UNIVERSITY COLLEGE LONDON is situated in Bloomsbury, so unknowingly I began my life as an undergraduate only a few streets and squares distant from where I had been born. UCL is the oldest, largest and most prestigious of the London colleges, and now a university in its own right. It was founded in 1826 to provide higher education for those who were not members of the Church of England, then obligatory for students and their teachers at Oxford and Cambridge, and was open to freethinkers as well as members of other sects and faiths, earning itself the soubriquet of ‘the Godless University’. The mummified body of Jeremy Bentham, the Utilitarian philosopher regarded as ‘the spiritual founder’ of the college, is famously preserved, and occasionally displayed, in a wooden cabinet in its main building. This is an imposing domed edifice designed by the architect of the National Gallery, fronted by flights of steps, on which students perch with their books in summer, and by a massive columned portico reminiscent of the Parthenon. It was always a visual thrill to come into sight of this building, set well back from the road behind a turfed quadrangle and screened by the dull facades of Gower Street, when one reached the entrance to the Quad and the Porter’s Lodge, guarded by a Dickensian-looking porter in antique livery.
But as a student I seldom entered the college by the main entrance. The English Department was reached by a less impressive side entrance known as Foster Court and accommodated in a former warehouse. It was built of dirty brick, several storeys high, and faced another building of the same grim aspect. The lift was off-limits to students, and you had to climb several flights of stairs to reach the English Department’s administrative office, teaching rooms and the rooms, separated by partition walls, occupied by individual members of staff. The ceilings were low, the corridors narrow and the floors covered with durable lino. One fine, sunny morning in late September 1952, in the largest of the teaching rooms, I joined my fellow ‘freshers’ for the first of several days of initiation into aspects of the college, the Department, and the courses we would follow. After some speeches of welcome and briefings by members of staff, there was an interval when coffee was served and we milled about, excited and nervous, trying to take the measure of the group of strangers to whom we now belonged. Some seemed to know each other already, and chatted with enviable ease. I approached a girl who had caught my eye: she had flawless features, blonde hair drawn back into a ponytail, and a shapely figure. She responded with a spontaneous friendly smile when I spoke to her. Her name was Mary – Mary Jacob. I can’t remember what we talked about – banal things, no doubt, such as where we came from, and what aspects of the course before us seemed most interesting or most forbidding. She seemed very nice. Later on that day I was lingering outside the Foster Court building before the afternoon session of our programme, and wondering where she had gone in the lunch break, when I saw her with two or three other girls walking abreast towards me, the autumn sun bathing them in light. I was struck more powerfully than before by her beauty, though she seemed quite unselfconscious about it. She looked strong and confident, glowing with health and a simple happiness at being where she was. As I moved towards her she flashed a pleased smile of recognition. The group stopped as I came up to them. ‘Where have you been?’ I asked Mary, and she said, ‘We’ve been to join the Catholic Society, or Cath Soc, as they call it.’ ‘Are you a Catholic?’ I said excitedly, hardly able to believe my luck. ‘I am too.’
