A Sort of Life (3 page)

I think that my parents’ was a very loving marriage; how far any marriage is happy is another matter and beyond an outsider’s knowledge. Happiness can be ruined by children, by financial anxieties, by so many secret things: love too can be ruined, but I think their love withstood the pressure of six children and great anxieties. I was in Sierra Leone, running ineffectually a one-man office of the Secret Service, when my father died in 1942. The news came in two telegrams delivered in the wrong order – the first told me of his death – the second an hour later of his serious illness. Suddenly, between the secret reports to be coded and decoded, I unexpectedly felt misery and remorse, remembering how as a young man I had deliberately set out to shock his ideas which had been unflinchingly liberal in politics and gently conservative in morals. I had a Mass said for him by Father Mackey, the Irish priest in Freetown. I thought that if my father could know he would regard the gesture with his accustomed liberality and kindly amusement – he had never disputed by so much as a word my decision to become a Catholic. At least I felt sure that my method of payment would have pleased him. The priest asked me for a sack of rice for his poor African parishioners, for rice was scarce and severely rationed, and through my friendship with the Commissioner of Police I was able to buy one clandestinely.

Both parents have known someone the children have never known. My father had known the tall girl with the tiny waist wearing a boater, and my mother the young dandyish man who appeared in a tinted Oxford photograph on their bathroom wall, with a well-trimmed moustache, wearing evening dress with a blue waistcoat. More than ten years after his death my mother wrote to me. She had broken her hip and she had dreamt unhappily that my father had not come to see her in hospital or even written to her and she couldn’t understand it. Now, even when she was awake, she felt unhappy because of his silence. Oddly enough I too had dreamt of him a few days before. My mother and I were driving in a car and at a turn in the road my father had
signalled to us, and when we stopped he came running to catch us up. He was happy, he had a joyful smile as he climbed into the back of the car, for he had been let out of hospital that morning. I wrote to my mother that perhaps there was some truth in the idea of purgatory, and this was the moment of release.

For me this dream was the end of a series which had recurred over the years after his death. In them my father was always shut away in hospital out of touch with his wife and children – though sometimes he returned home on a visit, a silent solitary man, not really cured, who would have to go back again into exile. The dreams remain vivid even today, so that sometimes it is an effort for me to realize that there was no hospital, no separation, and that he lived with my mother till he died. In his last years he had diabetes and always beside her place at table there stood a weighing-machine to measure his diet, and it was she who daily gave him his injections of insulin. There was no truth at all in the idea of his loneliness and unhappiness, but perhaps the dreams show that I loved him more than I knew.

The only separation that really existed was from his children. As a headmaster he was even more distant than our aloof mother. At the Easter holidays we would go to the seaside at Littlehampton, travelling with our mother and nurse in a reserved third-class compartment with a hamper-lunch, but my father wisely would always come down alone a few days later second-class. Sometimes he took a winter holiday alone in Egypt or in France or Italy with a friend, Mr George, a clergyman and headmaster. They remained very formal through all the years, calling each other by their surnames, though naturally George has a less formal sound than Greene. I think their holidays were more intellectual than convivial, for I remember my father naming some place in France visited many years before and saying to his friend, ‘You remember, George, that was where we drank a bottle of wine.’ Once – it was in Naples – they had a curious encounter. A stranger hearing them speak in English asked whether he might join them over their coffee. There was something familiar and to them vaguely disagreeable about his face, but he kept them charmed by his wit for more than an hour before he said good-bye. They didn’t exchange names even at parting and
he left them to pay for his drink which was certainly not coffee. It was some while before they realized in whose company they had been. The stranger was Oscar Wilde, who not very long before had been released from prison. ‘Think,’ my father would always conclude his story, ‘how lonely he must have been to have expended so much time and wit on a couple of schoolmasters on holiday’. It never occurred to him that Wilde was paying for his drink in the only currency he had.
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My mother’s remoteness, her wonderful lack of the possessive instinct, was made much easier for her to achieve by the presence of Nanny, an old woman who came first to look after my elder sister, some thirteen years before these memories begin, and by a long succession of nursery-maids (who never endured very long, for perhaps they represented a threat to Nanny’s future). I remember her bent over my bath with her white hair in a bun, holding a sponge. Her temper deteriorated before she retired on a pension, but I never remember being afraid of her, only impressed by that white bun of age.

