My Father's Fortune

by Michael Frayn

  *

  By this time, in any case, my father realises that the problem with little Michael goes deeper than an astigmatism or poor coordination. Not only is the boy never going to make any runs on the cricket field – he’s never going to be able to earn a living. He’s the antithesis of the Smart Lad that Tommy himself already was at his son’s age, and has ever since remained. He’s slow-witted.

  My sister also has an astigmatism, and is not all that much better at games than I am. But she’s quick, like our father, and over the years she gets as impatient with my slowness as my father always was. She has no academic ability – she fails the only two GCSEs (O-Levels, as they were called at the time she took them) that her school puts her in for, whereas I could paper the walls with certificates. When in later life I try to explain all this to people they believe that I’m displaying some kind of pathological or humorously disingenuous self-depreciation. Not at all. If you’d asked my father to sum me up in one word I can tell you confidently what it would have been: ‘dozy’. I’m as dozy as a weekend motorist. My father takes to calling me not Michael but Willy, after a character in a strip cartoon that features two idle tramps, Weary Willy and Tired Tim.

  He’s wearing specs himself by this time, and looking rather more like an academic than a sales rep, but it doesn’t make him any more sympathetic to my doziness. ‘Come on, Willy,’ he says, sounding increasingly weary himself, while he waits for me to remember what I’m supposed to be doing, and where and when and how I’m supposed to be doing it. He tries to help me with my maths homework. The pressure of his braced concave index finger against the end of his silver pencil projects a spray of tiny figures on to the paper, and I gaze at them just as dumbly through my glasses as I did without them. The pencil suddenly pauses and hovers. I can feel his eye on me. I’m supposed to be telling him what the pencil is to write next. Nothing comes into my slow head. ‘Roughly,’ he says. ‘You should always make a rough estimate in any case to check your answer against.’ I go on gazing at the figures. ‘Well,’ he says, ‘is it going to be something like a hundred, say? Or something more like a thousand?’ I peer at the space for the answer more closely. It doesn’t look to me as if it’s going to be more or less like anything. The pencil twitches. ‘Or ten thousand? Or a million? Come on, Willy, buck your ideas up.’

  But my ideas stay unbucked. At lunchtime one Saturday I go out to the scullery to pour myself a glass of water. ‘Thank you,’ I say politely to the tap as I turn it off, and when I return to the table feel obliged to report this amusing misunderstanding to the rest of the family. My father’s not amused, and I decide to keep to myself a later moment of absent-mindedness when I come home to change for cricket, and instead of white flannels find that I have somehow put on my pyjamas and gone to bed.

  What’s he going to do with me? He can see me ending up unemployable, like other members of the two families he’s had to support – another Mabel. Soon I’m at a school where they play cricket with a ball which is not only invisible but hard, and my new spectacles are even less help than before because I have to take them off in case this horrible projectile breaks them. At least the moments where I cringe in front of the wicket with only a bat and pads to protect myself tend to be brought to a swift conclusion. Worse, really, are the long hours of dazed boredom standing at some arbitrarily allotted point in the middle of the landscape, with the perpetual fear at the back of my mind that voices are going to start shouting my name. Somewhere up there in the sky a mortar bomb will be descending upon me, and I shall be expected not just to roll up into a foetal position with my head wrapped in my hands, but to make some pretence of trying to catch it. At least I didn’t know then what my cousin Jean, Phyllis’s daughter, has recently told me – that my great-uncle Robert died in agony as a result of being hit in the kidneys by a cricket ball. My father was evidently keeping this bit of family news from me.

  Football isn’t quite as bad. The ball is at any rate large enough to be sometimes visible, and there’s a bit of flatness and a faint suggestion of give when it hits you. I have some success at football, in fact – I score a goal. Unfortunately it’s against my own side, and my parents have to take it in turns to sit on my bed far into the night, trying to soothe my tearful shame. Years later still I’m at a school where they play hockey. One day my father and sister secretly come and watch me, to see if somehow hockey suits me any better than football or cricket. It doesn’t. It combines the worst features of both. There are twenty-one other players in studded boots, there’s a cricket ball flying unpredictably about – and all twenty-one players are waving clubs around. ‘You just stood there!’ says my father despairingly afterwards. ‘You didn’t do anything!’ echoes my sister. ‘You just watched them all run past you!’ says my father. I’m chastened. I just stood there and didn’t do anything? I made no attempt to run away? I must really be as slow-witted as my father and sister think I am.

