'Tears Before Bedtime' and 'Weep No More'

by Barbara Skelton

  When Brenda developed asthma, Daddy moved us all to a healthier atmosphere, high up in a new modern block off Baker Street. Their concern over Brenda’s health, and the comings and goings of medical men induced a bout of anorexia. I would eat nothing but Ryvita and lettuce leaves. A doctor recommended exercise. Every morning, before anyone was awake, I walked briskly round the outer circle of Regent’s Park, and went on starving myself. So Daddy packed me off as a boarder to Ashford High School. On autumn mornings, all the girls aimed to be the first one down to gather up the walnuts that had fallen in the school grounds overnight. At hockey, I started off the match … one two three and clack clack clack. I was then so tall that at netball all I had to do was stand on tiptoe to drop the ball into the net.

  At this stage, Uncle Dudley came to the fore. He was then a major in the RAMC. During holidays, I and my bicycle were despatched to some army base. My uncle was a great womaniser, much to Aunt Nancie’s grief. They had a son, Richard Brinsley. That side of the family always considered my father had married beneath him, whereas we would ridicule Uncle Dudley’s medical ineptitude. Once, he prescribed a remedy for colds and the instant the bottle touched the table, the cork flew up to the ceiling. He was not a weak man like Daddy, but rather formidable. Aunt Nancie was kind and puritanical. She considered Jane Eyre an immoral book for children. She was rich and, staying with them, life became quite luxurious. A maid brought up an early morning cup of tea with two thin slices of bread and butter. I would remain in bed reading Jeffrey Farnol, Mazo de la Roche† and Thomas Hardy until a gong announced that breakfast was on the table, where scrambled, poached or fried eggs with sausage and bacon were being kept warm on a hot-plate. Everyone dressed for dinner; a butler served at table and the meal terminated with a ritual glass of port. But my appetite was never appeased and, being too shy to say so, I would bicycle off to the nearest chemist, and spend any pocket money on malt and cod-liver oil that I mixed with Bemax in the secrecy of my room.

  Horrified by my ignorance, Uncle Dudley tutored me in French. The sentence ‘Pierre est allé au bord de la mer’ still rings in my head. I also learnt to play bridge. I developed a crush on Cousin Dick who was timid, with twerpy good looks. We would be put together in the open dicky of Uncle Dudley’s two-seater. Uncle D was fanatical about cars. At the beginning of the century, he had driven a Citroën as far as Iran and back. He loved to travel and at the end of his life, a widower and retired from the army, he travelled round the world as a ship’s doctor.

  The first sexual attack came from Uncle Ivan, the handsome Armenian husband of Mummy’s pretty sister, Vera. One summer at Grandma’s Uncle Ivan came into my room and plunged a hand under my nightdress. Not taking this as a warning, the following day I accompanied him into the town. While driving along the High Street, he said I’d find some sweets in his trouser pocket, but all I found was a hole and something warm and slithery.

  That summer, there must have been a large gathering at my grandparents’. One evening, with everyone seated in an upstairs sitting room dominated by a piano, I was asked to play the Moonlight Sonata for Daddy, poor Daddy who had been paying for piano lessons all these years; but, although used to performing at school concerts, I was unable to strike a note. All piano lessons were stopped and I remained Little Misunderstood.

  After the break-up of Aunty Vera’s marriage to Uncle Ivan, forever after referred to as ‘that dreadful dago’, Vera became the mistress of a Catholic solicitor who had a wife and children. On weekends, he and Aunty Vera drove down from London to stay at the Imperial Hotel. But Sundays were spent with Ma, as my grandmother was called. I used to brood on Aunty Vera’s scandalous situation. She appeared so glamorous with her sports car, pretty clothes and wide-belted high-collared pure camelhair coat. Grandma used to criticise her for using too much make-up and annoy her by saying, ‘You looked so much prettier, Viv, when you had a natural look.’

  Finally, Aunty Vera remarried a querulous alcoholic, then the Governor of Lagos. When he retired, she bought a cottage on the outskirts of Hythe. But she still spent most of her time on the Marine Parade. She would arrive, bounding up the stairs and bursting into the sitting room with the joyful welcome of ‘Hallo, girls’. And that is how the aunts always thought of themselves, ‘the girls’, until well into their eighties, when each one died.

