to be indisputably in cahoots with Fangby, sold everything including black knicker elastic at a farthing a yard. To us she sold Carter’s Tested Garden Seeds and penny Milky Way bars, which in those days included Radio Stars (A Set of 25).
We sowed our gardens with seeds bought with our own hard unearned pocket money. If the seeds were sown in the spring term and the plot weeded scrupulously for every last minuscule weed (more work for the Slave) in the last week of term, then when we returned (groan) for our summer incarceration, the carrots, spring onions, lettuce, and radish would be up and doing well.
Our enforced days’ holidays were punctuated by either Fangby Wife or Fangby Bootboy coming out with a battered toffee tin full of sandwiches. Lunch. We would fling the gristly old meat over the hedge, lay a young spring onion or a leaf or two of lettuce between the bread, and eat and enjoy. Thus we retained some independence from the Regime.
My feelings for the earth and the goodness of its fruits, not to mention its vegetables, date from that time. Earth gives you things you can actually eat without being sick. It is a miracle for which we should all be grateful. Pity that no more than sixteen boarders went to St Paul’s.
The dreadful years passed. Mr Fletcher was sacked for drunkenness and some wept to see him leave through the school gates. The Rev. Winterbottom left us, to be replaced by a Roman Catholic priest with bad breath called Father Chitterling, also well informed on what the Israelites got up to and why. One of our number, a boy we called Old Boghound for reasons long forgotten, came back at the beginning of term with news – rather garbled news – of how children were made and born. His sister had told him. Eggs came into it and it all sounded pretty disgusting. We gave Old Boghound six with his own cricket bat.
Beatings meant little to us, at bottom. Until my last term. One of our number, a large lad called Crouch, who looked like a neatly shaven dromedary, committed an Unforgivable Act. He was immediately expelled. Fangby locked him in a small attic room until his parents could collect him. His clothes were taken away.
We were lectured about this Act, which, we were told, would incur immediate beating and sacking if we perpetrated it. This was alarming and unenlightening, since the Act was never named. It was too terrible to be named. Had Crouch devised for himself the art of masturbation, only to be discovered when at the short sharp stroke stage? Had he been caught puffing at cigarettes? Had he seized on a once-in-a-lifetime chance to rape the Fangby Baby? Had he farted within ear-and nose-shot of Fangby Wife? We were never told, and I still keep hoping to come across old Crouch in some far Salvation Army shelter and get the truth from the horse’s mouth. The mystery of his Act increased the atmosphere of terror which prevailed.
Crouch was paraded before us the following day, in pyjamas, accompanied by a very grim and dropsical-looking Fangby holding a cricket stump. The classroom door was locked. Some of our number, sensing blood, asked immediately to Be Excused. Permission was not granted: we were to stay as assembled, to see that justice was done.
Fangby then proceeded to give Crouch twelve blows with the cricket stump on his bare bum. Everyone went deathly pale. Each whack brought a fall in the communal blood pressure. Two boys fainted, another we called the Mouse was sick on the floor. It showed there was good in us. Crouch never made a sound, but had to be helped from the room when the beating was over. It was little consolation to think that similar events had taken place in the Navy in Nelson’s day. The sinner left St Paul’s before sunset, and was presumably doomed from then on. Perhaps he died for England in the war then only three years away.
Whatever Crouch’s crime, Fangby’s was greater. Strange though it may be to admit such a thing, I had not until the flogging hated Fangby. There was something about his manner, a suspicion of fawning, a hangdog look which came over him, a droop in his shoulders, even a suspicion of apology on occasions when he addressed his little victims, which I found disarming. He was a soft-spoken man. Unlike Mr Fletcher, he did not use the whip of sarcasm on us. Perhaps in some fashion the monster was sorry for the way in which he earned his living. Perhaps – who knows – he too aspired to be a Gentleman.
The brutal flogging elevated him to a different category. He was now the enemy. He had demonstrated how Gentlemen were made – by Fear.
A gulf opened between the teachers and the taught. It was revealed to us as we cowered in our classroom after Crouch had been dragged away that a great division in the world lay between those who had power and those upon whom power was exercised. From now on, and for the rest of our lives, it was to be Us and Them. The Us was rather a solitary role.
