My Father and Myself

by J. R. Ackerley

  I sometimes wondered in after years about the Major, that strange enigmatic man, what he meant, what he felt, what he guessed or knew. Had he turned his back upon me on purpose, to leave me free to deal with my personal problems as I wished and in spite of his directives? It seems to me the kind of thing he might have done. And there were precedents for disobedience. Since the brothers Thorne have remained in my memory always—I can see their faces still—they may have been present in it then. Two subalterns, they had been in my battalion a year earlier, and the younger Thorne was one of the most beautiful boys I ever saw. He too was detailed for a raid; he too failed to return, and his brother, who adored him, went out alone to find him, in defiance of orders, and brought his dead body in slung over his shoulder, walking heavily back in the early dawn. This signal act of careless courage must have impressed the Germans, for they did not fire a shot.... But perhaps the Major found me as enigmatic as I found him, for I discovered in course of time that I too wear a defensive mask, a dead-pan look; when I think I have betrayed, under strain, the sickening anxieties and nervous fears from which I often suffer, I am praised for my coolness and self-possession, the rabbit within is not suspected. So the Major may have believed that I was exercising, in a rending situation, an admirable fortitude and restraint, courage of another kind. It would have been interesting to have had, perhaps at a post-war reunion dinner over a bottle of wine, his version of it all, but he was killed soon afterwards in the Schwaben Redoubt, a colonel then, defending an indefensible position, covering with the exhausted remnant of his command his brigade’s retreat, fighting hand to hand with a bayonet against overwhelming odds, encouraging his men with his personal example to the last.

  Mercifully for me this torment did not last much longer. Soon after Dyson’s first message another came to say that my brother had contrived to crawl back into the trenches of his own accord, he was wounded in the leg, not seriously. And now my mind is a total blank. I have said that I never saw him again, and that may be the truth; on the other hand I remember that when I was trying to recapture this episode some sixteen years later, this particular area of darkness worried me more than any other: had not the stretcher-bearers, carrying him away, stopped in the ravine outside the dugout and called me out to see him at his request? Thought is now useless to me, I shall never know; but whether he gave me the message out of his own mouth in the Boom Ravine, or scribbled it as a hasty note in the front trench before he was carried down to field-dressing station by some other route, he certainly expressed, somehow, somewhere, his apologies and regrets, and an urgent desire to be allowed to try again, now, at once, before his leg got too stiff. He must have been bitterly disappointed to have let the side down. Whatever happened I never recovered my watch. He reported at home that I had behaved “splendidly.”

  Two months later, on April 3, I had to take my men over the top again, to capture the village of Cérisy (what remained of it) in another sector of the line, and swapped my brother’s unreliable wrist-watch for that of my second-in-command, who was remaining in reserve. He lent it reluctantly; it was an engagement present from his fiancée. I promised to return it. He never saw it again either. As we marched up to the line from the billets in which we had been resting to take up our battle positions, an old officer friend of mine, Titcham—“Titchy,” as we called him—waylaid me upon the route. He had joined up with me as a subaltern in the beginning and we had served in the same battalion for a year, training in England, until he managed to wangle for himself a safe and cushy job on the brigade staff. He was now a brigade major and what we contemptuously called a “Brass Hat.” Seated upon his horse by the wayside he beckoned me out of the line of march. In a low confidential voice he said he supposed that, as an old campaigner, I had no illusions about what lay ahead, and offered me an immediate job with him on brigade staff, out of harm’s way. He begged me to accept it. He had always been fond of me, I knew, indeed he had a crush on me, I think, for I was a pretty young man, and wanted to save me from a fate, of the prospects and hazards of which he doubtless knew far more than I, since brigade headquarters had planned it. “You’ve done your bit already,” said he gently. But I too was a mounted officer. I had a huge mare named Sally, larger than Titchy’s, the largest I had ever seen. She was neck-wise, affectionate, and docile, I was fond and proud of her, and whenever I was perched upon her back I became more arrogant and conceited than I normally was. Titchy’s offer would certainly have attracted me if the bloody fool had made it earlier. But how could a company commander abandon his command on the very eve of battle? That would have been seen as plain cowardice, and cowardice should never be plain. Smiling down at him rather disdainfully from my superior mount, I thanked him and declined. I could not desert my men, I said. I then trotted after them on Sally.

