It is sometime early in 1986. Flic, her father, Robin, and I are standing on the terrace of the Avon Gorge Hotel in Bristol under a grey sky out of which a fine drizzle has begun to fall. Somehow I have persuaded them that it is better to be outside, in the open air, despite the weather. Above us and to our right Brunel’s suspension bridge crosses the gorge; to our left the land drops away and we can see the old red-brick warehouses and the terraced streets of south Bristol. Down below us the brown river flows between banks of grey mud.
Robin is wearing an agreeably scruffy old jacket, a bow tie (as always), and a lopsided smile. This would be a good place, he says, addressing me, for a young man to ask a certain question of his girlfriend’s father. Flic is pregnant and I have written to Robin and Catherine (Flic’s mother) to explain that while I’m not in favour of marriage I am very committed to Flic, our long term relationship, and our future child. He’s hoping for something more. I don’t take the bait but Robin doesn’t seem to mind. And I’m pleased that he has brought the subject up with such charm and good humour.
Robin seemed to me in those days rather posh and a little intimidating, as were the rest of Flic’s family. But I liked his joie de vivre and his sense of humour. In those things, if in nothing else, he was similar to my father who, when I introduced Flic to him, asked does he snore? as a cheeky way of finding out if we were sleeping together.
Flic’s family are so different to mine in regard to wealth, education and social class, and the differences were very big for our parents’ generation. They did, however, live through the same world war. They had extraordinary experiences of terrible times that our generation have been fortunate enough to escape. Robin was brought up as a Quaker and was a conscientious objector. He spent the war years in China, which was fighting Japan, working with the Friends’ Ambulance Unit, as the Quaker Volunteer Service was known. Still a pacifist in his seventies he was proud of having been dragged away by police in the protests against the erection of a statue of Air Marshall Arthur ‘Bomber’ Harris, who had been responsible for the bombing of Dresden.
My father was an ordinary working class man who was a motorbike dispatch rider throughout the war. He hated the army and was nick-named the static corporal in honour of his failure to rise through the ranks. He found it difficult to obey orders and when he got promoted from time to time he soon suffered demotion for being where he shouldn’t. He never saw the enemy and spent most of the war accompanying convoys of military vehicles in the UK. Sometimes he would slip away to visit my mum in London where she was working as a clippie, a bus conductress. A frequently told story has him following her bus on his army motorbike and waving to get her attention. She flirted with this seemingly unknown young soldier not recognising that he was her husband. At some point he took off his helmet and she got a shock, if not a disappointment. That was one of his few war stories.
My father did spend a little time overseas towards the end of the war. He was in newly liberated Holland where the people were hungry to the point that children were suffering from malnutrition. British soldiers, including my father, found themselves sharing their rations with the locals. Dad felt great sympathy for the Dutch people, was greatly respected by those he came to know, and made friendships there that lasted for many years after the war.
My mother spent some of the war years working on the buses in London until she gave birth to her first child, my sister Pam. Flic’s mother gave up her history degree at Oxford to work in the Land Army, in which women replaced agricultural workers who had become soldiers. My mum has been dead for many years but as I write this Flic’s mum, Catherine, is still alive at ninety-four. She is the last in her family of her generation, marooned in the twenty-first century, a world so different from the one she grew up in.
Before Kit, our first child, was born Flic’s parents drove down to Surrey to meet their future in-laws (out-of-laws?), my mum and dad. I choose not to be there; the embarrassment would have been unbearable. Robin and Catherine lived in what I can only call a grand house in Corsham, Wiltshire. Flic denies that it was grand. What can I say? Only that it stood in several acres of land and was big enough to house two adults and five children and still have the top floor (of three) rented out as a flat. It was, and is, a handsome Georgian building constructed out of Bath stone. I can’t really imagine what Robin and Catherine thought of my mum and dad’s council maisonette in Cobham. It consisted of four tiny rooms which added together might take up the space of the rarely used front sitting room in their house. Flic, again, wants to correct me. Your parent’s house wasn’t so small, she says. It’s just that the walls were very close together. No matter. I know that my mum and dad liked and respected hers and I hope that the feeling was mutual.
The truth is that Flic and I started on the road to Zagora from somewhat different places. We have different backgrounds. My mum and dad were working class Londoners born and brought up in what we would today call poverty. Mum was the oldest of five children and she spent much of her childhood looking after her younger siblings (three girls and a boy) because her mother worked in a café in the day and did cleaning jobs in the evening. Mum left school at fourteen and went, as they called it then, into service, leaving home to work as a scullery maid in a grand house. It wasn’t her choice, she wanted to stay on at school but uniforms were expensive and it just wasn’t possible.
