Experience: A Memoir

by Martin Amis

  The locomotive we rode on had a rating system, and one strictly enforced. Its first-class carriage was a mobile drawing-room, a thickly carpeted boudoir, with sofas, paintings, and swaying chandelier. Second class was a bourgeois barber shop of leather and mirror and antimacassar. But when I travelled alone I always chose the bare wood of third, for a reason that still makes me feel slightly serpentine. In those packed, silent, orderly carriages there was a better chance of seeing something you never saw in the Protestant north: nursing mothers. And although the back of the baby’s head looked nice enough, I have to confess that the bit I liked came before and after. Nobody else watched; nobody else noticed. In a country where tourists in bikinis were arrested at gunpoint, there was still this virtuous nudity, invisible to all except a furtive young foreigner whose thoughts were no longer pure.

  My brother and I were undergoing the integral ordeal of turning into men, but we had ceased to be deeply unhappy. In a late interview, talking about this time, Kingsley said that he partly owed his survival to the forgiveness of his children. Yet forgiveness, in the sense of full reacceptance, was never in doubt. Philip and I now knew that our father, while no longer with us, while no longer married to our mother, was still our father.

  In the late spring we went back to England. From then on it was all city, all London, and all experience.

  When I go back to the core of my childhood Lucy Partington seems always to be in the peripheral vision of my memories. I keep thinking that if I could only shift my head an inch and change its angle then I would see her fully. Just as Marian, a year my senior, was magnified in my mind, so Lucy, two and a half years younger, was additionally reduced (and little Mark was no more than a pair of legs in shorts, running off to where he needed to go). Only David did I see foursquare … Some people, alas, live and die without trace. They come and they go and they leave no trace. This, at least, was not Lucy’s destiny.

  She is off to one side, always off to one side, with a book, with a scheme or a project or an enterprise. Or with an animal. There were animals everywhere — it was like Big Red Barn with additional humans. And there was always a great succession of ponies and horses, gymkhanas, rosettes. I remember Marian practising jumps in the field beyond the garden. I remember Lucy in riding gear, her spectacled face eagerly smiling under a cloth-covered helmet. Every afternoon, to rusticated chants of ‘The cays are coming’, the cows did come, like a slow-motion Pamplona, dozens of them, with that rolling, shouldering trudge, down Duglinch Lane, which they basted with their steaming breath and their steaming dung. The cows never glanced at the small herd of children that watched them so intently every day. Like other Bardwells — like my mother, for example — Lucy Partington understood the innocence and mystery of animals, and she wrote about them with a clairvoyant eye, even as a child. In my clearest image of her she is crossing the small courtyard between the stable and the house, looking downwards and smiling secretively, privately, as if sharing a joke with the mouse I knew she had in her pocket.

  I was, on the whole, an equable little boy, easily the ‘easiest’ of the younger Amises. I loved my sister Sally, and often considered myself to be her appointed guardian;* I was capable of shedding tears of sympathy when she was distressed. But the Amises were, in configuration, a rough and ready boy-boy-girl (as opposed to the platonic perfection of the Partingtons’ girl-boy-girl-boy). Philip, therefore, exerted his will on Martin, and Martin, therefore, exerted his will on Sally. I did some terrible things to her,† often in concert with Philip. So as a ten-year-old, say, I might have looked at Lucy (seven-and-a-half) as someone I could mock or manipulate. But such an impulse was quite absent in David, and instantly vanished in me. It was a straightforward matter: you simply wouldn’t dare. You wouldn’t dare tangle with Lucy, and not just because you feared her rectitude and her wit. Her presence was somehow infinitely self-sufficient and self-determining. She was autonomous because she was powerful. And the idea of encroaching on her universe still makes me quail. When I think of Lucy being bound or restrained my nerves and membranes feel her moral force and its demand for release. This, together with the fact that her assailant was without physical courage, is my best reason for allowing a passionate hope — that it was all over quickly — to grow into something very like a belief.