  A small episode from the so-called Battle of Cérisy was carried, perhaps unwarrantably, by a colony of ants, into the final edition of my Indian journal, Hindoo Holiday. Anyone idle enough to wish to know a little more about my part in that absurd engagement will find it there. Suffice it to say here that mine was one of the only two companies to reach our first objective, the crest of a ridge. No special merit, however, should be inferred from that statement; we only ran forward, dashing from shell-hole to shell-hole; doubtless we happened to find more shell-holes than other companies involved. Messages passed along to either side of our thin line as we lay on our ridge petered out into space; our flanks, it was soon evident, were wide open. What to do? Heaven knew. I sent a runner back to battalion headquarters with an urgent request for reinforcements and set my men to digging themselves in as they lay. While they were scratching away, like hens, with their trench tools, at the hard French soil, the Germans counter-attacked in considerable strength, firing from the hip as they advanced. The very sight of them was enough for my company. Rising as one man they deserted me and bolted. I bolted after, shouting “Stop!”—not that I wanted them to. The vain word may well have taken on a shriller note when a bullet struck me in the bottom, splintering my pelvis, as was discovered later, and dealing me a wound where, my father had sometimes remarked, echoing Siward, no good soldier should bear one. With a flying leap that Nureyev might have envied I landed in a shell-hole which already contained one of the things I most detested, a corpse, and was soon to harbor another wounded officer named Facer, and a man bleeding to death of a stomach wound. When dusk fell upon that foolish and revolting day I was taken prisoner. Limping off into captivity, at bayonet point and parched with thirst, I picked up from the equipment of dead men bottle after bottle, hoping for a cooling drink of water; they all contained neat rum. I was reported “Missing,” with no further news for several weeks. “I’m not much given to praying, old chap,” wrote my brother later, “but I don’t mind telling you that I often went down on my knees and prayed to God for your safety.” Some time afterwards he was returned to duty with the battalion and became increasingly fed up, poor fellow, with a war he had once thought so glamorous. It was then that he reproved me for the second time. After some eight months spent, not uncomfortably, in various prison camps in Germany, I was sent, by my father’s manipulations, as an intern to Switzerland, and in the most enviable circumstances, as I now see, grumbled and sighed (the “moan” again), as did many others, about the hardness of our lot. We were silly enough to feel guilty and frustrated at being where we were. Exasperated by my grousing letters and doubtless now unnerved by endless trench warfare, my brother wrote roughly to shut me up; I should consider myself bloody lucky, said he, to be where I was, and he only wished he were there too. On August 7, 1918, just before the end of hostilities, as he was filling his pipe in the trenches and turning round to hail a friend, a whizzbang decapitated him. My father, I am told, was profoundly shaken by a grief he was too proud to share. Soon afterwards the stupid war ended and I was repatriated.

  8

  NOW THAT I am approaching my father alone I must say at once something which may not have been evident from the f
oregoing pages; I was fond of him and had for him a real admiration and respect. I was indeed fond of both my parents and liked my friends to meet them. My mother, who was charming, feckless, and garrulous, was an instant success with everyone; of my father, I think, visitors may have stood in respectful awe. This phrase might almost be said also to describe my own feelings towards him; I liked him, I got on well with him, but I was not quite at ease with him, nothing like as easy as I was with my own men friends, some of whom were as old as, or older than, he (G. Lowes Dickinson, Henry Festing-Jones). It would be too much to say that I was frightened of him, but I did not find it altogether comfortable to look him in the eye. He was—at any rate in this post-war period, the period where most of my memories of him belong—a kind, fond, generous and easy-going man; he was proud of me, his sole surviving son and now his heir, and, in so far as I gave him thought, I was proud of him. Yet our relationship was never to be what I think he would have wished, close and confidential, the kind of relationship I fancy he might have had with my brother. After his death, when I knew more about him and believed he may have guessed about me, I regretted this. Whether I could have achieved a nearer understanding with him must remain a question; I was only sorry, when it was too late, not to have put it more boldly to the test. It is the purpose of the rest of this memoir to explore, as briefly as possible, the reasons for our failure.

