My Father and Myself (3 page)

There were, as it happened, far more cogent reasons for this tardy rectification of their relationship than my aunt was aware of at the time. They were not to be known by her, or any member of the family, until after my father's death ten years later, by my mother, who survived him seventeen years, never at all, and the irony of this situation appeared in the last decade of my mother's life when my aunt, widowed for a second time and again left penniless, became a poor pensioner upon her charity, lived with her in some disharmony and was occasionally made to feel the dependence of her position. It sometimes then suited her
amour-propre
to remind my mother of the signal service she had rendered her twenty years ago; but although she was free to recall her intervention as a successful piece of diplomacy, she was unfortunately morally precluded from revealing the facts that had come to her knowledge since and lent to her intervention, in retrospect, so momentous a character. This crippled claim to importance brought her no reward more visible than self-satisfaction; the last thing my mother wished in alcoholic and eccentric old age was to acknowledge any obligation to her sister; after attempting, therefore, to challenge the truth of the story, a maneuver my aunt stoutly resisted, she would dismiss it with “Oh well, he would have married me in his own time anyway,” to which my aunt, who was also addicted to the last word, replied, “Yes, I don't think!”

But the subject, beyond providing one of the several battle-fields between the two old ladies, was not otherwise mentioned, and I might never have known that I was for so many years a social outcast if my mother had not once, in a moment of vexed self-pity, rashly disclosed the fact to my sister who, though pledged to secrecy, promptly passed it on to me. I was, of course, delighted. My mother, whom I had seldom been able to take entirely seriously, now acquired in my eyes heroic proportions; but unhappily it turned out that she was far from taking so romantic a view of herself, for when she learned that I too was in possession of her secret she became very agitated, vehemently denied the whole thing and implored me, unless I wished to make her ill, never to speak of it again. I was thus unable to discuss it with her, which I should greatly have liked to do, until, many years later, she herself brought it out one evening, quite casually and without a trace of embarrassment as one might talk about the weather; but by that time unfortunately she had almost completely lost her memory and could recall of her past no more than that now somewhat mechanical repertoire of anecdotes with which, from constant repetition, I was already over-familiar. She could not therefore satisfy my curiosity about her early life with my father, and such information as I possess is derived from other sources, principally from my Aunt Bunny who outlived her.

THEIR FIRST ENCOUNTER was in the autumn of 1892. My mother was going over to Paris to stay with some friends and was being seen off at Victoria Station by her mother, Aunt Bunny, and Charles Santon the singer. Upon the platform also, sauntering up and down, was a tall, handsome, elegantly tailored young man, of military bearing, with a fine fair mustache and a mourning band round one arm, who regarded my mother with noticeable attention. Certainly she was attractive, pretty, petite, and vivacious, and, according to my aunt, by no means unaware of the existence of young men. The handsome gentleman was also bound for the Continent, but first class; my mother, whose family had fallen upon hard times, was travelling third—only, added my aunt drily, because there was no fourth.

This is
her
version of the original encounter which was later to be of such consequence to myself; my mother modestly preferred to ignore Victoria Station. She staged the first moment of mutual awareness a trifle more romantically, in mid-Channel, when she was looking about for a steward to bring her a dry biscuit and some lemon as a preventive of sea-sickness. The sea was calm, and if my mother was failing to attract the attention of a steward, she was not failing, as she “gradually noticed,” to attract that of a handsome, soldierly young man, with a fine fair mustache, who was pacing the deck before her and casting in her direction glances of unmistakable interest. At length he was emboldened to approach her, and addressed her in so chivalrous a manner that it was impossible to take offence, his actual words, according to my mother, being “I see you are in difficulties. If I can be of any assistance, pray command me.”

Such a gentlemanly speech (which, in years to come, my mother delighted to recount at dinner parties, in sentimental and dramatic tones, while my father looked selfconsciously down his nose) was reassuring, he was sent for the biscuit and lemon and permitted to escort her on to Paris, which was his own destination. How the difference in their classes was adjusted my mother could not recollect, but it remained in her memory that he possessed an exceedingly beautiful travelling-rug which he solicitously wrapped about her, for the air in the Channel had been fresh. During the journey she learnt that his name was Alfred Roger Ackerley, that he was twenty-nine, a year older than herself, that he was lately bereaved of his wife, a Swiss girl who had died only a few months previously after scarcely two years of married life, and that the object of his journey to Paris was to visit his in-laws, who lived there. He seemed much affected by his loss; my mother used to say in later years, “He came to me a broken man,” and I think it may have been for him a severe blow, for he rarely spoke to us about that period of his life or mentioned his first wife's name, which was Louise Burckhardt. She was a friend of Sargent's, and a portrait of her by him, “The Lady with the Rose,” is in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. It seems unlikely therefore that my father fell in love with my mother so soon after his bereavement, but he clearly found her attractive—and indeed, from her photographs at that time and her appearance and character as I remember her, she must have been a charmer. He called upon her at her friend's house several times, leaving cards and flowers, for she was always out, and, without having found her again, sent more flowers to await her at the train by which he learnt she was leaving at the conclusion of her visit.

Their second meeting took place in the early summer of the following year, again upon water, this time the fashionable reaches of the river Thames. My mother was staying at Chertsey with her mother, Aunt Bunny, and Bunny's first ne'er-do-well husband, Randolph Payne, and they were all boating one day through Shepperton, Bunny at the oars, when a voice hailed them from a passing punt. Who should it be but Alfred Roger Ackerley, who was living, it appeared, a comfortable bachelor's life in a house in Addlestone. To describe this second meeting thus, as my mother used to describe it, invested it with the romance of happy coincidence; actually they had been in correspondence in the interval and young Mr. Ackerley had already paid luckless calls and left cards upon her in her Chertsey lodgings. My mother had by now quite an accumulation of his cards and was “overcome by confusion,” she said, when he discovered that she had preserved them all.

Calls were exchanged and Bunny was taken one day to tea with him at the Addlestone house, a visit which, according to her, was not an unqualified success, for their host paid her (whom he had nicknamed “the Boy” because of her prowess with the sculls and the punt pole and her general independence of spirit) rather more attention than my mother liked and recriminations between the two young ladies ensued during their homeward journey. But my mother need not have upset herself. She was not to be neglected. Eighteen months later, in the spring of 1895, she was pregnant and my father was declining to marry her. The reason he gave was indeed substantial; he was receiving a princely allowance of £2000 a year from his in-laws, Mr. and Mrs. Burckhardt, who regarded him more as a son than a son-in-law, and this allowance, which was to be perpetuated in Mr. Burckhardt's will, might well cease with his re-marriage. However, this excuse, though weighty at the time, was scarcely valid for a quarter of a century, the less so since Mr. Burckhardt died suddenly and intestate at the end of this very year, so that my father's expectations came to nothing—nor apparently did it satisfy Aunt Bunny. She, indeed, was in a position to take of my father's conduct and character a more objective view than was available to my mother, for she had, with regard to him, inside information, confidentially supplied by my Uncle Randolph, confidentially supplied to him by my father, with whom he had become pally, that at this same period my father was amusing himself with other women elsewhere: there was a certain Mrs. Carlisle, who lived vaguely, but appropriately, “in the North,” and he had also informed Randolph that two of the barmaids at the Chertsey Bridge Hotel were “all right.”

AUNT BUNNY USED to say that there was a strong streak of coarseness in my father's nature—and who should be better able than she to recognize it? It was specially evident, she said, in some of his ideas about women. In fact, as I remember him, his social manners towards women were admirable, always courteous, indeed gallant; it is also true that in male company he was liable to refer to pleasing specimens of the female sex who caught his eye in the street as “plump little partridges.” This predatory, gastronomic approach to women would certainly not have suited my aunt; in spite of her gay spirits and general camaraderie, in spite of her ready and robust sense of humor, in spite of her being a “jolly good sport” and “the Boy,” she was, I believe, fundamentally virtuous, she drew the line, and in her own reminiscences all the unfortunate men, except the two duds she chose to marry, who attempted to overstep it and take liberties towards herself or her particular girl friends, were always described as “dirty” or “nasty” old men, who got what they deserved from her fist, her nails, or her foot. She was something of a Mae West in her character, with an extraordinarily infectious chesty laugh, which I used to call her Saloon Bar laugh, a fund of amusing, risqué stories and ditties, and a staunch loyalty to all her men and women friends; but I have a suspicion that she, and my mother too for that matter, never found the sexual act agreeable or hygienic.

