My Father's Fortune

by Michael Frayn

  My father’s style has changed somewhat in these pictures. He’s no longer the smart lad he was when he started work and met Vi. He’s taken to tweed jackets and diagonal check sweaters and a pipe, that now archaic emblem of male gravitas. He has a certain steadiness in the look on his face, even when he’s smiling. In this world of holidays, though, his short back-and-sides is always gloriously hatless, and he still seems light on his feet – Fred Astaire, just about to take the pipe out of his mouth and twinkle away with Vi across the dance floor.

  And here they are together. I lift my eyes from the screen as I work and sneak another look at them, hanging on my wall beside the Harrods picture of Vi in working mode. They’re on holiday somewhere, relaxed and smiling, Tommy with pipe and open-necked shirt, Vi in a modest cloche hat of her own. They look so happy.

  *

  On the twelfth of September, 1931, at Edmonton Register Office, after twelve years of waiting, Tommy and Vi finally do become man and wife. The witnesses are Vi’s father and Tommy’s eldest sister Nellie. Tommy is now thirty, and his Rank or Profession is given as Builders’ Commercial Traveller. When he had first made this shift in his career I don’t know, but he has now found the vocation to which he’s going to remain faithful for the rest of his life. Vi, apparently, has no Rank or Profession. One of them evidently told the registrar that she was twenty-six, but after a little recalculation amended this to twenty-seven.

  Tommy must feel he’s doing quite well, because he’s still not free of his family obligations, even when his mother and Mabel move out of Devonshire Road in 1933 to perhaps cheaper rooms just off the Tottenham end of the Seven Sisters Road, a couple of miles further out. Things change a bit when his mother dies in 1935, and Nellie, who lives in Stoke Newington, on the other side of the Seven Sisters Road, shoulders responsibility for Mabel and takes her in. Mabel had obviously given up her job as a bookfolder by this time because she goes back down the Seven Sisters Road each day, rain or shine, to visit her former next-door neighbour in Devonshire Road. And each day returns precisely as the clock strikes five.

  Whether or not Tommy is still helping out financially, he and Vi have escaped from the Seven Sisters Road and found a flat in the north-western suburbs, over an off-licence in a new parade of shops opposite Mill Hill Station. The station, now Mill Hill Broadway, has these days been incorporated into the massive elevated bastion and ceaseless noise of the M1, as Anthony Avenue in Chicago has been into the Skyway. The shops are looking a bit run-down, and the off-licence has been replaced by a bookmaker’s, but in 1931 the stylish new Tudor half-timbering, with the medieval towers above, must have seemed very up-to-date. Perhaps it caught their eye at once as they came out of the station looking for somewhere to live – which suggests that, even though Tommy was now a commercial traveller, he hadn’t yet acquired a car. In all the time that I knew him, he to my knowledge almost literally never set foot on public transport. I’m not sure that he’d have known how to go about buying a ticket.

  So here they are, married at last and with a home of their own. But by this time another set of obligations has been laid upon him: Vi’s family. The decline of the Lawsons has continued throughout the twenties. They have now lost their foothold in Pooterville completely and are reduced to a part-share in a small house out in Muswell Hill. On Tommy and Vi’s wedding certificate the former palliasse magnate is now described, like his new son-in-law, as a commercial traveller. Even this, though, is probably more an aspiration than a reality. Vi and her sister, says Phyllis in her note to me, had ‘managed to keep things ticking over to a certain extent, but when Vi left home to get married I couldn’t do it on my own, and that was when the home definitely broke up.’ Their stay in the Muswell Hill house had lasted only a couple of years; now they have lost even that. Phyllis ‘went into digs,’ she says, ‘and my father had to “fend for himself”. I know things were very rough for him.’ She helped him out from her wages as a typist.

  Which leaves Nell. All her nervousness has been justified, all her fears realised. She’s left as destitute as Tommy’s mother was. She’s worse off, in fact – she hasn’t even a roof over her head.

  So Tommy and Vi find themselves sharing their new life together, for which they have waited so long, and their new Tudor flat at Mill Hill, with her mother. The arrangement is probably intended as a temporary stopgap. She will remain with them for the next eighteen years.

  *

  This is the second major test of my father’s character. And, once again, he has risen to it, without, so far as I know, ever complaining. It’s not a challenge that I should have met with any great distinction.

