Did Grannie die because she was sorry for herself? No doctor had any other cause until the last moment and then it was pneumonia, but there was something in the family, I think, that would just as soon die.
I learned later that Grannie had told my mother she couldn't climb the stairs anymore. So she couldn't go to the bathroom. But she used a chamber pot that perhaps Mum could deal with. So with Dad away, Mum was getting trapped into being a nurse to his mother. She didn't like it. Mum would say, “She's a dirty old woman.” And then it turned out that Dad had done a deal: he had had Grannie give him the house and in return he had promised to provide for her as long as she lived. With Mum doing most of the providing.
Grannie was the first person I knew who died. She was a large presence in my early years. In the passport that she and her husband, Alexander, took out in 1923, their two photographs look out at me. I never knew him, of course, but the facts are there: he was born on June 4,1877, she on October 27, 1880; he was five foot six, she was five foot five; his eyes were gray, his hair fair, her hair black and her eyes brown. He was a bacon tester, the passport says, and I believe he went around southern England doing just that. And the two of them had a theatrical company. They are gone, and not much more remains than the passport. Lives are so central, so full and eager, so long as someone is trying. Then they collapse. Britain, I learned as a boy, lost nearly half a million people in the war, and the world may have lost fifty million lives. Losing things is so easy. But in the passport, my grandfather's signature is so close to mine. And the more I look at his picture the more I like him.
Some of the mystery of my life began to break down as Grannie died. Mum became very angry and it was now that she told me that Dad was living somewhere else as well as with us. Of course, I'd suspected as much, but I'd been kind to myself by remaining in technical doubt over it. Now I saw that it was a battleground. And the house was a big part of it, because Grannie had once had a will that stated the house was to go to me when she died. All of a sudden, I could see how Mum had tried, and she had done it for me. But my father had changed the rules of the game. The will had been altered as he paid for his mother's upkeep.
He had a car that came with his job. He was now company secretary to the Empire Rubber Company in Luton. So he arrives in a car one Friday just like that. And one day, instead of going to Mitcham on the Sunday, he reckons to drive somewhere else. I went along. I don't know where, but somewhere west of London. And he stops at a pub and lo and behold there are people he knows there. And they are very friendly and eager to meet me. They seem like nice people, but he pretends it's just a chance meeting. When it's over, he drives us home.
“Who were those people?” I ask.
“I don't really know,” he says.
“They were acting like old friends!”
“I can't help that.”
It was another fight, and over Sunday lunch not a word was said. “We met some old friends,” I told Mum.
“We did not,” Dad said. He had a way of completely ignoring factual situations.
“Do I know them?” asked Mum.
“No,” he said.
“But you knew them,” I said.
“I was just being polite,” he said.
“No,” I said, “you're unbelievably rude, because you lie all the time.”
And he got up and went to his room. Never a word of explanation.
I don't mean to put all these events together like a string of beads. They happened over a few years, between my being thirteen and sixteen, let's say, a period in which I could talk to him more and more forcefully.
“Do you see?” Mum said to me once. “You can talk to him.”
“What?”
“When you get angry with him you don't stammer. It's a good sign. You'll be free of it one day.”
I had hardly noticed this, but it was true. So, when I could get a sentence out, I was ignored. One Saturday, my father and I had been to see Chelsea—it might have been in 1955, the year they won the League—and we were walking back to the South Kensington station to get the bus home. As we were walking, I was talking. And I don't know what I was saying. But at the bus stop as we were waiting for the bus—and there were other people in the line—he suddenly punched me very hard in the stomach. I was completely winded and I was on the ground. He left me there and didn't offer a hand when the bus came. He said nothing about why he had done it, nor about being sorry. To this day I don't know why he hit me, or what had come over him. It was like a mad action.
We got home and Mum could see that something was wrong.
“What happened?” she said.
“Absolutely nothing,” he said.
He was soon in his room.
I told her, but I was ashamed at being made so helpless.
It seemed to me he was drinking more. He had always drunk beer but now he was drinking whisky, too. There wasn't any hint of an explanation about it, but this was a man who never spoke about his inner life. I hope as you've read this you've been in no doubt about a certain love he had for me. But in never telling me he loved me, it was like he just did not permit himself that kind of language or that way of thinking. And I never heard he had told anyone else he loved them either.
Sometimes, when he was driving, it was clear he should not have been. We never heard of any trouble—but there was so much we never heard about. After Grannie died, nothing was done with the downstairs flat. It remained the same as ever, with all her clothes and her furniture. But now it was cold and damp and more likely to be haunted. I didn't see that Dad was touched or disturbed. His behavior backed up what Mum told me—that he and his mother had never got on. He had hated her, it seemed, because when he was a boy she had dressed him as a girl and let his hair grow long so that it curled. But the house became his. He said he was thinking of separating the ground-floor flat and renting it out.
On Sunday evenings, we got into the habit of going across the road to Bryan's parents’ house for drinks and sandwiches. And it was there that I noticed him drinking more and becoming more difficult if he got into an argument he could not back up.
We came home from one of those evenings and there was a fight—I mean a real physical fight for my life. He attacked me, and in the end I was holding him down on the bed. He was strong and it was all I could do to hold him. I wondered what I would do if he managed to throw me off. But I was bigger than he was by then, and he had drunk too much. He roared at me and said he hated me. He shouted, “Murder!” And then he passed into a drunken sleep.
The next time I saw him it was as if nothing had happened. And really then there was no alternative to the principle of his phantom existence—you could trust nothing.
23
Iwas doing badly at school. I wanted to specialize in history, but that option did not begin until the fifth year, whereas other special tracks started in the third. So I found myself in the lower classes kept for the boys who might collect some O-level passes in the big exams but who were hardly judged material for Oxford or Cambridge. Dul-wich was ruthless about this high aim. It measured itself by the number of people it placed every year in “Oxbridge,” not by those students who had done good work in suspect areas (I suppose that was why Michael Powell was not referred to) or had overcome significant handicaps.
My school report admitted bleakly that my “lack of participation” was holding me back. But no one ever discussed the reason for that, and the school never called my parents in to talk about it. It was held at arm's length. But I had eliminated so much from my program at the school: doing drama; taking a part in class talks; having as many friends as I wanted; or even turning up for school.
Then one day I had to have my annual “medical” examination at school. It was a strange formality, yet seemingly it was compulsory Once in every year a student had to go to the medical office and be inspected. Was it a final-resort effort to keep such things as infection and lice out of the school? Was it a tacit acknowledgment that boys from poor homes
—the sour cream—might have lacked proper care? This was outrageous and unlikely. After Suez, in the late 1950s, Harold Macmillan would become prime minister, and soon he would be telling Britain, more or less accurately, that “you've never had it so good.” But Super-Mac's attitude was rather grudging (did we actually deserve it?), and that went hand in hand with the tight-lipped benevolence that said it was best to check on children's health. I don't know why I'm laughing, because a weird rescue was coming, and again it was a stroke of benevolence from the system that I was lucky enough to receive.
The doctor and the nurse sat me down after the regular physical inspection, and the doctor said, “Now, old chap.” I was terrified. Had he spotted tuberculosis or lurgi, the dread disease from The Goon Show?
“Spot of trouble talking?” he said.
I nodded. He nodded.
“See what we can do. Letter for your parents very soon.”
Within days the letter came and in it the doctor said he felt that I might benefit from speech-therapy classes. These had just been initiated by the London County Council— oh, blessed LCC—and were entirely free. Because they occurred during school hours, the school gave me official permission to be absent. I should attend at an address in Blackfriars on Saturday mornings (Saturday was normally a school day, with school in the morning and games in the afternoon).
I was not alone. There was another boy in the school, Steve Spooner, younger than me but just as afflicted. We would go together.
That first Saturday, I took the bus to Blackfriars and found the place, just south of the river, not too far from where the National Theater stands now. A woman talked to us. She was friendly, calm. I liked and trusted her from the outset, and she said she was a speech therapist. However, she said, I must not think that stammering was scientifically understood, or even curable. Sometimes it passed. Sometimes it was forever. (One of the best talkers I ever met was Budd Schulberg, and he stammered all the time.) All she could offer was help in a variety of forms.
She told us we had lost the habit of natural breathing because we were in such a state of tension over speaking. Speech, she said, was natural, and needed ease. We began classes on physical relaxation, and she taught us to see how tense we were. So we lay down and gradually and consciously relaxed every part of our body as best we could. We were to practice this technique every day at home. I still do it. And there were breathing exercises in which we enlarged our lungs and began to count and measure how much air we had.
Next we were recorded and asked to make an analysis of our stammer. Nearly every victim has certain sounds and plosive consonants that are unusually challenging. Perhaps they could be avoided—if “Please” was vulnerable, for instance, you could say “May I.” You find a different speech formula, and soon realize that vowel sounds are easier openers than most hard consonants. Thus I started to write, or to play with words. For I had noticed some patterns already and had tried to scheme ways around them. But now I had official permission for that, and for the first time I began to see the prospect of a rhythm—a cadence to help me speak—in the way I chose words. I found that I had a brain that could work these things out very quickly. The teacher remarked on it.
Then we isolated the sounds that were still difficult and worked out “sliding” procedures. Very quickly on the brink of such a word, the speaker was to inhale deeply and slow the speech pattern. It worked a lot of the time. Listening to the radio with fresh curiosity I heard others who were doing it already.
Our last test was to go out in the Blackfriars area and say absurd things. I have referred to Monty Python before, but the show was still years away and I can only tell you that when it arrived I knew its spirit already from what I called our Saturday-morning “silly set-ups.” I was charged, for instance, to go down to the Cut street market, wait in line at a stall clearly selling fruit and vegetables, and say, “Excuse me, do you have any piano strings?”
“What did'e say?”
“He said have you got piano strings?”
“Does it look like it? What are these, mate? Are they apples, plums, cherries? Or do they look like bleeding piano strings?”
