With her broad, heelless shoes, thick stockings, and rather scurfy, unwashed appearance, she belonged, I fancy, in my father’s ideas, more to the category of “rum ducks” than to that of “plump little partridges”; rummer ducks than she were to be introduced by me into his house, literary, theatrical, musical and other folk, bachelors all. A constant visitor was a retired air-commodore, L. E. O. Charlton, with a charming young male companion, not quite of the same class, to whom he sometimes referred as his secretary, though one might have wondered why he should need one; there were also a young actor, who rendered my father momentarily speechless at dinner one evening by asking him, “Which do you think is my best profile, Mr. Ackerley”—turning his head from side to side—“this, or this?”; a brilliant talkative Irishman, of encyclopedic knowledge, with a thin, carefully curled, cylindrical fringe of a mustache and black paint round the lower lids of his eyes, which looked like mascara but was said to be an ointment for conjunctivitis, who arrived in a leather jacket with a leopard-skin collar and pointed purple suede shoes, and lectured my astonished father on the problem of the uneconomic banana skin; and an intellectual policeman. “Interesting chap,” said my father afterwards, adding, “It’s the first time I’ve ever entertained a policeman at my table.”
Even before this I must have given him food for thought. There was a very early episode, the details of which have vanished from my mind; it concerned a boy I picked up in Shaftesbury Avenue and asked my father to help. The boy was good-looking and well-spoken, in poor health and out of work. Whether I went to bed with him I don’t recall; doubtless something took place between us. My father consented to see him, liked him, gave him a job in one of his branches, and regretted it afterwards, I don’t remember why. I fancy the boy turned out to be consumptive, he may have been idle or dishonest too; at any rate he gave my father trouble and had to be got rid of at last. A little later I tried the same thing on with the Corsican waiter of the Café de la Paix, whom I have mentioned. Soon after our return from Paris and the dog’s turd, our butler gave notice, another had to be found and I suggested to my father, nervously through my mother, that this waiter might be given the job. He was a most attractive boy, we had all been affected by his charm and friendliness and made a point of reserving his table at the Café whenever we lunched or dined there; he had taken to us and it was known that he wanted to come to England to learn the language. It was not known, however, that on one of his afternoons off, I had taken him to a louche hotel where I had booked a bedroom: we had been corresponding since. But my father was highly vexed by the suggestion that he should be brought over to be our butler. “Certainly not!” he said, and added, “Joe and his waiter friends!”
As well as “waiter friends” and “rum ducks,” there were my writings. The Prisoners of War was published and performed in his lifetime, as I have said; Hindoo Holiday he read in typescript not long before he died. In neither of these works do “plump little partridges” abound, the emotional feeling is all between men and boys. Indeed, poor Mme. Louis, in the play, gets a flea in her ear which is gratefully remembered even today by elderly homosexuals. Mme. Louis: “You see, Captain Conrad, I hear you do not greatly care for the fair sex.” Conrad: “The fair sex? Which sex is that?” My recollection is that, although all my friends had read this play before its publication, my father had to ask if he might see it. Perhaps I was a little self-conscious, so far as he was concerned, about its homosexuality; perhaps I simply hadn’t thought to include him. I gave it to him of course. When he had finished reading it he silently handed it back, and I had to request an opinion I felt I should not otherwise get. I expect he was shy and diffident, for the opinion, when it came, pleased me very much. Taking his cigar from his mouth in his rather deliberate way and carefully depositing the ash, he said, “Anyone should be proud to have written it.” I did not put him to the humiliation of asking permission to read Hindoo Holiday, but I was cautious enough, before handing it to him, to remove the conversation with Narayan in which the Maharajah’s sexual behavior is made plain. Even so he smelt a rat, as I shall relate in a moment. All I am wanting to say here is that whatever sexual guilt I had to cope with in my subconscious mind I had none in my intellect; I thought, wrote, and spoke the love of man for man and, among my friends, even among some intelligent normal ones, made no bones about my activities. I have a letter from Lytton Strachey, whom I knew only slightly, which ends:
“With best regards to
The Army
The Navy
and The Police Force”
In short, I think I can say for myself that I was generally regarded as an open, truthful man, not secretive as my father turned out to be, and if ever he had evinced any curiosity about my private life I believe I would have told him, so long as he had questioned me in an intelligent way. But he never did, though a few opportunities occurred. He muffed one of them, I another. The former came some six months after my return from India, in 1924. On the boat out I had made friends with an Italian sailor of the lower deck, who slept two nights with me in my Bombay hotel before I went up country. We corresponded and agreed to meet again, in Turin where he lived, when opportunity presented itself. It came, as I saw it, awkwardly. I had, in fact, only just returned from Milan, where I had been seeking “on the spot” inspiration for my play about Sforza, when the summons to Turin came. This was in my most self-conscious period when I could write nothing and felt I was becoming a loafer in my father’s eyes. It may be, too, though I