Eighty Not Out (2 page)

Rosa discourages my presence in the kitchen, but there are many hours, when she has gone shopping with my mother, that I can spend with Annie, our maid. Annie is a devout Methodist; with infinite patience she lets me mess with starch and the blue bag. She also allows me to make butter-balls with two wooden pats; only perfect globes go into a bowl of cold water before being taken to the dining room. Larger portions are forced from a wooden mould with a daisy pattern on the bottom. The laundry room houses an enormous mangle, which can wring blankets, and several vast tubs for various stages of the wash: all this Annie copes with five and a half days each week. On Sundays she goes by bus to visit her married sister who lives in Connswater, on the other side of Belfast, with her husband and two children. I cannot hear too much about Billy and Winnie, who are about the same age as me, but do not meet them for many years – during the war in fact, when they were temporarily homeless after their house had been damaged during the German bombing of Belfast in 1941.

I do not often meet other children. When we go for drives, either in my mother's Austin Seven or in Gramp's huge dark green Singer coupé, I see them playing in the streets of Whiteabbey, where they have tops which they whip with skill; the boys have rickety-looking home-made carts, and a few have footballs. Some of the girls have corkscrew ringlets, which I envy, and I ask my mother to do my hair that way. She says that I do not have that kind of hair and, anyway, it is a vulgar style. I retort that Shirley Temple has ringlets and the sort of dress I would like in satin, with a tight waist and a bow at the back. My dresses are invariably home-made, in beautiful fabric, often embroidered or smocked, but I long for shop-bought fashion. I get ideas from the drawings and fashion magazines Auntie Rosemary brings home from the art school.

Gramp's life has been blighted in many ways, some of which would have soured a lesser man. An uncle, charged with the administration of his father's estate, had embezzled a capital sum, so that by the time my grandfather was twenty-one little was left, and the early days of his marriage to Rosa had been shadowed by financial insecurity. Their first child, a boy, did not thrive owing to a heart defect, dying before his first birthday. After my mother was born in 1896, there were several miscarriages, ending with the birth of Auntie Rosemary in 1909. Gramp never speaks of the
Titanic
disaster, nor the fact that he was not on the maiden voyage – was he not invited, or did he choose not to go? The breakdown of my mother's marriage must be agonising for them. He and Rosa are so unworldly (or is it naïvety?) that no rumour reached them until the situation reached crisis point not long before my birth.

He is thinking about what the future may hold for his daughters, and has already made plans for a bungalow to be built for my mother at Knock, a considerable distance from Greenisland. Why this choice? Probably the Malone area is already too expensive, Glengormley and Whiteabbey bleak, but Knock is a good centre from which to explore the infinite variety of the County Down coast, its rich farming hinterland, and the spectacular bird life of Strangford Lough, less forbidding than the Antrim coast with its dramatic glens and cliffs. A estimate of £500 is accepted to build a two-bedroom house with large living room, kitchen, bathroom, and attic space, attainable only by ladder; the ‘motor-house' is a separate wooden structure. The site is attractive: one of the many tributaries of the Connswater River flows past the bottom of the garden, marking the roadside boundary. Turning right at the front gate, the road rises steeply to Gilnahirk Church and Primary School, then a further mile to Mann's Corner, which is the limit of the bus run from central Belfast. A few prosperous red-brick houses with well-kept lawns and shrubberies stand back from the road, screened from curious eyes. The main interests at Gilnahirk are a duck pond and the shop, which smells strongly of paraffin, as do all such shops throughout Ireland – I like it.

2

Outer Suburbia in Knock

O
ur new house overlooks open farmland; always put to bed too early, I can hear the persistent call of a corncrake as I lie awake. In late summer neat haystacks pepper the fields, where the outer suburbs melt into countryside. Seventy years on I realise that the six houses – after Gramp's death, my mother and Auntie Rosemary used his legacy to build more houses in the same area – built by my mother were part of the malignant growth of characterless dwellings that now reaches as far as Dundonald and the drumlins of north Down.

We move there in early 1932, but there is no great wrench on parting from Gramp because we drive down to Greenisland every Sunday. It is an interesting journey via Cherryvalley, within walking distance of our house, Sandown Road, Neill's Hill Station, Ballyhackamore, then down the Upper Newtownards Road to the Holywood Arches, past the ropeworks, over the Queen's Bridge, where one can see the red funnels of crosschannel boats and Rank's flour mill, an early skyscraper, in the near distance. Many of the streets in the docks area are cobbled, and stalwart shire horses drag flat-bottomed trailers loaded with sacks of coal up the slope to the bridge. A few women wear black shawls – they look poor. There are hundreds of pigeons and sparrows, and I fear my mother may squash one. Sometimes we go by Mountpottinger and the Albert Bridge, passing the main market and the Law Courts before joining the Queen's Bridge traffic heading for the Shore Road via the Albert Memorial clock-tower. We pass the York Road railway station, and I get bored until we come to Whiteabbey, a mix of poor, back-toback, terraced housing with a few isolated affluent mansions. The red lantern over the public house means we are getting near Greenisland; we pass huge ornate gilded gates with lamps, which my mother says are the entrance to the lord mayor's residence, and I can see Knockagh Monument on our left; we are nearly there. My mother has contrived some sort of high seat for me, so I always have a good view. Michael sits on his rug on the back seat, resigned and greyly smelly. We turn right, off the road to Carrickfergus, onto the gravel sweep between the house and the tennis court, and we are there. Gussie, the one-legged gull is sitting on the sea wall as usual, and Michael goes on a wild tear around the garden.

It is high summer and the house is bursting with unusual activity. The adults hurry from the kitchen with jugs of lemonade and plates of sandwiches, heading for a long table set in the shade under my favourite tree: the one with the deep dark hole so high I have to be lifted to look inside. The tennis court is perfectly marked and Gramp is checking the height of the net. Rosa is dressed more elegantly than usual in a long coffee-coloured silk dress, with matching wide-brimmed hat and parasol: to my mind she looks too dressed up. Gramp's concession to the occasion is a blazer, which he soon takes off, and a new panama hat, instead of his battered old one with the wispy edge. Auntie Rosemary is dressed for battle in a white knee-length dress with a pleated skirt; she wears a shiny green eye-shade. My mother too is dressed in white and has brought tennis shoes in case she is called upon to make up a four. Auntie Rosemary has an admirer called Johnny, whose two elderly aunts own the house next door. I overhear whispers to the effect that he seems nice enough, being a law student at Trinity College in Dublin, but that he is a Roman Catholic. I gather this is not a point in his favour. She has another admirer – here today – whom I detest because he is always trying to be jolly, asking stupid questions and trying to play games with me – I suppose he thinks this will add to his popularity. He has flaming red hair and a shiny, freckled face, and I can tell he is no good at tennis. I have an articulated snake made in Hong Kong in the pocket of my dress, and am fiddling with it; he spots it and asks if he can have a go. Reluctantly I hand it over. We are standing near the steep, slimy green steps that lead from a gap in the wall down to the water's edge; the rippling tide is full in. Suddenly my snake contorts out of his hand and plummets into the sea. ‘Oh dear,' he says, ‘I'm so sorry. I'll get you another one.' I am furious and flee crying to my mother for comfort. She says with some asperity that she supposes it was just one of those unfortunate accidents, and he promises again to replace my snake: needless to say he does not. The next time I see a similar one is in Nairobi forty years later.

The move to Knock brought opportunities to expand social contacts, but my mother remained aloof from the only family with a child who lived nearby. Their house was on the corner where Gilnahirk Road was joined by Kensington Road, the houses on which varied from late Georgian to prosperous Victorian and Edwardian, with a sprinkling of architectdesigned new houses, generally regarded with disfavour.

My mother advertised for a nanny, whose principal duty would be to take me for walks and look after me while my mother went into Belfast to do shopping and change her books at Anderson & McAuley's library – I did not know why she preferred this to the Linen Hall Library. Occasionally she met friends dating from her days at Richmond Lodge School under the aegis of Miss Violet Nairn, a scholarly woman for whom she had great respect. One friend had married a kindly man, but had
TB
, still referred to as consumption at that time, and was ‘delicate'; they were childless. Another had gone to university and taught in a private school. A third had married a garage proprietor from outside her social circle, although this was not voiced in so many words. I gathered it was deemed an unfortunate choice; the fact that he resembled the film actor Charles Boyer may have something to do with it. Lust, in other words. Another, who lived not far from us, had a son of my age, and several times we visited them for afternoon tea. The golden-haired child later in life became a successful illustrator of children's books, so we might have had something in common, as I had an aptitude for art from an early age; but my mother found the family dreary, so we returned the hospitality once only.

There were contacts to be made within the show-jumping fraternity, and my mother soon found a friend whose family had a large house in Comber. Flo was a fearless horsewoman, and impressed me when she broke her collar bone for the second time. Her father owned a riding school and stables, so horses were always in need of exercise – but what a comedown for my mother from having had horses of her own. She swallowed her pride and they passed many hours hacking companionably around the lanes of north Down. The subsequent failure to turn me into a competent horsewoman was added to her list of disappointments.

Mrs Anderson, the only applicant for the job of nanny, came from a Protestant family from Swords, near Dublin, which moved north soon after the South became independent in 1922. She was married to a nice man called Murray and lived in Ballyhackamore. San, as I soon called her, was beautiful, fairhaired, with large cornflower blue eyes and a skin that turned in summer to golden brown: surely there must have been a Scandinavian ancestor. She took a pragmatic view of life, had a wicked sense of humour, and a devilish talent for imitating pretentious people. Some of her remarks were slanderous, but never malicious. We bonded from the start, and my mother enjoyed her wit, although San's lifelong incomprehension of modern technology, such as vacuum cleaners and gas pokers, tested her patience. ‘This auld thing's up to its tricks again.'

One of my earliest memories of an outing with San is the day – 16 November 1932 – we joined the crowd on the Upper Newtownards Road to see the Prince of Wales in an open carriage on his way to open the new Parliament Buildings at Stormont. I waved my small flag although disappointed that he was wearing a naval hat with feathers instead of a jewelled crown. Afterwards we went to the Post Office at Cabin Hill, for a chat with the postmistress, a kind lady of teutonic build: she had thick, corn-coloured hair dressed in coils around each ear.

Rosa, whose physique was sparrow-like, was now in her early sixties with seemingly inexhaustible energy; her mother and grandmother had lived into their nineties. If we met in the hall at her and Gramp's house, she would tell me not to go so fast on my red wooden-seated tricycle. On the rare times she bathed me in the scratchy-bottomed bath with lion's claw feet, I used to pray that she would not try to clean my navel with a probing fingernail, even asking my mother to intercede, but she too had a fixation with cleanliness of that sensitive part, in which only a small ball of fluff was ever found. However, bath-time at my grandparents' house brought the pleasure of Pears transparent soap – at home my mother favoured red Lifebuoy. I remember Rosa warning that a firm line would have to be taken with me, as not only had I a tendency to interrupt, I had been known to contradict – regarded as almost as bad as hitting back when smacked. In January 1932, Rosa dropped dead in the hall. A call from Auntie Rosemary broke the news. Gramp was in shock, and remained so for some days, but I did not cry.

The summer of that year was a sad one, although we always joined Gramp and Auntie Rosemary for Sunday lunch. Rosemary continued her studies at the art school, while Annie, the maid, who was about the same age as my aunt, became a housekeeper. I have no idea if she was remunerated accordingly. How soon after Rosa's death Gramp began his decline to inoperable stomach cancer, I do not know, but I remember clearly the sickly smell that pervaded his bedroom when my mother took me to see him. When I was asked to recite my numbers up to ten, paralytic confusion struck as I neared six and seven. My reading skills, however, were a source of pride to everyone. These visits were short and in his final months a resident nurse hovered in the background to ensure that visitors did not stay too long. I drew pictures of her in full nursing regalia, but my favourite subject was the Loch Ness monster, sightings of which were frequent throughout 1933. In the autumn Gramp died: again a call came from Auntie Rosemary, resulting in one of the few times I saw my mother moved to tears. The others were on the death of her dog Michael the following year, and on hearing Chamberlain's broadcast on 3 September 1939 telling the nation that it was again at war with Germany after an interval of only twenty-one years.

Auntie Rosemary, with the help of Annie, cleared the house at Greenisland, put it on the market and moved to Knock, where, with their father's legacy, she and my mother now owned a total of eight houses. This was done with the aid of the Halifax Building Society, and by the time I was eight or nine, one of the jobs I most dreaded was to be sent to deliver the shiny red, imitation moiré-covered rent books. This became excruciating when I learned that one of the tenants – a widow whose son attended my school – was behind with her payments.

We moved to one of the newly built houses in 1934, with Auntie Rosemary and Annie living next door. This arrangement worked well: Annie worked for both sisters, lived rent-free, and was content to be nearer her own sister in Connswater. Rosemary had finished art school without having graduated, and was now a civil servant at Stormont. Johnny was in his final year at Trinity College, but remained under the influence of his elderly parents, who owned a large estate in Mullingar in County Westmeath (later purchased by J.P. Donleavy, author of
The Ginger Man
). Rosemary was never invited to visit, as they remained adamant in their belief that she was an unsuitable future wife for their only child. Despite this, for several years, she wore a large aquamarine engagement ring.

My mother was a reluctant chaperone during the thirties. When Johnny coxed a Trinity crew at Henley regatta in 1936, he was determined that his fiancée should be present. Photographs show the weather was benign and both women were elegantly dressed – in no way lumpen lasses from Ireland – which must have gratified the already pompous young man, who insisted on referring to me as The Brat. My mother's photographs show Rosemary in a skiff, languorous hand trailing in the water, with a swan in the background. My mother wore an elegant black and white calf-length chiffon dress with a ruffled skirt. In the mid-thirties women's clothes had all the sophistication associated with the dance routines of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, materials were often cut on the bias, silks, satins, chiffon and fur wraps were in favour.

While they were away, I stayed with San and Murray, who had moved from Ballyhackamore to a new house on the Gilnahirk Road. I had the time of my life – liberty at last! San was tragically childless although not barren – there had been a traumatic miscarriage some years earlier. She also claimed to have only half a stomach and ate frugally. Murray owned a garage in York Street; it never flourished, due to his generous nature, which allowed customers to run up considerable debts, some of which were never paid. A countryman at heart, he kept a pony and trap, in which we went for excursions all over north Down. Pulled by the obedient pony, these excursions were pleasant compared with outings with my mother on a variety of horses, all of which followed their inclination rather than respond to my ineffectual commands.

Murray kept a dinghy at Whiterock, from which we fished for easily caught mackerel. My feelings were mixed; I loved being in the boat and the idea of fishing, but confronted with the reality of a terrified fish flapping helplessly at my feet, I recoiled. Seeing this, Murray dispatched them with a blow to the head, which I did not like either. He kept ferrets and there was always a dog in their house: the earliest I remember was a snuffly Pekinese which San adored, to be followed by a fox terrier called Patsy. I do not think these dogs ever got any formal exercise, although they had the run of a large garden, which was planted with military precision, like an allotment: pretty rows of sweet pea, as well runner beans, garden peas, broad beans, carrots, lettuce and, of course, potatoes. When the time came, there was no need to urge them to dig for victory.

Murray had a sister, the one with ‘brains', who was a senior civil servant at Stormont. Their mother, by the time she came to stay with San and Murray, was in an advanced stage of dementia; she had to be incarcerated at Purdysburn asylum after being found lurking behind a door, carving knife in hand. San was thought to be her intended victim. All I remember is a frail little wisp of a woman, who wandered around in an Edwardian high-necked dress, wearing a fixed vacant smile.