My Father's Fortune

by Michael Frayn

  Difficult to fathom this. Difficult, too, to imagine my grandfather selling china, and the other tenant drapery, to customers who couldn’t make them hear what sort of china and drapery they wanted. More difficult still to imagine what life was like in the house, with two deaf parents, four deaf children, and two other deaf tenants, all either shouting or murmuring inaudibly to each other in the shared kitchen. Mabel must sometimes have made a particularly striking contribution to the proceedings. She was not only deaf but simple (although reputedly sharp at cards), and was said to be often very difficult – given to wild outbursts at certain phases of the moon, when she shouted, among other things, that she wanted a man. Every now and then she had to retire to a mental hospital.

  And now here’s the new baby chucking his food under the table and screaming his lungs out, with his nappies being boiled on the copper … In the morning everyone trying to get their breakfast, and hot water for shaving, and their clothes pressed and ready for work. All of them wanting the one lavatory, which at that time was presumably a privy in the back garden …

  In the only photographs I have of my paternal grandparents the most noticeable things about them are his dignified but somehow weary and defeated grey walrus moustache, and her shock of resiliently springy hair. My father never mentioned their deafness, any more than he said anything else about them. He never mentioned deafness at all in the various stories he told me about his childhood. Nor did he ever complain about the conditions in which he’d been brought up, or imply that in our one-family detached house in the suburbs my sister and I were being spoiled by luxury. He made life in Devonshire Road sound convivial, in a traditional working-class way. At Christmas, he said, the entire clan would gather. (How many more are there packed into these two rooms now, and queuing for the lavatory?) They would all bring their music and recitations, sleep overnight in armchairs and on the floor, and take a door off its hinges to make an extension to the dining table. Not a word about none of them being able to hear what the others were reciting or singing.

  My cousin’s revelation about our mutual grandfather’s drinking came long after my father was dead, so it was impossible to ask him what further effect it had had on the family after the loss of the business in Plymouth. I suppose I have to imagine, in that overcrowded kitchen, not just a struggling mother, four adolescent children – one of them raving when the moon is full – four other lodgers and a squalling baby, but my grandfather coming home from the pub the worse for wear. The nearest pub, I noted on my walk around the district, was only five doors away, which may have been the amenity that recommended the house to him in the first place. When my grandmother reproached him for never worrying how they were going to manage if he spent all his wages on drink he’s supposed to have asked whether it would help at all if he sat down and did worry for thirty minutes.

  I look at my grandfather’s picture again, and now I see him brushing the foam off that dejected moustache, and sucking the last of the beer out of it. I take another look at my grandmother Louisa, who presumably had to keep this overladen ark afloat. Unlike him, I see, she’s still managing the ghost of a smile. Just.

  *

  By 1911, when the next census was taken, the house remained almost as overcrowded as before. Nellie, the eldest daughter, who worked as a needlewoman and made dresses for the wardresses in Holloway Prison (so her daughter Jean told me), had gone off to get married, to an insurance agent, but the other children were all still living at home. George was a compositor, says the census, Daisy a music-roll librarian for a pianola manufacturer, and Mabel a printer’s bookfolder. The deaf draper and his deaf wife are still in residence, but the other family has been replaced by a young nephew, Courtenay, another arrival from Devon, listed as a tailor’s cutter. Whether Courtenay was deaf, like the rest of the family, it’s impossible to know, because in the 1911 census the disabilities column has been discreetly blanked out, but he shares some of Mabel’s other problems. My father – who curiously never mentioned Courtenay’s living at Devonshire Road – often talked about visiting him in a mental hospital, where he sat in silence all day watching the hands of the clock go round. According to Jean, Courtenay and Mabel were at one point sweet on each other. Whether he reacted in the same way as her to the phases of the moon I don’t know, nor what life in the house must have been like if he did.