find the episode hard to recollect, that fresh human interests had brewed meanwhile in England. At any rate I vacillated, I didn’t want to go. This indeed was the very moment when that corrective friend of mine sent in his reproving shaft: “You are scared or bored by response.” More, possibly, because I was susceptible to criticism than because I wanted to go, I went. But since I was nervous about my situation with my father I persuaded this critical friend to conspire with me in a thumping lie. I was not going to Turin but to stay with him in his Weybridge home. Reluctantly he permitted this deception. Three or four days after I reached Turin (of which visit I remember nothing whatever) my father had a heart attack at table. Dr. Wadd, summoned by my mother—the occasion when her prompt action saved my father’s life—dashed in with a hypodermic syringe of digitalis and jabbed it so hastily, though successfully, into the back of one of his hands that it raised a large lump which he kept to the end of his days. My mother wired to me in Weybridge: my friend there was not on the phone. Realizing that the game was up, he came over to Richmond and told her the truth. It was decided to keep it from my father and a wire was sent to me in Turin. I never got it, for I was already on my way home; I had suddenly recollected that my birthday was about to fall and foresaw muddlement between Richmond and Weybridge. I did not know of my father’s illness, therefore, until I reached the house. Unfortunately there was something else I did not know; serious flooding had occurred in the Thames valley. I found my father recovering but still bed-ridden; he asked me at once whether the floods had held me up. I looked perfectly blank. Somehow we got round this for the moment, but I saw I had given myself away. I was upset about him, grieved to see him ill, remorseful for having lied to him. A day or two later, when he was better able to talk, I went to him and said, “I’ve got something to tell you, Dad. I lied to you about Weybridge. I didn’t go there at all.” He said, “I know, old boy. I knew you were lying directly I asked you about the floods.” I said, “I went to Turin.” “Turin, eh?” he said. “That’s rather farther,” and then, “I’m very sorry to have mucked up your plans.” This was sickening. I said, “I’m very sorry to have lied to you. I wouldn’t have done so if you hadn’t once said something about me and my waiter friends. But I don’t really mind telling you. I went to meet a sailor friend....” But he interrupted me with “It’s all right, old boy. I prefer not to know. So long as you enjoyed yourself, that’s the main thing.” Thus did he close the door in my face. At that moment, perhaps through some guilty need to conf
ess, I would, for better or for worse, have told him anything in the world.
The second opportunity occurred a couple of years later when he was reading the typescript of Hindoo Holiday. We were alone in the dining-room when he looked up at me and asked, “Was the Maharajah a bugger?” I wish I had said yes. I wonder how the conversation would have continued, if at all, from there. And I dislike lying, though I have got used to it now in the course of years. But he had chosen an unfortunate, for him typical, word. I was romantic about homosexuality then, “bugger” was a coarse, rude, objectionable word I did not care for and never used, except as a joke. I could not allow it to be applied to myself or my friends. I said no, and closed the door on him.
There was to be a final eleventh-hour chance, but we never took it. My father’s dying began with an illness quite different from the one that finished him off. At dinner one evening, when Dr. Wadd was present, he poked out his tongue at him and said, “What do I do about that?” There was a large, thick, purplish patch in the middle of it. He must have had it secretly in his mouth for some time and known what it was. “That’s all right, Rog, old boy, a spot of radium will soon clear it up.” For some weeks he lay in Wadd’s hydro next door with radium needles in his tongue, very patient, but getting more and more vexed with his old friend Wadd (whom he had long seen through as a humbug) who, believing him to be wealthy and knowing him to be dying, was now fleecing him in every possible way. Specialists visiting other patients would be winked in to take a squint at him, would amuse him with a “yarn” (which my father was now unable to cap, since he could not speak), and then send in a bill for ten guineas. These bills my father never disputed, grumble about them though he did, but he was glad to get out of Wadd’s clutches. Very groggy on his legs he went down to a hotel in Southsea to recuperate from his cancer, which had left him with a sore tongue, and to die of other things. But he was not to escape medical vulturism, for he carried with him a letter from Wadd to the Southsea doctor appointed to attend him, which somehow I saw. The part that I remember said that he could afford good fees. Soon after he was installed I visited him and found him in his bedroom washing out his mouth with permanganate of potash. He said, “You know, it’s a funny thing but my old dad had cancer of the tongue and I thought him an old man. In fact he was about the same age as I am. And now I have cancer of the tongue and I don’t feel old at all.” I too thought my father an old man; he was the same age as I am as I write this book and, although I have not yet had cancer of the tongue, I don’t feel old either.
Not long after this he had the first of a series of strokes, expected by the doctors. Syphilis had begun its attack upon the blood vessels of the brain. The stroke was slight and he was able to get about after it with the aid of sticks. He remarked to me then with a chuckle that the thing that had worried him most was that he might not be able to “get the horn” again, but thank heaven the doctor had reassured him on that point.