  Plagued by ill health, Daddy also retired and settled in the neighbourhood. We lived next door to Saltwood Vicarage; and close by stood a Gothic church. We became a family of hermits, with Daddy’s health the ruling topic. And, whenever the church bells tolled, he would recite some ditty from an Irving play that ended, ‘Oh, those goddamned bells.’ His days were spent tapping the weather gauge, reading The Times and taking afternoon strolls with the current dog. After Peter, it was a sheep-killing cocker spaniel. And, every evening at six o’clock, he turned on the radio to listen to the news. A great worrier, he was always fretting about bills. Most of his inheritance went in the Wall Street Crash. He was a great disappointment; I even fostered the idea he was not my real father – a common misconception among father-fixated children, according to some clever Freudian. My mother went on reliving her glamorous past, repeating anecdotes about Gertie Millar,‡ the actor Reginald Denny and Michael Arlen.§ ‘I remember him taking me to a ball …’ she’d say, ‘and on the way home we stopped at a cab stall for a cup of coffee. He was carrying a rolled-up umbrella, and pointing to a doughnut he spiked it with the tip of his umbrella saying, “I’ll have that one” … He was a very dapper little man.’

  She had long given up the piano. A large aviary was built into the garden and she bred budgerigars. There was nothing my mother could do well. Not even cook. We seemed to live on sausage and mash, being easy to prepare and cheap.

  I would go by bus to a convent school in Folkestone until one day my father flew into a rage because I had blocked the washbasin with camomile flowers, a hair-bleaching device. So I was packed off to school as a border until fifteen, when I left school altogether and took to wandering about the nearby woods with a book, followed by the postman’s son, a Heathcliffian character with a mongrel dog. We never spoke except to say good evening and, while I sat reading about Becky Sharp, he squatted close by, explaining to Daddy afterwards that he was doing it for my own good. I had another admirer, whom we named The Egg Man, rather as one might say, The Elephant Man, who came round every week with a poultry van.

  Then, Daddy agreed to pay for my keep in a YWCA hostel in London and I left home for good.

  *Harriette Wilson, born Dubochet, was the daughter of a Swiss clockmaker. Her Memoirs, published in 1825, opens with: ‘I shall not say why or how I became, at the age of fifteen, the mistress of the Earl of Craven. Whether it was love or the severity of my father, the depravity of my own heart, or the winning arts of the noble Lord, which induced me to leave my paternal roof and place myself under his protection, does not signify: or if it does, I am not in a humour to gratify curiosity in this matter.’

  †Author of the family saga, Whiteoaks. Farnol was another immensely popular novelist.

  ‡The actress who became Countess of Dudley.

  §Author of The Green Hat.

  Chapter II

  YWCA

  In the early days of their marriage, my parents had made friends with a neighbouring millionaire whose wife had also been a Gaiety Girl much admired by Daddy. Sidney had inherited a fortune from margarine. Being a director of Gooch’s, a large general store in Knightsbridge, he arranged for me to be taken on in the model dress department, where my job was to fold up the clothes in tissue paper and put price tags on the models in the window. As I was determined to buy a pure camelhair coat with a high collar like the one Aunty Vera wore, I’d save up my wages and at lunchtime, standing among the coat racks in the basement, drank milk through a straw. Knowing me to be a director’s protégée, the head saleslady sometimes took me to a teashop in Sloane Street. When she discovered that the customers preferred seeing the clothes draped on me rath
er than on a hanger, she recommended me to take a modelling course; and that was how, on evenings in Oxford Street, I learnt how to twirl round corners with outstretched pleading arms like someone balancing an invisible tray.

  At weekends, seated on the windowsill of my cell in the YWCA, I’d gaze down at the traffic and long to go home. On fine days, at lunchtime, I went into Hyde Park with a book. One day, while sitting reading on a park bench, no doubt attracted to the bleached hair and over-made-up face, a handsome Guards officer from the nearby barracks approached. The following day he suggested an evening rendezvous. The meeting place turned out to be a louche hotel off Leicester Square, where he had hired a private room and ordered champagne. Even so, I resisted all attempts on my virginity, merely laddering a pair of silk stockings in the fray on the four-poster bed. Mummy would have rated the officer a ‘perfect gentleman’. The following day, three pairs of silk stockings were deposited at Gooch’s information desk. The Guards officer, alas, never turned up in the park again.

