My Father's Fortune

by Michael Frayn

  What do my parents think and feel about these great events, and all the other aspects of the war that they must know so much more about than we do? For them, presumably, the war’s more than the Duration. Is their confidence that we shall win in the end absolute, even before the Germans take on Russia? Do they believe unquestioningly in the things that we’re fighting for?

  I don’t know. I can’t recall ever hearing them talk about it. The questions never arise. But then I’ve very little idea of what they think about any of the issues of the day. From the way my father behaves and the jokes he makes I have some sense of how he sees the world, which is still to a considerable extent how it must have looked to him from the standpoint of those two rooms in Devonshire Road. He remains, for instance, a lifelong supporter of the Labour Party, undeterred by being probably the only one (apart, I think, from my mother) in East Ewell; though he’s so uninterested in the actual details of politics that at a local election in later life, before party affiliations are shown on the ballot paper, he manages to vote not for the six Labour candidates he supports but for three Conservatives and three Communists.

  He respects any activity that requires human skill and human effort, from performing music and observing stars to spinning a cricket ball and double-entry book-keeping; and any notable products of that activity, from cathedrals and synchromesh gears to hand-made shoes and well-written newspapers. He’s inclined to be disrespectful, on the other hand, about all claims to social or moral ascendancy, and his scepticism remains unaffected by his own rise in life, or his elevation to the Fire Captaincy. Being a general, or a king, or a managing director, or a clergyman are all fundamentally comic conditions, rather like Barlow’s Scottishness or Kerry’s Irishness. So is being what he calls, talking about a customer or a colleague at work, a ten-to-two, or indicates by sketching the gesture of a hooked nose. I assume that he’s as unware as I am at the time of the possibility that his wife, mother-in-law and son are all ten-to-twos, and all have invisibly hooked noses.

  He certainly has no kind of religious beliefs, and nor, I think, does my mother. One of the things I remain most grateful to them both for is their failure to transmit to me that burden of indefinable constraint and unlocated guilt, that overarching cosmic awkwardness, which often seems to be so difficult to shake off. He has no formal ethics, either – no set code of right and wrong. He does what he does; though what he does often has a moral dimension. He shines his shoes and he expects me to shine mine; I understand, without being told, that shining your shoes and everything that goes with it are the keys to success in life. He supports his mother and his disabled sister, then maintains his parents-in-law, without any sign of impatience that I can recall. He endures his deafness, and the worse things that are to come, with courage and humour.

  He isn’t a great disciplinarian. I can remember only one attempt, early in our relationship, to punish me for something. Whatever it was I’d done, it irritated him so much that he suddenly lashed out at me in fury, and booted me up the backside, as if we’d both been eleven or twelve, instead of something more like thirty-six and four. The well-shone shoe didn’t connect with me. Cross as he was, it was probably more a demonstration of a boot up the backside than a seriously intended one.

  If there’s an abstract quality that he values it’s persistence. He’s reluctant to allow me to go to Crusaders, some kind of Low Church Sunday school that I long to join because my best friend David has; but when he finally gives in to my pleading, and I immediately hate it, he won’t let me leave until I’ve endured a salutary year or more of sanctimonious Sunday afternoons. He reminds me of this when later I plead to be allowed to join the school Cadet Corps. I persist in my nagging; he gives in; I’m once again immediately repulsed by it; he won’t let me leave until I have endured another salutary year or more of marching round the school playground every Friday in undersized ammunition boots and oversized battledress.

  But none of this, so far as I can see, springs from any general faith or particular beliefs – any set of assertions that unverifiable states of affairs are the case, or ought to be.

  I suppose, with hindsight, that he loved my mother. And loved me and my sister, though he never said. Perhaps, it occurs to me now with a shock of surprise, he loved us as blindly and helplessly as years later I love my own children – was filled with the same joy at the sight of us as I am at the sight of them. Is this possible? The extraordinary discoveries one makes in life! And once again, as so often, only long after the event, only when one has stepped into the shoes one saw before on someone else’s feet.

  *

  The lack of religion in the house is a further cause for Nanny’s nervousness. She sometimes furtively invites my sister and me into her room and gets us down on our knees among all the dim lights and lavender smells, with our eyes closed and hands pressed together, to say our prayers. We pray for our mother and father, and address other prayers, rather confusingly, to another father which art in heaven. His name, unlike the father which art writing his reports in the dining room, is Harold, and there’s no mention of any mother which art in heaven with him, or of any Nanny which art in his little back bedroom. Our own Nanny’s too flustered and whispery about these surreptitious occasions to offer explanations. She seems to fear that at any moment our father (the one which art not in heaven) might burst in and drag all three of us off to be burnt at the stake. He’s rather more likely, of course, given his taste for persistence, to have my sister and me down on our knees to Harold every single day of the year.

