My Father's Fortune

by Michael Frayn

  The Fieldings, almost painfully inconspicuous in themselves, become noticeable through their children. Their son John is simple-minded, and we do our best to add to his problems with our teasing. Their daughter Joan, on the other hand, later marries a fighter pilot, who will soon be one of our heroes. He looks exactly as a fighter pilot is supposed to look, with a clean-cut rugged handsomeness and determined jaw. We all worship him, just as naturally as we mock his brother-in-law.

  And in the midst of them all, at No. 3, there’s us. What do the Milwards and the Staineses and so on make of the Frayns? How much are they even aware of us, for a start? Jill and I are soon playing with the other children, but, until the war comes and my father has to organise everyone in the road to do fire-watching, I don’t think we have much social contact with most of our neighbours. When my father come face to face with them in the street, does he greet them with the same easy confidence with which he introduced himself to Vi fourteen years earlier? If so I don’t quite share it. I suppose all children eventually become aware of their parents’ embarrassing failure to be exactly like everyone else’s parents, and from a very early age I’m conscious, in the unconscious way that children are conscious of things in the adult world, that we don’t melt into the background quite as unobtrusively as I could wish.

  Where are we going wrong? Does my father call Staines and Kidd ‘Guv’nor’, as he does the contractors and architects he deals with in his work? Does he ask them how the Missus is? Reveal that he votes Labour?

  I don’t suppose he employs exactly the same repertoire of humorous usage as he does at home; we all have different languages for different social contexts. Some of his set phrases when he’s talking to anyone in the family are passing jokes that have solidified. Once, out in the car, he must have amused us by pretending to misread the warning on a road sign; now anything that threatens life and limb is dangherooz. Some usages he’s brought with him from Holloway or his stay in Newcastle – Newcastle – others he’s picked up from his weekend trips to the races and cricket matches. He gave old McCormick a tinkle, he tells Vi, but they’d gone all round the houses and got no forrader, because six to four on Worral in the Manchester office has been shouting the odds, so he had to go a bit canny – just hope to come up on the rails and get his nose in front. But then next day Renwick really gave McCormick what-for – hit him all round the wicket like a good ’un, which was quite a turn-up for the book.

  When my father (expertly) carves the Sunday joint he quickly tosses titbits into his mouth and winks: ‘Carver’s perks!’ One of his favourite words I’ve never heard on anyone else’s lips: hotcha-machacha! I imagine that this began life as a conjuror’s invocation, like abracadabra. My father uses it, though, to create a general sense of humorous mystification (‘Am I going to get a chemistry set for my birthday, Daddy?’ – ‘Hotchmachacha!’), or to pour scorn on what someone (usually me) is saying (‘Come on – quick – seven nines!’ – ‘Um … eighty-two?’ – ‘Hotchamachacha!’), or to warn you urgently against doing something dangherooz.

  He has a brief but complex assemblage of gestures and sounds to indicate his respect for something – particularly for things with which he has no personal acquaintance. Cézanne, say, or Château Mouton Rothschild. A wink and a quick sideways twist of the head, a twitch of the mouth and a click of the tongue. Then a knowing assessment: ‘Pretty good paintings, you know. Pretty good wine.’

  I try to imagine Miss Hay registering her approval of something equally alien to her – a steeplechaser or a batsman, perhaps – in the same way … ‘Mother’s Ruin in the two-thirty? Put your shirt on it … Not half bad with a bat, you know, old Hutton.’ Or Milward giving Knowles a little tinkle… Or Staines warning his masters against getting involved in Czechoslovakia: ‘Hotchamachacha, Foreign Secretary!’

  My father’s a good storyteller, and the colleagues and relatives who figure in his stories become characters like himself, slightly simplified and larger than life. Rebecca accuses me of having inherited this particular trait, even if none of his other characteristics. If there’s any grain of truth in this then I suppose I should be grateful to him, as for so many other things, because I’ve been able to sublimate it into my professional stock-in-trade. Rebecca will raise a sceptical eyebrow at this, and produce some wildly exaggerated account of my supposed exaggeration. I listen with my jaw dropping to her tales of the things I’m supposed to have said and done. But then she, like me, now writes fiction for a living; she’s inherited the same gene herself.

