My brother went to the Hulme Grammar School and I was destined for the Manchester Grammar, but at seven I got meningitis, and when I began to recover the doctor said, ‘Don’t worry about schooling, just concentrate on keeping him alive.’ So I was sent to Longsight Grammar School, which had moved into a vast house in Victoria Park and therefore was only five minutes’ walk away. I hated it.
Whether such schools could exist today, with the Department for Education maintaining a supervisory interest, I don’t know. It was presided over by an extremely brilliant, extremely religious, extremely eccentric clergyman called Arthur Frederick Fryer who ran the school almost on his own, with the aid of his wife, a couple of women teachers, another man whose name I can’t remember – only his nickname, Snowball – and a couple of masters who came in occasionally.
Running the school was almost literally true of A. F. Fryer. My memories of him seem chiefly to consist of seeing him in flight from one place to another, mortar board perilously perched, gown fluttering like the Witch of Endor. He was also immensely kind when his poisonous little charges gave him the opportunity to be. At the annual school concert the school song ended on a very high note, and each year someone screamed his way well above the others. It was darkly whispered among small boys that Old Fryer was responsible.
Teaching at the school was chaotic but moderately sound – the bright sparks came to the surface, the dullards sank without trace. I was a bright spark and floated upwards easily enough without having to exert myself. I won prizes every year – not because of any supreme cleverness on my part, but because the competition was so mediocre. The only reason I can imagine people sent their children to Longsight Grammar was because it was fee-paying and because it carried some small cachet by being both a grammar school and ‘ within the Park’. Or because of proximity – as in my case.
I was taken to meet the high master of the Manchester Grammar School – a man called Paton – and was accepted for the school, but then pneumonia arrived, the doctor told my parents I would not live the night, and, when I did, they decided to play safe and not commit me to a three-mile trip in all weathers, half of it walking, twice a day. So I stayed where I was.
The fact that I hated school need not be taken in itself as a criticism of the school I went to. I would have hated any school. Many years later it dawned on me, looking back over the evidence, that my mother badly wanted a girl when I was born, and although she mostly disguised her feelings she would dearly have loved to dress me up in buttons and bows. When it turned out that I was ‘ delicate’ – unlike my brother, who ailed nothing – she was able to sublimate her mixed feelings on my mistaken gender by lavishing every care and attention on me, guarding me against every chill or ill, ministering to my every want. So I was a spoiled brat. She even somehow delayed sending me to school until I was seven; but when I did go I did not at all care for the new and abrasive life it offered me.
My mother was a very strong character. Even when I criticize her I never forget her many sterling qualities. She was a faithful and loyal wife, a devoted mother, generous and guardedly warmhearted, struggling always with debility rather than real ill-health, a singularly pure woman – as indeed my father was pure. (I have written a little about them in a short story called ‘ The Island’.) It was not so much that they didn’t see the evils of life as that they chose to ignore them. Both born and brought up in Victorian times, they seem to exemplify so much that was best in that age. They believed in English liberal democracy, and in the perfectibility of man. My home was always warm and sheltering.
Loving too, but in a very undemonstrative way. Kissing was almost unknown – as indeed was praise. Praise might make you get above yourself, and that would never do. Self-esteem was the cardinal sin. ‘Side’, as we called it. It’s ingrained in me even today.
I remember when I was about nine finding my mother in tears because of the racking uncertainty of having her eldest son in the trenches and liable to be killed or maimed at any time. My father said: ‘Go and comfort your mother.’ I went across and perched on the arm of her chair, and kissed her and stroked her face. I did this willingly and sympathetically, but I was horribly embarrassed in the act. It wasn’t quite the sort of thing that happened in our family. We loved, but we didn’t demonstrate our love.