  The flat is filling up. It must be about this time that they acquire a dog – I think, from what I remember my father saying, a wirehaired terrier. And in September 1933 the dog is joined by a baby boy (the unexpected result, according to my Auntie Elsie, of a night out together, rather than of any conscious intention, which I find rather touching, and perhaps the hidden source of my interest later in life in the random and disordered). There’s rather a lot of me in the family snapshots dating from the next year or two. Or at any rate of a chunky, chubby boy with abundant blond curls, who slowly changes over the next three-quarters of a century, as I believe from my confused recollections and from a certain amount of documentary evidence, into the gaunt, balding old gent I now identify as me. The photographs show this wonderful child being held first by his mother, then by his father, then gazed at adoringly by both of them. By the age of three the boy’s hair is so luxuriant and wavy that he looks like an advertisement for shampoo. It takes very little imagination on my father’s part to see it flopping gracefully over his son’s suntanned brow in years to come as he effortlessly sends the best that the Australian bowlers can come up with away over the Nursery End …

  There’s no sign of the dog in the photographs, nor in my conscious recollection. In a jealous fury, apparently, one day while the family’s out, it attacks my cot and tears the bedding to shreds. My parents feel that they must make a choice between dog and son. They choose the son, fortunately, and the only trace of the wirehaired terrier that remains in our lives is deep in my unconscious, the cause, as I suppose, of the otherwise unexplained fear of dogs that I have suffered from ever since.

  The departure of the dog must reduce the pressure on accommodation a little. And perhaps, now that the future batsman has come along, the additional presence of the batsman’s grandmother doesn’t seem quite so onerous. The availability of a live-in children’s nurse to help change the England captain’s nappies (particularly one who is as devoted to him as they are themselves, and who is too nervous ever to want to go out) is beginning to show an unforeseen return on Tommy’s tolerance.

  Soon, in any case, they’re moving out of the flat into a house– and even further out in the suburbs. Plenty of other young families at the time are doing much the same, of course, which is why London is growing so fast in those two decades between the wars. The slightly odd thing about the move that Tommy and Vi are making, though, is that it’s to the south-western suburbs, on the other side of the Thames. They have both spent their entire lives in North London, and North Londoners regard South London as a foreign country, a vague tangle of unmapped streets where only missionaries and encyclopaedia salesmen venture. Moving south of the river must feel almost as adventurous as moving to the Southern Hemisphere.

  How does it come about? Well, Tommy’s already working for a firm just beyond the river in Southwark, and travelling the inner boroughs round about for them. Which means that he’s broken the psychological barrier of the river – and also that he must have a car. I have a hunch that they’re out for a spin in it with the baby, perhaps for a day by the sea on the south coast, perhaps just to the Derby on Epsom Downs, and that they get stuck, like everybody else, in the mile-long traffic-jam that used to build up in Ewell Village on summer weekends in the twenties and thirties before the bypass was built. And that, as they sit there in the blue haze of e
xhaust fumes, they find themselves gazing into an estate agent’s window with a sign that says the kind of thing that local estate agent’s signs do at the time:

  LIVE IN SURREY, FREE FROM WORRY!

  Modern Homes in Old-World Ewell!

  Where the fresh breezes blow straight from the Surrey Hills! Chalk upland soil! Detached residences available, erected upon approved principles, and finished to a degree of perfection!

  From £975. Deposit £50. Monthly £5 18s. 9d.

  However they happen upon it, one day early in 1935 they’re moving in. They’re not, of course, in spite of all the tempting offers in the local agents’ windows, buying the house. They’re renting, just as their parents rented before them. They have signed a lease with Stanley Charles Longhurst, a timber merchant in Epsom, at whose circular saws I later found myself labouring one summer for £3 a week (under-eighteen rate). The rent of the house is seventy-eight pounds (£78) per year; which, as anyone as quick at arithmetic as Tommy would instantly see, is approximately the same as he would be paying in instalments on a mortgage. Far though they have ventured into the wilderness of suburban South London, though, they have not gone completely native.

  What more can a man want, if he has a house, a garden, a beautiful wife, and a son who will one day open for England?

  A daughter, obviously, to complete the archetypal family.