  Then there are the photographs. Lucy’s poetry and prose were collected on her twenty-second birthday, 4 March 1974, just over three months after her disappearance. On the last page of the pamphlet — the Poetry and Prose — we see the author (aged eight) and her grandmother (Mummy B.) sitting on deckchairs in February sunshine. Lucy is in wellington boots and tartan trousers. She has an exercise book open on her lap. Almost fully camouflaged, the mouse Snowy nestles in a crook of her white rollneck sweater. Death has come to all three creatures pictured here. My cousin and my grandmother are both wearing spectacles, and they are smiling the same smile. I know that smile.

  Then there is the photograph I keep in my study (the glasses again, the school tie: ‘undesirable alien’), back to back with the other photograph: the two-year-old girl in the sandals and the flower dress, my daughter, Delilah.

  Then there is the photograph you will find in all the books, the smiling face among the other smiling faces of the other murdered girls. I know that Bardwell smile from a photograph of my mother when she was twenty-one, sitting with Kingsley (and Mandy, the dog) outside Marriner’s Cottage, near Oxford — and expecting me.

  * It was a good start, and it was a good finish, too: ‘… I have heard a number of people describe Lucy as sensible and I remember when I was about ten and I talked with Lucy about how sensible she was and she said to me, “Well the thing is that I like to be opposite of what people around me are doing.” ’

  * Weeks earlier Nancy had been hit by a car. Her right foreleg was broken, and the dragging paw became inflamed and then infected … Once, in South Africa, on a visit to a game reserve, my sons and I inspected a crocodile that had undergone the Mike Szabatura experience in jungle conditions: its entire upper mandible (about a third of its head) had been wrenched off in some unspeakable croc rumble. It lay there steaming and gurgling and reeking and, above all (being a reptile), waiting, waiting, waiting (waiting, in this case, for a bucket of food to be upended on to its tongue). I didn’t feel that the animal was aware of any significant reduction in its quality of life — any absence of a certain je ne sais quoi … It was different with Nancy, unfortunately. She was brave, and skipped along as best she could, but I kept thinking I saw sorrow, bewilderment and even disgrace in her frown and her hot brown eyes. I had become even closer to her after the accident. She was laid up on a mattress in the TV room, and every evening I had to persuade Nancy that it was all right for her to pee where she was. It took a long time; again the eyes, and great anxiety.

  * Sordidly trolling up and down the King’s Road, with Rob, one Saturday in the late Sixties, I came across a troupe of morris dancers performing in a garden square. ‘My granddad used to do this stuff,’ I was saying, when a costumed figure pressed a pamphlet into my hand. I opened it: and there was a photograph of the now-deceased Daddy B., in full rig, delightedly leading the Abingdon ‘side’.

  † The senior Bardwells were referred to by my parents as Daddy B. and Mummy B., the senior Amises as Daddy A. and Mummy A.

  ‡ For instance, who is the winner in this anecdote (addressed, again, to Larkin)?

  The best time was when I was lying in a partially filled bath with him in the room underneath accompanying on the piano, his foot regularly tapping, folk tunes he was playing on the gramophone, there being a difference in pitch between the two sources of sound of approximately one-3rd of a full tone. As one vapid, uniformly predictable tune ended and another began I found that the hot tap was now dispensing cold water, and getting out of the bath, began drying myself.

  I sympathise, but my vote goes to the regularly tapping foot. Kingsley’s portrait has its kinder moments. At one point he allows that there is ‘no harm�
� in the old boy. And we mustn’t forget the sweetness and decency shown by his fictional counterpart, Professor Welch in Lucky Jim (‘Poor old Daddy B.,’ wrote Larkin, on finishing it), over the matter of the scorched and savaged bedding. Letter to Larkin again (and I like the defeated tone): ‘I can see now what makes fathers fling their children out of the house with a few bob at the age of 11; mine ran up to him [Daddy B.] with cries of delighted welcome.’

  * My godfather and a fantastically bountiful one — especially when compared to my brother’s godfather and namesake: the lenten Larkin. Bruce was a minor composer who also wrote and anthologised crime fiction under the name of Edmund Crispin.

  * I don’t want to be mistaken here. My father had the innocence you need to be a novelist, and the greater innocence you need to be a poet. But he answered strongly to experience too; it roiled in him, and in us.

