Our photograph albums sat in a decrepit pyramid that I occasionally looked at as a child, but scrutinised with more intensity as the years went by. The black and white photographs are largely unposed, and all have a strangely ethereal quality to them. They begin with pictures of Mervyn as a young boy in China and end in the Priory Hospital fifty-six years later. One picture shows him as a ten-year-old cub scout. It always seemed so odd somehow, so hard to imagine him dib-dibbing and bob-a-jobbing in such a remote landscape. Back straight, hands in pockets, his left foot is placed way in front of his right, as though making sure that at least one of his feet was planted firmly on the ground. He has a sensitive, intelligent face and is so handsome that, as a seven-year-old girl, I would look at this photograph, hoping one day to have a cub-scout boyfriend as handsome as he was.
There is only one picture of my mother as a child, and I would gaze at it sometimes for its peculiarly old-fashioned quality. A tiny girl with a Louise Brooks bob wears a very short, white lace dress, the legs that hold her body upright as skinny as two matchsticks. She is dwarfed by a gigantic doll’s pram. Her miniature face in profile, she clasps the handle of the pram as a stout nanny in full, ankle-length uniform watches over her. As the story of her childhood unfolded that evening, so the picture confirmed the differences between my parents’ early lives. The ease of the poses captured in China could have been taken today; the lone picture of Maeve seemed from another century. Time moves on as the pages turn, but the mood remains the same, a light-hearted, illusory mood that seems almost timeless. Images of Mervyn clasping a branch above his head like the enormous antlers of a deer, now full face, now profile, the same branch, but held differently. In some his eyes are closed, in others, open, but in every frame he looks at one with the antlers, as though they are growing from him. Other photographs from the same day have him lying languorously in the branches of a tall oak tree, as if that’s where he belongs.
The wedding photographs are the only formal images that the albums contain. Two stiff, uncomfortable young people stare nervously at the camera, as though aching to peel off their clothes and run away – from everyone: guests, family, attention. Neither had wanted any fuss, but had been worn down by family pressure to marry where generations of Gilmores had married – St James’s, Spanish Place, in the heart of London’s West End. Mervyn dressed for the first and last time in a morning suit, black leather shoes gleaming in the winter air, gloves and top hat clasped tightly to his chest. Maeve is in oyster-coloured velvet. The dress still hangs in my wardrobe, the velvet as soft as on the day she married, the seventeen-inch waist measured and corroborated to quell my disbelief.
Physically, Mervyn and Maeve were very different, and if you didn’t know them well, their temperaments could seem very different, too. Mervyn was a flamboyant, confident man, at home in any surroundings in which he found himself, and with the combination of his Welsh mother’s dark, brooding looks and English father’s height, he cut a striking figure. His hair, worn much longer than was usual for the time, his unconventional and colourful clothes, together with the gold, hooped earrings he wore in both ears, made him one of the well-known figures in Soho and Fitzrovia in the thirties. His looks may have been brooding but his temperament was anything but. He was flirtatious and good fun, with an earthy sense of humour and a twinkle in his eye.
In stature and colouring my mother was his exact opposite. She was pale, fair and extremely slight and, unlike Mervyn, she was nervy, and desperately shy. She also dressed in a highly individual way for the times, with red espadrilles that tied all the way up her legs, skin tight Chinese dresses with high collars and gashes on either side, and fitted tweed hunting jackets worn over floor-length cotton skirts. Gigantic drop earrings hung from her ears and huge Spanish combs held up her hair but, apart from the unconventionality of her dress, she had none of the natural ease of my father. Yet her sense of humour was as quick and just as abstract as his. In Mervyn, she saw the poet she had always dreamed of; in Maeve, he saw everything a poet could ever want. Diana Gardner, a former student of Mervyn’s at the Westminster School of Art, recalled them at this time. ‘He gave off a sense of sentient vitality, as if he lived a “little extra”, and his senses were also a “little extra”. Here was the perfect Byronic romantic figure – jet black hair bursting upwards from a high forehead and a long narrow face in which were embedded bright blue eyes and sharply cut incisions in either side of a full, yet narrow and sensitive mouth. It is probably now quite obvious that the female students found him irresistible for, apart from his fascinating looks, he always seemed, while sitting beside any one of them, teaching, to be wholly interested in that one alone. It was apparent that he liked women, although he was also popular with the male teachers and students.