Despite her virtues, my mother, as the custodian of a highly strung, oversensitive and over-imaginative child, had a number of signal disadvantages. She loved to make your flesh creep – and God, did she not make mine! It was not of ghosts of which she spoke but of ill-health. Her brilliant china-blue eyes would focus on you when she told you for the tenth time about her cousin Ernest, who went to a danceand, coming home in the train, when still very hot from his exertions, gave up his seat to a lady and stood with his back to the open window. He was dead within a week, of pneumonia. And of his brother Henry who died the following year from the same thing: they were twenty-one and twenty-two. And of Cousin Essie, who when playing in the garden used to say to my mother, ‘ Feel my heart, cousin, feel how it beats so fast.’ And she too died, at nineteen. Speaking of our doctor, that eminent man who when much younger had saved my grandmother by taking her off the bottle, she would say to some visiting friend, ‘Of course our doctor, Dr Scotson, is a very good man, but’ – in lowered voice but never too low for me to hear – ‘far too fond of the knife.’ Her attitude to me was embodied in the words: ‘Wrap up, Winston’, ‘ Take a scarf, Winston’, ‘Put your other coat on, it’s a nasty east wind’, etc., etc., da capo.
Of course there was some reason for the concern. For a year after my bout of meningitis I would start screaming in the middle of the night, and my father would pick me up and carry me about the room, eyes open, still screaming, but not awake. I had the most ghastly dreams, some of which I could recall even into middle life. There is one I still remember about breaking knuckles. For most of my early youth if I ran fifty yards I would begin to cough like a broken cab horse. After the lightest, most casual rough and tumble with a friend I would feel sick for an hour. Although naturally highspirited, all this was a constant brake on high spirits, so that I often appeared even more reserved and more shy than I actually wanted to be.
Not that I didn’t have friends. I was not unpopular at school – except with a few hearty oafs – and had my own coterie of four or five boys, with whom I had a lot of fun. Also there were another four or five, who lived in Curzon Avenue but did not go to Longsight Grammar School, who formed another circle of which I was the sort-of leading spirit. Never the leading spirit when it came to any kind of athletic prowess, but almost always so in other things. I used to read some book of adventure and then they would sit round in a circle while I retold them the story – this often at great length. They would shout with annoyance if I tried to break off too soon. They adopted names I invented and games I devised.
A few girls used to be about too, though they were never part of the group. I remember kissing Hilda Carter fifty-four times in one day, which was considered a world record. But it was all very matter of fact, and she didn’t seem to mind.
What was not matter of fact was a meeting with a girl called Amy Warwick in Morecambe when I was thirteen. It took me five years to get over that. I think it was Edith Wharton who wrote somewhere: ‘One good heartbreak will provide the novelist with a succession of different novels, and the poet with any number of sonnets and lyric poems, but he must have a heart that can break.’
The last two or three years at school were not so dislikeable. Freed of the necessity of making a new life in a new and better school, I continued to coast along, doing just enough work to come top, growing much taller and a bit stronger, senior to the majority of the chaps in the school, and eventually a prefect. The number in my class lessening until there were only seven, avoiding school sports but taking up tennis; it was not such an agony turning out every day. All the same, the tuition was eccentric and sometimes inefficient.
But in the early school years, alongside my many genuine ailments were psychosomatic indispositions fostered by my dislike of school and the fact that on a day-school basis one could have a day off or even a morning off without too much difficulty. Compare the horrors of an early breakfast, a five-minute tramp through the rain, an uncongenial desk and an uncongenial task with a group of fairly uncongenial boys, an irascible master or mistress, scribbling in exercise books, learning verses from the Bible or from poetry, struggling with French, then wild affrays in the passages and all the other undesirable moments in a tedious and tiring day – compare it to a day at home: reading over a more leisurely breakfast, reading in the lavatory, reading in the dining room in a comfortable armchair before a blazing fire, reading over dinner, reading in the afternoon, reading over supper, reading in bed – the only discomfort being that I didn’t know what prep I should have been doing for the following day. It’s little wonder that a feverish headache or a bout of morning vomiting occurred too often to be true.
I saw little of my father at these times – he was away in the mornings before I woke – but my mother, though she no doubt suspected part of my ailments were sham, could never be absolutely sure the symptoms were not the onset of some dire genuine illness, and it was very much in her nature to pamper her children anyhow.
Perhaps she comfortably argued that I was ‘educating myself’. It was partly true. My parents didn’t have a big collection of books: a few novels, Dickens, Thackeray, Lytton, some good general books on such things as Evolution, Botany, and Astronomy; but above all there was a ten-volume ‘New Edition’ of Chambers’ Encyclopedia. This was a goldmine. I read the volumes endlessly, hopping from one subject to another like a honey-drunk bee. They opened new worlds for me.
