Experience: A Memoir

by Martin Amis

  We stood on the busy and well-lit foothill of Glanmore Road. Now we started off together, up into the steepening gloom. In a practised but roundabout way the youth asked me if, following his leniency with the pebble and the drain, I might consider doing him a favour. ‘What?’ I asked. He said he would give me a chocolate toffee, a Rolo — ‘or possibly two’ — if I would oblige him. ‘What is it?’ ‘Oh, it won’t take a minute. Just show me … ewe willie.’

  I came to a halt and received the pressure of tears on my chest. Strange: we know that children cry from fear, but this felt more like grief. I crossed the road. He watched me as I climbed the hill. I said nothing to my mother when I got home.

  A couple of weeks later I reencountered the boy with green eyes. I was a block from home, on a side street I crossed every schoolday (it had a good dirt lane, a shortcut, up the other end of it). Again it was dark, late, wet.

  — Oi. What ewe doing down here on my road?

  He had a companion with him, a stocky little boy, considerably and reassuringly younger and shorter than me. This terrible toddler, I would soon learn, was called David and answered to the usual Welsh diminutive.

  — What ewe doing down here on my road?

  — Your road?

  — It him, Dai.

  With explosive alacrity, like a fast bowler at the moment of release, Dai hurled his closed fist into my forehead. I didn’t know that boys that size could hit that hard. But I did know two things. One, that the attack was revenge for the favour earlier denied. Two, that little Dai, at least to begin with, had enjoyed Rollos by the tubeful. But Christ knows what they turned into, this pair. And Christ knows what their children turned into.

  — Who said ewe could walk past my house?

  — I didn’t know it wasn’t allowed.

  — … It im again, Dai.

  And so on for about ten minutes, the same question, and the same command. When I got home I told my mother how I had come by my swollen face. I gave her the bare facts, and not the subtext. Immediately she leashed up the three big dogs: Nancy, certainly, and Flossie? and Bessie? With anxious adoration I watched her go down the hill, like Charlton Heston or Steve Reeves wielding the reins of the chariot. The dogs, no less indignant than their mistress, were almost upright on their leads.

  She returned half an hour later, still furious and still unavenged.

  I was returning from the playing-field to my class. Cambridgeshire High School for Boys, during the Cuba Crisis, which places us in the week of 22—28 October, 1962, and puts me two months into my teenhood.

  The Cuba Crisis, I am sure, had a far heavier effect on me than the relatively minor violation I am about to describe — which might itself have been crisis-borne. I remember it* as one long dankly gleaming twilight: darkness at noon, a solar eclipse, an Icelandic winter morning. The planet’s children suffered this crisis — the most severe in human history — dumbly, with abject dumbness. I could talk about it afterwards (with David, for instance) but I said not a word to my friends at the time; and I don’t recall hearing any reassurance (or any effective reassurance) from my mother or my father. When the TV showed the kill targets, the concentric circles, the fallout forecasts, I bolted from the room. At school we had had our nuclear drills, where, I repeat, we were invited to believe that our desk-lids would save us from the end of the world. What were we supposed to do with such a notion? And what did it do to us?* The children of the nuclear age, I think, were weakened in their capacity to love. Hard to love, when you’re bracing yourself for impact. Hard to love, when the loved one, and the lover, might at any instant become blood and flames, along with everybody else.

  I was returning from the playing-field when I was jumped on by a group of older boys and dragged into a classroom. Some major inadvertency (perhaps this was connected to the crisis, too) had brought it about that an entire school outbuilding was left uninvigilated all afternoon — long enough, at any rate, for eighteen or twenty of the younger children to get the treatment that was waiting for me. The maximal resistance I gave was the result of primitive panic and remained unsubdued by blows and threats as I was spread out on the absent master’s desk and roughly stripped. On the blackboard someone had chalked up a kind of manifest; I thought for a moment that it was a school timetable, but in fact it was just a scorecard, giving each victim’s name, his age, his form, and the state of his sexual development, if any. For the record, my entry concluded: TINY. NO HAIRS AT ALL … Well, I could live with that. That wasn’t the end of the world, I thought, as I ran away clutching my belt in one hand and a shoe in the other. If fear is simply the intense desire for something to be over, then I had indeed been horribly frightened, that day. Frightened by their hysteria, their self-goading mob energy, all splutter and grinning spittle. Was there nihilism in it? Who cared? We were all dead anyway. But the essence, the gravamen, was the forcible restraint and what that does to the spirit.

