Vom Vater hab’ ich die Statur
Des Lebens ernstes Führen;
Von Mütterchen die Frohnatur
Die Lust zu fabulieren.
Urahnherr war der Schönsten hold
Das spukt so hin und wieder;
Urahnfrau liebte Schmuck und Gold
Das zuckt wohl durch die Glieder.
Sind nun die Elemente nicht
Aus dem Complex zu trennen
Was ist denn an dem ganzen Wicht
Original zu nennen?
—GOETHE
My mother had a respect for truth, but she was not a truthful woman. She once said to me, her lip trembling, her eyes sharp to detect my opinion, “Your father says I am a terrible liar. But I’m not a liar, am I? I’m not.” Of course she was not, I agreed, colluding, as we all always did, for the sake of peace and of something else, a half-desire to help her, for things to be as she said they were. But she was. She lied in small matters, to tidy up embarrassments, and in larger matters, to avoid unpalatable truths. She lied floridly and beautifully, in her rare moments of relaxation, to make a story better. She was a breathless and breathtaking raconteur, not often, and sometimes overinsistently, but at her best reducing her audience to tears of helpless laughter. She also told other kinds of story, all the time latterly, all the time we were in her company, monotonous, malevolent, unstructured plaints, full of increasingly fabricated evidence of nonexistent wickedness. But that is another matter. I did not set out to write about that. I set out to write about my grandfather. About my paternal grandfather, whom I hardly knew, and about whom I know very little.
When my father was dying, I came into his hospital room once, and he sat up against his pillows and looked at me out of his father’s face. I had never thought of them as being alike. My father was a handsome man, in a very English way, blue-eyed, fair-skinned, with fine red-gold hair that very slowly lost its fire and turned rusty and then white. He had quite a lot of it still left when he died, very lively silvery hair, floating. He had a wide, straight, decisive mouth. None of these words recall him. His father, my grandfather, never had any hair that I can remember, and had heavy cheeks and a fuller, more petulant mouth. It occurred to me for the first time, seeing his face in my father’s, to wonder if his hair had been red. He had had six children, of whom my father was the youngest, all of whom had the fiery hair. My grandmother, I am fairly sure, was dark brown. I did not tell my father that I had seen this semblance, partly because it vanished when he spoke, partly because I thought of it as unflattering, having as a small child seen my grandfather as someone off-putting, stout and old. The old were old in my early childhood, in the war years: there was an absolute barrier. My father never came to seem old as my grandfather was, though he was seventy-seven when he died. At the time when I saw my grandfather in him he must have had about three months left to live. He was, by accident, in hospital in Amsterdam. It was a spotless and civilised hospital, full of seriously gentle doctors and nurses all of whom spoke an English more perfect than might have been found in any hospital at home. My father disliked his dependence and they made it decorous for him. Whilst he was there, which was several weeks, we all, my sisters and brother and I, visited him. The visiting hours were long, most of the afternoon and evening, and for most of this time on most of these days, he talked to us. All my life, I had held it against him that he never talked to us. He worked with steady concentration, long long hours, and was often away on circuit. During my early childhood, when his parents were alive, he had been away altogether, in the Air Force, in the Mediterranean, in the war. He was called back from the Nuremberg trials to his father’s deathbed, or so my mother had always said. What exactly he was doing there, if indeed he was there, I have never heard and cannot imagine. In those weeks in Amsterdam he talked a great deal, about his father, about his mother, about his childhood, as he had never done. I don’t know if he realised how very little he had ever said. He was a silent man but by no means a cold or distant man, not as you might think of a distant man, if you read that word, immediately.
He was a judge. When I say that of him, I do not think of him as sitting in judgment. I think of him as a man with an unwavering instilled respect for evidence, for truth, for justice. When he delivered moral opinions, you could see that he was of his generation, time and place, a good man, a Yorkshireman, ambitious to better himself, aware, largely from outside, of social discriminations and niceties of class, a late-convinced Quaker, a socialist-turned-social-democrat. I respected his moral opinions, I share most of them, I am his child. But more than these opinions I respect in him his wish to be exact, a kind of abstract need which is somehow the essence of virtue. You might say, love is the essence of virtue. We were very inhibited people. Even my mother, with her indisciplined rush of speech, fantasy, embarrassing candour, endless barbed outrage, even my mother was essentially inhibited in that sense. We didn’t know how to talk about love. But truthfulness, yes. All those weeks, he kept looking at what was happening, with his respect for evidence. Once, towards the end, it faltered a little. He argued quite fiercely about the inexactness of the terms benign and malignant. All growths are malignant, he said, if they are hurting you, if they are engrossing themselves at your expense. I could see he knew what he was doing, playing with words; his eyes were not taking his speech seriously. His father died of cancer of the prostate, or so my mother said. During this curious excursus about these adjectives he said, as though I knew, which I didn’t, that when he had had “that growth” removed from his own prostate some years ago it had been entered on his record as “benign.” “What do they mean, benign?” he said cunningly, deliberately confusing himself, looking at me to see if I too could be confused. By the time of this conversation he was back in London. I think he had been told what his expectations were. They were then in fact a bare three weeks, though I believed, and he may have believed, that he still had many months, maybe a year. He was partly being kind to me too, confusing us both. He thought at that time a great deal about his father’s death. He told me once, I am now almost sure that it was he who told me and not my mother, that his father’s sufferings had been terrible. My father did not die of cancer of the prostate, nor even, as far as we can tell, of the wholly unsuspected voracious lymphoma whose cells the Dutch surgeons had discovered in the fluids drained from him in the coronary ward to which he was taken after collapsing in Schiphol Airport from the heart disease which he knew very well he had. He did not suffer in his father’s way.
It was his father’s death that was one of the main points of dispute in his relations with my mother, during their last troubled years. I am nearly sure it was this dispute that gave rise to the direct accusation of lying which so distressed my mother. She had always maintained that she had been present at my grandfather’s deathbed; she had been present, she led us to suppose, at the moment of his death. The events of my grandfather’s passing, the family intrigues and stresses, the testamentary injustices only righted by the hurried return of my father, the lawyer, were one of my mother’s best tales. They had become part of my own shaky sense of my origins, a kind of Dickensian melodrama of which my mother had been a brisk and humane witness and my father a practical hero. I had a vision of this scene derived largely from Victorian novels and a little from my infant memories of my grandfather’s house, huge, bleak, dark, polished, and gauntly uncomfortable. It all took place, in my imagination, in a kind of burnt umber light, thick and brown. Various surrounding persons wore frilled and starched caps and aprons over black stuff dresses. There was a carafe and a finely etched water glass on a bedside cupboard and my shrunk bald grandfather in a huge mound of feather pillows and mattresses, suffering an ultimate drowsiness of too much painkiller and mortal weakness. The brown light drifted like heavy dust. I do not know where this vision came from: not from my mother, though it was indissolubly connected to her eyewitness narrative. In his last years my father maintained more and more stubbornly and acrimoniously that this account was a fabrication, that only he himself had been present, that my mother had kept well away. He adduced her behaviour during other family disasters and crises, and the evidence was on his side. My mother had a terror of direct confrontation with grief and pain. She avoided her own mother’s dying; she did not attend her grandson’s funeral. Nor did she come to Amsterdam. She affected to believe that this crisis was temporary and inconvenient. I have no idea what she thought in her heart. In any case, my father’s evidence seemed on all logical grounds almost wholly preferable. It was just that I discovered, during those weeks in Amsterdam, that I needed an idea of the past, of those long-dead grandparents, and that the idea I had, which was derived from my mother’s accounts, was not to be trusted and bore no very clear relation to truth or reality. It was also clear that my father, during those last weeks, was trying to form a just and generous idea of his own father, whom he had fought, at a cost to both of them. So his account had also its bias.
