The Blue Touch Paper (2 page)

My mother had been raised in Whitehaugh Drive, a cheerless, rising street of Victorian stone houses, blackened by industry and with back yards the size of handkerchiefs. A few doors up was the spinster Betty Richie, who, on its release, was to see
The Sound of Music
365 times, once for every successive day of the year. The strong-minded Euphemia had done her very best to make sure that my uncle Jimmy stayed unmarried as long
as possible, the better, she hoped, to look after her in her old age. When Jimmy did, at forty, eventually make it out of the house with the inoffensive but marginally vulgar Nan, a childless spinster who bestowed sweet tea, jam and honeyed flapjacks down the throat of any child who came near, his mother refused to allow that the marriage had happened or to admit Aunt Nan to the family house. Only the favoured Peggy, the youngest and brightest of the three children, was lined up to make a brilliant match, and even allowed to go off from Paisley Grammar School to Glasgow University, where she at once fell in love with a medical student who also shone as a rugby player. For my mother, to whom the drunken, violent pavements of Paisley were nightly torture, a fate like Betty Richie's seemed to await.

For the whole of her life my mother was scared. She managed to be scared for forty years in Bexhill-on-Sea, a Sussex dormitory for the retired and soon-to-be-retired which is not, on the surface at least, the scariest of places. I both inherited her fear and tried to reject it. Her mother left Nancy with a strong idea of how things should be done. I only once saw her in any kind of trouser. Respectable women wore skirts. No incident loomed larger in her later anecdotal life than the time when, during the war, while working for the Wrens, she mistakenly drank a china cup of whisky late at night in the belief that it was tea. She made the resulting wreckage of her consciousness in the early hours sound like a descent into un-merry hell. Her horror of alcohol, of men, of violence and of any kind of public disorder seemed to me in my equal primness like a horror of life. My mother was always on guard, always on watch, expecting men, children, neighbours, strangers, and, I'm afraid, her own family to betray signs of their underlying beastliness. Civilisation was a veneer, a pleasant veneer, yes, but not to be trusted. Essential
things always came out. I grew used to her favourite rebuke. ‘I love you,' she'd say to me. ‘But I don't like you.'

Nancy was an intelligent and sensitive woman, born, by bad luck, into the wrong place at the wrong time. She passed her days as a secretary, or as she herself preferred to call it, a shorthand typist, at Coats, the cotton firm, where sometimes, among the reels and bobbins, she wondered whether she belonged with the professional actors like Duncan Macrae who would come from the Citizens' Theatre to Paisley to guest-star in otherwise amateur productions of thrillers and James Bridie's romances. Macrae was an expert in what the Scots of the time called glaikit comedy. We would call it gormless. But if a working-class satellite of Glasgow was not easy for her, then nor, I think, was the suffocating gentility of the south coast of England to which my father transported her after the war. They had met at a dance in Greenock in 1941, and the progress of their mysterious courtship was recorded by my aunt Peggy. In her diary, for reasons not clear to me or to my sister Margaret, Peggy sometimes calls my mother Agatha, even though that was neither her given nor her adopted name.

27 September 1941

My beloved sister went off at 10 o'clock this morning and didn't get back till the minutes before midnight. She was very gay when she came in and announced that she was bringing an Officer for lunch on the morrow. Shrieks from mother
.

28 September 1941

Clifford came. He was most charming and an easy talker; he was obviously very fond of Agatha, kept turning round and beaming at her in such an adoring way. Agatha dashed
into the back kitchen between courses and asked me what I thought of him. I gave my hearty approval. I think she could do a lot worse, especially at her age. Admittedly, he's queer looking and smaller than she is, but he's kindness itself and very generous
.

9 October 1941

Bombshell arrived today at lunch-time. Nancy's letter for this week brought the news that she was going to marry Clifford quite soon. Mother was bowled over by the news and called me all sorts of names for not letting her know sooner. Clifford is coming to see Father at the weekend and Dad is going to ask him gravely if he thinks he can keep her. It's going to be killing
.

13 October 1941

Again an ominous date. Clifford arrived tonight to explain his financial position to Father. Then we had some supper and everything seemed to be flowing smoothly until the date was brought up. Both Nancy and Clifford want it soon, very soon; in point of fact, next week. Mother almost fainted
.

22 October 1941

It's all over. The whole affair went with a decided swing and passed far too quickly. Everything passed off excellently. There was no confetti to bother Agatha, although the men hoisted Clifford on their shoulders and carried him downstairs, forgetting all about his sore leg
.

Reading this diary so many years later, the obvious temptation is to assume that this was the familiar story of a wartime
marriage. Two people come together and feel they have no time before the man will go away once more to put his life at risk. Soon after his visit to the Abbey Close Church of Scotland my father was indeed back on the high seas, though not before Betty Richie had sent the happy couple an ambiguous telegram reading simply: ‘You have done it now.' But so little in the lives of either of my parents could be called impetuous that this single action stands out as uncharacteristic of them both. Their decision was destined, in subsequent years, radically to transform my mother's life while having remarkably little effect on my father's. You would think that two people could not meet and almost immediately mate unless it was what both of them already had in mind. But what was in my father's mind was never clear to me, and, from her own reckoning, I'm not sure it was ever apparent to my mother either. For all the ceaseless blue flimsies that passed between them while Dad was away at sea, I never read anything in either of their letters which suggested a strong bond of understanding or of passion. My father became necessary to my mother, essential even, without ever becoming adored.

