* This was a compulsory part of the teacher training course, in which Julia and two other nuns went off to train with their fifty-seven Indian co-students. Bear in mind, when assessing the level of culture shock, that Julia was not allowed to eat with anyone who was not a professed nun, and had to obtain a highly unusual special dispensation to go on the course.
† The Marshalls were a brother and sister from a well-off Catholic family in Madras who were travelling around Europe; Peggie knew them through mutual friends. Julia was right to be sceptical about them, since they never gave her the corset.
‡ The previous inhabitant of the flat, a young woman called Vi Lambert, went home to British Guyana and married its future president, Forbes Burnham.
COLONIAL BOY
1
My father, Bill Lanchester, was born in Cape Town on 31 July 1926.
The experience of being loved by someone tells you a great deal about that person; almost as much as loving them does, but different. Love has many different textures. W. H. Auden said – it was one of his most beautiful ideas – that when you love someone you are seeing them as they really are. This was in contradiction to Sigmund Freud, who had argued that love is always an overvaluation – that when we love someone we project our own feelings and needs on to them and see them for something larger, more wonderful, more amazing, more worthy of love, than they truly are. Auden said that was wrong: on the contrary, when we love we are seeing someone as they really are, and it is this reality with which we fall in love. So to truly know someone, you must love them.
True, I think – I hope. Conversely, you learn a lot about someone by knowing what it is like to have them love you. I know something profound about my parents by knowing the way in which the texture of their love varied. My mother’s love was fierce, with a desperate edge; it was not that far removed from anger, from need. Her love had in it a fear of the world, and rage at the world too. There was no question that she would die for me, or kill for me; somehow, I knew the idea that she might have to do something that extreme had crossed her mind. There was a ruthlessness to her love, a ferocity.
My father’s love was not like that. His love was calming and encompassing. It wasn’t that it was impersonal – it was deeply personal – but it did make me feel that it was somehow bigger than both of us. I did not feel that he loved me in defiance of the world, or in the teeth of it; instead he made me feel that the world was a place I could move around in and still be guarded and looked over by love. When I was frightened as a child (which was often) no one and nothing calmed me as quickly and thoroughly as the presence of my father. It was a function not of what he did or said but of his own sense of calmness, based on a deep conviction that everything was going to be OK. I now know that this coexisted with all sorts of anxieties and disappointments and that things were far from easy for my father, who was, in some senses, hiding from the world; but I didn’t know or guess that as a boy, and I’m glad I didn’t. He must have been deeply loved and made to feel safe as a child, and he knew how to pass that feeling on.
I can’t be sure, but I don’t think he learned that from his father. I never knew my grandfather Jack Lanchester, who died before I was born, but I know that my father did not feel him to be an easy or an especially warm man. Jack – christened John but always known as Jack – was born at home in Bridge Row, in the town of St Helens, in Auckland, Yorkshire, on 15 September 1888. He was the third of five children born to Thomas Lanchester and Elizabeth Beaston (who was known as Anne). If for no other reason, Jack would be an important figure in my life because I derive my claim to British citizenship through him. His birth certificate – which I have to produce to prove I am British, because I and both my parents were born abroad – identifies Thomas Lanchester, Jack’s father, as a ‘Colliery Labourer’. On the basis of this, I have in some moods, and usually during arguments about politics, been known to claim that I am descended from generations of coal miners. But that’s not quite true. My great-grandfather Thomas was indeed working as a coal miner when his third child was born, but he had not always been one. The family business was a pub, which Thomas inherited after his own father’s relatively early death. Thomas already had a weakness for alcohol, and owning the pub made it worse. Before long he was drinking his own business. (Which is surprisingly rare in his trade. Publicans tend to be very careful about how much they drink – they have to be.) He became destitute, and had to go down the coal mines to support his family. Even though he was forced to sell the lease on the pub, in a classic example of an addict’s self-ruinous cunning, he never sold the freehold: as long as he still owned the deeds, he could always use them to get booze on credit. This does not sound like a regime calculated to ensure a long and healthy life, and it wasn’t: Thomas died at the age of thirty-seven. Because he died broke he ended up in a pauper’s grave, and is the only one of my immediate ancestors not buried at Manfield in North Yorkshire. His son Jack stayed angry with him for the whole of his life.