  *

  My father’s on friendly terms with at any rate one of the respectable neighbours, Shakespeare, at No. 1, and after the Laverses return from hiding at the end of the war they and my father are in and out of each other’s houses all the time, playing bridge and making (as it seems to me) exquisitely boring non-conversation. There are two other households in the street, though, who stick out a bit, as we do, for different reasons, and these are the neighbours my father is closest to: the Barlows, next door at No. 2, and the Davises opposite.

  The Barlows are Scots, which is a bit of an oddity in itself, and makes it difficult to assess their social standing very exactly. She’s a coloratura soprano. I have no idea where or what she sings, except at home. The characteristic sound of summer mornings, when the windows are wide, is of her practising, hours at a time, in her kitchen (or perhaps her scullery) as she clatters the dishes. He’s an architect who works for Putney Council, and my father immediately recognises in him a suitable subject for his stories. Most of these turn on what my father sees as his traditional Scots carefulness with money, which forms a good complement to my father’s carelessness with the literal truth.

  What entertains my father most is Barlow’s car. So far as I can recall, he’s the only person in the street to have one, apart from my father and Archie Dennis-Smith. Barlow’s old Austin, though, is distinguished from the other two by its livery of rust and filth. He’s too mean (according to my father) to waste money on repairs or on leathers to wash it. He’s also canny with the petrol and oil, and my father has a fund of stories about how Barlow has once again, to his surprise, had to abandon the car somewhere at the roadside between Ewell and Putney because either the tank was empty or the engine has seized up.

  In the end, of course, more petrol, even more oil, has to be bought. The extravagance at which Barlow draws an absolute line (says my father) is replacing the brake linings. They wear down to the rivets, but the car goes as well as it’s ever going to go without them. There’s the question of stopping, of course, but there are other and less expensive ways of doing this. Slamming the car into low gear, for example. Finding a side street to turn into or an uphill slope. Running out of petrol or oil. Barlow has to go down Putney Hill each day on the way to work, and my father tells us over and over how he prevents the car from running away with him by keeping the nearside wheels rubbing against the curb, with an eventual effect on the tyres that surprises Barlow, once again, as much as it gratifies my father.

  My father’s other friend in the street, Davis, at No. 17 opposite us, has two distinctions. First of all, like Archie Dennis-Smith, but unlike Kidd, Milward, Staines or even Barlow, he has a first name – George. The other distinguishing characteristic of George Davis, as my father always calls him (never just George), is that he’s an artist, and a famous one. He is G. H. Davis, who draws for the Illustrated London News, long since defunct, but at that time (or so it seems to us who are G. H. Davis’s neighbours) the most important news periodical in the country.

  His speciality is drawing pictures of ships and aircraft with sections of their outer skin cut away to reveal the internal workings. He does the great new ocean liners of the thirties – the Queen Mary and the Queen Elizabeth, the France and the Normandie and the Bremen – and you can see the teeming passengers streaming up and down the wide stairways between the decks, through suites of restaurants and saloons and ballrooms. All the gradations of the different classes are made graphic, and
beneath them the mighty engines thundering away, the holds crammed with trunks and packing cases, the cold-stores hung with sides of beef and mutton and every kind of game. He does the great biplanes and flying boats of Imperial Airways, and the airships that once seemed destined to replace them. When the war breaks out he achieves even wider celebrity by taking us inside the warplanes and warships of both sides.