I suppose I fell in love at that meeting, at second rather than first sight, though I didn’t define my feelings in those romantic terms. But I remember thinking, if not at that precise moment, then not long afterwards, that Mary had a kind of beauty that would last – a rather extraordinary reflection for a seventeen-year-old, as if I were already sizing her up as a possible wife. Perhaps I was, unconsciously. Consciously I was only aware that she was an exceptional girl, and that I wanted urgently to attach myself to her before someone else did, having sensed the vibrations in the air emanating from clever young people on the threshold of adult life and away from home for the first time, eager to make relationships with the opposite sex. I kept close to her in the days that followed, sat next to her at lectures and accompanied her to the bazaar-like events at which various student societies solicited membership. I signed up for the Catholic Society, of course. We explored together the various facilities of the college, including the Students’ Union, a large smoky basement with a bar, its walls festooned with hand-painted posters, furnished with battered armchairs and sofas where young men argued noisily and uninhibited couples necked. I asked Mary if she would like to go to a gallery one evening. She looked puzzled until I explained that I meant the gallery of a theatre, not an art gallery, and then she agreed readily. Mary was obviously very intelligent – she had won a State Scholarship, without going on to a waiting list – but she was unsophisticated, and her experience of theatre-going was limited to being taken with her older sister by a friend of the family to see variety shows and Christmas pantomimes. She had been brought up in Hoddesdon, Hertfordshire, a small town about twenty miles north of central London, and had attended a convent secondary school in Enfield, where she had been head girl and captain of games. I gathered that both her parents were Irish, and that she had six brothers and sisters. She had hardly any knowledge of London, which gave me a great advantage in securing her friendship, since I was able to be her guide to aspects of metropolitan life, such as how to reserve gallery seats. You went along in the morning before the performance and paid sixpence to have a numbered ticket stuck on one of the small folding stools which were arranged outside the theatre in the form of a queue, and came back in the evening to claim your place before the doors were opened, being entertained in the meantime by buskers who sang, tap-danced and played musical instruments. The seats in West End theatres were dearer than the Old Vic’s – two shillings, I think – but also slightly more comfortable, with backs to the benches. Galleries, colloquially known as ‘the gods’, were certainly a godsend to impecunious students, but they disappeared long ago from London theatres as their owners ripped out the benches, replaced them with more expensive upholstered seats and renamed the space ‘Upper Circle’ or ‘Balcony’.
I was of course conscious of a disloyalty to Peggy, to whom I owed my own introduction to that economical source of cultured entertainment, as soon as I began to seek Mary’s company at college. Very soon – about a week after I first spoke to Mary – I went round to Peggy’s house to tell her that I had met another girl and was going out with her. I don’t remember details of our conversation, which as usual took place in the porch of her house, and was brief. She looked at her feet as I spoke, with an expression both sad and wry, and said little. I had a feeling that she had feared this would happen, but perhaps not quite so quickly. I felt pity for her and some remorse, but there was no honourable alternative. I was quite sure that Mary was the girlfriend I wanted, and although I had no reason to suppose she was as strongly attracted to me, I had known from the moment she gave that smile of recognition in Foster Court that she liked me. She was nine months older, but even more innocent as regards sex – of knowledge about it, never mind experience. She had lived as a boarder in her last eighteen months at the convent school, since her home was so crowded that she couldn’t study properly there. At the school, I would learn in due course, she had been the unwilling object of schoolgirl crushes and the embarrassing embraces of an intense young nun, but had little contact with boys as a teenager. She had learned to dance and went to parish socials on occasion, but I quickly established that she had had no boyfriend before she met me, which for so attractive a girl in her eighteenth year was remarkable. That summer she had spent a month as an au pair with a wealthy family in south-west France, which was her first experience of Abroad, and something like a rite of passage for her, as my holiday in Heidelberg had been for me. Apart from that, family, school and parish had defined the limits of her world. Now she was free, at least in term-time, of her ties and duties to all of them, an independent adult in a big city, and – you could see it in her clear blue-green eyes – expectantly open to new experiences and new friendships. My desire to be the most important of the latter was of course greatly helped by the fact that I was a Catholic and therefore shared the same moral code. She had come up to London early to settle into her digs, and gone to a Union dance at the very beginning of Freshers’ Week which I had skipped, and been affronted by the behaviour of a boy who had danced with her, holding her too tight and trying to lure her outside for a snog. Mary was happy to accept me as her first boyfriend.
There were several Catholics in our year in the English Department, and we discovered fairly soon that it was an advantage to have had a Catholic education, even one as narrow and shallow as mine, in pursuing the BA Honours English course at the University of London. The curriculum was heavily loaded towards early literature, from the Anglo-Saxon period to the seventeenth century, much of which was saturated in Christian and often specifically Catholic doctrine, practice and allusions. Knowledge of these was especially useful for the study of medieval literature, and I recall that in our second year we Catholics tormented the young lecturer who was taking us through the Ancrene Riwle by pointing out his misreadings of religious references in this text (a devotional manual written by the chaplain to a group of nuns, generally thought to be the finest extant example of Early Middle English prose). Catholicism wasn’t much help, however, in coping with the epic poem Beowulf, partly because it had its roots in the pagan period of Anglo-Saxon culture, but mainly because it was written in Old English, which to us was a foreign language that had to be learned. There was an Old English Finals paper waiting for us at the end of our three years, with compulsory questions requiring the translation of passages of Beowulf into modern English. Students who were good at languages, like Mary, took to the task willingly; others like me found it a wearisome chore. One of our particular friends in the year was Derek Todd, who was older than all of us because his commencement of the course had been delayed by National Service in the Navy, followed by serious illness. He gave up the attempt to learn Old English as a decodable language, and prepared for the final examination by memorising the visual appearance of the text of Beowulf and the prose translation of it available in an Everyman anthology, so exactly that he would be able to recognise the passages of the former selected for the exam and match them with the modern English translation. This stratagem evidently worked because he obtained a First-class degree.
