Semi-Detached (9 page)

The
sister would want to hug us too tightly and slobber over us too wetly And the
poor patients were yellow After I’d been held up to give one of the old crones
a kiss, I remember my father walking away down the nearly empty ward and
quietly saying in a matter—of-fact tone to my mother, ‘She’ll be dead by New
Year’s Eve.’ But, you see, he was a
good man, who did good, by
performing his duty. We would go straight on to St Margaret’s — bigger and
noisier — and do it all again.

He took
us, I think, because we were life. His medical work was mostly with the
chronically ill, wheezing their way towards death. There were few glamorous
cures. But I have met a surprising number of them. In unexpected places people
seek me out, and sometimes I make the mistake of thinking they want my
autograph, but they want to tell me about my father, and his care for them.
Chronic illness and private practice don’t match. He was a National Health
doctor all his life and watched the erosion of the discipline of doctor-led
medicine with despair. When he retired he solemnly made us promise that, if he
were to fall ill, we wouldn’t take him to his own hospital.

Personally
I only rode as far as the roundabout. It was definitely part of the cycling
years for me. What age was that? I had a yellow bike, and later a blue one,
with drop handlebars with special pale blue racing tape wound around, like a
plastic bandage, for extra grip. I bought a water bottle carrier to attach
between my legs and a very beautiful square chromium-plated bolt-on mirror.

There
was one long, five-in-the-morning trip down to a pond somewhere near Woodford,
to go fishing. (Why? I never fished.) Even at that time in the morning, the lorries
thundered out of the night in an intimate rush: one tiny wobble, lose your
nerve and … kerrang. It was downhill the entire way, all thirteen miles on a
slight disabled-ramp of an incline. Too scary for my dad, I suspect.

But
more usually we cycled off to High Beach.

‘Is it
because of the beech trees?’ Jo asked.

‘Yes,’
said my mother. ‘Though I’ve never been there.’

‘You have
been there.’

‘Have
I?’

‘Yes.’

‘I don’t
remember it.’

‘And I
think it’s spelled the other way — “High Beach” —because of the gravel or
something.’

We came
to a sign, and it said ‘High Beach’.

High
Beach was a Victorian place of resort with a huge pub and a stretch of open
heathland dropping away to the Lee valley below John Clare was thrown in a
loony bin here.

Tennyson
had lived near by John Betjeman’s father used to take his work’s outings here.

‘That
pop star lives down here now.’

‘Rod
Stewart.’

‘He lives
somewhere here.’

The
surrounding villages of the Forest had the ancient rights to farm the wood, but
strict enjoinders to leave the deer alone. So the beech nuts were collected for
pigs and the trees were coppiced for firewood. The trees today owe their
magnificent squiggliness to all this. Then Queen Victoria gave the whole thing
to the Corporation of London, and it became where East Enders went for a day
out.

‘When
Aunty Betty heard we were moving to Epping she was horrified, my mother told
us. ‘She said, “You’re going to the place where the murderers bury their
bodies.”‘

‘We
used to come here in the summer to swim in the huge pool behind the pub.’

There
were steps up and the remains of buildings. I clambered on and looked through
the close-boarded fence. I was looking at another pool from my childhood. It
was still there. I didn’t recognize it at all. Surely it had been much bigger.

‘It’s
bound to look smaller,’ said Jo.

‘I know
that.’ But, there had been huge diving boards, the biggest in the region. I
remember finally plucking up the courage to go up to the top board, which meant
a very narrow and slippery ladder, and, once I got up there, it was much higher
than I’d ever been before. Higher than Loughton and Harlow, and they had proper
boards for show-off twisty divers in Olympic-sized pools. I stood shivering,
clutching the metal side rails for several minutes, before I decided that I
couldn’t do it and ignominiously had to climb down. But the pond I could see
through the crack couldn’t have sustained such a death jump. And there had been
changing rooms too. Where were they?

Londoners
don’t come to drink at High Beach much any more. The breathalyser has killed
the trade. In the woods, the litter stopped a few feet from the road. It was
probably quite a good place to bring the bodies now. We drove on.

‘Your
father proposed to me on the Isle of Wight.’

This
was all new ‘What were you doing there?’

‘There
was a special hotel for nurses. He was studying for his Membership, and I was
going away, just for a short holiday, and he came running down the platform
and shouted, “Get a hotel room for me.”‘

Yes,
that sounded both romantically delightful and presciently typical.

‘Why
couldn’t he book it himself?’

‘He was
very busy He didn’t want to come away at all. They had dragged them off just
after qualification, for the War. He always said that when he came back it was
as if they had to start all over again. He didn’t feel that we could get
married until he had his Membership.’

‘Of the
Royal College of Physicians.’

‘He was
made a Fellow, you know’

‘Yes, I
know’ But she was just going over his achievements, in his honour, paying him
his due, as she always did.

Until
later that morning, when I stood on the corner of the crossroads where Hartland
Road was bisected by Kendal Avenue, plunging away down a hill fringed with
red-brick walls and dripping evergreenery, I had never really been aware of how
comfortingly suburban our house was. I decided I would quite like to live in
one of these dignified Edwardian mansions now: not the new ranchero-style
maisonettes, with their steep drives, fake clapboard and hump-backed miniature
lawns squeezed into the former gardens of the grander homes, but in one of the
grander homes themselves, of course. Suitable for middle age, security and
routine, I suppose that was why my father liked it. Naturally, I found it
suffocating at the time.

‘He was
a retired dentist,’ my mother was telling Jo about the neighbour. She was as
interested to see the road as I was but a good deal less showily sentimental. ‘He
kept a gun by his bed.’

‘Did
he?’ I asked.

