Cousins

by Salley Vickers

  It must have been about a year into our friendship, when we were trying on our latest rehabs before the looking glass in the Blue Room, that Bev said, ‘Eddie’s dad and me aren’t married either, you know.’ I can see her now, standing there, looking at herself in the glass and twisting the ring she wore on her wedding finger. ‘We didn’t get round to it before he went. I dare say we will, though, when Ted gets home.’

  She never allowed herself the rider ‘if he gets home’, because that would have been unlucky. But it must have crossed her mind. The dance that evening was in Bamburgh Village Hall, and Bev spent most of it, in the backless dress we’d cut from one of Grandmother’s old silks, in the arms of Joseph Bainbridge, the farmer whose land she helped work, a much older man who was a lieutenant in the Home Guard. When we went to dances, we would habitually leave the boys in the care of either her mother or Margaret but that evening she said, as we were putting on our coats, ‘All right if Eddie stays over at yours tonight?’

  I don’t believe the affair amounted to more than insurance because when her Ted did come home Bev made an excuse to call to return a book and with unusual shyness asked me not to mention Joseph’s name. I wouldn’t have done anyway. Those were world-without-end times and most women had no certainty that they would ever see their loved ones again.

  What else can I tell you? Well, there were the animals. Nat was befriended by Hilda and Hexham, Grandmother’s current pair of spaniels. Grandmother made no bones about preferring dogs to children. She tolerated children as necessary to the family’s continued line – probably much as she had tolerated the means to bring them into the world – but she remained austerely aloof to their enchantments. And besides the dogs and Margaret’s hens there were always cats at Dowlands. There were the outside cats and the inside cats. The favourite inside cat was a big old bruiser of a tabby called Douglas, and one day Nat and Eddie dressed him up in a doll’s lace bonnet and pushed him about in an old dolly’s basketwork pram, which must have been Aunt Char’s. Douglas lay serenely at ease, like a little old lady out for a drive in her carriage, but the bonnet must have stirred in him some memory as not long after this outing Douglas was found to have produced kittens. Grandmother, who believed that a relaxation of any long-held conviction was as improper as the relaxing of manners or deportment, stuck to her guns, insisting that Douglas had been ‘seen to’, at which Grandad riskily opined that in that case the five kittens ‘must have been one of Cuddy’s miracles’.

  ‘Cuddy’ is the local name for Saint Cuthbert, whose influence is everywhere in those parts. Fred and I had been brought up by Margaret on the stories of Cuddy’s chicks, the eider ducklings, named after the saint who protected the nesting birds on his island hermitage, where he also talked to the kittiwakes and guillemots and rescued the little storm petrels, which are said to walk on water like Saint Peter, for whom they are named. Hetta claims that my interest in Cuthbert was one of my acts of rebellion against Fred. But I like to think I would always have been drawn to a saint who loved birds.

  Grandmother had no interest in nature outside her dogs (which I doubt she counted as animals) but Grandad, in his quiet way, liked birds. In the mornings, he sat in the big front window with his heavy military binoculars watching the bird life. Sometimes I requisitioned his binocs and, while Nat and Eddie cavorted on the dunes collecting fragments of shrapnel, I began to watch the waders which animate those bare beaches: oyster-catchers and turnstones, ringed plovers and sanderlings stalking the margins of the sea in search of sand eels. And my heart would lift with the graceful arctic terns, wheeling like tiny white scimitars across the big skies.

  Bev and I were exploring the library one wet afternoon when the boys had disappeared off to play submarines, when I discovered a blue-bound volume by Enid Shackleton, a name that aroused my curiosity as I had a friendly association with the famous explorer. His statue stands in a niche in a wall by Kensington Gardens and I used to converse with it when I was a child. Whether Miss Shackleton was a relative of his the book didn’t reveal, but what it did reveal was her interest in Saint Cuthbert.

  According to Miss Shackleton – I felt she was a Miss – the saint had walked from Holy Island to a spot not far from Dowlands, where he had built a chapel in which he had sojourned during one of his periods of silent meditation. He was a recluse by nature and, according to Miss Shackleton, at such times he spoke only to the sheep and to the birds.