The children of alcoholics are often preoccupied with questions of control. They grow up with a deep sense of life’s potential for chaos and instability, and seek to establish a countervailing space of order and rationality over which they have full command. That was Jack Lanchester. The way he sought to establish control was by earning money, the money to buy the freedom to live as he wanted to live – which meant not being at risk from anyone else’s whims or accidents or decisions. This was the main thing my father used to say about his father: that he had a deep conviction that money is freedom. This belief was the driving force in Jack’s life; it was coupled with a burning, and understandable, wish to get as far away as possible from what Auden – another Yorkshire-born expatriate – called ‘the enormous bat-shadow of Home’. These two drives – for control in the form of money, and to get as far away from England as possible – would have a huge effect on my father’s life. In that sense his grandfather’s actions had a dominating impact on large areas of his life. Some of the most important things that happen to people can happen before they are born.
My father wrote a short summary of Jack’s life when he was retiring in 1979 and had to take legal advice to work out his own nationality, tax, and residency status. That, and two short obituary clippings, are how I know some dates and the overall shape of my grandfather’s life. (The clippings are from the South China Morning Post, paper of record in Hong Kong,
and one from the Gatooma Mail, paper of record in the small Rhodesian town where Jack lived for several years.)
In 1910, after the death of his father, Jack, who had a degree in English from Newcastle University, went out to South Africa to work as a teacher at the Observatory School in Cape Town. He was twenty-two. His intention was to immigrate permanently: he was sick of England. He joined the South African Defence Force as a reservist in 1912, with the idea of minimising his obligation and maximising his freedom of movement in the event of war. A piece of family advice that was passed down to me from him goes as follows: if you’re going to be conscripted, it’s a good idea to join up as a part-timer first so you learn the ropes and (hopefully) have a bit of a say in where you are sent and what you are made to do. To me, the interesting thing about that advice is not so much what it says as the implied assumption that wars are things that come along every now and then in a person’s life, and it’s sensible to have a plan for when they do. Not many people my age in the West have that view, which would once have been not just common but highly practical.
Despite or because of his scheme, Jack never saw any action in World War One, which barely touched South Africa, though there was fighting against the Germans in South-West Africa. The war years passed peacefully for him, with the steady accumulation of money, which had been his entire purpose in going to South Africa. His plan as a teacher was not to be a teacher at all. While he worked at the school he saved as much money as he could, with the idea of putting himself through college to become a dentist. He attended night classes to learn the rudiments
of dentistry and get a jump on the university course he was going to take when he had saved enough money.
After eight years of this, Jack’s employers at the Observatory School got wind of what he was doing, and taking the view that his mind was on matters other than his work and his pupils, gave him an ultimatum: be a dentist or a teacher. They were sure he would have to choose being a teacher. But thanks to his energetic saving, Jack had raised just enough money by then to say, OK, fine, in that case I’ll be a dentist. He quit his job and won a place at Guy’s Hospital in London. This moment of pure ‘fuck you’ was one of the great occasions of his life.
Jack spent three years at his studies in London, and after qualifying he went back out to South Africa. He set out to look for a place where he could establish his practice, and he found one in what was then Southern Rhodesia, in the small midlands town of Gatooma, about a hundred miles from the capital Salisbury. This was 1921. Gatooma was small and sleepy and, thanks to its tobacco plantations, prosperous. (It’s less so now. I went to visit Zimbabwe with my father in 1980, just after the end of the civil war. As chance would have it the man sitting next to us on the Air Zimbabwe flight to Harare had been to Gatooma. ‘I know Gatooma,’ he said. ‘It’s a one-horse town.’ Then, with impeccable comic timing, he added: ‘The horse died.’) A year or two later, travelling on the train to Cape Town, Jack met a lively young Lancastrian teacher with the magnificent period name of Dora Higginbotham, also known as ‘Lannie’. She was impressed by how handsome he was; Jack’s good looks were always much remarked on. Photographs show him as well dressed, handsome in a dated style – though it has to be said that these good looks don’t really come across in photos, as old-time good looks often don’t.* In any case, I’m not sure that Jack put the famous good looks to much use, as he didn’t have much charm or an easy manner or much interest in the company of women. He was a man’s man and seems to have been one of those men on whom handsomeness is rather wasted. To give him credit, though, he immediately took to Lannie, who was lively and pretty and fun. They had acquaintances in common, and although they parted at the end of the train trip, they were both sure they would meet again.