‘He had
a very large collection of valuable snuff boxes. He said he’d shoot anybody who
tried to get in. But he wasn’t a
nice man. He was always complaining
about the dog. He would send letters claiming that the dog was encouraging
other dogs to come into his garden.’

The
dog, like most dogs do, entered the family under false pretences, obtaining a
fake visa as my sister’s pet. She chose him because he was the shaggiest of a
litter of Norwich Terriers. For a century, Norwich Terriers had been bred to be
bright, attentive little short-haired frisky yappy things, but then something
went wrong and this throw-back, flop-eared genetic mutation popped out. He
looked like a two-inches-off-the-ground walking draught excluder, a type
favoured by Victorian sentiment, which naturally found an echo with my
eight-year-old sister. She had to have him. She called him Harold. For a week
she shuddered in ecstasy over Harold the miniature Aberdeen Angus and then never
paid him the slightest attention again. So my father fell besottedly in love
with him instead.

Never
very profligate in the hugging and kissing department, Elwyn lavished every
emotional excess he could muster on the dog. They had much in common: vile
tempers if rudely awakened from a day-time nap, unquenchable appetites and
severe territorial obsessionalism (to get the dog or my father out of ‘their’
chair required daring and cunning). And they both disliked the cat too. My
father allowed Harold to kiss him, sleep in his bed and use him as a mattress.
In return, he accompanied the dog to the end of Hartland Road for its
comprehensive investigation of every kerb, stick, lamp post and bush in the
street. Hours could be spent in mutual love-ins. The dog took precedence over
everyone. Towards the end of my father’s life Harold was replaced by Judy, a
Jack Russell, which snapped at my babies. My father seriously suggested that
the children should be locked away upstairs to avoid annoying the dog. I have,
incidentally, grown to have exactly the same relationship with my Labrador, ‘Cadbury’
(chosen and named by a twelve-year-old).

Across
the bottom of what was a steep hill for supposedly flat, uninteresting Essex,
but a thrilling one to freewheel a bike down, I could see directly out on to
open, arsenic-yellow countryside and a row of massive pylons. The suburb was
skin deep. Out the back, behind Mikey Everard’s house, there had been the
fields and copses where we played kick the can.

Today,
the front of the house in Epping looks stark. It has two bays with Tudorbethan
timber-framed gables and is painted grey, despite the name ‘White Lodge’ that
shines out on a brass lettered plaque in the porch looking suspiciously like my
father’s handiwork. There is a small ledge above the door.

I had
climbed up on it once when I came home unexpectedly after some sort of
Footlights summer tour and found the place locked up. I had been able to see a
light on in my grandmother’s room and, indeed, her shadow playing on the net curtains,
but no matter how much I hammered on the front door or stood in the front
garden and bellowed at the window I couldn’t penetrate her deafness. So, mad
with frustration, I had finally clambered up the front of the house and knocked
on the bay window.

‘You
shouldn’t have done that!’ My father was aghast. ‘You might have given her a
heart attack.’

She
didn’t see me. I was standing on the top of the front door, six inches from her
face, yelling at her. She looked out into the darkness and addressed me
throughout as if I was a hundred yards across the street. ‘Who is it?’

‘Granny,
it’s me. Griff!’

‘Griff’s
not here!’

‘No. IT’S
ME. I AM GRIFF!’

‘Griff?’

‘Yes.
Let me in. I’ve forgotten my keys.’

‘Why
don’t you come in?’

My
mother was away up the hill towards the town, not particularly bothered to
explore the house we lived in for twenty years.

She
only really paused when we got round the back, by the alleyway that led out
into the high street. She pointed out the pair of houses. ‘We sold the land,’
she told Jo, ‘to pay for the repairs to the house because the man who owned it
previously had started stripping the place, taking out the fireplaces … there
was a huge hole in the roof when we arrived.’

The
hole, I remember, was magnificent — quite frightening even — with jagged
edges, in a sloping bit of ceiling just at the top of the first landing on the
stairs. -My brother and I liked it. It made the place look like a ghost house
from a film, or
The Munsters.
Almost the first thing we did, when our
cast-iron bedsteads were put up on the bare floorboards in our room, side by
side against a rough, unpainted grey plaster wall, was carve ‘home sweet home’
with a pair of dividers in what we thought was a good approximation of prisoner’s
graffiti. My father exploded, in a good approximation of a ‘chief warder’s
fury.

White
Lodge changed over our years of occupation, but in what order I can hardly
recall. The hole must have been patched up pretty quickly The rudimentary
servant’s quarters with big glass-fronted butler’s cupboards, which had to be
shown to visitors, were opened out into a modern kitchen with a bar thing
cutting it in half where a wall had once been. My mother and father applied
themselves to fitting out their new sixties home with William Morris wallpaper
upstairs (rather appropriate since Morris’ workshops were just down the road in
Walthamstow) and bold Sanderson fruity stuff in the dining room.

I
rather enjoyed the element of surprise involved in this. We never seemed to
have the money to do the things that other families did. We never went abroad
for our holidays. Suburban Epping utterly closed in around us. But I was quite
excited once to discover two brand new step ladders, standing in the garage.
What big things to buy without telling us. The lack of conspicuous consumption
in those years seems surprising now My parents were part of a generation still
reeling from the War. We lived in a perfectly adequate manner but frugally. And
we were the posh ones as far as our mates were concerned — in the big house.

With a
new boat in a muddy creek, my father seemed to have exactly what he wanted: his
house to fiddle with, his hobby and a strict routine of work. He took up
brick-laying and walled in a section of rose beds behind the kitchen. A
gardener called Lofty came, and went, after he propositioned my mother. The
sofas were covered in dark-blue squeaky fake leather. A big brick double garage
was built next to the house. Daddy erected shelving in the living room. He
built a puppet theatre. He bought a Cortina. Granny and Grandpa came to live.