Mother

by Nicholas Royle

  In each of these epistolary scraps my mother expresses her love with candour: there are no such letters and few outward signs of such intensity of affection in later years. But just as poignant is the fact that my father kept them: they were so dear to him that he carried them everywhere. So well-concealed about his person that I only chanced to stumble upon them years after his death. They are so worn: he must have unfolded and reread them many times. How much her ‘I love you’ must have meant to him! Even though I never heard him say those words to her. He only once said them to me. That was on the eve of his death. In response to my telling him amid my own tears that I loved him. He was not a man to show great emotion. I never in all my waking days saw him cry. Except – on occasion – with laughter.

  A remarkable letter survives from 21 December 1957. It’s so speedy and vital. Packed with play. Pricked with the elusion of what is fixed and proper. A proliferation of provisional names or nicknames. A love of the colloquial and euphemistic. The characteristic but gentle un-Christian ‘Gawd’. The Humphrey Bogarty ‘boid’. And a charming errancy over grammar and punctuation. ‘Its’ instead of ‘it’s’. ‘Thats’ instead of ‘that’s’. A preference for a dash – rather than full-stop. It’s a Saturday. It’s just eleven weeks after she’s given birth to me (her first child) and she is writing to Marion (‘Maryon’ or ‘old cock’ or ‘Slobbo’ or ‘Fanny’) on the birth of her own first baby (also a son) earlier that day. In the middle of the letter the newcomer’s father (my uncle John) phones:

  Sat. p.m.

  Dearest Mary-on,

  Bravo old cock! I’ve been throwing Nicholas around in my excitement and keep telling him he has his future playmate made but so far he hasn’t tagged on!

  Its rather wonderful to sit back smugly and think how clever you have been, isn’t it? I expect you must be feeling shattered but I do so hope you ain’t got a sore tail. I’m dying to hear how much he weighed and whether you had to drag out of bed at the early hours to get to the hospital. I’m so pleased it is a boy too. Daddy and Max are very thrilled.

  ———

  John has just this minute phoned to say Michael William weighs 8lbs 12ozs. GAWD! Poor old Slobbo – you must have had a time of it. He says you have no stitches so thats a relief eh? I suppose Nicnax will look really weedy against your son. I hear he has lashings of hair too. Still I’m consoled by the fact that he will probably rub some of it off on his pillow! I hope the nurses & sisters are decent – suppose they will be since it is Christmas.

  If we can’t get to see you in hospital we shall come & stay once you are home. But, we shall arrange things with John etc when he delivers the boid. I’m so glad it is all over before Christmas – I feel a weight off my shoulders! (8lbs 12ozs in fact!)

  Nicnax has big eyes too you know even if his mouth does roam over his face a little! Hope Mickie hasn’t got tightlips!

  Thought enclosed might come in useful. Let me know if you want anything. Phoned Nettie & she had a little weep too!

  I’ll be writing again Fanny. Meanwhile we’re all thinking of you both.

  God Bless.

  love F.A.B.

  My cousin and future playmate is Michael William Musgrave Morgan. His second name is also mine (Nicholas William Onslow). After our mothers’ much-loved father. My mother signs off as ‘F.A.B’ (‘Fatty Arbuckle’) in half-serious reference to being (as she would have said) ‘flabby’. It’s a letter full of love for her little sister. The most touching detail comes in the ‘too’ as she makes passing reference to their older sister Jeanette (or ‘Nettie’): Phoned Nettie & she had a little weep too!

  Maxwellian

  Your father was the educated one. Maxwell – or Max (as she always called him) – went to Merchant Taylors’ School at Moor Park in Hertfordshire – a public school not far from the family home at Perivale. His younger brothers Pete and Jeff also went there. How their parents afforded this is not clear. Tony Royle and Lola Onslow (née Kathleen Viola Frances Onslow) were both artists. Lola painted and sketched. She also had some success as a children’s book illustrator. Her beautiful line drawings and watercolours appear for example in The Enid Blyton Book of Fairies (1924) and Ronald Frankau’s ‘Oh Dear Dear!’ Poems and Stories for Real Children (1929). Tony was well-known as a cartoonist: for a good number of years he did ‘Just Jake’ and ‘Belinda’ in the Daily Mirror. Could this have brought in the kind of income to support three boys at a public school? In any case my father enjoyed Merchant Taylors’ and was pleased to observe that ‘old boys’ included such literary worthies as Edmund Spenser and John Webster.

