On the left-hand side of the King’s Road, beyond Old Church Street, where the painter Augustus John had kept his studio in 1910, was the fire station from which scarlet engines burst like flames with alarming regularity, and nearby was the Manresa Road library, where I was a newly enrolled junior member and the latest happy inhaler of the smell of old books. Along the next stretch of road after the Town Hall the anarchic clothes shops began to arrive. I stared through the windows of Granny Takes a Trip and Mr Freedom, and ventured into Stop the Shop, with its revolving platform that you had to leap off if you wanted to look at any of the clothes on the racks. The sales assistants, dressed with more flamboyance than any of their customers, looked disdainfully at anyone who interrupted their conversation, enquiring whether they might actually make a purchase. Punctuating the great fashion parade at the top of the King’s Road was the solid presence of Peter Jones looming up on behalf of an older generation, as if to say ‘enough’s enough’. This glass-walled department store was a bastion of courtesy and efficiency for locals, grand old ladies with their newly shampooed poodles and even royalty. Ever since the building had been completed in 1936, it had presented a symbol of reassurance in a fast-changing world.
A year after we moved to London I developed osteomyelitis in my left leg, a serious infection of the bone marrow that can lead to amputation if not treated with urgency. I was taken immediately to Great Ormond Street Hospital, and after the operation, undertaken by a delightfully flirtatious surgeon named Mr Lloyd-Roberts, my mother brought me a pale gauzy bedjacket edged in pink swansdown. I had seen one like it before, in a photograph of her in bed when she had TB. The bedjacket was one sign, but the seriousness of my illness was confirmed by an expression on my mother’s face that I did not recognise. I had never seen her so frightened. I was in the hospital for six weeks and she came to see me every day. Once, her visit coincided with a flurry in the ward, a tightening of nurses’ belts, a smoothing-down of starched skirts. Prince Charles was recovering from appendicitis in the adjoining room, and his mother had arrived to see her son, bringing her own mother with her. For Philippa, the royalist, the sight of her newly convalescent seven-year-old daughter in close proximity to a current and future monarch was nearly overwhelming. I made friends with William, who was in the bed next to me. While his mother had been pregnant, she had been given thalidomide, a tranquilliser prescribed as an antidote to morning sickness. The drug had not been properly trialled. The resulting deformities, detected in around ten thousand newborn babies worldwide and many more who died in the womb, made thalidomide the worst disaster ever to hit Britain’s medical profession. William had been born with arms and legs that were not fully formed and would never grow. My temporary incapacity was nothing in comparison with his life sentence.
On the day I left hospital, my mother cooked my favourite supper, and as I ate the hamburger, chips and frozen peas, followed by ice cream rolled in sponge for pudding, I had never been happier to be home. But a couple of weeks later she left for a holiday in the Bahamas with her new friends from St Tropez and I continued my convalescence in Hampshire at the ever-dependable home of Doccer Howard and his wife and near my maternal grandparents. The neighbours I liked best, apart from Doccer and Mrs H, were the always smiley Simmondses, who had a swimming pool shaped like a nurse’s kidney bowl that we were allowed to use whenever we liked. Mr Simmonds had a red sports car without a roof that I admired and a twirly moustache that I was not so keen on because his hello kiss felt like an encounter with a scratchy toothbrush. Mrs Simmonds smelled good, had a pronounced but attractive gap between her two front teeth and left pretty lipstick imprints on the stubs of her numerous discarded cigarette butts.
My father made little objection to Philippa’s frequent visits abroad and to her close friendship with the Silberbergs. Only when he was confronted with maternal rather than uxorious absence did any discomfort show. But although he always involved himself in our day-to-day welfare, his attempts to bath us on the latest au pair’s evening off were not always welcomed. In March 1962, he wrote to Philippa describing a bathtime with Adam and the challenge that his four-year-old son presented to his own naked-phobic father:
Verity is rather nice. She looks like sin itself, with a long hank of black hair hanging over one shoulder and a pint-sized face, very wicked, but she is considerate and sweet and Adam adores her.
‘I want Verity to bath me.’
‘Well she can’t. She’s going out for the evening.’
‘Who will bath me then?’
‘I will.’
