My Father's Fortune

by Michael Frayn

  *

  I don’t, of course, show my writings to my father, and I very much doubt if he ever sneaks a look. If he does he might just possibly perceive, through all the literary smog, that he has made a contribution of his own to the work. It’s not just that he has got me into the grammar school and so introduced me to Mr Brady and my fellow poets M. Lane and P. B. Shelley. A number of the poems and essays, he might realise, are based on bits of the countryside that he has taken me to in the car – for weekend walks in the home counties, on Leith Hill and the Ivinghoe Beacon, or during family holidays. Our trip to North Wales is particularly fruitful – quite a lot of that veiled majesty that I’m struggling to capture derives from one particular day driving down the Llanberis Pass, with a complex piled cloud mass hiding the mountains, out of which occasional glimpses of inconceivably lofty peaks emerge and vanish again. In the next few years I’m going to go back to Wales many times, sometimes with my fellow poet, and I’m going to become rather more closely acquainted with those high places, through the soles of my usually soaking feet and the skin of my often freezing hands. The mountains are going to become individual personalities as sharply defined and tangible as Blatcher and Janes and the other boys in my class, with names as familiar: Y Wyddfa and its outliers in the Snowdon massif, Crib Goch and Lliwedd, and on the other side of the pass the Glydrs, Fach and Fawr, and their outlier Tryfan. I’m going see them in falling rain and falling snow, in sunlit snow and sunlit rain, and I’m going to get exhausted and lost and benighted on them. I’m going to stay in every Youth Hostel in North Wales, and from the Birmingham University climbers who spend the summer in and around Idwal Cottage, in defiance of the three-nights rule, I’m going to learn Ivan Skavinsky and various other hearty standards – Avanti, popolo! (the song of the Italian Communist Party), I’m the man, the very fat man (‘What waters the workers’ beer’), Queenie, the queen of the striptease show (‘And she stops … but only just in time’) and Caviar’s the roe of the virgin sturgeon (‘The virgin sturgeon needs no urgin’). I’m going to continue to have intensely romantic feelings about those weathered folds of ancient rock. But never again will they seem quite so lofty or so majestic. Never again will I quite recapture that cloudy intimation of grandeur that I experienced looking out of the window of my father’s car.

  I suppose, now I think about it, that those glimpses of mysterious mountain tops emerging through the storm clouds are perhaps an objective correlative of what’s happening in my own life. Whatever effect my mother’s death may or may not have had upon my character and educational prospects, it has one unambiguously positive consequence. At an age when life for many young people is becoming more difficult, things for me can only get better. From the age of fifteen or so, as the clouds at last begin to lift, more and more sunlit peaks emerge around me. By this time I have extracted myself from the hated Cadet Corps and outgrown even my delight in the loyalties and strivings of the Boy Scouts. Another reversal, too, is occurring over the course of one single busy year, 1949. In January, aged fifteen, I’m getting myself confirmed, and surviving divine retribution for dodging the confession of my sins. That spring I cycle off to Communion every Sunday and feel God slipping down my throat, as glowingly warm as the mouthful of wine that symbolises one of his avatars (or incorporates it, possibly, in the Popish eyes of the vicar). The winey warmth spreads through not only my body but my poetry. Up the oak tree on Surbiton Golf Course that summer I’m telling God in The Creation, Opus 10, in case He doesn’t know: ‘Thou madest all, Thou art all,/Thy parts stretch all throughout/The homogeneous mass of Space and Time’. Two opus numbers later, the deceased Poet is ‘bending his way’ to the throne of God, where, ‘In one blinding flash,/He knows all.’ Drenched though I am in Shelley’s poetics, I seem to be impervious to his atheism.

  Or am I? Already in Opus 10 a questioning note has appeared. ‘All things were made by Thee, O God,’ I remind Him. ‘But who created sin?’ I’m not the first or the last person to have asked Him this, of course. I’ve just Googled the question, and discovered that there are 37 million entries for it. In Opus 12 I have moved on to a rather more original assertion – though to me now a considerably more opaque one – that God is ‘absolute Democracy’.