Before I was old enough to be taken on these holidays to Littlehampton, when all I knew of the sea was from the gossip of my elders, I used to assume that a pile of sand in a timber yard by the canal bank at Berkhamsted was the seaside; it seemed quite unremarkable to me, and I saw no reason to envy my brothers and sister. Indeed I was very content in those days to remain in one place (a contentment which I envy now). On the occasion of King George V’s coronation, when I was six, I was given the choice of going to London with my parents and the three elder children to seats procured for them by my uncle Graham or of watching the local Berkhamsted procession in the company of my maiden aunt Maud who lived in the town. The more economical alternative carried with it the right to choose a toy from the toy-shop, and to the relief of my parents I chose to stay.
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The toy I chose was a table croquet-set, and I remember with irritation how difficult it was to make the hooked hoops stand straight on a tablecloth. In the local procession somebody rode in armour on a horse, impersonating probably the Duke of Cornwall, and this recalled the picture of a knight in a big bound volume of some girls’ magazine in the dining-room. (Later I loved
Ivanhoe
and Maurice Hewlett’s
The Forest Lovers
and the first stories I tried to write were of the Middle Ages.) The toy-shop was kept by the old woman called Figg in the High Street. One climbed down a few steps into something like a crowded cabin, where on bunk over bunk lay the long narrow boxes of Britain’s toy soldiers, quite inexpensive in those days, in an amazing variety which recalled all the imperial wars of the past century: Sepoys and Zulus and Boers and Russians and French. From memories of those first six years I have a general impression of tranquillity and happiness, and the world held enormous interest, even though I disappointed my mother on my first visit to the Zoo by sitting down and saying, ‘I’m tired. I want to go home.’

There were terrors, too, of course, but they would have been terrors at any age. I distinguish here between terror and fear. From terror one escapes screaming, but fear has an odd seduction. Fear and the sense of sex are linked in secret conspiracy, but terror is a sickness like hate.

I inherited from my mother a blinding terror of birds and bats. Even today I loathe the touch of feathers, and I remember how one night at Harston a bat came into my bedroom from one of the great trees on the lawn outside. I saw it poke its furry nose first around the curtains and wait to be observed. Next night I was allowed to keep the window shut, but a bat – I was sure it was the same one – then came down the chimney. I shrieked with my head under the sheet, until my brother Raymond came and caught it in a butterfly net.
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Another recurring terror was of the house catching fire at night and I associate it with sticky coloured plates in the
Boys’ Own Paper
recording the exploits of heroic firemen. There always seemed to be fires in those days, and yet I never actually saw a fire until I witnessed too many of them in the winter of 1940–41. I think it was later, when I was seven, menaced by the approach of school and a new sort of life, that I was terrified by a witch who would lurk at night on the nursery landing by the linen-cupboard. After a long series of nightmares when the witch would leap on my back and dig long mandarin finger-nails into my shoulders, I dreamt I turned on her and fought back and after that she never again appeared in sleep.

Dreams have always had an importance for me: ‘the finest entertainment known and given rag cheap’. Two novels and several short stories have emerged from my dreams, and sometimes I have had hints of what is called by the difficult name of extra-sensory perception. On the April night of the
Titanic
disaster, when I was five and it was Easter holiday time in Littlehampton, I dreamt of a shipwreck. One image of the dream has remained with me for more than sixty years: a man in oilskins bent double beside a companion-way under the blow of a great wave. Again in 1921 I wrote home from my psycho-analyst’s: ‘A night or two ago I had a shipwreck dream, the ship I was on going down in the Irish Sea. I didn’t think anything about it. We don’t have papers here as the usual thing, and if was not till yesterday, looking at an old paper, I saw about the sinking of the
Rowan
in the Irish Sea. I looked at my dream diary and found that my dream had been Saturday night. The accident had happened just after Saturday midnight.’ Again in 1944 I dreamed of a V.l missile some weeks before the first attack. It passed horizontally across the sky flaming at the tail in the very form it was to take.

