Cousins

by Salley Vickers

  If Fred wasn’t born political then he had some gene which was waiting to be activated by the political because by this time he was not only reading avidly about socialism but had decidedly thrown in his lot with it. We grew up in the shadow of the First World War and our generation formed a backlash to that terrible exercise in human folly. Class folly, Fred called it. He was sent away to Stowe, a public school, which his mother in later life blamed for Fred’s socialist beliefs. ‘That progressive school,’ she called it. She wasn’t a bad woman, Blanche, and quite a looker in her day according to my father, who knew her when she was a bright young thing and his brother Oswald was courting her.

  Oswald, as the elder son, had money from his father, because that was how things were done in their day, and as far as I know he never worked. He trained for the bar but I don’t believe he ever took an actual brief. My father was cut from a different cloth. As the younger son with no means, he somehow got himself to medical school at Trinity College, Dublin. I never did ask how he came to go there and by the time I thought to enquire he was dying and there were other more important things to ask. I rather hope he was ducking out of the war but anyway Dublin was where he met my mother so if he hadn’t gone there I wouldn’t be here. I often think about how tenuous most of existence is.

  As a physician, Dad subsequently cared for many who bore the scars of that dreadful war and carried, discreetly, his own inner scars. There had been no need other than the false call of patriotism for Oswald to enlist. Dad kept a letter in his desk from Oswald, his last letter as it turned out, written before the Second Battle of Arras where he died. I have it still and I got it out the other day and reread it. It makes such sad reading.

  My uncle describes in this letter how he had to set his platoon to gathering up the dead bodies of their comrades – how they dragged the corpses of men they had been fighting beside into a ‘shallow depression in the ground and covered them with thin layers of soil, which was the best we could do for them’. He goes on to describe how the limbs of the dead would often come away as they were being dragged to their last resting place in that depression in the ground.

  But the worst part of the letter is this:

  ‘The padre gave us a ripping sermon last Sunday. He finished by saying, “Many of you men here today will not be here next Sunday. But you will have given your lives bravely for your country and you will not be forgotten.”’

  They were, of course.

  It was the loss of his brother, I suspect, that formed my father’s unusually tolerant character. Once, when my mother was being catty about Blanche, who gave an impression of blaming Oswald for his own death, I remember Dad saying, ‘We have to understand that Blanche’s world has been shattered and she hasn’t your moral fibre, Maudie.’

  I wouldn’t say that ‘moral fibre’ was my mother’s strongest suit. But she was certainly much pluckier than Blanche.

  Blanche married again, Charlie, a vulgar fortune hunter who had a fake coat of arms engraved on the Tye silver. I lay a good deal of what subsequently happened to Fred on that run of bad luck. Compared to Fred, I was blessed in my parents. For one thing, I was sent to a very different kind of school.

  I’m not sure how much I’ve told you about my mother’s family. They were Anglo-Irish, originally from Cork but at some point they moved to Dublin. Ma’s parents liked to boast that they could trace their ancestry back to the time of Elizabeth the First but, for all that, by the time she arrived they were poor as church mice. So to cut costs, Ma shared a governess with another Dublin family and Nancy, the child of this other family, became Ma’s best friend and much later my godmother. The two girls were greatly attached to their governess, Trudy, who held unconventional views and taught them to plant beans by phases of the moon, to listen to the music of Brahms and Schubert and to read Goethe in German.

  Trudy went on to teach at Rudolph Steiner’s school in Vienna but she left her mark on Ma. In those days, Cheltenham Ladies’ College was considered an ‘advanced’ educational establishment for girls of my father’s class, so Ma set the cat among the pigeons by insisting that I attend the first Steiner school in London. The Tyes regarded this as the height of irresponsibility, but my mother could charm the moon and stars out of the sky so she got her way with my father. And she liked to stir things up a little with the Tyes. As a result I attended a school where we were hardly scolded and certainly never hit, we learned to spot the constellations, to read the Bible as if it was a collection of marvellous stories, to love poetry and music, to dance and to carve. And to the end of my days I shall see even numbers as green.

