by Peter Hall
I can’t pretend that any of this bothered me. I didn’t feel deprived. I didn’t mind being a working-class boy who could only bath himself once a week in a tin bath in the kitchen. It seemed a normal, if somewhat boring, thing to do. I was perfectly happy swathed in my parents’ devotion, exploring the vast world of our tiny house and its neighbours. From the very beginning, my mother made me feel special. Perhaps this is the greatest gift a parent can give to a child. And I was, after all, the only child. When I asked why I didn’t have any brothers or sisters, my mother, with a slight sniff, would produce one of her aphorisms: ‘We couldn’t do for two what we can do for one.’ I believe now that this was a rationalisation which hid a great deal. I never knew the real reason. Perhaps she could not have more children; perhaps she could not face childbirth again. In any case, she was now hungrily ambitious for her only child. Circumstances had forced her into achieving very little for herself; and she knew early on that my father’s sunny, untroubled temperament was not going to achieve it for her either. So all her ambition centred on me.
I loved both my parents. They seemed to me fabulous creatures, expert in living and full of infinite strength and warmth. I would crouch under the living-room table, hidden by a long, red velveteen cloth which stretched to the floor. There I listened with delight as my parents went through a familiar routine. ‘Where has he gone?’ ‘Has he run away?’ ‘Whatever shall we do?’ At last my father would throw back the cloth and discover me doubled up in paroxysms of laughter. The huge figure would then lift me high in the sky and give me a colossal hug.
My parents were very physical and tactile. This surprises me now because their attitudes and morality were essentially late Victorian. They were very correct, very respectable. Looking back, it seems to me that Suffolk and East Anglia did not properly enter the twentieth century until the Second World War. But there was nothing prudish about my upbringing. I was cuddled and caressed. On Sunday mornings I would creep into my parents’ bed, taking care, of course, to wriggle between them, and luxuriate in the sense of being physically at one with somebody else. This sense of recognition, of being seen by somebody else’s eyes, of being appreciated and touched by another’s hands, is the happiest sensation for a child. Out of it comes the first stirrings of a healthy sensuality. When I was three or four, I had a recurring erotic dream in which our next-door neighbour, her children and I all danced naked. We laughed as our willies bounced up and down. Our lady neighbour had, I noticed, a willy that was especially large. It was years before I knew there was any physical difference between boys and girls. It was also years before this stimulating fantasy faded.
I was taught to pray and believe in God. As a small child I prayed fervently for everyone I knew, especially my mother and father. I wondered, though, what God looked like. My mother could provide no clues. Vestiges of East Anglian puritanism made her chary of suggesting idolatrous images. So I settled on one for myself.
In my childhood, a poster was displayed everywhere. It showed a maternal-looking peasant with a bonnet and an abundant, russet-coloured skirt. She held a large basket full of freshly reaped wheatstalks and brown eggs; she was the Ovaltine lady – a warm and cheerful earth-mother. I decided that she was God, and I thought of her when I said my prayers. My certainty was increased by regularly hearing a chorus of happy children on Radio Luxembourg. They sang in unison a catchy ditty beginning, ‘We are the Ovaltinees, little girls and boys …’ It was clearly a hymn of praise. My mother ticked me off roundly for being silly when, aged about five, I confessed to my secret God. I was hurt and indignant.
Religion was an automatic part of my life as a child, like a rather tasteless medicine administered regularly without explanation and without much hope of it doing any good. My parents went to church only for family rituals: marriages, christenings and deaths. My mother had a ready explanation: ‘You don’t need to be in a stuffy church to worship God. I can worship Him better outside in the fields, or in the streets when I look up at the blue sky,’ she would announce. I said I felt exactly the same: I would much prefer to worship Him in the fields. But it didn’t wash. I was packed off to Sunday School. I think now it gave them a chance to make love. I hope I am right.