  He’s a tall, benevolent, excitable man with a tiny, benevolent, placid wife, and I’m sometimes invited into his studio at the back of the house to gaze respectfully at the artistic chaos in which he works. His painstaking constructions are imagined from sheafs of technical plans (many of which, it occurs to me now, must be highly secret). To get a realistic impression of the exteriors of the destroyers and submarines, the Hurricanes and Wellingtons, he often also uses three-dimensional models. Some of these, when he has finished with them, he impulsively donates to me. The ones I recall best now are First World War biplanes and triplanes, with meticulously detailed struts and crosswires. My favourite is a German bomber, a Gotha biplane, with a corridor, open to the night winds, leading from the cockpit to the front gunner’s position in the nose, where a tiny but perfect machine gun is mounted. These models are by far the grandest toys that I will ever own, and I venerate them; but their record of survival in my muddling childish hands is considerably worse than that of their life-size counter-parts in battle.

  As a matter of fact Barlow is also an artist; two pale watercolours he has painted of Scottish seaside resorts hang on our dining-room wall. He and George Davis have something else in common, too – the disgraceful state of their gardens. Barlow’s front garden has at any rate one feature – his rusting motor car. I don’t think I’m doing George Davis an injustice when I recall that from the windows of his studio you look out through a tangle of rambler rose over a small but (to me) entrancing landscape of primeval forest and unmown savannah. Of course – he’s an artist.

  Was our garden also a disgrace? I’m not sure. I find it hard to know quite what it was. I’ve often told stories since of my father’s ineptitude in the garden (and there are more to come). But when I think about it I realise that this isn’t fair. I’m scarcely in a position to comment, in any case, since I’ve never even attempted to make anything grow in a garden. Whereas he planted and nurtured herbaceous borders on either side of the lawn, including banks of goldenrod that my sister and I hid behind, clumps of lupins, irises and Michaelmas daisies, and two formal beds of roses, of delphiniums and snapdragons. There were tomatoes along the sunlit south wall of the house. Beyond the rosebeds a hedge of macracarpa concealed a kitchen garden with apple trees, blackcurrant bushes and raspberry canes, a green cathedral of runner beans, and beds that during the war kept us healthy with an endless supply of potatoes, carrots, cabbage and curly kale.

  Now that I catalogue it, it begins to sound like Sissinghurst or Hidcote. All the same, there was something a bit … a bit funny about it all. It wasn’t like most of the other gardens where I went to play. What was wrong with it? I can’t put my finger on it … The lawn, perhaps. It was full of bumps and hollows, and plants that had some resemblance to grass but were not grass. There were odd unexplained patches of concrete and gravel. The layout of the beds was … unconvincing. Nothing was quite straight, or quite round, or quite lined up with anything else. The flowers looked as if they had sprung from packets of seed scattered at random, without checking the name on the packet first. There was rather a lot of elder and bindweed. Rather a lot of weeds of every sort.

  It looked like … well, like a garden bravely planted by a man brought up in two rooms, who has never seen a garden before. I don’t think anyone could ever have accused my father of keeping up with the Joneses. I’m not sure that he cared much what the Joneses were up to. Or even knew.

  *

  When I think about the unfairness of all those stories I’ve told people over the years past about my father as a gardener I begin to doubt the fairness of some of the other stories I’m telling here still, my father’s as well as mine.

  My father’s stories about Barlow, for example. Had he improved them a bit in the telling? Stretched one unfortunate occasion when Barlow had run out of petrol, or the engine had seized up, into a regular pattern of comically predictable behaviour? Extended a single brief accidental graze against the kerb on Putney Hill into a daily mile-long saga? Made something light and tractable out of heavy and intractable anxieties over money?

  Of course he’d improved the stories. That was his style. Have I improved them still further in retelling them, in spite of all my conscious concern for the historical truth? I can see my daughter’s sardonic smile at my even asking the question.

  It’s everybody’s style, in any case. All accounts of the past are a bit like Davis’s drawings of liners and bombers. They’re formalisations of what was once before us as an endlessly confusing and unformalised present. They’re intended to make visible the hidden causal machinery, to show up the structure of the decks and the different classes of saloon, and to decorate it all with little models of people made small and simple enough for us to understand. The stories we tell about childhood have no more resemblance to what that childhood was like as we actually lived through it than George Davis’s neat cutaways of a Lancaster bomber had to the interior of a real Lancaster in action, stinking of aviation fuel and vomit and fear.

