by Michael Foss
Most of all she remembered her father dead. He had been to Galway races on horseback. Returning in a state of jovial confusion, he had fallen from his horse somewhere between the Twelve Pins and Lough Corrib. The horse had bolted leaving her father with broken ribs and a punctured lung. He lay by the path for some time, into the evening chill, before a traveller found him. He lingered for a while but died from shock and pneumonia. He was not yet forty.
The death of the father left a hole in the family that had to be filled, by his widow’s prayers of course, by any luck that might come their way, but most of all by grinding labour. My mother, as the eldest remaining child, became responsible for the young ones, washing, dressing, feeding, guiding, a counsellor for their doubts, a balm for their hurts, too tender for slaps but making their tears into her pain. Inside of two years she was worn to a scarecrow. She no longer skipped or sang or played tag or dares at the end of the Mall in the noisy ring of schoolgirls. By nightfall, she was too tired for the dancing that she loved best of all. She began to smoke, for the sake of her nerves. But still the household bills outran the family income. She took the packet-boat from Dun Laoghaire to Liverpool.
Talking of Ireland, she always used to say, ‘It’s a terrible place. It kills its own people. Anyway, the people are just a race of pygmies. What do they know of living?’ After she left her homeland she returned only twice in a very long life, and then only for the shortest of visits.
In one respect my mother’s early life gave her an advantage. She doted on children and had plenty of experience in looking after them. Within a short time in England she had progressed from skivvy to mother’s help and then to nanny. She put herself in the hands of a London agency that specialized in providing, for a low wage, clean decent country girls with a religious education for the successful families of the Home Counties. She wore cotton print dresses with white cuffs and collars and a long grey coat nipped in at the waist to show her neat figure and slim build. She would stop before a shop window to pull a blue beret aslant above her light grey eyes and then go on with a certain swagger. She began to think better of herself.
She found that her services were in demand. In prosperous houses she lived in, partly superior servant and partly almost a member of the family. She had a room next to the children and a place at the table, though not for dinner parties. On these days she ate in the nursery or in the kitchen. For a happy period she worked for a novelist distantly related to the famous actress Sybil Thorndike, a thriller writer living in a house on the marshes amid a bohemian chaos of books. She began to read herself, something romantic but not too flighty, with a hint of tears in the inevitable pathos of true love.
Almost unconsciously she began to ape middle-class ways, digesting imperial prejudices and a new conservatism with the traditional Sunday dinners of roast beef and Yorkshire pudding. She took afternoon tea out of thin china cups, adding the milk before the straw-coloured Earl Grey. She read the Express or the Mail, not that Mirror rag, and found herself agreeing with the opinions of Lord Beaverbrook. She wore silk stockings. In the street, she no longer looked aside when a policeman’s eye fell on her. She gave him a haughty look back. She learnt from her employers to be suspicious of Jews, and had a horror of black people, of whom at this time she knew nothing. Her Irish accent slipped away as the language of middle England took its place, so slipshod and arrogant, full of sloppy diction and imprecisions drawled around a cigarette or over the rim of a cocktail glass. But all her life she still could not rid herself of the Irishness of certain words or phrases, like ‘post office’ or ‘third-class’. Whereas she had once been voluble and quick in speech, now she let incomplete sentences drift. ‘O you know what I mean,’ she would say, and ‘Well, there you are,’ just like the English.
She went abroad, travelling with families on holiday or business. In Barcelona she was engaged by a millionaire Catalan banker as one of four ‘governesses’, of different nationalities, to look after his six children in a vast, stately apartment on the Paseo de Gracia. There was also a summer house hanging above the city heat, on the mountain top at Tibidabo. In the apartment, a Danish governess had stalked her through the gloomy maze of rooms. Beneath an oil-painting of senator or general brown with age my mother was cornered. A meaty Danish hand clenched her buttock and then full lips tried to kiss her on the mouth. My mother recoiled in shame and horror, for she knew nothing of lesbians and indeed didn’t even know the word. The nuns had taught her that sex was a nasty business, unfortunately necessary for procreation, strictly in wedlock, to be endured but never to be indulged even in marriage. All her life, the thought of it left her disgusted and confused.
