Basil Street Blues (15 page)

At Drayton Gardens I was a placid infant sleeping in my pram in the garden whatever the weather and waking punctually for my ‘meals’. My mother had been unable to breastfeed me because I ‘bit too hard’, so she gave me ‘Cow and Gate’ milk from a bottle. It was mixed with water and if the mixture was too rich I came out in vivid spots. One day my mother added a mashed banana. I consumed it, stared frantically at her, and turned blue. She quickly gripped me by the feet, held me upside down and shook me until I started breathing again. But I had made no noise.

At Latymer Court I was a backward baby, literally crawling backwards into the furniture whatever temptations were waved or frisked in front of me. This habit of going backwards across the floor into crevices and corners grew so pronounced that my parents eventually consulted a child specialist. As they explained my curious problem to him I entered the room crawling forwards.

I have no memories of my mother living with what she called ‘the old people’ at Maidenhead. They seem to inhabit different worlds. But she had two memories of me there. In the first, she is laying me wrapped up and fast asleep on her bed while she goes off to prepare my ‘lunch’. When she gets back with the tray I am gone. The window is open and in a panic she wonders for a moment if there has been a kidnapping. Anyway, there is no kid napping. Not on the bed. Where was I? What should she tell the family? Will she ever get me back? She does get me back after a search reveals that I had turned over and slipped off the bed on the side next to the wall and am now sleeping quietly under the bed. The story is satisfying since it explains, or so I like to think, my preference as an adult for low beds to the insecurity of sleeping in high ones.

Her second memory gives a dramatic glimpse of the family as I got to know them and later tried to recreate them in
A Dog’s Life
. At the beginning of the war Fraser arranged for a large shelter to be built under the vegetable garden at Norhurst. I can remember the strange hump of the vegetable bed like a stilled wave, or the channel made by a monster worm as it furrowed its way from one side to the other. The interior smelt of wet earth and concrete, and possessed a curious other-worldly aroma that infected all our spirits. I used to play innocently on top of it during the day, but underground it did not seem quite so innocent. My father and our gardener were the architects. At night they had stolen out and returned with wheelbarrows of materials from a road that was being built near by – pioneers of privatisation. Inside, there were concrete slabs to sit or lie on, and hanging oil-lamps, and an enormous stack of tinned foods; but the German Luftwaffe never put us to the test of discovering whether we also had a tin-opener.

Before this hideaway was completed we used a lighted store-cupboard in which to conceal ourselves during emergencies. It was here we would place the large chest full of fragrant Rajmai tea sent to my grandfather from India each Christmas – a comforting companion in a crisis. This small cupboard under the stairs seemed to me a holy place that would surely afford protection from any war as it had previously protected my grandmother from thunderstorms. But we had dug for victory and had our new shelter ready for the Battle of Britain.

Being only thirty miles from London we sometimes heard the buzz and drone of the bombers and saw the night skies crossed by the moving lines of the searchlights. We had been issued with ‘siren suits’ as the proper clothes in which to greet enemy aircraft, and we were to be given rubber gasmasks which made us look ridiculously frightening and suggested death from suffocation. Among my aunt’s possessions is the first draft of a letter and a form which reveals that she had applied for gasmasks for the dogs – my grandmother’s bad-tempered sealyham, the few miscellaneous terriers attributed to my grandfather, my mother’s faithful scottie Popples, and the various labradors or sheepdogs owned by my aunt herself.

When the first air-raid alarm sounded at night we were more than prepared. My grandmother, who gave the impression of spending most of her nights poised at the door of her bedroom waiting for burglars, rushed straight into my mother’s room and snatched me (I was then aged four) from her bed. She was followed by Fraser running from his room without his dentures and quite naked save for the truss he was obliged to wear for his hernia. The two of them began wrestling over me while through a window, mingling with the sustained wail of the siren, could be heard my aunt screaming for the dogs. There was turmoil as everyone fumbled over the zips of their siren suits, hunted for torches, gasmasks and other impedimenta. Then we all struggled downstairs. We unlocked the back door (no easy matter) and made our way over some flowerbeds down the garden, cursing the irregularities of the route, the bad behaviour of the others’ dogs, the Germans, and one another. As we tumbled at last over the marrows and cabbages into the shelter, the ‘All Clear’ sounded, and we began tottering back. ‘I was spellbound, but had to follow the “circus”,’ my mother later wrote in her account for me. ‘Back to bed and you really did not know anything about it as you were half-asleep all the time – so was I.’ But I do recall the illuminations in the night sky, the cold air, and a general mêlée.