The disproportionate prominence of Old English in the degree course at London and most other British universities at this time had a historical origin. UCL had been offering courses on English literature from its foundation, but degrees in the humanities at the more prestigious ancient universities continued to be based chiefly on the study of classical texts in Greek and Latin, until a School of English was established at Oxford in 1893, against some opposition. To meet the objection that studying literature in the mother tongue was too easy to be worth a university degree, the curriculum was made as ‘hard’ as possible, mainly by requiring students to study Old English and its roots in other Germanic languages revealed by historical philology. Cambridge refused to offer a BA degree in English at all until 1917, when it introduced one with a different syllabus from Oxford’s, beginning the study of English literature with Chaucer, and incorporating courses such as ‘Tragedy’ and ‘Practical Criticism’ designed to provide cultural breadth and intellectual rigour. This syllabus also had an influence on the development of English studies elsewhere, but Oxford had been first in the field and its model was more widely adopted by other British universities, including London.
I had come to UCL expecting my course to be an extension in more depth and detail of my A-level studies, which began with Chaucer’s General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales, and went up to the late nineteenth century, supplemented by reading in more modern literature for S level. Instead I was disconcerted to find myself in the first term having lectures on nothing later than seventeenth-century prose, and discovering that ‘English’ as a university subject incorporated not only Anglo-Saxon literature, but specialised courses in subjects like palaeography, the historical study of handwriting, especially of the ‘secretary hand’ in which most Elizabethan and Jacobean manuscripts were written, and bibliography, the historical study of books as physical objects, including their printing and binding. We did have something called ‘Essay Writing’, a course taught in seminar groups of about ten students, which included some practical criticism and even a few creative writing exercises, but the teacher I had was unsympathetic to my efforts, and my personal tutor was also critical of the essays I wrote for him on seventeenth-century prose writers. The truth is that they didn’t appeal to me, and I lacked the cultural and historical knowledge to appreciate them, which was not surprising, given my age and patchy education. It took me some time to find my feet as a student.
Among the other Catholics in our year was Anthony Petti, who had no such difficulty. He was the son of Italian parents, and in appearance bore a slightly caricatured likeness to portraits of Renaissance aristocrats, prelates and soldiers of fortune. He was very tall, with long arms and legs protruding from his jacket cuffs and trouser turn-ups, a shock of stiff black hair like the head of a broom, high cheekbones, dark, close-set eyes and an impressively large Roman nose. He lived at home in north London, where he had been very well educated at a Jesuit school. His manner was slightly theatrical, though not in the least camp: when he had something serious to say his body language semaphored its gravity and his expression underlined its import with frowns and the lowered pitch of his voice; when he was amused or being amusing he snorted and giggled, capered and clowned, and he could switch from one mode to the other in an instant. He had a passion for music, especially classical opera and Renaissance church music, on which in due course he became an expert as both musicologist and choirmaster. Indeed I often wondered why he hadn’t chosen to study music instead of English. But as a first-year undergraduate Tony was impressively familiar with the canon of English literature. He was one of the few men in our year who had already done his National Service, so was older than most of us, which helped to make him a leader in departmental student activities, and one of the first things he did was to organise our year’s contribution to the entertainment at the departmental Christmas party. We had a meeting of those interested, and decided to present a burlesque poetic drama about a freshman’s life loosely modelled on Milton’s Samson Agonistes, a neoclassical verse drama that I and several others had studied for A level. I still have a creased, yellowing copy of the cyclostyled script, which was composed by various hands, but mostly Tony’s. It was called Simpson Agonistes (a title used decades later by Robert Metcalfe for a book about the trial of O.J. Simpson). I was cast as Simpson, and contributed his opening speech, in which Milton’s lines, ‘O dark, dark, dark, amid the blaze of noon, / Irrecoverably dark, total eclipse / Without all hope of day’, were replaced by:
O work, work, work amid the days of gloom.
Unmitigated work, unutterable work
Without all hope of play.
Tony directed the piece, which was a tissue of literary quotations and allusions, some familiar, others less so. Dramatically it pillaged Shakespeare and morality plays as well as Milton’s neoclassical tragedy, but it ended appropriately with Simpson’s death offstage under the collapsing pillars of the college portico, described by the Porter in the ancient Greek manner. Mary was in the female chorus that chanted the play’s closing lines:
Simpson is dead, in sleep of peace he lies.
More geese than swans now live
More fools than wise.
Not until sixty years later, when I googled these lines, did I discover that the first echoes Psalm 4, and the last two were lifted from Orlando Gibbons’s madrigal ‘The Silver Swan’ (1612). Tony Petti had a very well stocked mind.
Our performance was warmly received by the assembled staff and students, and several of the former said that it was the best of its kind that had ever been presented at the annual party. Later the text was printed on the Department’s own hand press as an exercise for Bibliography students. Most of the credit for its success was due to Tony, but in fact we were, without knowing it, an exceptionally bright year, as our Finals results would eventually demonstrate, so we educated and stimulated each other as bright students always do. We were also fortunate, again without knowing it, to be in what was at the time probably the best English Department in the country after Cambridge and Oxford. The staff included several men at the rank of lecturer whose careers had been interrupted by the war, and who, shortly after we graduated, moved on to professorial chairs at other universities: George Kane, world authority on Piers Plowman, Harold Jenkins, editor of the Arden Hamlet, and T.J.B. Spencer, a versatile scholar who lectured on everything from classical background to W.B. Yeats. In our second year the youngish Randolph Quirk returned from leave of absence in America to introduce us to modern linguistics in dazzling style, and the recruitment of Charles Peake strengthened the teaching of modern literature. The two full professors in the Department were less inspiring. A.H. Smith was a philologist whose speciality was the etymology of English place names. He lectured to us on the history of the English language from well-worn notes, and on one occasion read out a lecture he had delivered the previous week; it did not improve on second hearing, but nobody dared to interrupt his discourse to tell him. James Sutherland was a traditional literary historian best remembered for his edition of The Oxford Book of Literary Anecdotes, which had a long life before it was superseded by John Gross’s. His lectures on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature also tended towards the ramblingly anecdotal. Attendance at lectures was obligatory; a register was passed round the benches to be signed, and although it was not checked very rigorously, frequent absences would provoke a reproof.
The member of staff most revered by us students was Winifred Nowottny – Mrs Nowottny, we called her, since she did not have a doctorate, which was not unusual in those days. She was married to a Czech, but she herself was English, and her quiet voice had a perceptible northern accent. She was probably in her late thirties at this time. She was completely lacking in feminine allure: slight, pale-faced, with a long chin and lank mousy hair, she looked always on the edge of exhaustion, as if she had given blood in exchange for knowledge. Her reputation as a charismatic teacher filtered down to us from the senior students in the Department, and was confirmed when she lectured to us on Shakespeare in our second year. She somehow conveyed that she was giving us the benefit of her own latest thoughts and research on the play under discussion, and it was from her that I first apprehended the intellectual excitement and satisfaction that analytical literary criticism could yield. She had a legendary reputation as a personal tutor, and was greatly oversubscribed by final-year students, who were allowed to register a preference for a tutor. She took her pick, and in due course I was one of the lucky ones.
The tutorial system in UC’s English Department was (and I believe still is) its most distinctive and valued feature. Every student received a one-to-one tutorial for half an hour (though some tutors would be more generous with time) every fortnight, for which they wrote an essay on a topic related to their current courses that was read to and discussed with the tutor, who subsequently marked it. At this time one-to-one tutorials were rare in British universities outside Oxford and Cambridge, especially in popular subjects like English, and students were usually tutored in pairs, or more commonly threes and fours, normally for an hour each week. That was the system at Birmingham University until the 1980s, when it collapsed under the pressure of student numbers and was replaced by larger groups taking modular courses. It was a very expensive system in terms of staff teaching hours and, I came to think, a wasteful use of them. What students want and need most from a tutor is dedicated advice and feedback on their written work. When more than one student is involved the tutorial becomes a partly social event, and the role of the tutor is to encourage discussion between the participants, to put the shy and tongue-tied at ease, to prevent the bright and articulate from dominating the conversation, and to guard against doing the same himself. If you have a group that is clever and evenly matched it can be a stimulating experience for all concerned, but more often than not the social dynamics of the event hamper its educational effectiveness.
When Winifred Nowottny was my tutor, I was building up a body of knowledge in preparation for Finals by my fortnightly essays, so she allowed me to nominate the topics, and she would honestly tell me in a few cases – Joyce’s Ulysses was one of them – that she knew little about my choice. But such was the incisiveness of her intelligence that I would always learn something useful from her comments, and draw encouragement from her approval. About three years later, when I was a postgraduate student, she gave a series of intercollegiate lectures on the language of poetry at Senate House, the headquarters of the University of London, by which I was deeply impressed. It formed the basis for her first book of criticism, The Language Poets Use, published in 1962, by which time I was a university teacher myself, and I reviewed it favourably in The Tablet, the Catholic weekly. It consists mostly of close analysis of poems or parts of poems, which is designed to show how poetry ‘works’ – for example, on Milton’s lines ‘in the lowest deep a lower deep / Still threatening to devour me opens wide’ she comments: ‘the device is to run language back on its tracks by making “lower” worse than “lowest”; infinity is given a linguistic index by unfixing the fixities of grammar.’ The book belonged to the Anglo-American critical movement of ‘close reading’ generally known as the New Criticism, but it drew also on systematic stylistics and linguistics to give the analysis more-than-usual precision. It was a direction in which my own critical practice was moving in relation to the novel, leading to my first book of criticism, Language of Fiction, published in 1966. I toyed with the idea of calling it The Language Novelists Use, but decided that would be too ostentatious an hommage.
I kept in touch with Winifred in the 1960s, and once I visited her at home near Banbury in Oxfordshire when a lecture engagement took me in that direction. She seemed subdued and rather melancholy and she was alone except for her cats – I recall stepping over bowls of half-consumed cat food spread across the floors. She told me that she was working on the new Arden edition of Shakespeare’s sonnets, and I said truthfully that I could not think of anyone so well qualified to undertake it. After that I had no contact with her, and I was shocked to learn after many years had passed the sad story of her later life. She never completed the Arden edition of the Sonnets, but hung on to the commission for many years until the publishers cancelled her contract and gave the task to someone else. Perhaps like other scholars who have tackled the Sonnets she became obsessed by the insoluble enigmas they contain. Meanwhile her husband had died and she had become alienated from her only son. She became increasingly paranoid, and when she retired, refused to vacate the university flat in Bloomsbury which she then occupied. Rather than evict her, the University allowed her to stay but had no communication with her. She became a recluse, and one day was found dead in a flat that was filthy and full of scattered pages of notes about Shakespeare’s sonnets. It is one of the saddest stories I ever heard. But I was glad to discover recently from several links on the internet that The Language Poets Use is still a book that is sought and read, and that other scholars have recorded their debt to Winifred’s teaching.
Simpson Agonistes was not the only dramatic production in which I was involved in the weeks preceding Christmas 1952. The parish youth club was now known as the St Ignatius Social Club, with a more mature membership, and I did not sever my links with it on becoming a university student. One Sunday after mass at St Mary Magdalen’s I was approached by a young woman of the parish, who took an interest in the club and must have known about my literary aspirations, with a surprising but irresistible request. It appeared that the Nativity play normally performed by children in the parish junior school had been cancelled for some reason. Would I consider writing a Christmas play to be performed by members of the youth club instead? I would. I did. I not only wrote it, I directed it, acted in it, designed it, chose the music for it – did just about everything connected with it except sew the costumes. I used this experience many years later in a short story called ‘Pastoral’, one of a series commissioned by the BBC to be broadcast in the intervals of Prom concerts with some thematic connection to the music. My hook was Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony, which had provided the background music to the Crib Scene of my play. The story begins:
‘Dah dah dah, dah dah dah, dada dada dada . . .’ I never hear the opening strains of the ‘Shepherds’ Song’ from Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony without remembering my scheme to embrace the Virgin Mary. That is to say, Dympna Cassidy, who was impersonating the Virgin Mary at the time.