  The next chance meeting took place on a bus top. Peter was Austrian and so good-looking he could have been a film star, though he claimed to be secretary to Lady Asquith, and lived in a furnished room off Notting Hill Gate. Evidently his wages were small; all we ever ate were cakes. On Sundays, in a borrowed car, we drove to Guildford and went riding. Peter, on the other hand, never laid a finger on me. One day, maybe out of wishful thinking, I told him I had been raped and then aborted, and that was why Daddy had banished me from home, which so scared Peter that I never saw him again.

  Tina engaged me in conversation one evening while we were both lining up with our trays in the hostel canteen. Petite, bossy, with an obscene red mouth and ginger hair, Tina taught ballroom dancing on stiletto heels at Costelanni’s Famous Dancing School in Regent Street. On weekends, we would take the train to Basingstoke where I was kept busy cleaning her mother’s cottage windows. According to Tina, who was a good deal older than me, one should never sit idly brooding. These were formative years still; and her endless activity made a deep impression on me; she was always on the go, sewing dusting, knitting and reading aloud Somerset Maugham’s short stories; he remained her favourite author. Tina’s childhood had been spent in Tientsin, where her father had been Governor, and she clearly identified with Maugham’s heroines.

  Thinking she rendered me a service, she introduced me to her boss Mr Costelanni himself; but all he did was to take me to a greyhound track, and introduce me to a nauseous concoction of champagne and Guinness known as Black Velvet. All tracks, whether horses, cars, or dogs, bore me to distraction. All I enjoyed was the appearance of the little men in white aprons, carrying buckets, who circled the track, shovelling.

  At this stage, Aunty Vera would lend me her cyclamen satin evening dress, Sidney’s chauffeur would collect me from the YWCA, and Sidney, the family friend, and I would dine at either Scott’s in Piccadilly, Oddenino’s or the Savoy Grill where, after dinner, we moved to the edge of the dance floor to watch the cabaret or danced sedately to a foxtrot or a tango.

  In high heels, I was a good deal taller than Sidney. Dapper, white-haired, impeccably dressed, when not wearing a dinner jacket, with a red carnation in his buttonhole, he would appear in green tweed or oatmeal, a silk handkerchief in his breast pocket and brown and white co-respondent shoes. On Sundays, his chauffeur drove us out to a golf club. Exceedingly clean, smelling of Hermès eau-de-Cologne and cigar smoke, reserved and devoid of conversation, Sidney’s main interests were golf and business. As well as having a wife, a house in Grosvenor Square and a villa in Cannes, though not a promiscuous man, he had always maintained a mistress.

  One weekend, his chauffeur drove us to Brighton. On Saturday afternoon I wandered into a fortune teller on the seafront. Noting a smudge on my middle finger, she counselled me to go on writing, but failed to foretell the loss of virginity that night in a suite of the Royal Albion. Although I felt no loss or regret, I never boasted of my alliance with this father-substitute – my father’s best friend, what’s more – done to spite Daddy, the same clever Freudian later said.

  I moved into a large flat in Crawford Street. Sidney furnished it in pale green with an Axminster carpet and green velvet curtains. A Bechstein followed. Piano lessons resumed. I was given an allowance, half the amount he had settled on his wife, according to Sidney, who thought he was being fair to both of us. Furs followed … a white ermine cape, two silver fox-stoles, one slung over each shoulder with their jaws snapped together. On my birthday, the chauffeur deposited a sports car at the kerb. I had outdone Aunty Vera. Then the chauffeur drove us round Europe. A suite at the George V. Champagne luncheons at Fouquet’s. Afternoon drives in the Bois. Shopping in the rue de Rivoli. Josephine Baker at the Folies Bergère. Holland. Belgium. Italy. Gelati. Ghiberti. The Ethiopian crisis. In Bologna, tomatoes were thrown at the chauffeur seated at the wheel of the Alvis. In Rimini, the hotel was full of Italian beauties dining with German officers à la Stroheim. In Basle, we lodged in the Hôtel Trois Rois. In the evening, from my hotel window, I could see the workers leaping into the river, their arms held high, hands clutching some garment as the swirling current swept them homeward. In Monte Carlo, I developed a passion for water-skiing. Then, on our way back, in the Villa d’Este, alone in my hotel room, gazing out at the moon, I stood draped in white ermine and, without understanding why, burst into tears.