  Whatever this means, I can see with hindsight that I’m beginning to depart quite sharply from the theology of the Catechism that I learned and recited so recently. That autumn, soon after my sixteenth birthday, I have an experience oddly like the blinding flash that brought enlightenment to the Poet in my Opus 12 a few months earlier. The lightning strikes as I’m running up the stone staircase to my classroom. I’m three-quarters of the way between the ground floor and the half-landing when it comes into my head with absolute clarity that I don’t believe a word of it.

  Of what? Of everything that I have since January been telling the vicar, the bishop, God and M. Lane that I did believe. It’s as if a weight had been lifted off my shoulders, or the top of Snowdon had appeared sunlit through the encircling clouds. Confirmed in January – apostasised in September. A busy year. But that moment of illumination on the stairs settles the question once and for all, and I have never, in the sixty years that have elapsed since then, had the slightest inclination to go back into the darkness. I suppose the truth is that my parents never implanted faith in me, in spite of all my grandmother’s efforts, at an age when it tends to mark one for life. I’m grateful to them, as for many other things; and in particular to my father, who waited so patiently for me to make up my own mind.

  *

  Not that I keep my father informed about the current state of my beliefs. He must be a little relieved, though, to realise that I have at last started to make a serious effort with my school work. I’m not sure why. Partly, I think, because next summer I shall have to take School Certificate, the precursor of first O-Levels and then GCSE. I’m not very clear about the career structure for poets, but you probably need to stay on into the sixth form, even perhaps to go through the gateway into that sunlit court I have so briefly glimpsed – if only to be expelled again, like Shelley, for your heroic refusal to accept what they tell you there.

  I’m softening chiefly, I think, because in that crucial year we are for the most part well taught. No Mr Brady now, sadly, for English – only a dry disciplinarian who grinds suitable opinions into us on Chaucer and Shakespeare. I’ve begun to get interested in more than just English, though – and to regret the many holes torn in my knowledge of most subjects (some of them unfilled even today) by my earlier efforts to torment the staff and amuse the class. I remain indifferent to science and history – rather curiously, because in years to come I’m going to be gripped by both. Some of the less practical abstractions of mathematics I’ve at last begun to enjoy, and my imagination’s stirred by the fjords and oxbows of geography, by its moraines and eccentrics, by the wheat of the Great Plains and the apricots of Mildura. I can’t help laughing at Topaze, the Marcel Pagnol play we’re reading aloud in French. I get increasingly absorbed in my struggles to disentangle the syntax of Virgil, and in the lost mythological world that so slowly emerges from it. I’d like to be able to report that my character has been improved by conversion, but it hasn’t. My fellow-poet and I remain intellectual snobs, loftily condescending to the philistinism we see around us at home and in school. We’ve been privately humbled, it’s true, when M. Lane produces from somewhere an old textbook on prosody. As we turn the pages we discover that there’s an aspect of poetry of which we have remained completely unaware, even though we’ve been reading and writing so much of it for the past year: metre. How we’ve managed to keep our eyes and ears so closed I can’t think. Now we’ve been told about it we scoff at it, of course, as at everything else. We’ve long since rejected rhyme. What self-respecting free spirit would allow himself to be constrained by something so patently artificial and outmoded as anapaests and amphibrachs? Well – Shelley, we discover, for a start, now we know what we’re looking for. We’re deeply shaken. Like Monsieu
r Jourdain we’ve been writing prose without knowing it – but then he wasn’t trying to write poetry. Production at the great Frayn & Lane verse works falls off sharply. It’s difficult to go on ignoring those seductive rhythmic possibilities once you know about them – and a lot more difficult still to write verse that incorporates them. The days of the 500-line epics are over.