  I was lying in bed on a bright summer evening. We are not in the city and we are not in the village. We are in the suburbs of Princeton, New Jersey: Edgerstoune Road, a stretch of detached single-storey houses backed by woods and hillocks … My parents were giving one of their parties, and I could hear it, like a baritone schoolyard, several walls away. Sometimes at these events my brother and I served as paid waiters: $3 each, on one famous occasion. But it was apparently too late for me to be up, though the room felt full of day and I seemed a great distance from sleep. It was 1959 and I was nearly ten — and fully Americanised, for now: accent, crewcut, racing bike with whitewall tyres and electric horn …

  The door opened and a dapper middle-aged man smiled and confidently entered, followed by a woman in a grey silk blouse beneath a black jacket, dark-haired, handsome, even distinguished, with artistic bones. At the sight of me her face ‘lit up’: it is the what-have-we-here? expression of the adult who lacks all talent with children (under more normal circumstances they approach on tiptoe and address you in an idiocy-imputing singsong). Throughout she remained by the open door, one hand holding a cocktail glass, the other flat on her breastbone. The man came towards the bed and sat down on the foot of it. After some general inquiries he introduced the notion that he was a doctor and that it would be a good thing if he examined me. Grateful for the diversion, I slipped readily out of my pyjamas.

  Now, looking back, I wonder how many children came before and after me, and I wonder how far it went. In my case it went as far as what is usually called ‘fondling’, though the word is blasphemously inapt, suggesting that the man touched me ‘lovingly’ (he was not a lover. He was a raptor). And what kind of mission was this anyway, to come to the house of a friend or a colleague, to find a solitary boy-child, and, risking everything, to conspire against his trust?

  This third violation has taken on a new resonance in my mind, following the exhumation of Lucy Partington, because it involved grown adults and a folie à deux.* Significantly, perhaps, my memory of the man is vacant — a shape, a tone, an outline. But my memory of the woman is intact and entire. How she leant against the open door, maintaining her tall-eyed, all’s-well smile as she turned, every few seconds, to glance down the corridor. I must have noticed those glances at the time, their frequency, their dissimulated stealthiness. All this had to melt down through me.

  It didn’t feel like an unpleasant experience at the time but it clearly was an unpleasant experience. Why didn’t I mention it to my mother the next morning, or any morning, chattily, innocently, over breakfast or on the way to school? As with the other incidents, I kept quiet, and was obliged to make my own sense of it. These are insults. These are thefts. They take something from you that you never quite get back.

  Paedophilia means ‘love of children’. And paedophiles will say that that is all they are doing: loving children. Like suicide, paedophilia is an evasive subject, and little understood. But some statistical emphases point you in a certain direction. When violating girl children, for instance, the paedophile shows a marked preference for s
odomy. And those under paedophiliac assault are very likely to be additionally hurt, too (never mind, for now, about the ‘untold damage’ of an intrusion into the sensorium of a child); and, secondly, with these supererogatory beatings, the younger the child the greater the danger. The younger the child … That tells me something. And so does this. When I have handled my babies I have had the wayward thought, the thought suggested by their beauty and their innocence. It feels like a sexual thought but in essence it is a violent thought. To act it out in any way would be like dashing the naked body to the bathroom floor. Paedophiles hate children. They hate children because they hate innocence, and children are innocence. Look at them. They come here naked — but not quite. To the fit pair of eyes they come here thoroughly armoured: with native honour clad.

  Syzygy

  Here is a geographical epiphany. At the most westerly point of the Welsh peninsula, on the tip of its lower talon, lies St David’s, widely but quietly famed, in the 1950s, as the smallest city on earth. It was a village that had a cathedral in it. It was a city that was also a village.

