Time to Be in Earnest (11 page)

And then Dusty arrived. She was a young—but not particularly young—woman living with her sister in Roseford Road, and came by the day to help look after us. I can’t imagine why she was living with her sister or why she should have taken the job, since I can’t believe that she was paid more than a pittance. I suppose it was convenient as she only had about thirty yards to walk each morning. She was tall, rangy, with bright eager eyes behind large spectacles, a wide mouth and dark springy hair. Her two great pleasures, indeed obsessions, were the National Front, to which she belonged, and the Women’s League of Health and Beauty founded by Prunella Stack. She went off to meetings of the former wearing black trousers and a black turtleneck shirt. Once she took me to a demonstration of the Women’s League, and I can recall the rows of women in black satin tight-fitting pants and white blouses, waving and stretching their arms, bending and twisting in unison, an extraordinary if not unimpressive sight.

Dusty made no attempt to indoctrinate us into her Fascist beliefs and as far as I can recall they consisted of admiring the young men who went to the meetings, and of being intensely, if naïvely, patriotic. I often wonder what happened to her when the war broke out and disillusionment set in. But she was kind, even-tempered and cheerful, finding no difficulty
in coping with my father, and while she was with us life was changed for the better.

One memory is particularly acute. It happened very soon after she arrived. I went up to my bedroom and there, lying folded on the sill beside the open window so that it was aired by the sun, was a clean, ironed nightdress. It is still a powerful image of conscientious caring and it lifted my heart. After trying, not always successfully, to cope with housekeeping and school, I was going to be looked after.

Of we three children I think it was my sister Monica who suffered the most from Mother’s illness. Monica was Mother’s favourite child. I had the privilege of seniority and was regarded as my father’s favourite, and Edward was the youngest and the boy. Monica in between, the least enviable position in any family, always felt herself at a disadvantage. When, a few weeks ago, I talked to her about that time in our lives, she said that no one had ever explained to her what had happened. I had merely told her and Edward one morning that I was taking them for a long walk. When we returned, Mother had disappeared. Monica didn’t see her for nearly two years and wasn’t even told what had happened to her. I find this astonishing but I believe it to be true. I must have thought that Father was explaining things to her; he must have thought that I would do it. Certainly I can’t remember that I ever discussed my visits to the hospital with either of my siblings. If I did indeed leave Monica in ignorance, then I had failed her in a matter more important than cooking breakfast, keeping the house clean and seeing that she had a clean blouse for school on Monday.

My elder grandson’s wedding day. His bride (an Australian, whose family came from Malta) wanted a civil ceremony with no one else present except themselves and their two witnesses. It rained heavily all morning, but I hope it was fine for their ceremony. There is to be a church blessing to which the family will be invited on 4th October in Blythburgh church.

Yesterday I went from Victoria to Horsham, where brother Edward met me and took me to his and his wife Mary’s new home in Henfield.
I felt rather ashamed not to have visited them earlier, but we had a good day with much family talk. After lunch Edward and I explored the village, which has some very agreeable Regency houses, and then took his usual path along the edge of a field of linseed where we sat together in the strong light of the setting sun and gazed over the golden-brown field towards the Downs. We spoke about childhood and I asked Edward if he had a memory of a single childhood birthday. My own seventy-seventh had reminded me that I couldn’t remember any early birthday celebrations. Neither could he.

It seemed to us, talking gently together, that our childhood had been lived on a plateau of apprehension with occasional peaks of acute anxiety or fear. That may have been good for me as a writer, less good, I suspect, for my sister and brother. We were always afraid of my father, as indeed were most of our friends who, when they came to the house, did so with some apprehension. Perfect love may cast out fear, but fear is remarkably potent in casting out love. I think that my father would have liked children who were more affectionate, even while his severity inhibited the open affection of which I think he had received so little in his own childhood.

One of the characteristics which caused us most embarrassment was his almost pathological reluctance to part with money. I remember the misery at the beginning of each term in trying to extract from him my games sub, which I think was either a shilling or one-and-sixpence in old money. I was constantly reprimanded for my carelessness in forgetting it. I could never, of course, have brought myself to say that I had asked for it without success and was too frightened to go on asking.

Father was an indefatigable gardener, but the garden was disciplined rather than tended. The result was always spectacular. Everything flourished in his hands. The garden at Roseford Road was a rough plot when he bought the newly built house, his first overambitious house purchase, and he set to work to produce order and plenty in strict geometrical patterns. A square lawn on which we were not permitted to tread was laid front and back. Straight paths were bisected by others at right angles. Vegetables sprouted in precise rows; peas which were never picked until the pods were yellowing, cabbages with hearts as tight as footballs. It was almost intolerable for him to see anything picked. Despite the abundance my mother would creep out surreptitiously to pull up a cabbage where it would be less noticed—always a hopeless task—or to dig up a single root of potatoes, carefully smoothing over the soil. I grew to realize
that Father’s childhood had been insecure and that, when he began work at fifteen in the Patents Office in London and had to support himself on a meagre wage, he would sometimes go hungry. The garden represented security and abundance. But from time to time, perhaps to impress, perhaps to buy popularity, he would invite colleagues from the office to come and plunder, and they would move among the beanstalks and the peas happily filling their baskets while my mother watched with understandable resentment from the kitchen window.