Perhaps I should now set out the elements of the family myth derived from my mother’s accounts of my father’s family. These accounts are dyed with her own perpetual anxiety as to whether she herself was, in the last resort, acceptable or unacceptable to them. Also by her own most necessary, most comfortable myth that she herself had represented to my father a human normality, a domestic warmth, an ease of communion quite absent from the chill household and extravagant passions amongst which he had grown up. As a small girl I believed what I was told, including this myth, despite having lived for months with my querulous and cross maternal grandmother, despite daily exhibitions of my mother’s frustration and rage.
The idea she gave me of the family in Conisborough is skeletal and discontinuous. She liked to tell the same few exemplary episodes over and over: the strange behaviour of my grandmother with the teapot, my own first wintry visit to the dark Blythe House, the never-quite-explained indifference or aloofness of my father’s family to my parents’ wedding. She faltered in telling this, and I think told differing versions, in some of which my paternal grandfather attended briefly and in some not at all. Something had hurt her badly, and when my mother was hurt to the quick the narrative power became disjunct, the odd sentence failed to reach its verb and died on a question mark. The hero of the wedding story was her own father, a red-whiskered, extravagantly open workingman who had done her proud and had also in some way been hurt, or so I deduce. I remember that grandfather well, my only relation given to loud laughter, practical jokes, and a disrespect for reticence. He was kind and frightening, and ambitious for his daughters in a practical way, though admitting to a regret that he had no vigorous, mechanically minded son.
The central figure of the Conisboro’ family was in one sense my grandfather, who is presented as a Victorian despot, purblind to the feelings of his wife and children, wholly devoted to his business which was the manufacture and sale of boiled sweets. He seems to have spent no time in the company of his six children, and to have had no thought for their future other than that they should be incorporated, in due course, into the family business, which was their life. My grandmother, a devout Methodist, was characterised, always, by both my parents, as “a saint.” My mother went in considerable awe of her, though she would also utter witty and disparaging comments on her ungainly housekeeping, and imply that they had, in the end, come to love and respect each other. The eldest son, my uncle Barnet, was crippled at birth, and spent his twenty-nine years confined to a wheelchair. My grandmother, my mother said, had devoted herself wholly to this helpless son, “did everything for him herself,” insisted on lifting and changing and pushing even when her strength was unequal to it. As a result, my mother implied, the other five were neglected, were, in her phrase, “left to drag themselves up as best they might.” They were all, also, my mother claimed, extraordinarily gifted, intelligent, creative, vital, stunted, apart from my father, by my grandfather’s incapacity to imagine that education conferred any benefits, or that any life other than the making of boiled sweets could possibly be desirable. They went to the local grammar school, where my mother indeed met my father, in the eleven-plus intake. From there they were removed as early as possible, given, in my mother’s phrase, “any material thing they desired” and set to work for the sugar-boiling.
Barnet, Arthur, Gladys, Sylvia, Lucy, and Freddie, who was my father. I met some of them, extremely briefly, though not Barnet and Sylvia. They are not part of my life, only of stories and sharp pictures, which, if they have anything in common, have the idea of furious energy, unmanaged passion, thwarted and gone to waste. The Arthur I saw I associate with thick carpets and golf clubs: the Arthur of the myth wanted to live dangerously, was a skilled pilot, a motorcycle speedway racer in the Isle of Man, a volunteer rear gunner in the First War. He flew, my mother said, round Conisborough Castle, a gloomy circular ruined tower, visible in my childish imagination from the upper windows of Blythe House. I see him roaring and dipping, looping the loop and circling, watched by the redheaded siblings envying the brief speed and freedom. The only other thing I know about Arthur is the manner of his death. This story is my father’s, unusually. He had a heart attack from which he recovered, assumed, without evidence, that he had an undivulged cancer and a short life expectancy, and went out, belatedly, to live dangerously again, thus precipitating another heart attack and a fatal collision with the back of a stationary bus. “Wine, women, and song,” my father said darkly, partly shocked by his brother’s failure to examine the evidence properly, partly envious of the extravagance. Arthur never left Conisboro’ and the boiled sweets, however. I remember him red and solid and a little bluff. I remember a resemblance to his father.
Gladys married young, and briefly, because she had to, my mother said. She married a coal miner and divorced him with considerable firmness once the immediate need for respectability was past. My mother did not expatiate on Gladys, whom she clearly disliked. I can’t remember how old I was when she first told me these few facts—old enough to have read some Lawrence as well as suffering Jane Eyre, old enough to imagine a romantic red-haired girl in a long serge skirt running through fields, hiding behind hedges, with courage and fear, to a place of secret and absolute emotion. I see always a dry stone wall and grey-green, slightly sooty Yorkshire hill grass. This imagination was daunted by my incapacity to connect this girl with the wild, ageing aunt who visited us briefly, in Sheffield, when I was thirteen, and presented us with two huge, pink-cheeked, rose-pouting, lace-frilled dolls in cellophane-covered boxes, and a diverse and lavish set of manicuring tools in a soft red leather case. My mother made this transient visitor most unwelcome and she never came again. My mother in fact hated any incursion by any guest into her fenced and indomitably comfortable domestic territory. I remember them sitting at tea, on two corners of the dining table, my mother’s mouth pinched with disapproval and distaste. My aunt was large and alarming. She wore an odd hat, which I have re-created as a bright purple silken turban, though I think that is my invention, and had a great unruly mass of wiry gingery hair and very pale sharp blue eyes, close to the sides of a prominent beaked nose. My mother poured tea, and waited very obviously for the visit to be over. My aunt began various jerky speeches which trailed away; her movements were abrupt and awkward. After she had gone, my mother spoke with concentrated and sharply expressed distaste of the vulgarity and unnecessary extravagance of the silly presents. It was only this year that my younger sister told me that she had found the dolls magical and beautiful. Later, this aunt spent several years in a caravan perched on the North Yorkshire coast. I remember my father’s alarm when the radio reported that part of these cliffs had been swept away, perhaps in the terrible storms of 1953. I remember him going north to sort out some trouble in which she had threatened a neighbour with a garden fork. She was, my mother said, “quite mad.” Certainly she died after some years in a mental hospital. My father went to visit her, during her last years, and reported that she failed to recognise him. He never I think described her, or her acts, to me, except during those last null years, when he would say sadly that it made you wonder what it was all for. I found her story hopeful and exciting, against the evidence. What I was afraid of, in the days when I first learned about her, was the “normal,” the respectable, the quotidian domesticity which my mother claimed to be happiness, suffered with savage resentment, and exacted payment for, from those she cared for.