‘Mervyn mentioned almost in passing that he was going to be married in two months’ time – and this was proffered by someone who had been accepted as a kind of perpetual Don Juan!’ Diana remembered. ‘It was an equal surprise to hear that the woman chosen was also a student at the Westminster – but not known to anyone in the life class because she worked quietly downstairs in Eric Shilsky’s sculpture class.’
During a break, Diana and other students went to the sculpture room to be introduced to Maeve by a diffident Mervyn. Maeve had ‘her gold hair scraped back into a knot and pinned, and with two-inch gold rings hanging from small ear lobes, she could be recognised as an artist’s archetypal human being: someone from a Florentine painting’.
It went without saying that Maeve Gilmore would marry well, and she did marry well, but in a wildly different way from what her parents expected or hoped for. Although irresistible to Maeve, Mervyn was anything but irresistible to her parents. Frightened by the intensity of their daughter’s passion for a man who was never going to make any money, she was sent to Germany to learn the language and, if all went to plan, forget this impoverished artist. A life of ‘making do’ wasn’t what they had in mind for their youngest and most beautiful child and, after a while, with a few hundred miles between them, she would, they were sure, forget.
For six months she lived in a castle owned by a cheerful widow, Baroness Von Norbeck, travelling back and forth to Bonn every day for her art classes. While there, she witnessed Hitler speaking at a parade, and never forgot the terrifying magnetism he held over the crowd. Maeve and Mervyn wrote every day of those painful months spent apart (the letters were destroyed during the war when a bomb hit her parents’ new house in Chelsea Square) and when Maeve returned home, she refused to consider marrying anyone else – ever. She would become a nun, live in a closed-order convent and bid farewell to everything and everyone if the answer was no. Her adoring parents eventually gave in. Mervyn’s lack of money and address (a warehouse in Hester Road, Battersea) and his bohemian ways couldn’t disguise his lovely nature and passionately focused approach to work, and it wasn’t long before they became very fond of their prospective son-in-law.
For all the differences in their upbringings – Maeve’s spoilt and sophisticated, Mervyn’s modest and unique –my parents were alike. They were made of the same stuff, and on 1 December 1937, Miss Maeve Patricia Mary Theresa Gilmore married Mr Mervyn Laurence Peake.
They moved to Primrose Mansions, to a flat overlooking Battersea Park, where my nineteen-year-old mother described herself at this time as knowing nothing of anything – cooking, cleaning, conversation, life. There was no one alive more boring than her, she said. Mervyn, by now making quite a name for himself, was proudly introducing his new bride to a very different world. At first, intimidated by the people she met, people she knew by reputation, she was painfully shy. But the first and, at the time, most famous poet she was introduced to, Walter de la Mare, immediately put her at her ease with his gentle, friendly manner. He had invited Mervyn to tea at his house in the country so he and his wife could meet Maeve. And slowly, through her husband’s belief in her, she began to acquire a quiet self-confidence that was to remain with her for the rest of her life.
In 1938 they moved from Battersea to Maida Vale, where they painted side by side on two floors of a rented house, living on the money they earned by selling their pictures and with some help from Maeve’s parents. Patricia Herington, a neighbour in Randolph Avenue, remembered those days:
Our back gates opened on to a large communal garden. One afternoon my mother washed my hair, gave me a clean frock and sent me out there. I didn’t yet know the neighbouring children. One or two spoke tome and told me there was to be a party. I suppose my mother knew and hoped I might get scooped up and included. That didn’t happen. All the children disappeared and I stayed on my bench feeling left out and too ashamed to go home. Your parents saw me from the window and came down to rescue me. Once upstairs, they gave me strawberries and ice cream. The afternoon changed colour. These two wonderful beings liked me. And Mervyn –my exciting artist friend – had chosen to paint me and not one of the other children. A tiny incident but of enormous importance to that little girl who was me. You see how kind your parents were.