But so much work with children made her long for some of her own. She did not want a husband very much. Young men were for parties and demure flirting and picnics and dancing the night away. For ten years she had worked her own destiny and she had become too independent to welcome the rule of men with all their obsessive, wilful and infantile tricks. She abominated sexual fumblings, and the desperate panting pursuits aimed towards the bedroom. But she wanted children of her own, and according to the constitution of the society she had so carefully infiltrated there was no other way but wedlock. One just gritted the teeth and went ahead.
She prepared herself for it. India was lucky ground for her. In a sense, it provided her with a tabula rasa upon which she could rewrite her story. In India, all the English were strangers, imperial servants, starting on level terms more or less, without too much baggage from the past. Drawn together, a minority faced with nameless threats from a culture they did not understand and a history they misrepresented to themselves, the English felt the need for comradely bonds. The rigid stays of old hierarchies were loosened somewhat. It was possible for young people to become what they dreamed themselves to be. A son of a poor gardener became an army officer – a gentleman – and an Irish skivvy transformed herself into the officer’s lady. To all their world, they became sahib and memsahib.
They married and entered fully into the life of the times. A handsome couple, and perhaps a happy one – he tall and quite dashing, she fey, impulsive, fun-loving. Two baby boys came in quick succession. An ayah was on hand for the drudgery of infancy, the bottles and the stinking nappies and the lacerated nights.
‘We had nothing, of course,’ she used to say, ‘but, oh what fun and gaiety!’
Mah-jong in the mornings, or the young wives’ coffee parties; a gentle stroll out of the heat of the day on the maidan with the dog Kipper; charades and fancy dress; amateur dramatics; Sunday lunches at the club – pulao and long drinks – lasting well into the evening; the lovely mess-nights with the regiment, candles in silver sconces guttering under the slow swing of the punkah, the gleam of medals on broad chests, the rich tawny red of the circulating port, the fervent affirmation of the Loyal Toast; then the forgivable larks of the young officers, so puppy-like and endearing, barging about in childish games on the carpet.
At other times the crowd of them would get together at Luigi’s Restaurant in Pindi before continuing with heated faces to the fashionable dance. Then they would ride out at dawn for a spin round the hill-top in an open cabriolet while some drunken voice attempted a melody from Bing Crosby, or that new soft-shoe transatlantic swing.
Her life went flying by, but my mother had not reckoned with Hitler and a world war.
*
What had happened to her hard-won advantages? She heard the night bombers drone out from the airfields of the fenlands nearby. Sometimes the noises of the air were so loud and puzzling she held her head in her hands. Those hands were again rough and sore, smelling of potato-peelings and cabbage-water. Testing the breakfast porridge with a finger she saw that her nail was broken and untrimmed. She could not laugh any more. Her children seemed always under her feet, and she did not know whether to hug them or smack them. Sometimes she did both in a minute. Her gums were beginning to bleed. She retired to bed in the afternoons with migraine headaches. Was she lacking i
n vitamins? Whom could she ask? Going in and out with a pail of pig-swill, she saw her mother-in-law silent behind the door or bent stiffly over the washtub, as impassive as a cigar-store Indian.
‘Your grandmother was an upright and honest woman,’ she told me with bitterness, ‘but I could have hit her for her uncaring coldness to you and your brother and for her cruelty to me. Of course I didn’t hit her, I was much too afraid of her.’
*
My mother could not endure so much hard-heartedness. The cold little cottage under the iron discipline of the old woman was like an angina in her chest. To free her breathing once again she took her brood under her wing and put us all for the time being in the upstairs rooms of the Rose and Crown pub.