  Child psychology is a tedious subject and if I advance one or two facts about my early childhood, I do so in no seriously scientific spirit or belief in their significance. I was a persistent bed-wetter. My Aunt Bunny told me that, like my brother, I was an accident and a “little unwanted” and that some attempt was made to prevent my arrival also. Possibly it was more perfunctory, possibly that instinct for self-preservation I have mentioned preserved me; at any rate I emerged a robust and healthy child, but became a persistent bed-wetter. Psychology, I believe, has abandoned a theory it once held that bed-wetting is a kind of unconscious revenge mechanism; I am sorry if that is so, for it seems to me an amusing notion that I might have been pissing upon a world that had not accorded me the whole-hearted welcome my ego required. But whatever may be thought of that theory now, my parents could hardly have known of it then, for child psychology was not invented, nor would my father, I hope, have had the impudence to beat me for my behavior, which he eventually did. A good deal of patience, it is true, must have been expended upon me for years, and many a good mattress did I ruin until I slept permanently upon rubber sheets. Then came a time when the practice ceased, then it began again in my early ’teens. I myself, of course, knew nothing about it, only that at first it was pleasantly warm, then unpleasantly cold, and in the resumed cycle I used to dream, I recollect, that I was standing in a urinal—a devilish dream, for what more natural than to pee? At any rate, when I began once more to ruin the new and unprotected mattresses with which I had at last been entrusted, my father denounced it as “sheer laziness,” to which, I fancy, he had long attributed it, and taking down my trousers in front of my protesting mother he beat me upon the bare bottom with his hand.

  This is not recommended treatment, I believe, for my particular weakness, or strength, whichever it was, nor is it recommended for building up a relationship of love and confidence between father and son, and I still faintly remember the embarrassment and humiliation I felt when I pulled and buttoned up the trousers he had taken down before laying me across his knees—though, memory being what it is, I can’t be sure that this was on that particular occasion, for he beat me for other things as well, though not often and not hard, and if these chastisements had upon our future relations any effect, I certainly never bore him any conscious grudge.

  Another disadvantage to which he may be thought to have put himself in regard to us children was that throughout our formative years he was what may be called a “weekend” father, if as frequent as that. Having accidentally produced us all and concealed us, first in Herne Hill, where I was born, then in Herne Bay, where my sister was born two years later, he removed us again, at the turn of the century, to Bowdon in Cheshire, his own homeland, where we were accidentally discovered by his business friends. He himself was working in Covent Garden and had a flat in Marylebone where, according to Aunt Bunny, he led a gay free bachelor’s life—“all the fun of the fair,” as she put it—and to which my mother was never invited. We were therefore brought up and surrounded by women, my mother, aunt, grandmother, his sisters, old Sarah and various nurses, governesses, and maids, while he himself was an irregular weekend visitor: in 1900, for instance, eighteen months after my sister’s birth, he departed with Stockley for Jamaica on a business trip. It was not until 1903, when he removed us again, this time to the first of the three houses we were to occupy in Richmond, Surrey, that he lived with us and we became a united family.

  Such a father might well be an awe-inspiring figure to small children, and that was the aspect he sometimes assumed. For of course we were as naughty and disobedient as children are likely to be when reared almost entirely by sweet, kind, doting women in whom all sense of discipline is lacking. My poor, dear, scatter-brained mother to whom, in particular, we paid so little heed, would sometimes be driven by our unruliness, impertinence, or down-right cruelty to say, “I shall have to tell your father when he comes,” and occasionally, provoked beyond endurance, she did—and that was how I got my beatings. The dogs too. We always had household dogs, and my father was dispenser of justice to them also, for no one but he would “rub their noses in it” to house-train them, or take punitive action against them, the “good hiding,” for other offenses. It is fair to say that he came to us generally in the guise of Father Christmas, loaded with presents; but if we or the dogs were in disgrace he came as a figure of retribution, and it may be that, for this reason, he did not perfectly earn his way into my childish heart. But I would not care to make too much of all this as affecting the confidential relationship he himself offered my brother and me some years later.