The Them were multitudinous.
You may imagine that I was happy to leave St Paul’s. You may, but it would not be true. For my parents, ever tender for my welfare, had put my name down for a much larger school, Tremblingham College, which boasted four hundred boys. Since St Paul’s never boasted more than twenty, including day kids, the chances of bullying at Tremblingham might be reckoned at twenty times more likely.
I never adjusted to Tremblingham. It proved to be much like a larger scale St Paul’s without the laughs. Perhaps I would have done better if I had not felt I was being sent away as a punishment, as part of what amounted to a continued policy of not loving me. That feeling persisted throughout my school days, being now and then reinforced by one or other incident which showed I was not just imagining things.
While the pitiful round of school term, recovering from the last school term, and preparing oneself psychologically for the next school term, was in full swing, much was going on elsewhere.
The female Winter baby, first seen in these pages red-faced and supping milk, had by now grown up considerably, to the extent of running about and being able to bark like a dog when requested to do so. She had a name: Ellen Mary. She proved to be good value. Whereas I had been reduced to a dreadful lickspittle, hanging around to do anything my parents suggested in order to avoid even more severe punishment (The Hulks? The Inquisition? The Bar?), Ellen, confident of inexhaustible mother’s love, was a rebellious little spark, and an increasingly stalwart ally.
The sense of alliance grew when Mater again began to have swollen knees, to wear looser clothes, and to rest even longer in the afternoons. There was an impression that pink bootees were being knitted, new maids engaged, and new cans of powder lined up on the bathroom shelf. I knew these ominous signs of old. Though still blind to the finer points of reproduction, I sensed that another member of the family impended. And the treacherous thought came – it was going to be yet another little girl.
When this suspicion was conveyed to the first little girl, she was furious. Ellie was certainly not having a sister in the house. She’d rather have a big white dog, like Mrs Ravage’s. She began to play up in preparation for the event. I was flabbergasted at this show of spirit, which would certainly have involved me in another walk-out up Ipswich Street. Behind my invincible aura of non-confidence, I trembled when the bedclothes were flung on the fire, and when the bottle of Friars Balsam was hurled out of the window, followed defiantly by a new tube of Colgate’s Toothpaste. What powers of self-expression this sister had!
Alas, not even a new toothpaste tube can check the onward march of the fallopian tubes. Again the nurse dominated the house, all starched bosom and little pink nose, again the wailings of the newborn and the scent of meconia.
I was transfixed. All the old misery of disgrace went into psychic re-run. Was I again to be whisked off to granny’s and lose another twelve teeth? Perhaps it wouldn’t be so bad if Ellen were exiled as well. We could have fun in the mahogany-bound bath that made do-dos noises, and Ellen would certainly give granny a run for her money.
A maid brought us the joyous news. It was only a boy. I was saved. Good old God! Well played, Jesus! The parents would not get rid of me for a mere boy. I went back to Tremblingham with a relatively light heart. Ellen was furious, and at first refused to go to school. She had to be bought a little white dog – like Mrs Ravage’s but smaller – before she could be induced to venture farther than the front door-step.
This new boy, soon christened Clement, marked a turning point in the relationship between Ellen and me. We now had something we both disliked. It brought us closer together – as close as we could get, considering that I kept having to go to school for two-thirds of the year.
Rebellious boys are popular at school. Quiet boys are unpopular. Quietly rebellious boys are the most unpopular. I could see that once again Tremblingham was up to Fangby’s lark of trying to make us into Gentlemen – and with far better chances of success. So everything I did was against the grain, although I could not stop myself learning, since little else offered itself.
War was brewing. Over in Hitler’s Germany, the smart money were beginning to pack. Meanwhile, we had our little battles on the home front.
While relations with Mater could not be regarded as more than warm, with an occasional sunny period, father was a figure I admired from afar. He was all I hoped to be, and evidently as he himself hoped, a model son for his father, my authoritarian old grandad.
He had his role in superior Nettlesham society.
Both he and Mater had musical ability. Every Sunday, father played the organ in church. We entered solemnly into God’s temple, and nipped solemnly out of the same to the mighty strains he evoked. Evenings, he worked late in our shop, doing the orders. He did not smoke or gamble or drink. I never heard him swear. He was, however, a good man with a gun, won many prizes at shooting, and evidently had God’s okay to shoot rabbits and partridges and pheasants whenever they showed their faces in our part of Suffolk.