In the mornings my brother and I went to the village nursery school. A handful of tiny tots with flat country accents tried to push wooden alphabet blocks into the simplest elements of an agricultural vocabulary – ‘cow’, ‘pig’, ‘barn’, ‘hay’. Country schooling proceeds under different concepts, as well as a different sky, from that of the city. The retired lady who struggled as our teacher – too old for war-work – sang us rhymes in a cracked voice, keeping time with a pencil tapping a glass tumbler. The mid-morning mug of milk came warm from the day’s first milking. In the afternoons, wrapped to the nose against the wind from the east, we learnt from the village kids the timeless arts of childhood mischief, how to defeat boredom with mud-slides and squabbles and troublemaking in farmyards. In the evenings, changed into pyjamas, we crouched on the landing of the pub, peering through banisters into the bar below.
The aroma that wafted up to us was peculiar. Damp coals, wet clothes, manure sticking to boots, a mustiness rubbed off from the coats of animals, the sourness of old farmhands who had long forgotten to bathe, all this mixed with the slop of the beer on the mahogany and the dry frowsty stink of the tobacco. But it was companionable in there, in the warm fug, with the light strained out and mellowed by the nicotine colour of walls and ceiling, with the rasp of hobnails on the scrubbed planks of the floor and the subdued, almost monosyllabic mumble of country talk, to outsiders hardly distinguishable from the soft grunts of their farm animals.
My mother liked to sit on a high stool at the end of the bar closest to the fire. The grate was small and the ration of coal not generous. She crossed her legs with some elegance and sat quietly, though the farmhands knew that she was Fred’s wife and they could address her if they wished. They were in no hurry. She lit a cigarette and waited, expelling smoke quickly through her nose, taking a medium-dry sherry or a small whisky with a lot of soda.
We grew drowsy with the soft sounds and the clink of the glasses and went to bed. But we tried to keep awake until the bell rang for ‘last orders’. Then we crept out again to the landing, getting ready to join our treble shouts to the landlord’s traditional bellow of ‘Time gentlemen, please’. This seemed worth all our efforts to keep awake. The adults, or so we thought, needed all the help they could get to steady them at the end of the day.
Once or twice while we were there, our grandfather sidled shyly into the public bar, having slipped the leash at home. Once, grandmother came to fetch him back. At the door of the bar – my grandmother would not enter – there was a muttered altercation.
‘Tom,’ she said with icy contempt, ‘I can smell the drink on you.’
‘Yus, missus, you can smell it right enough,’ his battered old face beamed at her, ‘but you cain’t smell how many I’ve had!’
When my mother heard this exchange, she later said, she turned her head aside and laughed for the first time in weeks.
*
The jolly interlude did not last. Soon we were out in the flatlands, looking for somewhere more settled than a couple of rooms in a public house. It was unpleasant to discover just how dark was the world outside, away from the rough comfort and fellowship of the pub. Why was it that our life in the byways could not go on, pushing alphabet bricks into country words, singing ‘Jack and Jill’ with tremulous notes under a spinster’s furrowed brow, sneaking tuppenny bars of bitter chocolate from the dusty counter of the village shop, lying down to sleep to the squeak of the beer-pulls and the soft thud of darts into the dart-board?
A ramshackle car took us to a bleaker reality. Out in dreary landscape we were dumped onto the rutted yard of Copse Farm where Farmer Griffith and his wife were prepared to rent us rooms but drew the line at extending to us anything like a welcome. Only the compulsion of the war drove them to rent out lodgings, but that cataclysm was not large enough to force them into friendliness.
I began to learn how much of farming was squalor. The long midden-heap behind the barn; the urine stench from the straw in the milking parlour; the thick coat of the farmyard dog matted with burrs and dried mud; rusted old machinery strangled by the weeds; green scum on the cattle-trough; fallen and split branches rotting in the orchard; broken gates stitched together with wire and baling-string; holes in the buckled tin roof of the tractor shed; the neglected farmhouse itself, blistered and blotched with weather marks. The ploughed fields shone dully, the colour of raw meat.
