My Father and Myself (2 page)

Very fittingly,
My Father and Myself is
dedicated to her.

In considering the story of his relationship to his father, let me begin by making two chronological lists.

Needless to say, it was only by degrees that the son discovered some of the more startling facts about the father's life. He tells us that he learned of his illegitimacy (curiously enough, his maternal grandmother was also illegitimate) from his sister, who had heard it from his mother, but he does not say if this discovery was made before or after the marriage. There was, on the face of it, no reason to suspect such a thing. The children were given the name Ackerley and even Roger's business partner, Stockley, believed there had been a registry-office marriage. Though for the first few years, he seems to have been a “week-end father,” who only paid them occasional visits, he set up house with them in 1903 and was as attentive and generous to both the children and their mother as they could possibly have wished.

Of his father's second family, Mr. Ackerley only learned from a letter he left to be opened after his death, requesting his son to make certain financial provisions for them. For Muriel's children he had shown less paternal concern.

Then, even after learning from his landlord, Arthur Needham, that the Comte de Gallatin was not only queer but a bold cruiser of Guardsmen, it was only after his father's death that he began to wonder about this friendship and its break-up. It must have been odd to realize that, had some Time Machine monkeyed with their time-spans, it might well have been a thirty-year-old Joe who picked up a twenty-year-old Roger in a bar, and for a short while believed he had found the Ideal Friend.

The Fruit Business did extremely well, so that the household enjoyed every comfort. There was a butler, a gardener, and, evidently, a very good table. Ackerley Senior had an Edwardian appetite in food and drink with all the risks to health which that implies. Like King Tum-Tum, he had to take the waters every year, in his case at Bad Gastein.

As a father, aside from a distressing habit of telling dirty stories, for which he must be excused because it was the convention among his business colleagues, he seems to have been all that a son could reasonably hope for. To begin with, he was good-tempered.

Unintellectual businessmen who find they have begotten a son who wants to become a writer are apt to be bewildered and resentful, but he gave his own a liberal allowance and never attempted to make him go into the family business or even take some regular job.

Then he was unshockable. In 1912 he told his two sons that

At the same time, and this seems to me to have been his greatest virtue, he was never nosy. It is quite obvious, for example, that he knew perfectly well what his son's sexual tastes were. In view of some of the characters the latter brought to the house, he could hardly have helped knowing.

I don't think Mr. Ackerley ever fully appreciated this aspect of his father's character. Speaking for myself, I would say that between parents and their grown-up children, the happiest relation is one of mutual affection and trust on the one hand, and of mutual reticence on the other; no indiscreet confidences on either side. In the following dialogue, it is the father, surely, who shows the greater wisdom and common sense.

Like all of us, Mr. Ackerley had his cross to bear, but I simply do not believe he was as unhappy as his habit of glooming led him to imagine. How many people have had so understanding a father? How many have found their Tulip? How many have written four (now five) good books? How many have been in the position to earn the affectionate gratitude of a younger literary generation? No, he was a lucky man.

—W. H. A
UDEN
1969

My father and myself

To Tulip

THE APPARENTLY HAPHAZARD chronology of this memoir may need excuse. The excuse, I fear, is Art. It contains a number of surprises, perhaps I may call them shocks, which, as history, came to me rather bunched up towards the end of the story. Artistically shocks should never be bunched, they need spacing for maximum individual effect. To afford them this I could not tell my story straightforwardly and have therefore disregarded chronology and adopted the method of ploughing to and fro over my father's life and my own, turning up a little more sub-soil each time as the plough turned. Looking at it with as much detachment as I can command, I think I have not seriously confused the narrative.

—J. A.

I WAS BORN in 1896 and my parents were married in 1919. Nearly a quarter of a century may seem rather procrastinatory for making up one's mind, but I expect that the longer such rites are postponed the less indispensable they appear and that, as the years rolled by, my parents gradually forgot the anomaly of their situation. My Aunt Bunny, my mother's younger sister, maintained that they would never have been married at all and I should still be a bastard like my dead brother if she had not intervened for the second time. Her first intervention was in the beginning. There was, of course, a good deal of agitation in her family then; apart from other considerations, irregular relationships were regarded with far greater condemnation in Victorian times than they are today. I can imagine the dismay of my maternal grandmother in particular, since she had had to contend with this very situation in her own life. For she herself was illegitimate. Failing to breed from his wife, her father, whose name was Scott, had turned instead to a Miss Buller, a girl of good parentage to be sure, claiming descent from two admirals, who bore him three daughters and died in giving the last one birth. I remember my grandmother as a very beautiful old lady, but she was said to have looked quite plain beside her sisters in childhood. However, there was to be no opportunity for later comparisons, for as soon as the latter were old enough to comprehend the shame of their existence they resolved to hide it forever from the world and took the veil in the convent at Clifton where all three had been put to school. But my grandmother was made of hardier stuff; she faced life and, in course of time, buried the past by marrying a Mr. Aylward, a musician of distinction who had been a Queen's Scholar at the early age of fourteen and was now master and organist at Hawtrey's Preparatory School for Eton, at Slough. Long before my mother's fall from grace, however, he had died, leaving my grandmother so poor that she was reduced to doing needlework for sale and taking in lodgers to support herself and her growing children. What could have been her feelings to hear the skeleton in her family cupboard, known then only to herself, rattle its bones as it moved over to make room for another?

Nevertheless, it seems to have been left to my Aunt Bunny, her younger daughter, to exhibit the deepest sense of outrage at my father's behavior and to administer the sternest rebuke. This, to anyone who knew my aunt, might be thought strange, for she was the jolliest, cleverest and least conventional member of an unconventional family. She was, in fact, at this time its main financial support by her engagements as a vocalist, a mezzo-soprano of concert platform and operatic standard, though her great promise was soon to collapse and reduce her to light opera and musical comedy, understudying Connie Ediss at the Gaiety Theatre, and provincial touring companies in anything that offered. But her moral position did not lack strength, for she had lately, in 1890, contracted an orthodox union with a gambler named Randolph Payne; moreover she was always a formidable champion of the rights of her own sex. However, she failed, as everyone else failed, to persuade my father to make an honest woman of my mother and punished him by declaring that she would never speak to him again. Nor did she for ten years; but then, since her hostile attitude was seen to be as inconvenient as it was ineffective, she relented, a reconciliation took place and she and my father became firm friends. Besides, the test of time had already made it ironically clear that while my father and mother had attained happiness, fortune and good repute without the blessing of the Church, holy wedlock with Uncle Randolph had brought my aunt nothing but shame and privation.

At the time of her second intervention, in 1919, she was, of course, a middle-aged woman and, if aspects can sit, the moral aspects of the matter had taken a back seat. She was concerned now, more practically, for my mother's financial future and what, in this respect, would happen to her in the event of anything happening to my father; taking advantage, therefore, of a pleasant opportunity when she was dining with him alone, she summoned up her courage, for he was a king, if only a banana king, and an authoritative sort of man, and asked him boldly whether, in fairness to my mother and their two surviving children, he had not better marry her after all. Much to her surprise and relief, he “very sweetly” accepted her advice. This historic event occurred at Pegwell Bay in the spring of the year, and my aunt, full of her triumph, urged my mother to hold him to his promise without further loss of time, in case he changed his mind, or, since his blood pressure was known to be high, something less disputable happened to him. But my mother, who was liable to inconvenient Eastern superstitions, announced that she had always wished to be married on October the thirteenth, her lucky day, and no other date would do. The ceremony was therefore postponed until then and involved my aunt, who was to be one of the witnesses, in a troublesome railway journey, for she was touring with Cyril Maude in
Lord Richard in the Pantry
and had to come up from Cardiff during the run of the play. The wedding took place quietly at St George's, Hanover Square, in the presence of my aunt and her second husband, an inebriate named Dr. Hodgson Chappell Fowler, who were now the only sharers in my parents' guilty secret.