  The second picture I have of my father as a child shows him at about the age of five, wearing the sailor suit in which small boys were traditionally photographed then. He looks, not wispy and self-effacing, like his siblings, but even cockier than he did as a baby. And cocky he was going to remain, for another forty years at any rate.

  The only thing he told me about his education is that at the local central school he was given personal tuition in French by a master who perched on the desk in front of him and brought the register down on his head each time he made a mistake. As a teaching technique this was remarkably effective – it knocked every single word of French out of him. I never heard him essay even a humorous ‘je ne sais quoi’. He was also a boy soprano in the local church, and by the time his voice broke he had risen to become head choirboy. As an introduction to religion this served almost as well as the French lessons did to French. He retained a strong lifelong distaste for every aspect of it.

  Something stuck, though, something that gave him a lot of pleasure over the years: the music. Often as we drove somewhere together he would lift up his voice, by this time tenor but still sweet and strong, and sing the soprano line from one of the old oratorios. He knew most of the great Baroque standards, but the aria that he sang over and over again was I think from Stainer’s Crucifixion: ‘Fling wide the … fling wide the … fling wide the gates,/ For the Saviour awaits …’ Whether he ever got any further than this, to a bit where the gates were at last open and the Saviour admitted, I can’t now remember.

  *

  ‘Smart Lad Wanted.’ This was the formula with which a lot of job advertisements used to begin. The smartest lad that any employer could ever wish for is now on the labour market: Tom Frayn, leaving school at the age of fourteen, and just starting out in the world to help support his family. I have a number of photographs of him taken over the next few years, and you can see – he’s as smart as a whip. So handsome, so poised. Three-piece suit, hair slicked straight back, flat against his skull. In one of the pictures he has a nonchalant cigarette between his fingers. In another his adolescent face is crowned by an enormous grey homburg. Already.

  His first job is as an office boy in the Hearts of Oak life assurance company in the Euston Road. Somehow each morning he emerges from the chaos of that tiny kitchen at the top of Devonshire Road with a clean collar, his suit pressed and his shoes shined, and walks down to the Seven Sisters Road to get the tram. The First World War is in its second year, and Tom Frayn is enjoying the fourth piece of good fortune in his life, though he probably doesn’t appreciate it at the time. The first was the quick wits he was born with, the second was the brother and sisters who have made him such a favourite, the third was the mother who has somehow kept the family going – and the fourth is being only fourteen years old, and too young to be called up before the war ends.

  At some point in the next few years he advances from office boy at the Hearts of Oak to wages clerk at McAlpines, the big building contractors. He goes to Newcastle, as he always call it later, with a stressed short ‘a’, the way the people who live there do, and travels round the city every Saturday in his teenage homburg with a bag of cash, paying out the labourers who are installing sewers and culverts. He must still be in London, though, or back there again, when he has the fifth great stroke of fortune in his life. This is after the war’s over, on a winter’s day early in 1919, when he runs into a friend of his called Bert Crouchman. I imagine it must be a Saturday, because that evening there’s a party, to which Bert is going because a girl he’s seen called Vi will be there, and he’s hoping to get himself introduced to her. Would my father like to come
with him?

  Tom is said to have only two interests in life at this point. One is dancing. He’s a good dancer, deft and easy in the Fred Astaire manner. The other, no doubt exercised in tandem with the first, is girls – and I suspect, from what follows later, that he also has a certain talent in this department. I don’t suppose he takes much persuading. All the same, I can’t help feeling an instant of vertigo when I think about the sheer fortuitousness of this meeting with Bert Crouchman, and the arbitrariness of Tom’s response. A lot is riding on this one brief moment while Tom makes up his mind. My existence, for a start, and my sister’s. The lives of my three children and my sister’s two. Of our eleven grandchildren …

  He shrugs. He’ll go to the party.

  A close call there. Or so it seems to me now, as I write this, ninety years on, and the implications of that passing exchange finally strike me.

  2

  House of Straw

  So there she was, the girl Bert Crouchman was after. Vi. Violet Alice Lawson. My mother.