Their flat was a delight – especially to a child. There was something lovely to look at wherever you turned. Your father painted vines, flowers and birds all over the doors and on one a life-sized portrait of your beautiful mother with her long blonde hair, dressed, I now realise as a nymph. Because I was keen to become an artist, Mervyn made me up a little sketchbook. At the time I was in my Dutch phase and obsessed with producing pictures of little girls in fly-away bonnets, boys in baggy trousers and bowls of stiff tulips. With patience and understanding he got me to look at the world around me as well as the one within. As we studied a geranium together, he persuaded me to try and copy the stems and explained that it was the life moving through the plant which twisted its shape in different ways. He said although it was still, in its pot, you could imagine it dancing. In September of that year, war was declared and very soon afterwards we were all dispersed. Two special people who made me feel cherished and safe went out of my life, though not out of my memory.
With the war approaching, Mervyn and Maeve decided to pack up and move again, this time to the country. They rented a small, damp house in Warningcamp, Sussex, a mile from Burpham, where Doc and Bessie had retired, and awaited my father’s call-up papers and the birth of their first child, my brother Sebastian.
Among the letters I inherited from my mother when she died were several from Mervyn to his mother-in-law. Most mentioned socks.
November 1939
Dear Mrs Gilmore,
How can I tell you how much I admire and appreciate my pink socks? ‘Pink’ is a feeble word for the colours that distil about my ankles, which are getting more and more spoiled. They are really lovely (my socks, not my ankles) and with the tie Ruth [Maeve’s sister] has made for me, I feel quite ‘set up’ aesthetically. Not only from the decorative standpoint, but functionally, they are perfect. In actual fact, they fit me better than any I have ever had, the heel sliding beautifully on and gripping on my own heel resiliently and firmly.
I admire your craftsmanship. The cigarettes have been, as I’m sure you know from past experience of my nicotine habit, very much appreciated, too. I am smoking one at this moment.
It will be very nice if you can manage to get along this way when the baby is born. Maeve is feeling pretty rotten these days and is longing for the suspense to be over. It has been most kind of you to help her so much with your very necessary and beautiful gifts for the baby, many of which have taken you and Ruth many hours of work. Your generosity in regard to the nursing home has been an invaluable help and kindness. My own resources are practically nil, as the Westminster, though open, is working with a skeleton staff. I hope it will put on a few muscles one day. Selling a few pictures here and there doesn’t really make much difference, and I only appreciate the teaching work I had now that I’ve lost it. It is possible that I will be appointed as a war artist as Kenneth Clarke, who is director of the N. Gallery, is chairman of the committee which the Ministry of Information has set up, and who will choose the artists. But one never knows how long one has to wait. I am also being kept waiting by publishers from whom I may get commissions to illustrate some classics.
However, I suppose things will recover. I did not mean this letter to contain any allusions to the seamy-er side of life, but rather to impress upon you my very sincerest wishes for Christmas and 1940.
With love from Mervyn.
Sapper Peake, Gunner 1597577, was called up on 29 July 1940. ‘Get your hair cut, you look like a bloody poet,’ said the sergeant at his first parade. Mervyn was a willing but hopelessly inept soldier, bored rigid by the pettiness of army life, but he got on well with his comrades, whom he drew at every opportunity. Despite a letter from Augustus John to the War Office, recommending ‘Mr Mervyn Peake as a draughtsman of great distinction, who might be most suitably employed in war records’, and despite John’s letter to Mervyn, remarking that ‘so far one has seen little but the comic side of warfare treated by alleged draughtsmen. You, like Goya, are interested in the serious’, his longing to be of what he considered ‘real use’ during the war never happened. Instead, he was a driving instructor (with no driving licence and no knowledge of engines) and a cookhouse orderly. It was a dreadful waste of talent and an enormous disappointment to Mervyn. ‘If they put the wrong people in the wrong jobs at the bum-end of the army, they probably do at the scalp end,’ he wrote to his friend Gordon Smith.
