Family Romance

by John Lanchester

  The decision to evacuate had to be made very quickly. People were given a week’s notice and were not told where the evacuees were to be sent. The Lanchesters’ decision was made: Jack and Lannie would stay, Bill would go.

  In 1950, Lannie wrote an account of their parting in a grey-blue school exercise book with the title ‘Lest I Forget’:

  Friday July 5th. Sad day packing off one’s son (14 years old on the 31st of the month) in charge of a friend. Son complete with Penguin editions of Shakespeare’s Comedies – waistbelt with compartments stocked with American dollars – lots of advice & injunctions all completely ignored and forgotten as soon as said – trunk & suitcase well stocked with clothes & books & even some bedding. Farewell from the wharf side – disappearance of son below to his camp bed (one of several hundreds it seemed in former lounge of Empress of Canada) to get down to one of the Comedies. To be told destination Manila (Philippines) & then to Australia.

  Previous to departure one had to be ‘collected’ at the Peninsula Hotel & one sat there waiting until one’s name was called. Looking back after nearly 10 years one wonders how one could have endured it & what feelings one’s only child had at the moments of departure!

  Home we the parents went in the pouring rain & the flat seemed curiously empty.

  It was more than five years before they saw each other again. The pain in that short passage is so great, I find it difficult to read. For Lannie it was so great that she couldn’t bear to write her son’s name.

  * Maud Gonne, ‘the most beautiful woman in Europe’, seems plain in almost every photograph. You hardly ever see an old photo in which someone who’s famous for being beautiful actually looks beautiful. I sometimes wonder if this phenomenon is to do with historical shifts in the idea of beauty; or with people’s relative ease in front of the camera; or with different exposure speeds requiring people to hold poses for uncomfortable periods. To complicate things, and very broadly speaking, men in old films – say from the 1930s – who are supposed to be good looking still seem good looking (Clark Gable, Errol Flynn), whereas the women look, at best, on the pretty side of odd. Why?

  † Actually, technically, what he offered to sell him was the several-hundred-year-long lease. There was no freehold property in Hong Kong, since the entire territory in those days belonged to the British Crown. I don’t know who owns it now – the Chinese government, I suppose. This might sound like an esoteric point, but when negotiations over the future of the territory were opened between the British and the Chinese in the 1980s, the issue that brought both parties to the table concerned lapsing commercial leases in the New Territories.

  2

  The atmosphere on the Empress of Canada was anxious but excitable. Bill felt the excitement and fear of being alone and responsible for himself. The Lanchesters had a family friend, a Mrs Braithwaite, who kept an eye on him as far as Manila, a journey of about a week. He sent ‘cheerful and amusing’ letters home from Manila. He also reported that, after a great deal of careful thought, he had bought an airgun. Lannie found that funny, but it is painful too, since it shows with some pathos how his mind was running on the idea that he might have to defend himself. The evacuees were sent to a hotel near Baguio City, a mountain holiday resort. There, final arrangements were made for some of them to go to Canada, others to Australia. When Bill was asked where he wanted to go, he said Melbourne, because friends of the Lanchesters were on holiday there and he would at least know one family on the new continent. An acquaintance of the Lanchesters, a Mrs Barker, was also going to Melbourne, and she took over the job of keeping an eye out for him. They left Manila at the end of August 1940, among the last group of evacuees. In the event, Mrs Barker’s help was to be invaluable in giving Bill somewhere to stay while he found himself a place at boarding school. For that reason he was carrying his Hong Kong school reports. The last of them, signed by his form teacher, Mr Orr, has a large scrawl across the page: ‘Exams cancelled due to evacuation.’

  Jack transferred money to an account in Melbourne once it was certain that Bill was going to end up there. Part of it was to pay school fees; it came in handy when Bill won a place at Melbourne Grammar. This was, and is, one of the best schools in Australia, though one with an Establishment, Anglo bias. Bill struggled hard to fit in; too hard, he later felt.

  With the background of fantasy which I had in my mind – stories told to myself to amuse myself during immobilisation in plaster – at the back of my mind was a comparison (unflattering!) between myself as the (heroic) leader of my talented gang & myself as the usually-left-till-last follower in the real life of the concrete school playground. And the contrast can have only strengthened the feeling of hurt – hurt that the fantastic qualities which were really mine should go unappreciated.

