‘She walks in beauty like the night
Of cloudless crimes … chimes … it’s no use,’ said Mrs Gardiner, ‘I can’t see a thing without my specs. You’ll have to read, Monica.’
Wednesday night was poetry night. My mother had once belonged to the local choral society which met once a week to rehearse an unchallenging repertoire of popular works for performance in the parish church to an audience composed of friends and relatives of the choir. The advent of a new, young conductor who wanted to introduce an element of modernity into the programme – adventurous pieces full of percussion and discords and unnerving silences – had caused rumblings of dissension within the ranks. He had finally overreached himself with the intimation that certain of the second sopranos were having trouble with the top notes – were not in fact sopranos at all, and might like to switch voices. My mother and half a dozen other women, already aggrieved at a recent hike in the annual subscription, resigned in a body. They were suspicious of modern music, resentful of being talked down to by someone just out of college, and they were damned if they were going to sing first alto: give up the tune after all those years, no thank you.
To fill in the chasm that this act of insurrection had left in their cultural lives, my mother and the other rebel sopranos decided to turn their attention to another branch of the arts. In pursuit of poetry, as of music, they preferred to hunt in a pack, and every Wednesday evening would see them gathered in whosever living room the hospitality rota decreed, sherry in hand, thrilling to the forthcoming chase.
One of the women, Mrs Davis, who worked as a librarian and had once had a poem of her own published in the Lady, acted as chairwoman. Her job was to introduce the poems to be read with a few words about the life of the poet, the historical background and the movement to which he belonged. Poets, I gathered, did not come singly but in waves.
My father, who was rather fond of poetry, would retreat to his study with his pipe the moment the first arrivals crunched down the gravel drive. I was allowed to sit in or not as I chose, provided I was quiet. I usually joined in, as I always liked to be included in anything that was going on, and besides there were better biscuits to be had on a Wednesday night.
On this particular evening, though, I left at half-time because my granny, mother’s mother, who was staying with us, was starting to fidget with boredom. She was not keen on poetry, having been forced to learn reams of the stuff at school – Gray’s ‘Elegy’ and ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’ – and was anyway rather deaf, so kept missing bits and tutting which made the readers nervous. Another source of discomfort was the lack of heat in the living room; Granny’s house in Bognor Regis was centrally heated to a ferocious degree, and she found my mother’s aversion to warmth impossible to understand. To be fair to my parents, they had not left her to freeze, but had furnished her room with a three-bar electric heater which made a twanging noise and smelled of scorching dust, and it was to her room that we retreated with tea and biscuits for a game of cards.
‘I’m not a great one for poetry,’ Granny said as she shuffled the pack. We were sitting either side of her bedside table; I was perched on the bed, she was in the armchair. ‘I’ve always preferred novels, myself. Have you read much Thackeray?’
‘No,’ I said. I was nine years old.
‘Well, you should. I’d read all of Thackeray by the time I was your age. Used to read all night under the bedclothes by torchlight at school. Caned for it regularly. Ruined my eyes of course. The reading, I mean, not the caning. Wouldn’t you like to go to boarding school?’
People often remarked how dissimilar my mother and granny were – an observation intended to flatter my mother. There was some truth in it: my mother tended to disapprove of things silently; my grandmother vocally. Granny had acquired at an early age the air of a woman thwarted. As a young girl her ambition to study law had been obstructed by parents reluctant to sponsor the education of a mere female. Instead, she had watched them squander their money on putting her three less intelligent brothers through public school and university where to a man they failed to distinguish themselves. She had however absorbed some of the lessons of her schooldays – she would rather starve than use the wrong knife and fork, for example – and could at least claim that thanks to Thackeray and Co. her nights had been spent profitably. Her marriage to an older man from the village was not happy. My grandmother was not suited to marriage, and my grandfather was not suited to my grandmother. Domesticity did not come naturally to her. She had some modern notion that motherhood was not necessarily women’s work, and if you had been bathed by her as an infant in two inches of cold water with wedges of hot ash from her cigarette dropping on to your bare skin you tended to agree. Determined that her own daughter should not be similarly penalised, she budgeted and saved and went without to send her to a good school. But she had reckoned without the vagaries of human nature. What my mother enjoyed by way of material advantages she completely lacked in ambition, wanting nothing more than a quiet family life and a little job to bring in some pin money.
