These three men had been married only once. My father had been married three times; had, I understood, been very rich and very poor; and had had more jobs than he had had cars, which was a lot. He had once written me a list of all the cars he had ever owned; it began with something called an Invicta, which he had bought in 1912 when he was twenty, and continued over two pages.
During World War II he had done three jobs at once: he had managed his own furniture business in High Wycombe; had, with no previous experience, run a farm on a hill just outside that town; and had written a series of autobiographical books about life on the farm – they were sub-titled ‘One Hundred Acres Farmed by an Amateur’. He had been ‘too old to fight’ in that war and told me without shame that he was ‘a coward’ and that, had he been young enough to be called up, he would have avoided fighting anyway, as he had, fortuitously, during World War I.
The books – four of them – had made him quite wealthy. In the three years between the end of the war and my birth, he had owned a Rolls-Royce and a yacht. I had seen photographs of both, and there was a model of the yacht in a glass case on top of the cabinet containing the Encyclopaedia Britannica in our living room. When I asked my mother about this period of their life, she downplayed both these signs of riches: the Rolls-Royce was an old second-hand one, and the yacht was not what some people would call a yacht – it was a large sailing boat with room for eight people.
These days, he wasn’t wealthy. He had spent the money from the books, sold the yacht and the Rolls-Royce, and wound up the furniture business long ago. After the war, his publishers had brought out four more books with decreasing success and had, in 1950, declined to publish his ninth. Despite this, he still woke every morning at 5 am and wrote for about three hours, either with a fountain pen, sitting up in bed, or on a black portable typewriter at his roll-top desk, wearing his dressing gown over his pyjamas.
When I was younger, before I liked reading, I would go to his room every morning as soon I woke up and he would stop writing and play games with me, or I would climb into bed with him and he would tell me exciting, made-up, adventure stories. He taught me chess, cribbage and bezique, and he made a board on which we played shove ha’penny. He liked to play with me, his late child, born late in a late marriage, and I took it as the joke he intended when he said that his writing career ended when I started to demand his attention.
I loved him, and I loved being with him, but he had a demon. It showed itself in frightening outbursts of rage, sometimes vented on strangers in shops or in traffic, only rarely on me; I had learned to recognise the stirrings and to back away. But my mother couldn’t escape; she was the enduring receptacle for his wrath. In his presence she was quiet and subdued; away from him she came to life and laughed. He seemed compelled to destroy her spirit – and he succeeded in dulling her brightness – but I knew that it would never leave her altogether. I loved her unreservedly, and couldn’t understand why this otherwise clever, funny and kind man should attack someone so innocent and so perfect.
The mood came upon him most frequently during breakfast, as my parents sat with their newspapers at opposite ends of the table, with me in between. Often he would read out something he had written that morning and ask for her opinion. But no response was ever adequate. A positive comment provoked a sneering shrug, as if her opinion were of no consequence; a critical one led to an interrogation as he pinned down with ruthless logic precisely what she meant and proved – to his own satisfaction at least – that she was both stupid and wrong. The exchange might end with him shouting ‘I cannot suffer fools gladly’ in the ugly tone I had heard him use to bank clerks and shop assistants, and with my mother gently sighing and drawing her paper up in front of her face. My hands and arms and shoulders would tingle with the fear that he would hit her. And I wondered what would happen then. And I wondered why and I wished it would stop.
* * * * *
He was always Professor Plum, but we didn’t play Cluedo that day because we couldn’t find my mother. At first neither of us could think where she was. We had gone into the garden to look for her and were gazing at the budgies when my father said, ‘I know. She’s warbling… She’s gone to practise warbling in a bonnet.’
‘What’s that? What’s warbling in a bonnet?’
‘HMS Pinafore. You know, the opera. They always wear bonnets in HMS Pinafore. She’s in it, God help us. Mrs…Whatsername persuaded her.’