‘But I don’t want to be seen by you.’ I insisted and there was a lot of hiding behind towels and loud complaints that the water was too hot, then too cold and I had chosen the wrong coloured bath mat and the pyjama jacket goes on first, Dadda, didn’t you know that?
I would watch my mother’s departure, waving stiffly from the steps of our house as she got into a taxi, calling out to her at the final moment as she slammed the door, asking if she really had to go. Or I would see her leave from my position at the sitting-room window, kneeling up on the cushion of a sofa covered in yellow satin material that shone in two stripes, like the line of hackles on a dog in which the hair faces in the opposite direction, putting my face into the not quite clean net curtains that smelled bitter and were rough to touch, crackling a little when the nylon rubbed against itself. As the taxi drew away, I would swallow down the ache in my throat and go upstairs with our new and permanent nanny Shirley to watch Coronation Street on the tiny television in the cupboard next to the Baby Belling where Shirley made us comforting toast. Shirley had been born twenty-eight years earlier in Sissinghurst village, and Horace, her father, had been indispensible to Vita and Harold when they first arrived at the house. He was an expert builder and bricklayer who mended the crumbling Elizabethan walls and built others up on which Vita trained her roses and clematis. Shirley came to work for us when she was in her twenties and remained with us for fifteen years.
In some ways the marriage of our parents was still clearly a viable relationship despite the growing separateness of their lives. Shirley had arrived shortly before the birth of my sister, Rebecca, a gap of almost nine years separating us two daughters. She was a constant, discreet, no-nonsense presence, showing unfaltering love to us children and without whom my childhood would have been infinitely poorer. Although a good part of her time was inevitably concentrated on Rebecca, she gave our entire family more than maternal reassurance. While my father grew to rely on her wisdom and practical support whenever my mother was away, Shirley also provided my mother with the companionship and human presence that diluted Philippa’s increasing hostility towards Nigel. She would often try to persuade Shirley to delay her day off until after lunch so that she would not be left alone with her husband, fearful of their antagonistic intimacy.
* * *
I was not enjoying school and my report said I did not take part in sports or indeed in the classroom. I felt ‘unsatisfactory’, a word weighted with doom and used by both my parents with unhesitating frequency. Characters in books felt like better friends than did the real-life girls I met in London. I found sustenance in literature, especially in Narnia’s Lucy, Wonderland’s Alice and particularly any motherless or fatherless little girl who had a secret. They all became my imaginary companions. I longed to meet Mary Lennox and Colin, the sickly son of the house, whose father lived abroad and barely ever came to see him or the secret garden growing behind the locked door. These children’s secrets were my secrets too. The wardrobe with a concealed panel at the back that led into Aslan’s snowy kingdom was as real to me as any piece of furniture at home. I envied the unexpected friendships and the implicit criticism and eventual approval of unsatisfactory children; spoilt Mary Lennox admired the boy Dickon, who charmed the animals and showed her a different way of behaving; the indulged Little Princess Sarah Crewe could not have survived the tragedy of her father’s death without the love of Becky, the girl who cleaned the rooms
in horrible Miss Minchin’s school. And there were reassuring surrogate parents, mothers like Mrs Sowerby who cooked and listened and instinctively knew when a skipping rope was all that was needed to make a lonely child feel happy.
Then school life improved. We were suddenly in the news. A girl in the sixth form called Twinkle, who wore pink lipstick in morning prayers, went on television with her top-of-the-hit-parade pop record about a boy called Terry who crashed his motorbike and died, giving even the youngest pupil a sense of drama by association. Twinkle’s glamour increased when a mystifying rumour went round the school (forever unsubstantiated but still thrilling) that she was going to have a baby without a husband. And there were other excitements. A famous pop group called the Yardbirds rented rehearsal rooms in a shed next to our lacrosse pitch and busloads of screaming girls would arrive to catch a glimpse of them.