  I gaze at the old photographs of her in my album and see something of what my father saw when he walked into that party with Bert. A heart-shaped face and wide, wide eyes. Piled brown hair and plaits down to her waist. In one of the photographs she looks straight out at me as perhaps she did at him that evening. There’s something touchingly wistful about her expression.

  Tom looked at her, and she looked at him – and that was it. He was eighteen, and for him those few short years of girls, plural, were suddenly over. She was still only fourteen, and boys, plural, can hardly have begun. Their lives were settled for the next thirty years.

  It was her younger sister, my Auntie Phyllis, who told me about how they met. In fact she wrote it down for me, seventy years later, when I asked her what she could remember of my mother. ‘Tommy went straight up to Vi,’ she wrote, ‘and said “I’m Tom – I suppose you’re Vi!” And from then on, nobody else got a look-in.’ Poor Bert, said Phyllis, must have wished he’d never mentioned the party to Tom. What happened to Bert thereafter she didn’t record. He had dropped away from the story like the launch stage of a space rocket.

  Fourteen-year-old Vi and eighteen-year-old Tom – or Tommy, as he now became to Vi and all her side of the family. From Phyllis’s account of the way he introduced himself he sounds as if he was at his most self-assured that evening, as much the cocky young man of the world as he looks in his photographs. I expect he gave her one of his irresistible smiles. Soon, I imagine, he was demonstrating his double-jointedness to her – bending his fingers backwards against the table in a sickeningly unnatural reverse curve, and pushing back the thumb on his right hand until it seemed ready to snap off. Then showing her his other special attraction, the thumb on his left hand, that couldn’t be bent at all, because there was no joint in it to be even single; his brother George, the compositor, had showed him round the printing works when he was a boy, and allowed him to put his hand in a press.

  I suppose she looked up at him with those wide eyes, and that hopelessly appealing plangency in her heart-shaped face. Fourteen, going on fifteen, confronting eighteen, going on twenty-five. She saw the way he was looking at her – he saw the way she was looking at him – and by the time they had finished looking the story of their lives was half-written. Together with the lives of all eighteen of their descendants so far.

  They had quite a lot in common, if you went back a few years, I discovered as I worked through the records. Her father, Albert Lawson, had come from a rather similar background to Tommy’s father – he was the son of a general labourer in Chatham Dockyard. Like Tommy’s father he had been a shop assistant, in a draper’s, and the family, like Tommy’s, had been through some rocky times.

  Bert had launched out from his modest beginnings with high hopes and great enterprise. He had become a travelling salesman, and left his fiancée, Eleanor Dormon, behind in England while he went out to the United States to make his fortune. He travelled all over, I think for the Irish Linen Company, and did well enough to send for Nell to come and join him. They married in New York, in June 1903. Bert, twenty-six, just beginning to make his fortune in this unforgiving land, and Nell, already thirty, who had overcome her lifelong fear of anything and everything to cross the Atlantic third-class or worse and join her fate to his in the summer heat of New York. Then off to the train station together, to the howling sirens and crossing-bells in the night as they chased the hard-won dollar, to Buffalo, to Cincinnati, to St Louis and Cleveland. That elusive dollar always just ahead of them, just out of reach. Now Nell’s pregnant, and throwing up, and more nervous than ever, and still they’re moving on, always moving on. Until they reach Chicago, where, on 6 August 1904, my mother is born.

  I went to look at the street the first time I was in Chicago, and went again to show my daughter Susanna when she was working in the States. Anthony Avenue, way down on the South Side, a street now split in half by the elevated ramparts of the Skyway. These days the district is black, and the first time I went the friend who took me would let me out of the car only on condition that he drove alongside of me as I walked, ready for me to jump back in at the first sign of trouble. It looked peaceful enough to me. But it didn’t look as if it had ever been the kind of street, even when it had had two sides to it, that suggested Bert had got very far towards making his fortune.