I remembered then. She was at the Liston Hall in Chapel Street, rehearsing.
‘She has to learn how to warble in a bonnet,’ my father said abstractedly. ‘You don’t have to learn, do you?’ He was talking to one of his budgerigars.
‘She left us a shepherd’s pie.’
He didn’t seem to hear me. ‘How many will be purple? That is the question.’ He was looking at a small wooden nesting box, high up at the back of the aviary. ‘What do you think, Sunny Jim?’
‘Three out of four,’ I replied.
The budgerigars had been an enthusiasm for about two years; my father had built a lean-to aviary out of two-by-one and chicken wire, installed nesting boxes and bought four adult budgies, two of each gender. Despite minor setbacks – tiny, blind, pink creatures falling to the ground and being tended to in the house, often unsuccessfully, with eye-droppers filled with warm milk – the aviary was now packed with budgerigars and, reluctantly at first, he had started to sell them by advertising in the Bucks Free Press. The next stage had been to specialise in budgies of a certain colour; he and I both liked an unusual pastel purple; he had isolated two birds of this colour and we had waited expectantly to see if their children would turn out the same.
To prevent my hopes from rising too high, he had read out loud to me long sections of The Origin of Species and tedious articles from The Encylopaedia Britannica. He was expecting ‘throwbacks’ as detailed in these two publications, and we got them: of the three surviving children, one was purple and the other two were green. The purple youngster, who turned out to be a girl, had taken ten months to reach adulthood and had then been isolated with a purple cousin – not with her father, because that way we might produce a new colour altogether, if we carried on long enough, according to my father and Darwin – and we were now waiting to see what would happen.
‘All right. Two bob. I’ll give you two bob if we get three out of four.’
Two shillings was a lot of money, but I tried for more by looking disappointed and saying, ‘Oh, go on. Five bob. There might not even be four.’
He looked at me sharply. ‘No, two bob. Two bob’s enough.’
My pocket money, paid to me by my mother, was one shilling a week. My father gave me money sporadically when it occurred to him, which tended to be simply when he was feeling flush, or when he heard that I had done something good, scoring a goal or getting high marks at school; he gave me sixpence if I found a new farm on the Ordnance Survey map, but only if it led to a sale, which had happened six times in his two-year career as a seed salesman.
And then there were the bets. The odds were against me, but then, I never had to pay out. ‘What colour will the next car we see be?’ ‘Red.’ He would then think for a couple of seconds. ‘OK. A penny.’ Red and blue were usually a penny; black and white twopence; green threepence; and wishy-washy colours like beige and maroon might go as high as sixpence. We also betted on types of car, types of people – ‘lady with grey hair’ – animals, traffic lights, pubs – defined by brewer – and any random thing that entered my father’s head as we drove around the lanes of Buckinghamshire.
* * * * *
On a cold, sunny afternoon in the week after Uncle George’s funeral my father and I drove up a long gravel drive, lined with new young conifers. At the end was a large, dull, red-brick house; roses were sprinkled in geometric patterns across recently mown grass; and several girls and a very small boy were trotting around a horse-filled paddock while a bossy woman in a sleek headscarf shouted and waved a whip about.
Alt
hough he knew he had to do business with the farm manager who would be in the farmyard round the back, my father stopped the car and walked across the gravel to the front door. He wanted to greet the owner even though he didn’t like him; he was one of what my dad called ‘the idle rich’, but he paid the bills and, more importantly, might easily be induced to buy his seeds from the competition for the price of a few gin-and-tonics. My father had to maintain a presence and he was at a disadvantage in this one respect; he hated alcohol and would only visit pubs if this was absolutely essential to further business; inside a pub he would order bottled Carlsberg and drink it as slowly as possible.
On this occasion I stayed in the car while he talked to a small, aggressive man in a tight checked jacket, cavalry twills and a flat cap that looked as though it had just been ironed. He soon returned exclaiming, ‘God strewth, that man thinks he’s God almighty!’