It was at this time (the year was 1929) that I was conducting my affair with my English sailor who, as I have said, was stationed in Portsmouth, which is contiguous with Southsea. I forget if I had already established us both in the Portsmouth flat; at any rate I was constantly driving down from London to see him. Now that my father had chosen Southsea for his convalescence (was it because he knew I went there so often?) I wanted to visit him too; but the sailor had the larger share of my interest and, not wishing to miss any opportunity of seeing him, the most convenient arrangement seemed to be to bring them together. This worked very well; my father was charming to this inarticulate, monkey-like boy who could not express himself without the help of manual gesture, of whom he could not have made much, for there was not much to make. He must surely have wondered—if he had not guessed—what his son, whose photo had lately appeared in Vogue under the caption “We Nominate for the Hall of Fame,” after the London production of The Prisoners of War, could possibly see in so dumb a companion; yet he accepted him with grace and good humor, invited him two or three times to dine with us both in his grand hotel, joked with him and teased him to make him laugh, and took an interest in his pursuits, his naval life, his boxing, and his deep-sea diving. Thinking back at it all now, I expect he must have been pretty bored with this boy, and I wonder whether, by having him with me so much, I may not have forfeited my last chance of a private conversation and understanding with my father. I doubt it. The sailor, it should be said, was helpful and attentive to him too, so far as, in such daunting surroundings, his natural diffidence allowed him to exert himself; he helped him out of his chair and supported him along the corridors; when my father was feeling equal to it we drove him about in my car. But if there were opportunities for a quiet conversation with me he did not take or make them; he asked no questions, invited no confidence—and offered none; if I had my secret life, he had his.
One evening he remarked to us jovially at table that he was particularly pleased with himself, he had lately had a wet dream, a thing that had not happened to him for months. None of these merry remarks of his had, for me, the least significance; I took them all as the rather wistful jollities of the sexually abdicated. When we were escorting him to his bedroom afterwards, the lift-man said to him, “The lady from the Pier Hotel has phoned, sir. She wants her suitcase back at once.” A momentary silence ensued; then my father said rather gruffly, “Come in and get it. You’ll find it under the bed.” The sailor and I covered up this awkward indiscretion as best we could with small-talk; we speculated about it when we left. A similar indiscretion occurred a little later, this time by way of the telephone operator, and the name of the lady at the Pier Hotel, who wished to speak to him, was supplied. It was Muriel. My mother and sister happened to be having tea with him; he said briefly, by way of explanation, “You remember I’ve spoken about her. An old friend.” My mother, who was the vaguest of creatures, made nothing of this, but it gave my sister food for thought. In fact my father had mentioned this lady to us, but not often and not for many years; she had been actively engaged, we dimly recalled, in some ambulance or hospital service, of patriotic interest to him, during the war, and he had occasionally alluded to her in laudatory terms as a splendid woman who had done wonderful work for the sick and wounded in various countries and received for it sundry foreign decorations. But “old friend” of his though she might be, he had never brought her to our house and, so far as I could recollect, none of us had ever met her. Now, it appeared, she had graciously emerged from her ambulance to look after him in his illness, for which we felt extremely grateful to her. My mother could not have coped with sickness at such a distance, it plunged her into a state of agitation even at home, and any patient nursed by her would soon have been driven round the bend. Nervous of life, frightened of death, surrounded by sedatives and boxes of glycerine suppositories, she was already forming that eccentricity of habit which was soon to confine her, an affable chatterbox and for a time a secret drinker, with a female help and a succession of Sealyham dogs, within the sheltering walls of her own dwellings for another seventeen years. Not without reluctance did she allow herself to be driven to Southsea by my sister to visit my father; when his condition worsened she went no more until his death; she excused herself from going up to see him dead (my notebook contains the entry “Mother and Headwaiter” but alas I can’t remember what it means, something characteristic and bizarre, no doubt) and did not attend his funeral in Richmond. I saw that the very thought of it upset her and advised her to stay at home.
Now that the presence and name of the lady at the Pier Hotel were out, I daresay my father relaxed whatever caution he had ever employed, at any rate so far as I was concerned, and started to let slide what he saw he could no longer prop up, for I began to collide with her and was introduced. She was a tall, rather coarse-looking woman to whom I did not take, but she was clearly fond of him and addressed him as “Dear” and “Dearest.” She described herself as a widow with three daughters, and she had known my father for twenty years. A little later,
when I called with my sailor, I found her with the youngest of her daughters, a girl of seventeen, who called my father “Uncle” and “Darling” and bore so marked a resemblance to him and my sister that I was not wholly unprepared for the revelations that followed his death, which occurred soon afterwards.
The last time I saw him alive another stroke had left him partially paralyzed. He was conscious but did not know if he was on his back or his side and was under the delusion that he was too near the edge of the bed and might fall out. He wanted to pee, he said, and asked me to fetch his bed-bottle, but it was a great struggle for him to get into the right position to insert his “tool” into it. I helped him, rolling him with difficulty on to his side, and tried to guide him into the bottle. I had handled a good many “tools” in my life, but with this dread gun that had shot me into the world I may have been awkward and clumsy; at any rate he pushed my hand away and finished the job himself. Only a few drops came out. Even in this extreme moment he said no more to me, except, dismissively, that there was nothing more that I could do. To Muriel afterwards he said with a groan, “I wish I could die”; he would never have said so meek a thing to me.
My Father and Myself Page 13