Dad was born to a young woman working as a servant for a middle class family. He was fostered and looked after by someone who he always referred to as Mrs Kettle. He never knew his father and, as illegitimacy was a source of shame in those days, had a tough start. He left school at fourteen too.
My parents had three children and lived in a council flat in south-west London, Dad working night shifts for London Transport. Then, in 1956, he got a job as a chauffeur to a rich architect, they moved into a tied cottage in leafy suburban Surrey and I was born. There was a ten year and more gap between myself and my brother and sisters and they all left home early and I grew up as a single child.
Flic and I had different childhoods. My playmates were the sons of architects and solicitors while Flic played with the kids from the council prefabs (prefabricated houses built during the war) and climbed over the wall into her own garden to scrump apples, not telling her friends she lived there. She went to a private nursery school, a convent school, and what might be called a finishing school in Oxford. I went to a good junior school and then a grammar school (clever kids only), in Kingston-upon-Thames. I see that already some of the differences are beginning to look like similarities. The truth is that while social class defined people from our parent’s generation (imagine what leaving school at fourteen did to my mum and dad’s confidence), it didn’t affect us so much at all. I have never for a moment felt disadvantaged because of wealth or class. Those things are a sideshow, a source of interest and often enough amusement, that’s all. The cultural differences between Flic and myself are mostly fun. Take, for instance, the subject of vocabulary.
There was a big wedding at Flic’s mum’s house recently and I was amused to see that the portaloos installed for the occasion had the word toilet covered up and replaced with the word lavatory. I can imagine Flic’s oldest brother seeing the toilets, as I call them, and muttering the word vulgar, or, even better, ghastly – words I wouldn’t dream of using. Sometimes the upper-middle classes make good use of the word extraordinary. It’s pronounced like this: ex-STRORD-dinary, with a strong emphasis on a random syllable. Flic is one of six and their posh accent diminishes in direct proportion to their ages. So Flic and her younger sister Alice talk almost normally. But Anna, who is five years older than Flic, comes out with a highly accented GHAST-ly and even, on occasion, ex-STRORD-dinary. I don’t mind. It makes me smile.
Other words? Well, dinner, is out of the question. What was it Flic was taught? Only dogs and servants have dinner. I may be exaggerating, only dogs and children I think it was. The correct word is, of course, supper. Just as settee is quite out of the question and sofa is right. Lounge is inadmissible and sitting room is the proper word.
The upper-middle classes also take delight in eccentric nicknames. Among Flic’s friends and family you can meet with Twitch, Miney, Gog, Foff, Fluff, Feathers and many more. And Flic, short for Felicity, has been known in her family by that name from a very early age. In fact eccentricity is encouraged among such people, in great contrast to the what will the neighbours think mentality of my upbringing.
If we go back to my grandparents’ day the differences between our families are greater. My sisters both remember going to the dog races with my grandmother. Gran would bet on a greyhound, telling Margaret, my younger sister you’ll get that new coat I promised you if that dog comes in. Margaret never did get the coat. My aunt Jean remembers, as a small child, collecting granddad’s best suit from the pawn shop. Gran was a woman of high spirits with a zest for life that made her inclined to spend money that she didn’t have. So it was that my granddad’s suit was pawned during the week to provide some extra cash and then on a Saturday morning, after receiving Friday’s pay packet, one of the children would be sent to get it back. This, like the dog racing, was meant to be a secret from granddad, or Pop, as we knew him.
I can just about remember my grandparent’s house in Willesden, North London. I remember Gran rubbing my face with a flannel so hard, as if you weren’t clean if it didn’t hurt. And I just about remember the big family gatherings where we would dance The Okey Cokey or Knees Up Mother Brown and Pop would play the spoons. I’m not sure what Flic’s family did on equivalent occasions but I’ve heard them sing Latin rounds.
I have in front of me now Pop’s gold watch. On the back are inscribed the words Presented by T Wall and Sons to E J Beale for good service 1939-1956. That’s right, sixteen years in the same job, an admirable achievement in those days when unemployment and the poverty that went with it were greatly feared. What a man wanted was a job for life. It didn’t matter what is was, the noble thing was to stick it out and provide for your family.
And so it was that my father took up the job of chauffeur, driving a rich man up to London and back every week day for twenty something years. The man could have gone on the train, it would have been quicker, but to arrive in a chauffeur-driven Rolls Royce gave him a certain status. Not much of a job then; merely a rich man’s status symbol. But Dad did what he had to do and was mostly happy. I remember Saturday mornings and him getting the Rolls out of the garage, washing and polishing it and singing and whistling as he worked. He would sing I have often walked down this street before from the musical My Fair Lady. Or Louis Armstrong’s What a Wonderful World.
