Bad Blood (11 page)

But what went on
inside
? When did Valma realise what her father and Marj were up to? When did she understand that she too was being talked about? What would she even have known about sex, when
her
mother believed it was (all of it, always) vile? She must have ‘known' about MB, from the rows, but clearly that had not alienated her from her father. This affair did, because this time of course (I realise) he was being unfaithful not so much to Hilda as to
her
– betraying her with her friend, making use of her, shaming her in public, turning her into a sexual object before she'd even properly recognised her own wants . . . She must have been burningly ashamed, especially if she felt jealous of Marj, as she may well have, given her old role in her father's Rhondda life, when he was her tutor and she his main link with the world.

And there was another bitter betrayal. He seemed to have forgotten that she was a clever girl, and lost all interest in her mind and character, in his hectic obsession with the mere fact of youth. He may or may not have damaged Marj's young life (she seems to have gone off to her hospital training on time and to have revisited Hanmer later at odd intervals when the fancy took her) but he certainly scarred his daughter's sensibility horribly. She lost all the confidence and hopefulness you can glimpse in the dashingly virginal girl of 1934. She became fiercely censorious about bodies and their wants, so much so that it always seemed a bit of a miracle that she'd managed to make an exception for my father, and marry and reproduce at all. And she was shy, fearful, mislaid most of what she'd learned from Grandpa or at school and saw herself apologetically as inept, unable to cope with life. She wouldn't talk about intimacies of almost any kind – and that's how I know that despite
the gossip her ‘fast' adolescence was entirely innocent, for she'd reminisce about Percy Davies and his motorbike, and light-hearted times before the war quite openly. Then the blackout curtain in her head would be drawn and she'd be closed off again.

Her alienation didn't happen all at once, though, and in any case it was never complete. There was one corner of her personality in which she remained always her father's daughter, his girl. Although in real life they became strangers, in the magical world of unreality – of theatre – they shared common ground. She starred in
Aladdin
and
Dick Whittington
and his second
Cinderella
in the years between Marj and the war. She did go on with singing lessons, too, and sang in the church choir, doing solo parts in the anthems for special feasts so long as he officiated in Hanmer. The panto songs she still hummed around the house when I was little and she was back among the cinders. One I well remember went ‘I wonder who's kissing her now' (which I think rhymed with ‘showing her how') / ‘I wonder who's looking into her eyes / Breathing sighs / Telling lies . . .' When she acted and sang my mother was the other she might have become – radiant, accomplished, glamorous, often funny, shamelessly extrovert. As I grew up I found her metamorphoses in Women's Institute productions and the local Amateur Operatic and Dramatic Society shows achingly embarrassing. The gap between her selves was so great it made me feel queasy. I didn't somehow connect the stage persona with Grandpa, so implacable was her disapproval of him. But this
licensed
magic was what lingered of his influence.

Not much more remained to him of his dreams of freedom, either. His offences went unpunished – except that Hanmer became a life sentence. ‘Thou seest, thou wicked varlet, now, what's come upon thee: thou art to continue. . .' He was
licensed to perform, that was his ‘character' and he was trapped in his role for ever after. He contrived to live with himself by savouring the ironies of his situation, contemplating the waste of his talents and making the most of his hopelessness in dramatic sermons. He consciously took on some of the glamour of the undead. Womanising became a routine vice – he no longer believed that sex was any sort of passport to a different future and seems to have taken up with the kind of understanding spinster who had affection to spare. And he added booze to his list of bad habits. Already in the 1934 diary he's making a home from home of the Fox and Goose, and sits there doing his correspondence. He goes back to whittling cigarette holders and fixes the radio aerial to the topmost branch of the apple tree, where I remember it trailing its wires as I looked up from the rope swing that hung from a lower branch, dreaming away the days.