  Our sense of being among the elect – or even perhaps of entirely constituting it – is sustained by our continuing passion for music. Here our no less profound technical ignorance doesn’t much trouble us, because we’ve no aspirations to compose or play. We start on the libretto for an opera, it’s true, though this may be earlier, when we’re still in epic mode. We have a composer to hand, a boy in the class called Shutter who can actually play the piano, and who will later go on to read music at Oxford. We have a title, Caligula. We also have a piano – a jangly upright which has improbably appeared in the Frayn dining room to replace the grand that my father paid to have taken away ten years earlier. (Why, how, do we suddenly have a piano again? I assume so that my sister can have piano lessons, though whether it’s been thrown out by a neighbour or found on a dump I’ve no idea.) Shutter and LaneFrayn sit down together after school at the keyboard, like George and Ira Gershwin, and Shutter improvises colossal out-of-tune chords and runs for the words that FraynLane are scribbling down and passing to him a page at a time; but since all we know about Caligula is that he was a tyrant and made his horse consul the supply of plot soon dries up, and the whole enterprise with it. What we do with music a lot of the time is talk about it. What do we say exactly? I don’t think we say anything at all exactly. We talk in the same kind of way as we do about the universe, the mountains of Wales, the destiny of the romantic poet and so on. In music, as in everything else, we celebrate the transcendent, the immanent, the diaphanous, the ethereal. Often we simply mention titles and opus numbers, key-and time-signatures, mood and dynamic indications – and add nothing of our own but celebratory exclamation marks. It’s rather like the prisoners who have told each other their jokes so many times that all they need to do to get a laugh is to announce a reference number. ‘The second section of the allegretto in Opus 95!’ ‘Yes! Or that bit in the last movement of the Seventh!’ ‘You mean the bit like the bit in the allegro ma non tanto in Opus 132 …?’

  Mostly, though, we do actually listen to music. On the wireless above all, and later on the random collection of scratched old 78s that we buy in the second-hand department at Foyles – odd choruses from The Messiah, odd movements from Schubert quartets and Bach partitas. Whenever we can afford it we go to concerts at the Albert Hall. These offer excellent value, because the acoustics are so eccentric before they modify the roof many years later that you hear everything twice and three times. The difficulty is to find the price of the tickets, even for a Prom, even for the standing-room high up under the echoing cavern of the roof. Until we make a wonderful discovery. There’s a boy in our class called Ridge whose stepfather is an honorary steward at the hall. He gets two free tickets for the Grand Tier at every concert – and neither he nor nor anyone in his family has any interest in music. So Ridge passes the tickets on to LaneFrayn. Thereafter all we have to find is the fare for the Greenline bus from Kingston after school (hard enough – if only there’d been another boy in class with a relative in London Transport!). Then we sit on the steps of the Albert Memorial and occupy the time until the concert by construing our Virgil together. The pages of our exhausted school editions have been worked loose by the slow fingerings of earlier generations, so that we have to keep jumping up to recapture them as they flutter away in the wind. Then – glory! Seats – seats! – in a box just over the orchestra, stage right. Close enough to see Furtwängler, on his first London tour after the war, mouthing at the choir – shouting aloud at them, I think – in the last movement of the Ninth.

  At the end of the evening we reel home on the Greenline, uttering little cries of ‘That bit in the scherzo, though!’ – ‘Yes, and that bit in the last bit of the first movement!’ – as drunk and incoherent as homegoing football supporters. Not that we’ve drunk so much as a cup of tea – we couldn’t have afforded it. What have we eaten, for that matter? Nothing, for the same reason, not since the unchewable meat and the dollops of lumpy mashed potato for school lunch nine hours earlier. All we’ve consumed is thirty lines of the Aeneid. And the music, the music.

  *

  We’ve also discovered politics – in the first place, I think, like so much else, through Shelley. In the form magazine we’ve founded I’ve written an article supporting the Labour Party at the 1950 General Election, and Lane, characteristically, has outflanked me and made the case for the Communists. I’m so impressed by his arguments that I no less characteristically follow his lead and shift my allegiance leftwards. The ‘absolute Democracy’ that I managed the year before to identify as an attribute of God we both now see as incarnated in the Soviet Union.

  I don’t think it occurs to either of us to join a Party organisation, or to become activists of any kind. We’re not joiners or activists. We’re content simply to be right when everyone else is wrong, to know the truth that everyone else is too blind or prejudiced to grasp. We two are members of the brotherhood of man, an exclusive club from which all the other people we happen to have come across so far are plainly excluded. We’re the local representatives of the broad masses, and we smile pityingly at all those who are unequal to our equality. I hawk my communism and atheism around the school, trying to provoke the class enemy, interrupting meetings of the Christian Union until even the sweet-tempered and patient boy who runs it is obliged to ask me to stay away – a triumph for me, of course.