His brother Hereward was completely different. Hereward cared nothing for church. Every Sunday, Hereward lay in late, recovering from the excesses of the night before. He smoked, drank and gambled. Gambling was a kind of passion with Hereward. He never worked late in the shop, and was over in Newmarket, betting on the gee-gees, as often as he could. I often used to think it must be more fun in Uncle Hereward’s and Aunt Hermione’s house than in ours, had it not been for their three mischievous sons, my cousins, Seneca, Setebos, and Cecil. These large indolent lads were good at football, blowing up frogs with straws, sliding on partly frozen ponds, and other sports for which there was much local competition. They bullied anyone smaller than they (like me) and howled vigorously when beaten. They were all red-faced, with a redness which varied throughout life from acne to high blood pressure. I hated them because they once made another kid and me toss them all off twice in quick succession behind a barn.
Why had my father only one pale son plus little Clement, and Hereward three red-faced sons? It cannot have been just the luck of the draw. God must have had some excuse for making my father so short of male progeny and that progeny so inept at blowing up frogs with straws. The answer seems to be that he and Hereward related to their dread Pater, my grandad, much as Ellen and I did to Mater. Hereward always knew that whatever he did, however awful he and his sons were, he was sure of his Pater’s love; and my father, however good he was, however often he abstained from a pint or a drag on a Player’s, never could be sure that his Pater loved him.
As I have revealed, my origins were humble. Not that I saw them as humble at the time. Indeed, I thought of them as a cut above most origins, and the family – whatever its other shortcomings – as prosperous.
Grandad Winter’s was not any old ironmongery. It stood in the square of Nettlesham right next to the Westlake Memorial Hall. Father said it was the biggest ironmongery business, almost, in the country; which is to say that it may have been the thirty-first biggest. Anyhow, we sold a lot of galvanized pails, I can tell you.
These were the very pails I mentioned as ringing in the new life, my life. Their harmonies, less reckonable than a peal of bells, were awoken by my father’s reception of the news of the birth of his first son upstairs. He was at the time adjusting a price ticket saying Unrepeatable: 1/1½d. each: Bargain, when the news took him by as much surprise as if he had had no hand – or any other member – in the proceedings which precipitated my birth. He fell off the top of the steps on which he was balancing. Down he went. And with him went a dozen of the one shilling, one penny ha’penny pails, careering over the shop floor in great bucketfuls of sound, some actually rolling cheerfully out into the square. I was, you might say, into ironmongery from the very beginning. Nowadays they use the American term Hardware and done with it.
Grandad ruled over this shop with a rod of wood, which he applied without hesitation to my bare legs if I got in the way of customers.
He spent his days in a small office at the back. Its one window, not much more than a foot square, looked out on the brickwork of the side of the Westlake Memorial Hall. Wedged in with him was our cashier, Doris. In the front of the shop my father and his brother worked. Somehow father always got the dirty jobs and put up shutters, whereas it was Hereward who got to seduce the lovely Doris.
I was not popular in the shop. Things rattled when I went by. Nowhere was safe, nowhere was comfortable. Harsh surfaces threatened. On every side lurked stiff coconut matting, giant scrubbing brushes, blades of saws, bales of barbed wire, down to your humble emery paper. Fortunately, I was welcome in the shop next door, the little milliner’s and haberdasher’s run by Mrs Tippler and her two daughters, Rosemary and Ruth, among their soft goods.
No harsh surfaces here. Mrs Tippler was delicate and refined; conscious of her unfortunate name, bequeathed by a gent either deceased or permanently living up to his name in the Conversation Arms, she never touched a drop. Her two daughters were all peachy surface, pretty and pink and refinedly dressed – and a barrow-load of mischief when Mumsy was not around. I loved Rosemary Tippler. I loved Ruth Tippler. And this was rather odd because when I was twelve Ruth was thirteen and Rosemary was eighteen – at least a generation or two older than I, as it seemed.
But how desirably naughty they were. Since they took an interest in me, I blossomed in their sight. A detestable failing. Ever since, I have blossomed when a pretty woman showed interest in me, and after blossom comes the fruit, which has often been bitter.