I have in my possession the family Bible which Dad once gave to me, and which, in a pencilled addendum, traces our ancestry back to the Earl of Bristol in the fifteenth century. But by the time the twentieth century began, the Hares were red-brick bourgeois, living in Ilford in a by no means luxurious house, and yet still able to maintain two live-in maids. In quite ordinary streets, servants were still part of the deal. My father was the middle of three brothers, all of them short and all of them soon to be prematurely bald. Both the eldest, christened Sterika but mercifully known as Eric, and the youngest, christened Alan but condemned to be known as Bumper, had
posh golf-club accents which embarrassed me when in their company, and which would later make the cinema actor Terry- Thomas sound unaffected. Some of Bumper's adventures were, by repute, not so different from those of exactly the kind of bounder and cad that unusual actor played. But my father, christened Clifford Theodore Rippon but known alternately as Bluey and as Finns, had a much less noticeable accent. He was that rare kind of Englishman who's hard to place. Probably that was because he had run away from England when in his teens. Faced with the prospect of following his father into Barclays Bank as a manager, Finns had left Chigwell School, where he told me he had spent much of his time stealing walnuts from a spreading tree, and made his way to Australia.

At some point in my childhood, Eric told me that during the First World War at St Paul's School he had played cricket, waiting each year to progress upwards. From 1914 onwards, the first XI, he said, had played in the certainty that they would then go off to the trenches. When the season resumed, the likelihood was at least four or five of the year's previous team would have been killed. It was Eric's luck to have been born in 1900, so by the time he enjoyed cricket at the highest level, the conflict was almost over, and at last, in 1918, a full team might hope to survive. When I asked him how young men were so willing to accept the certainty of their own imminent death without question, he replied, ‘Nobody questioned. You played cricket knowing you were likely to die. And you accepted it. I can't explain to you. I can no longer explain to myself.'

My uncle's lasting memorial, therefore, was not to be in a cemetery at Ypres or at Thiepval, but rather in
Wisden
, where, playing for Essex as S. N. Hare, he is still credited with holding the record for a ninth-wicket partnership in first-class cricket.
For the rest of his working life, while employed by Shell, he would be allowed back from Baghdad for the summer in order to attend each of the five test matches in the company of the novelist Alec Waugh, who was Eric's rather unlikely best friend. But my father had been born six years later in 1906. His passion was not for cricket but for classical music. When I was little, he would play me Brahms, just as Brad Pitt does for his son in the Terrence Malick picture
The Tree of Life
, and tell me it was the greatest music ever written. The one thing Finns knew, even as an adolescent, was that he had been born into a country in which he did not wish to live.

When, in 1976, I directed the play
Weapons of Happiness
by Howard Brenton, I would constantly repeat to myself a favourite line, when one character says to another, ‘You really are something of a perpetual absence, old man.' It stayed with me for years. I did not understand its resonance until I one day realised that the phrase ‘a perpetual absence' so perfectly described my own father. Even when Finns was present, he was absent. But he was rarely present. At his best, he was attentive but opaque, happier with anecdotes than with conversation. At his frequent worst, he was self-involved and inconsiderate. Given my mother's naturally nervous disposition, nothing could have been worse for her than marrying a husband who was rarely around. He had gone to Tamworth in New South Wales to work as a jackeroo when he was still under eighteen. In his own account, he had moved from Australia to a tea plantation in Malaya – doing what, I have no idea. He never seemed particularly physical. He had entered the merchant navy, where he played reveille on the cornet every morning to wake the ship, and played again at night to put it to bed. The life suited him fine.

During the Second World War, merchant ships were commandeered for the national effort and used to convey troops. Dad was torpedoed twice, once in a troop ship in the Mediterranean early on in the war, and then again as part of a North Atlantic convoy. He had had to climb down nets on the side of his ship in open sea and take a rowing boat to safety. Photos of him in his pre-war freedom show him larking around in easy camaraderie with other men of his own age, standing on each other's shoulders, often near swimming pools which look like half-cut-off oil drums on the decks of ships. He smiles without a care in the world. But by the time he meets my mother, he is seen in a series of framed piano-top photos with his hat still at a jaunty angle, but with a far more serious expression. He usually has an impressive row of braid along the top pocket of his white uniform, because for the length of the war he was in the Royal Navy. At its end, he returned to merchant service, rising to become a full purser with P&O. When attending my first raunchy and foul-mouthed play
Slag
at the Hampstead Theatre Club in 1970, my mother finessed the problem of parental reaction beautifully. ‘Yes, we enjoyed it, but your father, having been in the navy, probably understood more of it than I did.'

If I was conscious of wanting not to inherit my mother's timidity, then it was my father's evasiveness I recognised in myself, and also disliked. When Dad died in 1989, my mother was embarrassed by his omission of both his children from his will. I asked my sister if she had been surprised. ‘Not at all,' Margaret replied, without any apparent bitterness. ‘Dad was never interested in us when he was alive. Why should he be just because he's died?' Asked in 2000 by the Almeida Theatre to adapt Chekhov's 1880 ramblings, usually performed in the English-speaking theatre under the title
Platonov
, I was taken
aback when I enquired what the meaning was of this strange word,
, by which the play was known in Russia. ‘Fatherlessness,' I was told.

Margaret had been born in Paisley in 1943. After the war the family had moved down to St Leonards in East Sussex, where my father's father had also retired. St Leonards is itself a kind of adjunct of Hastings, in the same relationship as Hove is to Brighton: part but not part. The winter of 1947 was, at the time, the coldest of the century, and my mother, pregnant and alone, pulled Margaret up the steep, icy hill to 23 Dane Road. She lived with my sister on the ground floor of a high unremarkable turn-of-the-century semi-detached which had been chopped haphazardly into flats. The pocket-handkerchief garden was now in front, not behind. My mother loved to joke about the view from the kitchen sink which was nothing but a blank bottle-green wall.