  When he’s teaching me to drive, and I’m hesitating for a moment about obeying his order to race an oncoming petrol tanker into a possible gap beyond the double-decker bus in front, he has a new phrase for me – I’m ‘a mass of indecision’. A Smart Lad was still wanted, by my father and everyone else in authority over me, and I was not that Smart Lad. I suppose I took after my mother; I was a bit of a mother’s boy. She never called me Willy, and I don’t think she worried too much about my failures on the games field. Even she, though, thought I could do with a bit of bracing up. When I was at the football school she would give me sixpence sometimes for coming top of the class. And when I whined to her that the other boys had started bullying me, possibly for coming top, or possibly because of that ill-considered goal, she was sympathetic but brisk. ‘Just get your back against the wall and keep your fists up.’

  Perhaps, though, it was my father who did more to give me my character. He observed my doziness and made me see it myself. Hung it on me, like a tailor measuring up a customer and gauging his taste, then hanging a well-fitted suit on him. He probably drove me still further into doziness. Away from hard balls and hard mathematics, into the soft landscapes of language, of grammar and metaphor, of assonance and dissonance, where I felt more at home.

  He had a relish for words himself, it’s true, particularly rather ambitious ones with a bit of a swagger to them – ‘gallimaufry’, ‘plethora’, ‘rodomontade’, ‘prestidigitation’. It went with his hats and brogues and lightness on his toes. I suppose I inherited the logophilia together with a bit of the bantering manner, and some of the impatience. When I attempted to help my children with their maths homework I was as impatient as he had been – worse, perhaps, since I couldn’t really understand it myself – and it had much the same effect.

  I look again at that snap of my two-year-old self gazing at the coloured ball, and I see something else in it as well as doziness and astigmatism. I see a touch of incipient rebelliousness. I think I do know it’s a ball. I think I do know I’m supposed to bash it or boot it in some kind of way. I just won’t, for some reason.

  You can back yourself into being who you are, just as easily as you can walk or get pushed into it. Many years later I discovered that I enjoyed playing tennis and squash – even an occasional informal game of football. I needn’t have dug my toes in quite so hard as a child. I could have done a bit more to meet my father halfway. I could have bashed or booted something. To our mutual advantage.

  6

  Fire Resistance

  My parents like to take their holidays at the start of September, when the crowds have gone back to work. We go in the firm’s car, almost always to the West Country. The journey starts early, at fresh young hours unknown in the normal course of life, and proceeds by way of places whose names still seem to me almost as charged with promise now as they did then: Basingstoke, Andover and Stonehenge, or, on a more southerly track, the Hog’s Back, Winchester and Shaftesbury. At some point Crewkerne, Wincanton and Dorchester are likely to come into the story. It’s raining, of course, but,
as one of us remarks every few minutes, the sky looks a little brighter in the west. Which is where we’re heading. By the time we’ve reached Bridport or Honiton something has gone wrong with the car. Steam is coming out of the engine. My father has found a roadside pond, and a rusty tin can to bale with.

  One year we go to Newquay. By the time we have established ourselves at our hotel, just by the harbour, that promise in the sky to the west has been made good. The tidal pools among the rocks and across the endless yellow shine of the sands are glittering in the late summer sun. September is always a good month for me because it’s my birthday on the eighth, and this year I’m going to be six, which is something I’ve been wanting to be all summer. My parents, though, are irritatingly reluctant to take me down to the beach, or to pretend not to know that we’re now less than a week away from the eighth. They’re spending long hours of the day sitting in the lounge of the hotel with all the other adult residents, smoking and listening intently to the wireless. The air’s grey with cigarette fug and boring official voices.

  I suppose they must have explained to me what those voices were saying, but the only thing I can remember is a dream that I have some days later. The Germans have bombed all the roads leading back to London. Along their entire length, from Yeovil to Shaftesbury, from Axminster to the Hog’s Back, they’re nothing but lines of bomb craters. We’re never going to get home.

