My Father and Myself (20 page)

IN 1925 I took a flat in Hammersmith. The river front, seen from the bridge as I drove between Richmond and London in my car, had caught my fancy and determined me to live there; I often explored it but found nothing to let. Then one day a small shopkeeper near Hammersmith Terrace, a charming row of eighteenth-century houses, said that he believed that the owners of No. 6 had some unused rooms and were thinking of taking a lodger. The name was Needham. I at once called at No. 6. A tall, heavy, untidy man of about sixty, clad in a dressing-gown over shirt and trousers, opened the door to me. He seemed taken aback and flustered by my enquiry. It was true there was an unused floor in the house, true he had been thinking of letting it, but he had not made up his mind, the place was not ready, he had never had a lodger before, he was not perfectly sure that he wanted one, he could not understand how the matter had “got about.” Nevertheless he was friendly and kept saying “Good gracious me!” with a titter, shielding his mouth with his hand as he spoke. I asked to see the rooms and he consented. They were empty, grubby, but charming, a self-contained flat on the first floor overlooking the river which flowed at the bottom of the small garden, the very thing I wanted. I persuaded him to rent them to me and in due course moved in.

I was a serious, rather severe, young man, making no progress with my writing and hampered by a lack of confidence in myself, some inkling perhaps of incapacity. My poetic drama about Galeazzo Maria Sforza, of which there was practically nothing to show but some mawkish speeches between the two young conspirators on the eve of the assassination, had been irritably abandoned, and I was toying with a new play,
Judcote
(the name of the house of a family called Jude), which required no research, being based upon the exasperatingly stupid and monotonous home life in Richmond from which I had again escaped. Little did I then know that beneath the surface of that dull domestic scene lay concealed a plot every whit as sensational and dramatic as anything I could devise. The plot of
Judcote
(never finished) scarcely needs description, it can be guessed: a young, upper-middle-class, intellectual homosexual (myself of course), lonely, frustrated, and sick of his family, especially the women, his feckless chatterbox of a mother, his vain, quarrelsome and extravagant sister, and the general emptiness and futility of their richly upholstered life, becomes emotionally involved with a handsome young workman. This workman and his mate come to repair the french windows of the Judes' sittingroom, the catch of which has broken, so that they are always drifting open, being irritably closed, drifting open again (symbolism, you see, the invitation to escape), and the young Jude catches envious sight of the two young men affectionately larking at their work. The larking ends in a small disaster, for the handsome boy's chisel accidentally wounds the hand of his mate. But Jude has had a vision of the happy companionship he lacks. Months later the windows start drifting open again, manual labor is once more summoned, only the handsome boy turns up. Where is his mate? asks Jude. Dead of course, the cut in his hand turned septic and he died of septicemia. Jude bursts into tears. The boy puts his arm round him and comforts him. Jude falls in love with him and, after various other happenings which I never got right, runs away with him into a working-class life and they live happily together as mates ever after. When this romantic play declined to budge, as it constantly did, I had my Indian notebooks to fall back on.

My main neurosis at this time was noise. The need for undisturbed quietness throughout the working day had become an obsession with me, upon the lack of it I blamed my failure as a writer, and in my preliminary negotiations with Mr. Arthur Needham I particularly stressed this point: was his house quiet? should I be plagued with noises—pianos, radios, gramophones, voices —from within or through the walls from the neighbors on either side? Nervously he reassured me, the house was as quiet as the grave; he could hardly have foreseen the cause of my eventual exasperation. In retrospect it amuses me to think that a noise which now seems to me so jolly and sympathetic, then enraged me: the barking of dogs. During my six or seven years in this flat I became a querulous dog-denouncer. Whenever the tide was low, local residents would take their dogs on to the foreshore of the river and excite them to a constant yapping by throwing sticks into the water for them to retrieve. This got on my nerves to such an extent that as soon as yapping started, even if it were so far off as to be only faintly heard, I would utter a groan or curse, push aside my play and wearily bring out my Indian journal instead, a task which I regarded as akin to idleness, an admission of failure, since my extensive notebooks already supplied its rough material and to present it required no great concentration or inspiration.
Hindoo Holiday
, therefore, which has sometimes been dubbed a classic, was largely written in a spirit of vexation. I now know that had the house been indeed as quiet as the grave I should never have completed my play, or any other play; my inventive ability and (more important) my power of application were too slight.

Another allied foible was the conviction that one should discourage familiarity with anyone whose proximity—landlord, neighbor, other lodger—lent him a possible nuisance value. In one of my previous flats, of which my tenancies had been transient, my landlady, a “plump little partridge” if ever there was one, had at last managed through her tireless concern for my comfort, her constant knocking on my door to ask if I had everything I wanted, to dislodge me, and I was therefore determined to keep the Needhams at bay. There were three of them, Mr. Arthur, his brother Cecil, and their sister Louie: they must have thought me an extremely brusque and unsociable fellow. Having already unnerved poor Arthur with my strictures over noise, so that he crept about his own house like a mouse, I then managed, for some eighteen months or two years, to give an impression of such urgent busyness as, with precipitate haste and the most perfunctory of salutations, I flew past the Needhams in the hallway, on the stairs, that soon they slid nervously out of the way whenever I was heard approaching; there would be a sound of scurry, a sense of rapidly disappearing figures and quietly closing doors. As with the hidden plot in my Richmond home, little did I know what I was missing here too. But as time passed and I perceived that my privacy had nothing to fear from these old people, moreover that I should never make of that privacy any literary use, my defenses were gradually relaxed and I began to take an interest in this strange, eccentric, Dickensian trio.

They were all bachelors, the offspring of that J. Needham who has a notable place in the
Encyclopedia Britannica
(Eleventh Edition) under the subject “GUN.” In 1874 he had invented “the ejector mechanism by which each empty cartridge case is separately and automatically thrown out of the gun when the breach is opened.” Mr. Arthur and Mr. Cecil (known as “Cis”) had followed in his footsteps, Arthur as inventor, Cis as executor; but cigarettes and water instead of cartridges were the objects now ejected from their contrivances. They had made and patented a round metal cigarette-box and a cigarette-case, called respectively the “Pick-me-up Container” and the “Take-one Case,” which, either by being lifted, or pressed or slid in some part of their anatomy, automatically poked up a cigarette into your hand to save you the fatigue of selecting one for yourself. Their other invention was a Perpetual Fountain, designed to stand amid ferns on the dining table, or to hang as a lamp from the ceiling, which forever sprayed up and retrieved its own small internal puddle of water and was said to be in some demand among Eastern potentates and fishmongers.

These articles were made by Cis, with the assistance of a spotty little boy, actually on the premises, or, rather, under them, in a workshop beneath the garden. There, in this subterranean chamber, among packing cases, tools, lathes, and antediluvian machinery, he spent practically the whole of his conscious life, bent over his benches, his steel spectacles tied at the back of his head with a piece of string to prevent them falling off into the baths of acid and solder. A
farouche
, unshaven, grimy, wiry little terrier of a man, whose unkempt hair sprouted as profusely from his brows and ears as from his head, he seldom rose to the surface, except to rush stealthily from time to time down the garden (as I observed from my window) to take by surprise, if he could, the mischievous little ragamuffins who prowled the foreshore when the tide was out and enjoyed to clamber upon and rock his grounded sailing boat which was tethered to the garden wall. This boat, his cigarette-cases and perpetual fountains were the loves of his life (he had had no sexual experience of any kind, Mr. Arthur, who had lived with him always, informed me later), and when I got to know him better he took me for a sail or two.

Miss Louie too was seldom seen. A tall old woman of nearly seventy she looked after her brothers to whom she was devoted, as they to her, and had become almost a part of the dust and dinge of the cluttered house against which she was no longer able to prevail. Beneath the thin white hair her scalp was visibly grey with dirt, as also were her feeble fluttering hands. Yet once upon a time, one saw, she must have been pretty, this emaciated, nervous, faded old woman, whose dentures clicked and trembled as she spoke; a spectral beauty remained. She too from my window I sometimes saw in the garden, ineffectually poking and striking with a walking-stick at the stray cats who came in from neighboring gardens to crouch on the walls or the trellised arch that carried her rambler roses in wait for the birds towards whom her sympathies lay. “Go away, cruel, cruel creatures!” she would cry in a quavering voice, striking, thwack, thwack at the astonished pussy-cats, “Go away, you horrid cruel things!”

The only other occupant of the house was a large brown dog named Prince, so old that rigor mortis seemed already to be setting in. If he managed to totter stiffly out to the nearest tree in the garden, he seldom accomplished his purpose of lifting his leg against it. Peering frowningly down at him from my window, in these dog-denouncing days, I would observe him with horror straining with feeble persistence to hoist his leg without over-balancing. How kind I would be to him now! I would lift his old leg for him. He smelt from afar of his own approaching death; the lower part of the house was always rank with this odor of decay, mingled with the peculiar smells that arose from Cis's workshop beneath the garden.