“Ah. Well, then, do you by any chance have some cheese?”
The speech-therapy establishment was new in the area.
Before very long, the word got around that crazy kids with speech defects were likely to be roaming around asking bloody nonsensical questions. So we were treated with a little more tolerance or humor. We were “comedians.” We were local novelties, like blind children or newcomers from Jamaica. The object of the exercise was to separate the articulation of speech from its emotional need. I can hear Olivier pouncing on this: “Aha, the Gielgud method!” (And, of course, Olivier knew the Cut, located as it was between the Old Vic and the National.) For others this unusual play had fascinating links to the whole style and content argument. It did encourage mannerism and surrealism, and I'm not being flippant when I talk of Monty Python, for the process quite quickly gave me a surrealist view of many everyday English transactions. You might get your head knocked off, but I found something unexpectedly liberating in asking a bus conductor for “a ticket to Paradise.” Moreover, I met conductors quite capable of coming back with, “That's the 109, mate, but I can get you to the Slough of Despond.” I was acting at last. I might be stammering still, but in the astounding comedy there was a healing light. (Or was it just the false light smugglers used to lure cargo boats on the rocks?) After all, I can speak now—yet I hear the absurd in every earnest remark.
I told Margaret, “I love you,” and she said, “Of course you do.”
I don't know how they do speech therapy today. Perhaps there are delicate drugs that chill the proper lobe in the brain, or laser jets that can erase constriction. Perhaps it is still the same, a matter of finding your way out of the maze and raising merry riot in the street markets of the land.
I think I went to speech-therapy class every week for four years. In that time I grew older, of course, passing through periods that are often seen as troublesome and formative even in kids who have kissed the Blarney stone. Later on, we had specific psychotherapy classes. We were asked about our family life. I tried to explain my situation.
“Does that make you angry, sad?”
What a superb question. By then I was doing English at A level and having very good teachers ask questions about the meaning of poetry and drama, but I don't think I'd ever had so pointed and discerning a question about a feeling before. “Does that make you angry or sad?”
“Both,” I said greedily.
“You'll be all right,” said the therapist. “Try to tell the story.”
It changed gradually. Kids at school said they saw no difference, except that I was talking more. And they were a little older and kinder, so they waited for me. With a good friend, Tony Hepburn, I wrote a paper for the History Society on the history of jazz. He read both parts to get it in during the lunch hour. But I could answer questions afterward.*
History had happened. For my fifth year at Dulwich I was in the History Remove and suddenly I had great teachers: Ernie Williams, the head of history; David Hen-schel, the most arousing speaker I had encountered; Reg Colman, a steady guide to Tudor iniquities; and Jack Gwillim, who had a wintry wit and shyness no matter that he had been captain of one of the greatest Welsh rugby sides of all time. Suddenly Dulwich was what it had promised. I was playing rugby and cricket. I was loving the schoolwork. And I felt that maybe I could handle it all. At which point I think I realized that I had got into the dark hole from which I reckoned there was no escape. Growing up and being normal. The implication of what talk means in terms of emotional candor was daunting. And as I talked more I felt my Dad sink into rage or middle age. I cannot say that feeling was without revenge.
In Mitcham, Bert began to fade. It seemed his cancer had returned. I had the idea of taking some of my records and a record player over there. He and Grandma didn't have a record player. I had some classical records and w
e listened to them together and talked a little, though it was still hard to hear what he wanted to say.
I was not sure what he wanted, to live longer, to last longer, or just to be done with it. I did not know how to talk to him about his life: how had it gone, was he disappointed or happy? In every way I could see, he seemed to have led a humble life. He was a clerk. He had married and had two daughters. He liked to see the horses racing on the downs. He enjoyed a winning bet and was stoical about losses. There was a grace about him, a way of showing his reactions to winning and losing, a timing that let other people in on the game. When I played records for him he smiled with approval, as if he had always wanted to end like that. And once or twice, sinking in deeper than the occasion, I heard the music myself—for the first time in my life. I looked up and he was smiling.
One afternoon in summer he died, in the garden. I cycled over. Grandma had put a white cloth over his head where he was still sitting, surrounded by growing flowers. The funeral home was coming. Alone with him, I lifted the cloth. He had the same peaceful expression I loved. But the struggle had gone, the tension. He seemed younger and more handsome, and I realized how far the last smiles had been his way of deflecting pain.
I told Grandma what I thought and she said, “I think you're right. Lord, he was a rascal, though.”
“Was he?”
“You can't imagine!”
But I could. I took his rich inner life for granted, and I felt some rhyming when he died just a week before William Faulkner. That was neither here nor there, except that they were the two men who meant the most to me at that time. And Bert left me his books, a couple of hundred titles-George du Maurier, Somerset Maugham, The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam—and I folded them in with my own books, the Faulkner, The Film and the Public, Leonard Feather's Encyclopedia of Jazz, and the first biography of James Dean, by William Bast.
Try to Tell the Story Page 13
