“It’s all right, old boy. I prefer not to know. So long as you enjoyed yourself, that’s the main thing.”
Like all of us, Mr. Ackerley had his cross to bear, but I simply do not believe he was as unhappy as his habit of glooming led him to imagine. How many people have had so understanding a father? How many have found their Tulip? How many have written four (now five) good books? How many have been in the position to earn the affectionate gratitude of a younger literary generation? No, he was a lucky man.
—W. H. AUDEN
1969
My father and myself
MY FATHER AND MYSELF
To Tulip
FOREWORD
THE APPARENTLY HAPHAZARD chronology of this memoir may need excuse. The excuse, I fear, is Art. It contains a number of surprises, perhaps I may call them shocks, which, as history, came to me rather bunched up towards the end of the story. Artistically shocks should never be bunched, they need spacing for maximum individual effect. To afford them this I could not tell my story straightforwardly and have therefore disregarded chronology and adopted the method of ploughing to and fro over my father’s life and my own, turning up a little more sub-soil each time as the plough turned. Looking at it with as much detachment as I can command, I think I have not seriously confused the narrative.
—J. A.
1
I WAS BORN in 1896 and my parents were married in 1919. Nearly a quarter of a century may seem rather procrastinatory for making up one’s mind, but I expect that the longer such rites are postponed the less indispensable they appear and that, as the years rolled by, my parents gradually forgot the anomaly of their situation. My Aunt Bunny, my mother’s younger sister, maintained that they would never have been married at all and I should still be a bastard like my dead brother if she had not intervened for the second time. Her first intervention was in the beginning. There was, of course, a good deal of agitation in her family then; apart from other considerations, irregular relationships were regarded with far greater condemnation in Victorian times than they are today. I can imagine the dismay of my maternal grandmother in particular, since she had had to contend with this very situation in her own life. For she herself was illegitimate. Failing to breed from his wife, her father, whose name was Scott, had turned instead to a Miss Buller, a girl of good parentage to be sure, claiming descent from two admirals, who bore him three daughters and died in giving the last one birth. I remember my grandmother as a very beautiful old lady, but she was said to have looked quite plain beside her sisters in childhood. However, there was to be no opportunity for later comparisons, for as soon as the latter were old enough to comprehend the shame of their existence they resolved to hide it forever from the world and took the veil in the convent at Clifton where all three had been put to school. But my grandmother was made of hardier stuff; she faced life and, in course of time, buried the past by marrying a Mr. Aylward, a musician of distinction who had been a Queen’s Scholar at the early age of fourteen and was now master and organist at Hawtrey’s Preparatory School for Eton, at Slough. Long before my mother’s fall from grace, however, he had died, leaving my grandmother so poor that she was reduced to doing needlework for sale and taking in lodgers to support herself and her growing children. What could have been her feelings to hear the skeleton in her family cupboard, known then only to herself, rattle its bones as it moved over to make room for another?
Nevertheless, it seems to have been left to my Aunt Bunny, her younger daughter, to exhibit the deepest sense of outrage at my father’s behavior and to administer the sternest rebuke. This, to anyone who knew my aunt, might be thought strange, for she was the jolliest, cleverest and least conventional member of an unconventional family. She was, in fact, at this time its main financial support by her engagements as a vocalist, a mezzo-soprano of concert platform and operatic standard, though her great promise was soon to collapse and reduce her to light opera and musical comedy, understudying Connie Ediss at the Gaiety Theatre, and provincial touring companies in anything that offered. But her moral position did not lack strength, for she had lately, in 1890, contracted an orthodox union with a gambler named Randolph Payne; moreover she was always a formidable champion of the rights of her own sex. However, she failed, as everyone else failed, to persuade my father to make an honest woman of my mother and punished him by declaring that she would never speak to him again. Nor did she for ten years; but then, since her hostile attitude was seen to be as inconvenient as it was ineffective, she relented, a reconciliation took place and she and my father became firm friends. Besides, the test of time had already made it ironically clear that while my father and mother had attained happiness, fortune and good repute without the blessing of the Church, holy wedlock with Uncle Randolph had brought my aunt nothing but shame and privation.
