Your school now … Susan had been arranging for a place but it’s for older girls, so we would have to start again. We’ve been thinking about it – you know it won’t be easy to find the right kind of school for you; Marjory and Joan didn’t get on in any of theirs, they loathed each more than the last. So we have a suggestion to make, it’s up to your mother of course, but we wanted to know how you felt about it. Would you like to go on staying with us? doing lessons with a tutor? We’d keep the girls at home too and club together so we could get someone really good to teach you. We’re thinking of moving to London – Jack thinks he’s got a chance to do posters. You’d be a kind of PG, if you know what that is, it’ll come to no more than your school fees. What do you think your mother would say to that?
Oh, she’s in favour of private education, I said.
What about yourself now? There are advantages about school, you’d be with people of your own age … You must think about it.
I did not. I fell for the plan at once. No establishment, no new change, the line of least resistance.
I took trouble over the letter to my mother, to be enclosed in Susan’s, urging our case. By the time her answer came – a reluctant yes – we were already ensconced in a flat in Hampstead. So the pattern for the rest of my childhood and early adolescence was set. It was a key decision and, as I knew even then, it was my own. Circumstances allowed me to make a choice when I was still incapable of weighing what the choice involved. Life with Susan and Jack – once they had escaped their parents and the starched servants – was cheerful, easy-going; they enjoyed being artists even if they weren’t successful ones and were light-hearted over their periodic financial disasters. They were nice people, kindly people, naively bohemian, quite as delighted as I was to find themselves eating out at a Charlotte Street trattoria. They were good to me but had no intention of playing foster parents – I was lodger and stranger, a near equal from another tribe; that I was a child was largely ignored; as long as I looked after myself, that was the unspoken compact, and caused no trouble with my shadowy guardians, I could do as I pleased.
As far as my education went, they were as good as their word. At first. They found me a tutor, a woman with a history degree; I bicycled to her flat twice a day, and loved it. No more parroting by heart – I was taught properly. Jack’s posters did not catch on, London was expensive, we were being mildly dunned … After less than a year we left the Hampstead flat one early morning riding on the furniture van – it felt both an escape and a picnic. For a time we lived on the South Coast; in various places, once in one of those converted old railway carriages by a beach, there I used to read in an upper bunk by a one-candle light. Then when finances got really low, we went back to the parental Midlands; then to a series of country cottages, another stretch in London when Susan had been promised a show. So it went on. For my teachers, as in Italy, we had to rely on local lights; some of them were good, others less good. I did work on my own but it suffered from lack of supervision. People we saw were mostly grown-ups, casual ones at that, Susan and Jack picked up friends and we were often a crowd, but they, too, like the rest of our life were here today and gone tomorrow. When there was money there was drink in the house, gin, red wine: Australian burgundy of deplorable memory and Chianti so-called, a meal out, the pit in a theatre …Second-hand cars were acquired with optimism, parted from sorrowfully. I had pocket money, and we all borrowed from each other freely. My clothes had become almost as run down as they had been at Feldkirch, my daily costume being a blue serge school tunic handed down from Marjory or Joan. When my father’s estate was finally settled – the will broken, the house sold, the contents sold – my sister (did I hear from her? a dozen lines now and then scrawled large over a page of crested paper; she had her own troubles, big troubles, but these scrawls conveyed nothing of them), well my sister did an imaginative thing, she wanted me to have my father’s gold cigarette case and against much opposition she wanted me to have it now. She was right there: it gave me more pleasure than it could have at any later time. I carried the case filled with sixpence worth of Craven A, flashing it around in solemn hospitality. They would have let me smoke had I wished; I tried it once or twice, didn’t like it, was never tempted again. When we got hard up at the end of the month, I handed the gold case to Susan (Jack was not to be told) who would take the bus to the nearest pawn shop. It was honourably redeemed each time.
Yes, they were nice people, kind people, who kept going by being able to laugh at themselves and at what befell them; for all their muddling they had strength, a very English strength: made up of modesty, pluck, acceptance of the surface of things – tolerant qualities, survivors’ qualities (which can keep the sky from falling). Humour was Jack and Susan’s weapon to dilute the anguish of existence with its infinite possibilities of disaster. A useful weapon, a likeable weapon – not a romantic weapon and not the best for getting at the essence of existence. To me then, growing into my teens, arrogant with intellectual desires, bound on some quest I could not have defined, they were not the people to engage emotions or fire the imagination.