A few years later I used the same material, with numerous variations and additions, in an episode of my novel Therapy, whose hero recalls acting the part of Herod in a Catholic youth club Nativity play to keep a proprietorial eye on his girlfriend, playing Mary. These fictional versions of the Brockley youth club production had the curious effect of displacing the original in my memory, so that when I tried to recall it for the purpose of this book the images in my head were all of the familiar Bible story, performed in appropriate costumes, but with more colloquial dialogue and contemporary ‘relevance’ than usual. In fact the play was much more ambitious than that. Looking through a box of old papers I came across a copy of the script, entitled A Dream of Christmas, and found that it was a three-act play in which the traditional story was presented in the second act as the dream of a group of travellers marooned in an inn on Christmas Eve, whose characters correspond to the biblical ones. All of them have problems in their lives (e.g. there is a husband who suspects that his pregnant wife has been unfaithful, and another woman who is barren like Mary’s cousin Elizabeth) which the dream of Christmas, interpreted by a priest called Father Brown (‘No relation to Chesterton’s,’ he quips), who is also stranded at the inn, helps them to understand and accept. The dramaturgy is incredibly schematic and the dialogue often stilted and sententious, especially in the third act, when all the characters’ difficulties are effortlessly resolved. Perhaps conscious of these improbabilities, and in an effort to wrong-foot the audience, I resorted to a sensational denouement in which Father Brown is revealed to be a lunatic, escaped from the local asylum, who is under the delusion that he is a Catholic priest – God working in mysterious ways. I know the play was performed as written because it was reviewed in the youth club’s stencilled news-sheet by an anonymous critic who complained of the frame story’s simplistic structure and baffling conclusion, and yet I still can conjure up no memory of its first and third acts. It was not suppressed by embarrassment or shame, because the play, performed on a makeshift stage in the school hall, was well received by a full house that included my admiring mum. A note in the news-sheet records that it raised £9 for the Bishop’s School Fund.
I found the whole experience very exciting and satisfying, and the more enjoyable because Mary was part of it, albeit somewhat reluctantly. I persuaded her to play the part of the Virgin Mary in the second act, and buxom Aurora to play the invented character of a simple young friend of hers, who is impressed by, but cannot emulate, Mary’s unworldliness. I played the part of Joseph myself, and made more of his shock at, and eventual acceptance of, Mary’s pregnancy than the New Testament does. A psychoanalytic critic could no doubt make something of the unconscious motivation behind both the dramaturgy and the casting.
Mary was not a natural actress and had no pretensions to be, but she participated gamely for my sake. She had to stay overnight in our house for the final rehearsals and performance, sleeping in my bed in the back bedroom, while I had a made-up bed on the floor of the lounge. She had already met Mum and Dad several times, but not on such intimate terms. Dad liked her and appreciated her good looks, and Mum – well, I think Mum would have preferred that I didn’t have a girlfriend at all, but if it was inevitable then she couldn’t fault my new choice. There was some tension between them because Mary was used to helping at home with domestic tasks, but Mum was always reluctant to let any guest into her kitchen and at first resisted all Mary’s offers of assistance. For her part, Mary was somewhat scandalised by the way my mother cosseted me and my nonchalant acceptance of this treatment.