Mrs Griffith cooked turnips and swedes and beets in watery stews, with occasional hints of chicken or rabbit. A greyish bread was wrapped in plain paper. Meals were eaten in a general silence, with now and again a sharp word or two about the weather. It did not seem to be polite to mention the war. My brother and I scraped the plates, making as much noise as possible. We kicked each other under the table. After each meal Mr Griffith removed his false teeth and put them in a glass of water on the mantelpiece, and there they stayed in public view until the next meal. I had never seen detachable teeth before and went out of my way to give them a good inspection. They looked cruel and filthy, but I respected the farmer for his confidence in displaying them.
The farmhouse was cold, standing square in the way of the prevalent north-easterlies that swept down from Siberia. It was scarcely warmed by single-bar electric fires that could never be left on in a vacant room. The light bulbs were almost too dim for reading. Only a few fingers of hot water were allowed in the bottom of the bath. My brother and I grew morose, pushing and shoving to be first out of the house, lashing out at each other in sudden tempers. The vitality was draining out of us. Heads down, we kicked stones in the yard and poked sticks into the rabbit hutches. The animals learnt to avoid us. The dog warned us off with low growls, the muck-flecked hens flew apart clucking, and the geese, hissing with outstretched necks, got into a phalanx to repel us. The animals seemed as wretched as the farm.
One afternoon of bright winter sunshine Mr Griffith slaughtered a pig. It was a big sow with floppy ears and what looked to me even then a worried expression. I was surprised by the two remarkable rows of its teats. The farmer and a labourer despatched it with brutal efficiency, not caring whether we children were watching or not. Executions of the farmyard were no mystery to the country child – chickens with necks wrung, rabbits stunned and killed, partridges shot for the pot. The pig, squealing and backing and sliding in the mud, often down on its knees, was jammed in a metal frame and its throat expertly cut with one long motion of the knife. A bloody bubble like a sigh burst from its mouth. Then the hind feet were secured by a rope to a block and tackle and the upended beast was hitched up to a beam over the barn door, and left there for the blood to drain. After the first rush, a thin frothy flow leaked into the bucket beneath.
At the end of the winter at Copse Farm I fell ill. Despite a warning from my brother I had been larking about on the rim of the cattle-trough and I had fallen into three feet of dirty, icy water. Though fished out quickly, and bathed, and sent to bed with red flannel and a hot-water bottle on my chest, I went down with pneumonia, which my mother attributed to congenital bronchial weakness. In my fever I saw nightmares, a naked rabbit wearing its own flayed skin like an ill-fitting overcoat, and a recurring vision of a pig thrashing and drowning in a pool of blood.
The doctor said, under the circumstances, bad dreams were
not unexpected. I had a high fever, and besides it was wartime. Horrors were normal enough. With many patients to see, the doctor left in a hurry. I heard the farmyard gate groan on rusty hinges and clang behind him.
THREE
Corridors
ANOTHER DEPARTURE, ANOTHER cold destination. Money was the problem. While we were in Lincolnshire, two or three times my mother had found it necessary to go to London to see the bank manager.
A railway journey, in those days, with the trains flushed from their normal routes by bomb damage and troop movements, was like a prolix argument set down in broken grammar. Trains puzzled by their own tracery grumbled over a destabilized railbed, metal squealing even on the slowest of curves. In the carriages, smuts from the engine lay on the dirty rep of the seats. Weather streaks obscured the windows and a greyish grit coated most surfaces. Water in the lavatory, if it ran at all, came from the tap in brown driblets.
In an old photo I see my mother arriving under the hooting, echoing, dingy canopy of the London terminus, a pert little town-hat at a cockeyed angle on her head and a tentative smile on her pale face. The day had hardly begun and already she looked wan and pasty.
On all sides in London were mementoes of old wars. War is the one big game common to all complex societies at all times. The evolution of modern man is set out in the streets of our cities as a true via dolorosa, by way of fire and sword and bullet. How much public commemoration stinks of death! Implacable generals with a full book of killings sit proudly on frantic horses, all arched neck and flaring nostrils and bulging eyes. Swords are uplifted, pikes aimed at bellies, gun-barrels levelled with terrified faces. Cannons thrust their heavy snouts skywards. Women carved in stone, with wild weeping hair, disrobe out of pity for the fallen.