* * *
Life was further fragmented by stays in Italy at intervals. The idea had been that I should go there for the holidays but as these were irregular and my mother no more settled than Susan and Jack, I went when asked for. I travelled on my own, trustees sent money and that, by going third class, could be laid out to advantage. I contrived stops between trains, dined in splendour at the Galleria in Milan on real Italian food and wine, put in a little dogged sightseeing in places I’d been told of, quite uncertain yet of my own taste. If it was summer my destination might be some villa on the Mediterranean (oh, the clear water of those uncrowded bays), if winter a chalet in the Dolomites belonging to Alessandro’s family where he taught me skiing. He and my mother had got unobtrusively married. Indissolubly what’s more, she said, do you realise there’s no divorce in Italy, neither religious nor civil, benighted country (those were the early years of Mussolini). Alessandro would say nothing. I accepted what I found. Most children have a pinch of fatalism and detachment in their composition, they also totter through a jumble of tough observation and absurd misjudgements. Each Italian visit felt different; some slow almost invisible shifts had occurred, such as the shifts that slide a series of stills into a moving picture. My mother and Alessandro must have been going through a process of establishing a framework, a common ground in the outside world, and there was ever the question – this was discussed – of finding an occupation for him. The rented house, the borrowed lodge or flat, was always made liveable, civilised. This they achieved as a team. My mother had a knack of making any room look charming. Alessandro was good with his hands. First thing my mother would hang up her Klee. (She did have a Paul Klee, a present, I understood, from a previous lover, and she took it wherever she went; once when that love was brand new, she had propped up the Klee in the compartment of her wagon-lit.) Then they would move the furniture around and if it was sombre or ugly they’d paint it over with some pleasant colour (this often caused trouble with the owners). Alessandro could knock together an efficient ice-box from old packing cases, sawdust and tin in a matter of hours, then embellish it and the kitchen cupboard with fragments of pastiche – a couple of Braque cubes, a trace of a Marie Laurencin – he was quick on the visual uptake; anything he had seen once, if only in a book, he’d have the hang of it. My mother seemed pleased by such feats and would show them off in her slightly deprecatory manner, as she would show off, say, my spouting chunks of poetry, implying that we, he and I, were rather clever if hardly original for our age and station at things she could have done with her hands tied behind her back. Her married life had an audience now, friends staying at the house, overflowing into local hotel or pensione. My mother’s friends they were and during those early years mostly women. She did have women friends and was loyal and devoted to them, as they were to her: attracted – she was always a centre – by her vitality, the flowing talk that seem
ed to give a point to everything they did, the laughter. They also grew attached to Alessandro. They had come to judge – Twenty years younger … Much too handsome … And what does he do? – they stayed to bask in his company. He liked women and showed it, it was as simple as that; he treated them indiscriminately in a light flirtatious way, all on the surface, quite public. It might have given offence, apparently it did not. Yet there was not the slightest doubt in anyone’s mind that his entire devotion was for my mother. Alessandro’s serious leanings – so far – had been towards women older than himself; his first affair, when he was little more than a boy, had been with a married lady in her forties whom he was still fond of and occasionally visited. As for other friends, he seemed to have shed them for the present; men bored him and men’s talk (though he himself was not in the least an effeminate man). He had not shed his family. They too came and stayed, mingling or not with my mother’s friends. They – there was Mama and a gang of young brothers and cousins – seemed to have accepted his marriage with fairly good grace: his father was dead and Alessandro, though not the eldest, was his own man. Mama was a vigorous woman, embarrassingly youthful, with a clear face and a manner that often missed being tactful. She and my mother managed; she