My Father and Myself

by J. R. Ackerley

  There were two ghosts, one live and one dead. The dead ghost was the Count. So far as I recollect, Arthur asked me, soon after he managed to get at my ear, whether it could have been a relative of mine who, many years ago, had been a friend of his dear old friend the Count de Gallatin. Doubtless I said, “Why, yes, my father. He knew the Count de Gallatin when he was a young man,” and thus my formal introduction to the old gentleman of the portrait was effected. He had lived, it emerged, in a house just round the corner, No. 3 St. Peter’s Square, which Arthur had found for him and helped him to move into from Belgravia after Mme. de Gallatin’s death. There he was looked after by a man-servant, Tommy, and his faithful housekeeper, Miss Emily Lenfant, and there he had died in 1915. He had been for many years a regular visitor at No. 6, “Never missed a Sunday,” said old Arthur.

  “Miss Emily,” as she was always referred to, was the living ghost, and I suspect that it was primarily through her memory rather than Arthur’s that the link between the Count and myself was forged. A Catholic orphan of unknown parentage, she was taken as a child by Mme. de Gallatin from the convent orphanage in which she had been reared, given the name of Lenfant (l’Enfant) and employed in various capacities, as “help,” lady’s maid, and finally housekeeper. She had known my father at The Hermitage, Old Windsor, over forty years ago. When Mme. de Gallatin died, she had continued to devote herself to the Count, until he too died, aged sixty-two, of fatty degeneration of the heart. A woman in the sixties now herself, she had remained on the friendliest terms with the Needhams, was a constant visitor to their house, and was to reside in it and look after the two brothers when Miss Louie died in 1930. It was not until then, the year after my father’s death, that I was introduced to her.

  It is probable, therefore, that speculation between Arthur and Miss Emily about a link between the new lodger (myself) and the Count began at No.6 directly after my arrival. Indeed there may have been no speculation at all; I don’t know to what extent Miss Emily was in Mme. de Gallatin’s and the Count’s confidence, but some of the drama had passed before her very eyes, and it seems safe to assume that she would instantly have realized that the young Mr. Ackerley who had just rented Arthur’s first-floor flat could be none other than the son of that other young Mr. Ackerley who broke the Count’s heart in 1887 and joined Arthur Stockley (whom also she would have known) in Elders and Fyffes in 1892. In which case, she and old Arthur having easily worked me out, the form of his opening question to me was merely a diffident and tactful way of gaining information he already possessed —and passing it on to me. How galling therefore it must have been for the intrigued and excited old man to have to control his curiosity for so long, owing to my evasive tactics.

  The cat out of the bag, his pent-up loquacity was also let loose and I was shown further relics of the Count, gifts and photographs, mostly signed, in which the mustache, though still waxed, did not turn up at the ends but proceeded on to a directer conclusion. I asked if he had ever spoken of my father, and Arthur said yes, once or twice, but “Oh dear me, you couldn’t mention his name! The Count never forgave him for the way he treated him!” Old Arthur, it soon appeared, was a snob, and the words “the Count” were thereafter frequently on his lips, as also was the name of another noble friend of his, Lord Norton. This old gentleman I was once privileged to meet when I ran into him and Arthur promenading in the street, a spruce Nice figure with a silver-headed cane and a flower in his button-hole.

  Later still I was being given to understand, with many a circumlocution, much tittering, and many fits of coughing, that of course his friend the Count had also been “that way,” “Oh my word, very much so.” This could not have surprised me greatly; I had already written off Lord Norton as another old queen, like Arthur himself, and since we all, as homosexuals, tended, as with any other persecuted group, to find our way into the closed and sympathetic society of our kind, I assumed that Arthur’s bosom cronies were probably as “queer” as himself. But I was amused and questioned him: What was the Count like? Oh he was a charming man with a French accent, but (from my notebooks):

  “Good gracious me, he was awful! So unscrupulous! I daren’t introduce him to people, heavens no! I introduced a young friend one day and, oh my word! I’d told the Count that he wasn’t ‘that way,’ but would you believe it? he asked him round to his house and tried it on at once! And my young friend said to me afterwards when I asked him what he thought of the Count, ‘Well,’ he said, ‘he seemed a funny sort of chap and I’ll tell you this that if he hadn’t been a friend of yours I’d have punched him on the nose!’ Of course I didn’t like to say much to the Count, but I asked him what he’d thought of my young friend, and he said, ‘Oh, he seemed quite nice at first, but then he was dreadful!’ Goodness me, I couldn’t be seen with him, the way he carried on! There was another time at the Napoleon! It was too much! I didn’t know where to look! He simply went straight up to any soldier he fancied!”