Sunday School and children’s services continued throughout my childhood. I liked them more after the age of eight. By then I had learnt the piano and was often asked to play the hymns. I realised when I was six that death is an experience all living creatures share, and that one day I would die. I was horrified, and the thought appalled me for days. Did this mean extinction? And if there was a heaven, where was it? The sheer size of space bewildered me. I was told that there were millions of stars, an infinite number of universes going on and on and on. Yet at some point, surely, space must stop? And then what? What was beyond it? What happened there and who was in charge? Was there another God in charge of God? Who started all this? I wasn’t sure that it was God. And would it go on forever? As I grew older, I became more bewildered as I learnt about the evils men did in God’s name. He seemed to change sides all the time. I comforted myself by playing the piano.
Our home didn’t have much furniture and we didn’t have much food — though it would be wrong to imply that I ever went hungry. My mother ‘made do’, but frequently reminded me that it was hard work. I don’t think she exaggerated.
For my first twenty years, I constantly heard my mother boast that she always provided a good, cooked meal for my father’s dinner. This occurred in the middle of the day. He would come home at about one o’clock, eat appreciatively and then go back to work. When he returned at night, there would be ‘tea’ on the table – large slices of white bread, home-made jam, home-made cakes and quantities of strong, sweet tea.
On Saturdays and Sundays, my father would visit the local pub and have a pint of bitter. Sometimes resources stretched to a pint-and-a-half or two pints. This would result in many complaints from my mother and the delay of dinner by a quarter of an hour. On Saturday nights, at precisely 9.15 p.m., he would return to the pub. He sometimes went on Sunday evenings as well, but it was not a routine – I think he believed that he should not make a habit of the pub on the Sabbath. Occasionally he bought ginger beer or a bottle of Guinness for my mother. These were frugal days.
I was a fussy child. I didn’t like meat, but the weekly joint appeared in so many guises – roast, cold, minced, stewed — over its seven-day existence that the portions were tiny. We often had rabbit or hare given to my father by his country friends. When we ourselves moved to the country we snared rabbits; or thanked the local landowners effusively for the present of a partridge or pheasant. I hated milk and didn’t want to eat eggs – particularly the white of eggs. I was told off for my awkwardness. I could not bear fried food or fat in any form. My mother was bewildered. Fat and dripping were the stuff of life to her. She sobbed uncontrollably at the thought of my malnutrition. Some fifty-five years later I was tested for allergies and the doctors urged me to give up eggs and any product originating from the cow.
To a tiny boy, Bury St Edmunds was not a shabby little market town, but somewhere formidable and forbidding. I was overwhelmed by the rows upon rows of houses, by the frightening ruins of the Abbey – all sharp medieval flint — and by the enormous railway station where my father worked. I was proud of that; but even prouder to know that he had been a chorister at the forbidding church of St Mary’s. The Playhouse cinema was more friendly. My father had appeared there as Giuseppe in The Gondoliers for the Amateur Operatic Society. This, I sensed, was the highlight of his youth.
The long walk from Avenue Approach across the town to the street where my grandparents and aunt had their houses terrified me. I don’t remember traffic; I suppose there was little in those days. But I remember the multitude of houses – baleful houses that stared threateningly, united in keeping me out. My maternal grandmother’s house was similar to ours — two up and two down with a kitchen at the back. But it was a place I hated visiting. There was a smelly
loo in the backyard with a huge wooden seat which filled the entire wall. The loo paper was rough squares torn from the Daily Mirror. A smell permeated the house: the smell of age or decay or hidden dirt?
All the women of my family were fearsome cleaners, yet I suspect they were surface cleaners only. The hidden corners and the secret mouse holes went undetected. And the houses were always full of dogs — unwashed and spreading hair. My grandfather had a fine old collie whom I adored. Unwashed dog was the strongest smell of my childhood.
My grandmother’s front parlour was loaded with gaudy porcelain knick-knacks and paintings of the Scottish Highlands at sunset. Amazingly there was a piano — not tremendously in tune, but with most of the keys working. My Uncle Bill, with Brylcreemed hair and engaging grin, would vamp the latest Fred Astaire hit. He added sheets of modern Gershwin or Cole Porter to the ancient music of In a Monastery Garden.
My grandfather had given up his job as a house-painter at fifty because of an attack of sciatica. He spent the next twenty years reading the Daily Mirror, smoking his pipe and listening to the radio. From time to time, he would keep an eye on his garden — though somebody else had to dig it for him.