  One summer I went there on a camping holiday with my aunt Miggy and her four children: Marian, David, Lucy, Mark. That time lives in my memory as a stretch of unpunctuated delectation, as if the sea salt in my throat was continuously succumbing to the taste of ice cream. When we got ready for bed in the great tepee I felt I was shedding my towny complexity and mire, and that I was entering a calmer universe than the one I would (eventually) return to Aunt Miggy was my mother and yet not my mother. David was my brother and yet not my brother. This was my family and yet not my family. Night was only a cone of canvas away, but I was fully protected. In Speak, Memory, writing about his uncle, Nabokov is economically elegant on the child’s sense of secondary, or additional, security: ‘Everything is as it should be, nothing will ever change, nobody will ever die.’

  Some freak perihelion or syzygy caused the sun to hang unnaturally low in the late afternoons. A tennis ball would cast a shadow two yards long. As David and I, anticipating an evening snack, went to visit some new friends on the site, our hosts — two men sitting with their back to us around a fire — would start calling out greetings when we were forty feet away. We were growing boys. We were immensely proud of our shadows.

  When the time came these new friends agreed to drive me back to Swansea. ‘We’ll be getting to your place about lunchtime, Martin,’ one said. ‘We’ll be getting to your house around the time that people have lunch,’ said the other. The great Eva Garcia was alerted.

  Throughout the journey I sat hunched forwards on the back seat, praying that Eva would be at her best and not staring tragically out from under her red bandanna. We arrived, at 24 The Grove (the house had somehow been passed on to the Garcias). And Eva’s welcome was warm to the point of flirtation. My heart swelled as she laughingly and lavishly served up her speciality and staple: fried eggs, chips, toast and tea. Eva’s eggs: the pale sun of the yolk, the succulence of the glair.

  It was not Eva’s fault, of course, but it was her peculiarly Welsh privilege, in Cambridge, in 1963, to tell me that all this was over. The first act was over. Only when I came to write the present book did I realise how much I lost and how far I fell in the course of that brief sentence: ‘You know your father …?’ Childhood, the grandparents, the Partingtons, the village, the animals, the garden, innocence, even Eva herself: all wiped out.

  And my father, too, was gone or going.

  To the end of his life Kingsley maintained the following: ‘the idea was’ that he would have his holiday with Jane, and then return to the family (and then go on seeing her as often as he could). Still, he knew he had crossed a line with my mother. He did come back to the house on Madingley Road. I imagine he must have been very frightened to find it empty, vacated by animals, children, wife. He didn’t like empty houses anyway. There was nothing there, not even a note.

  We had absconded to Soller, Majorca, to a villa the family had already rented for an experimental year abroad. I can’t describe it because I can’t remember it — golden walls, an orange grove, much sun, great gloom. In his useful if curiously repetitive biography,* Eric Jacobs writes:

  It may be that their marriage unravelled more by miscalculation than by plan, certainly with no deliberate intention that it should on Amis’s side. Perhaps, he thought, Hilly had gone off to Majorca as a way of calling his bluff, in the hope that he would rush off after her full of contrition and eager to renounce Jane. If so she was mistaken.

  No. My mother had crossed a line too. The idea of Kingsley ‘rushing off’ to Spain is fantastic. If Mum had taken us off to Miggy’s (as Miggy, once, had come to her), then my father might have fought his way to Gretton. But Soller? To accomplish this he would have needed: someone to make all the bookings, someone to get him to Southampton, someone to share his cabin on the boat, and someone to lead him from Palma to Soller and right up to our front door. The only possible candidate for the task was Elizabeth Jane Howard. Anyway, it didn’t happen. The marriage was still very far from loveless, but my mother had made a decision. She tells me, now, that she fantasised about Kingsley ‘rushing off’ to Spain, but never expected it. My mother understood the force of that old precept (or tautology) about character being destiny. Of course, it is idle to quarrel with the fait accompli of the past, idle of me to ‘wish’ that my father had stayed with my mother. Divorces are like revolutions: accomplished fact. But I am struck by the symmetry of it: the same phobias, the same neurotic timidities that kept them apart in 1963 would reunite them, in 1981.