  Nanny gives me a Bible. I have it still on my bookshelf, inscribed ‘Xmas 1943’, its spine worn away by being pressed against the lever of my bicycle bell as I cycled to Crusaders each Sunday. And maybe it’s her piety that wears away my unbelief a little, too. At some point in the war, certainly, I write two poems of a religious nature. One is about the heroism of the people of Dover under bombardment by the German cross-Channel guns, the other about the invention of the electric telegraph by Samuel Morse. Each stanza of the latter ends with a repetition of the first message that Morse sent on his newly installed line from Washington to Balti-more: ‘What hath God wrought!’ I have also developed a feeling, which I suppose is essentially religious, that any fun or pleasure in life is unseemly, and has to be balanced out in some kind of moral double-entry system. On Christmas morning – perhaps in 1943, the same year as the Bible – after my sister and I have been awake since four o’clock, agonisingly counting the minutes until we finally hear faints signs of life from our parents’ room, I insist that before we can go downstairs and open our presents we must kneel up on our beds and hold an extempore Christmas morning service of prayers and carols. I pray aloud at great length. I know a lot of carols, and we sing them all. My poor sister.

  Eventually the more acute symptoms of religion pass off, and for a year or two I’m in remission. I don’t know what brings this about. Sunday school, perhaps.

  *

  In spite of my father’s political sympathies we pay for the doctor who comes rather frequently every winter to put a thermometer under our tongues and feel the swollen glands in the corner of our jaws. The only alternatives would be to become panel patients, as working men (not women or children) lucky enough to have national insurance are called, and wait to be seen at the doctor’s surgery in Epsom on a Thursday morning, or to get some form of charity. Nobody in Hillside Road is a panel patient. By the time you’d waited your way through enough Thursday mornings to get to the head of the queue your glands would have subsided, your broken bones knitted up, your mortal remains been laid to rest.

  Nor do my parents ever consider educating my sister and me in state schools. The local Council School, a large purpose-built municipal structure in Ewell Village, where the lavatory tiles covering the walls are decorated with the pupils’ daubs in vulgarly bright poster paints, is visited by the middle classes only on Sunday afternoons, when Crusaders is held there. The rest of the time it, and the Council School children
who emerge from it at the end of each schoolday to spread vulgar Council School infections such as ringworm and impetigo around the district, and litter the streets with dropped aitches and double negatives, are simply below our conceptual horizon. The Central School that my father went to in Holloway, with the French teacher who had with such personal attention beaten French out of his head, are aspects of the past that he has turned his back on.

  So my sister goes to the kindergarten at Sutton High School for Girls, three miles away, wearing a pale mauve blazer and an anxious look on her face, with a velour hat in winter over her mass of blond sausage curls, and in summer a straw boater. But where am I to go? I’ve finished the top class in Nonsuch School, the delightful little local academy run by Miss Dunk and her father, and accommodated partly in a decayed Victorian mansion and partly in a raw new house on another of Gleesons’ estates. I’ve had a good time there, and a productive one. I’ve learnt to read, and have written the essay that moved my father to suggest a career in journalism. I’ve served as official scientist in Diana Baker’s gang, in its camp under the laurels in the old shrubbery. I’ve mastered the triangle in the school’s percussion band, and sung a song that represents the call of the yellowhammer, ‘A Little Bit of Bread and No Cheese’. I’m ready for something more demanding.

  My parents decide to see whether I might get into Sutton High School for Boys, a few hundred yards along the road from the girls’ high school. The blazers here are purple instead of a discreet mauve, and there are other differences, in spite of the similarity of the name. The girls’ school is owned by the Girls’ Public Day School Trust, a non-profit body that runs well-reputed and academically oriented schools all over the country. The boys’ school is owned by the Reverend J. B. Lawton, who is also its headmaster. The girls are housed in a substantial spread of classrooms, laboratory blocks and gymnasia, tree-shaded tennis and netball courts, and a spacious hall where we go later to see my sister play Seventh Rat in The Pied Piper of Hamelin. The boys are in one single-storey building. Its front wall, visible to the public, is built of brick, and all its other walls of corrugated iron lined with tongue-and-groove boarding. The whole school shakes whenever a door’s slammed. There’s no hall where the boys might be distracted by amateur theatricals. A wobbly partition between two of the classrooms is folded back each morning to make a space where the school assembles for prayers.

  My mother takes me for the entrance exam. It’s conducted orally, by the Reverend J. B. Lawton in person. He wears a clerical collar and heavy priestly boots. His grey hair’s cropped as close as his little unblinking eyes are set, and his cheekbones gleam from the closeness of his shave. In the corner of his study is a rack with a selection of canes of various thicknesses. Hoping no doubt to head him off from investigating too closely my progress in arithmetic, which is still limited in spite of my father’s efforts, my mother lays stress on my literary abilities, and the success I have had with titles such as ‘The House I Should Like to Live in When I Am Grown Up’. The Reverend J. B. Lawton obligingly concentrates the examination upon the arts side.

  ‘Spell “beautiful”,’ he says.

  ‘B-u-e …’ I begin, but realise at once that this draft could be improved. ‘B-e-u … B-a-e …’

  My restless search for perfection evidently impresses the learned and pious proprietor. I’ve passed. I’m in.