  It must have been about the year 1912, when I was turned sixteen, that he invited the two of us into the billiard-room of Grafton House, the second and largest of our three Richmond residences, for a “jaw,” which could hardly be called “pi” and which he himself described as “man to man.” We were both at the age when boys have normally discovered the pleasures of masturbation, and if that delightful pastime can be over-worked, no doubt we were over-working it. Probably we both looked a trifle yellow and my father thought the moment had come for a friendly chat. The precise way he approached this delicate subject I don’t recall; I am sure he did it as decently as could be done in the circumstances—the circumstances being that he had left it all rather late. The ground for such intimacies needs some preparation, and in common with many English children of our class and time our education in such matters had been totally neglected. Worse than neglected, I, at least, had been misled and reached my preparatory school supposing that I had been delivered to my parents by a stork, a naivety that won me the ridicule of other boys. Indeed, considering what I afterwards learnt of my father’s behavior, and of the license and impropriety of his relationship with my mother, I think it a trifle dishonest of them to have excluded me so completely from that freedom of thought in which they themselves seem to have indulged. At any rate, by the age of sixteen, such knowledge of sex as I had gained I had gained for myself, and it had become tinged with slyness and guilt.

  My father had sent my brother and me to Rossall School, preparatory and public, in Lancashire, his own territory, partly because he believed it to be a good, healthy, roughish school where we would get plenty of exercise and have “the corners knocked off us,” partly because his own North Country friends, such as Captain Bacon, sent their boys there, partly to put us out of reach of the “mollycoddling” influence of the women. I was a cherubic little boy with large blue starry eyes; my first nickname was “Girlie,” and at the public school older boys soon began to make advances to me. In my very first term there the head of m
y house, who seemed to me more like a man than a boy, used to sit on my bed in the darkness, night after night, begging to be allowed in and whispering into my ears things that terrified me almost to tears. He never got his way with me, whatever his way may have been, and for long after he left, happily for me at the end of that term, I continued to hate his memory and think of him as the devil. I don’t remember when I started to masturbate, but this was my first introduction to love. Later, a ginger-headed boy used to crawl across the dormitory floor to my bed after lights out and, lying on his back on my strip of carpet, beseech me in whispers to let him in, or, failing that, to stretch down my hand. Him too I resisted for a time, but he was more my own age than my previous wooer, less alarming, and I was eventually cajoled into stretching down my hand. I remember that I found the touch of his hot flesh and the smell of his stuff on my fingers more repugnant than exciting; for a long time I disliked the smell of semen, unless it was my own; I have never been able to enjoy other people’s smells—farts, feet, armpits, semen, unwashed cocks—as I enjoy mine. Later still I became more accustomed to the prevalent depravities of this excellent school, so discerningly selected by my father, in which I was never bullied or, when my first too mysterious and monstrous wooer had gone, unhappy. A shameless and amusing boy named Jude, who sat beside me in class, had opened the seams of his trouser pockets, so that his own hand or that of any willing friend could have ready access to the treasure, not hard cash but hard enough, that stood within. My left hand was sometimes guided through the open seam on to Jude’s body as we sat poring over our books—though I remember wishing that it could have been the body of his younger brother instead, who was more attractive but not in my form. This led to holes being made in my pockets, but whether Jude’s hand or anyone else’s, except my own which was frequently there, was ever permitted to enter I don’t recall. Indeed, when I try to think back to my schooldays, I remember only my hand, not often and always by invitation, upon a few other boys, not their hands upon me, and if this is true I can suggest a physical reason for it to which I shall come later. I see myself, then, gazing back, as an innocent, rather withdrawn, self-centered boy, more repelled by than attracted to sex, which seemed to me a furtive, guilty, soiling thing, nothing to do with those feelings I had not yet experienced but about which I was already writing a lot of dreadful sentimental verse, called romance and love.