I can understand my father’s insecurity because, for most of my early life, I shared it. When I was a child I couldn’t settle to sleep until I had entered into my private world. My imaginings were always the same: I am in a low, large, single-storey building in the Bull Ring in Ludlow. It is composed of innumerable bedrooms, each containing an immense bed. There are hundreds of us sleeping there and in the middle of one of the beds I am anonymously huddled. Outside the building, guards parade, perpetually on watch. No one knows where I am and I couldn’t be safer. Thus protected securely, I am able to get to sleep. I can’t remember at what age I let go of this nightly ritual.

After we moved from Ludlow to Cambridge, we ate as a family only occasionally on Sunday. We three children and my mother ate in the kitchen and my father had his lunch and dinner brought to him on a tray in the dining-room. I can remember Mother placing it down before him with an expression compounded of resentment and slight apprehension; being brought up in a boys’ boarding school was no training for a good cook. Even when she was in hospital and I took over the cooking, Father would still eat on his own. I now realize that, like me, he needed at least one period of absolute solitude during the day and perhaps this was his way of ensuring that he got it.

My father was a great deal more affectionate to his grandchildren than to his children, as often happens, and when he was old and living alone in a small house at Southwold, I grew to admire the qualities he had always possessed: independence, courage and his own brand of sardonic humour. Unfortunately these are not the qualities which are most important to small children. But his own life wasn’t easy. He began work at fifteen, fought in the First World War as a sergeant in the Machine-gun Corps, and spent all his working life in a job which gave him small satisfaction. I like to think that his last years were happy. In his old age I began to realize how much I loved him. But then, I think I always had.

We had dinner at the local restaurant and then went home to bed. Edward gave me a copy of an Australian publication about the history of the 215th Battalion in 1940–45 which made mention of our father’s youngest brother, Padre Jimmy James, who served with the Battalion and won the Military Cross for going unaccompanied in a jeep to the German lines to recover the bodies of dead comrades. He was, apparently, the only padre to receive the MC. I met him and his wife on one of my publicity visits to Australia and have an earlier memory of him when he came to London to march in the victory celebrations following the end of the war.

Edward, now seventy-four, is almost blind in one eye and has impaired sight in the second. Apparently the near-blindness is due to deterioration which can’t be corrected, so that he has to face the certainty of blindness. He bears it all with his usual stoicism and now listens to audiotapes instead of reading. He is still able to garden and to see most of his shrubs.

Returning this morning I was met at Victoria by Frances Fyfield, who took me in a taxi to Camden Passage, where we spent an agreeable half-hour trying on jewellery (but not buying) before having an excellent lunch at Frederick’s.

On Thursday to Southwold for a long weekend with Françoise Manvell. I first met Françoise when I was invited, and went to, Boston University for three months to teach the detective story or, as they say in the United States, the mystery. She is now a widow but was then married to Roger Manvell, who was teaching film at Boston. They were both kind and hospitable to me and I welcomed the companionship of compatriots when living abroad for even a few months. Françoise is not strictly speaking a compatriot; she is French and lived in Paris during the occupation and liberation, a time which is fascinating for me to hear about.

We arranged to travel to Southwold separately, as Françoise drove herself from Oxford. I caught my usual train from Liverpool Street and arrived in time to share a lunch of smoked salmon sandwiches in the
conservatory with Clare and Lyn who were already there. Clare was peeling apples to make chutney, and the strong smell of apples, vinegar and spices pervaded the kitchen and will undoubtedly remind me of this weekend whenever I smell it again. Françoise arrived shortly after four.

The weekend has been spent resting, walking, talking and, on Friday, driving to Leiston, where Françoise and I enjoyed ourselves hunting in the Trading Post. The owner clears houses and her huge shed-like shop has the attraction of a childish treasure trove. Apart from the fun of occasionally finding a treasure or a domestic object needed but no longer made, there is something poignant and nostalgic about the accumulated leavings of dead lives: the old wedding photographs and remnants of tea-services, the sentimental Victorian prints, the formal photographs from the 1920s of earnest children posed against obviously spurious backgrounds and gazing into the lens with concentrated innocence. I remember a similar photograph taken when I was eleven and had just started at the Cambridge High School: my mother standing behind a synthetic wall (she was always sensitive about her size), myself with hair unnaturally tidy, held back with a slide, wearing my pleated gym tunic, Monica and Edward seated.

Among a pile of objects we both found something to buy: Françoise a Doulton Victorian toothbrush-holder large enough to make an attractive flower vase, and a very pretty glass vase, also nineteenth-century, and myself two turn-of-the-century blue specimen vases, which I bought as a present for Clare.

I was the first up this morning and heard the news of the death of the Princess of Wales as soon as I turned on the radio for the 7 o’clock news. My reaction, which must have been shared by millions, was disbelief, as if the natural order had somehow been reversed. Death has power over lesser mortals but not this icon. It took a few seconds of listening to the newscaster’s sombre voice to realize that this wasn’t a carefully contrived publicity stunt; this was reality, horrible, brutal, ugly and final.