My Father and Myself

by J. R. Ackerley

  “Mr. Fred Jones had been a soldier in the Foot Guards and brought out by Mr. Inslip. It’s the commonest thing possible in the Army. As soon as (or before) I had learned the goose-step, I had learned to be goosed....

  You can easily imagine that it is not so agreeable to spend half-an-hour with a housemaid when one has been caressed all night by a nobleman. This is the experience of all the men of my regiment, and I know it is the same in the First, the Blues, and every regiment of the Foot Guards. When a young fellow joins, some one of us breaks him in and teaches him the trick; but there is very little need of that, for it seems to come naturally to almost every young man.... We then have no difficulty in passing him on to some gentleman, who always pays us liberally for getting a fresh young thing for him.

  Although of course we all do it for money, we also do it because we really like it, and if gentlemen gave us no money, I think we should do it all the same. So far as I can see, all the best gentlemen in London like running after soldiers, and I have letters from some of the very highest in the land.... There are lots of houses in London for it—I will give you a list some day—where only soldiers are received and where gentlemen sleep with them. The best known is now closed. It was the tobacconist’s shop next door to Albany Street Barracks, Regent’s Park, and was kept by a Mrs. Truman. The old lady would receive orders from gentlemen and then let us know ... !”

  This book was privately printed in 1881, two years after my father enlisted in the Blues at Albany Street Barracks.

  Engaging speculations! Hoping still to drag him captive into the homosexual fold, I pursued my historical researches. Little could be expected from the Records Offices of the Blues and the Horse Guards, but I tried both and received copies of his certificates of discharge: conduct, alas, “very good.” An attempt to dig deeper into the records of the Blues met with no success; the relevant ones, I was told, had unfortunately been destroyed in a fire. Searching through the back files of The Times I found the report of the lawsuit between my father and de Gallatin. This rather dejected me: if their relationship had been anything but above board, would my father have taken the risk of putting the “vindictive” Count in the witness box in a dispute over money? Somerset House yielded me various death certificates and wills, including Ashmore’s, and this reminded me of what seemed my last hope, Ashmore’s son. Of this man I had private information, supplied by a close homosexual friend of mine and one-time colleague of his, that Air-Commodore Charlton I have already mentioned, that he too had indulged in homosexual practices, but furtively, screening himself by marriage and by denouncing and punishing the same practice in the ranks of his command. Whether General Ashmore, a cold and wary figure, knew more about his father and mine than he disclosed in his interview with me I shall never know; all that I got out of him has already been related.

  Baffled in all my enquiries I bethought me again of old Arthur Needham, with whom I had long been out of touch. Had I pumped him sufficiently? Had he, after all, the clue I so badly needed? Was he, for that matter, still alive? One weekend, in February, 1938, I went down to Hammersmith in search of him. No. 6 had been sold, but Arthur was living, I gathered, in a smaller house near the bridge. There I found him, with another dog, a tomcat thirteen years old and of enormous girth, and a housekeeper named Annie, to whom the cat belonged. He was lying cast down on his bed, sideways, as though he had fallen on it. I thought him ill or even dead, but he soon sat up and was between the two, a pitiable wreck, much thinner than I remembered him, gasping for breath. He was fully dressed—perhaps I had written and he was expecting me—but his housekeeper told me that he had not left the small house at all for eighteen months. Like some frightened animal with its back to the wall he was hiding from the death that had lately claimed Cis and Miss Emily. It was clearly useless to ask too much of him. From my notebook:

  “I can’t get me breath. Isn’t it awful to be old? First it was Louie, then Cis, then Miss Emily, and I shall be the next.”

  “Arthur dear, do tell me. Did your friend the Count de Gallatin ever say anything about having made love to my father?”

  “Oh, the things you say! I’m as nervous as a kitten, the least thing sets me off. I can’t even write a check now, me hand shakes so.”

  “Arthur, it’s important. Do you know about my father and the Count?”

  “Oh, you couldn’t ask the Count. But I had my ideas all the same.”

  “I don’t want ideas. I want facts. Did they go to bed together? That is what I want to know. Did the Count ever tell you anything?”

  “Oh lord, you’ll be the death of me! I think he did once say he’d had some sport with him. But me memory’s like a saucer with the bottom out.”

  I never saw old Arthur again, nor can I attach the least importance to “some sport.” I expect he was trying to please me—and be rid of me. He died, aged seventy-eight, at the beginning of 1941. Before that, in 1940, a bomb fell outside my flat in Clifton Gardens, bringing the ceilings down. This put an end to my tenancy and to such fitful interest and sporadic attention as this memoir had been receiving. I did not look at it again for twenty years.