It was at this time that he began writing Titus Groan, the first book in the Gormenghast trilogy. Any free moment would be spent in the barracks writing in small red exercise pads and publishers’ dummies, which were then sent home to Maeve for safe-keeping. She would type them up and keep them by her at all times, saying that if a bomb should be making its way to Sussex, there were three essentials she would grab when making a dash for it – babies, nappies, manuscript. There were two babies now. Sebastian and Fabian. Fabian, delivered by Wendy in the Peter Pan nursing home in Rustington, had been born in April 1942 and, as Mervyn was moved around the country fulfilling his army duties, Maeve stayed in Sussex, looking after their two small sons.
In May 1942 a telegram arrived informing Maeve that her husband had had a nervous breakdown. He was sent to the Military Hospital Neurosis Centre in Southport and, in 1943, was discharged from the army as surplus to requirements. During this time, he made a recorder from bamboo on which he learned to play ‘Plaisir d’amour’ and ‘Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring’, pieces my mother often played on the piano after my father died.
He had so longed to contribute in a real way, and a few weeks after the war ended it seemed at last to be possible. Mervyn was commissioned by the Leader magazine to accompany Tom Pocock, a young journalist, to Germany where Tom would write as Mervyn drew, each depicting the aftermath of the war. Mervyn wrote to Maeve: ‘You know I will do all that is in me to do what was in our minds when we decided, through your insight, that it was for me to make records of what humanity suffered through war. I will not forget the reasons which prompted me to try and go to where people suffer. I will miss you desperately, but I will be proud to do something which we both believe in.’
In his memoir, 1945: The Dawn Came Up Like Thunder, Tom Pocock describes their first meeting and subsequent trip:
The Peakes were then living in a residential studio in Glebe Place off the King’s Road in Chelsea, but our first meetings were in another, which he rented for a few shillings a week in Trafalgar Studios, a gaunt block in Manresa Road. This was Bohemia as I had always imagined it: the enormous, high-ceilinged studio with its great, grimy window, stacked with canvases and reeking of oil paint and turpentine. Jars stuffed with brushes, a palette bright with abstract dabs and swirls of paint, and an open bottle of cheap sherry, were prominent details of décor. There was also, as expected, a beautiful girl in attendance. This was Maeve Gilmore, Mervyn’s wife, whose corn-coloured hair, wide-set eyes and air of content, made her seem to me the goddess Ceres incarnate.
Mervyn Peake, then aged thirty-three, was a lean, slightly stooped man with black, sprouting hair and a narrow, deep-lined face in which dark, troubled eyes were set close. His manner was friendly, slightly diffident; gentle, but also masculine. One could sense that he had been an appallingly helpless soldier – he was reputed to have saluted with his left hand when he remembered to salute at all – and as our preparations progressed it became obvious that the little disciplines and formalities of military life, which I took for granted, were to him bewildering irrelevancies … but Mervyn was as professional and efficient in the assembling of his artist’s materials as he had been bemused by the logistics of our expedition. His dark sombre good looks and the deep-set troubled eyes might have belonged to a most forceful person but he was intensely gentle … a delightful and generous companion.
The photograph album shows pictures of Mervyn in 1945, dressed in an army greatcoat, sitting on a pile of broken bricks in occupied Germany, or standing against a wall with crumbling, cratered buildings in the background, the ubiquitous cigarette in his mouth, pencil in hand, recording the awful destruction in a sketchbook.
He wrote to Maeve from near Wiesbaden:
Most dearly beloved-oh-my darling girl –
What a terrific lot has happened since I wrote to you from Paris – yet I was in Paris this morning. I am now on the river near Wiesbaden, and tomorrow we are jeeping to Bonn.
After the impression I have received here, of the way the Germans feel towards the Americans, and presumably towards the English too (we’re in an American zone at the moment) I don’t feel too keen on introducing myself to one.