  Merchant Taylors’ gave my father and his brothers a very clear sense of ‘proper English’. My father worked for some years as an editor and artist (in heraldic design) at Burke’s Peerage and later became a director of a small graphic design company based at Sutton (in Surrey) that did illustration work for science books and journals. In his later working years he spent more time copy-editing and proof-reading. (He was then based at home. Once a week he would drive the three hours or so up from Devon to do a full day’s work at the Sutton office and then drive back again.) But he was always a fiend for grammatical precision. I suspect his zeal on this front helped limit production of what my mother called her ‘screed’. Likewise if I ever wrote a piece of fiction or an essay and showed it to my father with the clear request that he not comment on spelling or punctuation he always seemed happy to read it and always returned it with the simple remark ‘Most interesting’ – never expanded upon. Followed by a series of specific observations about where I’d failed to put a comma or misplaced a quotation mark or misspelt or misused a word.

  Simon and I coined ‘maxwellian’ to reference this persnickety quasi-implacable dimension of our father’s character. And also to reference any suspicion of its replication or resemblance in ourselves. In truth I have always been guided by my father’s love of good grammar and precise locution. But in writing about my mother I have been compelled to respond to what was quirky and singular about her own language. I have experienced a kind of unfettering. And stumbling into a new closeness to her in the very reaching out to shape words and syntax – idioms and ironies – in the wake of her voice and her laughter. In the remembered tricks and turns of her vivacity. I discovered I had to write – for better or worse – without commas. Things linked without notifications or signposts. Continuous but broken. Making more use of dashes. In sentences sometimes lacking main verbs. Or subjects. Discandying flux. Even if at the same time I cannot write a sentence without wanting to pay homage to my father’s lifelong maxwellian vigilance as Grammaticality Enforcement Agency.

  A single instance of ‘maxwellian’ sensu stricto must here suffice. About five years after my parents had moved from Surrey down to Devon my father became embroiled – in an epistolary way – with a local dignitary called Dr Terry Glanvill. Honiton News covered the story of Dr Glanvill’s project of raising money for charity through the innovative sport of woodlice-racing. At this point my father intervened. On 18 January 1985 the paper published his letter to the editor: Sir – I was puzzled to read that Dr Terry Glanvill calls his new sport ‘Woodlice racing’. Surely, in accordance with the normal pattern for this kind of activity (e.g. horse racing, car racing, etc), the appellation should be ‘Woodlouse racing’?

  Dr Glanvill appeared unable to understand. Or at least unwilling to countenance what my father was saying. In a response published a fortnight later he declared: Sir – In answer to your correspondent’s query, they are called woodlice, not woodlouse…

  Anyone else might have left it there. My father felt it incumbent upon him to write in to the paper once more. As always gentle and courteous:

  Sir – Dr Glanvill seems to have missed the point I was trying to make. No one disputes that woodlice are woodlice or, I trust, that a woodlouse is a woodlouse. The matter at issue is the use of the name in the sport of racing, since in all other instances of which I am aware the singular form of the noun is used when c
onjoined with the word ‘racing’.

  However, since Dr Glanvill has originated this sport, it is obviously up to him to decide what it is to be called, and he no doubt wishes to emphasise its unusualness by departing from the standard pattern of nomenclature.

  I note among my own reference sources that some 24 different species live in the British Isles, of which the Armadillidium vulgare (the one which rolls up into a ball) ‘was formerly employed in popular medicine as a readymade pill’. This no doubt explains why another name for the woodlouse is ‘pill-bug’.

  I was delighted to learn that the woodlouse is proving so useful in raising money for charity, and wish Dr Glanvill continuing success in his admirable and ingenious project – particularly as he is so thoughtful as to set the little creatures free after they have played their part.

  My father is quite clear about what is appropriate and correct but he is also amenable to innovation: if the fellow wants to call it ‘woodlice-racing’ he is wrong but not to worry. All is for the best in this best of all possible worlds: my father liked to recall this formulation from Voltaire. He loved Latin and would also quote with effusive pleasure from Horace and Julius Caesar. I recall him reading out the response to Dr Glanvill before he posted it and the delight he took in that Armadillidium vulgare: he had the pronunciation pat. Whereas my mother and I would be less sure. More inclined to marmalade the armada and dilly-dally on the lid of its delirium. Not to be vulgar about it.

  My father loved the sounds of words but delighted in fixed forms. He had a marvellous store of ready-made speeches and recitations. From A.A. Milne’s ‘Bad Sir Brian Botany’ (‘Sir Brian had a battle-axe with great big knobs on. / He went among the villagers and blipped them on the head…’) to Aesop’s ‘The Ant and the Grasshopper’ (or rather La Fontaine’s ‘La cigale et la fourmi’: ‘La cigale, ayant chanté / Tout l’été, / Se trouva fort dépourvue / Quand la bise fut venue…’). He could recite with as much ease from Francis Bacon’s essays as from Shakespeare’s Henriad. He had a love of books as objects. The laden shelves of his study bore witness. On Saturdays as a teenager I would accompany him to secondhand bookshops in different towns or villages in Surrey or South London – sometimes twenty or thirty miles away. But in these years he seldom bought a book. Any purchase tended to be of some out-of-print reference work relating to his interests in heraldry or genealogy. He read The Bookseller and other secondhand and antiquarian book catalogues that came to him in the post. He read his quarterly Buddhist magazine The Middle Way. It seemed he had been a very active and diligent reader but then stopped. All the literary and philosophical texts he quoted were from his schooldays. Something must have put an end to his reading. I never asked and no one said.

  I suppose it was the war. When he reached call-up age he wanted to go to sea but the navy was full. He was part of the decimation that generated the Bevin boys. He was a coal miner at Worksop in Nottinghamshire. He spent three years underground. By general consensus it was hellish. Many men reported afterwards that they could not wait to get out. But these were the best years of my father’s life. He relished the digging. Being underground. The physical camaraderie. The routine. Every day the same. Down the mine first thing. Up at the end of the day. A meal served to him in his digs. A few beers at the pub. Thirsty work down t’ mine (as he liked to reminisce). Then sleep and start again. Digs to digs.

  Who’s turned the lights out?

  In the early stages I was committed to the idea of a memoir that would contain no photographs or other illustrations. I could not not think of Alice’s incredulous question in Wonderland: ‘What is the use of a book without pictures or conversations?’ But I wanted more than anything else to evoke my mother’s voice. Her sayings and tricks of phrase. The veering polytonal quality of her speech. I was driven by the desire of what Philip Sidney and William Wordsworth call prosopopoeia. Giving a voice to the absent or dead. From the beginning I was also mindful of Roland Barthes’ little book about photography. On the surface Camera Lucida (1980) is not about his mother with whom he lived most of his life and who died in 1977. If there is a surface. That is the question. Does a photo have a surface any more than a page of print? In any case Barthes’ book is haunted by a photograph of his mother as a girl aged five in a winter garden in 1898. The picture is not reproduced. He found the thought of its inclusion unbearable. And so the most powerful image in the book is not present.

  I was drawn to the thought of a memoir that would call on the reader to imagine: to see but also and perhaps first of all to hear. Might there be a way of experiencing a memoir with pictures but still in sound? Of letting the silence of photographs speak? Or if not speak at least in some ghostlike way enter into the conversation? Isn’t Alice in the end suggesting something of that with her ‘or’? An or of gold like the roar of which George Eliot speaks: If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence. My mother loved Blake and would sometimes quote him. Often out of the blue: To see a world in a grain of sand / And heaven in a wild flower… But she also loved Eliot and her call to hear the grass grow and the heart of the squirrel. I imagine a sort of mystic photo pad in which the words that surround and respond to each picture have the effect of making the photograph disappear. Translated into the roar on the other side.