Later on, much later, after his death, my mother's worst insult was to say, ‘You're just like your grandfather.' This was in my adolescence and what she mainly meant (but couldn't bear to spell out) was that I was promiscuous, sex-obsessed. I took it as a great compliment. This, of course, confirmed her in her opinion, for Grandpa's pride in his own awfulness was his distinguishing trait. Otherwise, when you think about it, why write these diaries? Who is he writing
for
? The answer seems to be: himself. He is justifying himself. This involves not only making excuses (although he does plenty of that, blaming Hanmer, Hilda, MB, the Author of the universe and so on), but also simply
making it all real
. If you write things down, however compromising (‘Marj on my lap in the study'), then life is redeemed from the squalor of insignificance – which is (I'm sure he believed) worse than wickedness.

His secrets are like the secrets of a character delivering a
stage soliloquy who ‘doesn't know' he has an audience. Grandpa was always writing for Grandma in a certain sense, inconvenient though the consequences of her getting her hands on the written ‘evidence' may have been. By the same token, he was writing for me too, reaching out a scrawny hand across the years. For instance, on 27 October 1934, out of the blue: ‘Today I had the old inspiration back again to write. I wonder shall I try! I lose it so when I have to work at other things and then too I don't get much encouragement.' And on 8 December, ‘I make another resolution to spend my time in journalism and writing. I think I can make good now.
Marjorie's taunt
[his underlining] determines me in this matter.' Marjorie must have jeered at him for his line about getting away and making a new life. That freelance existence never materialised for him. Here are his words, though, in print at last.

 

He keeps some secrets still. As I made my way through the cramped scrawl towards the end of 1934, and he began to fiddle with his pipe once more and listen to the wireless, I was troubled by a vague intuition and an even vaguer memory. This sounded like where we came in – ostracism and boredom, plus (it's true) pantos and rows, which didn't figure in his last months in South Wales. But still . . . I went back and reread 1933 and there – in September, right at the beginning of the affair with the nurse – was the source of my troubling memory. The entry was indistinct, so I hadn't transcribed it, but on closer inspection it surely said: ‘MB and self set out at 2 p.m. We stop at Bangor . . . I am in this eternal triangle again.'
Again?
Puzzling over the word, I don't want to believe it. But there it almost certainly is. Had he done it all before? Was that why he'd been stuck at St Cynon's? Very possibly, thought my father, when I asked. My mother had said that there was a rumour in South Wales
of another woman, even possibly a child, but was never willing to say more, in any case didn't want to know . . . Well, it would figure. The sin I'd thought the start of the story perhaps wasn't so original after all. The old devil was never to be trusted.

He would rub dry leaves between his palms and mix them with shreds of tobacco, and when he lit his pipe it smelled like an autumn bonfire. This was after his first stroke, when I was seven or eight years old, and he was supposed to cut down on smoking but instead extended his meagre ration and fed his habit with more or less anything combustible. He could walk with a stick, but his whole left side was stiff and the old cynical expression on his face had got an extra involuntary twist to it. His words were a bit slurred. He hadn't long and knew it, and perhaps cared as little as he claimed – not because he was saintly and resigned but because he was exasperated. ‘Damn it all!' he'd say defiantly. Although he hadn't yet reached sixty he was at least threescore and ten at heart, and had long affected a familiarity with death. Before his illness he even looked like pictures of the grim reaper, robed in his cassock, with his scythe, cutting the long grasses growing to seed on the lumpy lawn. Some of the lumps were bowls buried in the grass, waterlogged and cracked and mysterious, toys from before the war.

All around us things rotted gently and it looked peaceful but wasn't. So married were Grandpa and Grandma that they offended each other by existing and he must have hated the prospect of gratifying her by going first. On the other hand
she truly feared death, thus he could score points by hailing it as a deliverance and embracing his fate. It was, in any case, a line he'd rehearsed for years. Sometimes the parish dead would lie coffined in the church the night before their funerals, and he would go and watch beside them. He found their company, he'd announce to no one in particular, more amusing than his wife's and then he'd set off through the churchyard with his lamp for a private wake. There were horrid hints – his own, or perhaps Uncle Bill's – about the creaks and gurgles corpses produced. Uncle Bill, my mother's younger brother, had converted to Communism in rebellion against Grandpa and was a militant materialist, but he often indulged in such ghoulish thoughts under cover of his socialist realism. Anyway the point about bodily decay mimicking the signs of life merely served to strengthen Grandpa's unflattering comparison between live Hilda and a dead villager.