  At home Nanny, hand nervously fluttering in front of her mouth to keep the terrible word from the ears of others, asks me to reassure her that I’m not really an atheist, and when with unsparing honesty I decline to, refuses to believe that I mean it. Even my father’s patience is tested. He takes me and my sister to a performance of The Mikado in which the title role is being sung by one of his colleagues from the office. I sit all evening with contemptuously folded arms – and go on sitting at the end when everyone else stands up for the National Anthem. I have embarrassed him in public, my father tells me afterwards with rare bluntness. Also my feet smell. I need to take a bath and change my socks more often. God, the pettiness of the bourgeoisie!

  Rather as the religious sometimes concentrate their devotions not so much on God as on one of His saints, so we focus ours less on the Soviet Union itself as on (for some reason) Czechoslovakia, where democracy has been notoriously crushed a couple of years earlier in a Soviet-supported putsch. Or so the poor dupes of the capitalist press believe. We know otherwise. We decide to combine two of our romantic enthusiasms by going climbing in the Tatras. We study maps and brochures; even the mountains look happy under socialism. We go to the Czech consulate to get visas, and we seem to be the only customers. A world-weary official with a gold tooth gives us the application forms. ‘You take these home and fill them up,’ he explains, ‘then you bring them back here, and I throw them into the waste-paper basket.’ We’re shocked. A cynical relic of the old order, evidently. A few weeks later there’s a report in the paper that a Second Secretary at the consulate has committed suicide, I think by jumping out of an upstairs window, as Masaryk is alleged to have done in Prague. Whether it was the man with the gold tooth I don’t know. It doesn’t shake our faith for a moment. We never fill in the forms, though. I think it has belatedly occurred to us that the train to Central Europe might be even more expensive than the Greenline to Kensington. Though we were probably intending to hitch-hike, which is what we do the following year when we go to Paris and the Haute Savoie. On £7 each (I still have my old passport, in which all purchases of foreign currency have to be marked in these post-war years of perpetual economic crisis), so that we live mostly on ficelles spread with the English strawberry jam that we’ve brought in our rucksacks, together with a pack of incr
easingly rancid English butter.

  *

  Our form master in School Certificate year is Mr Brown, our Latin teacher, and his passion, apart from the Latin classics, is photography. He celebrates the end of the exams by taking a class photograph. His Rolleiflex has a timer, so that he’s able to take his place in the midst of us – a slightly built figure, now nearing retiring age. One look at him as he sits there in his own photograph and you can see what he is: a gentleman and a scholar. He has always treated us, while he introduced us to Virgil and Caesar, as if we, too, are gentlemen and scholars – but has always also kept in hand a terrifying reserve of unpredictable fury, expressed in violent cannonades of desk lid on desk, at the occasional sudden suspicion that we’re not.

  I study the rows of grey-on-grey faces in the photograph as they gaze obligingly into his lens. We look a decent enough lot. Verging on the gentlemanly, most of us, a few of us even quite scholarly. Some a bit goofy, some already handsome – particularly Lane, who looks like a Mississippi gambler being played by Gregory Peck. The only visibly unsatisfactory member of the party is me. I’m sitting at Bunter’s right hand, for some reason, nine feet tall and nine inches wide, with my arms defiantly folded in the way they must have been at The Mikado, and I have a most unpleasant sneer on my face. Have I put the expression on specially, in honour of the occasion? Or – good God! – do I look like that all the time? Is this what my demonically handsome fellow-poet has to endure as we talk about sonata form? Is this what my father sees across the supper table every evening? Yes, my poor father. I’m now two years older than he was when he left school to start work, and assumed the responsibility of supporting his destitute mother and disabled sister. I look back at the old photograph of him, the Smart Lad with the slicked-down hair and the handkerchief in his breast pocket, the easy charm and the self-confident smile, as handsome in his very different way as M. Lane. The contrast with me is ludicrous. No sane employer would take me on as an office boy. And could I ever begin to support anyone else? I look scarcely capable of supporting my own wilting person.