When Mrs Tippler worked at her hats in the little room over her shop, or went out to see her ladies (those fortunates who had married Gentlemen), Rosemary and Ruth kept shop. I cannot remember them ever going to school. Perhaps they didn’t.
Rosemary loved to tease and kiss me. She had rich brown hair which she, like a smart young thing, had had shingled, whereas her younger sister had a crop of straight dark hair, kept in place by a big blue slide. Rosemary would say silly things to make me laugh and then laugh at me for laughing, and ask me if I was ‘all there’. When she had made me smart enough, she would kiss me. Real kisses. Marvellous kisses, mouth to mouth. Sometimes she would crush me to her tender bosom, when I could sniff how sweet she smelt. She would even permit me, momentarily, to feel her breasts when, excited beyond measure, I put my hand there.
It is really terrible to be twelve years old and not know what it is you wish so frantically to do. Terrible and delectable.
A green curtain was hung to cut off the rear of the shop. We felt ourselves safe behind it. They had few customers, and those often short-sighted.
Rosemary had a way of daring me to do something and being disapproving as I did it, while at the same time seeming to urge me on. Easy enough to say now that she was uncertain of her own sexuality and felt safe only when she could control the situation with a much younger boy. All that’s over the young boy’s head. He is in love and longing to experiment with all the dangerous forces whirling about him.
She wore a black velour dress on the day I was challenged to undo its little fiddly black buttons if I just dare. Every button undone was an absolute affront, an outrage.
‘Do you see this, Ruth? Look just at what he is doing now. Oh, you little devil, there goes another button. I’m going to go right out and tell your mum. What does he hope to find in there, I’d like to know. Eh, Joseph? What do you think is in there?’
It was warm in there. Perhaps from design, she wore no brassiere. Next moment a lovely soft breast was resting in the palm of my triumphant hand. It was a bit like finding an egg when you reach up into a bird’s still warm nest in the spring. Almost as exciting.
‘There, Ruth, what do you think he’s got hold of now? The cheek of it! I bet you didn’t expect to find that, did you, sonny? Why, you’re looking quite excited, and what exactly do you imagine you’re going to do with it now? You mustn’t be clumsy with it – it’s delicate enough to be set before the king …’
I drew it out into the curtained daylight of their room. Rosemary screamed with affront and caused the breast to pop in again like a startled rabbit. For years after that – all through my adolescence – I had visions of getting that breast out again and kissing it, and much else besides.
Ruth I also loved. Her part in all this sexy teasing was also important. She was the onlooker. She watched, giggled, and commented.
Out at the back of their shop was a small yard, wedged between high walls. It was there she showed herself no mere onlooker.
I had noted how she jumped up and down with excitement when her sister kissed me. Ruth was darker, her lips redder, than her elder sister. And evidently more emotional.
Excited by a tease I had just enjoyed with Rosemary, Ruth and I fell to kissing. Kisses are marvellous when you know of nothing better. Strawberries out of season. Unlike her sister, Ruth was interested in my body. That is how she soon came to be clutching a sausage shape in her hand, and how I came to have my hand in her knickers and to be fingering a little crescent moon of a fishpool, with bewilderment and joy.
Gasping, I let my head roll back – and saw that Rosemary was watching us out of the rear window.
The delight of those two girls, and the harmless play with them, made a return to Tremblingham doubly awful, but warmed many a cold night in my bed when I got there.
I was playing with some friends in Nettlesham Square one day when out came my mother to the edge of the pavement and called me.
‘What’s wrong?’ I asked, fearfully drawing near and feeling guilty as ever.
‘Your grandfather’s seriously ill, that’s what’s wrong. I don’t think you’d better play out there.’
So I didn’t, but it served little to improve the old man’s health. He was seventy-five and had suffered a stroke just before he left home for work that morning. His sons took him to hospital (in Hereward’s car), and father stayed by his bedside overnight. When the old man appeared to be sinking next morning, my father said to him – as mother faithfully reported to us later – ‘I hope you’ve divided the business up fairly between Hereward and me in your Will. Otherwise we’ll only quarrel over it.’