At the time of her second intervention, in 1919, she was, of course, a middle-aged woman and, if aspects can sit, the moral aspects of the matter had taken a back seat. She was concerned now, more practically, for my mother’s financial future and what, in this respect, would happen to her in the event of anything happening to my father; taking advantage, therefore, of a pleasant opportunity when she was dining with him alone, she summoned up her courage, for he was a king, if only a banana king, and an authoritative sort of man, and asked him boldly whether, in fairness to my mother and their two surviving children, he had not better marry her after all. Much to her surprise and relief, he “very sweetly” accepted her advice. This historic event occurred at Pegwell Bay in the spring of the year, and my aunt, full of her triumph, urged my mother to hold him to his promise without further loss of time, in case he changed his mind, or, since his blood pressure was known to be high, something less disputable happened to him. But my mother, who was liable to inconvenient Eastern superstitions, announced that she had always wished to be married on October the thirteenth, her lucky day, and no other date would do. The ceremony was therefore postponed until then and involved my aunt, who was to be one of the witnesses, in a troublesome railway journey, for she was touring with Cyril Maude in Lord Richard in the Pantry and had to come up from Cardiff during the run of the play. The wedding took place quietly at St George’s, Hanover Square, in the presence of my aunt and her second husband, an inebriate named Dr. Hodgson Chappell Fowler, who were now the only sharers in my parents’ guilty secret.
There were, as it happened, far more cogent reasons for this tardy rectification of their relationship than my aunt was aware of at the time. They were not to be known by her, or any member of the family, until after my father’s death ten years later, by my mother, who survived him seventeen years, never at all, and the irony of this situation appeared in the last decade of my mother’s life when my aunt, widowed for a second time and again left penniless, became a poor pensioner upon her charity, lived with her in some disharmony and was occasionally made to feel the dependence of her position. It sometimes then suited her amour-propre to remind my mother of the signal service she had rendered her twenty years ago; but although she was free to recall her intervention as a successful piece of diplomacy, she was unfortunately morally precluded from revealing the facts that had come to her knowledge since and lent to her intervention, in retrospect, so momentous a character. This crippled claim to importance brought her no reward more visible than self-satisfaction; the last thing my mother wished in alcoholic and eccentric old age was to acknowledge any obligation to her sister; after attempting, therefore, to challenge the truth of the story, a maneuver my aunt stoutly resisted, she would dismiss it with “Oh well, he would have married me in his own time anyway,” to which my aunt, who was also addicted to the last word, replied, “Yes, I don’t think!”
But the subject, beyond providing one of the several battle-fields between the two old ladies, was not otherwise mentioned, and I might never have known that I was for so many years a social outcast if my mother had not once, in a moment of vexed self-pity, rashly disclosed the fact to my sister who, though pledged t
o secrecy, promptly passed it on to me. I was, of course, delighted. My mother, whom I had seldom been able to take entirely seriously, now acquired in my eyes heroic proportions; but unhappily it turned out that she was far from taking so romantic a view of herself, for when she learned that I too was in possession of her secret she became very agitated, vehemently denied the whole thing and implored me, unless I wished to make her ill, never to speak of it again. I was thus unable to discuss it with her, which I should greatly have liked to do, until, many years later, she herself brought it out one evening, quite casually and without a trace of embarrassment as one might talk about the weather; but by that time unfortunately she had almost completely lost her memory and could recall of her past no more than that now somewhat mechanical repertoire of anecdotes with which, from constant repetition, I was already over-familiar. She could not therefore satisfy my curiosity about her early life with my father, and such information as I possess is derived from other sources, principally from my Aunt Bunny who outlived her.
2
THEIR FIRST ENCOUNTER was in the autumn of 1892. My mother was going over to Paris to stay with some friends and was being seen off at Victoria Station by her mother, Aunt Bunny, and Charles Santon the singer. Upon the platform also, sauntering up and down, was a tall, handsome, elegantly tailored young man, of military bearing, with a fine fair mustache and a mourning band round one arm, who regarded my mother with noticeable attention. Certainly she was attractive, pretty, petite, and vivacious, and, according to my aunt, by no means unaware of the existence of young men. The handsome gentleman was also bound for the Continent, but first class; my mother, whose family had fallen upon hard times, was travelling third—only, added my aunt drily, because there was no fourth.
This is her version of the original encounter which was later to be of such consequence to myself; my mother modestly preferred to ignore Victoria Station. She staged the first moment of mutual awareness a trifle more romantically, in mid-Channel, when she was looking about for a steward to bring her a dry biscuit and some lemon as a preventive of sea-sickness. The sea was calm, and if my mother was failing to attract the attention of a steward, she was not failing, as she “gradually noticed,” to attract that of a handsome, soldierly young man, with a fine fair mustache, who was pacing the deck before her and casting in her direction glances of unmistakable interest. At length he was emboldened to approach her, and addressed her in so chivalrous a manner that it was impossible to take offence, his actual words, according to my mother, being “I see you are in difficulties. If I can be of any assistance, pray command me.”
Such a gentlemanly speech (which, in years to come, my mother delighted to recount at dinner parties, in sentimental and dramatic tones, while my father looked selfconsciously down his nose) was reassuring, he was sent for the biscuit and lemon and permitted to escort her on to Paris, which was his own destination. How the difference in their classes was adjusted my mother could not recollect, but it remained in her memory that he possessed an exceedingly beautiful travelling-rug which he solicitously wrapped about her, for the air in the Channel had been fresh. During the journey she learnt that his name was Alfred Roger Ackerley, that he was twenty-nine, a year older than herself, that he was lately bereaved of his wife, a Swiss girl who had died only a few months previously after scarcely two years of married life, and that the object of his journey to Paris was to visit his in-laws, who lived there. He seemed much affected by his loss; my mother used to say in later years, “He came to me a broken man,” and I think it may have been for him a severe blow, for he rarely spoke to us about that period of his life or mentioned his first wife’s name, which was Louise Burckhardt. She was a friend of Sargent’s, and a portrait of her by him, “The Lady with the Rose,” is in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. It seems unlikely therefore that my father fell in love with my mother so soon after his bereavement, but he clearly found her attractive—and indeed, from her photographs at that time and her appearance and character as I remember her, she must have been a charmer. He called upon her at her friend’s house several times, leaving cards and flowers, for she was always out, and, without having found her again, sent more flowers to await her at the train by which he learnt she was leaving at the conclusion of her visit.
Their second meeting took place in the early summer of the following year, again upon water, this time the fashionable reaches of the river Thames. My mother was staying at Chertsey with her mother, Aunt Bunny, and Bunny’s first ne’er-do-well husband, Randolph Payne, and they were all boating one day through Shepperton, Bunny at the oars, when a voice hailed them from a passing punt. Who should it be but Alfred Roger Ackerley, who was living, it appeared, a comfortable bachelor’s life in a house in Addlestone. To describe this second meeting thus, as my mother used to describe it, invested it with the romance of happy coincidence; actually they had been in correspondence in the interval and young Mr. Ackerley had already paid luckless calls and left cards upon her in her Chertsey lodgings. My mother had by now quite an accumulation of his cards and was “overcome by confusion,” she said, when he discovered that she had preserved them all.
