Basil Street Blues (16 page)

From time to time, amid panic and pandemonium, my grandfather was required to travel up to London for a meeting of the Rajmai Tea Company, and once or twice I went up with him on the train. When he arrived at Paddington he would hand up his neatly-folded copy of
The Times
through the smoke of the hissing engine to the train driver who touched his cap and nodded his head as he took it. My grandfather always came back looking worried from these days in London, and the dogs themselves would sneak into the corners of the rooms.

Part of his difficulties arose from increasing deafness, though this also afforded him protection from the perpetual squabbling that filled the rooms at Norhurst. As a child I had the double experience of my parents’ marriage that had unhappily broken up, and my grandparents’ marriage that had been unhappily kept going. At one point I was to make an attempt to run away from Maidenhead to join my mother in London; at another point, I attempted to run back from London to Maidenhead. The family was baffled: but I do not feel so baffled.

Norhurst was to be my intermittent home for twenty years. Everyone was very kind to me, but the atmosphere had become saturated with unhappiness. It was a ritualised unhappiness, repeated in the same formula of words through the awful succession of meals, housework, and more meals that was our routine, every day, all year. I can hear their voices still:

I declare unto goodness I don’t know what’s wrong with you… Are you perfectly potty? Are you insane? Sometimes I think you should be certified… Shut up! You bitch!… You are disgusting! How dare you speak to me like that? I do have ears you know… One can’t open one’s lips in this bally house… Sorry! Sorry! Sorry! Sorry! Will that do? Or would you like me to go down on bended knees? Why don’t you arrange for me to be shot at dawn?… I’m sick to death of you all. I wish I were dead! I wish we were all dead, dead and gone.

Sometimes they shouted all this and more, much more, from separate rooms. At other times I would come across one of them practising these same words under her breath. During meals, above the immaculate reports of wars, natural disasters, weather and sport issuing from the huge wooden wireless in one corner of the dining-room, they confronted one another with the same shouted phrases yet again. From another corner of the room my grandmother’s parrot ‘Mr Potty’ (though we realised after she produced an egg that we had got her gender wrong) croaked back to us our shrill invective from her vast cage.

Into this echoing pit of abuse had tumbled ‘Josh and Bang’ from their heady days in Ireland; also their daughter Yolande who had looked so engagingly bold and lively in her early photographs, so happy with her friends in the South of France; and even the kindly Kate Griffin, the ‘Nan’ who had nursed my father so carefully through his illnesses and was now called ‘Old Nan’ by me. It was their collective unhappiness I had tried to recreate in
A Dog’s Life
that so distressed my father – and that probably accounts for my avoidance of arguments today. ‘They sat around in dismay, bowed, overcome,’ I wrote. ‘The words came from them mechanically, as though they existed under a spell...They had passed and repassed on the same staircase, twisted the same door handles, sat in the same old chairs around the same old table, and heard the same monotonous voices… and as time wore on they had somehow grown into strangers – strangers to themselves and one another.’

We lived at Norhurst as if in a capsule. No one visited us – we would never let anyone in. If by some mischance a person came to the door and rang the bell, we suddenly stopped our insults and froze into silence until he went away. When the telephone rang (Maidenhead 336) we panicked, rushing with frightful cries from room to room until it ceased ringing and we could relax again into our hostilities. We were certain the telephone was not ‘safe’, that the world could hear every syllable we said, though we had nothing to say and could hardly hear what others were saying to us. We did not want to hear. The truth was that we were frightened of the world outside. We had locked ourselves in an awful embrace and forgotten how to communicate with strangers.