  Here is a photograph of the McAdam family at Drymen in around 1905. A mother and father and four offspring. From left to right standing up are Helen or Nellie (b. 1879) and Walter or Watty (b. 1887) and William (b. 1891). Seated are John (b. 1882) and parents Helen (b. 1851 née Helen Millar King) and John (b. 1847). The picture is the work of A and G Taylor Artistic Photographers of 127 Sauchiehall Street Glasgow. An albumen print in cabinet card format. It is formality personified. Everyone is dressed in their Victorian or early Edwardian best. Everyone is watching the photographer or the birdie. But photographer and birdie are no more present than you are. The people in the photograph are not smiling but the mouths of Nellie and her little brother William suggest some disposition to amusement. All the mouths are uncanny. Tight-lipped. Akin.

  Roland Barthes asks: what pains in a photograph? He coins the term ‘punctum’ to designate some detail that has an unexpected and inordinate capacity to wound. There is something painful that moves over this Drymen family photograph. A punctum is first of all the opening of a tear duct. The photograph trembles in the eye of the beholder. At one moment it is the awful sense of composition as decomposition. The mouths all arranged. And then the hands. Then the jarring distance between the bodies. Then the creeping force of the ivy and other vegetation that surrounds and envelops them in our certainty that all of these people are dead. The boy on the right is my mother’s father. Or rather he will be. In the bizarre instant of the picture William is just a young lad of fourteen standing in placid concentration alongside a father whose facial hair looks like the overdone product of a low-budget Victorian TV melodrama. But spectral excess is the very oxygen of the picture. Like Philip Larkin’s ‘MCMXIV’ it is engulfed by the future. They will all die in time. Never on time. The McAdam offspring will live on till the 1950s and 60s. But my mother’s grandfather John will die at Drymen in 1926. And her grandmother Helen will die in 1938. In a room in broad daylight in the time-capsule overlooking the Square these will be her dying words: ‘Who’s turned the lights out?’ Isn’t that also what pains in a photograph? The way it can say not ‘Look at us in the brightness of now!’ but ‘Who’s turned the lights out?’

  Out of the picture

  The village of Drymen held a kind of enchantment for my mother. It had to do with poetry and song but also mourning and silence. So many McAdams lived in and around and are buried there. At various times they ran the Square Inn (now the Winnock Hotel) and the Clachan Inn. The Clachan is the oldest licensed pub in Scotland (1734). Its first landlady was Rob Roy MacGregor’s sister: Mistress Gow. The McAda
ms belonged with the MacGregors. My mother’s contempt for the pettiness and inanity of nationalism came out of a deep swirling attachment to her father’s Scotland as much as to her mother’s England.

  There was a well-established link between inn and kirkyard at Drymen: coffins would stop en route for mourners to drink. My mother’s aunt Nellie died four years before I was born. But her uncle Watty was still living when we visited on at least a couple of occasions. He spent most of his life as a farmer but was landlord of the Square Inn from 1924 to 1928. He was a lifelong bachelor. He once made the eighteen-mile journey south to visit the city of Glasgow. Not at all to his liking. He never went again. I remember him sitting in the time-capsule cottage on the Square without a word. Like a character in a late Beckett play. So much dwelling in silence. And then there was Cousin Nessie. I suppose they were sharing the cottage then. I only recall her as gap-toothed and ruddy-cheeked and gray-haired. For many years she ran the tearooms on the Square as well as the Clachan Inn. She had a tendency to say ‘Och – that’s terrible!’ Simon and Cousin Mike and I internalised this declamation and parroted it for years. It was key to our love of a Scottish accent. A ‘ter-r-r-rible’ stretched out to implausible length. As teenagers visiting with our mothers (our fathers more or less never came with us to Scotland) we would strive to tell Nessie things that might elicit the response: ‘Och – that’s terrible!’