Memory is like a long broken night. As I write, it is as though I am waking from sleep continually to grasp at an image which I hope may drag in its wake a whole intact dream, but the fragments remain fragments, the complete story always escapes.

I must have been still under six years old when we all waited through a sunny afternoon in the St John’s garden – on the English side of the road – for the chance of seeing Blériot making his London to Manchester flight, but he never passed overhead – it was a long afternoon wasted, when we might have been across the Channel in France, in the holiday-garden.

I hated the very idea of children’s parties. They were a threat that one day I might have to put to practical use my dancing lessons, of which I can only remember the black shiny shoes with the snappy elastic and the walk down King’s Road, between the red-brick villas on winter evenings, holding someone’s hand for fear of slipping. The only children’s party I can actually remember was up near Berkhamsted Common in a big strange house, where I never went again; a Chinese amah asked me if I wanted to make water and I did not understand her, so that always afterwards I thought of it as a Chinese expression. Many years later I wrote a short story about a children’s party, and another about dancing lessons, and perhaps there are memories concealed in them too.

I have an impression my father used to smack me as a child though I can remember only one specific beating at a later age, perhaps because it woke a sexual interest in me. Once I called my my maiden aunt Maud a bugger and she reported it to my father, who pulled me out from under a table and demanded an apology which I was unwilling to give, not knowing what my offence was. Indeed I never meant to offend her. I was closer to her than to any other of my numerous aunts, most of them officially maiden – Helen who ran a school of Swedish gymnastics and had passionate women friendships, dear muddle-headed Polly who lived at Harston and painted bad pictures and taught Gwen Raverat to draw and wrote ambitious plays for the village institute (the whole conflict between Christianity and Paganism in
Northumbria she managed to contain in a one-act piece with fifty characters), the beautiful mysteriously gay Nora (whom we knew as Nono), Alice, the progressive, who ran a school in South Africa and was a friend of General Smuts and Olive Schreiner, Madge, an aunt-by-marriage, the pretty daughter of the Irish poet Doctor Todhunter – she sang songs about ‘Away with the gipsies oh’ in pre-Raphaelite gowns from Liberty’s.

And somehow left out, I think, of all the children’s memories except as a figure in the remote background of the sunny garden – one had to peer to see her closer – there was Florence, who lived in her own cottage at Harston. Harston had been colonized by the Greenes almost as effectively as Berkhamsted or, as I was to discover later, St Kitts. The Greenes seemed to move as a tribe like the Bantus, taking possession. Helen, Polly, Alice and Florence were all paternal Greenes, and Florence was the only girl to marry, but as she had no children she returned to the tribe. I remember her as a thin peaky old lady, her face, which had perhaps been beautiful, hidden behind a spotted veil, tied like Queen Alexandra’s under the chin. She had none of the gaiety, fantasy and silliness of Polly; she wasn’t brusque and masculine like Helen and Alice. She hadn’t a family voice at all that one could recognize. It was as though her loss of virginity kept her apart from all the other Greene aunts – she was only Mrs Phillips, the widow of a county schoolmaster. And yet before she married she had been the most romantic of them all. At eighteen she fell in love with a young sailor who wanted to leave the navy and emigrate with her to the wilder parts of Australia, but the wisdom of older relations prevailed. Otherwise Australia might have been colonized too. Four years later a rich brewer in Lincoln wanted to marry her and gave her the
Life of Charles Kingsley
. He was a poor substitute for the young sailor and nothing came of that. There was a Mr Rust, but no one ever knew which of the sisters he had an eye on, so Florence finally settled for Mr Phillips, the schoolmaster. He kept a little monkey who ate oranges, dividing them meticulously, peeled paper off the walls, and put his arms tenderly round Mr Phillips’s neck. Would Mr Phillips without the monkey have been enough? Strangely, as an old lady, one thought of Aunt Florence as being always on
a visit, from remoter regions even than Alice, perhaps from Australia.