  * Kingsley and I agreed, by the way, that the last forty-odd lines of Paradise Lost were incomparably the greatest thing in non-dramatic poetry in English.

  * A couple of years ago, after being thoroughly nosed by a salt-and-pepper Alsatian (Nancy! How could you do this to me?), I was stripsearched for drugs at Venice Airport. ‘The dogs are never wrong,’ said the spivvy plainclothesman, dressed in full entrapment gear with earring and neck bracelet. I was guided into a back room. The first thing I saw was a man flexing and wriggling his fingers into a raised rubber glove, and I thought — No, you ain’t going to do that, are you? I wanted to say: You’ve got the right guy but you’ve got the wrong trip. (And there would never be a right trip, not after this.) Isabel was there. I started taking my clothes off. When I got down to my boxer shorts I was told to lower them. This I did, and was then contemptuously dismissed. It felt like the crime of indecent exposure in reverse. More than this, though, my nakedness had proved my innocence. A tenuous connection had been made.

  † Technically it was also my first fiasco. A structural fiasco: we were asking each other to double in age. No reproaches were voiced. And I didn’t have to lie there with a hand spread limply across my forehead, going on about my homework and the pressures facing the contemporary eight-year-old.

  * Frederick West was always very much of the village, then, later, very much of the city, too. Unsurprisingly, his early, yokellish brutalities were visited on animals.

  * We all remember it. To paraphrase Christopher Hitchens’s pertinent inversion: Like everybody else, I remember exactly where I was standing and who I was with at the moment that President Kennedy nearly killed me … Except it wasn’t just a moment, it wasn’t just a week. It began with the first Russian test, on 29 August 1949, and it lasted for forty years.

  * In Don DeLillo’s novel Underworld (1997), which is an 800-page meditation on this query, the schoolchildren are issued with dogtags. ‘The tags were designed to help rescue workers identify children who were lost, missing, injured, maimed, mutilated, unconscious or dead following the onset of atomic war … [The children] were expecting a drill, the duck-and-cover drill, which they’d rehearsed before the tags arrived. Now that they had the tags, their names inscribed on wispy tin, the drill was not a remote exercise but was all about them, and so was atomic war.’

  * Frederick West, like Rosemary West, was a paedophile. He raped and sexually tortured his own children, and murdered two of them. ‘Your first child should be your dad’s,’ he used to tell his girls — a line that seems to have a kind of caveman rectitude about it (you could imagine it being parlayed into some sententious village-idiot couplet, beginning, ‘Unless first child by father be / …’). ‘I made you,’ West would say in answer to his daughters’ protests. ‘So, I can touch you.’ In Out of the Shadows, the gauntly painful memoir she wrote (with Virginia Hill), Anne Marie, West’s eldest, reveals that her father succeeded in making her pregnant when she was fifteen. The ectopic foetus was surgically removed; Anne Marie was told that the operation was ‘something to do with her periods’. Years later, after complications with her two subsequent pregnancies and a full hysterectomy at the age of twenty-three, she saw her medical records and then confronted her father. ‘You don’t do things like that to children. I was just a child. I loved you. You abused that and me,’ she told him, among other things. Before saying that he wasn’t going to listen to ‘this fucking rubbish’ and stalking out of the house, West, absolutely floundering, came up with: ‘If you’re going to bring up all that stuff — well, you’re no bloody daughter of mine.’ In 1994 Anne Marie left flowers on the gates of 25 Cromwell Street and a note to her murdered sibling: ‘To my sister Heather, I’ve searched and sought, I’ve wept and prayed we’d meet again some sunny day. Missing you so very much. Will always love and remember you. All my fondest love, Big Sis, Anna-Marie.’ As I was finishing this book Marian Partington told me that Anne Marie (the name changed), with whom she is in touch, was lucky to survive a recent attempt at suicide. She has all Marian’s sympathy, and all mine.

  * Kingsley Amis: A Biography (1995). See, in due course, Appendix.

  * Jane was in fact a few years older than my mother — close to my father’s age (forty-one at the time). Philip and I had just turned fifteen and fourteen respectively.