Dora was my grandmother, Gran to me, but otherwise generally known as Lannie. As to what she was doing in South Africa in the first place, the short answer is I don’t know, which is odd in a way, because Lannie is the only one of my four grandparents whom I knew personally – and also odd because she is the one who kept the papers relating to this time. Indeed, the trunk full of family papers was hers. It’s a camphor-wood chest, bought, I would bet, in one of the furniture shops in Wanchai at some point in the 1930s. It is lined with the Evening Standard for the day of King George VI’s death in 1952. That is a very Lannie touch. It was sensible to line the trunk with something, so she might as well do it with a bit of newspaper that would seem interesting years later. Practical but not just practical, and alert to a point of potential interest and entertainment: that was Lannie. But there is next to nothing about Lannie herself in the trunk, and nothing at all about her life before she met Jack, and she never spoke to me about it, so I don’t know how she came to be in South Africa.
In any case, Jack and Lannie fell in love. He proposed, she accepted, and they were married at St Thomas’s Church in Rondebosch, Cape Town, on 15 October 1924. The trunk contains a clipping from the Cape Times: ‘The bride looked charming in a sleeveless gown of white marocain, draped with silk lace, and carried a sheaf of pink carnations.’ There is a photo of my grandmother in that outfit, with a held-for-the-camera smile which had much less wattage than her real one. On the back of the photo she’s written: ‘Wore my wedding frock back to front!!! And didn’t know it!’ They honeymooned in the Cape Province, and her ‘travelling frock was of a yellow crêpe de chine, with cloak of beige colour marocain and hats to match’.
Lannie gave up her teaching job, and went to live in Gatooma with Jack. In about a year’s time, she was pregnant. As she came close to term, she set off down to the Cape to have her baby. She almost left things too late, since July was the depth of winter in southern Africa, and the road from Gatooma to Salisbury was subject to flooding; it became impassable only a few hours after she got through. But she made it, and arrived in Cape Town in time to give birth to a boy in the small hours of 31 July 1926. The boy was christened George William. I always called him Dad or Pop or variants thereof – Dadsky, Popsky, Popskianovich – and everyone else always called him Bill. He was never, not once, called George. In his childhood, I see by looking through the trunk of papers, he was known as ‘Billy’ to his parents. When he was a few weeks old, Lannie and Billy travelled back up to Gatooma, which is where they lived for the next few years.
My father’s childhood was of a kind which has now, I think, more or less vanished from the world. He lived in the colonial bubble. In one sense the Lanchesters’ life in Gatooma was typical for a well-peopled, thickly neighboured small town: the family had a cook and a houseboy, as an adult African male servant was known, and also an African wet nurse who first suckled Bill and then became his nanny. She and her children were his closest companions, and when he spent time with people he spent it mainly with them. Dad’s childhood, while it had its peopled side, was also profoundly lonely – a colonial loneliness, marked by comfort, relative affluence, and safe, well-supported isolation. His African friends were inevitably at a psychic distance, maintained by both sides; if he had any European friends of the same age during these years, he never mentioned them to me. Nonetheless, he loved Africa. When I spent a month in Zimbabwe with him in 1980, he seemed much more at home there than he ever did during his relatively brief time in England.