My grandfather’s two youngest children carried out acts of considered rebellion and escape. My mother’s favourite tale, apart from the tale of the teapot perhaps, was the tale of my father’s act of severance. She herself, a girl from the working class, from a back-to-back house with no inside plumbing, but supported by her father, had won unprecedented scholarships to Cambridge, where she went in what I imagine as a frail tremor of intellectual will and unimaginable social terror to read English. Her Cambridge was the Earthly Paradise and the Queen of Hearts’ garden of arbitrary obstacles and disgraces rolled into one. Until she died she went over and over moments of solecism she had too late detected in those years. She dreamed at least yearly, perhaps more often, that she was to be forced to resit her finals with no warning, and consequently to be exposed as a fraud. My father, who was, my mother acknowledged, the only student in her year who did better than she did in exams, had been briskly removed from school by his father to become a commercial traveller in boiled sweets. My mother said that this was a black time of his life, and that he became very ill, frightening his mother once or twice by fainting into the coal bucket. The “into” was part of her graphic style. As a little girl I had a clear vision of his pale limbs somehow telescoped and contracted into this dirty receptacle, like a discarded dead root, though I think now that he was probably trying to lift it, that the blood ran to his head. I knew exactly where this coal bucket stood in Blythe House. It stood on the threshold between the kitchen and the cellar, whose dark door led into a frightening blackness I remember stepping nervously back from. I must have been three. The coal bucket can never have been there, but I associate the two blacknesses, the fear of uncontrolled falling. My mother said my father would never afterwards talk about this time. In Amsterdam he did, a little, half-apologizing to some unseen presence for the great trouble he had caused by his mixture of deviousness and distress. He had worked, my mother said, secretly and alone and late at night, unknown to his father, to take the Cambridge entrance exam, had saved and skimped every penny of what she called his “pocket money” and he later, in the hospital, called “my wages” and had finally won an exhibition to read law. So he had confronted his father, and had explained that he had saved, from this allowance, enough money for his first year’s fees and lodging, and that he meant now to go to Cambridge, because that was what he wanted to do.
The end of this tale always puzzled my imagination. My grandfather, my mother said, had been filled with pride and delight at this announcement, and had “fallen upon your father’s neck”—an unlikely motion, I always thought, in that portly and rigid trunk. I think now the phrase derives from the good father’s reception of the Prodigal Son, but that is confusing, for my grandfather’s hypothetical embrace welcomed revolt and prodigality. In any case, my mother said, Pa had immediately put £1,000 into my father’s bank, in order that he should live comfortably at Cambridge. No sentence of my grandfather’s speech was recorded in my mother’s account of this episode, which, although dramatically delightful, causes problems about his nature, and the true nature of his unreasonable rigidity and his children’s incapacity to communicate with him. How could they have had no inkling that he would have been proud or pleased? Was he capricious? Stubborn? Easily enraged? Had his children ever tried to explain to him what they wanted or hoped for? Had they inherited from my saintly grandmother an expectation of self-denial and strict obedience which precluded any attempt at dialogue? Was he formidable, was he wrathful, was he stony, was he emotional? No one has told me, I do not know anything about him. My father said, “Pa tried to do the best for us according to his lights, but he couldn’t conceive of things outside his business.” Where did it all come from then, the drive, the ambition, the passions of his offspring? I associate him with Dombey, if only because I think my father did. He once said that Dickens’s observation of Florence Dombey was a miracle, that a child neglected and passed over and denigrated does indeed become more and more self-critical, more anxious to please, to find authority reasonable. But he himself did not submit for long. He went to Cambridge, and did well, and had tea in punts with my pretty and fragile mother.
The story of Lucy parallels that of my father, in some ways. This again is my mother’s version. At some point my grandfather had sent Lucy and Sylvia on a world cruise, for what reason my mother did not say, though she made it clear that in her view a world cruise was a poor substitute for higher education and some degree of financial independence. Lucy had been ravished by the open spaces and free life of Australia during this journey. It was an idea that at second-hand moved my father, too. When I was myself sitting Cambridge entrance and he a very successful junior barrister, or perhaps during the first slacker year after he took silk, he found time to write a thick, escapist novel, in which the hero moved from the dark, dirty, and dangerous world of Sheffield steel mills to a land of clear, clean deserts and great flocks of wheeling, pearly parrakeets. He threatened occasionally to emigrate. It was his generation’s dream in the years of austerity and the choking class structure and battle fatigue. Lucy did in fact carry out this postwar dream, appearing one morning at breakfast in Blythe House to announce that she and a young woman friend had passages booked to sail that very day. “That very day” is my mother’s contribution, and perhaps suspect, but the tale is the same. My grandfather could only tolerably be dealt with by faits accomplis. His reactions to this announcement are not known to me. Lucy went to a life of violin playing and the breeding of Airedales. In the early years of his retirement my father went out to see the deserts for himself and came back troubled about the corruption of the aborigines by alcohol, and perhaps a little lowered, as a man is whose dream vision has been replaced by a solid and limited reality. I was glad he never emigrated for I early developed a passion for languages, and thus for Europe. My father died European, despite his vision of deserts, as a direct consequence of a journey up the Rhine, which he thought over, as he sat in his high Dutch hospital room, talking to the Humanist visitor about the novels of Conrad and Charlotte Brontë she brought him, and to a young surgeon about the kinds of hawk planing over the roofs which were all he could see. “It was civilised,” he said with satisfaction, of his last painful venture. He described cranes and herons and castles and the moonlit water. And his own defeat by a brief climb from mooring place to town centre. He was also a good raconteur, not like my mother, deliberate, weighing his words, judicious, telling you some things and holding others back.
When did my mother first tell me the story of Sylvia? I must have been too young to be told it, whenever it was, for I remember it as my first absolute confirmation that my mother’s myth was untrue, that the hearth’s warmth did not keep off the cold blast, that there was no safety. Before, I thought there were two sorts of people in the world, those to whom terrible things happened, as in books and the news, and those condemned to the protection of normality and the threat of boredom and custom. I believe my mother told me this story in the war itself, in Pontefract, where she kept house miserably whilst my father was away, except for a brief period of anxious and exalted activity when she taught English to grammar school boys. I loved her then. She talked to me about subjects and predicates, Tennyson and Browning, the Lady of Shalott, and not about household dirt and failures of attentiveness. I should already have known about uncertainty. I was a gloomy child and was in my secret soul certain that my father would never return from wherever he had abruptly vanished to, his red hair shorn, hung around with canvas buckets and kitbags under his ugly folded blue cap. There was a boy, too, at school, who died one night of diabetes. I remember being distressed that I couldn’t really know he was dead, that everything went on just as if this wasn’t so. Perhaps I only really learned about Sylvia later, but associate the learning with these other losses. Sylvia had fallen in love, on that fated world cruise, with someone whom my mother described as a “remittance man” in South Africa. They had married, and my grandfather had provided for them by offering them a workman’s cottage he owned, in Conisboro’. There was a child, another Sylvia, who was, I believe, more or less my own age. They were very unhappy. The remittance man, according to my mother, was “very cold. Pa didn’t understand. He came from a warm country. He was desperately cold.” My saintly grandmother visited, furtively my mother managed to imply, with blankets and hot soup. She provided these also for the local poor. Quite what happened to the remittance man I never dared to ask. As a little girl I thought the word meant that he was somehow provisional and not to be considered. Perhaps he went home, to the hot sun and the gold mines and his life before the incursion of my tragic aunts. I have given him, in my imagination, the features of a South African novelist I know, thoughtful, considerate, secretive, withdrawn. When I was little I saw him as a Gilded Youth, in a boater.