But in addition to these I had a daily diet of ‘ comics’ – six a week – and when a lending library was discovered I was able to borrow sensational novels which I lapped up at a phenomenal rate, thereby debasing my taste. I remember winning a handsomely bound Walter Scott novel – The Talisman – as a prize and making a great effort on it but finding it completely unreadable. Perhaps there really is a trace of the philistine in me, for I have not read it even yet.
When I met Sybille Bedford for the first time a few years ago, in addition to congratulating her on her magnificent books, including her just published and semi-autobiographical novel Jigsaw, I said how bitterly, bitterly I envied her her childhood. ‘Why?’ she said. ‘ It was not particularly happy.’ ‘I know,’ I said, ‘ but it was so rich in every sort of literary and artistic influence. You lived and breathed in a world where great literature came more naturally to you than the daily paper. In spite of all your vicissitudes, shortage of money, treks across Europe and the rest, everything was put before you, in art, in music, in writing. You accepted the best because you knew no other.’
It must be said, though, that in my early writing years I remember being thankful not to have been to a university, where one was taught to have the opinions of one’s mentors. (Surely F. R. Leavis’s unforgivable sin was teaching the young to sneer.)
Instead I came in wading through the trash, picking my own path, making my own discoveries and choices which for better or worse were not imposed from without.
But one of the greatest drawbacks in not going to a university, though I did not realize it then, was not in missing the tuition but in not meeting students of my own age, of like or different opinion (on whom I could sharpen my own mind), and of making friendships which would last all through the years.
In my early twenties I was invited, with two others, under the auspices of the WEA, to go to a summer school being held at Wadham College, Oxford. As an introductory task, I was invited to write an essay on Charles Morgan’s The Fountain, which was a book greatly admired by the critics. I wrote an essay so adverse that I was not at all popular with my tutors when I got there. So maybe some contrariness in my nature might have enabled me to preserve an independent judgement anyhow.
Saturday the 8th of August 1914 was a warm summery day, but towards noon the sky clouded over and it was beginning to rain, as it sometimes does in Manchester.
I had wandered in from outside; my mother was in the kitchen with the maid, so I went into the drawing room. This was unoccupied – only the piano looked tempting; but I went back into the hall and thence to the dining room. My father, sober and grave, was standing on one side of the fireplace and my brother, rosy cheeks and eyes glinting, was on the other. They were discussing an event which had occurred the previous Tuesday; Britain, in defence of Belgium, had declared war on Germany.
I remember exactly what my brother excitedly said as I came in. ‘It’ll be a regular flare up!’ My father gravely shook his head. But neither of them dreamed that my brother would eventually grow to be old enough to be drawn in. When he was, in late 1917, he was drafted into the South Wales Borderers and began his training at Kinmel Park, North Wales. It was known locally as Kill’em Park, because of the dozens of young men who died there from pneumonia and allied diseases before they got anywhere near a German. I remember going to see him once, trailing with my mother across what seemed like miles to a great flat camp where he appeared abruptly at the door of a wooden hut, pale and suddenly thin and with an appalling cough.
Later he was transferred to Newmarket, and in the early spring of 1918 was sent to France. People said to my mother, ‘Oh, they won’t put him in the firing line – they’ll keep him in the rear, he’s far too young.’ In fact he went straight in and was in the thick of the great Ludendorff Offensive that sent the Allies reeling and prompted Haig’s famous ‘Backs to the Wall’ message. One day my mother got a telegram from the War Office. With terrified fingers she fumbled it open to see that her lance corporal son had been ‘wounded but remained on duty’. In fact a shell splinter had cut his face just below the eye. Had it been an inch higher it would probably have killed him and so altered not only his destiny but mine and that of scores of other people, since without his pressure we might not have moved to Cornwall. So all one’s destiny is controlled and decided by the direction of a flying splinter.
In September 1918, to his family’s profound relief, he was sent home to train for a commission. It was to be in the Machine Gun Corps, which was known in the army as the Suicide Club; but before he could go back to France the Armistice came.
It must all have been a shattering experience for a boy just out of school, a genteel boy who had never been away from home. I remember the maid picking the lice off his shirt when he came home. He was so inured to maiming and death that during a ninehour German bombardment at the beginning of the Ludendorff Offensive, he sat all the time on a box of Mills bombs in a mudfilled trench listening to a solitary British gun, an eighteen-pounder, persisting with its lonely reply. His only company was two members of his platoon, and they were dead.
Yet when he himself lay dying nearly seventy years later I sat by his bed and somehow the question of the war came up, and he said: ‘I wouldn’t have missed it for anything.’ Such is the oddity of human nature.
By the end of the war he was just twenty and his natural destination in a dishevelled civilian world would have been a position with his father at D. Mawdsley & Co. But the objections of my uncle, who had four sons coming on, blocked this, so he took a position with a firm of cotton shippers called Jones, London & Garrard, who shortly offered him a post as their chief representative in Hong Kong. It was a brilliant opportunity, with high pay and fine prospects, but he turned it down; his nine months in France had convinced him that he wanted no more travel. So he worked for the firm for several years in England in what was, because of the collapse of the Indian and Chinese markets, to become a dead-end job. As it happened, the man who went out to Hong Kong in his place was murdered, so it was not altogether an ill decision.
He soon wanted to marry, could not possibly afford to on his then salary, and my uncle had succeeded in introducing his two eldest sons into D. Mawdsley & Co.
Cecil said he owed a great debt of gratitude to Uncle Tom for his jealousy, for otherwise he would probably never have come to live in Cornwall. Taking a holiday there with his fiancée in September 1924, at a place he chose at random out of the Great Western Railway Holiday Guide, he fell instantly in love with the county and the village of Perranporth. Having got there eighteen months later, he never wanted to move again, even after he had retired, and never did move again, for all the rest of his long life.
When my father was fifty-four he took his bath one November Sunday morning, came down and sat in the drawing room to read the Sunday Chronicle. But after a few minutes he found he could not hold the paper; he was losing the use of his right hand and arm. Then he lost the use of his right leg. Then he lost his speech. Then he lost consciousness. Coming chattering in as a noisy schoolboy, I was stopped by the maid, who said: ‘Hush, your father’s ill!’ I stared at her and said: ‘D’you mean Mother?’
My father in my eyes was never ill. He never had been. The apostle of fitness, he used to jump gates instead of opening them. He was never known to be tired. The year before this, taking one of his regular walks with his men friends, they found on reaching the station to go home that they had walked twenty-four miles. So while waiting for the train he ran up and down the platform so that he could say he had done twenty-five.
It was a strange mixture – of this relentlessly energetic man and this delicate woman who was always tired and had no stamina at all. (Perhaps I am a fair mix of the two.) If he ever felt impatient with her he never for a second showed it. Nothing was too good for her, nothing too much trouble. If there was ever impatience in his heart it showed only with his sons – much more particularly towards me, whom his wife was bringing up as a mollycoddle. For, except with my mother, he was not really a sensitive man. When he took Cecil to an indoor swimming pool for the first time he told him to jump in at the deep end and he’d paddle his way easily back to safety. Instead Cecil was hauled out half-drowned, and as a result never learned to swim in his life.
During my childhood and early youth I saw my father only at weekends and sometimes briefly in the evenings, and his attitude towards me always seemed to be one of abruptness and slight disparagement. When I was thirteen I went down with lobar pneumonia, and the doctor, finding me unable even to cough, warned my parents that I was not likely to live the night. In the bedroom, after he had gone, my father rounded on my mother, blaming her bitterly for allowing me to go back to school when I hadn’t properly recovered from influenza. I remember listening to this and thinking: ‘ Good Lord, he’s fond of me!’
On that sad Sunday morning when he was taken ill they sent a maid hurrying for the doctor. Our own doctor was out, so another man came. He made a brief examination, lifted my father’s eyelid, and shook his head. He left a note at our own doctor’s, saying his patient would be dead before nightfall.
But the patient did not die. Instead a bed was brought down to the drawing room and a day nurse and a night nurse were engaged. These women were stiff and starched and demanding. The night nurse’s first insistence was that our new drawing-room carpet must be washed with carbolic soap. For six months they ruled the house while my father climbed slowly back to life and, to the doctor’s astonishment and delight, began to move his right arm and leg again. Presently he was able to go out in a wheelchair, then to walk with a stick – a few steps, and ever a few steps further. But physically he was a ruined man, and such had been the damage to his brain that he began to have fits – sometimes twice a month, sometimes at longer intervals. In them he would go purple and grey, and as the fit reached its climax he would scream at the top of his voice. No sedative was able to cure or prevent them. Sometimes a handkerchief tied and tightened around the right arm would check them and the attack would pass off with only a brief aguelike shaking.
It was at this early stage of his convalescence that we bought a wheelchair, which he could steer by means of a long iron handle at the front, and during the first summer holidays I used to push him as far as Birch Park where, on a quiet afternoon, he would get out and sit on a park seat, sometimes chatting – so far as he was able – with a friend. During these peaceful interludes I raised his ire more than once by standing on the chair, steering with the bar and pushing with the other leg. This way one could get up a fine turn of speed and go careering round the park paths with the wheelchair going backwards.
It was the following summer that I went with my parents for a prolonged stay at Morecambe. My father by then could walk short distances with a stick; we stayed at a small hotel at the end of Regent Road and walked every morning to the front, on to the pier and along to its end where every day a concert party called ‘Jack Audley’s Varieties’ performed. No doubt a more adventurous boy would have struck out on his own, but, apart from absenting myself when there was a rough sea to watch – and sometimes the sea can be spectacularly rough there – I went along and listened and, of course, read. Because the concert party was not geared to people staying more than two weeks the programmes repeated fairly frequently, so that in the end I could, without conscious effort, remember and sing, with all the words, their entire repertoire. Even today I can remember twenty songs, and when my children were young I would sometimes entertain them with these. Reference was then sometimes made to ‘Daddy’s music-hall days’. Alas, all my music-hall days were spent reclining in a deckchair.
Of course after his illness my father was quite incapable of any form of work, and within four months my Uncle Tom called to say regretfully that the firm could no longer afford to pay his salary. I listened, convinced that destitution stared us in the face, not knowing that my father for years had taken a derisory salary in order to bolster the profits of the firm, of which my mother, being a partner with her two brothers, took a third share.
Tom’s eldest son, the younger Tom, whom I much liked, presently joined the firm. Young Tom was a very strange character (an extreme example of the kind of eccentric the Mawdsley family occasionally throws up): an intellectual, a lover of music and the arts, a dilettante, and a neurotic. Like his three brothers he was brought up under the iron hand of his irritable, ill-tempered, jolly, uncultured, weathercock of a father, and when the boys were at home they did everything they were told, exactly as they were told, and no questions asked. (My mother said they crept around the house like white mice.) May, their mother, was an easygoing, eventempered but astute woman who alone knew how to manage Tom senior. The boys, when they possibly could, kept out of his way.
But young Tom, although he did not marry and continued to live at home, developed a life of his own, joined the Manchester Athenaeum, went to concerts and read widely. In a way he was a sad young man – and there are many such about – a person with a passion for culture and no creative talent at all. At the age of twentyfour, having read deeply in psychiatry, he went to an analyst and for the rest of his short life visited him five times a week. In the mid- Thirties he began to take an active interest in the persecution of the Jews in Hitler’s Germany and Austria, and by various contrivances – such as finding or inventing jobs for them in the firm – was able to get a half-dozen of them to the safety of England. Because of his work in this field he convinced himself that he was a marked man whose name would be in the Nazi Black Book, which would condemn him to a concentration camp if Hitler were to win the war. When France collapsed and the British army straggled back weaponless from Dunkirk, Tom thought the war lost and committed suicide by jumping from a third-floor window of the warehouse. He left a note saying: ‘I have died for democracy.’
The second son, Harry, was much more normal, a typical thrusting unintellectual North Country good-timer, good-looking and a smart dresser. He would probably have done well in the firm and for the firm, but decided one fine June morning to drive with a friend to Wimbledon in his new Riley. At five o’clock in the morning, racing along the empty roads, they met a bus on the wrong side of the road, the driver having gone to sleep. Both young men were killed instantly.
Tom’s youngest son, Denis, was eventually drafted in to the firm, so fortunately it remained a family concern.