  Fred had a very different school experience. I suppose if you had to be sent away to boarding school to be whacked on the bottom by older boys and told to ‘be a man’ if you ‘blubbed’, then Stowe wasn’t such a bad one. Although his first love was classics, Fred acquired his taste in literature from his inspiring teacher Tim White, the eccentric alcoholic and hawk lover, who wrote The Once and Future King. And he was taught history by a dashing young Marxist, George Rudé, who became an expert on the French Revolution.

  Fred was like Will, or rather Will was like Fred: they were both prone to intellectual crazes. I remember a summer when, thanks to George Rudé, all Fred would talk about was the French Revolution and the Terror and how the means justified the end – do I mean that? Or do I mean the other way round? What I am trying to say is that he insisted the revolutionaries were right to have Louis XVI put to death for the greater good. I had been reading A Tale of Two Cities so I was all for the other side. I don’t much care for Dickens as a rule but I still like that one.

  We had a fierce argument about this as we walked across to Holy Island. There was only a rough and ready causeway then and too bad if you got cut off by the tide.

  ‘They acted as if they were God,’ I said, when Fred admiringly quoted Danton, saying, ‘Let us be terrible in order to stop the people being so.’

  The mention of God always got him going. ‘Better them acting God than God acting God.’

  ‘Oh Fred, that’s an absurd thing to say. Anyway, I thought you were all for the people. Why should Robespierre and his crew speak for them? I think it’s insulting.’

  We were terribly earnest. It makes me smile to think of it.

  There was a piece of synchronicity, if that is the word I want, to do with another pupil at Stowe, a nearcontemporary of Fred’s, John Cornford. You maybe won’t have heard of him but he was rather famous in our day. He was brilliantly precocious and won a scholarship from Stowe to Trinity, Cambridge aged only sixteen, and he was also a poet and a rip-roaring commie besides, so obviously very glamorous. Thinking about it, poor old Blanche had a point about Stowe being a hotbed of radicalism.

  I must watch out for the propensity for the ‘olden days’ nostalgia that tends to overtake the elderly, but I do wonder if characters like John exist now. He bore that hallmark which endows a child with a charged aura for life – he was adored by his mother. She, Frances Cornford, was a poet too. She wrote ‘Oh Fat White Woman Who Nobody Loves’ which I used to admire, but having reread it, I think it is really a rather snobbish poem.

  When I think of Fred’s mother it is amusing to consider how very different she was from my own. Where the most sensational writing Blanche undertook was devising elaborate dinner menus, my mother wrote short stories, smoking and wearing a Chinese dressing gown and red silk slippers. None of her stories were of enduring worth but they were published in the magazines of the time and were not insignificant either. She had a turn for the sepulchral and wrote slightly fey but sometimes chilling stories about spirits and old charms and prophetic dreams.

  My mother, like many of her contemporaries, had a crush on Rupert Brooke – from what I’ve read since, rather a cold-hearted man. He had been an intimate of the Cornfords and a special pet of Frances’s. Ma wrote a pretty drippy story about Rupert Brooke’s spirit haunting the River Cam. I have the manuscript still and I’m sorry to r
eport that it was written in purple ink. The story attracted the attention of Frances Cornford. She must have admired it as she wrote quite a warm card inviting my mother to visit her in Cambridge, and as I had caught her passion for Rupert Brooke I accompanied her on this visit.

  I am not sure why Fred joined us on that trip to Cambridge. Maybe it was a weekend when he had an exeat from Stowe and was coming to stay anyway. He rarely went back to Bakewell where Blanche and Charlie lived. He had heard on the school grapevine that John Cornford had put on an anti-war exhibition with his lover Margot Heinemann (another communist convert) and he carted me off to see it. The shock of seeing men’s faces disfigured and blasted by war turned Fred into a pacifist on the spot. I can still picture his cornflower-blue eyes blazing with fury. And his determined ‘We must put an end to this obscenity.’