  I have another, even more vivid, dream some weeks or months later. I have studied, in George Davis’s manuals, pictures of the British seaplane built by Supermarine in Southampton that established itself as the fastest aircraft in the world when it won the last Schneider Trophy race in 1931. It’s a single-seater, and in my dream I’m landing in it all by myself on the calm surface of a deep blue sea, among little islands off a rocky coast. I feel as calm and profoundly happy as the sea is calm and blue. The coast, I know, is Massachusetts. I have been evacuated to America.

  So this is my war, in those first few months – two dreams, and of things that never happen. My handsome cousin Maurice, meanwhile, George and Nelly’s son, the schoolboy in the holiday snaps from the twenties, is a lorry driver with the British Expeditionary Force in France. In May 1940 he’s force-marched from Fresnes, south of Paris, to Dunkirk, and evacuated from the beaches. My handsome cousin Philip, George and Daisy’s elder son, has by this time joined the Navy, and is serving aboard a destroyer escorting convoys in the North Atlantic.

  The war touches our street. Archie Dennis-Smith exchanges his tennis togs for oily overalls, and cycles off each day to work as a foreman in a factory on the Ewell bypass that makes aircraft parts. The Fieldings’ simple-minded son now pedals slowly off on his pushbike each morning to work as a labourer on the local farm, growing food for the War Effort. His handsome brother-in-law, the fighter pilot, is somewhere up there above our heads on fine summer days, chalking the story of the war in a shifting scribble of condensation trails across the blueboard of the sky, incomprehensibly but we know gloriously. A plane – one of ours, his even – swoops low across the gardens, waggling its wings in triumph. Another, trailing black smoke, dives and vanishes behind the rooftops. One of theirs. We hope. This is 1940 – I still haven’t got my specs. It’s a wonder that I can make any sense of the war at all.

  Two Irish navvies come down the street, knocking on all the front doors looking for work building air-raid shelters. Spending money on some passing craze like an air-raid shelter is exactly the kind of thing that my father would never dream of. In the unlikely event that his friend Kerry, or someone else at work, somehow persuaded him that we actually needed a shelter he would wait till the end of the war and get an old discarded one from someone, or improvise something out of his samples and a few bits off Bert’s rusty bicycle. The war’s changing everything, though. He agrees a price with the navvies and they dig the biggest hole I’ve seen in my life so far. It occupies one whole corner of the garden, where the blackcurrant bushes were. In the hole they erect a framework of curved steel tubes, and clad them with corrugated iron. It looks rather like one of the standard Anderson shelters recommended by the government and named after the Home Secretary, that are being installed in back gardens all over London. But Andersons are for the lower social orders – ours aspires a little higher. The metalwork is stencilled with the name of the manufacturer, Boulton Paul, the firm that also makes the Defiant night-fighter. I have detailed drawings of the Defiant in the albums of pictures of RAF planes that George Davis has passed on.

  The navvies cover the corrugated iron with the soil they have dug out. They install a plank floor and plank beds, and carve out a neat earthen staircase down to the door. So now we have an extra room – a country retreat, even – which is also a weapon of war built by the makers of the Boulton Paul Defiant. We’re the only family in the entire street who takes the navvies on – the single family out of seventeen to have an air-raid shelter of any sort. We have suddenly caught up with the Joneses and overtaken them.

  One night the warning sounds. My sister and I are got up and wrapped in dressing gowns. It’s still the middle of the night; this is even better than going on holiday. Nanny refuses to leave the house. She knows she’s going to die very soon, one way or another, and she prefers to do it in the blazing ruins of her own room. The rest of us trek down the garden through the warm late summer night and make ourselves snug in a little world of candlelight and emergency snacks. Somewhere up there in the darkness Boulton Paul are engaging with the incoming Dorniers and Heinkels. Down here Boulton Paul are enclosing us in the damp earth smells and the excitement of being all four of us together.

  The war’s wonderful.