  Within a couple of years, in 1906, with Nell pregnant again, they’d given up on the American venture, and Vi’s sister Phyllis was almost born on the boat back. In the 1911 census Bert was exactly where he had started out – an assistant in a draper’s shop. The house they were living in was a solid and convincing one in Dartmouth Park, half a mile west of the Holloway Road, but according to the census it belonged to Nell’s father – described in her birth certificate as a house painter by trade – and they were there as his lodgers, in a single room. Spacious, of course, by the standards of my father’s accommodation. In any case things began to look up. Bert got a series of well-paid jobs, said Phyllis in her note to me, as a buyer with Selfridges, John Lewis, and other West End stores. By 1912, the electoral register records, they were renting no fewer than three rooms off his father-in-law.

  Then came the real turning point in Bert’s fortunes, as it did for so many, one way or another – the First World War. He gave up working for other people and went into business on his own account, selling palliasses to the government. He had made it at last, not with fine linen for the comfortably-off, but with straw mattresses for the troops. He had become one of those reviled entrepreneurs who were doing well out of the war.

  So well, in fact, that he was able to move his family out of the lodgings and into a detached house, which they had entirely to themselves. No father-in-law, no lodgers. He bought a car, a Ford Model T. He took Vi out of school – at fourteen, just like my father. But not, like him, to find work and help support the family. To go to the London Royal Academy of Music, to study violin and piano. She had a gift. She was to be a violinist. However similar her world and Tommy’s had once been, they were now very different.

  This is how things stood that Saturday evening in 1919, when Bert Crouchman and Tom Frayn came calling on Vi at her cousin’s party.

  *

  After I’d looked at the setting of my father’s childhood in Devonshire Road I walked, as he must have walked so many times in the next few months, to the house where my mother was now living. It’s in Gatcombe Road, Tufnell Park, less than half a mile from my father’s house. But it’s on the other side of the Holloway Road, and sociologically it’s rather more than half a mile. To the north-east of the Holloway Road are the early Victorian terraces of the ‘rough old neighbourhood’ that had never quite made it into middle-class respectability; to the south-west, where Bert and his family had now established themselves, is a land of late Victorian villas that seem as well cared for and genteel still as they ever were.

  This is getting close to the part of Holloway where the Grossmith brothers probably located The Laurels,
the home of the Pooters in Diary of a Nobody. The Laurels has three storeys, with a flight of steps up to a front door on the piano nobile. Gatcombe Road is rather different – a street not of terraces but of detached two-storey villas, their front doors not proudly elevated but waiting welcomingly at ground level. No. 1, where the Lawsons are living in 1919, has fluted columns and stained glass beyond the privet hedges. What does Tom make of this quiet and tree-lined backwater, and this comfortably desirable residence, as he calls to pay court to Vi over the coming weeks and months? What does he make of his future in-laws? I was going to get to know both of them later, unlike my paternal grandparents, and they’re not much like the Pooters, in spite of their new respectability – or for that matter the usual picture of war profiteers.

  Bert, for a start. Like my father he’s a bit of a card. Unlike my father he’s also a bit of an adventurer, who seems able to turn his hand to anything. He cycles – all over the south of England, sucking a pebble to keep his mouth moist, on a drop-handled machine which I later inherit, and which is built to much the same specifications as a cast-iron bedstead. He swims. While they were in Chicago, my grandmother told me, he had swum across Lake Geneva. I assumed for years that she was suffering from some fairly characteristic geographical confusion here, and that the story was another ship of gold. But when I very tentatively inquired about it the first time I was in Chicago my friends drove me there – Geneva Lake, to be precise, a noted beauty spot in Wisconsin, a mile or so across, and notoriously dangerous for swimmers. Bert had set out with a friend who gave up halfway, swum on undeterred, had a rest, and swum back. Later he took my grandmother sailing on the lake, and almost drowned them both when a sudden storm blew up.