To which grandfather said, or rather husked, these drear words: ‘You’ll have to fight your own battles from now on, Ernest.’ An hour later, he died, right hand still clutching a book about Scott’s Expedition to the South Pole.
After the funeral, attended by all the other acceptable ironmongers for miles around, I returned to Tremblingham. Term was almost over when I received a letter from my mother saying that they were moving to a small house in Lowestoft. Lowestoft was to be home from now on. Hereward and father had quarrelled bitterly and Hereward had bought father out of the business.
Father had fought his own battle. And lost.
It was goodbye to galvanized pails at one shilling and one penny ha’penny, goodbye to red-faced Seneca, Setebos, and Cecil – already away learning to be Gentlemen at a much smarter school than mine – and goodbye, alas, alas, to Rosemary and Ruth, my two loves. Nettlesham was now behind me for ever, and I returned at term end to a saturnine house on three floors, with two small rooms on every floor and a smell of fish emanating from the basement, standing at the fishier end of Lowestoft.
My parents, who so often had no idea, had no idea that I might miss my various friends and enemies in Nettlesham. I was simply left to adjust to the new circumstances on my own. Defeated, I retired to the top floor of the house and played under the sloping roof with my Hornby trains. Ellen by now was old enough to serve as a competent guard or ticket collector. Come summer, we found our way to Oulton Broad, and there we swam together, the best of companions.
That side of life was enjoyable. In the house, gloom reigned. My father felt himself a displaced person. He did not acquire another business for himself, nor would he work for others. Instead, he invested his little nest egg in large decayed houses, in which we would live while he redecorated and repaired them, and strove mightily to get the garden into order again. Then he would sell at a profit, and start the process over again in another old house. So our homes became impermanent.
Father had little to do with us. He became a man of deep silences. We saw him as someone on the top of ladders, painting ceilings, or at the bottom of gardens, laying crazy paving. He was another crippled goat that lost its way.
These cottagers, in kinship close, yet share
No words, no joys; before their cheerless grate
They live apart, though bound by kindred fate.
Father came into his own when buying property. While the owner was extolling the merits of his house, father would stand creaking a board beneath his foot – he unerringly found out creaking boards – and interrupt suddenly, saying, ‘Is this floor rotten, do you know?’ Or he would tap at a wall and ask, wistfully, ‘Any death watch beetle recently?’ His way of looking at guttering or sash windows could reduce a proud owner to silence.
At selling houses, father was equally adroit. He never used an estate agent. So for a while his business flourished. He made money. But the war was approaching fast, and property on the East Coast became very slow. Finally, nothing was selling, and father was left with a monstrous house on his hands. He closed it down in a fit of desperation, and took us off to Cornwall to live – a great swerve in his life, as if to avoid demons. The Lowestoft house was commandeered by the military during the war, and sold off later to the council for a song. It is now demolished. Twenty town houses stand where it once stood.
At this point came a break in the narrative. Using a different pen, Joseph resumed further down the page.
It is impossible to continue as I began. The protective tone of levity has failed, after taking me through the years of early childhood. Long after that, until I was grown up, until after I left the army, I could never communicate to anyone the shame I felt at my mother’s desertion of me and my banishment to my grandmother’s house in Lavenham.
Much of the pain came from a source quite beyond my control, years before my birth. I have said that I was my parents’ elder son but not their first-born. Here’s the awful secret. They had another child, born six years before me, which died.
The story of my generation, now getting a little long in the tooth, is set about with war. We were a parenthesis between wars. My parents-to-be, young Ernest Winter and Madge Scoones, met during World War I, when he was on leave and she was acting as temporary nurse in a hospital in London. He was so eager to meet her again after the war that, when the home-coming troopship on which he was sailing was delayed outside Southampton harbour, he dived overboard and swam ashore. This exploit became a family story. It was hard to equate the aloof father I knew with that eager young man.
They were married in Nettlesham, Ernest’s home town, in June of 1919, after a brief engagement. In March of 1920, a child was born to them.
How can I best relate this dark story? I never remember a time when my mother was not telling me about that dead child. Father never spoke of it. It was a girl. Mater told me piously, ‘Your poor little sister is with the angels now.’