  18

  AFTER MY FATHER’S death I moved my mother out of Blenheim House on Richmond Hill, the last of our three family residences. It was taken by Dr. Wadd who had coveted it for some times as an annex to his hydro next door (both houses and himself have long since been demolished). He offered to buy such fittings and furnishings as my mother would not need in the small box of a house we had found for her in Sheen Road. She selected what she wanted, the things she specially liked; the rest of the contents of the house, valuable curtains and carpets, silver, mountains of Blue Onion china, were sold to Wadd for a song. I remember a fine roomy Chesterfield in the drawing-room going for twelve and sixpence. This old friend of the family had always had an eye for the main chance. Owing to my work in the BBC I could take little part in these transactions, except to curb my mother’s careless generosity. Particularly precious to her were sundry trunks, suitcases, bags and several large cardboard boxes. All these and whatever else she needed were transported to 159a Sheen Road. Here she lived for eleven years, 1930–1941.

  She asked me if I would live with her—just the question, no pressure. It saddened me to say no; I could not have endured it. Instead a woman companion-help, whom she liked, was found for her and she had her little dog. I went constantly to see her and she was visited also by Aunt Bunny and the “Doc,” Air-Commodore Charlton and other friends of mine who were fond of her. For over a year she seemed perfectly happy, a merry little squirrel in its cage; then my sister announced her return with her child from Panama; she had failed to patch things up with her husband and was now divorced. There was no ready place for them to live in and my mother decided to have them stay with her. I tried to dissuade her from a step which, it seemed certain, was unlikely to suit anybody; the house was too tiny for such an invasion, she and my sister had never got on together, and my mother, who had had nothing to do with children since we were born and not much then, was surely too old and fixed in her habits now to be able to endure for long the addition of a small boy to her household. But she had set her heart on it, she was sorry for my sister in her adversity, had forgotten all the dissensions of the past and doubtless also wished to play the part of grandmother. The results were as unpleasant as I had foreseen; by the time when, some years later, other accommodation had been found for my sister, my mother had taken to living almost entirely in her bedroom, into which she would allow no one else to go, even her servant, and had also taken secretly to the bottle. Then the “Doc” died and Aunt Bunny, left destitute, went to live with her in Sheen Road.

  By the side of the house was a pretty cul-de-sac named Peldon Avenue, where the little Sealyham bitch got her exercise. One night, in September, 1941, a land-mine fell into it, cracking the house from top to bottom. My aunt happened to be away at the time; my mother and her servant were sleeping on mattresses in the sitting-room on the ground fl
oor. Windows and doors blew in, the ceiling fell on them as they lay. In a panic the servant rushed out into the street in search of help. Returning, she found my mother standing in the dark, shattered room in her night shift, her hair full of plaster. “I think it very inconsiderate of you,” said my mother reproachfully, “to go out before sweeping up all this glass. I might easily have cut my feet.” The concussion had ruptured a small blood-vessel in one of her eyes; otherwise she was uninjured. She was seventy years old.

  My sister, who was then living in a large block of furnished flats near by, found one for her and Aunt Bunny in the same building. It was here that, my mother’s faculties rapidly failing, she made friends with the fly. Her furniture had to be removed from the wrecked house; I had it stored in a depository that had been improvised in Richmond Town Hall—upon which, soon afterwards, an incendiary bomb fell, burning everything up. Among the things that confronted my sister and me for disposal in my mother’s sacred and filthy bedroom, with the great piles of ancient newspapers she had hoarded and the empty whisky bottles, was her personal luggage, her trunks and suitcases and those large cardboard boxes she had so carefully preserved. It was necessary to find out what they contained before deciding whether to store them or to take them along to her new flat—though, her memory going, if not gone, she asked for nothing and seemed hardly aware of what was happening in the world outside. I was personally curious too; I might find some useful information, letters, etc., about her early life with my father. I opened the cardboard boxes first. They were full of wastepaper. The wastepaper consisted of old receipts and circulars, letters, envelopes, Christmas cards, bits of Christmas crackers, newspapers cuttings about dressmaking or cooking recipes, household lists and memoranda, old theater programmes, visiting cards, blank pieces of paper, and literary compositions of her own—rambling verses and pensées in her large quill-pen writing; all these had been torn up into small fragments and put back into the boxes, which had then been secured with string. I opened her three square leather hat-boxes. They were full of wastepaper. There were two large cabin trunks. They were crammed with wastepaper. The drawers of her dressing table also contained wastepaper, excepting for two or three bundles of letters, tied with ribbon, from Harold Armstrong, my brother and myself. In the midst of this sea of torn-up paper various other objects were discovered: a few old and ragged small articles of clothing, some aged feathers and other trimmings for hats, empty jewel-cases, empty boxes, empty tins, old cosmetic and powder containers, buttons, hairpins, desiccated suppositories, decayed De Reszke and Melachrino cigarettes, old and used sanitary towels done up in tissue paper, stumps of pencils, orangewood sticks, Red Lavender lozenges. An occasional gold or silver trinket, of no value, was found, an occasional undestroyed treasury note (£3.10s.0d. in all). Suddenly, for a time excitingly, bundles would appear like presents in a bran pie, done up in tissue paper and tied with ribbon or string, or large plain envelopes, bulging and sealed. They all contained wastepaper, torn into small fragments. To this mass of rubbish clung my mother’s odor of “Jicky” and Red Lavender lozenge. The last thing to be opened was an ancient battered black bag such as doctors used to carry. It was locked. No key could be found, but the leather had rotted, the bag was easily torn open. The first thing that met my eye was a page of pencilled writing in my mother’s hand: “Private. Burn without reading.” At last! Beneath were sundry packages tied up in ribbon. They were full of wastepaper. There was nothing else in the bag.