  After a few weeks in Soller my brother and I fell into a wordless routine. After breakfast we went through the orange grove to the iron gates and sat on the wall and waited. We were waiting for the postman. We were waiting for something from my father — something that his occasional notes and postcards weren’t bringing us: they seemed paltry, tangential, wholly incommensurate. What took us out there every morning? What did we need to know? It got paler and paler, this waiting. We said little. The oranges were orange and the leaves were green. The postman’s motorbike was red. The letters were white or brown and the postcards colourful. But I couldn’t see these colours. The oppression did not appear to originate from my own heart: the world was doing it, subtracting clarity from things. We were almost comatose by the time my mother put us on the plane.

  I can see Kingsley now, in his striped pyjamas, rearing back from us in histrionic consternation. London, midnight, the harsh doorbell. The plane was late, the warning telegram had not arrived. It wasn’t just that he was surprised to see us. He was horrified to see us. We had busted him in flagrante delicto: in blazing crime … Our mother had been terse (though never critical) in her descriptions of his living arrangements. And Eva’s unconfirmed figment of the ‘fancy woman’ (all bangles, cleavage and electric red hair) had faded in my mind. Kingsley, we had come to understand, was living in a ‘bachelor flat’. When I thought of my father, during the later weeks of that four-month separation, I pictured him in the unlikely role of a functioning, indeed rather houseproud single man: Kingsley heating up a philosophical TV-dinner; Kingsley frowning as he chafed that stubborn stain on the saucepan; Kingsley ironing a shirt … These were his opening words to Philip and me, nicely phrased, I thought (even then): ‘You know I’m not alone.’

  Devastated, and scandalized, the brothers shrugged coolly, and entered.

  In her white towel bathrobe, with her waist-long fair hair, tall, serious, worldly, Jane loomed beyond him — already busying herself, cooking eggs and bacon, finding sheets, blankets, for the beds in the spare room. It would have been an impossible heresy for me to admit that any woman was more beautiful than my mother. But I could tell at once that Jane, while also being beautiful, was certainly more experienced.* And experience accounts for the well-attested attraction, to the Young Man, of the Older Woman. It isn’t just a matter of sexual experience. The older woman brings with her the glamour and mystery of life lived — people met, places se
en, experiences experienced. Jane had been around, and at a high level — higher than my father’s. I acknowledged the appeal of that with simple resignation and I did not feel disloyal to my mother.

  That week passed in a spree of expert treats — gimmicky restaurants, the just-released 55 Days at Peking† in Leicester Square, the Harrod’s fruitjuice bar, a new LP each (mine was Meet the Searchers, featuring ‘Love Potion Number Nine’) — counterbalanced by long, fumbling and (for us) inevitably lachrymose discussions between father and sons. Outwardly calm, unusually quiet-voiced, Kingsley set about the task of explaining how marriages unravel. He took everything we threw at him, even when Philip said (incredibly, to me — but then again the words were tearfully blurted), ‘You’re a cunt.’ These talks served a vital purpose, though it wasn’t one of elucidation. All I can remember, from Kingsley’s end of it, is a derisory ramble about china tea — how Dad liked it, and Mum never remembered to buy it, and now here he was, contentedly awash in Earl Grey … Towards the end of our visit the journalist George Gale‡ came to dinner. Pretty soon he was putting on his coat again and heading off to Fleet Street. The telephone had rung. This was a call from the real world. ‘No!’ my father shouted into the mouthpiece. Jane wept. That was where I was and who I was with when I learned that Lee Harvey Oswald had killed President Kennedy.

  As soon as we got back to Spain we entered the swirl of school — in Palma. This establishment, run by a theatrically pedantic Yorkshireman, was casual and cosmopolitan and above all coeducational, featuring the daughters of businessmen and diplomats: wonderful, terrifying and inconceivably distant young women. Fascistic and Catholic, Spain nonetheless showed considerable laxity towards the young, and Philip and I were starting to enjoy new freedoms. My mother appeased us with dirt-track motorbikes which we crashed about eight times a day. We could order a beer at the cafés in the town square after school; and once, with a friend, we had a brandy each before school (where we would be known, thereafter, as Los Tres Coãacs). Spanish cinemas acknowledged no rating system, and we paid several visits to a perfunctorily dubbed Psycho.* There was a girl of sixteen who often commuted with us on the Soller-Palma train. Saying it was an experiment, she once kissed me on the mouth with parted lips. I thought: This is heavenly, but shouldn’t it be happening to Philip?†