When they first arrived in Hanmer it must have looked unlikely that she would outlive him. I'm not at all sure, looking back at some of those diary entries, that he wasn't actively expecting God to take her off. Indeed, dropping Him a hint – ‘I have met MB. . . and thereby hangs all the tale of the future. What will that be I wonder?? God knows since it is His doing that all this has come about. So then I commit the future to God.' If you think about it and about that oath he swore to MB on the Bible, it looks as though he may have been entertaining a contingency plan for remarriage in the sad event of Grandma's demise. True, he would soon become disenchanted with MB, but that may have been in itself partly a consequence of the Almighty failing to oblige and so refusing him the respectable widower's escape route to an alternative life. MB no longer, as it were, had the endorsement of providence and was in every sense too heavyweight for mere dalliance.

It was probably the move to Hanmer – although she hated it – that saved Hilda from death by bronchitis and asthma. She sounds from the diary much fitter than she was in smoky, damp, industrial South Wales. And as a result the balance of domestic power shifted in her favour. Once she had possession of the diaries she granted herself a secret DIY divorce, complete with alimony. He was to pay the housekeeping, all family expenses and also a separate sum each quarter which she would squirrel away. Given his own financial priorities (tobacco, drink, women and simply getting out of the house) it's no wonder that the grocery bills weren't paid and our underwear was in rags. The crises of credit fuelled more rows and so it went on. Bit by bit their war turned cold, and the anger bubbled away volcanically under the surface.

Inside Hanmer church

‘God moves in a mysterious way' indeed (hymn number 373 in the book, recommended for use ‘In Times of Trouble'). Grandpa must have come to the conclusion that the Lord was a bit of a practical joker. He didn't lose his faith, but it took on a jaundiced complexion, nicotine-yellowed and steeped in bitterness. Hymn 373 says we're not to worry, since God's frowns often hide smiles, and draws the moral that it's rash to think you can read His purposes. Grandpa's trials had been more subtle and mocking, and worked the other way round – smiles hiding frowns – but they spelled out the same message. He had been led up the garden path, disappointment was his vocation now and he could testify to the hollowness of the world's promises with real conviction. One of his sermon notes reflects on the value of human imperfection. Under the heading ‘Man is Heaven's Ambassador to Man' he writes: ‘An angel can only speak in the second person – “For unto you a child is born” – but man can speak in the first person – “For unto us a child is born” – and you all know that a preacher is never
so effective as when he speaks in the first person . . .
An angel may be a fine teacher, but the world needs a witness
.'

He was no angel, as everyone knew. He preached theatrically (what else?), his style was deliberate and yet devil-may-care, as though he had nothing to lose. His past followed him like a long, glamorous, sinister shadow. Worldly unsuccess was an asset in the pulpit. There his disillusionment with life gave him spiritual distinction. I wasn't seeing it from the point of view of the congregation back then, of course: I sat in the choir stalls and had a bit part in the show. His part was the one he played all the time, so I stayed spellbound when other members of the cast returned home to reality. It wasn't as though being allowed behind the scenes spoiled the illusion, much the reverse. The musty-smelling vestry where we robed and disrobed, where he kept the wine in a special cupboard, where the organ's bellows wheezed, was a marvellous place to me. That was where we came into our own. We had the key to the side door of the church, and came and went casually at odd hours. I'd slot the white cards with black
numbers into the wooden frame, to spell out the hymns for the next service, he'd tut over the choir's messy accumulation of service sheets and half-sucked mints and Victory-Vs hidden under their desks, and have a quiet swig, communing with himself.