At some point in her own history, and certainly when I was only just born, Sylvia killed both herself and her small daughter. I know this, because I inherited certain toys belonging to this destroyed cousin. There was a dog, or nightdress-case, zipped, furry, black and white, and peaceably couchant, whom I loved for years before I discovered his provenance. And after. I remember with terrible courage shouting, when some clearance of outgrown toys was proposed, “You can’t throw Wops away. He was Sylvia’s.” Knowing I did not know what this sentence meant to them, using it to save my dog, shamed. “Your father smoked terribly for two years after Sylvia died,” my mother said once. This at least explained why he, who never smoked, owned a chased silver cigarette case. I could not imagine his feelings. My mother had reduced her accounts of Sylvia to various manageable dicta. Sylvia, she gave the impression, was the most gifted of the gifted gaggle. She could have done all sorts of things, my mother said, and always added, “It was like putting a racehorse to draw a milk cart.” She said also, scornfully, “She was no housewife, she had no idea.” I imagined a hutlike house, stone-floored, coal-fired, with barely room to turn round in. There must, however, have been a gas oven. I think I took Sylvia’s fate as a warning against both brilliance and sexual passion. My father used to be partly amused, but ultimately more alarmed, by any evidence of extravagant passions in his daughters. He was a romantically-minded man, and believed that the first lover is always the most important. He was a virtuous man, and was, it seems clear, steadfastly faithful to my mother. He spoke of his brother Arthur, in Amsterdam, with a kind of mild envy. He felt he had always been too cautious. “When I come before my Maker,” he said, sipping the glass of wine the doctors, despairing of cure, had permitted him, “which I do not expect will happen, I shall have to beg him to forgive me my virtues.” My mother said he had learned from the others’ disasters, he had learned to be careful and to value security and domestic peace.
My mother’s accounts of my grandmother’s selflessness were like pearls, or sugar-coated pills, grit and bitterness polished into roundness by comedy and my mother’s worked-upon understanding of my grandmother’s real meaning. Whilst I cannot remember any quoted instance of my grandfather’s speech I can remember various sayings of my grandmother, including her welcome of my infant self, on my first visit. There she stood on the doorstep, my mother said, rigid and doubtful—I imagine it for some reason taking place on a snowy evening, in the early dark. She did not say, how lovely to see you, or let me see the baby, or come in and get warm, but “It hardly seems worth the trouble of all that packing just to come here. Babies are always best in their own house, I think.” My mother would always add a long explanation of this ungraciousness—my grandmother was genuinely self-deprecating, she was very well aware of the real trouble of transporting a baby with all her equipment, she was thanking my mother for having made the effort. The grit inside the pearly sugarcoating was a fear of rejection by both women, perhaps. “I nearly just turned round and went home,” my mother always said, and always added, “but it was just her manner, she meant very well, really.” And “she was really very fond of me, she came to see me as a daughter, I was a favourite.” The famous teapot story is another such instance. It took place, I think, in the war, during petrol rationing. My grandmother was driven over by the chauffeur, from Conisboro’ to Sheffield, to take tea with my mother and to see another baby. She sat briefly, talking to my mother. But when offered tea, she stood up abruptly and said no, no thank you, she had stayed too long, she must get back to pour my grandfather’s tea for him, he expected it. My mother’s emphasis in this story was on the childish helplessness of my grandfather, who, with a houseful of servants, could not stretch out a hand and lift his own teapot. My grandmother’s formidable manner and her excessive dutifulness were part of each other, in my mother’s vision, a kind of folly of decorum in which the result was the rejection of my own mother’s carefully prepared tea and cakes. “All that way, and the petrol, and the chauffeur’s time, wasted just to pour a cup of tea,” my mother would say scornfully and yet with fear. This story runs into the story of my grandmother’s death. Even in her last illness, my mother would say, when she was weak and in great pain, my grandfather would not allow her to sleep alone in a spare bedroom. She gave the impression, my mother, of the elderly man howling like a lost child, “creating” on landings until my grandmother wearily “dragged herself” downstairs again, to his side. “He couldn’t sleep without her,” my mother said. And “he had no consideration.” This inarticulate crying out is the only image of his speech I have. I see him pacing in an improbable nightshirt, beside himself. My mother’s contempt for male helplessness was edged with savagery. This operated even during my father’s last illness, which she persisted in seeing as a fantasy and a betrayal, which could have been better handled. Her original announcement of his collapse included the authoritative and unfounded assertion that he’d be perfectly all right in a day or two, there was no need for anyone to bother. Her account of my grandmother’s death is riddled with doubt, but I have nothing else certain to hold, or imagine, my father never got round to telling his version of that story, so the enraged and frantically obtuse old man persists in my memory.
I had almost forgotten what was perhaps her favourite tale, the perfect example of the fecklessness and neglect to which my father, before he found her, had been subject. Two of the sisters—she was never quite sure which—Gladys and Sylvia, Sylvia and Lucy—had gone out into the fields to play, taking with them the baby, my father, whom they had put, for safety, into a horse trough and had wholly forgotten, returning without him, remembering his whereabouts only when, many hours later, my grandmother asked where he was. The child had been discovered, my mother said, by searchers, lying half in and half out of the water in the stone trough, as the dark fell, quite abandoned. She always affected to find this story amusing, and always instilled into it a very understandable note of bitter indignation against everyone, the girls, the mother, the father, the state of affairs that could allow this to happen. When my father returned to it in Amsterdam it was with a kind of Arcadian pleasure. “We ran wild,” he said with retrospective delight, “we had so few restrictions, we had each other and the fields and the stables—we had an amazingly free childhood, we ran wild.” His little room in the Dutch hospital was warmly lit, for a hospital room. He had bad days when he huddled under the blankets and shivered with final cold. He had good days when he sat up and talked about the world of his childhood, the pony and trap, the taste of real fresh bread, the journeys they made in the pony trap to the races and came back in the dusk singing all together, the poems they wrote, the amazing variety of wildflowers there then were. “I grew up before the motorcar,” he said. “You won’t really be able to imagine. It was a world of horses. Everything smelled, rather pleasantly, of horses. The milk was fresh and tasty. There were real apples and plums.”
During those weeks, during that unaccustomed talking, which despite everything was pleasant and civilised, as he meant it to be, he did try to construct a tale, a myth, a satisfactory narrative of his life. He talked about what it was like to be part of a generation twice disrupted by world war; he talked about his own ambitions, and more generally about how he had noticed that it was harder for those who felt they had achieved nothing to die. He talked above all about his childhood and particularly, perhaps, though not illuminatingly, about his father. He talked of how his aunt Flora’s coffin had been refused houseroom, even for a night, by relatives who disapproved of her religious views. He knew he was dying. He had set out because he sensed he was very ill. But we were told before him, and more specifically, how fast and of what he was dying. He was surprised about the cancer. “I had no idea,” he said to me, with a kind of grave amusement at having been caught out in ignorance, ignoring evidence. “It never occurred to me that that was what they were worried about.” And, on another occasion, casually, but with a certain natural rhetorical dignity that was part of him, “You mustn’t think I mind. I’ve nothing to regret and I feel I’ve come to the end. Don’t misunderstand me—no doubt in the near future there will be moments of panic and terror. But you mustn’t think I mind.” He said that for my sake, but he was a truthful man. He was already steeling himself against the panic and terror, which were in the event much briefer and more cramped than we then supposed.
He had often said before, though he didn’t repeat it, at least to me, during those weeks, that a man’s children are his true and only immortality. As a girl I had been made uncomfortable by that idea. I craved separation. “Each man is an island” was my version of a delightful if melancholy truth. I was like Auden’s version of Prospero’s rejecting brother, Antonio, “By choice myself alone.” But during those extreme weeks in Amsterdam I thought about origins. I thought about my grandfather. I thought also about certain myths of origin which I had pieced together in childhood, to explain things that were important, my sense of northernness, my fear of art, the promised end. By a series of elaborate coincidences two of these had become inextricably involved in what was happening. The first was the Norse Ragnarök, and the second was Vincent Van Gogh.
We went to see the Götterdämmerung, in Covent Garden, on the last night of my father’s doomed Rhine journey. I had a bad cough, which embarrassed me. Now whenever I cough I see Gunter and Gutrune like proto-Nazis in their heavy palace beside the broad and glittering artificial water, and think as I thought then, as I always think, when I think of the 1930s, of my father in those first years of my life knowing and fearing what was coming, appalled by appeasement, volunteering for the RAF. When I was clearing his things I found a copy of the “Speech Delivered in the Reichstag, April 28th 1939, by Adolf Hitler, Führer and Chancellor.” It was stored in a box of family photographs, the only thing in there that was not a photograph, as though it was an intimate part of our family history. At the time, because I was thinking about islands, I remember very clearly thinking about the similarities and dissimilarities between Prospero and Wotan. I thought, in the red dark, that the nineteenth-century Allfather, compared to the Renaissance rough magician, was enclosed in Victorian family claustrophobia, was essentially, by extension, a social being, though both had broken rods. When Fricka berated Wotan, I thought with pleasure of my father, proceeding slowly and freely along the great river.
My favourite book, the book which set my imagination working, as a small child in Pontefract in the early years of the war, was Asgard and the Gods: Tales and Traditions of Our Northern Ancestors. 1880. It was illustrated with steel engravings, of Wodan’s Wild Hunt, of Odin tied between two fires, his face threatening and beautiful, of Ragnarök, the Last Battle, with Surtur with his flaming head, come out of Muspelheim, the gaping Fenris Wolf about to destroy Odin himself, Thor thrusting his shield-arm into the maw of the risen sea-serpent Jörmungander. I remember the shock of reading about the Last Battle in which all the heroes, all the gods, were destroyed forever. It had not until then occurred to me that a story could end like that. Though I had suspected that real life might, my expectations were gloomy. I found it exciting. I knew Asgard backwards before my mother told me about Sylvia, that is certain. I remember sitting in church, listening to the story of Joseph and his coat of many colours and thinking that this story was no different from the stories in Asgard and less moving than they were. I remember going on to think that Ragnarök seemed “truer” than the Resurrection. After Ragnarök, a very tentative, new, vegetable world began a new cycle, washed clean of blood and fire and gold. I may, I see now, rereading the book as I still do, have been influenced in these childish steps in literary theory and the Higher Criticism by the tone of the authors of Asgard, who rationalise Balder and Hodur into summer and winter, who turn giants into mountain ranges and Odin’s wrath to wild weather, and who talk about the superior truths illustrated by the beautiful Christian stories. They are not Frazer, equating all gods gleefully with trees, but they set you on course for him. I identified Our Northern Ancestors in my mind with my father’s family, wild, extravagant, stony, large, and frightening. They were something of which I was part. They were serious gods, as the Greeks, with their love affairs and capriciousness, were not. The book was, however, not my father’s, but my mother’s, bought as a crib for the Ancient Icelandic and Old Norse which formed an obligatory part of her degree course. I can’t remember if she gave it to me to read, or if I found it. I do remember that she fed the hunger for reading, there was always a book and another book and another. She never underestimated what we could take. She was not kind to her children as social beings, she screamed at invited friends, she felt and communicated extremes of nervous terror. But to readers she was generous and resourceful. I knew she had been the kind of child I was, speechless and a reader. I knew.
It was with my mother, on the other hand, that the Van Gogh myth originated. Her family name had a Dutch shape and sound to it. Her family came, in part, from the Potteries, from the Five Towns, and a myth had grown up, with no foundation in evidence, that they were descended from Dutch Huguenots, who came here in the time of William the Silent, practical, warm, Protestant, hardworking craftsmen, with a buried and secret artistic strain. This Dutch quality was a kind of Gemütlichkeit, the quality with which my mother had hoped to warm and mitigate the wuthering and chill of my father’s upbringing. In Sheffield, after the war, we had various reproductions of paintings by Vincent Van Gogh around our sitting room wall. There was one of the bridges at Arles, one of the sunnier ones, where the water is aquamarine and women are peacefully spreading washing. There were the boats on the beach at Les Saintes-Maries de la Mer, which I recognised with shock when I went there eight years later. There was a young man in a hat and yellow jacket whom I now know to have been the son of Roulin, the postman, and there was a Zouave in full oriental trousers and red fez, sitting on a bench on a floor whose perspective rose dizzily and improperly towards him. There were also two Japanese prints and what I think now must have been a print of Vermeer’s Little Street in the Rijksmuseum, a housefront of great peace and steadiness, with a bending woman in a passageway on the left. I always, from the very earliest, associated these working women in Dutch streets with my mother. I associated the secret inwardness of the houses, de Hooch’s houses even more than Vermeer’s, with my mother’s domestic myth, necessary tasks carried out in clear light, in their own confined but meaningful spaces. In my memory, I have superimposed a de Hooch on the Vermeer, for I remember in the picture a small blond Dutch child, with a cap and serious expression, close to the woman’s skirts, who is my small blond self, gravely paying attention, as my mother would have liked. The Sheffield house, in whose sitting room these images were deployed, was one of a pair of semi-detached houses purchased as a wedding present for my father by his father, who could never, clearly, do things by halves, who thought, rightly, it would be an investment. We left one of these houses for Pontefract, during the war, for fear of bombs, and came back to the other. At the period when I most clearly remember the Van Goghs and the Vermeer/de Hooch the second house was in a state of renovation and redecoration. My grandfather had died, various large and dignified pieces of furniture had come to be fitted in, and there was money to spend on wallpapers and curtains. I remember one very domestic one, a kind of blush pink with regular cream dots on it, a sugar-sweet paper that my parents repeatedly expressed themselves surprised to like, and about which I was never sure. In my memory, the Van Goghs hang tamed on this delicately suburban ground, but in fact they cannot have done so. I am almost sure that paper was in the dining room, where my aunt Gladys was flustered by my enraged and aproned mother. In any case my earliest acquaintance with the paintings was as pleasantly light decoration round a three-piece suite. This was part of what he meant his work to be, sensuous pleasure for everyone. When did I discover differently? Certainly before I myself went to Arles, before Cambridge, in the 1950s, and saw that tortured and aspiring cypresses were exact truths, of their kind. When my father collapsed at Schiphol I was writing a novel in which the idea of Van Gogh stalked in and out of a text about puritanical northern domesticity. There was nowhere I would rather have found myself than the Van Gogh museum in Amsterdam. I was reading and rereading his letters. He wrote about the Dutch painters and their capacity to paint darkness, to paint the brightness of black. He wrote about the hunger for light, and about how his “northern brains” in that clear, heavy, sulphur yellow southern light were oppressed by its power. He was not cautious, he lived dangerously. He felt his brains were electric and his vision too much for his body. Yet he remained steadily intelligent and analytic, mixing his colours, thinking about the nature of light, of one man’s energy, of one man’s death. He painted the oppression of his fellow inmates in the hospital in St. Rémy. He was a decorous and melancholic northerner turned absolute and wild. He observed and reobserved his own grim redheaded skull and muscles without gentleness, without self-love, without evasion. He was truthful and mad. In the mornings I went and looked at his paintings, and in the afternoons I took the tram out to my father’s echoing hospital, carrying little parcels of delicacies, smoked fish, fruits, chocolates. In the afternoons and the evenings he talked. He talked, amongst other things, about the Van Gogh prints, which were obviously his own, his choice, nothing to do with my “Dutch” mother. He talked particularly about the portrait of the Zouave. That was on one of his good days. I had bought him some freesias and some dahlias. I had not realised, in all those years, that he was one of the rare people who cannot smell freesias. He claimed that on this occasion he could. “Just a ghost of a smell, just a hint, I think I can smell it ...” he said. He helped me to mend one of the dahlias with Sellotape, where I had bent its stem. “You can keep them alive,” he said, “if you keep the water-channels open. I’ve often kept things alive successfully for surprisingly long periods, that way.” He talked about Van Gogh’s Zouave, the one of the family prints I had liked least, as a child, because the floor made me giddy and because the man was alien, both his clothes and his face. It was, said my father precisely, “a very powerful image of pure male sexuality. Absolutely straightforward and simple. It was always my favourite.”
He looked at me over the tops of his little gold half-glasses and smiled. “Van Gogh went to find the Zouaves in the brothel in Arles,” I said. I was going to go on to say that Van Gogh believed that the expense of energy in sex was bad for his, or anyone’s, art. But he wasn’t listening. He didn’t really think I knew anything about Van Gogh. He had the idea that he might get well enough to go round the Rijksmuseum and see the Vermeers. He did. My sister took him, alarmingly unstable and determined. He wanted to hear music. He wanted to fit things in. Sometimes I think he meant to shorten his time by living well, so that he would die quickly. The Dutch doctors put life into him with nitroglycerine drips and blood transfusions. He told me one day, making a story out of it, how he had walked to the lavatory, lurching along walls, creeping along corridors, gripping bed foot and doorknob, only to find a queue of other frail pyjamaed men. He told this story with a detached, comic anger. He was saying, in effect, “This is what we come to.” He was measuring his strength. On one of his better days he set out on the same journey quite gallantly. We had bought him some slippers. He was very troubled about the loss of his slippers and nail scissors, which had gone ahead of him, in the aeroplane he missed, to the home to which he never returned. My mother, who became obsessively angry about the taxi which had waited in vain for this aeroplane, was further enraged to receive someone else’s suitcase, in the event. “With a dirty shirt, and someone else’s dirty comb and used razor,” she said. My mother drew back from all human dirt and muddle. My father sat on the edge of his hospital bed, scrupulously clipping his toenails. His ankle, between his pyjama and his new slippers, was white, and smooth, and somehow untouched, covered with young, unblemished skin. I looked at it and thought how alive it was.
In the mornings I walked along dark canals. I liked the city. I remembered that Camus had said that its concentric canals resembled the circles of Dante’s Hell. I even bought a copy of La Chute to check the quotation, and carried it around with a paperback copy of Van Gogh’s Letters, to read over my solitary lunches. Its hero calls himself a juge-pénitent. He recalls the wartime history of the city, with ironic detachment. He pleads (in the legal sense). Amsterdam is, he says, “au coeur des choses. Avez-vous remarqúe que les canaux concentriques d’Amsterdam ressemblent aux cercles de l’enfer? L’enfer bourgeois, naturellement peuplé de mauvais rêves.” Despite my reason for being in the city, I didn’t find it hellish, more reassuring in its persistent sea-fretted solidity. The people were kind and reasonable. The university teachers had agreed to take cuts in salary and working hours, in order to avoid redundancy. My father, who had not walked along the canals, nor studied the brick housefronts, sat in his concrete-walled cell and worked out the social background of everyone he met, the surgeon, the Humanist visitor, the nurses, the other patients. Unlike Camus, he did not suppose that to be bourgeois was to incline towards hell, bad dreams, and bad faith. But, in his generation, he found places on the social scale infinitely fascinating and important. The surgeon owned seagoing yachts and an empty piece of Scotland where he fished salmon and shot grouse. My father, even in those weeks, was delighted by this discovery, by this contact with good breeding and success. He said to me of his own father, diagnostically and matter-of-fact, “I suppose we were lower-middle-class really. That was what we were.” He was being ruthlessly exact. He would have wished it otherwise. He talked to the surgeon in his professional voice, from behind his professional mask, more openly smiling than what I think of as his true self, the reflective, solitary face I watched, as he thought out his past, and his future. If he would have to ask his Maker to forgive his virtues, he was sure that they were virtues, and that he had exercised them. When he came home, to the London hospital, there was a strike on, the surgeons wore smeared gowns and the ancillary staff were brusque and sloppy. Amsterdam seemed a fitter place for him, somehow. Its strangeness was in a way life-giving.
To me, too. I took pleasure, despite everything, in mastering the train system, in reading words in a new language, in making friends with the Humanist, who was distressed by the approaching death of a teenage German heroin addict. I stumbled across the flower market, on the canal bank, where I bought him the dahlias. I sat in a restaurant in the Leidseplein and ate a huge bowl of mussels with a glass of good white wine, in the dying October sunlight. The table was in a little glazed front parlour, half outdoors, half in, which reminded me of the covered porch in my grandfather’s Bridlington house, where I had spent a holiday bedridden with measles. The windows were finely etched with floral and geometric patterns. These, too, I associate with my grandfather. I see as I write that the etched drinking glass and carafe that stand by his bed in my vision of his death are those that stood in fact by my bed, on the only overnight visit to Blythe House. I remember that we inherited these objects at his death. My father was allergic to shellfish. He had collapsed in court in Naples, in 1944, after eating lobster, and had developed huge hives on the bench in Hull, twelve years later, after a prawn cocktail. A police surgeon, examining him privily in a cell, had told him he must never eat shellfish again, and he never had, though he had taken intense pleasure in them. I did not feel bad about eating the mussels. There was too much else to feel bad about, and I would not have eaten them if he had been there, I think. I did feel bad about the paintings. I experienced my one moment of desolation during those weeks in the middle of the Rijksmuseum, amongst all the darkly ingenious still lifes, the heaps of dead books, mementoes mori, the weight of the varying sameness of past endeavour, the silence, my own incapacity to stop and feel curious.
The Van Goghs were different. I could not like, I could not respond to the very last paintings, the tortured and incompetent cornfield, with the black despairing birds crowding over the paths which lead nowhere. But the great paintings of Arles and St. Rémy shone. The purple irises on gold. The perturbed bedroom. The solitary chair. The reaper, making his deathly way through white light in fields of shining corn. I knew what Vincent had said about this painting as the image of a cheerful death, a secular human image, of a man moving into the furnace of light. I stopped thoughts off. I thought of Vincent in front of Vincent’s paintings. I brought postcards to my father for him to see, contained, faded diminutions of all this glory, and he painfully addressed them to my mother, her sister, his oldest friend, in trembling writing, saying that he was all right. We have all inherited his handwriting, which was cramped and nondescript. My mother’s was generous and flowing and distinguished. We were all trained differently, yet we all write his small scrawl. How does that come about?