  At Sutton High School for Boys, he explains to my mother, I can prepare to take the Common Entrance Examination, and go on to any of England’s great public schools. Or, if she and my father prefer, I can stay on here, in the venerable corrugated-iron halls of Sutton High School for Boys.

  For another ten or eleven years, if Eton or Winchester don’t appeal.

  *

  Every now and then the war comes closer to home. Fielding’s handsome son-in-law is shot down, and loses both his legs. I don’t know when this happens. I just remember him later, I think at the end of the war, in trim civilian suit, handkerchief in breast pocket, off with all the other commuters each morning to catch the train at Ewell East station, swinging himself bravely down the street on two tin legs and two crutches, pipe clamped in the determined jaw, a hero still. He and his wife are living with her parents, like so many other returned war heroes with nowhere else to go – until the marriage breaks up. He departs, and the glory at No. 12 with him.

  It’s the Blackout that does for my beloved grandfather. He was knocked down in the unlit streets by a taxi, says Auntie Phyllis in the little memorandum she wrote for me years later, and this starts up an old injury sustained a dozen years earlier when he fell down a flight of cellar steps. He was still living in digs in Kentish Town, still ‘fending for himself’, and apparently was reduced at one point to hanging around the Carreras works in Mornington Crescent at the lunch hour, waiting to touch Phyllis for a discreet cash handout. Everyone in her office knew about it. People would tell each other, ‘Oh, there’s Lawson subbing her old man again.’ By the time of his death things seem to have looked up a bit, and he was working as a clerk at Cable and Wireless. The post mortem, as recorded on his death certificate, says nothing about injuries caused by cellar steps or taxis. It mentions only a heart problem – and cirrhosis of the liver. I have no recollection of his drinking more than the odd pint with my father at the Spring Hotel in Ewell Village. Can both my grandfathers have been boozers?

  The next victim is closer still. Christmas 1943, and things on the home front are looking notably bleak. ‘The Government’, records my almanac of the twentieth century for 22 December of that year, ‘says there are only enough turkeys for one family in ten this Christmas.’ Our family’s one of the other nine. Not even Sid has been able to raise any eatable birdlife from the farmers of Lincolnshire. My father decides that one of us must be sacrificed. He goes out after breakfast and chases the drake round the garden. Through the bare winter flower beds and the desolate vegetable patch. Round the coal shed. Over the asbestos fence into the stinking quagmire around the air-raid shelter.

  Within an hour or so he has caught it, and conducted it to the garage to wring its neck. He has consulted the Khaki Campbell handbook and found out how to do this, swiftly and with a minimum of suffering to either victim or executioner. The drake, however, exemplifies the national spirit of defiance invoked by Winston Churchill in his famous response to the prediction that England would have her neck wrung like a chicken: ‘Some chicken … some neck.’ Some drake, it turns out – and its neck, reports my father later, is as rubbery as a garden hose. The scene in the garage is kept from us, but it plainly gets more and more like the murder of Rasputin, until finally my father has to fetch the rusty chopper from the coal shed. Though since the rusty chopper’s too blunt even to chop firewood …

  Eventually the drake’s dead and plucked, and my mother has cooked it. Even after two or three hours in the New World cooker, however, it’s still, like England, defying its enemies. None of us can get so much as the prong of a fork into it.

  *

  Tuesday, 6 June 1944. A Tuesday morning like any other at Sutton High School for Boys. Latin, I think … Until the walls of the classroom shudder in anticipation as the door’s flung open and the Reverend J. B. Lawton makes a solemn entrance. We all freeze. Any faint sounds – of breathing, perhaps, or of a page being cautiously turned in Kennedy’s Eating Primer – cease. The good pastor has already caned his way through a queue of fifteen or twenty boys waiting after prayers, perhaps a fifth of the school, and has no doubt dispatched a few more in shifts since then. What does this unscheduled visitation portend? The solemnity of his expression suggests the worst. A really shocking new offence has come to light. A pen nib has gone missing, perhaps. The entire class is going to be caned. He’s going to take off his jacket once again and roll up his sleeves. He’s going to put the same effort and concentration into every stroke of the cane as he always does, rising a little on his heels, with his eyes opening suddenly wider for a moment in concentration, as he brings the weapon down with
such impressive force and accuracy on to that small outstretched hand, that awkwardly vertical behind …

  But no. The kindly shepherd of our souls is simply passing on some war news he has just heard on the wireless. The Allies have launched their long-expected invasion of Europe. We give a faint cheer, and no one’s punished for it.

  A week later comes further war news. This time it announces itself.

  It’s in the middle of the night, and presumably the air-raid warnings have sounded, because we’re sleeping downstairs, our parents as usual next to the live fuse boxes, my sister and myself in the corridor outside Nanny’s room. A familiar racket of ack-ack, but this time so loud that Nanny comes out of her room to join us, uttering little cries of terror. And she’s right, because now there’s a sound the like of which we have never heard before in any previous raid – an angry buzzing, deafeningly loud, like a giant bluebottle, that passes directly over the roof of the house as if almost touching it. The whole house shakes like Sutton High School for Boys – and then shakes even more violently as the buzzing suddenly ends in a gigantic explosion.