My father was to join the Royal Air Force, and my Uncle Kenneth, who had been in the Territorial Army (he was a member of the Artists’ Rifles in Chancery Lane) was immediately made a Captain in the Rifle Brigade. On 20 October 1940, ‘being about to leave the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland and to serve for a time in foreign parts’, he gave Basil power of attorney over his affairs. My father is still described as being a company director and his address is given as Norhurst, the family home.

While training in the Rifle Brigade earlier that year Kenneth had come across his cousin Ivor (son of ‘Uncle Pat’) who was a regular soldier. He had been impressed initially by Ivor’s devotion to discipline, but soon, seeing how far it went, wondered whether he was ‘off his head’. At Maidenhead we always enjoyed these stories of ‘mad Ivor’ and used to speculate on whether he suffered from early sunstroke or something more devious.

But why, I wondered, hadn’t my father joined up at the same time as Kenneth? His service record, which refers to ‘rheumatoid polyarthritis noted in 1932’, suggests that his entry was delayed by poor health. He did not become a member of the Royal Air Force Volunteer Reserve until the spring of 1941, his civilian occupation during 1940 being given as a sales manager in Birmingham. I never heard him refer to this job (he was probably selling off his glass company there), nor did my mother mention it in the last pages of her account, simply covering this period with a note: ‘Couldn’t stand the strain.’

It is clear that by the end of 1940 their marriage was pretty well over. At Maidenhead they slept in separate rooms, though this was partly because there were no proper double beds in Norhurst, and my mother always insisted on nine hours’ sleep at night – otherwise she had ‘no eyes’ in the morning and would have to place teabags on her eyelids during the siesta hour. In a Will my father made on 20 March 1941, shortly before joining the Royal Air Force, he appointed his brother and sister as his joint executors and trustees and as my guardians. There is no mention of his wife in the Will, and in his service record he gave his father as his next-of-kin (though in a moment of absent-mindedness describing him as his wife).

Later that year Flying Officer Basil Holroyd was posted to Wilmslow in Cheshire – and my mother went too. It was their last chance together. Once they had settled into a boarding house (the first of four), she came and fetched me from Maidenhead. I had been attending a small nursery school which I was taken to along a lane known as Folly Way. The school was called Highfield and all I can remember now is learning to crochet and ‘colour in’ surrounded by an indiscriminate noise as the boys rushed around the top of Castle Hill. At Wilmslow I went to a new school of which I recall nothing except a big green field. But my mother wrote about a prize-giving day in the summer of 1942 with crowds of parents in the garden. It was evidently one of those amiable occasions when the sun shines and ‘all shall have prizes’. But when my name was called out I was too shy to go up to the headmaster’s table, and my father had to collect the prize himself. It was too literal a version of what he wanted from me.

My mother worked at the refreshment bar of the Church Army Canteen inside the RAF station at Wilmslow. Pumping the milkshake machine and cutting the fruitcake passed for glamour in those days – it was certainly livelier than Norhurst. She made several friends, in particular the vivacious Shirley Morton whose husband Ivor became a semi-celebrity playing the piano with Corporal Dave Kaye at the entertainments which included Gracie Fields among the visiting stars. We sometimes heard them on the ‘Light Programme’ of the BBC too playing chirpy dance tunes, and patriotic songs, ‘Roll out the Barrel’ or ‘Hang out the Washing on the Siegfried Line’. I remember the great hangar where they played against a clatter of plates and cups and glasses in the background. In the evenings, as one of the ‘Wilmslow Wheelers’, my mother (they still called her ‘Sue’ in those days) would join the convoy of bicycles off to the pubs. Bicycling back in the black-out on her upright but uncontrollable Raleigh was always a tricky business and there were many spills. Though this was the time when I heard loud arguments at night between my parents, the wartime spirit of forced gaiety and compulsory conviviality in public never seemed to flag. ‘Basil was always one over the 8 in those days,’ my mother wrote in her idiomatic English.