  *

  Winter comes. There are more air raids. Bombs, though, are not the only things that fall out of the sky. There’s also rain, and it turns out that a hole in the ground, even one occupied by a Boulton Paul air-raid shelter, behaves in a way which neither my father nor the navvies have foreseen. It fills with water. The sharply cut earthen steps soften into a mud slide that leads down into a foul-smelling stagnant pond. The chances of dying in the shelter, either of exposure, drowning, or some waterborne disease such as cholera or bilharzia, are visibly much higher than of dying through enemy action in the house. There’s no question of sheltering in it again after that once.

  My father realises, though, that there’s another way in which the shelter can be used to help the War Effort. We need to supplement the egg ration, as some of our neighbours are doing by raising chickens. Chickens, it occurs to him, are not the only birds that produce eggs. So do ducks. And ducks like water.

  My father makes another of his rare large-scale purchases: five Khaki Campbells – four ducks and a drake. They will feel particularly welcome at a house called Duckmore, and are to have sole occupancy of what is now effectively an armoured duck-pond, where they will be safe at night, even if we won’t, from the Blitz which is now beginning. During the day they’re to be allowed to roam freely about on the surface, eating kitchen scraps supplemented by balancer meal, perhaps so-called because my mother will have to buy it by the sack at the seedsman’s shop in Ewell Village, and struggle home with the sacks balanced on the crossbar of the second-hand gents’ bike that my father has by one means or another acquired for her. He has laid out yet more money on a handbook devoted to the raising of Khaki Campbells. They have encouragingly few requirements, he has established. They can eat almost anything. Except lupins, which will poison them instantly.

  The garden’s full of lupins, so my father erects a fence around the shelter to keep the ducks away from them. It’s constructed out of sheets of TAC roofing, stuck endwise into the mud. Ducks, however, rather like holes in the ground, turn out to behave in ways that my father has not foreseen. They fly. They take one look at the underground swamp they have been made free of, and instantly want to be elsewhere. They flap their wings and fly over the sheets of TAC roofing into the less waterlogged parts of the garden, where the first thing they do is to eat all the lupins.
>
  They survive, for some reason, and continue to feast on the lupins for the next four years. They eat most of the other flowers, too. The sea of mud and duck-droppings around the walled swamp in the corner laps out to occupy the entire garden. But, scattered in the mud each day around the devastated plants are the large blue-green eggs that keep us going for the rest of the war. They’re one of my father’s successes in life – and the least likely one yet. It goes some way to counterbalance his failure to provide England with a new opening batsman.

  *

  Now that the Blitz has got under way and the ducks have taken over the shelter we retreat at night into two windowless spaces inside the house. My parents spread a mattress for themselves in the cupboard under the stairs, next to the bare fuses, and sleep with their heads jammed up against the two violin cases and the ever more tightly compressed layers of junk in which they’re embedded. My sister and I sleep in the dark corridor that leads to Nanny’s room. It’s not quite as enjoyable as the shelter was. I feel a certain unease as the sirens start up, one after another, rising and falling like the voices in some forgotten oratorio – and feel it still when I hear the same familiar polyphony now, in war museums and television documentaries. I don’t much like the colossal racket made by the local anti-aircraft guns, and I like even less the characteristic steady throb of the German bombers. They sound so dogged, and so alien, and they pass overhead with such painful slowness. And yet, when the sirens start up again, one after another, in the long steady gloria of the All Clear, I can’t help feeling a slight disappointment. The excitement’s over, and nothing has happened after all.

  My father’s Fire Captain for the street. Every week he posts a schedule on the telegraph pole outside with the list of neighbours who have to stay up on Fire Watch. The Fire Watcher wears a helmet, to protect him not from the Germans but from ourselves – from the shrapnel that rains down from our ack-ack. He doesn’t have to watch for the kind of bombs that explode, because they announce themselves perfectly clearly, and would in any case blow any nearby Fire Watcher off the face of the earth. What he’s on the lookout for is incendiaries, which might otherwise lie unnoticed on roofs and sheds until the white blaze of the phosphorus had set the whole property on fire. If he ever saw one he would have to come running to our house for the famous bucket of sand and long-handled shovel, or the official stirrup-pump that as the war goes on we use to water the tomatoes and spray screaming children with on hot summer afternoons.