  † After a while, Kingsley got off his seat and lay down on the floor every time Ava Gardner appeared on screen. Ava Gardner was the co-star, opposite Charlton Heston; and 55 Days at Peking, according to my Halliwell, runs for 154 minutes. In all, Kingsley must have spent a good half an hour stretched out on our shoes.

  ‡ A.k.a., satirically, George G. Ale.

  * This was another film that had a notable effect on my father. I was especially pumped-up for it, after this conversation with my mother in Cambridge a year earlier:

  — Mum. Why is Dad following you about and making you go to the bathroom with him?

  — Because we saw a very frightening film last night.

  — What was it about?

  — … It’s about a man who thinks he’s his mother.

  Her answer satisfied me. I thought: Yes. That would do it.

  † Needless to say, it was happening to Philip, very thoroughly, with somebody else. An Older Woman, too. I couldn’t believe his luck when he told me about it. I was only a year behind him, true, but years lasted a very long time in those days, and were not the mere afternoons, the mere evanescences, they have since become.

  * Sally was born on 17 January 1954, at 24 The Grove. I was allowed on the scene soon afterwards, and I have an utterly radiant — and utterly false — memory of my hour-old sister, her features angelically formed, her blonde tresses curling down over her shoulders. In fact, of course, she was just like the other Amis babies: a howling pizza. Larkin celebrated her arrival with ‘Born Yesterday’, a poem that Sally, over the course of her life, often rewrote, its opening line, ‘Tightly-folded bud …’, becoming, at one point, the no-nonsense ‘Fat pod …’, and so on.

  † This was the worst. From my bed I once flung a small pair of scissors at Sally, or in her direction, as she slept. The point struck her forehead — and yet she slept on. Only when I was wiping away the few drops of blood did she stir. ‘What are you doing?’ she asked. ‘I’m just wiping your brow.’ Then she said, unforgettably, ‘Hanks,’ and, with a sigh, resumed her rightful slumber.

  Letter from Home

  108 Maida Vale

  London, W.9.

  9/1/68.

  Dearest Dad and Jane

  Thank you both for your respective letters. It’s nice to know you expected it of me: while I knew that failure to secure a place at Oxford would not be complemented by my being thrown naked into the streets, I did, however, enjoy the calm reassurance that neither of you would ever speak to me again. VERY seriously though, thank you, O Jane, for quite literally getting me into Oxford. Had you not favoured my education with your interest and sagacity, I would now be a 3—O-levelled wretch with little to commend me. I have a huge debt to you which I shall work off by being an ever-dutiful step-son.

  By the way, the idea of commut
ing to Brighton thrice-weekly sounds fine to me, but that limber elf, the celebrated hobbie-gobbie, takes a more cautious line. I see his point, or rather mine, but I think staying in Brighton for 6 months of solid … [The present letter is incomplete, so this is definitely the time and the place to clarify the structural function of these letters, what with the author’s sudden and florid reOsricization (the symptom, now, not of torpor but of pride). Down in Brighton there had previously been an auxiliary English master (it was usually the Goblin who gave us our Shakespeare, Coleridge, Lawrence), and he had fingered me, I felt, for an anti-talent — a powerfully facile anti-talent, but an anti-talent. What was his name? A disappointed, passionate, longsuffering being, with an air of intelligent melancholy; if they had made a film about this man, then only Denholm Elliott could have played him. In an essay on Wilfred Owen I wrote something like: ‘To extricate himself from the Georgians, Owen needed the Great War; as a poet he was animated by the shocks and amazements of great suffering.’ Denholm Elliott had underlined the last seven words and suggested: ‘Why not just say “it”?’ With Osric here, what we are seeing is the first pass, the first lunge at language. Always a painful sight — but ignore it. Structurally, that’s what these letters are for: to allow the reader, hard-pressed by the world as it is, to enjoy a few moments of vacuity, of luxurious inanition, before coming to the matter ahead.] … erchiefs for Xmas. Deeply moved, I reciprocated the gift with a featherweight gilt-edged mirror which is doubtless the pride of that good housewife’s home.