  I already knew the Napoleon and was to get to know it better and to “carry on” there myself, though with more circumspection than the Count; it is a pub in Knight-bridge, not far from the Horseguards’ Barracks, in which my father had once dwelt, a famous resort for picking up cavalrymen. At some point in these confidences I said jokingly to Arthur, “Do you suppose the Count ever tried anything on with my father?” This put him into such a delicious taking that his bronchials went wrong, and coughing and spluttering, “Oh my goodness the things you say! Good gracious me, you’ve quite took me breath away ... !” he hastened from the room.

  Unhappily I made of these conversations with Arthur Needham very few notes. Though amused I was not interested enough and did not foresee how curious I should become later. But I find some other small jottings. He gave me a description of the interior of the Count’s St. Peter’s Square house at which, of course, he was a frequent visitor. The sitting-room, he recalled, contained a full-length portrait of Mme. de Gallatin, so painted and placed in an alcove that it gave the illusion that she was approaching through a curtained doorway and about to step down into the room between the ferns that had been carefully arranged to conceal the lower edge of the frame. The Count never kept photos or letters, said Arthur; there were certainly no visible relics of my father, “Good gracious no”; a snap or two of current soldiers might be found lying about, but the Count always tore them up when the soldiers let him down. “Dreadfully fat and ugly” in his last years, he was often to be seen in summer time on his veranda in the Square, sitting or parading up and down in a silk dressing-gown, much to the surprise and displeasure of his more conventional neighbors (“Goodness me, the Miss Hughes who lived on the corner, they were always complaining, they didn’t think it at all nice”), who would have been more surprised and displeased had they known what brought him out, which was to examine the tradesboys flying round the Square on their bicycles. When the war broke out, said Arthur, the Count used to take cigarettes to the wounded soldiers in some local hospital (“Oh yes, wherever soldiers were the Count was sure to be”); but his ill luck in friendship, begun by my father, apparently pursued him throughout his life; even Tommy, his ex-guardsman servant, let him down at last. “A young ‘so’ man,” picked up by Arthur in a Hyde Park urinal and subsequently annexed by the Count, he instantly decamped after his master’s death and almost before he was cold, with everything portable in the house he could lay hands on and vanished (“Oh, isn’t it shocking!”). Having got through three fortunes in his life according to Arthur Stockley, the Count died worth £128. 0s. 4d., but he had also some property in America, and this and everything else that Tommy did not pinch was inherited by the faithful Miss Emily.

  17

  THIS STORY, DROPPED into my ears whenever Arthur could gain access to them, took some time to unfold, and so much longer to impress itself that I am vague now about dates and the sequence of events. I reached No.6, as I have said, in 1925, my father died in the autumn of 1929, it was not until at least half-way through that period that I
was introduced to the portrait of the Count de Gallatin. How much of the scandalous information about him I received before my father died I don’t recall, nor does it matter; had I had it all, as maybe I did, it would have made no difference to my thought and behavior. The story was odd, it was amusing, it had, so far as my father was concerned, absolutely no reality. It must be understood that he was at this time the father-figure I have described in my Chapters 8-10. The story of his double life was not yet disclosed, nor the story of his dealings with my mother, which came later; he was simply my old familiar dad, with his large top-heavy figure, his Elder Statesman look, his Edward VII hat, umbrella, and eternal cigar, his paunch, his mustache, his swivel eye, his jumps and his unsteady gait, his dull commuting, respectable life, his important business, his dreary office pals, and their eternal yarning about chaps putting their hands up girls’ frocks (never into boys’ flies)—it was difficult enough as I have said, to think of him in any amorous situation at all; to imagine him in the arms of another man was not possible. It must be added that, besides my ignorance of his history, I had not yet seen the photos of him as a young man which illustrate this book; they came into my hands years later from Uncle Denton and Stockley; the only early photo of him in the family album that I recollect was the New Brighton group on the lion-skin rug, an innocent looking affair, if only because there was safety in numbers.