And then a new teacher arrived named Mrs Fitzgerald. She taught us English, history and scripture, and she lived on a boat on the Thames. She was distracted by life, running into the classroom at a tilt, unbalanced by a huge pile of exercise books covered in red-biro corrections, her face full of movement and anxiety, freckled and breathless with strands of hair the deep colour of ripe crab apples escaping from a untidy bun. Swinging her legs as she sat on the teacher’s table facing the class, she would time-travel us schoolgirls away from 1960s London and into the world of Dickens’s French Revolutionary knitting women, the tricoteuses of his Tale of Two Cities. The domesticity of their occupation and the unnerving placidity of their demeanour contrasted with the blood-curdling executions taking place in front of them, as they sat ‘knitting, knitting, counting dropping heads’. Nothing unnerved Madame Defarge, the chief knitter, as her needles expertly and covertly encrypted within her stitches the names of those to be killed. We shared Mrs Fitzgerald’s horror and admiration and never forgot the scene. Later on, children became the inspiration for several of Penelope Fitzgerald’s books, but it had long been children whom she inspired. Once she spoke about how she longed to see a blue poppy. I picked one for her in the garden at Sissinghurst and brought it to school. When the absence of the poppy was discovered, I found myself in terrible trouble. But I had not known it was the rarest flower in the garden. I only knew that I wanted Mrs Fitzgerald to have it.
Nor was I aware that while the tricoteuses were using their knitting to lethal effect in our classroom text, Mrs Fitzgerald was knitting at home for her family’s survival. Struggling to pay her bills, she would unravel her daughters’ sweaters and reassemble them with a little more wool to make them last longer. How could any of us have known that when she was not introducing a roomful of girls to her love of books, she was managing an alcoholic husband, trying to keep her daughters in food and clothing, darkening that grey-red hair with a tea bag for economy, and eating chalk for nourishment? How was I to know that the battered, leaky Thames barge on which Mrs Fitzgerald lived was sinking into the river at the World’s End just a few yards from my own home? And how was I to know that all the time the theatrical showiness of Chelsea was settling itself in her mind, waiting to re-emerge years later in her wonderful novel Offshore where ‘the King’s Road fluttered, like a Gypsy encampment, with hastily-dyed finery while stage folk emerged from their beds at a given hour, to patrol the long pavements between Sloane Square and the Town Hall’. All I knew was that Mrs Fitzgerald’s lessons were better than any of the other lessons and made going to school fun for the first time.
At home, my mother’s life in London was unravelling too. My father recorded, not altogether uncritically, in a letter to his parents that she had become ‘soignée’. She had her nails painted scarlet and sat beneath an upturned metal flowerpot that wooshed warm air onto her fashionably straightened curls once a week. But she was seldom at home to greet us when we got back from school. Even when she was not in France, she never seemed to be around when she was needed and wanted. One day my brother pulled out some nylon stuffing from the cushion of his kindergarten chair and shoved it up his nose ‘when I wasn’t looking’, he explained later with charming guilelessness. He was having severe difficulty in breathing and his teacher was worried. My mother rushed to the school after a telephone call to say Adam needed urgent medical attention. By the time she arrived, the stuffing had already been hoiked out with a pair of tweezers by a doctor. Her newly painted blood-red nails did not escape the matron’s silent glare of disapproval, nor did the rarity of her appearance at school.
Once when I returned to find the house empty as usual, the inevitability of her not being there and the unfairness of not having a mother like the other girls, one who would help me off with my coat and ask me about my day, suddenly swamped me. I stood on the top step and weighed up the options. None were very appealing. An old friend of my father’s who wrote screenplays for television lived opposite, but he never spoke to us children. Two doors down was an MP who never spoke to us either. Mrs Lamont next door looked kindly but she had a horrid snappy dog and lived behind a dark privet hedge. So I ran away to my own friend Ellen, who lived a few streets away in a house with a mother who was always there to help her off with her coat and ask her about her school day. An hour later Ellen’s doorbell rang. A policeman was standing on the step and told me my mother was on the warpath. There was a dreadful row when I got home, and I thought how unfair it was, because it was not my fault that I’d been left all alone.
* * *
We had never visited our grandparents’ house in France but in August 1963 my mother took us with her to St Tropez. It was the first time we had been abroad. Adam and I were anxious misfits in a sophisticated playground, an exotic land of ice creams, crêpes, warmth and being undressed. We would escape the rosé-infused grown-ups on their sun loungers to examine Brigitte Bardot through binoculars, trying to control our sniggers as the local goddess lay on a rock across the bay from the villa wearing only the bottom half of a blue gingham bikini. She was the first naked, well, semi-naked adult we had ever seen.