‘And he’s a bloody fool,’ he added as we drove round the back through some small cypresses, past a garage containing a highly polished, bottle-green Jaguar 2.8, to the farmyard. Here the gravel became tarmac, streaked with just a little mud. The bailiff appeared immediately. He had neatly brushed hair and no mud on his clothes, but he did know about farming and my father enjoyed chatting with him about ‘yields per acre’, ‘straight ears’, ‘one-year leys’ and endless stuff, some of which I had begun to understand.
That this man respected and trusted my dad went without saying; more unusually, he remembered me and my name and called his sheepdog for me to pat. He ordered several hundredweight of Koga 2, at that time my father’s revolutionary new line of wheat, signing the order that my father wrote out in his order book. As we drove back past the house, the man in the checked jacket was standing on the gravel talking to the woman in the headscarf. My father lifted his hand from the steering wheel and waved rather formally; the man nodded. My father glanced at me. ‘Never forget, Sunny Jim: no person of quality esteems another merely because he is rich.’
‘Yes, Dad.’ I had heard this before.
The speed and success of this call left my father wondering what to do next. We sat in the A35, deliberating. We could go home or we could visit someone else. I knew we were close to my favourite farmer and his wife.
‘Can we go and see Dor and Narby?’
He turned and smiled at me knowingly; he liked Nobby and Doreen Cox as much as I did. He pushed his hat backwards so that it hit the ceiling of the little car and removed his glasses while continuing to smile to himself. He shut his eyes and pulled his thumb and forefinger across them to his nose; then he opened his eyes, blinked and replaced his glasses.
‘All right, Sunny Jim. There’s no sale in it, but it’s good customer relations… And we’ll get some tea.’
He turned the ignition and flicked the black plastic knob under the windscreen, unnecessarily activating the indicator. With only average grunting and cursing, he performed a seven-point turn in the country lane and we were off down a gradual curving hill with the Chilterns high above the hedge to our right. We passed through a long straggly village without speaking.
‘Could you tell me more about your father?’
He felt inside his overcoat, pulled his handkerchief from the breast pocket of his jacket and blew his nose noisily. Then he held the steering wheel and his handkerchief with his left hand while gently drumming with his fingers and thumb on the black plastic spoke beneath his right hand. The drumming meant that he was thinking.
‘It’s a story about my mother as well. There are two sides to every story.’
He replaced his handkerchief, changed down a gear as the car began to slow on a hill, rummaged in his side pocket and handed me a small, shiny tin. ‘Roll me a cigarette; there’s a good chap.’
I often did this and took some pride in my prowess. My friends’ fathers seemed to smoke ready-made Player’s Navy Cut, or not to smoke at all which I found very dull. In the shiny tin was a little machine comprising two rollers with waxed cloth stretched over them. I pulled a Rizla paper from the green packet, placed it in the cloth between the rollers, tugged tobacco from the silver paper packet labelled ‘A1’, crammed it down on to the paper, pinched the rollers together, twiddled them so that only the gummed edge of the paper stuck out, licked the gum, twiddled some more, pushed the rollers apart and there was a perfect cigarette.
It took me less than a minute on this occasion. Meanwhile he was telling me that it was hard for him to know whether to begin with his father or his mother. I suggested he start with his father and why he went to Swan River, Manitoba.
‘But that’s the end of the story, you see.’
He turned and looked at me, then looked quickly back at the road. I handed him the cigarette which he stuck in his mouth while searching in his jacket pocket for his Ronson.
‘And once he goes, there’s no more to tell about him.’
His voice quavered a little and his eyes were watering. I was embarrassed, and part of me wished I hadn’t asked the question. He had cried in my presence many times, but we had usually been watching a film, either at the cinema or on television. I put my hand on his forearm, and he lifted his other hand from the steering wheel and put it on top of mine for a few moments.