It is true that today a few peasants waved from the fields, and one or two oldish people bowed good morning and a few girls smiled hopefully, but in the main it would be impossible to believe were one not to see them. They are no more. They are relics. Terrible as the bombing of London was, it is absolutely nothing – nothing compared with this unutterable desolation. Imagine Chelsea in fragments with not one single house with any more than a few weird-shaped walls where it once stood, and you will get an idea in miniature of what Mannheim and Wiesbaden are like – yet these are the only two that we have seen, save for the broken streets of every small town we passed through on our jeep ride here today. The Ruhr, to which we are going tomorrow, is reputed to be the worst – but how could it be worse than what I’ve seen today.
In June 1945, two months after the British Army liberated Belsen, Mervyn went to the concentration camp. The wooden huts the inmates had lived and died in had been razed to the ground, and those inmates still – barely – alive moved to the former SS tank barracks. He drew them, as one by one they died. That day was nothing in comparison to the suffering these people had experienced, but to be present at the death of a stranger, to witness the barbarity of what the Nazis left behind was to confront evil. I’m told that after a while he appeared to be as he had always been, but the experience had done something to him and was to haunt him forever. It was the catalyst for what was to come.
Tom Pocock described how he had left Mervyn at the main gates of the camp one morning and promised to collect him there in the afternoon …
When I returned to the gates of Belsen, Mervyn was waiting and climbed into the Humber staff car beside me. He had a sketch-pad in his hand and, as he turned its pages, I could see drawing after drawing of skeletal figures. On the last page, he had neatly written some verse and he asked me to read it.
The poem was expanded and later published in a collection of Mervyn’s poetry, The Glassblowers:
If seeing her an hour before her last
Weak cough into all blackness I could yet
Be held by chalk-white walls, and by the great
Ash coloured bed,
And the pillows hardly creased
By the tapping of her little cough-jerked head –
If such can be a painter’s ecstasy,
(Her limbs like pipes, her head a china skull)
Then where is mercy?
And what
Is this my traffic? For my schooled eyes see
The ghost of a great painting, line and hue,
In this doomed girl of tallow?
O Jesus! Has the world so white a yellow
As lifts her head by but a breath from linen
In the congested yet empty world.
Of plaster, cotton and a little marl?
Than pallor what is there more terrible?
There lay the gall
Of that dead mouth of the world.
And at death’s centre a torn garden trembled
In which her eyes like great hearts of black water
Shone in their wells of bone,
Brimmed to the well-heads of the coughing girl,
Pleading through history in that white garden;
And very wild, upon the head’s cheekbones,
As on high ridges in an icy dew,
Burned the sharp roses.
Her agony slides through me: I am glass
That grief can find no grip
Save for a moment when the quivering lip
And the coughing weaker than the broken wing
That, fluttering, shakes the life from a small bird
Caught me as in a nightmare? Nightmares pass
The image blurs and the quick razor-edge
Of anger dulls, and pity dulls. O God,
That grief so glibly slides! The little badge
On either cheek was gathered from her blood:
Those coughs were her last words. They had no weight
Save that through them was made articulate
Earth’s desolation on the alien bed.
Though I be glass, it shall not be betrayed,
That last weak cough of her small, trembling head.
The girl was to haunt Mervyn for years to come.
The dream-like photographs continue. Page after page of Maeve and Mervyn with Sebastian and Fabian, the four of them, the perfect unit, two young boys with two young parents, until I arrive seven years later to alter the dynamics – me, a fat, woollen-bonneted, nine-month-old baby, propped on the hide of Judy, our donkey, with no sign of anyone around to catch me if I topple; pictures of my smiling father, holding me on his shoulder, in his arms, above his head, by his side.
Then come the pages of sadness, the pages I prefer to skip over. Photographs of my mother looking at my father as though he were a small child she must constantly fret over, cling to, prop up. Mervyn looks ninety, Maeve fifty. They are in the grounds of the Priory Hospital, a few months before he is taken away to a place where he is cared for properly. Maeve is holding Mervyn’s hand. He looks at the camera. She stares at him, her eyes are defeated, she attempts a smile. The collars of their coats are turned up.