I think it was earlier, during the autumn term, that I accompanied Mary by Green Line bus to her home in Hoddesdon, and encountered a family life that was very different from mine. They lived in Lord Street, a turning off the High Street that eventually became a winding country lane, in a semi-detached house that was almost identical in size and design to 81 Millmark Grove, but had to accommodate nine people instead of three. Not all nine of them had been continuously in residence together, because some of the children had lived with friends or boarded at school for periods when the pressure on space was acute, and of late the older ones had begun to live away from home, but it was always an overcrowded house, as its worn carpets and furniture showed. Mary and I made our visit on a weekday, and both parents were out at work when we arrived. Our lunch was prepared by their oldest child, Brian, who was in his early twenties, and living at home temporarily while he looked for a job, having been recently sacked from a chemical company, Mary told me, for causing an explosion. He had graduated from King’s College London with a poor science degree, and Mary thought he had wasted his time there. She had applied to King’s College herself, and had taken exception to the way he had paraded her for the admiration and badinage of his hearty beer-drinking cronies when she went there for interview. (She was offered a place, but opted for UCL.) She had no more affectionate memories of him earlier in her life, claiming that he borrowed her meagre pocket money and failed to repay it, and cheated at Monopoly. But on first acquaintance Brian seemed friendly and hospitable, and I was impressed by his ability to cook a meal. His speech struck me as very different from Mary’s correct but neutral register – much more clipped and assertive, in an upper-class style which seemed out of place in this humble dwelling. I learned that he had done his National Service in the Army before going to university, and been commissioned as a second lieutenant, which would partly explain the accent.
In the course of the afternoon and evening the other members of the family returned home from their various schools and workplaces, except for Mary’s older sister Eileen, who was doing a diploma course at a Catholic teacher training college in Roehampton, and fourteen-year-old Alice, for reasons I don’t recall. All the young children seemed to me very charming, and all gave me the same spontaneous friendly smile on being introduced that Mary had given me at our first meeting. She was the third-eldest child, followed by Alice, John (twelve), Kathleen (ten) and Margaret (nine). Mrs Jacob, who was a teacher at a local school, came in at about teatime, and greeted me cheerfully in a strong Irish accent. I always had some difficulty in following what she was saying, not so much because of the accent as because her train of thought kept branching off into abrupt digressions and uncontextualised memories, interspersed with proverbs, quotations, jests and pious ejaculations; but her fundamental goodwill was always evident. She was a stout, vigorous woman of fifty, with a fresh complexion and a head of dark, thick, naturally curly hair. She belonged to the large family of a farmer called O’Reilly in County Clare in the west of Ireland, who had offered her the choice of extended education or a dowry. She opted for the former and emigrated in 1922 to London, where she was trained as an elementary school teacher and worked in the East End. She had digs in Hampstead where she met Frank Jacob, a very different kind of Irish immigrant. He was a Dubliner, descended from English Quakers who had emigrated to Ireland in the seventeenth century, and he possessed a family tree to prove it. They founded the famous Jacob’s biscuit-manufacturing business, but unfortunately Frank belonged to a less prosperous branch of the family. He had served briefly as a private soldier in an Irish regiment of the British Army at the end of the 1914–18 war, probably without leaving Ireland. Despite his Protestant background he was an Irish patriot, and told a tale of being persuaded at that time by a member of the IRA to convey a parcel containing a gun to somebody, which would have had serious consequences if discovered. He came to England to find work and met Mary O’Reilly in a London branch of the Gaelic League, an organisation dedicated to the promotion of the Irish language, which Mary, who was bilingual in Gaelic and English, helped him to learn.
Through courting her, Frank became converted to Roman Catholicism. This was not simply an expedient to marry her, for he was a totally convinced, indeed fundamentalist Catholic for the rest of his life, and suffered great distress at the thought that his unbaptised Quaker family must be eternally damned, until his elder daughters explained to him the most liberal interpretation of the doctrine of Baptism of Desire, which promises that those who live righteously according to their lights will be saved. The young couple came under the spell of Father Vincent McNabb, a remarkable Dominican friar of Irish origin, based in the Hampstead Dominican Priory. He was a regular and much-admired speaker at Hyde Park Corner, taught Thomist philosophy, pursued the cause of ecumenism when it was not as fashionable as it is today, published numerous books on religious topics and was a friend of G.K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc. Like them, he was a strong believer in distributism (the distribution of property, especially in the form of smallholdings, to a large proportion of the population) as being more conducive to social justice than either capitalism or socialism. Under his influence the newly married Frank and Mary Jacob bought a bungalow just outside Hoddesdon, in an acre of ground on which Mary grew vegetables and raised chickens and a goat, while Frank commuted to London where he had a clerical job with the Crown Agents. The young couple suffered a personal tragedy in the death of their second child in infancy from convulsions, and the smallholding did not prosper, so they decided to cut their losses and moved into Hoddesdon, renting one of the newly built houses in Lord Street. They and their three children, of whom Mary was the youngest, fitted reasonably well into the three-bedroomed semi. But they went on to have four more children, three of them quite close together, for reasons obviously connected with Catholic teaching on birth control, about which I shall have more to say later in this book. All were born in the master bedroom, and slept there for the first year or so of their lives, and the front reception room had to be used as a bedroom most of the time.
