I PRESUME THERE was a lull in the bombing of London in 1942, when Hitler was preoccupied with his campaigns in Russia and North Africa, which made my mother think it was safe to return there. Or perhaps it was the installation of a Morrison shelter in our front room that was the crucial factor. This was a large black box made of girders and thick steel plate, about the height of a table and occupying the floor space of a very large double bed. The sides were heavy-duty wire mesh, one of which lifted up to give access to the mattresses and bedding within. You crawled in when the siren sounded an alarm, or slept there routinely every night, protected from all but a direct hit by a bomb. I was very fond of the Morrison shelter, which was in many ways like the ‘dens’ that children love to build for themselves. It felt cosy and safe when you were inside, and I used the top to lay out an airfield for my motley collection of model planes.
I know we were back in London in 1942, because I was seven that year, and made my First Communion at the Brockley parish church of St Mary Magdalen at that age, as was customary, on the assumption that seven was ‘the age of discretion’ at which a child could understand the nature of the sacrament and the concept of sin. In fact there were two sacraments to be understood, because you had to cleanse your soul of sin in the sacrament of Penance (usually referred to as Confession) before receiving the Eucharist. Children were prepared for this rite of passage at the parochial elementary school. Like, I believe, most of those who experienced it, I found confession more daunting than communion, even though I had invented a profane version of it with my auntie Eileen as confessor. Occupying a pew in a row of apprehensive and fidgety classmates, ‘examining your conscience’, moving along to take your turn in the confessional, a wooden structure like a large wardrobe at the back of the church, pulling aside the curtain, kneeling down in the semi-darkness, and reciting a prepared list of sins to the vague priestly presence behind a grille that resembled the door of a meat safe, wondering afterwards if, out of embarrassment, you had omitted something which would invalidate the whole process (that distant occasion, for instance, when a playmate’s sister lowered her knickers and lifted her skirt to show you the dimpled cleft between her legs, though you unchivalrously declined to reciprocate by displaying your own weeing apparatus) – this was an anxious business, although the priest was kindly and the ‘penance’ (silent recitation of a few ‘Hail Marys’) was light. In communion you received Jesus into yourself in some mysterious way in the form of a consecrated wafer placed on your tongue by the priest, which was a kind of magic that a child could accept readily enough. The main challenge was to swallow the host without chewing it, which would be disrespectful, and possibly sacrilegious, but not so easy to manage when your mouth was dry because you’d had to fast from food and drink since going to bed the previous evening. We practised with unconsecrated hosts in the communion class. The real thing, we were told, would be the happiest day of our lives. I didn’t feel that it was, though some ladies of the parish did their best to make it memorable, laying on a special breakfast with jellies and cakes for us first communicants in the school afterwards. I thought the happiest day of my life would be when the war was over and my dad came home for good.
The school was a utilitarian two-storey brick building adjacent to the church, with classrooms on the ground floor divided by partitions which folded back to make a parish hall outside school hours, and a high-walled asphalt playground, with toilets for boys and girls on opposite sides. I have a mental image of that drab playground crowded with children running and skipping, kicking and catching balls, like the stick-figures in a Lowry painting. The boys’ urinal consisted of a gutter and a wall against which older pupils would vie with each other to pee the highest. It was open to the sky, and sometimes they would be seen by the headmaster, looking down from an upper-floor window, and get caned. As in all Catholic schools of the period, there was a good deal of corporal punishment. I was in the class of Mrs Clark, a pale-faced, ginger-haired, short-tempered lady who administered it freely, not just for misbehaviour but for what she regarded as culpable ignorance or incompetence. Her method was to roll up the sleeve of the offender and slap the soft flesh on the underside of the forearm with her hand. The careful, deliberate way she rolled up the sleeve was more frightening to me than the sound of the slap. I feared her wrath, but was clever enough to elude it.
The church was a more ornate redbrick building constructed at the end of the nineteenth century in basilica style. There was a Lady Chapel next to the high altar which was hit by a bomb and left in its ruined state, partitioned off from the main body of the church for the duration of the war, an open wound in the side of the holy building and a constant reminder of evil German aggression as you passed it in the street. The priests who served the parish were Augustinians of the Assumption, a French order founded in the nineteenth century whose mission was to oppose the godlessness of modern society. The parish priest, Father Louis, was French and preached sermons of passionate exhortation with a strong accent. He was advanced in years, with a full, grizzled beard, and looked like a biblical prophet in an old painting.