  This was my mother’s comment on life. It might serve also as a comment on this family memoir, which belongs, I am inclined to think, to her luggage. A good many questions have been asked, few receive answers. Some facts have been established, much else may well be fiction, the rest is silence. Of my father, my mother, myself, I know in the end practically nothing. Nevertheless I preserve it, if only because it offers a friendly, unconditional response to my father’s plea in his posthumous letter: “I hope people will generally be kind to my memory.”

  Illustrations

  My father, c. 1890

  My father as a guardsman

  New Brighton: Stockley, my father, de Gallatin, Dudley Sykes

  My father and Miss Burckhardt in New Brighton in 1889

  My mother in The Merry Wives of Windsor

  My mother in the ’Twenties

  Myself as a preparatory schoolboy: “Girlie”

  Myself as a subaltern

  APPENDIX

  WHEN I HAD completed this so-called memoir, which remembers so little, a friend of mine who read it for me said I had fallen into the error of self-indulgence. The material contained in the present Chapter 12 was then rather more extensive and was divided into two chapters, for having started to examine my sexual psychology, so far as I was able, I became so interested in it that I worked it out to the end. My friend criticized this and I agreed with him; the book is not an autobiography, its intention is narrower and is stated in the title and the text, it is no more than an investigation of the relationship between my father and myself and should be confined as strictly as possible to that theme. I therefore removed two extraneous passages from my then Chapters 12 and 13, and telescoped those chapters into one. The book then came closer to its purpose and moved more swiftly in its pursuit of my lost and unknown father. But what was I to do with the excisions? The book had been a considerable sweat to write and they merited, I thought, a better fate than the wastepaper basket. Besides, I wanted to keep my dedication, which seems to me apt and just, and needed to state the reasons for it. For the interest therefore of psychologists in particular I have preserved these discarded pages in this appendix.

  Another fact about my baffled sex life was that I was sexually incontinent, and of that I was deeply ashamed. I did not know then, as I have been told since, that it is a quite common affliction (although I must add that, to my annoyance, I have never been to bed with anyone who shared it) caused by anxiety, which I take to be a part of guilt, and might have been corrected by psychoanalysis. It was a great nuisance to me in many ways, and had a bad effect upon my conduct, if not upon my character. Whenever I was emotionally aroused, whenever I was in the presence of someone physically attractive whom I was wanting to embrace, or even when I was awaiting his arrival, I lived in a state of hot sexual excitement, the bulge of which in my trousers I was always afraid would be noticed. A kiss then, the mere pressure of an embrace, if I got as far as that, was enough to finish me off—and provide a new shame, that the stain, seeping through my trousers, might be seen. It may well have been this that, in my schooldays, sitting beside Jude in class and letting him guide my hand through the opened seam of his trouser pocket, precluded me, in my recollection, from requiring or desiring reciprocal treatment. I took to wearing tight jockey shorts to prop up against my stomach my betraying display, and later preferred double-breasted to open jackets as a further disguise.

  This incontinence (to run ahead) had other deplorable results. It put an end to my own pleasure before it had begun and, with the expiry of my desire, which was never soon renewed, my interest in the situation, even in the person, causing me to behave inconsiderately to him; I have not been above putting an abrupt end to affairs with new and not highly attractive boys in whose first close embrace, and before taking off our clothes, I had already had my own complete, undisclosed satisfaction. Apart from the probability that I did not then want to go further, how could I go further and reveal to someone who had not yet reached a state of erection the mess I had made of myself? Even a little friendly moralizing at such moments as a wriggle out: “Perhaps we oughn’t to be doing this,” has not been beyond my capabilities. It may well be that the final disappointing of that Cambridge boy who stayed in my Richmond home was due to this, that through a kiss and the mere thought of taking him to bed I had already had my orgasm.

  If this life I am prowling about in were someone else’s and I its historian (which in fact is the way I am trying to see it), I would rub my hands gleefully over some of the poe
ms I wrote and published in Cambridge. What can these curious productions mean unless that although I regarded myself as free, proud and intellectually unassailable as a homosexual, I was profoundly riddled with guilt? Two in particular seem to me so shocking that I wonder how I ever came to publish them. One is called “On a Photograph of Myself as a Boy.” Of its five overloaded stanzas two will suffice:

  My younger self, what were you musing on

  So gladly in that calm, sequestered place?

  Your young beliefs are now forever gone,

  And gone the peace that lighted then your face.