  Enid Shackleton had the Victorian woman’s gift for pen and ink. There were some skilful sketches of various Cuthbert landmarks, the cave where he might have gone to meditate, or, in another version, where his body rested when the brothers took it in their flight from Holy Island to escape the Viking raids. But there was also a neat little sketch of this chapel which stood by a stream.

  Bev was on duty with the children, and I was on one of the longer walks that I took when free to do so. I had climbed a steep escarpment, through a field of black-faced sheep, when I came upon a spring and followed it on up to where I hoped the water might be less foul with droppings. It was one of those scorching days in September that can drop out of the gods’ laps and I was parched.

  Just over the top of the escarpment I came upon the remains of what might have been a shepherds’ shelter, until I saw the remnants of what had once housed a bell and recognized a tumbledown version of Miss Shackleton’s drawing of Cuthbert’s chapel. When I’d slaked my thirst, and taken off my boots and socks and cooled my feet in the stream, I sat with my back against a boulder and watched a flock of goldfinches, scarlet and gold, flit through the dark crimson berries of a nearby hawthorn.

  ‘A charm of goldfinches.’

  I spoke the words aloud into the deep quiet. The only other sounds were of the plunging stream and the silly sheep below. A trilling lark began to spin high in the air above me and all around there was nothing but expanses of hill grass, threaded with the heavenly blue of harebells. Quite suddenly I was sure that Cuthbert had been there and had sat as I was sitting and communed with the birds.

  I don’t know if I prayed. I don’t know that then or now I know what praying is – or if anyone does – though I have had need of praying and would like to believe in its power. Let us say that I sent thanks into the air that afternoon. For if it was not Cuthbert it was surely some good spirit watching over us who decreed that Nat and I should move up to Northumberland. Because almost a month after we had left the house in Round Church Street, a German plane, cruising home, idly discharged a spare bomb over Cambridge. My housemate, the physicist, was killed outright. His lover all but died, but was dragged out of the flaming wreckage in time to save her life. Not her legs, though. When I wrote to Ralph, our landlord, to express my sorrow I learned that her legs had been too badly burned to be saved.

  The news of the destruction of the Round Church Street house had left me more disturbed than anything I had yet experienced because the danger fell so close. Had Nat and I not got out, it is more than likely that we would have been killed or maimed. I had been tormented too, more than ever, by the conviction that Fred, whom I loved and it seemed couldn’t help myself from loving, was wrong. There was evil in the world and an evil that should be, must be, fought. His own son’s mother had been destroyed by it. His son might have been destroyed by it. His son, my little Nat, had we lived in Europe could have been put down as vermin. The knowledge of this had weighed on me so crushingly, so bewilderingly and unanswerably, that I had not known what to think or feel.

  But that afternoon, by Cuthbert’s stream, I recovered a sense that there is also good in the world and that it can survive in unexpected quarters – and might still prevail.

  6

  One Saturday in April 1945, Nat and I had walked down the track from Dowlands to the sands still strung with wire, and were busy digging out a complex waterway, secure in the knowledge that no Nazi enemy would loom out of the sea, when over the dunes a familiar figure appeared. Nat set off at a lick yelling, ‘Daddy, Daddy, come
and see my harbour. Are you coming to live with us now?’ The question I’d never dared to ask.

  Nat and I had visited Fred pretty regularly in his forest sanctuary. I had seen it as my duty to Nat to make sure he saw his father but I had not cared to question what my own position with Fred might be. Nor could I have said what I wanted from him now, even if he were able or willing to give it.

  But from the hour of that reappearance Fred seemed to take it for granted that we would start a life together. His first words to me were ‘Hello, Weasel pet’ and he kissed me, quite casually, as if he’d just nipped out to fetch the papers. It was as if Magda and his marriage to her had never been. I honestly believe he had forgotten – or stowed away in a peculiar mental strongroom – the fact that Nat was not my child.