On Monday mornings he or one of the other priests from the presbytery would often appear in school at the first session when the register was taken, and order any children who had not been to mass the previous day to stand up. These unfortunates (believing, I suppose, that their absence had been noted and that to pretend otherwise would only make a bad situation worse) would then have to offer their explanations and excuses, which would be received with varying degrees of scepticism and disapproval. We would be reminded that to miss mass on Sunday, deliberately and with no good reason, was a mortal sin. According to the Penny Catechism (then the standard guide to Catholic doctrine, and still in print), mortal sin is so called because ‘it is so serious that it kills the soul and deserves hell’. So if you happened to die after culpably missing Sunday mass, without having obtained absolution in confession or managing to make a ‘perfect act of contrition’ on your own (a difficult feat, because your sorrow for sin had to be motivated purely by the love of God, and not by the fear of punishment), you would go to Hell for all eternity. This was so patently absurd – the punishment so grotesquely disproportionate to the putative offence to God – that it is hard in retrospect to credit that anyone really believed it, but such was the power of clerical authority that no one challenged it. The concept of mortal sin (as distinct from venial or minor sins) was a crucial element of traditional Catholic moral theology by which the Church defined how salvation might be forfeited, and it acquired special force in the first half of the twentieth century, as John Cornwell has convincingly demonstrated.1 Before then, only very devout Catholics received communion frequently, and the majority did so only at Christmas and Easter and on other special occasions. Pope Pius X (1903–14) began a campaign urging the faithful to receive communion at every opportunity, and in due course the majority of attenders at Sunday mass did so. At the same time the ‘age of discretion’ at which a child should be introduced to confession, which had been flexibly assessed in the past, was defined as seven. Frequent communion required frequent confession to ensure that one was in ‘a state of grace’. In this way the clergy was able to police the moral lives of the laity continuously from childhood till death, and ensure that they were obedient to the dictates of the Church. After the Second Vatican Council of the early 1960s, which shook up the whole system of Catholic belief and practice, the distinction between mortal and venial sin largely disappeared from the language of religious instruction, as did the habit of frequent confession among practising Catholics.
I walked to school and back – a distance of about a mile – initially in the care of an older girl recruited for this task by my mother. Later I became more independent, but usually came home with a group of pupils who lived in the same direction. One afternoon we were a few hundred yards from the railway bridge that traversed Brockley Road just before Brockley Cross when a German aeroplane flew low over our heads firing its machine guns, perhaps at a train on the line, though its main target was said later to be an anti-aircraft battery on Telegraph Hill. These rare hit-and-run raids, as they were called, by fast fighter-bombers that flew under the British radar, were not heralded by the warning ululation of an air-raid siren. Some of the bullets hit the white-tiled walls under the bridge and left pockmarks which were still discernible the last time I looked, about fifty years later. We children had a narrow escape, which may have been the reason why Mum and I left London again in 1943.
We returned to Cornwall. This time we lodged with a very hospitable family called Smith who lived in the village of Mount St Charles, a mile or so from Porthpean, to whom we had been introduced by my uncle Vic. Mr Smith was an industrious man: a butcher with his own shop and slaughterhouse, he also had a smallholding and a milk round in the locality. Needless to say, we ate extremely well while we lived in the house behind the butcher’s shop. I particularly remember the lavish provision of clotted Cornish cream at teatime to accompany home-made scones and jam, and the rare experience of spooning honey from the comb on to one’s bread and butter. The Smiths had two daughters: one, Dorothy, was a teenager, and the other, Jenefer, was much younger – indeed too young to be a playmate for me, though adults liked fondly to imagine that we might be sweethearts when we grew up. A snapshot guaranteed to draw a murmured ‘Ah, aren’t they sweet?’ survives from this period, of Jenefer and me in front of the butcher’s shop, she in a white summer frock, with plump dimpled cheeks under a dense mass of dark hair in ringlets, and I in short flannel trousers and rolled-up shirtsleeves beside her. Our suntanned arms are linked, and with our free hands we are stroking the Smiths’ collie sitting patiently between us. My most vivid memory of Jenefer is less romantic: watching with a mixture of fascination and pity as Mrs Smith combed her tightly curled natural ringlets with a steel comb to remove the nits she had acquired at school, crushing them on a sheet of newspaper and treating her scalp afterwards with gentian violet, while her daughter wriggled and whimpered.