My grandmother, huge and Victorian, was dignified, haughty and quick to take offence. She represented the past to me, the old days; just as Uncle Bill was modern and represented the future – a future, what’s more, of cheerfulness and charm. But it was whispered (and I heard the whisper very early in life) that he was not a Pamment (my mother’s family name). He had been a foundling, adopted gladly by my grandparents. He was not ‘one of us’. That was doubtless why cheerfulness kept breaking in.
The rest of my mother’s family were great moaners. They believed that life owed them a better living than it had provided, and were moody, introspective and always seeing implied insults in each other’s behaviour. They loved to be proud of their grievances. ‘They’re not speaking,’ I would be told of Uncle Ted, my mother’s elder brother, and Auntie Gee, her elder sister. This would explain why another Sunday dinner at Grandma’s had passed in inexplicable tension. Only Uncle Bill was always spry. But then he wasn’t one of us …
The real ‘us’ was Uncle Ted – a brilliant, wayward man who could brood and sulk better than anyone. But he was also very funny, warm and generous. Like so many of his generation, he had left school at twelve or thirteen. But he was miraculous at making things. He had a lathe and all manner of brightly shining tools in my grandfather’s shed. He took the Model Engineer, a magazine which displayed in each issue pictures of beautiful engines and machines in model form. I pored dizzily over back numbers and discussed them eagerly with him. He was the ideal uncle for a small boy. He promised to make me steam engines I could fire, model cars I could drive, model aircraft I could fly. I would dream great dreams. I would see the beginnings of these wonderful creations: little, beautifully-turned fragments of brass or small, spoked wheels that he had made with great precision. But nothing was ever finished. He never seemed to have the time.
One Christmas (it was 1935 when I was just five) Uncle Ted rigged a microphone in his outside workshop and, by ingenious wiring, hooked it into my grandfather’s large wooden radio which stood by the window in the living room. On Christmas Eve, I was startled to hear a programme interrupted by a message from Father Christmas. He brought special greetings to Peter Hall of Bury St Edmunds. I was delighted, and either didn’t notice or wasn’t surprised that he had a strong Suffolk accent.
Uncle Ted earned a living as a car mechanic. Beneath his melancholy spirit and hypochondria (for he was always ‘seriously’ ill) was an instinctive understanding of mechanical devices that amounted to genius. In the late Thirties, he married Auntie Vera, a lovely and practical girl from Ipswich. A daughter and a son arrived, Jean and Roger, so I was soon, blessedly, no longer the only child in the family. But it was too late: I had been ten years without other children.
I still wonder what would have happened to Uncle Ted if he had had better opportunities and a slightly more positive approach to life. In middle age, much like his father, he gave up work for ‘health reasons’ and went on glowering at the world till he died of Parkinson’s in his eighties, his marvellous talents sadly unfulfilled.
With his sister (Auntie Gee) and his father, he had started a small-holding for vegetables in the Fifties. It lost money. He and his father quarrelled cruelly, and ended up not speaking to each other. Many years later, his son would still not go to visit him, even when the old man was dying. At his funeral, I sat in the family car that followed the hearse, and noticed a figure standing alone at the grand iron gates of the cemetery. He clutched a battered bicycle in the pouring rain and was shrouded in a muddy, wet-streaked mac. It was Uncle Ted. As the car passed him I turned and looked back. He watched the hearse and its contents drive by without expression. Then he mounted his bike in the downpour and pedalled off in the opposite direction. We were not a forgiving family.
Chapter Three
I showed a love of music early in life. I insisted on listening to the Salvation Army band in the Bury St Edmunds marketplace every Saturday. And on Sunday mornings, I begged to walk by the military band from the barracks to great St Mary’s as the Suffolk regiment went on its weekly church parade. I could hear nothing finer than the rattle of kettle drums and the crash of cymbals. My father or one of my uncles would walk with me. We never went into the church.