As we drove towards Nobby Cox’s farm he began talking about the house, his grandfather’s house, the one Uncle George had told me about, and the people who had lived in it while he had been growing up in the 1890s.
His memories were of a house crammed with people – his grandfather who was called George; his mother, Amelia, usually known as ‘Sis’; his father, Tom; his uncles, George and Ernest; his aunt, Rose – the astonishing La Frascetti – Uncle Ernest’s first wife; and two servants, both called Alice. He described most of them at some length. It seemed that he had the fondest memories of his grandfather, his mother and Uncle George. Uncle Ernest and La Frascetti had been intriguing characters, but away from home a lot performing in music halls in Britain and abroad. Last of all he mentioned his little sister, Gladys.
Not only had all these people lived in one house, but numerous relations had dropped in all the time because his grandfather had been the eldest of seven brothers and sisters, most of whom had lived nearby with their spouses, children and grandchildren. The house had been run, somewhat imperiously, by Sis, my father’s mother, who had taken charge in her teens and who had deferred to no one except her own father, to whom she, and all the rest of them, had deferred a great deal.
By the time my father had told me all this, including naming and describing all his great uncles and aunts, we had been parked in the lane outside the Coxes’ farm for almost an hour. All the time I had expected that the next minute we would get out of the car and change into our wellingtons for the tramp through the Coxes’ sticky farmyard, but there was always just one more person, or another detail, that my father had to mention. Eventually we picked our way past derelict farm machinery to the Coxes’ back door. It was the kind of home where the front path, the front door and the front room were clean and neat but barely used. My father speculated that the Coxes would have people they regarded as superior – such as their landlord, or an official from the Milk Marketing Board or the vicar – in their front room, but not friends or tradesmen.
The half-hour we spent with the Coxes took my mind off the story of my grandfather Tom, and Uncle George’s curious instruction; but later, in bed, I thought about all my father had told me in the car. He had given me a quick but vivid account of his childhood. It seemed a magical time to me with horses instead of cars, gaslight instead of electricity, singsongs around pianos, family parties with numerous aunts and uncles and cousins, and servants to help with the work. And I could imagine the people who had lived in that house in Dalston: the grey-haired, bearded patriarch; the strong young woman; the handsome, moustachioed man who had married her and turned to drink; the two brothers, one slick, talkative and witty, the other introspective and kindly; the young, pretty, servant and the blowsy, larger one. I had had a picture i
n my mind of the music-hall artiste since Uncle George had first described her; I saw her more fully now: brash, determined, physical and friendly. I could imagine the house as well; it was like ours but on a grander scale and with an extra floor – the basement, where the kitchen was.
There were two things I didn’t know, and Uncle George had in different ways asked both questions: ‘Ah! But why did he drink so much? That’s the question,’ and what had he done in Swan River, Manitoba?
3
Deborah and the Outsiders
Deborah and I had known each other since we were four, when my mother had used money left to her by her father to open a shop selling china and glass two doors from Deborah’s father’s sweetshop in the High Street. She was one month younger than me, born on the same day as Prince Charles, the little boy on our savings stamps. We had much in common. We both lived above shops in which three of our parents worked long hours, and neither of us had siblings.
We fell into a sister-brother relationship with none of the bad bits; we didn’t have to compete for our parents’ attention and we could get away from each other if we wanted to. As we grew older and went to different schools, we found friends of our own sex with whom we spent more time, but the closeness remained, even after my mother’s shop failed and we moved to our house a quarter of a mile away in Station Road. My mother became the book-keeper at what had been her own shop, which meant that I went on spending time among the china and glass.
We met in the library the next Saturday – it was the first time we had seen each other since Uncle George’s funeral – and later we walked through the back streets towards the lock. I told her that I had found Swan River in my father’s atlas and that Manitoba seemed to be right in the middle of Canada, with Swan River about halfway up it, on the left-hand side.
Swan River Page 3