jangled her son’s nerves, which he visibly controlled. My mother, I guessed, was quietly doing something for the brothers, helping to put one through university, pulling strings for another (she had not burnt all her boats). That was a period when the money situation was on some sort of even keel, the trustees too had accepted the marriage and were underwriting my mother’s refound respectability. We lived in modest comfort. There was little mention of bills and no utopian attempts to grow our own potatoes, which seemed indicators of high financial stability to me. I, by the way, had an allowance now out of my father’s estate which was paid by the courts to whomever I was living with. We had servants. A cook, a maid, an older woman coming on washing day (when the wash was taken to the communal stream or trough); I quickly forgot the early skills acquired as a sub-drudge in the German village and became oblivious of housework. The time I had now, I spent reading. They were nice servants, Italian servants, which was synonymous; it was they who provided an element of continuity. Not that they remained long the same, there was no family factotum to follow our geographical changes – Erminia … Fosca … Renata … Camilla … your faces and names are as fused now as the places: were you with us at Positano? on Capri? at Fiesole? What remained constant was what they gave to us, to the house, to themselves, a compound arising from their natures and traditions: hard work, dignity, much laughter; cleanliness to the degree where it becomes an aesthetic element; generosity in their dealings: gentilezza. It was reciprocated. Here Alessandro was perfect. Mutual respect, trust, emotions shown at crisis times, without familiarity. Young he might be, he was il signore, the master. With me, too, it was good. Good at the stage when I was the bambina, the child of the house (they, the servants, treated me as such); and still good later when they felt I should reach the signorina stage, still easy, affectionate, though it wasn’t a stage – if one translates signorina as young lady as I suppose one must – I ever came much to terms with.
It was my mother, sad to say, who did not quite fit into that gentle, balanced circuit. Perhaps it was her way of treating everyone as a conversational equal that misfired with these women of Italian peasant stock – her fluidities against their bedrock – she never shirked giving as good as she did not get, so her egalitarian sharpness was meted out however young you might be or ignorant or dependent. And there was her temper. Quick, violent at its peak, soon over. But shocking because such a breach of the ironic cool: the maids were afraid of her (as I had been, still could be). When china got broken or the stove went wrong, they’d come to Alessandro to act buffer. What was worse: they did not really like her. Curious perhaps as my mother thought of herself as a socialist (on Fabian lines). I lapped it up; Alessandro, who followed her lead in so many ways, poohpoohed it. There was a rankling episode when the three of us and a woman friend found ourselves at an hotel at Bologna while a waiters’ strike was taking place. My mother went into the street and marched with the workers and banners. Not a half bottle of acqua minerale was to be had at our hotel let alone a crust, and the restaurants and food shops were tight shut. We were cross and very hungry. My mother returned with shining eyes replete with the cause and human fellowship. Didn’t you get ravenous? we asked. Oh, the comrades had sustained her with delicious salami, fresh bread, fiaschi of wine … Did you bring some back? Oh, she said – I forgot.
Our own food was good, simple good. Pasta made at home, clear lean broth distilled from a scrap of beef and a barnyard fowl, vegetables picked out in the market in the morning, lemons and olive oil, in those fragile green phials blown at Murano, always on the table; meat conceived as garnish more than hunk: aromatic fillings in pomodori and melanzane, slivers of veal done with a light hand; salads of tender leaves. And always the abundance of fruit, Sicilian oranges in winter and baked apples and pears; the apricots, green almonds and cherries of early summer; later peaches, figs, melons, at last the ripe grapes … It was wholesome food, genuine food, never played-about-with, show-off food, and its basic assumptions were honesty of materials, a feeling for texture and a nice attention to both plenty and thrift. (Indeed, we always ate up the scrap of beef and the barnyard fowl.)