When I was six or seven I saw a brass band of toy soldiers parading in a shop window in Ipswich. I craved them with a passion that hurt. I told my Aunt Vera, who was an immediate friend to a small boy, all about the toy band. I told her of the wonders that would follow my possession of it. I could do counter-marches, tattoos and spectacular parades. It could figure on the stage of my toy theatre. I indicated that it would entirely change my life. I had little expectation that I would ever own this fine body of men, and I only half knew, in some recess of my mind, that I was begging Auntie Vera to buy the band – a box of delights that I am sure was far beyond her means. But I went on just the same. She encouraged me and I was obsessed.
On my birthday, the box of soldiers duly arrived, a present from Auntie Vera. I am still ashamed at the stratagems I used. Just before my thirtieth birthday, I fear I did the same thing. I was much taken by vintage motor cars and extolled their beauties to Leslie Caron, my wife, knowing that a friend had a 1922 Rolls-Royce he might be persuaded to sell. The open Rolls duly arrived on my birthday, with brass headlamps and a gearbox like a well-bred lorry. I felt as guilty then as I was when I cried with pleasure over the box of soldiers.
My Auntie Gee lived in the same road as my grandmother. I was always told that she and her younger sister, my mother, had been ‘in business’ together as young girls. They had actually been shop assistants at the local drapery store. They would sometimes take me to visit it. I loved to watch the change and the bills whizzing along the overhead wires. There are pictures of the sisters in their twenties, spruce in cloche hats, going out for the day on motorbikes with their fiancés: my father and Uncle Hugh Rainbird.
Uncle Hugh worked in a large corn-and-seeds shop on the outskirts of the town. He was an affable man but, sadly, an alcoholic, always ‘out’ at the Conservative Club or the Rotary Club, or having a drink with ‘a valued client’. Aunt Gee spent her life sitting at home wondering when and in what state he would return. She prepared his meals punctiliously, but they were always spoiled because he was late. He would then mix everything – meat, vegetables, chopped Yorkshire pudding – into one great goo which he anointed with quantities of tomato sauce and vigorously stirred together. He said it was an aid to his digestion. I watched my aunt’s face as this ritual proceeded and her cooking was systematically destroyed. The next day, she would produce another impeccable meal.
Aunt Gee had no children. She was a second mother to me, as encouraging and concerned as my real mother, and a trifle more lenient. When my mother was in hospital for a long period with an appendicitis which turned into peri
tonitis with complications, I lived with my aunt.
The only people we ever met were relations – ‘family’. In the eighteen years I lived with my mother – from Avenue Approach to Cambridge and Whittlesford – I can’t remember a single visitor who was not family coming into the house. I was allowed the occasional school friend to play, but on a limited basis. My mother never had anybody call on her, nor did she wish it. Only with her own family, and particularly with Aunt Gee, was she intimate. ‘Blood is thicker than water,’ she would say grimly. ‘You don’t want other people putting their noses into your business and coming inside the house; better keep yourself to yourself.’ Ironically, the only neat and tidy rooms in any of our houses – my mother’s, my aunt’s, or my grandmother’s – were the front rooms which were never used. They contained the best furniture and awaited visitors who were never asked to come.
Our celebrations were always gatherings of relations. Every bank holiday, every Easter, every Christmas, we would make the journey to my grandmother’s, where all the aunts and uncles assembled. This went for many weekends too. Once there, the men would leave for the pub, with Uncle Bill exuberantly in the lead, and my father, Uncle Ted and Uncle Hugh following. They often returned somewhat later than expected. Meanwhile, my grandfather would sit in his chair pulling on his pipe, and my grandmother, Auntie Gee, Auntie Vera and my mother all busied themselves with the cooking. As lunch got nearer, my dread increased: up to my tenth year, I found it impossible to eat anywhere but in my mother’s house. I could sometimes manage fish and chips or bangers and mash in a café when we were on our annual week’s seaside holiday. But I could not swallow my grandmother’s cooking. Nor could I tolerate Aunt Gee’s. The fatty flavours of the meat and the stale smell of the overdone vegetables nauseated me, though I suspect that the cooking must have been much the same as my mother’s. I would try to force something down, but it wouldn’t stay. Week after week I would sweat, feel sick, and then rush from the table and throw up. Sometimes this was real, sometimes it was the desperation of someone acting to escape a crisis.