But my father did not like my mother’s new friends or approve of her going out with them at night, leaving me in the boarding house. He was often away himself at RAF stations in the north of England arranging the supply of provisions overseas and would have preferred my mother to go back to Maidenhead, taking me with her. But she would not go. They argued violently. ‘We really could not stand each other by then,’ my mother wrote. Though she makes no mention of another man in her account, she told me never to mention the name of a certain RAF officer there, and not having mentioned it, I have forgotten the name.

It was at Wilmslow that my mother began having affaires. In his novel
The Directors
, my father wrote: ‘Thelma’s first affairs hurt him bitterly… She was constitutionally unable to exist without the admiration of men… She didn’t even feel very deeply about any man she went to bed with and usually forgot all about him as soon as the brief intrigue was over. Then the excitement of a new affair would prove irresistible.’ I have no doubt that this passage comes from these times at Wilmslow.

During one of the school holidays in 1943 (‘it must have been summer’, my mother wrote, ‘although you were wearing your pale blue overcoat’), my father announced that he was taking me down to Maidenhead. ‘But he never brought you back to me,’ my mother continued. ‘...After a few months, when the Mortons left Wilmslow, I went with them.’ She stayed with her friend Shirley Morton for several weeks in London and then moved to a boarding house in Cresswell Gardens, off Drayton Gardens where she had begun her marriage. I have no memories of this upheaval, only of the repercussions that would follow.

My father, soon to be promoted to Squadron Leader and unexpectedly benefiting from his exile at Chillon College, was being trained as an RAF interpreter. In 1944 he was posted to Paris. Before leaving, he drove me over from Norhurst to begin my first term at Scaitcliffe, the boarding school he had described as ‘absolute hell’.

‘What shall we do with the boy?’ That cry comes back to me whenever I think of my early years at Maidenhead. As if to answer the question, my father, in the intervals from his career in France, would turn up at Norhurst with some devastating present – an air rifle, chemistry set, conjuring tricks or even golf club – and after a few flourishes and gestures, a few words of encouragement and a laugh, leave the fine tuning of my tuition as rifleman, chemist, magician or golfer to my aunt while he returned to fight the Germans or encourage the French. My aunt did her best, but I remember thinking one rainy day as we quarried out some lumps of ice to put on her forehead while waiting for the ambulance to arrive, that we shouldn’t have chosen the dining-room to play cricket.

Most of these events passed my grandfather by. He got little sleep at night and would catch up during the day with a series of ‘forty winks’. Besides he had his own disasters to occupy him. The post would arrive, he would shake his head and on the backs of the envelopes begin a sequence of calculations that never seemed to come out well. Distracted, he would suddenly stand up and crash his poor head against some unexpected corner of furniture and then, blaming the government and all its works, stick on another piece of Elastoplast.

This Elastoplast, like the impasto of an expressionist painter, covered the dome of my grandfather’s head which, because he was bald and somewhat bent, he appeared to be accusingly presenting to us all. His face too, with its changing surface of bumps and bruises, was something of a battlefield largely because of his shaving habits. He was not a skilful shaver. His chin and cheeks, as well as his nose and neck, were sometimes dotted with tufts of cotton wool and crossed with thin red lines like alleged Martian canals. Late in life my father gave him an electric razor. After some experimentation in the privacy of the garage, he found this gadget easiest to use while standing on the seat of the upstairs lavatory from where he plugged its dangling cord into the overhead light. In the darkness the whole operation lasted nearly half-an-hour, for he sometimes submerged part of his kit in the cistern. It was impossible for the rest of us to use the lavatory over these periods. My aunt, my grandmother, Old Nan and myself would line up outside, rattling the door handle and crying out in exasperation. But he felt protected by the comfortable whining of his machine. Occasionally he would shave the same side of his face twice since there was no soap to guide him. But over a week things would even out.