By 1932 or so, Jack had become fed up with Gatooma and had raised enough money for part two of his plan for financial independence. He won a place to do a doctoral degree in dentistry at Northwestern University in Chicago, whose dentistry school was one of the best in the world. While he did the two-year course, Lannie and Bill went to England and stayed with relatives. Jack then was about the age I am now. I have to say I don’t feel much empathy with his desire to go away and leave his family for a couple of years, just so he could earn a qualification which would perhaps enable him to make more money. Jack seems to have been unable to see the happiness that was right in front of him, right in front of his nose. He put himself through university for a second time, using his savings from Gatooma and working a night job as a lift operator in a hotel. It seems an odd thing for a family man in his forties to be doing, and perhaps an indication of Jack’s restless unhappiness and the extent to which the idea of ‘independence’ had become reified: it wasn’t enough to be a respected, comfortable, secure professional in a small Rhodesian town. That, somehow, wasn’t real independence, because real independence meant money. Money didn’t symbolise or facilitate independence, it was independence, in and of itself.
During Jack’s time in Chicago, Bill and Lannie went back to her home town, Cleveleys in Lancashire. It was during their two years there that the big bad thing happened. Bill was diagnosed as having a ‘tubercular hip’. This is a condition that occurs in children when tuberculosis bacilli travel down the blood supply and affect the joints. Today it is treated by chemotherapy; in the 1920s and 1930s, it was treated by the use of plaster casts and braces, to prevent joints from fusing, and by rest. It was often fatal and always extremely painful. Children spent up to three years immobilised on their backs in bed. Bill and Lannie returned to Gatooma, on the advice of doctors who said that the climate there would be much better for Bill’s condition. In Gatooma he spent six months in bed and another six months with his leg in a brace. Bill, who was six, was not too young to be frightened. He deeply felt first the pain and later the boredom and enforced solitariness of the condition. In later life Bill was to think that this period permanently marked him, and gave him a shunt towards dreaminess, fantasy, a feeling of unworthiness, and isolation.
I know this story from things my grandmother and my mother tol
d me, and from papers in the camphor-wood chest. My father never mentioned any of it, except to say he had worn a leg brace for some time. Indeed he never mentioned that he had had TB, and I didn’t know it until I began looking through his papers and found the short autobiography I mentioned earlier (the one he wrote for the purpose of – of all bathetic reasons – clarifying his residency and tax status). To have had one parent who had TB and never bothered to tell me about it might be called an accident but to have had two qualifies as – well, I’m not sure I can complete that aphorism in a suitably Wildean way. Let’s just say my mother and father tended not to blurt things out. When at age thirteen or so I had a test for TB at school and turned out to be immune, my parents took an unexplained but keen interest in the fact. No wonder.
Both Bill and Lannie felt that this period of sickness exacerbated his bookish, dreamy insistence on living inside his own head – something he did as much as anyone I’ve known. That’s one of the things I have to stress in describing my father. This gentle, soft-spoken, intelligent man, shortish and roundish and well-dressed and friendly, a listener and a calm-seeming grown-up of quiet humour, good natured and straightforward in manner and externally so conformist, was one of the dreamiest, most inward people I have known, one whom reality only affected when it intruded on his inner world by force. He was capable of extraordinary feats of not noticing – and whereas this is so often a passive-aggressive act, a wish to deny the existence of someone or something, with him it was a testament to how far within his own world he was living. His gentleness and kindness and good manners were related to that, too: as if he had worked out the rules of human interaction only by close study, and had learned the importance of certain sorts of conduct, without gaining any real sense of how normal give-and-take, the ordinary rough texture of daily interactions, actually works. It wasn’t life as an only child in an especially solitary version of the colonial bubble that made him like that – God knows enough people emerged from a similar background as more or less the diametric opposite. But, in his case, it helped. It’s possible to have a childhood as isolated as that today, but it’s only just possible, and only perhaps if your parents are a bit dotty, home-schoolers or religious freaks or people doing good in the third world. My father took up residence in his own head in a way that would have been an excellent preparation for a career as a writer or an academic, but which didn’t, as it turned out, serve him all that well in the life he lived. I caught a glimpse of what he must have been like in childhood when his mother, my grandmother, took me out to the shops or gave me pocket money: she used to beg me to spend it on sweets. Her great and entirely well-founded fear was that I would want to spend it on books instead – which is what, if she wasn’t looking, I would do. My bookishness made her nervous because it reminded her of her other-worldly, defenceless son.
Family Romance Page 14