My Father and Myself (22 page)

Not long afterwards he himself fell ill and died, and the revelations of his secret orchard came out, to be followed, a couple of years later, by the information contained in the first sentence of this memoir. Under these successive blows—the first was shattering enough—the established image of the paterfamilias, the respectable, dull, suburban householder, the good, the poor, old dad, lay in pieces and needed reconstruction, yet it was not until about 1935 that I began to think seriously enough about him and myself to think us out on paper. Up till then he remained a curious and amusing subject for discussion among friends. I had indeed much else on my hands and mind, besides my sexual affairs, though I attach small importance to them now as excuses for inattention. Despairing of being a writer I took in 1928, as I have said, a job in the BBC; following my father's death I had the clearing up of his estate and the removal of my mother to the smaller house. Nevertheless, it seems that at this time a little more sunshine entered my life, fleetingly I fear, for I find among my papers a letter to me, dated July 16, 1930, which interests me as providing a portrait of myself in the late 'twenties. It is from that intellectual policeman I have mentioned, the friend to whom I owed so much, but whose character was so unstable and touchy, his demands upon friendship so impatient, that a mutual friend once said of him that he could not wait for the plants in his garden to grow but must be forever pulling them up to inspect their roots. The letter is written in anger, but anger is as valuable as alcohol for the communication of home truths. I forget the actual event that triggered this letter off, but I know that, like the barking dogs, he often got on my nerves with his constant unannounced invasion of my privacy and his inability to hold his indiscreet tongue in front of my sacred sailor, whom he himself had brought into my life. I suppose I must have had a conscience over my behavior to him and sent him some tactless apology; the following, which did not sever our friendship, was his reply:

The “excuses for gloom” which were “vanishing into thin air” were, no doubt, the belated departure of my sister to Panama to attempt to restore her marital life, and the satisfactory settlement of my mother's financial future. In the same year Miss Louie died, Miss Emily came to take her place and I met her. Those readers who may be thinking I have held this card up my sleeve for new and startling disclosures will be disappointed. A dull, dutiful woman, she had nothing to say to my questions about my father, questions which could not have been particular since I did not then know what to ask. Yes, she remembered him and as a very handsome young man, what great friends he and the Count had been, and what a pity it had all come to such a sad end, she couldn't say why. I tried again later to speak to her, with no better result; as Arthur himself remarked when I mentioned my failure, “Oh she was never a one to
talk
. Good gracious no! One can never get a
word
out of her, certainly not
against
anyone. Such a good, kind soul!”

Not long after this, when I was at the peak of my ability to be a “miserable bloody tyke” owing to the rupture with my sailor, in the disconsolation of which I wallowed for a couple of years, Cis was discovered to have cancer which sent him in and out of hospital, killing him at last; and finding myself an inconvenience to Arthur, who talked of selling the house, I moved into a smaller lodging nearby; then, in 1934, to a flat in Maida Vale. It was here that, for want of something to occupy such leisure time as was not spent at the BBC or prowling the streets, I began to brood over this story of my father and myself. It germinated, as I have said, out of a sense of failure, of personal inadequacy, of waste and loss; I saw it as a
stupid
story, shamefully stupid that two intelligent people, even though parent and son between whom special difficulties of communication are said to lie, should have gone along together, perfectly friendly, for so many years, without ever reaching the closeness of an intimate conversation, almost totally ignorant of each other's hearts and minds. That I had also been handed ready-made an unusual and startling tale did not escape my journalist's eye. My father was a mystery man. Part of his mystery had now been revealed; what about that part of the picture which still lay in darkness, his early life and relationship, so odd in view of Arthur Needham's tittle-tattle, with the Count de Gallatin—and, for that matter, with Mr. Ashmore, these two wealthy gentlemen in their thirties and the impecunious and uneducated young guardsman in his ‘teens, to whom they had both taken so inordinate a fancy? Was not a man who was capable of so much, capable of almost anything? Who could shed light upon all this? It was very old history, but there were two people still alive who might help, Arthur Stockley and Uncle Denton, my father's younger brother, who lived in South Africa. I started a correspondence with them both, and the general information they sent me, such as it is, is incorporated in the opening chapters of this memoir. From Stockley came the accounts of New Brighton and The Cell Farm, and that long impassioned private letter from Mme. de Gallatin which I have quoted in full. And from him and Denton came the photographs of my father as a young man. These made me sit up. The inherent absurdity of envisaging my father in the arms of another man had never really faded; it faded now. It is true that, studying the photograph of him in uniform, I decided that I would not have picked him up myself; but the picture was said not to do him justice, and the better one Uncle Denton claimed to have he never managed to find. But from the photo of him as a young man-about-town it was not difficult to see why Ashmore and de Gallatin had fallen for him. Where and how had he met these two men? That was the crucial question. I put it to both my correspondents. Neither of them knew, or, if they knew they were not disposed to say. Nor did I feel, from my knowledge of them and the tone of their letters as my enquiries grew warmer, that insinuations or blunt questions would have any other effect than to bring the correspondence to an abrupt end: Denton indeed remarked in one letter, “I enclose an answer to your family questions and will be pleased to answer any others
within reason.”
How vexing it was! What fun it would be if I could add the charge of homosexuality to my father's other sexual vagaries! What irony if it could be proved that he had led in his youth the very kind of life that I was leading! Where
had
these two men met him? Had they picked him up, as I picked guardsmen up, in the Napoleon or the Monkey Walk? Or was he “ordered” through Mrs. Truman before her shop was closed? For a friend of mine, who had a small library of erotica, had drawn my attention to a book which confirmed my belief that the behavior of the guards of which I had learnt so much in my own time had been no different in my father's. This two-volume work was entitled
The Sins of the Cities of the Plain, or the Recollections of a Mary-Ann, with Short Essays on Sodomy and Tribadism
, and the relevant essay was called “I Joined the Army,” by Frank Griffin:

This book was privately printed in 1881, two years after my father enlisted in the Blues at Albany Street Barracks.

Engaging speculations! Hoping still to drag him captive into the homosexual fold, I pursued my historical researches. Little could be expected from the Records Offices of the Blues and the Horse Guards, but I tried both and received copies of his certificates of discharge: conduct, alas, “very good.” An attempt to dig deeper into the records of the Blues met with no success; the relevant ones, I was told, had unfortunately been destroyed in a fire. Searching through the back files of
The Times
I found the report of the lawsuit between my father and de Gallatin. This rather dejected me: if their relationship had been anything but above board, would my father have taken the risk of putting the “vindictive” Count in the witness box in a dispute over money? Somerset House yielded me various death certificates and wills, including Ashmore's, and this reminded me of what seemed my last hope, Ashmore's son. Of this man I had private information, supplied by a close homosexual friend of mine and one-time colleague of his, that Air-Commodore Charlton I have already mentioned, that he too had indulged in homosexual practices, but furtively, screening himself by marriage and by denouncing and punishing the same practice in the ranks of his command. Whether General Ashmore, a cold and wary figure, knew more about his father and mine than he disclosed in his interview with me I shall never know; all that I got out of him has already been related.

Baffled in all my enquiries I bethought me again of old Arthur Needham, with whom I had long been out of touch. Had I pumped him sufficiently? Had he, after all, the clue I so badly needed? Was he, for that matter, still alive? One weekend, in February, 1938, I went down to Hammersmith in search of him. No. 6 had been sold, but Arthur was living, I gathered, in a smaller house near the bridge. There I found him, with another dog, a tomcat thirteen years old and of enormous girth, and a housekeeper named Annie, to whom the cat belonged. He was lying cast down on his bed, sideways, as though he had fallen on it. I thought him ill or even dead, but he soon sat up and was between the two, a pitiable wreck, much thinner than I remembered him, gasping for breath. He was fully dressed—perhaps I had written and he was expecting me—but his housekeeper told me that he had not left the small house at all for eighteen months. Like some frightened animal with its back to the wall he was hiding from the death that had lately claimed Cis and Miss Emily. It was clearly useless to ask too much of him. From my notebook:

I never saw old Arthur again, nor can I attach the least importance to “some sport.” I expect he was trying to please me—and be rid of me. He died, aged seventy-eight, at the beginning of 1941. Before that, in 1940, a bomb fell outside my flat in Clifton Gardens, bringing the ceilings down. This put an end to my tenancy and to such fitful interest and sporadic attention as this memoir had been receiving. I did not look at it again for twenty years.

AFTER MY FATHER'S death I moved my mother out of Blenheim House on Richmond Hill, the last of our three family residences. It was taken by Dr. Wadd who had coveted it for some times as an annex to his hydro next door (both houses and himself have long since been demolished). He offered to buy such fittings and furnishings as my mother would not need in the small box of a house we had found for her in Sheen Road. She selected what she wanted, the things she specially liked; the rest of the contents of the house, valuable curtains and carpets, silver, mountains of Blue Onion china, were sold to Wadd for a song. I remember a fine roomy Chesterfield in the drawing-room going for twelve and sixpence. This old friend of the family had always had an eye for the main chance. Owing to my work in the BBC I could take little part in these transactions, except to curb my mother's careless generosity. Particularly precious to her were sundry trunks, suitcases, bags and several large cardboard boxes. All these and whatever else she needed were transported to 159a Sheen Road. Here she lived for eleven years, 1930–1941.