  If I found his apparent expunging of Magda disturbing I didn’t dwell on it. I was governed by the passionate conviction that Nat and I belonged together and what mattered more to me than anything was that nothing should part us. Together we had coped through those war years and we hadn’t done badly. We had made a life for ourselves, and I might have suggested that we go on as we were, but Fred was Nat’s father and from the sight of them together, that day when the firm fact of peace fully reached me, I could not in all conscience have parted them.

  And, I had to remind myself, I had no right to do so. I was not Nat’s mother. I wasn’t even his legal guardian.

  All this was so long ago it’s hard to be truthful about how I really felt. For a while when Fred came home to Dowlands I was in a kind of dream-like reliving of our childhood before Magda and the war and Fred’s precious principles got in the way. We most of us secretly desire, I suspect, to return to the conditions of childhood, where there are plenty of questions about life but not, on the whole, questions about how to live. It’s the questions about how to live that are so flummoxing.

  Although King’s had held over Fred’s fellowship, he elected to begin his new life much as he’d led the old one by turning down this opportunity for a comfortable existence.

  When I queried this all he said was, ‘You can’t seriously imagine that I’m about to spend the rest of my days teaching Aristotle to privileged public-school kids when there’s real work to be done?’

  ‘I wasn’t a public-school kid.’

  ‘Darling Weasel, you’re different.’

  ‘OK. Jock wasn’t a public-school kid.’

  Fred frowned. ‘Who’s Jock?’

  ‘Someone I knew at Cambridge.’

  ‘Was he in the Party?’

  ‘There were other people worth knowing at Cambridge, Fred.’

  Jock died at Arnhem. I took Hetta with me once to find his grave.

  I learned that during his time as a forester Fred had become involved with the WEA. The Workers’ Education Association ran classes for working people and Fred had volunteered to tutor several of these in Durham. He had returned from this experience alight with a new mission to teach.

  He conveyed this to me one night in bed in the Blue Room.

  ‘The WEA is a terrific concept.’ He was waving his mug about so violently that cocoa spilled over the sheets.

  ‘Fred, do be careful. It’s a hell of a job washing sheets and Margaret’s got enough on her plate.’

  I might have suggested that Margaret was a worker too, but I didn’t bother. He simply looked puzzled at this and announced in what I called his political-rally voice, ‘Those of us who have had a privileged education have a duty to pass that on.’

  ‘You know what,’ I said, by now sufficiently irked by the reiteration of political piety, ‘I’m not sure that being shoved off to a public school to be got out of your mother’s hair in order for her to enjoy the blandishments of a parasitic stepfather is such a fucking privilege.’

  That did silence him. I rarely swore. I have sometimes wondered if Fred maybe felt this was unseemly in a woman, though he would never say so.

  But he had a point. With the fresh winds of democracy blowing and men coming out of the services eager for opportunity in their post-war lives, the spurt of enthusiasm for education was refreshing. Through his Durham connections, Fred learned that the Oxford Delegacy for Extra-Mural Studies had linked up with the Staffordshire WEA and had persuaded Josiah Wedgwood, who was sympathetic to the idea of improving the lot of working people, to lease to them an ugly neo-Georgian mansion, the former home of a local bigwig and now owned by Wedgwood. Fred’s wartime activities finally paid off. The Wedgwood Memorial College was set up and Fred, to his delight and my relief, was appointed warden.

  The three of us moved there in the autumn of 1946. Barlaston Hall was a large house but our attic flat under the roof was cramped, which suited Fred as any discomfort salved his social conscience. It had been the old servants’ quarters, boiling hot in summer and draughty in winter, and, so that people could see for themselves that we were not living the life of Riley, he insisted that we hold any parties in our flat, rather than in the refectory which would have been far more suitable.

  Living with any other person takes getting used to and I have sometimes wondered if men and women are really suited to live together. These parties of Fred’s entailed a lot of beer and raucous singing late into the night. But I was happy enough because it was the first place I could call my own home. What mattered to me was Nat’s wellbeing, and Nat, who was a gregarious child, thrived.