I once saw the film of Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day with Anthony Hopkins playing the part of a butler in a grand house. He was brilliant, portraying the deferential, almost obsequious, manner that a man must adopt in such an occupation – a certain stiffness of movement, head bowed a little, face expressionless. How do I know this? Because I remember my father playing that role when he was with his employer. They spent a great deal of time in each other’s company over the years but never spoke much and certainly not of personal things. After more than two decades of knowing each other my father’s employer still called him Collins and my father in return used the word sir.
Of course people didn’t open up about personal matters in those days in the way they do now. Least said, soonest mended, was one of a number of phrases people used to say we don’t talk about that. It’s interesting to note that in Flic’s family they were prohibited even from talking about not talking about things – at least in English. If an inappropriate subject came into the conversation they were told ça ne se dit pas, French for it is not said. In the bath they were told to wash those unmentionable places with the words entre les jambes et sous les bras. And in my family our parents’ Christian names were a well kept secret. I don’t know how old I was when I came to know that they were called Harold and Winifred.
My father was Harold to his wife, Collins to his employer, and Dad to his children. But there was another name too. I have a vague childhood memory of hearing him addressed as Cap by old friends who came to visit. You might think that it stood for Captain or Capo but you’d be wrong. I have only recently learned that it was short for Madcap. Hmmm… not the name I would imagine for him but then my earliest memories are of him in his fifties. But wait, here’s a memory and I believe it’s true. On his seventieth birthday he rode his motorbike at seventy miles per hour no hands, and took a photograph of the speedometer to prove it. Madcap it is then. That’s one of the ways that I’ll think of him from now on.
I have spoken to both of my sisters about Dad recently. One sent some photographs that made me a bit lumpy-throated and tearful for a moment. The other sister sent these words (which also made me feel lumpy-throated and tearful for a moment too):
I would say that we were not worse off than our neighbours and Dad was always in work. We had clean school uniforms. A mum at home to care for us, a large extended family, wonderful Christmases and caravan holidays. Dad would be so proud to see us now. That illegitimate lad who with a bad start in life gave love, security and adventure to us.
One of Flic’s sisters started gathering a collection of stories of their father recently. He wasn’t a madcap but certainly an eccentric with a great sense of humour. There is, for example, the letter, written in verse, that his niece, Christina, received from Rudolf Nureyev in answer to her fan mail. It included the words I find my pas de deux les hard de deux thinking of you. Some people believe that Nureyev didn’t write that letter at all but that it came from a certain Robin Eden. When the residents of the new estate built at the back of Robin and Catherine’s house looked out of their windows one morning and saw a tramp asleep on a bench, an empty beer bottle by his side, they phoned the police. The tramp turned out to be a stuffed figure, like a scarecrow. Again there are those who believe it might have been the work of a tall man wearing a bow tie who was seen in the vicinity earlier that morning. The name Robin Eden springs to mind. But who am I to say?
On the face of it my father and Flic’s could not have been more different and so it surprises me to find myself writing about a couple of similarities. Firstly, I think that for both of them their activities in the war years will be remembered as being compassionate rather than anything else. That’s a good thing to be able to pass on to our children. And they both retained a boyish sense of humour into their old age. I suspect that they were able to do this because they had the support of their wives, Catherine in the case of Robin and my mum, Win, in the case of my father, women who were each the emotional and practical backbone of the family.
Thinking about it now I wonder if the biggest difference between Flic and myself is that she was one of six and I was, in effect, a single child. My sisters left home early to get married and my brother was killed in a motor accident at the age of seventeen. So most of my childhood memory is that of an only child. Or, you might say, since my two sisters spoilt me and competed for my affection (and they still do), an only child with three mums. I guess that explains some things. Certainly Flic was brought up to share and to practice great tolerance. I wasn’t.
My parents were ordinary people of straightforward kindness and integrity. Flic’s parents were ordinary posh people of straightforward kindness and integrity. My mum and dad didn’t try to make me follow a particular career; they just wanted me to be happy. Flic’s mum and dad didn’t try to make her follow a path either. Both of us were born to parents who were already in their forties, and we were brought up in comfortable, predominantly middle-class, leafy, small-town suburbia.
And so ends the chapter that included the words Flic and I started on the road to Zagora from somewhat different places; we come from different backgrounds. I really believed those words as I wrote them. Now I’m not so sure.