  And when I retell my father’s stories I’m moving one stage further away from the original experience, like George Davis depicting not an actual Lancaster but someone else’s model of a Lancaster.

  No doubt Barlow told his wife stories about my father. ‘Pours petrol into that car of his. It’s often standing there with half a gallon or more left in the tank, completely unused. And as for oil! He throws it about like a drunken sailor! Now he’s buying new brakelinings!’ Perhaps George Davis does the same. ‘Saw Tom Frayn mowing his front lawn again. Second time this summer. Funny fellow, Tom – killing a perfectly good crop of daisies.’

  Another question occurs to me in relation to my father’s stories – a strange absence among the people he told them about. Apart from Barlow and George Davis there were various colleagues and customers who were immortalised. His cousin Courtenay, watching the asylum clock. Me and my own various idiocies. His brother and sisters, occasionally.

  But about his parents – never. Not a word, in all the thirty-seven years I knew him. The sons of Noah piously covered their father’s nakedness. Perhaps my father was doing the same. For better or worse, that’s one way in which I’m failing to follow his example.

  *

  And only now, as I write this page, does another rather fundamental question occur to me: I can remember something about my father’s social relationships, but which of the neighbours were my mother’s friends? Who did she tell stories about? Mrs Barlow? Mrs Davis? I don’t think so. I can’t make my mind form a picture of her talking to or about any of them. She walked to the shops, pushing my sister’s pram or pushchair, and I went with her. I can remember the shops we went into. I can remember some of the weather. She must sometimes have said good day to Mrs Kidd or Mrs Knowles as we emerged from the gate, or stopped to chat with Mrs Shakespeare as we turned the corner into Queensmead Avenue … I can’t see it, though. Her friends are her family and my father’s family from North London. And of course my father himself, my sister, and me.

  All four of us together, often. On a Sunday morning, perhaps, sitting outside the Tattenham Corner Hotel on Epsom Downs. My father has fetched two pints of bitter and two half-pints of ginger beer on a round nickel-plated tray. The ginger beer is in authentic pub beer glasses engraved with the measure, exact models of the glasses our parents are drinking from, and we have a packet of potato crisps with salt in a twist of blue greaseproof paper. If it’s still too early in the year to sit outside we stay in the car. Our parents sit in front, chatting peacefully to each other now and then about whatever it is that parents chat to each other about. My sister and I sit beh
ind them, on our best behaviour, not squabbling or pestering, looking out over their shoulders at the complex white rails of the empty racecourse and the soaring spring cloudscapes above the grandstand. An occasional gust of April wind rocks the car slightly. The fizz of the ginger beer in the authentic pub glasses is deliciously intoxicating.

  What’s our mother like? Not like anything – she’s just our mother, as taken for granted and uncharacterised as the air we breathe. She’s put on a bit of weight by this time, I see from the old photographs. I suppose she’s shy, and feels as displaced in Hillside Road as my father does, but doesn’t have his cheek to brazen it out. What the neighbours see, I should imagine, insofar as they see anything, is a placid, smiling woman who keeps herself to herself. With us, though, she can be mercurial. She sits in the dining room in the evening with my father, and my sister and I dare each other to get up and creep downstairs, further and further, before we turn and run terrified back to bed. The darer watches through the bannisters as each sortie brings the daree closer and closer to the dining-room door … until he or she can distinguish the voices of the BBC news announcers and comedians on the other side of it … is actually touching the handle … turning it … Until in the end, inevitably, the door abruptly disappears in front of our over-confident fingers and a flying mass of fury comes hurtling out, slapping wildly at whichever of us it happens to be as we run screaming back up the stairs – then slap, slap, slap – this bed, that bed – darer and daree without distinction.