We talked about heredity during those long visits. He said my mother had come increasingly to resemble her mother, and that there was a lesson in that. We also talked about my mother’s untruthfulness. My father felt that it was a failure in perfect good manners to complain about her narrative onslaughts on his own veracity. (This was complicated by a powerful fear they both had of failing memory, since accuracy meant so much to both of them, after all.) He said, not for the first time, anxious about the fact that it was not for the first time, that we had been over this ground, that she had claimed to have been at his father’s deathbed, where she had not been.
“I should know,” he said. “He was my father. I was certainly there. How can I be wrong?”
It was then that I saw that much of my past might be her confection.
“Have you ever thought,” I said, “how much of what we think we know is made out of her stories? One challenges the large errors, like that one. But there are all the other little trivial myths that turn into memories.”
He was struck by this, and produced an example, of how some flowers had died, and my mother had supposed that perhaps the cleaning lady might have watered them too little, or perhaps too much—probably too much, and that that was why they had died, because Mrs. Haines had overwatered them, and so hypothesis became the stuff of fact.
Earlier that year, when it had been she who was ill, we had had a similar conversation, and I had said, joking and serious, “It’s all right for you. You didn’t inherit those genes.” Both of us, under stress, found this very funny, we laughed, in complicity. Later he told his housekeeper, over coffee, that I was the image of his mother, that I resembled that family, strikingly. But I don’t think this is true, and the photographs I’ve seen don’t bear it out. Now, in moments of fatigue, I feel my mother’s face setting like a mask in or on my own. I have inherited much from her. I do make a profession out of fiction. I select and confect. What is all this, all this story so far, but a careful selection of things that can be told, things that can be arranged in the light of day? Alongside this fabrication are the long black shadows of the things left unsaid, because I don’t want to say them, or dare not, or do not remember, or misunderstood or forgot or never knew. I left out, for instance, the tear gas. I wanted to write about Amsterdam as clean, and reasonable, and enduring, and so it was. But two of us came out of the airy space of the Van Gogh Museum into a cloud of drifting gas which burned our throats and scoured our lungs. There were black-armoured police and stone-throwing evicted squatters. Behind our hospital-headed tram was a smoking column of burning cars. For several nights we couldn’t return to the hotel directly; it was cordoned by police and the paving stones were torn up. My father could not begin to be interested in these manifestations. He was fighting his own private battle. To omit them is a minor sin, and easy to correct. But what of all the others? What is the truth? I do have a respect for truth.
I remember one particular day at Blythe House, when both my grandparents were alive. I remember this day clearly, though it is not my only memory, possibly because I wrote about it at the time. Now I try to calculate how old I was, I see that I am already confused. It was during the war, during my father’s Mediterranean absence, perhaps 1943 or 1944, certainly a very sunlit day during what I remember as a succession of burning still summers, the beginning of my hunger for sunlight. I had stayed at Blythe House in winter. It had seemed stiff and frightening and huge, whether because I was then very little, or because it was so much bigger than our wartime house I don’t know. I remember an enormous cold bathroom, with a deep bath standing portentously in the middle of a huge empty space. I remember a view of dirty snow, a children’s playground with slide and circular roundabout and swings on loops of chain. I remember the cellar mouth and a dark, frowsty kitchen. I remember my mother’s pervasive anxiety. But this summer visit was different. I noticed things. I was not wholly passive.
At the beginning and end of the visit my grandparents stood formally side by side in front of the house, on a gravel drive, and I looked up at them. My grandmother wore a straight black dress, crêpy and square-necked. Her hair was iron-grey and caught up, I think, in a tight bun or roll. Her expression I remember as severe, judicious, unsmiling. Her stockings were thick and her shoes button-barred and pointed. She was composed, I could say, she made no unnecessary movements, no conciliatory speeches, no attempt at affectionate embrace. (My other grandmother rushed and enveloped us, smacking her lips.) My grandfather’s face was obscured because it was tilted slightly backwards. He had a large protuberant belly, across which was looped a gold watch chain. I remember his belly most. He was not a fat man, nor a large man, but substantial. I thought—or if I did not think, I have since regularly thought, so that the ideas are bonded to this memory—both of Mr. Brocklehurst, the tall black pillar of Jane Eyre, and of Mr. Murdstone in David Copperfield. I did not expect my grandfather to do anything frightening or condemnatory, though I was afraid of committing a faux pas. He was identifiably a Victorian patriarch, that is all. Though in those days I had no idea of historical distance and supposed we were all threatened with Newgate prison for debt, and with Fagin’s night in the condemned cell. I could tell, I think, that my grandfather was not very interested in me, and that he had nothing to say to me. But in some way I cannot now remember matters developed so that he escorted us to the works itself, to see the boiling of the sugar. On this journey we were accompanied by a tall man in a brown overall, with a lugubrious, respectful, and friendly face, and by some other forgotten man, who lingers in my memory only as the owner of a cloth cap.
The works was gaunt and bare. The floor I remember as mere earth, though it cannot have been: it was certainly dark, not tiled, and dusty. It was all like an enormous version of the outdoor washhouses of the north, draughty and cold and echoing. On the left as we went in were large vessels I associated with the coppers my other grandmother boiled sheets in, stirring them with a huge wooden baton. I saw, or I remember, four of these. One was full of sulphurous yellow boiling sugar, one of a dark, cherry-red, one of bright green and one, which amazed me because it was an unusual colour for sugar, of a kind of pale inky colour, a molten sea of heaving, viscous blue glass. The colours and the surfaces were brilliant and enchanted. They undulated, they burst in thick, plopping bubbles, they swirled with curving streamers of trapped air like slivers of glass. There was a smell, not cloying but clear and appetizing, of browning sugar. We moved on and saw large buckets full of this gleaming fluid poured onto a huge metal table, or belt, which ran the length of the room. Smoking it hissed down and began to harden. Men with paddles manipulated and spread it, ever finer, more translucent, wider, like rolled pastry magnified numberless times, the colours paling so that magenta became clear peony-pink, so that indigo became dark sky-blue, so that topaz became straw-gold. And a kind of primitive mechanical tart cutter descended and stamped these gleaming sheets, making rows of rounded disks. The process had things in common with glassblowing, which then I had not seen, but which later, in Venice, in Biot, reminds me always of the urgent work with the hot sugar, before it cools. Humbugs ran not flat but in a long coiling serpent, thick as a man’s trunk at one end, tapering to thumb-size, through an orifice which simultaneously gave it a half-twist and bit. The most miraculous moment was when my grandfather urged the man in the brown overall to show me how the stripes were made in humbugs. Now I have it, now, almost, I hear his voice. It was both hesitant and eager and wholly absorbed in its subject. I cannot remember the words, but I can remember his certainty that I would find this process, his work, as startling and satisfactory and amazing as he did himself. This is all I know about him at first hand, that his work fascinated and absorbed him. The humbug stripes were as extraordinary as he had promised. The humbug sugar lay, hot and soft, in a huge mass at one end of the table. The overall man pulled off an armful of it, which he rolled roughly into a fat serpent coil, a heavy skein, like my mother’s knitting wool, on his two arms. We went out of the shed, into a yard, where a large hook protruded from the wall—very high up, it seemed to me, so that he had to reach up to it. But I was a very small child for my age, maybe it was not so high. The man hung the fat tube of brown sugar—dark, treacle-brown sugar—over this hook and began to whip it around, and around. I knew this motion, it was the regular turn of the playground skipping rope, twist and slap, twist and slap. And as I watched, the sugar lightened. From treacle to coffee, from coffee to a milky fawn, from fawn to a barley-sugar straw colour, and from there, through the gelatine colour of old dried egg white to pure white, no longer translucent but streaked and streaked with infinitely fine needles of air. “It’s the air that does it,” my grandfather said. “Nothing but whipping in air. There’s no difference between the two stripes in a humbug but air: the sugar’s exactly the same.” I remember him saying, “It’s the air that does it.” I think I remember that. We took the white rope back into the factory, and laid it on a dark one, and the two were wound round and round each other, spiralling and decreasing in girth, by skilled slapping hands, until the tapered point could be inserted into the snapping machine. I remember the noise it made, moving on the metal, a kind of crunching and crackling of dried sugar, and a thump and slap of the main body of it—this last noise a magnified version of school plasticine rolling.