  Yes, Arthur Needham’s prattlings were certainly odd; it was intriguing to know that my father had once had a close friend who had ended up—to use his own word—a bugger, and my friends and I joked about it together: “Do you suppose they went beddy-bye?”; but to give it serious consideration was another matter. An innocent explanation, after all, lay close at hand in my own young experience; the Count, like myself, may have started his emotional life (continuing it longer than I) by falling for young men whom he was unable to touch but worshipped from afar; his active and predatory homosexuality could have begun later. Indeed, so little thought, let alone suspicion, did I give to the relationship that I am vague now as to what I said to my father about the strange coincidence of my happening upon the Count’s tracks. It would not have been easy to say much in any case to this old man with whom I had never had an intimate conversation and who never appeared to invite one, nor for that matter had I much to say, knowing little more about the Count than that he had started as a friend of my father’s and ended as a friend of Arthur Needham’s; to make insinuations about the latter association would have been out of the question, as also to appear suddenly and unprecedentedly interested in my father’s past life. My recollection is that I mentioned, merely as an oddity, that my present landlord had known the Count de Gallatin who had lived and died round the corner from us in St. Peter’s Square in 1915, and that no particular interest was evinced in this item of news. I remember asking what the Count had been like, and my father, picking his nose, replied, “A funny chap, a decent sort of fellow, most unfortunately jealous.” I believe I had the New Brighton photo with me—I had taken it to show to Arthur Needham—and asked what had happened to the fourth member of the group, Dudley Sykes. “He married and died,” said my father briefly, returning to his newspaper.

  Not long afterwards he himself fell ill and died, and the revelations of his secret orchard came out, to be followed, a couple of years later, by the information contained in the first sentence of this memoir. Under these successive blows—the first was shattering enough—the established image of the paterfamilias, the respectable, dull, suburban householder, the good, the poor, old dad, lay in pieces and needed reconstruction, yet it was not until about 1935 that I began to think seriously enough about him and myself to think us out on paper. Up till then he remained a curious and amusing subject for discussion among friends. I had indeed much else on my hands and mind, besides my sexual affairs, though I attach small importance to them now as excuses for inattention. Despairing of being a writer I took in 1928, as I have said, a job in the BBC; following my father’s death I had the clearing up of his estate and the removal of my mother to the smaller house. Nevertheless, it seems that at this time a little more sunshine entered my life, fleetingly I fear, for I find among my papers a letter to me, dated July 16, 1930, which interests me as providing a portrait of myself in the late ’twenties. It is from that intellectual policeman I have mentioned, the friend to whom I owed so much, but whose character was so unstable and touchy, his demands upon friendship so impatient, that a mutual friend once said of him that he could not wait for the plants in his garden to grow but must be forever pulling them up to inspect their roots. The letter is written in anger, but anger is as valuable as alcohol for the communication of home truths. I forget the actual event that triggered this letter off, but I know that, like the barking dogs, he often got on my nerves with his constant unannounced invasion of my privacy and his inability to hold his indiscreet tongue in front of my sacred sailor, whom he himself had brought into my life. I suppose I must have had a conscience over my behavior to him and sent him some tactless apology; the following, which did not sever our friendship, was his reply:

  “For years now you’ve been sponging on your friends’ energy by sitting gloomily about and letting them move around making excuses for you. I seem to have spent all my London life saying to myself ‘Poor old Joe’ over something or other, but now that your excuses for gloom seem to be vanishing into thin air I am not going to let you pick on me. You must find something else to get a ‘vague uneasiness’ over. I don’t like you now and I am not going to let you worry me any longer.

  I have had as much cause as you to be miserable. I’ve been lonely just as much as you; one hundred North Country policemen are not company. You could have talked to me and wouldn’t.

  Since you’ve sneered all the affection out of me I find myself calmly thinking of you as ‘a miserable bloody tyke,’ and I can go to bed at night and get up in the morning several times and still think the same, which I’ve discovered as a fairly good test of whether I really believe a thing or am only pretending to myself.”

