Returning now to the legal dispute, how interesting is Stockley’s reversal of the facts forty-six years later. He was, I believe, an honest man, as this world and the business world go, of a rigid moral code, severe and self-righteous (his standards of human perfection were King George the Fifth and Rudyard Kipling): perhaps the final order of his loyalties affected his beliefs. Or did my father contrive, out of uneasiness, to throw dust in his eyes, as he seems to have done in another matter to which we shall soon come? It is possible that Stockley was not back in England when the action was judged in July, and heard of it only afterwards from my father, whom he ran into by chance at the Tivoli. But the margin must have been slight, for both these events took place in that same month. At any rate he had no part in the legal proceedings and tried to keep out of the squabble. He was friendly with both de Gallatin and my father; the former had been best man at his wedding three years previously and godfather to his son and heir. But he was not to be allowed to sit on the fence. He was busy inaugurating in Covent Garden the banana business which, starting in an almost costermongerish way, was to become Elders and Fyffes, and my father, bored with idleness, asked if he could come in as “office boy.” He was accepted. But when de Gallatin heard that he was to be employed by Stockley, he wrote angrily to the latter to say he “must choose between them” who was his friend. “It was a ridiculous request,” says Stockley, “and I did not hesitate.” When Mme. de Gallatin was dying some years later she summoned him and he went (“I never blamed her as she was devoted to G., and one can understand a mother’s unreasonableness”), but the Count was never again seen by him or by my father and disappears out of their story to arise later as a ghost in my own.
The year 1892, therefore, was a momentous one in my father’s life; in it he lost a wife, gained a job which was to make his name and fortune, and picked up my mother on a Channel boat. She was not, as we have seen, his first conquest, nor was she to be his last, and it may therefore be permissible to wonder how long the affair would have continued had not an accident occurred.
6
MY ELDER BROTHER Peter was the accident. “Your father happened to have run out of french letters that day,” remarked my Aunt Bunny with her Saloon Bar laugh, and I have for some time been aware that if I am to get this history even approximately straight I must somehow steer a course between my aunt’s Rabelaisian humor, my mother’s romanticism, and the mutual jealousies of both. Nevertheless my brother was neither intended nor wanted and efforts, probably of an amateur kind, were made to prevent his arrival. My mother was thirty-one years old at this time and working on the stage, a more respectable stage than the one Aunt Bunny was to reach, known indeed as the “legitimate” stage (she was a recruit of Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree): this is not however to suggest that she should therefore have known better. Doctors were confidentially consulted, various homely remedies prescribed, and all manner of purges, nostrums, and bodily exercises employed to bring about a miscarriage. But my brother was not to be quenched. Nevertheless he did not survive unscathed. He emerged prematurely, a seven-month child and breach delivery, double-ruptured, jaundiced and black in the face, presenting altogether so wretched and puny an appearance with his head sunk between his shoulders like a tortoise that the doctor in attendance remarked, more prophetically, it may be thought, than he realized, “Seems hardly worth saving.” This event occurred on October 6, 1895, in Melcombe Place, Marylebone, where my mother’s family were then living. Mr. Ackerley then concealed Netta Aylward (my mother’s maiden name) and the child at 4 Warminster Road, Herne Hill, in care of his grandmother and of a faithful housekeeper of his named Sarah.
If Arthur Stockley’s memory is to be trusted my father withheld from him, then and always, the truth of his dealings with my mother, for up to the end of his life Stockley believed that they had been married at the Marylebone Register Office before my brother was born. “The marriage was kept secret,” he wrote me, “as your father did not want old B. [Burckhardt] to know of it.” Secrecy, for some reason, was maintained by both of them, in spite of the death of “old B.,” for nearly ten years; it was not until about 1904 that it came out accidentally that my father had a “wife” and three children living up in Cheshire, news which greatly puzzled and displeased some of his business friends, who wondered why they had been kept in the dark.
This book is not about my brother, but in connection with him my own character and story develop and his subsequent history must be briefly sketched. Fed at first through a quill, for he could not suck, and wrapped in cotton wool soaked in cod-liver oil, this flickering life was gradually brought, mainly by the unremitting care and skill of my grandmother, through a sickly childhood, to become in time a tall, thin, dark, rather sallow youth of a lively and good-tempered disposition. He liked practical jokes and all forms of buffoonery, was good at playing cricket and the bones, had a charming natural tenor voice and a leaning towards the stage: he collected pictures of Henry Irving and Beerbohm Tree and was always acting and dressing up.
This was in my mother’s tradition, but the paternal influence was stronger and he was training to enter our father’s business when the 1914 war broke out. This brought in the paternal example again: my mother said, “Thank Heaven my boys are too young to join up,” and we offered ourselves to the Army at once. I was accepted; my brother, who had been obliged to wear a truss throughout his life, was rejected. The patriotic fervor of the time, which looks in retrospect so idiotic, was strong; he was not a chap to be left out of drama of any kind and resolved to have his rupture corrected by an operation. To this decision he was encouraged by our family doctor, a handsome, dandified sportsman named Harry Wadd, who took my brother along with him to hospital one day to watch the same operation performed upon someone else before he underwent it himself—an invitation I myself would certainly have refused. But there was, I think, in my brother a streak of bravado, inherited from my father, which I did not possess; though was it not to carry it too far to dress up for the benefit of the specialist who was engaged to perform the operation? That eminent and busy man was somewhat taken aback to find in the nursing home not the youth he was expecting but a grotesque bearded tramp with a red cardboard nose and huge papier-mâché feet. However, the operation was successful and some time later my brother was accepted by the Army. In 1918, just before the Armistice, he was killed by a whizz-bang. My parents were married in the following year.
Possibly this sequence of events, this brief potted biography, which actually spread itself over nearly a quarter of a century, did not present itself to them in the crude light in which I have sketched it in; but I feel that to my father at least it may have done so, and that although Aunt Bunny’s intervention on my mother’s behalf at Pegwell Bay may have been the determining card which won the belated day, the true cause of the marriage lay in some deep, sad desire to make amends. Be that as it may, however little my father welcomed my brother when he came, he lost his favorite son when he died. Peter approximated far closer than I did to the paternal image, a chip of the old block, and was already set to fulfill my father’s cherished ambitions: he would have married and, perhaps, provided grandchildren (he was already courting several girls before he died and my father was fond of children), and he would have entered the banana business. Finally, it may be added, he would not have written this book. He was, in fact, all the things that I was not, though we got along together perfectly well.
He was fond and proud of me and thought me a being far superior to himself, a genius. We never quarrelled over anything that I can recall, and in all our seventeen or eighteen years together I remember only two occasions when he displayed anger with me, both times for moaning. The first time, which I can relate here, was when I was twelve years old and had a pain in my bowels which the doctors could not for some time diagnose. It was a bad pain, indeed it almost killed me, for it ended in an operation for peritonitis, and I lay moaning in bed day after day for I don’t remember how long while doctors cam
e and stuck their fingers up my bottom but did not reach my pain. It was the sound of my moaning that my brother could not stand, and one day he shouted at me for God’s sake to shut up, I was upsetting the whole house, said he, and even if I did have a pain there was no reason to kick up such an infernal shindy about it. I was so startled by this heartless attack upon me, for he had never spoken to me in such a way before, that I stopped moaning at once and found he was perfectly right, I did not need to be moaning at all; I had got into the habit of it, I suppose, and it had turned into a kind of self-pitying croon. He apologized afterwards; but later still when he himself lay in the agony of a mastoid he did not utter a sound. He belonged in this respect upon my father’s proud “stiff upper lip” side: “I hope I can bear a little pain with the best of ‘em.” Of this I shall have more to say later, but one other revolting instance of it may be recorded here. From sculling on the river at Richmond where we lived, my brother developed blisters on the palm of one hand, and my father, in whom the original guardsman persisted, told him that the best way to harden blisters was to rub one’s own urine into them. This barrack-room remedy resulted in a badly poisoned hand, the whole of the palm oozed with pus. Dr. Wadd was summoned and said, “You can bear a spot of pain, Pete old lad, can’t you, or do you want an anaesthetic?” I myself would firmly have demanded an anaesthetic, total if possible, local (if invented then) at least, whatever the expression on my father’s face might have been, but my brother said, “Go ahead.” Wadd then borrowed a pair of scissors from my mother and slit the whole puffed-up palm across. My brother did utter a gasp, turned green and almost fainted; but it was what my father would have called a “jolly good show.”
My brother was deservedly popular wherever he went, on account of his good nature and his entertainment value, the versatility of his histrionic talent and his readiness to display it. Besides his skill with the bones and his true tenor voice, which was later to keep audiences of soldiers spell-bound with such songs as “The Trumpeter,” “Soldier Boy,” “The Mountains of Mourne,” and “Where’er You Walk,” he was a good tap-dancer and a natural comedian. He would, I think, have been wasted in my father’s business. A few physical details return to my memory: his straight dark brows that almost met, his narrow palate and weak over-crowded teeth, the brownish stain round his loins from the leather of his truss when he took it off to go to the baths at school, the yellow mark just above the cleft of his thin white buttocks where the wash-leather pad rested, and his abnormally long dark cock, longer than my own or any other I had seen. I remember feeling rather ashamed of it when we went to the baths together, and wondered how he could expose it as he did with such seeming indifference and what the other boys must think. Unspectacular though my own was I always shielded it modestly from view with my towel, like a Japanese. I recollect that I had a feeling of distaste for his thin sallow body, and believe that he had no such unfriendly thoughts about mine, which was always erupting in cysts and boils.
Having been sent to school two years in advance of me, owing to my peritonitis, thereby paving a pleasanter way for me by being there to welcome and protect me when I came, for no boys held me down on my back and spat or poured ink into my mouth as they had done with him, he left a year earlier than I and went to Germany to learn the language in preparation for my father’s business. His return thence, just before the outbreak of war, impressed upon my memory his first appearance as a man. He was smoking one of my father’s Gentleman cigars and wearing an Edward VII grey felt hat, a heavy reddish-purple overcoat with a belt, patent leather shoes and a monocle. He carried a slender cane like Charlie Chaplin and was beginning to spot round the mouth. I thought he looked an awful ass and rather a cad; not of course foreseeing that in a few years’ time I myself might be sighted in London dressed in a voluminous black carabiniero’s cloak, cast over one shoulder in the Byronic manner, and trailed by children calling out rude remarks.
After that I remember nothing more about my brother until our last melodramatic meeting. This was in a dugout in France, in a ditch called the Boom Ravine.
7
BECAUSE OF HIS rupture my brother entered the war a good deal later than I. He was posted to a battalion of the Northumberland Fusiliers. This unit, however, seemed stuck in England, and my brother, chafing to “do his bit,” got himself transferred to my battalion, the 8th East Surreys, in which I had been serving in France since the summer of 1915. He did not join me there until the Christmas of 1916, after my return from England where I had spent a few months recuperating from wounds. By this time, although he was my senior in age, I was his senior in rank, a captain and company commander, while he was still a second lieutenant in charge of a platoon. He therefore had to salute me, which he did gladly and conscientiously. Let me not appear to boast however; my promotion was not due to any military proficiency I possessed or any distinctions gained, but simply to the fact that most of the other officers in my battalion had been killed on July 1, 1916, the action in which I received my wounds.
These wounds of mine are not without interest, at any rate to me. They showed me something which I was to notice often again in my character, that I have a fairly well-developed instinct for self-preservation, both physical and moral. If the old campaigner of Tel-el-Kebir had known as much about my wounds as I did, what would he have thought of me? The Battle of the Somme, Sir Douglas Haig’s masterly operation, has often been described. This vast, full-scale attack was prepared for by an incessant bombardment of the German lines, prolonged over many days and so heavy that, we were told, all resistance would be crushed, the enemy wire destroyed, their trenches flattened, and such Germans as survived reduced to a state of gibbering imbecility. It would be, for us, a walk-over. Very different was our reception. The air, when we at last went over the top in broad daylight, positively hummed, buzzed, and whined with what sounded like hordes of wasps and hornets but were, of course, bullets. Far from being crushed, the Germans were in full possession of senses better than our own; their smartest snipers and machine-gunners were coolly waiting for us. G.H.Q., as was afterwards realized, had handed the battle to them by snobbishly distinguishing us officers from the men, giving us revolvers instead of rifles and marking our rank plainly upon our cuffs. The “gibbering imbeciles” confronting us were thus enabled to pick off the officers first, which they had been carefully instructed to do, leaving our army almost without leadership.
Many of the officers in my battalion were struck down the moment they emerged into view. My company commander was shot through the heart before he had advanced a step. Neville, the battalion buffoon, who had a football for his men to dribble over to the “flattened and deserted” German lines and was then going to finish off any “gibbering imbecile” he might meet with the shock of his famous grin (he had loose dentures and could make a skull-like grimace when he smiled), was also instantly killed, and so was fat Bobby Soames, my best friend. I had spent the previous evening with him and he had said to me quietly, without emotion, “I’m going to be killed tomorrow. I don’t know how I know it but I do.” How far I myself got I don’t remember; not more than a couple of hundred yards is my guess. I flew over the top like a greyhound and dashed forward through the wasps, bent double. Squeamish always about blood, mutilations and death, averting my gaze, so far as I could, from the litter of corpses left lying about whenever we marched up to the line through other regiments’ battle-fields, never hurrying when word was passed down to me, as duty officer in the trenches, that someone had been killed or wounded, in the hope that, if I dawdled, the worst of the mess might be cleared up before I arrived, my special private terror was a bullet in the balls, which accounts psychologically, for it was, of course, unavailing physically, for the crouched up attitude in which I hurled myself at the enemy. The realization that I was making an ass of myself soon dawned; looking back I saw that my platoon was still scrambling out of the trench, and had to wait until they caught up with me. My young Norfolk servant, Willimot, who then walk
ed at my side, fell to the ground. “I’m paralyzed, sir,” he whimpered, his face paperwhite, his large blue ox-like eyes terrified. A bullet, perhaps aimed at me with my revolver and badges, had severed his spine. My platoon-sergeant, Griffin, lifted him into a shell-hole and left him there. Then I felt a smack on my left upper arm. Looking down I saw a hole in the sleeve and felt the trickling of blood. Then my cap flew off. I picked it up and put it on again; there was a hole in the crown. Then there was an explosion in my side, which sent me reeling to the ground. I lay there motionless. Griffin and one of the men picked me up and put me in a deep shell-hole. Griffin then tried to unbutton my tunic to examine and perhaps dress my wound. I was not unconscious, only dazed, and I had by now a notion of what had happened. It was another instance of the credulity of the time—my company commander’s contribution—that we officers had been told to carry a bottle of whisky or rum in our haversacks for the celebration of our victory after the “walk-over.” Some missile had struck my bottle of whisky and it had exploded. Of this I became dimly aware when Sergeant Griffin moved me; I felt the crunch of broken glass in the sack beneath my arm. What precisely had occurred I did not know; besides the smarting that had now started in my arm I had a sensation of smarting in my side, so I was damaged there also, though by what or how much I could not tell. What I do remember perfectly well is resisting Griffin’s attempts to examine me. I lay with my eyes closed and my wounded arm clamped firmly to my wounded side so that he could not explore beneath my tunic. I did not want to know, and I did not want him to know, what had happened to me. I did not feel ill, only frightened and dazed. I could easily have got up, and if I could have got up I should have got up. But I was down and down I stayed. Though my thoughts did not formulate themselves so clearly or so crudely at the time, I had a “Blighty” one, that sort of wound that all the soldiers sighed and sang for (“Take me back to dear old Blighty”), and my platoon, in which I had taken much pride, could now look after itself.
My Father and Myself Page 5