And yet, because of its familiarity and my insecurity, I was attached to Norhurst as my father had been to Brocket, which was only round a corner but a generation away. That house lay in sunshine, this one in darkness. On the ground floor the ‘morning-room’ was without light and occupied by the telephone, like a monster in its cave; in the large hall, like the remnants of a beleaguered army, had been assembled the last cracked pieces of Lalique glass: the jardinière with gazelles and the eglantine powder box; the archer ashtray and the water grasshopper in opal, green and blue; the goblet with dogs and the vase with egrets; the amber carp, the dahlia bowl, the mulberry and mistletoe lights, the cockerel mascot. One or two of these, with a cry and a curse, we smashed each year until there was almost none; at the back of the house a gloomy dining-room gave on to the garden where the sparrows, chaffinches, thrushes and blackbirds waited noisily for their three meals a day; also at the back was the kitchen, the only warm room in the house, and a dilapidated scullery where frightful battles over washing-up raged. Off the landing upstairs stood five small bedrooms and two bathrooms – one for my grandmother, the other for the rest of us. But baths were discouraged. A bath a day was unthinkable. As my grandmother remarked (referring to my mother): ‘Some people must be bally dirty if they need
that
amount of washing.’ The boiler, which was encased in a shed outside the kitchen and which we fed night and day with coal and coke and much else besides, seemed to have fallen asleep. Whatever mixture we gave it, whatever knobs we twisted or levers pulled, it continued dozing and we got barely enough tepid water for our washing-up contests. The trouble was that we all had contradictory notions of how the boiler should be operated. ‘Now look here,’ my grandfather would begin, taking out a pencil and the back of an envelope to demonstrate his theories to Old Nan, the only person who was obliged to listen to him (though he would raise his voice so that his message reached everyone). On Fridays a gardener called Western came in to help with the leaves and twigs, enabling the rest of us on Saturdays and for the rest of the week to blame him for getting everything wrong. ‘Western must have been putting grass in the boiler again,’ my grandfather would grumble, shaking his head mournfully. He was very fond of Western whom he often called ‘a damn fool, and no mistake’, beaming as he said it.

It was the garden I loved at Norhurst, with its hovering dragonflies and bumblebees, its ladybirds, butterflies, chaffinches, robins. It was a long and narrow garden, divided into three sections. Nearest the house was a lawn which belonged to the crowds of birds except in wartime when we turned it into a vegetable patch. In peacetime, it reverted to green grass with rosebeds, a place in which to savour Rajmai tea on a summer afternoon, and get my aunt to send down her lethal-sounding leg-breaks to me with a tennis ball. The middle section was wilder, incorporating a small rock garden and a dangerous pond with its mighty toad, and a large tree in which I could hide. Further down, where the shelter had been dug, was a sandpit for me to jump in. It lay beside some enormous marrows and elongated hanging beans. At the end stood a garden shed and, over the fence, the peaceful insecurity of All Saints’ cemetery.

Though once or twice a cousin was invited to play with me (the boy who was whispered to be Rex Harrison’s son and who then suffered from an ophthalmic illness that made his eyes bright red), on the whole I played alone. I hid and found myself in the tree; captured and released myself from the shed; raced myself up and down the length of the garden past the sundial and the dogs’ graves; threw a tennis ball high on to the roof and, as it spun down out of the blue sky, caught it; and contrived a complicated game with a ball against the garage doors, simultaneously winning and losing.

The garage, guarded on one side by a peach tree and on the other by a walnut tree, was a sombre fascinating place, an Aladdin’s Cave, piled high with treasures from the past – a broken rocking-horse, a strangely-painted screen, a still-working radiogram, pictures of girls and horses by Lewis Baumer and Anna Zinkheisen, suitcases, ladders, illustrated catalogues and mildewing books, one or two imposing pieces of furniture and large threadbare carpets with faded colours, a bowler hat belonging to my aunt, a walking stick that turned out to be a gun, and bottles of cider that I was sometimes allowed to drink in the evening with my grandfather. It was obvious treasure. There was even room for a car, a little eight-horse-power Ford that my aunt no longer used.

I sometimes sat in my aunt’s old car and listened to records on the radiogram. My grandparents had no interest in music and my father seemed actively to dislike it (he could be propelled to his feet if told that a piece from Gilbert and Sullivan was the National Anthem). But my aunt had a collection of ‘seventy-eight’ records – ‘Miss Otis Regrets’ or ‘Dinner for One Please, James’, ‘Bye-bye Blackbird’, ‘It Had to be You’, ‘Who’s Sorry Now’, ‘Always’, and Charles Trenet singing ‘La Mer’. They were scratchy but curiously poignant and appealing. My aunt never took them into the house to play – she never played anything. I did not know why. But I played them, and then I played my own records. How I first heard classical music, how I got hold of my records, I cannot remember. I daresay I listened to the wireless and then demanded these records as birthday and Christmas presents. I would take Schubert’s
Unfinished Symphony
, Verdi’s
Requiem
, Wagner’s ‘Ride of the Valkyries’ out to the garage, and sit there absorbing them in the dark. My favourite composers were Tchaikovsky and Beethoven whose symphonies I got to know by heart. I suppose these garage concerts began when I was aged about nine, and continued for eight or nine years. I would turn up the volume, open the car door, and sit enthralled. Sometimes I could not sit still but had to stride up and down through the dusty bric-à-brac waving my arms, lifting up my voice, joining in. This music, and the imaginary adventures I was led on upstairs by Conan Doyle, Rider Haggard, H.G. Wells and others, were no artistic luxury for me but the essence of my life. I would come in from these hours in the garage, or down from my bedroom, glowing with happiness and fortified against the family warfare that was more real to me than any combat against Germans, Italians or Japanese. I was at the centre of this domestic warfare and regarded the world war as mere orchestration for it.