In the summer of 2008 I talked about my book Deaf Sentence at a literary festival in Fowey, and afterwards a smiling, grey-haired lady came up to the table where I was signing copies and introduced herself as Jenefer. There was no opportunity to talk much, for she had another appointment, but we exchanged addresses and in due course letters. She told me that some time ago she had deduced from reviews of my books and a profile of my life that I must be ‘the little boy who came to stay with us during the war’. She remembered well the nit-picking ordeals, and told me that the photo of us together with the dog was taken in the summer of 1943, when she was six and a half and I was eight and a half. It is one of the very few precise chronological markers that I have for this phase of my life. She wrote: ‘I always remember your mother and Aunt Eileen as such beautiful women’, and recalled that her elder sister Dorothy used to go horse-riding with Eileen.
Mr Smith was a kind, friendly man who did his best to compensate for my fatherless state. If I was willing to get up very early on holidays or weekends he would take me in his van to collect the churns of milk which the local farmers left at the gates of their properties, and once I helped, rather ineffectually, to bring in the hay from a field that belonged to him. I had a sneezing fit as dust and pollen swirled about in the air, and when I became susceptible to hay fever in adolescence I wondered if my allergy originated on that day. I never really took to the rural and agricultural way of life, in spite of Mr Smith’s kind efforts to initiate me into it. For me, 81 Millmark Grove in its grimy urban setting was still ‘home’ and I yearned to return there. There was a song made enormously popular in the war by Vera Lynn’s rendering of it, beginning, ‘There’ll be bluebirds over the white cliffs of Dover, tomorrow, just you wait and see . . .’ which projected a sentimental vision of the peace to come:
There’ll be love and laughter
And peace ever after
Tomorrow, when the world is free
The shepherd will tend his sheep
The valley will bloom again
And Jimmy will go to sleep
In his own little room again.
I always identified with Jimmy when I heard the song.
I don’t know how long we lived with the Smiths, or why we left Cornwall and went back to live in Lingfield. Possibly my mother was concerned about my education because the standard of the village school at Mount St Charles was poor. The Notre Dame convent school in Lingfield, which normally took boys only up to the age of seven, was prepared to make exceptions in wartime, and I and another boy who lived locally were admitted into a class of girls of our own age, some of whom were boarders. Neither of us had the slightest sexual interest in them. In their brown gym tunics and thick stockings they seemed like an alien race, who were often mean to each other and cried easily. At breaks we played with the younger boys, and rather enjoyed the power we had over them due to our seniority. It was for me an agreeable change from the rather rough and intimidating Cornish school.
Mum and I had lodgings in a street of what were probably council houses, with the mother of a little girl called Pauline, whose husband was away in the forces somewhere. We had the front sitting room and a bedroom to ourselves, and Mum shared the kitchen. How she managed financially at this time, how much she suffered from boredom, loneliness and the frustrations of house-sharing (though we got on well enough with our landlady), I have no idea. Lingfield was more congenial than it might otherwise have been, especially to me, because my grandmother had also left London at the time of the Blitz, and settled there for the duration, as living-in housekeeper to an elderly single gentleman called Mr Sandal, while Pop stayed in London, working at Barkers department store in Kensington and fire-watching from its roof at nights, coming down to the country by train at weekends. Nana was the person I most loved in the world after my parents, and she remained very dear to me in adult life. I knew she loved me too, because whenever we met her face would light up with pleasure in a way that cannot be faked. She was small in stature, with a matronly figure, strong well-fleshed features and fine black hair. She was quick-witted though not formally well-educated, gentle, kind and transparently sincere, and she had the rare ability to relate directly to a child, talking to him without any trace of condescension or adult self-consciousness. Mr Sandal’s house was a redbrick villa at the end of a short cul-de-sac that led to the village recreation ground. I loved to spend time with Nana in the kitchen-parlour, playing cribbage, helping her shell peas from the garden, drinking tea and asking her to read our futures in the pattern of the tea-leaves left at the bottom of the cups, and watching her light the gas as dusk fell outside, holding the spill up to the pale mantle until it ignited with a faint ‘pop’ and glowed red and then white. Some of her favourite expressions – like ‘a nice game played slow’, applied ironically to tedious and futile tasks – have stayed with me ever since.