  The “excuses for gloom” which were “vanishing into thin air” were, no doubt, the belated departure of my sister to Panama to attempt to restore her marital life, and the satisfactory settlement of my mother’s financial future. In the same year Miss Louie died, Miss Emily came to take her place and I met her. Those readers who may be thinking I have held this card up my sleeve for new and startling disclosures will be disappointed. A dull, dutiful woman, she had nothing to say to my questions about my father, questions which could not have been particular since I did not then know what to ask. Yes, she remembered him and as a very handsome young man, what great friends he and the Count had been, and what a pity it had all come to such a sad end, she couldn’t say why. I tried again later to speak to her, with no better result; as Arthur himself remarked when I mentioned my failure, “Oh she was never a one to talk. Good gracious no! One can never get a word out of her, certainly not against anyone. Such a good, kind soul!”

  Not long after this, when I was at the peak of my ability to be a “miserable bloody tyke” owing to the rupture with my sailor, in the disconsolation of which I wallowed for a couple of years, Cis was discovered to have cancer which sent him in and out of hospital, killing him at last; and finding myself an inconvenience to Arthur, who talked of selling the house, I moved into a smaller lodging nearby; then, in 1934, to a flat in Maida Vale. It was here that, for want of something to occupy such leisure time as was not spent at the BBC or prowling the streets, I began to brood over this story of my father and myself. It germinated, as I have said, out of a sense of failure, of personal inadequacy, of waste and loss; I saw it as a stupid story, shamefully stupid that two intelligent people, even though parent and son between whom special difficulties of communication are said to lie, should have gone along together, perfectly friendly, for so many years, without ever reaching the closeness of an intimate conversation, almost totally ignorant of each other’s hearts and minds. That I had al
so been handed ready-made an unusual and startling tale did not escape my journalist’s eye. My father was a mystery man. Part of his mystery had now been revealed; what about that part of the picture which still lay in darkness, his early life and relationship, so odd in view of Arthur Needham’s tittle-tattle, with the Count de Gallatin—and, for that matter, with Mr. Ashmore, these two wealthy gentlemen in their thirties and the impecunious and uneducated young guardsman in his ‘teens, to whom they had both taken so inordinate a fancy? Was not a man who was capable of so much, capable of almost anything? Who could shed light upon all this? It was very old history, but there were two people still alive who might help, Arthur Stockley and Uncle Denton, my father’s younger brother, who lived in South Africa. I started a correspondence with them both, and the general information they sent me, such as it is, is incorporated in the opening chapters of this memoir. From Stockley came the accounts of New Brighton and The Cell Farm, and that long impassioned private letter from Mme. de Gallatin which I have quoted in full. And from him and Denton came the photographs of my father as a young man. These made me sit up. The inherent absurdity of envisaging my father in the arms of another man had never really faded; it faded now. It is true that, studying the photograph of him in uniform, I decided that I would not have picked him up myself; but the picture was said not to do him justice, and the better one Uncle Denton claimed to have he never managed to find. But from the photo of him as a young man-about-town it was not difficult to see why Ashmore and de Gallatin had fallen for him. Where and how had he met these two men? That was the crucial question. I put it to both my correspondents. Neither of them knew, or, if they knew they were not disposed to say. Nor did I feel, from my knowledge of them and the tone of their letters as my enquiries grew warmer, that insinuations or blunt questions would have any other effect than to bring the correspondence to an abrupt end: Denton indeed remarked in one letter, “I enclose an answer to your family questions and will be pleased to answer any others within reason.” How vexing it was! What fun it would be if I could add the charge of homosexuality to my father’s other sexual vagaries! What irony if it could be proved that he had led in his youth the very kind of life that I was leading! Where had these two men met him? Had they picked him up, as I picked guardsmen up, in the Napoleon or the Monkey Walk? Or was he “ordered” through Mrs. Truman before her shop was closed? For a friend of mine, who had a small library of erotica, had drawn my attention to a book which confirmed my belief that the behavior of the guards of which I had learnt so much in my own time had been no different in my father’s. This two-volume work was entitled The Sins of the Cities of the Plain, or the Recollections of a Mary-Ann, with Short Essays on Sodomy and Tribadism, and the relevant essay was called “I Joined the Army,” by Frank Griffin: