Forgotten Life (17 page)

She was silent for a moment, giving the matter consideration. ‘In the social services they encounter a lot of men who went through the war and survived unscathed. Mostly they're of pensionable age now. Research has shown that many of them found it extremely difficult to adjust to civilian life; some, indeed, claim they never did manage to adjust, becoming alcoholics or chronically unemployable. I would say that some might almost be classified as psychiatric cases – the ones who had a bad war—'

‘Ellen, dear, that's my subject,' he said patiently.

‘War experience certainly caused a great division between generations. Those who returned found that those who had never been away did not understand their problems or want to listen.'

‘Do you think he tended to whitewash his Burma experience?'

‘He never married, though, did he?' Perhaps she had not heard his question. ‘Joe needed a decent, understanding English girl.'

After a pause, Ellen added, ‘Marriage raises more problems than popularly supposed. Or rather, people know marriage is not the solution to everything, but they still prefer to pretend that it is. Men and women.'

Clement laughed rather forcedly. ‘People don't want things to be as they are. They dream up idealized situations and try to live by them, but sometimes the bottom falls out of the market.' He thought of his wife's fantasies, to which he knew Ellen took exception, and tried to steer the conversation into another course. ‘Do you think there was something of that in Joseph?'

‘Poor Joseph's dead, Clem.' Again a long silence, as if she mulled over the implications of what she was saying. ‘Why don't you simply keep all his letters and so on, if you want them, and forget about making them into a book? Let him rest. Live your own life.'

‘I am trying to live my own life. I feel my brother is part of my life.'

‘You weren't close. He and I were close. When are you going to sell the Acton flat?'

‘A bit more cleaning up to be done first, Ellen.'

He exchanged a few more desultory remarks with the distant voice in Salisbury and then hung up.

The baffling quality of his relationship with his sister did not diminish with time or distance. Since they saw so little of each other these days, the matter was no longer of importance: yet it worried him. The will to be friendly, even close, should have had greater effect. He ascribed the problem to the way in which his parents had remained so distant. The failure of their relationship, that abiding mystery, had been central to the emotional development of their three offspring, Joseph, Ellen, and Clement.

Perhaps because of that central loss, Clement felt almost a mystical identification with the institutes round him: his College, the University, Oxford, or more particularly North Oxford – the Puginesque, Betjemanesque half-mile which contained so much diversity and snobbery – and, beyond that (‘mistier and mistier') England, the European idea, and the planet Earth itself as a complex ecological unit. He was in some respects a feeble man, yet not an ignorant one, and some of his intuitions, he recognized, had been gained from his wife's half-instinctive, slapdash writings, which he constantly defended, whatever his own private reservations, against the unthinking contempt of the Oxford crowd.

This tendency towards loyalty now attracted him to the preservation of what would otherwise be the forgotten life of his dead brother, and not least to concealed aspects of that life.

Evidence for the concealed aspects of Joseph's life was contained in a binder which the historian had covered with a piece of green wallpaper, possibly to denote a special affection for the book.

It was this book which Clement read through again when he returned to Rawlinson Road at six o'clock in the evening. Sheila and Michelin sat companionably together in the kitchen, drinking white wine with their feet up on the kitchen table. They were watching the news on television.

‘How was the Bursar?' Sheila asked.

‘Did I tell you he had turned back into a hunchbacked toad?'

He took a glass of wine with him and went up to his study. The book Joseph had labelled
LIFE HISTORY
was a plastic binder containing badly typed pages of a student's loose-leaf block. Stuck to the inside of the binder was a photograph of the Market Square in Nettlesham, Suffolk.

Joseph's account began abruptly.

 

This is my life history, which I set down this 8th day of January 1987, being of sound mind more or less. I write it for my own sake, but also in the hopes that perhaps others may gain some advantage from its strange lesson.

It is a history which serves to illustrate two principles: that one may be in grave error for many years without knowing it, and eventually recover; and that, as La Rochefoucauld says, we are none of us as miserable or as happy as we think we are.

Part I
really begins before I was born, but we will leave that till later. I first saw light of day, with a thunderous noise, like harsh bells jangled out of tune, in the market town of Nettlesham, in Suffolk. While my arrival was a cause of astonishment to me, I have to report straight away that it was a grave disappointment to my mother, and that from this disappointment much grief sprang.

Part II
may serve as a warning to other historians. It tells the story as I fully believed it to be until a short while ago. That story, however, was a curious misreading. I had misunderstood my own life's story. How, in that case, are we to know that we can ever read other people truly?

With such a question mark, I begin.

 

Nettlesham in the mid-nineteen-twenties, when I was born, was a sleepy little hole. There was not much to distinguish it from a thousand other small English towns, except this: that a minor eighteenth-century poet, William Westlake, famous in his day, came down from London to live with his female cousin in a house on the town square, wrote a few poems sitting at his window, went off his head, and died there. So I claim kinship: I lived there and went off my head.

Not many may boast, as I justifiably can, of having emerged amid the grandiose rattling of galvanized pails at one shilling and one penny ha'penny. It was the first noise to greet my ears on this earth, an unmistakable noise, not harmonious and, as it was to prove, hardly auspicious. As distinguished in its way as the ringing of church bells. And you'd go a long way these days to find as many galvanized pails as we had.

Thus my beginning, and the announcement to Nettlesham, or to anyone who happened to be nearby in the square, that I had butted in on the scene and effected that awful transition out of the nowhere into the everywhere with some success.

in the immortal words of William Westlake, in his poem on his mother's portrait. Other remembered gems of his include ‘The Conversation', ‘A Summer Stroll Through Parts of Suffolk', the renowned ‘The Crippled Goat' (‘I was a crippled goat that lost its way …') and many other affecting pieces.

Westlake's name was commemorated by the Westlake Memorial Hall and Westlake Street. There was even a Conversation Arms in Commercial Street, although its literary associations began and ended with the name. Westlake wasn't a drinking man – no wonder he went mad.

It's clear that Westlake was a polite and conventional chap. My father had the same qualities, clinging to spats and the Sunday sermon with the same fervour that Westlake showed towards the heroic couplet. Also affected by Westlakeitis, he composed a history of World War I – in which he had flown biplanes and ridden mules and various other characteristic vehicles of the time – entirely in verse: it was the last appearance of the alexandrine and the heroic couplet. Unfortunately, this literary relic has not survived. He read parts of it to me when I was young and defenceless. I remember only this couplet:

I mention Westlake because there was a time when I too longed to be just as dead and as deadly respectable as he. Being spurned by my mother, I had only the death wish to court. The death wish proving as adamant as my mother, I suppose I must own that such writing as I have done probably owes something to the author of ‘The Crippled Goat'. Had it been Constable instead of Westlake who went mad in Nettlesham, I should no doubt be turning out watercolours by now; these childhood influences can be extremely powerful.

But how did I come to misunderstand my own life story? Can there be anything so idiotic? What streak of the perverse entered into me? There must have been some influence more powerful than old Westlake's crippled goat to make me so obdurately lose my way for so long.

There certainly were factors to make even the least shrewd of infants suspect that he was less than popular in the maternal bosom. Take the case when Mater was swelling and I shrinking; she swelling with another infant and I at four years shrinking under the weight of what was to come. So she wanted a girl with an urgency bordering on the dotty: she did not have to bring me into it. I could have been left in blissful ignorance of the whole reproduction thing, among my farm animals and Bonzo the dog.

Instead, I was made to get down on my knees with her every evening before beddy-byes (bloody beddy-byes being about six) and pray with her, earnestly and too long, that this time –
this
time, pray God,
nice
God – this time it would be a little girl with a little cunt and cute little skirts and pigtails. Pretty humiliating for a chap, boding no good.

Why didn't God intervene? Lean down and prod her on the shoulder? ‘Sorry Mum, but I shouldn't go into all that in his presence or he'll start thinking of himself as a failure. Read Freud if you don't believe Me.'

People, and this includes deities, intervene only when they are not
wanted. Nature rolled inevitably on, mother found it more and more difficult to sink to her swollen knees. I caught – and how was that for timing? – how, why, did they let it happen? – I caught whooping cough. What's embarrassing is that it sounds such an old-fashioned disease to catch, like curvature of the spine, or ophthalmic spermatorea. Why could I not have caught curvature of the spine? ‘Oh, the poor little lad has curled into a hoop, let's cancel the pregnancy.'

They must have warned me that whooping cough was fatal to babies but, not being up in medical science, I suppose I went right back to studying
Chick's Own
and forgot all about it.

Next thing is, the much-prayed-for infant arrives, proves the existence of God by coming complete with little cunt, little skirts, and pigtails, and I'm flung out of the house. Flung out on the very hour the infant surfaces. Go and live with granny, you little bastard.

On the whole, grannies get a good press, bless them. They're small, they don't eat much, and they view television regularly. In the thirties it was different: they never watched television and they smelt of mothballs. As an additional eccentricity marking her off from the rest of humanity, Granny Scoones wore black: black dress, black stockings, black slippers, black bow in her hair. Black knickers too, for a fiver. Her widow's weeds. Regardless of the fact that the old weed had been dead for about sixty years by then.

Granny lived in a tall house in Lavenham, all of sixty miles away from home and baby. It was called ‘No. 99', which somehow conferred singular honour upon it. The Late Mr Scoones had gone up in the world; he had been taken away from school at the age of fourteen because his father, a carrier, could not pay a farthing a week for his schooling. ‘A carrier' – no doubt a euphemism of the time, like those chaps who turn up in criminal court nowadays describing themselves as ‘a company director'. The Late had eventually acquired one or two houses, none quite as grand or quite as semi-detached as No. 99, and become Chairman of the local Budgerigar Breeders and Fanciers Association. He had left behind a great deal of solid furniture, very fashionable with the aspiring classes in the eighteen-nineties, covered all over with carving and scrolling, dotted with tiny shelves, and
seeded with mirrors wherever possible. It was all mahogany, of course. The Late Mr Scoones was not the man to venture into oak.

The toilet on the first landing conformed to the same pattern, with a fine high mahogany seat, the moving parts activated by a lever to one side, rather reminiscent of today's ejector seat in fighter planes.

The bathroom, too, had its share of mahogany. The mahogany ran up and around the wash basin, embraced the big misty mirror set too high for me to see into, and completely encircled the enormous bath, as if wood had developed the temperament of bindweed. The bath had a point in its favour. When allowing water to escape, it emitted a disgusting gargling noise which always made me laugh. Since laughing, in chronic whooping cough cases, brings on vomiting, the purpose of the bath was often defeated.

I dwell on these details because I hated everything in the house with – well, not exactly a passionate intensity, but certainly with all the intensity a whelp of that age could bring to the subject. We always remember best what we hate best. Also, in my desperate case, the toilet and bathroom were the rooms to which I was dragged when my illness came on. I had no ordinary whooping cough, like the poor kids down Baxter Row, who always had something so appalling that it's a wonder the working classes of Nettlesham didn't die out in that generation; I had whooping cough with complications. The complications, I realized later, much later, sprang from the bilious attacks which came on whenever something brought to my attention the fact that Mater was so pissed off at having me. A lot of sicking up went on at No. 99, I'm proud to say, and the mahogany took quite a hammering.

In order to cure or at least quieten me, my granny's doctor, a tall sallow man with side whiskers, carrying a bag, and dressed in even blacker black than granny's, and called Dr Humphreys-Menzies – oh, you won't believe it, you'll think I'm getting this out of an old bound volume of
Punch
– Dr Humphreys-Menzies came along and prescribed a medicine of noxious stickiness which was to be taken last thing at night. Probably a mix of laudanum plus cow gum and masses of sugar to taste. I'm certainly right about the sugar, for in
no time the mixture had rotted away all my milk teeth. The teeth went brown and green and began to waver in their sockets, like old men trying to keep awake in their pews during the sermon on Sundays. Out they had to come, ha-ha, something else we can do to the little bastard.