It is necessary to know about my father that he had been a guardsman. He was born on April 1, 1863, the seventh of a large family of three boys and five girls, in Prospect Cottage, Rainhill, a village near Liverpool. His father, who described himself as a share-broker, came a financial cropper in 1875 and had to remove his family to a smaller cottage nearby and send the children out to work. The girls took jobs as teachers, the boys were put to trades, my father left school at the age of thirteen and went as clerk to a firm of auctioneers in Liverpool. His schooling therefore was of the briefest.

Height was one of the distinctive features of this family, transmitted to the children from both sides; they were all uncommonly, in the case of the girls unbecomingly, tall and, with the sole exception of my father, uncommonly plain. Three of his sisters, Emily, Susan, and Sally, survived into my early middle age; unfortunate creatures, kind though they were their appearance was so grotesque that it is difficult to suppose they could ever have known romance or believed themselves destined for anything but the lifelong spinsterhood which was their lot. Over six feet in height, gaunt and flat-chested, with harsh voices and large hands and feet, Emily and Sally could easily have masqueraded in the clothes of their youngest brother, my Uncle Denton, without the imposture being detected or their prospects in life improved. This leathery-skinned, equine uncle, who outlived the rest of his family, told me that his father was a good-looking man. If so the only photograph of him I ever saw did not do him justice. Be that as it may, if there were good looks about, my father got them all; he was not merely better looking than the rest, he was a strikingly handsome man.

In 1879, when he was sixteen years old and already nearly six feet tall, he ran away to London and joined the Army. I know of no special reasons for this step, reasons stronger than might drive any spirited youth cramped up with a large family in a small cottage on restricted means to go off in search of life and adventure. It is true that his father was something of a disciplinarian (“My old Dad had a very heavy hand. I can feel it still.”), but he respected him and was on good terms with his brothers and sisters. His mother he had scarcely known; she died when he was two years old, after Denton's birth.

He enlisted at Regent's Park Barracks as a private in the Royal Horse Guards, the Blues, giving his age as nearly eighteen. In this regiment he served for three-and-a-half years, of which eighty days were spent campaigning in Egypt, where he took part in the Battle of Tel-el-Kebir. In 1882 he purchased his discharge for £28. Nine months later, July, 1883, he re-enlisted in the Second Life Guards: Trooper Alfred Ackerley. From this regiment he purchased his discharge less than a year later, in 1884, for £18. Throughout his service with these two units he refused all promotion. There was a brief moment in Alexandria when his colonel compelled him to “take the tabs,” and reduced him back to the ranks within twenty-four hours for being carried back to camp by the drunks he had been detailed to bring in. It was an anecdote he liked to recall in later life, as he liked also to recall some of his conquests. The conquests were not, of course, military conquests; to the Battle of Tel-el-Kebir I don't recollect that he ever referred; they were amorous exploits, his own or some crony's, such as how he was almost caught
in flagrante delicto
with his color-sergeant's young wife. I have forgotten these tales now, but he would sometimes regale me with them in the 'twenties when, the ladies having retired to the drawingroom leaving him and me together, he would circulate the port and brandy and, his Gentleman's cigar in his mouth, reach an unbuttoned stage of mellowness and ease.

The Household Cavalry are a fine body of men, much admired for their magnificent physique and the splendor of their accoutrements, but it will hardly be claimed for them that they are—or at any rate were—refined in their tastes and habits. Conscription and improved rates of pay may have brought some alteration to the scene, but in my father's young days and on into my own, sex and beer and the constant problem of how to obtain these two luxuries in anything like satisfactory measure on almost invisible means—in his day the Queen's shilling—represented the main leisure preoccupation of many guardsmen and troopers. Nor is this surprising. Healthy and vigorous young men, often, like my father, the merest boys, suddenly transplanted from a comparatively humdrum provincial or country life into a London barrack-room, exercised and trained all day to the bursting point of physical fitness, and let loose in the evening, with little money and large appetites, to prowl about the Monkey Walk in Hyde Park, the pubs, or West End streets, in uniforms of the most conspicuous and sometimes provocative design—it is hardly surprising that their education in the seductions and pleasures of the world should take rapid strides. The tall handsome youth from the village of Rainhill seated with drawn sword upon his charger in Whitehall, arrayed in plumed helmet, glittering cuirass and white buckskin breeches, and gaped at by admiring spectators who sometimes dropped coins into his highly polished top boots, certainly found life very much to his taste. Unhappily my knowledge of that life and of the years that followed is meager.