When it was over, my grandfather fetched out several conical paper bags and these were filled with the fragile slivers of sugar that fell away from the stamping machine. Those too I still remember. At first they were light and powdery and crystalline, palest of colours, rose, lemon, hyacinth, apple. Hot they tasted delectable, melting like sweet snowflakes in those days of sugar rationing. If rationed out and kept too long they settled, coagulated, and became a rocky mass undifferentiated, paper-smeared, sweating drops of saccharine moisture.
I wrote about this, at East Hardwick School. It is the first piece of writing I remember clearly as mine, the first time I remember choosing words, fixing something. I remember, still, two words I chose. Both were from my reading. One was from a description of birds on a Christmas tree, in, I think, Frances Hodgson-Burnett’s Little Princess. The birds were German, delicate, and made of very fine “spun-glass.” The word had always delighted me, with its contradiction between the brittle and the flexible thread produced. I remember I used it for the fragments in our conical paper bags. I remember also casting about for a way of telling how violent, how powerful were the colours in the sugar vats. I wrote that the green was “emerald” and I know where I found that word, in the reading endlessly supplied by my mother. “And ice, mast-high, came floating by / As green as emerald.” As green as emerald. Did I go on to other jewels? I don’t remember. But I do remember that I took the pleasure in writing my account of the boiling sugar that I usually took only in reading. Words were there to be used.
Later, my grandfather encouraged me to pick his flowers. He had a conservatory, on one side of the grey house, with a mature vine, and huge bunches—I remember many huge bunches—of black grapes hanging from the roof and the twisting stems. He gathered one of these, and encouraged us to taste and eat. “More,” he said, when we took a tentative couple of fruit. “They are there to be eaten.” Grapes were unknown in those dark days. I remember dissecting mine, the different pleasures of the greenish flesh inside the purple bloom of the skin, the subtle taste, the surprise of the texture and the way the juice ran. I was taken out and told to pick flowers. I took a few dubious daisies from the lawn. “No, no,” he said, “anything, anything at all, you help yourself and make a really nice bunch.” He liked giving, that too I am sure of, from my own experience. I made a Victorian nosegay. Everything went right, it formed itself, circles of white, round circles of blue, circles of rose, a few black-eyed Susans. And a palisade of leaves to hold its tight, circular form together. I ran up and down, selecting, rejecting, rich. My mother described the early age at which I had distinguished the names, phlox, antirrhinum, lupin. I don’t remember her much that day; she must have been at ease. Or else I was. It was unusual for either of us to be at all settled, at all confident, at all happy. It was almost like my father’s idea of his family life as Eden, though then I didn’t know of that, knew only that these grandparents were to be regarded with awe. I don’t think I saw them again. We did not go there often, and after a time my grandmother died, and then my grandfather, who could not, my mother said, live without her. “He was like a lost child. He was quite helpless, all the life gone out of him.”
My mother only outlived my father for a little more than a year. She did not appear to grieve for him, going only so far as to remark that she missed having him around to agree with her about Mrs. Thatcher’s treatment of the miners. She was curiously despondent about the prospect of dying herself under a government for which she felt pure, instinctive loathing. Immediately after the war she had once told me that when it began she had thought through, imagined through, all the worst possible things that could happen, to England, to my father. “Then I put it behind me and simply didn’t think of it anymore,” she said. “I had faced it.” As a little girl, I found this exemplary and admirable. Action is possible if you stop off feeling. Some chill I had learned from my mother worked in Amsterdam when I stopped off the dangerous thoughts possible in the presence of Van Gogh’s dying cornfields or his dark painting of his dead father’s Bible. I could talk to my father about his father only by not loving him too much, not exactly at that moment, not thinking too precisely about his living ankle, cutting him off. My poor mother maybe—in part—cut him off too efficiently, too early, faced it all too absolutely and too soon. During the war, I have been told recently, the Air Force wrote to her relations begging them to influence her to desist from writing despairing letters to her husband in North Africa. Wives were asked to keep cheerful, to tell good news, not to distress the men. She faced his loss, I believe her, and then complained of her lot. She said when he had died, bewildered and uncertain, “I had got used to it already, you see, I had got used to him not being there, all the time he was in Amsterdam.” She was explaining her apparent lack of feeling.
The day of his funeral was bitterly cold. It was just before Christmas. It was a Quaker cremation, attended mostly by non-Quakers, who did not break the tense silence. I felt nothing, I felt fear of feeling, I felt the rush of time. Outside my mother was pinched and tiny and stumbling. I said, “I remembered the day he came back from the war.” “Yes,” she said, very small and vague. He came back at midnight, or so my mother always said. He had sent a telegram which never arrived, so she had no idea. She went furiously to the door and burst out, “It’s too bad,” thinking he was the air-raid warden complaining about chinks in the blackout. What did they say to each other? I remember being woken—how much later? I remember the light being put on, a raw, dim, ceiling light, not reaching the gloomy corners. I remember the figure in the doorway, the uniform, the red hair, a smile as surprised and huge and half-afraid as I imagine my own was. I remember him holding his officer’s hat. Why hadn’t he put it down? Or am I wrong? I remember even an overcoat, but I confuse the memory of his return hopelessly with his parting. The hair was less red, more gold than I’d remembered. He had a hairy ruddy-ginger Harris tweed jacket which my mother had always said exactly matched his hair, and which I still think of as “matching” it, though I saw differently and remember better. (And how to be sure with all the years of fading between then and that last cold day?) I sat up, scrambled to my feet and leaped an enormous leap, over my bed, over the gap, over the bed with my small sleeping sister. I don’t remember the trajectory of this leap. I remember its beginning but not its end, not my safe arrival. I do remember—this is surely memory, and no accretion—a terror of happiness. I was afraid to feel. This event was a storied event, already lived over and over, in imagination and hope, in the invented future. The real thing, the true moment, is as inaccessible as any point along that frantic leap. More things come back as I write; the gold-winged buttons on his jacket, forgotten between then and now. None of these words, none of these things recall him. The gold-winged, fire-haired figure in the doorway is and was myth, though he did come back, he was there, at that time, and I did make that leap. After things have happened, when we have taken a breath and a look, we begin to know what they are and were, we begin to tell them to ourselves. Fast, fast these things took and take their place beside other markers, the teapot, the horse trough, real apples and plums, a white ankle, the coalscuttle, two dolls in cellophane, a gas oven, a black and white dog, gold-winged buttons, the melded and twisting hanks of brown and white sugar.