At some point Mr Sandal died and Nana became housekeeper to a GP, a bachelor or widower whom she always referred to as ‘the Doctor’, so I have forgotten what his name was. In fact I don’t recall ever meeting him, though I suppose I must have done, since I visited Nana frequently in her living quarters at the back of his fine house. It had a splendid garden well stocked with vegetables and fruit – raspberries, loganberries, redcurrants and blackcurrants, apples, pears, damsons and quince. Nana was a good plain cook, especially of pastries, puddings and conserves, and made excellent use of the garden’s produce. She was very happy there, and stayed on for a year or two after the war was over. I missed her then, and used to visit her occasionally, travelling on my own from London on a Greenline bus that passed through Lingfield on its way to East Grinstead.
East Grinstead is the nearest sizable town to Lingfield, and during the war Mum and I went there occasionally for shopping. It was the site of the famous Queen Victoria Hospital where the pioneering plastic surgeon Sir Archibald McIndoe and his team treated Allied airmen who had been badly burned, and occasionally one saw these brave men in the streets in bright blue hospital suits with white bandages wrapped round their faces. Their presence was only one of many continual reminders that ‘there’s a war on’, along with the vapour trails of planes in the sky on their way to bomb Germany, and the convoys of military vehicles on the roads moving towards the coast in preparation for the invasion of occupied France. In 1944 I was nine, old enough to begin to take an intelligent interest in the progress of the war, with a comforting sense that we seemed to be winning. The prospect of an early return home to London, however, was extinguished by the bombardment of the capital by V1 flying bombs which began in June, shortly after D-Day. At the beginning of August one of these missiles landed smack in the middle of Millmark Grove, demolishing sixteen houses and damaging many others. Remarkably, only two people were killed. Our house, being near the end of the street, suffered light damage, mainly to windows, as Dad reported after being given leave to inspect it. A family whose house had been destroyed asked if they could move into ours temporarily, and it is pleasing to record that he agreed, and that many years later I received a letter via my publisher from a member of that family expressing gratitude for the loan of our house. Before long the V1s were followed by V2 rockets, and in November one of these hit a crowded Woolworth’s store in New Cross, killing 168 people, the worst disaster of the V-weapon campaign. The closest I came to personal experience of these dangers was when I was walking across a field near Lingfield with my grandmother one day and a black V1 suddenly appeared overhead pursued by a Spitfire, low enough for us to see the camouflage markings on the fighter and the orange flame coming out of the flying bomb’s jet engine before they disappeared out of sight. I presume the fighter was looking for a safe place to shoot down the V1, or else to tip its wing and make it crash.
Dad spent a long period of the war very far from any action, and from us, stationed with Jack Nathan’s band at a base near Lerwick in the Shetlands, relieving the monotony by fishing and playing golf in his off-duty hours, and sending me amusing strip cartoons of himself engaged in these activities, stared at by sheep. But the band must have been back in England in 1944, because Mum and I joined him for Christmas together in Millmark Grove (rather surprisingly, because the odd V1 or V2 continued to fall on London into the New Year). I remember him meeting us at Victoria station and saying to my mother, ‘I see we’re losing the war again’, a hyperbolical reference to the Battle of the Bulge in the Ardennes, then in progress, which worried me. But by the early spring of 1945 it was obvious that the war in Europe was approaching its end, and my father and his mates were looking forward to demobilisation, when to their dismay Jack Nathan’s band was ordered to go to India to entertain the troops there. They travelled by sea, and I possess Dad’s dog-eared copy of an American paperback in a ‘Fighting Forces Series’, called What To Do Aboard the Transport, which must have been distributed to the troops on embarkation since it has no price on it. It included guides to star-gazing and bird-watching with which Dad passed the time more profitably than most of his fellow passengers, who played endless games of cards. Always good at adjusting to unalterable circumstances, he quite enjoyed the voyage, but he disliked what he saw of India, its heat and insects and squalor, and the experience probably put him off foreign travel for the rest of his life, because he never left the shores of England after his return, except once to join me and my family on holiday in Guernsey.