When we came home I wanted desperately to see the undressed motherliness of my mother. I had never seen her without clothes. The grown-ups’ bathroom was directly underneath our own, the door always locked whenever one of my parents was inside. With a nail file taken from my mother’s dressing table, I managed to cut a flap in the blue linoleum floor beneath our basin. Prising up a loose wooden board, I had a clear view of the bath fifteen feet below me. I put the linoleum flap back in place and waited until the evening, when I heard the bath running. Lying on my stomach and carefully lifting the lino, there was the grown-up bath with my mother sitting in it, her knees drawn halfway up to her chin. But I had forgotten how her curls frizzed up with heat in a way she did not like. Covering her head and, from my bird’s-eye perspective, concealing her entire body, was her large forget-me-not-speckled bath cap. One short but audible indrawn breath of disappointment gave my game away. She was furious. How had I dared to do such a thing? I was put at once in ‘disgrace’, a word loaded with consequences including the threat that I would be carried away to the ‘Kiddymart’. We were very familiar with this establishment although we had never actually been there. Not yet. The Kiddymart was a special supermarket where parents took their unsatisfactory children and swapped them for better versions, the type who would not spy on their naked mothers. I was given a reprieve from barter this time but made to understand that adult nudity was both private and in some way shameful.
When our mother was away again the following summer and Shirley took Rebecca to stay with her parents in Sissinghurst village, Adam and I were sent to our cousins on the Norfolk coast. A family friend of theirs, a painter, was also staying, using the garage at the back of the house as a studio. He was very solicitous of me and called me darling and invited me to come see him in the garage. I was now ten years old, a sucker for being darlinged, a fan of pop music and a fan of the song playing on the garage radio, ‘Doo Wah Diddy Diddy’ by Manfred Mann. The family friend said I was beautiful and then he asked me to ta
ke off my knickers. I fled. I wrote to my mother and told her what had happened and asked her to come back to England and take me home, posting the letter in the red postbox at the end of the twitten in the village. I had assumed it never reached her because she never came to get me. Except the other day I found it, opened and tucked away in a file containing my childhood drawings.
Sometimes Nigel took us on excitingly rigorous holidays, travelling in a rented Dormobile to Scotland or Ireland, or taking the ferry from Harwich to Norway to shiver and twiddle down the fjords. Nigel’s solo parenting attempts on these trips were sometimes clumsy and inhibited. ‘I hope you aren’t consti?’ he would mutter, using an expression that had died out with the war but feeling he should somehow enquire whether our digestion systems were still functioning on a diet of reindeer meat and Polo mints. One year we went to Amsterdam and could not understand why women were sitting in the shop windows. ‘They’re waiting for their lunch’ was all he could come up with. But in contrast to the uneasy sophistication of St Tropez and the Darcey they were wonderful adventures and we were never happier than when huddled and freezing in our macs on the floor of a waterlogged rowing boat in the Hebrides, belting out ‘Over the Sea to Skye’.
Sometimes when my mother was away, we stayed in London under the care not only of my father and Shirley but also of Mrs Tremson, our cleaning lady. Mrs T was of indeterminate age, but to my eyes her careworn face made her ancient. She ran her sudsy empire from the linoleum-floored kitchen in the basement, mopping it twice a week with a soapy sponge attached to one end of a long pole, working it up to a skating-rink shine. We spent a great deal of time down there with her, having tea at the trendy breakfast counter covered in dark green Formica, on uncomfortable stools with seats that whirled round and round. Occasionally there would be Twiglets and crisps, the modern food a treat in contrast to our usual Spam sandwiches and slices of luncheon meat and corned beef, the attendant layer of yellow fat clinging to the sides of each slice. Pausing to squeeze the dirty water from the sponge into her bucket, she would push back her long, yellowish-grey hair and lean her chin on the pole. With ash dropping from a roll-your-own balanced on a whiskery lower lip, she would caution in her nicotine-lined voice: ‘Another war is right round that corner, mark my words.’ Beaten about by gloom and despair, she feared all over again for her East End birthplace, where in the 1940s so many buildings had tumbled in flames.
A House Full of Daughters Page 17