  On Saturday, 6 March 1937, it begins to snow. It goes on snowing hard throughout the night, as Vi goes into labour, and on the Sunday Dr Wilde, the family doctor in Epsom, has to drive through the whirling flurries and the gathering drifts to come and deliver her. The snow is still falling as the baby is born, and my father has a nightmare drive across London to fetch Florrie, the monthly nurse we’re borrowing from her last clients, our rich stockbroker relations in Enfield, where for some reason she seems to have taken up permanent residence.

  My parents tactfully allow me to choose my new sister’s name, and even more tactfully steer me to the choice that I suppose they’ve already made: Gillian. Gillian Mary. Jill.

  What Dr Wilde always calls her, though, for as long as he attends the family, is the Snow Baby.

  3

  Duckmore

  So there we all finally are, in spite of the combined fecklessness of my two grandfathers, Bert Crouchman’s plans, and the spring snow. Mother and father, a boy and a girl (and Nanny to fuss over them). At 3 Hillside Road, East Ewell, twelve miles out of the smoky heart of London – a detached house at last, like the palliasse magnate’s villa, with no one quarrelling and banging about on the other side of the wall, no one overhead, no one underneath. In a trim green cul-de-sac where no trams clatter, and no drunks sing and vomit. Separated from even the tranquillity of the road by a front garden, with a buddleia where in summer the butterflies mass and sun themselves. With enough space on one side of the house to have a garage for the car, and on the other a shed to keep the coal in.

  The house even has its own name, Duckmore, written in embossed metal letters on the green-painted gates, which are already, since the house was built eight years earlier, rotting on their hinges in the most picturesquely rural manner. Where the name came from I don’t think my father ever knew or asked. Duckmore, though! As it might be Chatsworth or Manderley.

  And now, I think, I can make some sort of guess at why he was coming through the French windows round the back of the house that afternoon in 1936. Because the very first thing he wanted to do on his return from the great city was to have a look at the garden. For me Duckmore and its grounds had existed forever, the ancestral hall of the Frayns, the only world of which I had ever been fully conscious. But for him, a year after we moved in, it was still new. And he had earned it all by his own quick wits and hard work, in the teeth of so many setbacks. It was his liberation, his great adventure in life, his triumph. In a moment he would go indoors and begin once again to enjoy the interior amenities. The dining room, the lounge. The kitchen and downstairs back bedroom, with the corridor connecting them. The separate scullery. The ‘Ideal’ boiler and the ‘New World’ gas cooker with the ‘Regulo’ oven. The two upstairs bedrooms, the bathroom and separate lavatory, the ample storage available in the dusty loft.

  But first, the garden. That great estate, those rolling green acres, of which he is now master; lawns and glades, rose gardens and kitchen gardens, meadows and orchards. Or which one day will be. Fifty feet wide and a hundred feet long – an eighth of an acre. And over the fences, six gardens away, you can almost see the open farmland starting, with the long dip slope up to the North Downs beyond. He draws the good upland Surrey air into his lungs.

  Then in through the French windows (and not even the villa in Gatcombe Road had French windows!), and there’s his son and heir, already as high as the dining-room table. A chunky-looking lad, with fair hair and blue eyes. He can see him in years to come, at one of the great public schools. A cricketer, of course – a batsman. He smiles at me as I bravely make light of some childish injury, and what he sees is me strolling out to the wicket, pads gleaming, bat tucked under my arm as I pull on my gloves. And then the elegant leg glides, the effortless cover drives. The sneaked singles, the solid fours. All done with such grace, with such modesty. And now here’s the ball lifting up and away for a six – over the heads of the astonished fielders, over the proud father in the applauding crowds, out into the misty blue skies over the Surrey hills …

  *

  How does the future cricketer himself see the world at this point? I think my first conscious memories are not of the house, or of my father as he came through the French windows that afternoon, but of myself, given objective reality and placed in the public domain by his memorialising and mythologising of me. Of my early sayings, when I was first able to speak, that he repeated over and over again, to me and no doubt to anyone else who would listen, until they passed into family lore.