  And there was that dead father, pointlessly killed and lying in a grave in France, like Hamlet’s ghost haunting him.

  But you must understand that the true toll of the First World War was only lately being acknowledged and pacifism was very much in the air. Anyone with an ounce of humanity was horrified by the slaughter of those thousands of young men, so to be passionately anti-war was all the thing. In November, that same year, on Armistice Day, a big anti-war march was staged through Cambridge as a protest against the militarism of the Cenotaph celebrations in London, and Fred bunked off school in order to take part. Afterwards, he came on to London to stay with us and my chief memory is of him talking his head off about the demonstration.

  ‘You should’ve been there, Bets,’ he said, lolling on my bed, his eyes alight with the thrill of it. ‘The toffs and hearties pelted us with rotten tomatoes and eggs. Bloody idiots.’

  It sounded unpleasant to me. I didn’t relish the idea of being pelted with rotten tomatoes and eggs but I can see now that for Fred to be the target of the hatred of his own class was a fillip to the spirit of rebellion against Blanche. ‘The old order is changing,’ he pronounced loftily, ‘and they know their time is over.’ It didn’t seem to occur to him that he was part of this ‘old order’.

  I found all this disturbing. I didn’t like his new attachment to a collective movement. We had done everything together as a pair I would have believed inseparable and I had that evening the first intimation of being abandoned. Well, you get used to it.

  I can see Fred now, in my room in our house in Battersea, talking on and on till the roofs outside grew white in the dawn light, enthusing about the wonders of the world to come, and I did my best to listen, not because I agreed with him but because I wanted to understand. I must have dropped off at some point since I woke to find him sprawled like a great scarecrow beside me and I bundled the blankets round him as if he were my baby. That must have been the winter before the summer of the sand dunes. So I hadn’t quite lost him yet.

  I stopped writing here to try to find the old hat box where Hetta, bless her, stored all the old pre-war memorabilia when we moved to Ely. It took some time to track down and I finally located it under my bed. When I opened it, I found various left-wing pamphlets, including one with a photo of John Cornford on the cover staring at the camera and smoking. I met him that day we went to see Mrs Cornford. He was handsome and bright as paint and no doubt very noble. But to tell you the truth I didn’t like him. I felt he was vain.

  There were various other, terribly serious, left-wing articles in the box too, which I read through for the first time. In one John makes this rather typical pronouncement: The transformation of a worried intellectual into an effective member of a revolutionary party does not take place overnight. He was all of eighteen when he wrote that. Anyway, he was quite wrong as far as Fred was concerned because it was John’s own death, when he went to fight for the Republicans in Spain and was killed the day after his twenty-first birthday, which was the catalyst that propelled Fred into the Communist Party.

  I suppose it was inevitable. Along with all the other factors, Fred was inclined to hero worship. And even I, who was never a political animal, cannot honestly say that I disagreed with what Communism stood for. You must remember that Stalin’s crimes had yet to be uncovered and the call of equality and compassion for the poor and the dispossessed are powerful intoxicants, especially for the young. But maybe because of my very different parents, or maybe because I was born so, I was always too sceptical to accept any ideology uncritically or to belong to any movement.

  If you had asked Fred later in life he would have insisted that we were always close. He would probably have intimated that he always loved me too, though he wasn’t one for declaring love, not that I minded that. But his memory, like his politics, could be rose-tinted and there was a period when we were not close at all.

  Magda was Viennese and a student at the LSE which then as now was a political beehive. When war broke out and the Houghton Street premises were requisitioned by the War Ministry, the LSE was moved to Cambridge. But even before this there was a good deal of exchanging of pollen between like-minded bees at other hives. Magda was bound to attract Fred’s interest. She had joined the Communist Party as a schoolgirl, just as Hitler was coming to power, and would have held a particular fascination for an untried, upper-class, disaffected young radical fresh from public school.

  She was one of those women who most women but few men recognize: she had the knack of making men feel that it was a privilege to know her. Way more sophisticated than any of her British peers, she had sailed close to danger and received the deference due to that condition.