At about the time Dad went to India Mum returned to London from Lingfield to work at Deptford Town Hall in the department concerned with ration books. She probably wanted to earn some money and get the house straight before Dad came home, and she gauged correctly that I no longer needed her constant protective presence. I boarded with the family of the boy of my own age who was my classmate at the convent. I have forgotten his name, but I liked him, and his mother, and her cooking, and I was quite happy to accept the arrangement. That Nana was living nearby, where I could visit her frequently, was reassuring. Nevertheless I looked forward eagerly to moving back to 81 Millmark Grove, the only source of anxiety being the prospect of another change of school in the autumn. Mum arranged for me to sit an entrance examination at my uncle John’s old school, St Joseph’s Academy, Blackheath, which was in the process of becoming a state-aided Catholic grammar school. I passed the exam successfully (I wrote a ‘composition’ plagiarised from the novel Black Beauty, but perhaps the examiners found this enterprising rather than culpable) and was given a place for the new school year beginning in September as a fee-paying pupil, with the understanding that if I passed the newly established 11-plus exam after my next birthday there would be no more fees to pay. The fees would in any case have been modest, for the school had an honourable policy of adjusting them for eligible pupils from low-income families. I had been introduced to algebra and French in my last months at the convent without making much progress in either, and I remember asking my mother anxiously if I would be expected to have a grasp of these subjects when I started at St Joseph’s. She thought not.
I have no distinct memory of the end of the war in Europe in May, but I was back home in Millmark Grove for the surrender of Japan in July and the celebrations of VJ Night, described in Out of the Shelter:
They had a bonfire in the street, on the bomb-site. Everybody came out of their houses and stood around the bonfire laughing and talking and drinking beer and lemonade out of bottles. Like all the children, Timothy had a red, white and blue ribbon pinned on his coat in the shape of a V. There were bonfires that night on lots of bomb-sites all over London. They lit up the sky in a red glow like the Blitz.
That bomb site would soon become a kind of adventure playground for me and my friends in the street, and until the gap was filled in with new houses it gave us illegal access to an immense railway embankment with trees and bushes and hollows ideal for playing a game called the Lost Commandos we developed from a comic. Servicemen began to come back from the war, welcomed by home-made banners and posters on the walls and in the windows of their houses. I made my own ‘Welcome Home Dad’ posters and waited impatiently to display them, which took some time as he cautiously declined the offer of a lift in an RAF transport plane and travelled by sea. But eventually we were happily reunited and a new chapter of our lives opened. I had to start secondary education; Dad had to rebuild his professional career; and Mum . . . well, Mum had to cook and keep house for us in the era of post-war ‘Austerity’ when rationing and shortages made that occupation an unrewarding struggle.
Dad tried to resume his career as a singer with bands broadcasting on radio, but had no luck. His ‘tenor sweet style’, as it used to be described in music magazines, had been superseded by the ‘crooning’ style made popular by American singers. I remember that he was excited about getting an audition with the Ted Heath band, probably the best of its kind at the time, and very disappointed when he was unsuccessful. (The singer who got the job was Jimmy Young, later to become a celebrity broadcaster.) Nevertheless, Dad’s ability to sing as well as play several instruments meant he was usually fully employed with gigs and occasionally longer engagements in clubs. He returned home from work in the small hours of the morning to sleep late, with a pillow over his face to keep out the light. After an hour or so of music practice, the rest of his day was devoted to one of the many interests and hobbies which he took up, dropped and sometimes returned to, such as painting, calligraphy, golf, sea-angling off the pier at Brighton, collecting antique pottery and playing the stock market. My mother participated in none of these activities. In the evening he had a meal we called ‘tea’, which was a kind of early supper, and sat down afterwards in his reclining armchair for a short rest, covering his face with a newspaper. Then he would suddenly cast the newspaper aside, glance at the clock, swear and rush out of the room and up the stairs to change into his dinner suit, and down again to collect his instruments from the front room, and up again to get something he had forgotten, while Mum and I did our best to keep out of his way until the front door slammed behind him. Dad rarely left himself enough time to leave the house in a leisurely way, and I recognise the same tendency in myself.
The work he went off to do was providing entertainment for other people, in a branch of the music business that was essentially social. On the stand the musicians in a dance hall or club were always exchanging jokes and quips between sets, laughing among themselves to convey a feeling of bonhomie and enjoyment to the customers, and when Dad became leader of his own resident quartet at a nightclub in the late forties he would circulate and chat to the regular patrons. Having exercised his social skills at work he had no inclination to do the same in his leisure hours, which in any case were not those of most other people. He and my mother therefore had virtually no social life together – no friendships with other couples, no entertaining or being entertained at home, no outings to theatres or cinemas or restaurants together. My mother’s social life consisted almost entirely of informal contact with women friends and relatives. From old snapshots in photograph albums it is clear that in their courting days and the early years of marriage Dad and Mum had a fuller social life together, and in that period of economic depression they were probably better off than most of their neighbours; but after the war Dad established a domestic routine that served his own needs and priorities while neglecting Mum’s, and she was not sufficiently assertive to do anything about it. Both my father and I were the only children of doting mothers, who lived at home until early adulthood, ‘waited on hand and foot’ in the proverbial phrase, and we assumed that it was the natural order of things.