I enjoyed that food, how not? We all did, having healthy appetites but, like the Italians we lived amongst, took it for granted. Now it would be regarded as pastoral, utopian and luxurious beyond the dreams of cuisine naturelle and the cost of health shops. What struck me then was the democratic pattern of Italian meals – everybody who had anything to eat at all ate (with regional differences) more or less the same. It was a very big more or less of course and I felt that I knew something about that too: about rich and poor, village life and château life, Susan hanging on by means of the pawn shop, and the ways Fosca and Camilla’s families scratched a living. I ruminated on what went on around me and derived pleasure from sorting out the contrasts. The proper study of mankind …? Food? I might have done worse. Food is as revealing as money and sex, and is revealed more often. People can’t wait to tell you that they mustn’t eat cabbage or have a craving for puddings; whereas how frequently do you hear, I’ve got ten thousand in my deposit account, or I can’t bear parting with small change? As for truth about sex … Anyway at that point I thought little about that and guessed less. I had a kind of unhurried sense that there was a side to adult life – possibly agreeable – that would disclose itself when the time was right, an odd incuriosity possibly prompted by my mother’s casual disclosures and my reading so much beyond my years. It simply was beyond my years. (A friend once told me that as a small boy – he was the son of Aldous Huxley and thus not exactly reared in an intellectually deprived environment – he had read through a French two-volume history of Anne of Austria under the unwavering impression that the subject was a female donkey: ne d’Autriche. But then the poor chap, like me, was brought up trilingual.) My interest in how people lived was nourished quite literally by the food I shared with them. Table customs, I had long realised, were divisive. What chasm between the aspic-upon-soufflé of our haute-juiverie in-laws in Berlin and the sodden starches and cold bacon of the German village. In England I had experienced the alternatives of the imperturbably ordained meals at the parental Midlands home and the casual scruffiness at Jack and Susan’s when fending on their own. We did for ourselves – still unusual in the 1920s for people of the middle-class even when badly off. Susan did the cooking, the rest of us took turns in giving or avoiding to give a hand serving and cleaning up. Nobody could say that Susan cooked well or much (though we were fed generously), sausages and rice pudding were about her mark; the bulk of our daily sustenance was convenience food, hideous term, and certainly not as varied or as pseudo-grand as it has since become. No deep-frozen coquilles Saint-Jacques: baked beans we had and bloater paste in little glass jars off the corner grocer’s s
helf, Jello, jam roll, bread and Marmite for tea, fish and chips for supper, with tinned salmon and pineapple cubes as stand-bys. I devoured it all cheerfully enough; what I missed was wine. I had no idea for a long time, that the very best claret, let alone port, was shipped to and drunk by (a few of) the English; I only knew what I saw and that was that wine with meals was an exception not the rule, which happened to be true then for most people. How we have changed all that now that England has entered a golden age of wine! (With quality and variety on offer greater than in any other country in the world.) Let us count our blessings.
In Italy we had wine; everyone drank it naturally, liberally, every day, young wine, local and cheap. Ours was chosen by Alessandro or the cook with the same care, no more, as the vegetables and the fish. It was not discussed at table. My claret evenings with my father were part of the world that was behind. Someone sometimes was offered a small glass of vermouth; brandy was kept on hand, Alessandro might be called upon to seal some masculine deal with grappa, besides these there were no spirits in the house nor was there talk about drink orimpression that the subject was a female donkey: ne d’Autriche. But then the poor chap, like me, was brought up trilingual.) My interest in how people lived was nourished quite literally by the food I shared with them. Table customs, I had long realised, were divisive. What chasm between the aspic-upon-soufflé of our haute-juiverie in-laws in Berlin and the sodden starches and cold bacon of the German village. In England I had experienced the alternatives of the imperturbably ordained meals at the parental Midlands home and the casual scruffiness at Jack and Susan’s when fending on their own. We did for ourselves – still unusual in the 1920s for people of the middle-class even when badly off. Susan did the cooking, the rest of us took turns in giving or avoiding to give a hand serving and cleaning up. Nobody could say that Susan cooked well or much (though we were fed generously), sausages and rice pudding were about her mark; the bulk of our daily sustenance was convenience food, hideous term, and certainly not as varied or as pseudo-grand as it has since become. No deep-frozen coquilles Saint-Jacques: baked beans we had and bloater paste in little glass jars off the corner grocer’s shelf, Jello, jam roll, bread and Marmite for tea, fish and chips for supper, with tinned salmon and pineapple cubes as stand-bys. I devoured it all cheerfully enough; what I missed was wine. I had no idea for a long time, that the very best claret, let alone port, was shipped to and drunk by (a few of) the English; I only knew what I saw and that was that wine with meals was an exception not the rule, which happened to be true then for most people. How we have changed all that now that England has entered a golden age of wine! (With quality and variety on offer greater than in any other country in the world.) Let us count our blessings.
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