  Of course, from that day in the dunes I had been in love with Fred. Slyly, and miserably, I observed him watching the commanding figure of Magda at a meeting at the LSE he had inveigled me into attending while I was still at school. His gaze rested that second too long on the ripe-bosomed body and radiant, confident smile. My own wiry frame and sandy hair had long since earned me the nickname Weasel. I knew he meant it fondly.

  Fred saw me as an extension of himself – and accordingly less entitled to consideration. Magda was other, and therefore, according to his particular moral reckoning, more deserving of his attention. And she was Jewish and with the increasing dominance of the Nazi party she was vulnerable. I couldn’t compete with that. The vulnerable like the dead have cards that the hale and living can never play.

  I followed Fred to Cambridge and I went simply because he was there – keeping him doggedly in my sights because of Magda. My father used to say I had a measure of his own mother’s flinty determination and it is true that when I set my sights on something I can often achieve it. It was a matter of astonishment to all but Ma when, from my dotty school, I won an Exhibition to read English at Cambridge. Actually, the school wasn’t as dotty as all that. They managed not to ruin what I was naturally interested in and that in my view is the most important feature of a good education.

  I was not altogether surprised when Fred appeared offhand when I arrived, very nervous, in Cambridge in the October of 1937. He could never successfully hide anything from me – emotionally he resembled a mountain spring, quick-flowing and clear as glass. I called round to see him in his rooms at King’s and all he said was, ‘Hello there, Weasel. You settling in all right?’ Perfectly friendly but hardly a lover’s welcome. He offered me a cigarette and then said, ‘Sorry to dash but I’m just off to a meeting.’ I was hurt but I was too proud to show I cared.

  A week or so later he invited me to the cinema to see The Life of Émile Zola which he described as an ‘important film’. I watched it dutifully and we went for a drink afterwards at the Eagle where he talked very excitedly about Zola, who was his current craze. I had read no Zola so I couldn’t contribute much, not that Fred really noticed as when another King’s man came into the pub Fred started a quite separate conversation with him about collective farms. He left me to walk back to Newnham alone. Even casual male acquaintances tended to walk us women back to college so it wasn’t hard to read the signs. It was as if St Aidan’s Dunes were in another country, whic
h I suppose they were.

  In the summer term we played quite a bit of tennis together. We’d always made a good mixed-doubles pair but it wasn’t hard to guess who it was he was dashing off to London to see after a game, leaving me stranded with Peter Shepherd from Trinity. Peter was a harmless chap and pleasant enough and he had a big serve which meant he was in demand on the tennis courts. But he was so dull that once off the court everyone made excuses to get away from him. That was to be my fate, I told myself: the nice girl who puts up with bores.

  So the first two years at Cambridge were a bleakish time for me. But it wasn’t all bad. I adopted a cheery all’s-right-with-the-world veneer, which goes a long way to making one feel more cheerful, and I stifled my jealousy by starting a literary magazine with Giles Truelove from Selwyn, the college across the way, and Marion Stiles, a fellow Newnham student who became my closest friend.

  Giles and Marion and I racketed around together and for all my unhappiness over Fred the three of us had a lot of innocent fun. We published worthy articles in our magazine and some fairly humdrum poetry but there was always the odd jewel, including a poem by John Cornford’s lover, Margot Heinemann, on what it meant to live without him. One of the twentieth century’s great love poems, ‘Heart of the Heartless World’, was written for her and they must have been almost John’s last recorded words before he was killed. It’s an awful thing to say, because she lost him in that poignant war, but I envied Margot that poem.

  The hardest part for me in all this was that Fred stopped going to Dowlands. At the end of my first Cambridge term, Ma and Dad and I drove up to Northumberland to spend Christmas there as usual. I jumped out of the car expecting to find Fred reading in the library or by the fire in the drawing room. But only Margaret was there to greet me. She said, ‘Oh pet, I am glad to see you and what a shame about Master Fred.’ He could never get her to drop the ‘Master’.