  The TUC financed weekend and week-long courses, where potters and miners and steelworkers came to be taught social history, Labour history and international history, which ensured that we had an ever-changing extended family of men and women, released from the daily grind of work or from being Hitler’s targets – demob-happy and more than willing to kick or bowl balls with an outgoing youngster. I once found Pat Kendall, a corpulent delegate from the Foundry Workers Union, crouched, visibly sweating, in the fork of the prized tulip tree, with Nat shouting at him directions on how best to negotiate his way down.

  ‘He’ll make a grand shop steward,’ was Pat’s slightly truculent comment when he made it back to the ground.

  Fred, who lost no time in recruiting other like-minded comrades and fellow travellers as teachers, was in his element, chewing over dialectical materialism with those who shared this enthusiasm. I was no companion for him in this – in the first place I didn’t believe in it and the impersonal frankly makes me tired. But I had my own interests. I enjoyed teaching literature and putting on plays and making sure that the less politically enthused students did not feel too left out. Fred, whose warmth with political colleagues was immense, tended to ignore those who didn’t share his views. His own disregard for wealth or worldly status, which however much he had rejected he had patently once enjoyed, provoked envy, something I could never get him to understand. He was too generous and too forbearing in some quarters and in others thoughtless and tactless. I should have seen it coming. I did see it coming, but – my fatal flaw – rather than grasping the nettle I let it float down the stream.

  Complaints, from one or two disgruntled souls at first, began to be lodged behind Fred’s back. But over time the disaffection must have grown and one day he was summoned to Oxford, where the left-wing political bias of the courses was raised. Fred returned from this encounter with an expression which told me that he was going to set his face against any directive that defaulted from his own. When I questioned him over what the meeting was about all he would say was, ‘Oh, you know, the usual bureaucratic rubbish.’ He had that strain in him which he shared with Will, a compulsion to go too far.

  Fred had been put on notice to temper his educational policy but as he kept the edict from me it came as a shock when we were given our marching orders. For two years Barlaston had been a haven, and a future with no jobs or home to go to, one small child to support and another on the way, was a demoralizing prospect. It provoked one of our first outright rows.

  When I asked why he had said nothing of this threat before, Fred’s reply was, ‘I d
idn’t want to worry you, pet.’

  ‘Fred, that is so abundantly untrue it’s insulting. You didn’t tell me because you didn’t want me trying to persuade you to change your behaviour. And don’t call me “pet”.’

  ‘Something will turn up, darling Guns. It’ll all be Sir Garnet Wolseley, you’ll see.’

  This invoking of a favourite expression of my own mother’s, one that featured an Anglo-Irish establishment general who made his name in the Crimean War, was the last straw.

  ‘Fred, you do know who Sir Garnet Wolseley was?’

  He looked pained. ‘Of course I do.’

  I am not as a rule a sulker. But for the next week I sulked. After days with me packing up our few possessions in what I hoped was a speaking silence Fred asked, ‘What’s up, Bets?’ And it is possible he truly didn’t know.

  At that particular moment, I had been remembering an evening when Bev and I had gone dancing and I had spent the evening in the arms of her cousin Dick.

  ‘If you want to know, I was thinking that I was happier with Bev.’

  I didn’t mention Dick and was the more annoyed when Fred’s only comeback was, ‘I was reading the other day that bisexuality is quite normal.’

  7

  With nowhere else to go we fell back on my ever tolerant parents. And for the next few years we lived in the basement of my childhood home in Battersea. Fred, who would never knowingly have touched a hand-out from Dad, had no idea that the rent we paid was greatly reduced. His political persuasions, plus his non-existent war record, meant that few doors were open to him, and even fewer that he would agree to walk through. For three years he took badly paid clerical jobs and, at a very low point, did a heroic stint packing sanitary towels in a factory, which to his credit he addressed with aplomb. He liked working alongside ‘the girls’, his term for his colleagues, and I expect they in turn liked him because it would be only a very stuck-up woman then who minded being called a ‘girl’.