  Back in London, an abortion was dealt with cleanly in a nursing home. Accompanied by Sidney’s ex-mistress, a recuperation took place in Madeira. It was very agreeable swimming from the rocks of Reid’s Hotel in February. While the duenna gave bridge parties in the hotel lounge, I carried on with the band leader in the surrounding countryside. Cynicism had set in. The duenna advised me to get a life settlement out of Sidney. Feckless like my parents, I was not cut out for that sort of thing. The future would take care of itself!

  It was I who terminated the affair, for no rhyme or reason other than boredom. An unemotional man, Sidney never questioned the decision. Being an original shareholder of Wimbledon, every year he went on giving me two Centre Court tickets. And we went on meeting for lunch or dinner until, many years later, he married again, for a third time, the last lucky bride being his Irish housekeeper. They moved to Ireland to breed race horses.

  It was never known what Daddy had thought of the affair. But Mummy, forever after, whenever Sidney was mentioned, referred to him not only as a swine, but ‘that dirty old man’.

  Chapter III

  First Love

  In those days, like Jane Austen’s heroines, what most girls dreaded was eternal spinsterhood. Uncle Dudley had become the general in charge of medical services throughout India. He wrote inviting me to stay. I bought a lot of pretty clothes from a small boutique in Bond Street. One of the evening dresses was deep red in the style of a sari with a short red bolero trimmed with sequins. Then, with a first-class ticket, I boarded the Viceroy of India, When the ship docked in Marseilles, the future King of Egypt and his mother came aboard. One night, there was quite a scandal when the band appeared and a tipsy passenger tried to drag the Queen Mother onto the dance floor. It was dark when we docked in Alexandria and the ship was surrounded by hundreds of lit feluccas. The fellaheen were celebrating Farouk’s return. A red carpet was lain along the gangplank, and shouts and laughter continued throughout the night.

  When the Viceroy of India docked in Bombay, there was Uncle Dudley leaning on a shooting-stick on the quay dressed in khaki shorts and a topi, a row of medals on his chest, among them the DSO. As the passengers disembarked, he adjusted his eyeglass, anticipating my appearance. After dining in the air-conditioned restaurant of the Taj Mahal Hotel, we visited a nightclub full of sailors dancing together. The following morning we left for Poona, four hours’ drive away. Then Poona was almost a dirty word, being a synonym for Anglo-Indian bigotry. You only had to mention Poona for people to jeer and it was included in many music hall jokes. In fact, it was a very pretty hill station filled with barracks.
We entered the drive of a white bungalow covered in bougainvillaea, where Aunt Nancie awaited us holding a Welsh terrier. I was looked after by an ayah, who washed my hair, took charge of my clothes and for breakfast she brought me a paw-paw with fresh limes. Otherwise, the meals remained scrupulously British. We always dressed for dinner. The first course was a clear soup with croutons. While we were eating, brightly coloured lizards ran along the walls or peeped out from behind the picture frames. The first evening, when I appeared wearing the red sari dress, my aunt was shocked. To her Indians were an inferior race and it struck her as odd that anyone should wish to imitate their way of dressing. I slept under a mosquito net and was usually awakened in the morning by a series of bugle calls coming from the nearby barracks. Very soon Uncle Dudley had found me a retired race horse. On late afternoons, I’d set out for a leisurely canter round the compound. After trotting docilely out of the drive, the stallion (if he did not throw me a short way up the road) broke into a canter and headed for the racecourse. Once there, he galloped round, with me clinging to the mane until, thoroughly exhausted, he trotted back to his bag of oats. This caused my relatives such anxiety, particularly as I refused to go out wearing a topi, that they found me a riding companion. Colonel Rice and his steed clopped into the drive. The Colonel had a reputation for being a fine horseman. He taught me how to handle the reins, grip well and keep my heels well down. Then, off we would set for a leisurely canter out of the compound into the surrounding countryside, through stretches of sugar cane and villages full of yapping pye-dogs. We would return at dusk, the sky a blaze of red, while on either side of the track Indians squatted over camp fires preparing their evening meals. But I was still bucked off, for the stallion would be bitten by horseflies between the buttocks and break into a gallop. Before long I was anxious to give him up; and, as a consolation, someone presented me with a tame leopard.