The use of this garden was available to me also, though I did not enter it much, at any rate during the time when I was avoiding the Needhams. To reach it one had to pass through their drawing-room, as I suppose it might be called, a large ground-floor room they never used themselves, preferring a small parlor that opened off it. This large room, into which I sometimes peeped when the coast seemed clear, was like a junk shop, crammed with dusty furniture, occasional tables, screens and relics of the Needhams' past. Its walls were plastered with pictures, portraits, photographs and framed diplomas, foxed and faded like their owners. The walls of the staircase too, up and down which I dashed in my evasive days, were thickly hung with the overflow of these pictures and testimonials; among them, I sometimes noticed as I hastened by, was a particularly large amateurish oil-painting of a pompous old gentleman dressed in ceremonial attire and seated on a kind of throne. He had bulging blue eyes and a large mustache that extended beyond the sides of his face and, waxed at the points, turned upwards like the Kaiser's. A pale aristocratic hand, issuing from the folds of his vice-regal robes, rested on the arm of his throne. How was I to know that this old gentleman was the Count James Francis de Gallatin, my father's boyhood friend?

“I thought you was never going to speak to me,” said old Arthur Needham reproachfully one day when we were becoming pally and confidential. Of the trio he was the one most frequently met with. His inventive fancies having long since exhausted themselves over the creation of the Pick-me-up Container, the Take-one Case, and the Perpetual Fountain, his life's work was done; short of occupation and breath he was often to be found wheezing bronchially about the passages, unshaven, clad in his habitual dressing-gown, his collarless shirt fastened at the throat with a brass stud. His scanty grey hair had been doctored, obviously by himself, no barber could have made such a mess of it; aspiring to be blond, it was almost orange at the sides. Met in this négligé, when the thaw between us was setting in, he was always overcome by a genteel, simpering embarrassment: “Fancy you catching me like this!” His fluster was greater if, as often happened, he was not wearing his dentures—“me ornaments” he called them—and he would shield his mouth with his hand, apologizing from behind it with few aitches and much old-maidish giggling. How easy it is to make fun of old people and old animals! Forty years later I myself, with one tooth only in my upper jaw, do much the same as old Arthur did: my denture bothers me, I carry it in my pocket when I am not eating and try to restore it unobserved to my mouth if I meet some friend unexpectedly in the street.

Probably from the very beginning, when I first pressed the bell of No. 6 Hammersmith Terrace and Arthur Needham opened the door, I divined that he was homosexual, or as we put it, “one of us,” “that way,” “so,” or “queer.” One soon got a sense for such recognitions. But with my fear of interruptions and distractions I did not wish to know more, certainly not to claim kinship with him. The intellectual policeman I have already mentioned helped to bring about the happy result of the closer relationship I had hitherto stifled. Recognizing me one evening when he was on duty in King Street as the author of
The Prisoners of War
, which had lately been produced and he had seen, he became a friend of mine and got me going socially in Hammersmith much faster than I could ever have got on by myself. Soon No. 6 was being visited by him and other policemen, his selected friends, as well as by sundry pet tradesboys and costermongers whom he had discovered in the course of his day or night duties. Old Arthur, whose lair was on the ground floor, would often answer the bell (I had no bell of my own) and, after the first shock of finding uniformed policemen on his doorstep, much enjoyed the excitement and vicarious pleasure of admitting these youthful, friendly callers. He himself, I think, had pretty well abdicated whatever active sexual life he had enjoyed; but sometimes he would smarten himself up, put on collar and tie and a complete suit, pop in his “ornaments” and, assembled in all his parts, issue sedately forth in the evening and proceed, with slow dignified strides of his long thin legs, to his favorite pub in King Street, a tall, erect, distinguished-looking old man, high-shouldered, rather pot-bellied, a walking-stick beneath his arm and, in his jacket pocket, a curious small antique. This, which he gave me before I left, was a silver pin or spike about four inches long, of unknown origin, age, or utility, one end of which was prettily carved in the form of an erect silver penis gripped by a silver hand. The carving, though perfectly realistic, was so delicately done, the composition so neat, that the design was not instantly discernible, a second look, even a third, was needed to recognize it.