Frank Jacob was too old to be called up in the second war and served in the Home Guard, continuing to commute to his job in the City. His salary was modest, and his wife was fully occupied with her babies and infants for many years. The family was hard up in the late 1930s and early ’40s. Only the introduction of Family Allowances by the Labour government elected in 1945 made life tolerable, and even so the children had to make do with clothes and shoes that were handed down or donated by sympathetic friends in the parish. For want of a toothbrush in childhood, Mary would suffer from gum disease later in life. The house was an inferior example of its type: the hot water system never worked properly and the bathwater had to be heated in the kitchen washtub and carried upstairs in a bucket. The only thing to be said in favour of this house as a place to bring up children was that there was common land beyond the fence at the end of the back garden, with a brook that made an inviting play area, and further off there were fields and woods to be explored.
The Jacob family were poor by economic criteria but middle class by birth, education and aspiration, striving to maintain respectability in a very Irish way. Thus the parents spoke with an Irish accent but the children were brought up to use received English pronunciation and punished if they ever lapsed into the local Hertfordshire dialect; and during the war they were forbidden to use public shelters when the air-raid sirens sounded, because of the low class of people who frequented them. They mixed with the children of more affluent families, some of whom generously treated them to holidays and excursions, and as they grew up they became more and more conscious of what was lacking in their own domestic habitat, but they did not apologise for it or shrink from inviting their friends to visit. When I met them I was overwhelmed by their friendliness, vitality and sheer numbers, and although I registered the absence of comfort in their domestic arrangements, it did not bother me. They had the fascination of otherness: it was a family antithetical to my own in almost every respect, except that I shared with them a common faith – and their lifestyle was much more typically Catholic than mine. At home they said grace before meals, and the walls and shelves of the house were crowded with holy pictures, plaques and statues. Most of the children had been educated at the parish junior school by an order of German nuns who were refugees from Nazism, and there was a strong bond between the sisters and the family which endured. The angelic-looking younger son, John, rose early to serve at mass for a different community of enclosed nuns in the town before going off to school – the same Jesuit college that Tony Petti had attended. It was thought that he might have a vocation to the priesthood.
The last member to arrive home was the paterfamilias. Frank Jacob was delighted to see his daughter Mary for the first time in weeks, kissed her, and shook hands with me. He sank down in the armchair reserved for him in a corner near the fireplace of the crowded living room, where one of his young daughters sat on his knee and another brought him a cup of tea. He was a person very different in character and temperament from his wife and the rest of the family: quietly spoken, with a flat Dublin accent, and not quick to speak in the first place. His expression gave little away about what he was thinking. Photos of him early in the marriage, especially one with a hunting rifle tucked under one arm, portray a good-looking, virile young man, with a head of fair, wavy hair, but the passing of the years had thinned the hair, and thickened his waist. He moved slowly and with deliberation, as if conserving his energy. He had been commuting to his job in the City for a quarter of a century, a journey by bus, train and on foot that must have taken him at least ninety minutes each way, year in and year out, in peace and war, rain and shine, six days a week (a half-day on Saturday). It was an exhausting routine, but it also largely relieved him of practical involvement in bringing up a large family in an unsuitable house and on an inadequate income, a task which devolved upon his wife, who was hardly equal to it, as my Mary was keenly aware. I created a somewhat idealised fictional version of this family in my first published novel, The Picturegoers. There were tensions and conflicts in its history of which I then had no knowledge, and psychological traits in some of its members that would create serious problems in the future. Much of this unhappiness was connected, directly or indirectly, with their Catholic faith, but for most of them only the faith made it bearable.