I did love my grandmother, as children often do, but I was frightened of her too. She was a fine storyteller, and could be relied upon to take my side in any dispute – just as a way of evening things out and prolonging the argument. But her outspokenness and lack of tact were legendary. ‘What’s that appalling noise?’ she once demanded, and when told that it was the sound of me practising the cello, laughed and said, ‘Good Lord, I thought a cat had got stuck up the chimney.’
Visits to her house in Bognor were an ordeal, too, as we would be obliged to go down to the beach for the afternoon, a pilgrimage which inevitably exposed me to public scrutiny and embarrassment. While other families seemed to get by with a few towels, our luggage had to include an ice-box, hamper, towels, spare towels, deck-chairs and wind-breaks from which father was required to build a bedouin-style encampment. While normal people undressed, Granny would add more and more layers – coat, scarf, rugs – and sit grimly facing out to sea as if it was all a test of character.
‘No, not there, Stephen, there. Not too close to those people. They’ve got a wireless.’ Her voice would echo across stretches of sand like a drill-sergeant’s across a parade ground. Mother and father instead of hiring a beach hut used to get changed, with much hopping about, inside a home-made orange towelling tent with a drawstring neck which was worn like an oversized poncho. Designed with self-effacement in mind, it rendered the wearer visible for miles. As a mere child I was expected to be exempt from finer feelings like modesty and to manage with just a towel. The last time we had been to the beach together I had wriggled out of my knickers and vest and half-way into a one-piece swimsuit under cover of a small towel which I was holding up with my teeth, when granny, provoked beyond all endurance by this display of prudery, snapped, ‘Oh for heaven’s sake, what does she need that for? It’s not as if she’s got any bosoms!’ and snatched the towel away to expose the truth of this to the whole beach.
On this particular evening, while the ladies downstairs were laying Byron out on the slab, we were playing Beggar Your Neighbour, which my mother always called Beat Your Neighbour, because, she said, beggar was a swear word, or very nearly. Granny was a formidable opponent; there was no question of her letting me win, and after two hands she suggested we play for money. ‘We usually play for matches,’ I said, but she dismissed this with a wave of her hanky.
‘Go and ask your father for some change, then we can play properly.’
‘Come in,’ came father’s voice from the study in response to my timid knock. I peeped round the door – I didn’t often venture further than this into his sanctuary. My role was usually one of summoner, calling him to lunch or supper. Occasionally, of course, I crept inside while he was out, but the carpet was so covered in papers, schoolbooks, marking, piles of typewritten pages, notes on this, translations of that, that it was almost impossible to cross the room without disturbing something. It always looked like the scene of a recent break-in.
‘Can I have some change? Granny wants to play cards for money.’
‘You’re not listening to the poetry then?’
‘We stayed till the interval,’ I said. ‘Granny got cold.’
He nodded. He was wearing, over his regular clothes, an all-in-one flying suit made of dark brown sheepskin, fleecy side out – obviously designed for Antarctic flights in open-topped aircraft – which gave him the appearance of a large teddy bear. There was a gas fire in the room but he never lit it, refusing to claim for himself any comfort which mother had relinquished.
He searched his pockets for a moment before trying to stand up, realising he was hemmed in by boxes of papers, and subsiding again. ‘I don’t seem to have any on me,’ he said. ‘Try my jacket – it’s somewhere in the bedroom.’
It had been hung up on the back of the door, no doubt by mother. One pocket contained nothing but chalk – a few broken sticks and some grey powder which lodged under my fingernails as I scrabbled for coins – the other held father’s wallet, which like the study was full of bits of paper but no money. Although it was obvious at a glance that the wallet was too flat to contain any change, I browsed idly through the contents. I didn’t consider this to be snooping as father had more or less given me permission. There were library cards and bank cards, stamps, old receipts, and some pieces of blue paper with numbers on and words like NET and GROSS and TAX. And tucked in a pocket at the back was a square black and white photograph of a tiny baby in a cot. A baby who was not me: on the back in blue ink in unfamiliar handwriting were the words: Birdie aged 18 days.