Though I was an excessively timid child, the boredom that timidity induced would sometimes get the better of me, and I became for a few moments vicariously bold. One day I found some nice fat cartridges inside a desk in the morning-room. Remembering the walking stick that was a gun I took these cartridges to the garage and found that they fitted. I then went off to find my grandmother who happened to be in her bathroom, not having a bath. I showed her the walking stick, put it in her hands, pointed to the trigger and asked her to pull it. She was reluctant to do so, but I begged her and begged her until eventually she did pull it. There was an enormous bang and a hole appeared in the floor through which our feet dangled, emerging, I daresay, like strange stalactites in the garage below.

I got into grave trouble for this exploit and my father arrived back from France to punish me. But really everyone blamed my grandmother. She had become a figure of blame round whom all the irritation in the house seethed and beat itself. The sight of her struggling downstairs, or patting the cushions, or rearranging the chairs, or humming as she sauntered indecisively between rooms, or simply eating, provoked surges of uncontrollable indignation from us all.

In his novel
The Directors
, my father has a breakfast scene in which John Maitland, a distinguished character with ‘a Victorian conscience about anyone who is dependent on him’, sits reading
The Times
while his wife chatters uninterruptedly without ever gaining his attention. She is an empty person, without occupation or interests, a child in a woman’s body, who has become completely dependent on her husband and so made him her prisoner. This is a picture of Fraser and Adeline at Brocket while my father was young. ‘John had bought the old Georgian house shortly after their marriage and she had fallen in love with it at first sight. She still loved it when she wasn’t feeling bored – which was all too often. Time hung heavy on her hands...’

After almost half a century of time, Adeline (whom Fraser now called ‘Di’, rapping it out like a terminal injunction) makes her appearance in my novel as I saw her when I was young at Norhurst. She is now a ‘bent and fragile old woman, bravely pessimistic’, with a parchment face, and lips coloured crimson so inaccurately as to make her mouth leer across her cheek like a Hogarthian trull. I pursued her in
A Dog’s Life
as she advances to her breakfast.

Her sparse metallic grey hair lay chaotic and unkempt, crushed by a dilapidated hairnet. From her left ear hung an earring; on her right foot a sober black gumshoe. Around her neck was suspended a fantastic chain of imitation pearls that stretched, as though elastic, far below her waist, and, when she got down from her stool, almost to the floor itself… Before her on the table was piled an assortment of articles, reminiscent of a junk shop. There was a ballpoint pen and a bottle of ink, one ball of string, a bottle of aspirin, some soap, a book, two flashlights and a small tin of boot polish. She was prepared for almost anything.

My father did not object to this passage, or to my other descriptions of his mother. ‘Strangely enough, you seem to have dealt more gently with your grandmother,’ he wrote to me. ‘This I suppose is only to be expected considering she caused most of the misery. It was greatly due to her spendthrift habits that father got into trouble with the banks. Anyone who was dependent to any degree on her paid pretty dearly for the pleasure.’

At various times in the course of her life we had all been dependent on her. Adeline had spent the family money, my father believed, and given the family no love in exchange for that money. Fraser and Basil were consequently ‘embarrassed’, both in the financial sense and in their vulnerability to attractive women like Agnes May and Sue who, they calculated, did give love for money. My father, who lacked self-esteem, talked women into marriage with glowing descriptions of financial happiness to come. He could not credit that anyone would accept him ‘for poorer’.