  ‘Take it round the adges’ – my attempt to repeat his advice about coping with hot food. I still remind myself, faced with a bowl of scalding soup, that the adges will be the the first bits to cool. And the words bring back not only him, and the small child solemnly learning how to deal with the problems of life, but – almost – an elusive deliciousness that has haunted the edges of my memory ever since, and that I think, with hindsight, must be of groats. Robinson’s groats, to be precise – I remember the tin.

  ‘I can say “steam” but I can’t say “shmoke”.’ And now I see a locomotive labouring up the gradient from the local station. It’s always the same kind of weather in my memory – a day of rolling dark clouds with a hint of rain. The line has been electrified for a decade by this time, so the locomotive must be hauling a goods train. And there watching the train, visible to me only through my reported words, is the small serious child who is being watched in turn by his equally unseen father as he exclaims upon the evanescent speakable steam hissing out of the valves and cylinders, and the unpronounceably dense shmoke piling above the funnel.

  My first conscious direct memory of anything outside myself is not of Duckmore and its broad estates but of the street. I am adventuring out of our front gate and into the great world beyond. It’s a summer’s day – perhaps this is the very first summer after we moved in, when I’m not yet three. I walk along the pavement, on and on into the endless distances of the street – past the gate of No. 4 – on and bravely on, until I find myself in a strange new landscape with its own exotic flora, a mass of sunlit pink blossom on a tangled rambler rose hanging over a garden fence. I have got almost as far as the garden gate of No. 5. At this point I somehow become aware of how far I am from home, and abruptly lose all my taste for exploration. I turn and and run back to No. 3.

  Hillside Road, boundless as it seems to me at that age, is actually a little cul-de-sac. Seventeen detached houses of assorted design (or at any rate variations on six different themes), screened by seventeen assorted front gardens. No. 3, Duckmore, is I think a derivative from the Arts and Crafts Movement, and is trying to dissim
ulate its upper floor beneath a heavy wig of Dutch tiles so as to make itself look more like a cottage. The short street ends in a turning circle with a lamp post in the middle of it and loose gravel all around, a fair proportion of which is removed by myself and my friends in the years to come, embedded in our knees when we race round the circle on bicycles which skid helplessly away beneath us in the unstable surface.

  Behind the luxuriant vegetation of the front gardens live mostly rather retiring neighbours, whose discreet middle-class style is in keeping with the character of the street. Between the electoral register for 1938, the last taken before the war, and the first one taken after it, in 1948, I see to my surprise that considerable churn has occurred, and that by no means all the names on either list are familiar to me. In my recollection, the neighbours have all been there since the beginning of time, and with one or two notable exceptions never change. Next door to us, behind the massed cherry and almond blossom at No. 4, are two maiden ladies, Miss Hay and Miss Fowler, who live a retired life, and who are glimpsed only through the crack of their minimally opened front door – though sometimes three or four times a day – when I ask them if I may please get our ball back. Behind the rambler rose at No. 5 are Miss Johnson, another maiden lady, and her father, then the Laverses, the Kidds, the Staineses, and round the lamp post at the top, the Milwards, the Knowleses, the Williamses and the Fieldings. Staines is in the Foreign Office, suitably enough, and Williams owns the newsagent’s in Ewell Village. Shakespeare, going the other way, at No. 1 on the corner, has some connection with a firm that specialises in high-quality lithography. How Lavers, Kidd, Milward, Knowles and Fielding earn their livings I don’t know. Three other families are so unobtrusive that I have completely forgotten them.

  There are some anomalies in this well-ordered world. Archie Dennis-Smith and his wife, at No. 13, seem a little too grand, with their Noel Coward voices, their open Triumph Dolomite sports car, and their departure on summer weekends, he in white flannels, she in pleated white skirts, both carrying an assortment of racquets under their arms, to join the tennis parties given by Warbey, a wealthy cardboard-box manufacturer who lives in the unmade-up private avenues a quarter of a mile away. The Laverses, inconspicuous though they are, later evacuate themselves from London when war threatens and let their house to an Italian family, the Locatellis. Italians! In Hillside Road! It occurs to me now that they were probably refugees from Mussolini, but subtle distinctions of this sort are entirely beyond us, and I don’t think anyone ever speaks to them. Soon, of course, they’re not just aliens but enemy aliens, and I suppose this is why they and their many unspoken-to children all vanish so suddenly – into internment (taking, say the shocked neighbours, even the electric light sockets with them).