It happened that an old book I often looked through contained steel engravings of religious subjects. Perhaps it was an illustrated edition of Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress – a book which even as late as my childhood could still be found in every self-respecting religious home. One picture showed a small boy climbing a hill. Over his head – rather uncomfortably close, to my infant mind – floated a small girl angel, with only a shred of cloud to conceal her nudity. This menacing little phenomenon became my dead sister, hanging over me like the Sword of Damocles. The Angel of Damocles.
Nothing I did was ever as good as what my steel-engraving angel would have done. Nor could I in any fashion prove an adequate substitute for her. Mater would in no way allow my coming into the world to appease her grief for the child that had left it. It was her tragedy and she needed to hold it to her.
Her story was that the little creature had lived only six months before fading out. ‘We just have to believe,’ she told me, ‘that she was too good for this world.’ Six years of mourning had gone by, and then I turned up. She felt herself insulted. ‘We just have to pray that next time it’s a little girl,’ she told me.
Next time, it was a little girl. It was Ellen. Ellen assuaged Mater’s wretchedness as I could never do. Gradually, she became more cheerful, more human, and, by the time World War II broke out, she was able to confront its vicissitudes with amiable courage.
But that wretched little steel-engraving angel took far longer to fade from its position a foot above my head.
My despair at school became worse when father again moved house to buy a small business in Bude, in Cornwall. On that occasion, my parents removed my sister Ellen from her school and took her down with them to a local school. I, however, was left at Tremblingham, despite my pleas to be moved too. Clem was just an infant then.
I took this rejection as a further desertion. Coming at puberty, it went very hard with me, and I suffered a nervous breakdown. The school doctor was a sympathetic man, and sent me nearer home. For some weeks, I was housed in a small private nursing home on the north Cornish coast, and allowed to recover gradually. In the evenings, in a season of calm weather, we were able to watch from the upper windows the first wartime convoys moving out of the Bristol Channel into the Atlantic, the ships outlined against a setting sun.
There I experienced again a recurrent dream which had first come to comfort me at my grandmother’s, at the age of five. But my recovery was due as much as anything to a woman called Irene Rosenfeld, who lived only a few minutes away from the nursing home.
Irene was in her mid-twenties. Of course I thought of her as much older than I. In the October of 1941, when we set eyes on each other, I was fifteen, and in many respects still a hag-ridden little boy. We met on my daily walks along the cliffs and at first we only talked together. Then Irene invited me to her house for tea.
She was completely alone. She had a big complicated family, but they lived elsewhere. She was married to a man now serving in the Air Force, who came home on leave only occasionally. She was lonely but did not actually want the burden of a love affair. I was her substitute – her victim, I suppose, in some ways. So I can see the situation, years later. At the time, however, I fell into her embrace and her tuition with gratitude.
They best can learn, who court the Muse
When learning doth with gentle joy infuse
as old Westlake remarked of more academic matters.
The days at the nursing home became transformed. I lived in a golden daze, to think that I would be with her all afternoon and evening, that we would be naked to each other and in bed together. I could not believe my luck. Here was someone who really did love me, and showed it abundantly. Later, it became possible for me to see that, in her kind way, Irene was merely enjoying sex with me, and passing empty hours in a manner she thought safest; but for me it was a full-blown love affair, tinged with some pathos to think that my poor darling was so old.
The threatened return of Irene’s husband on leave happened to coincide with the nursing home’s declared intention of returning me to school. I bought her flowers, I made her speeches, I felt my heart breaking, I suppose I was as absurd as a fifteen-year-old can be. Irene took it all seriously and sweetly, and kissed me over and over, even weeping prettily as we finally parted.
Somehow, the remaining school years passed. In fact, I was happy at school for the first time. I had something positive to set against all the previous negativity. I talked smut like the rest of the boys – but that pure affair (as I regarded it) with Irene remained my precious secret, to be shared with no one.
In the autumn of 1943, I was conscripted into the army, and went straight from school into a barracks at Prestatyn. The days of my childhood were finished. Within a year, I found myself in Burma.
Joseph’s ‘Life History’ ended there. Part II, mentioned in the opening paragraphs, was missing. There, Joseph had promised to show how he had misunderstood his own story.
The meaning of that curious remark as yet remained obscure to Clement.