Mum’s siblings, meanwhile, had been living, and continued to live, much more exciting lives. Eileen got a job as a civilian secretary at the American Army HQ in Cheltenham prior to the Normandy invasion, and volunteered afterwards, with a number of other adventurous women similarly employed, to serve in France. They didn’t know their destination until their military plane broke through the clouds and they saw Paris spread out beneath them and a cheer went up in the cabin. She worked in the Chaplain’s Department, which as a good Catholic she found congenial, wore a smart quasi-military uniform, and sent us a snapshot of herself wearing it jauntily in a snow-covered Parisian street, smiling and obviously exhilarated by the atmosphere of the liberated capital. At the end of the war the secretaries followed the military into Germany, and Eileen was sent first to Frankfurt and then to Heidelberg, where the US Army of Occupation set up its headquarters because, unlike Frankfurt and most other German cities, it was almost entirely undamaged by the war.
In this picturesque setting she enjoyed all the privileges and comforts that the American Army could supply to its personnel on a scale unattainable by other nationalities. In the middle and late forties American society, having rapidly recovered from the Great Depression of the pre-war era, embodied the whole world’s desires for the materialistic Good Life, mediated through its movies and magazines in the imagery of huge cars, huge refrigerators, huge steaks, ice cream, candy and Coca-Cola ad libitum, consumed by human beings who looked happier, healthier and about a foot taller than their equivalents in war-weary Europe. Having access to the PX store which provided American goodies to the military community in Germany, Eileen was able to pass on some of them to us in England when she made her occasional visits – nylon stockings for Mum, candy bars for me with strange names like ‘Baby Ruth’ and ‘Oh Henry!’ and cartons of Lucky Strike for Dad. As time went on, and the tourist resorts of Europe began to open for business again, she used her dollars to visit some of them during her leaves and sent back postcards and letters with lyrical descriptions to us in England, where the annual foreign currency allowance of £25 per person severely restricted Continental travel, even if we had desired it.
Meanwhile my uncle John was also starting a new life in Europe. After doing duty as an instructor for most of the war, he was posted to Brussels at the time of the liberation of Belgium and there he met a young woman called Lucienne at a party. They fell in love and married. It was a civil wedding, because she was a divorcée with a son of about my age, and John, unlike his sisters, had long ceased to be a practising Catholic. He brought his bride to London soon after the end of the war to meet us and other friends and relatives. He was tall and handsome in his RAF officer’s uniform, with crisp wavy hair and a dashing moustache, and Lu obviously adored him. She herself was not a beauty, but she was a vivacious and charming person whom I liked immediately and remained attached to for the rest of her long life. She was of Flemish and Jewish stock but belonged to the well-off Brussels bourgeoisie who spoke mainly French. Her father owned a wholesale textile business in which he promised to find John a job. Thus John returned to the homeland of his mother, Adèle.
The occasional visitations of Uncle John and Aunty Eileen in the immediate post-war years were like sudden splashes of colour and explosions of noise in our quiet monochrome existence. We rarely entertained at home, and never more than a few people at a time, but when Eileen was visiting us there would be gatherings of her and Mum’s women friends in our lounge, powdered and perfumed and dressed to the nines, sipping sherry and gin-and-orange, exchanging anecdotes and shrieking with laughter, parties on the fringes of which I lurked, fascinated and uncomprehending. Eileen and John were both emotionally volatile individuals, quick-tempered, prone to sudden changes of mood, and whenever the siblings came together sooner or later the initial euphoria and hilarity would be followed by arguments, reproaches and, on Eileen’s part, tears. Dad, who disliked immoderate displays of emotion, found these visits a strain and used his work commitments as an excuse to get out of the associated socialising. He also resented Eileen’s comments on the shortcomings of our domestic arrangements and suggestions for improving Mum’s lot. His reaction was understandable, but so, in retrospect, were the comments and suggestions.
1 John Cornwell, The Dark Box: a secret history of Confession (2014)