Calls were exchanged and Bunny was taken one day to tea with him at the Addlestone house, a visit which, according to her, was not an unqualified success, for their host paid her (whom he had nicknamed “the Boy” because of her prowess with the sculls and the punt pole and her general independence of spirit) rather more attention than my mother liked and recriminations between the two young ladies ensued during their homeward journey. But my mother need not have upset herself. She was not to be neglected. Eighteen months later, in the spring of 1895, she was pregnant and my father was declining to marry her. The reason he gave was indeed substantial; he was receiving a princely allowance of £2000 a year from his in-laws, Mr. and Mrs. Burckhardt, who regarded him more as a son than a son-in-law, and this allowance, which was to be perpetuated in Mr. Burckhardt’s will, might well cease with his re-marriage. However, this excuse, though weighty at the time, was scarcely valid for a quarter of a century, the less so since Mr. Burckhardt died suddenly and intestate at the end of this very year, so that my father’s expectations came to nothing—nor apparently did it satisfy Aunt Bunny. She, indeed, was in a position to take of my father’s conduct and character a more objective view than was available to my mother, for she had, with regard to him, inside information, confidentially supplied by my Uncle Randolph, confidentially supplied to him by my father, with whom he had become pally, that at this same period my father was amusing himself with other women elsewhere: there was a certain Mrs. Carlisle, who lived vaguely, but appropriately, “in the North,” and he had also informed Randolph that two of the barmaids at the Chertsey Bridge Hotel were “all right.”
3
AUNT BUNNY USED to say that there was a strong streak of coarseness in my father’s nature—and who should be better able than she to recognize it? It was specially evident, she said, in some of his ideas about women. In fact, as I remember him, his social manners towards women were admirable, always courteous, indeed gallant; it is also true that in male company he was liable to refer to pleasing specimens of the female sex who caught his eye in the street as “plump little partridges.” This predatory, gastronomic approach to women would certainly not have suited my aunt; in spite of her gay spirits and general camaraderie, in spite of her ready and robust sense of humor, in spite of her being a “jolly good sport” and “the Boy,” she was, I believe, fundamentally virtuous, she drew the line, and in her own reminiscences all the unfortunate men, except the two duds she chose to marry, who attempted to overstep it and take liberties towards herself or her particular girl friends, were always described as “dirty” or “nasty” old men, who got what they deserved from her fist, her nails, or her foot. She was something of a Mae West in her character, with an extraordinarily infectious chesty laugh, which I used to call her Saloon Bar laugh, a fund of amusing, risqué stories and ditties, and a staunch loyalty to
all her men and women friends; but I have a suspicion that she, and my mother too for that matter, never found the sexual act agreeable or hygienic.
It is necessary to know about my father that he had been a guardsman. He was born on April 1, 1863, the seventh of a large family of three boys and five girls, in Prospect Cottage, Rainhill, a village near Liverpool. His father, who described himself as a share-broker, came a financial cropper in 1875 and had to remove his family to a smaller cottage nearby and send the children out to work. The girls took jobs as teachers, the boys were put to trades, my father left school at the age of thirteen and went as clerk to a firm of auctioneers in Liverpool. His schooling therefore was of the briefest.
Height was one of the distinctive features of this family, transmitted to the children from both sides; they were all uncommonly, in the case of the girls unbecomingly, tall and, with the sole exception of my father, uncommonly plain. Three of his sisters, Emily, Susan, and Sally, survived into my early middle age; unfortunate creatures, kind though they were their appearance was so grotesque that it is difficult to suppose they could ever have known romance or believed themselves destined for anything but the lifelong spinsterhood which was their lot. Over six feet in height, gaunt and flat-chested, with harsh voices and large hands and feet, Emily and Sally could easily have masqueraded in the clothes of their youngest brother, my Uncle Denton, without the imposture being detected or their prospects in life improved. This leathery-skinned, equine uncle, who outlived the rest of his family, told me that his father was a good-looking man. If so the only photograph of him I ever saw did not do him justice. Be that as it may, if there were good looks about, my father got them all; he was not merely better looking than the rest, he was a strikingly handsome man.
My Father and Myself Page 2