  This feeling caused by disparity was particularly strong when I first joined Melbourne Grammar – oh what a feeling of ‘where do I fit in’? Curious that I should have accepted, almost as an axiom, the feeling that I must fit in it, & that the thought seems never to have occurred to me that perhaps the ‘it’ was not suitable to me – no ability to ‘stand off’, to ‘be critical’.

  Those remarks come from a notebook of 1959. Bill was being overly severe on himself – as he never stopped being. The sporty, hearty, unreflective ethos of the school no doubt didn’t suit the introspective, dreamy, physically unrobust child he was; but a fourteen-year-old boy separated from his parents and everyone else he knew by thousands of miles, an indefinite stretch of time, and a world war, had no choice except to try and fit in. And there is always, for clever young people, the old standby: when all else fails, find some exams to come top in. So that is what Bill did.

  No small part of the story of the Lanchesters’ war years is told by the different types of paper that survive. This, from Jack’s office, is the only letter on a proper posh letterhead.

  Dr John Lanchester

  L.D.S.R.C.S. (Eng.) D.D.S.

  (Northwestern University)

  Tel. 57689

  32A Nathan Road

  Kowloon

  Hong Kong

  Sept. 2/41

  Dear Bill,

  Your letter of August 15 arrived yesterday. You tell us that you were 1st in Division and 1st in Group and 3rd in Form. Well this is very good and I am very pleased you can hold your own ‘down under’. At Central British here there wasn’t much competition but I imagine there’ll be some good stuff where you are now. Well don’t get conceited – keep plugging steadily away and I wouldn’t be surprised if you do better the next examinations. Good – keep it up!

  The market has staged a sudden upturn these last few days & I am watching it. May get out if things go on rising for they will surely fall again. It’s just a case of guessing the top.

  I suppose we can look for a lessening of the heat now and I’ll be glad.

  We are both very fit. Dr Shannon gave me a faculty handbook on the B.D.S. (Dentistry) of Melbourne University – get one for yourself & let me know what you think. It looks a very good training to me. Dentistry is a very good profession (I know you’ll laugh at my saying that) but I have made a lot of mistakes which afterwards gave me a lot of headaches – I wouldn’t do those mistakes again. I’d try to get into the Colonial Medical service as a dental surgeon if I had to start again.

  Well Cheerio & good luck.

  Yours affectionately,

  Dad

  This is the first letter from Jack that survives in the family papers. When I read it, it was the first time I directly heard his voice, and in some ways it lives up to the negative image I had formed of him. One of the most expressive things about it is the printed letterhead: Jack felt he had got somewhere in life, and was proud of it. When I first read the letter I thought that his recommending to Bill – gentle, dreamy, congenitally unworldly Bill – that he consider becoming a dentist shows how very little he knew his son. The tone deafness to what Bill was like, the bad advice and the inappropriately timed pressure about careers, the immediate
injunction not to get conceited, the talk about his investments, the ‘yours affectionately’ instead of ‘Love’ – all of this is Jack the money-minded dentist, an easy man not to warm to. But that is not all that can be felt in this practical letter, since you can tell, clearly tell, that Jack dearly loved his son. It’s in the tone, hard to pin down but tangibly present. Some of the bad advice, I now think, came less from Jack’s not knowing Bill than from his having a strong sense of what Bill was like, and being very worried about it. He thought Bill had his head in the clouds (which he did), that he didn’t have a clue about how the world worked (which he didn’t), that he was prone to fantasy and buffeted by strong feelings he didn’t know how to modulate or control or express (all true). He tried to cure Bill’s dreaminess by giving him practical advice, advice calculated to turn him into a practical man. Does that, can that, ever work? Probably not. But I was surprised and pleased by how strongly Jack’s love for Bill comes through in these letters from the 1940s, his only writings to have survived.

  The letters to Bill from these days before the fall of Hong Kong are mainly from Lannie, and they are mainly full of wittering. If you took them at face value, you would think that she had no idea what was going to happen. Except, actually, she did: war was coming, it was only a question of when – and war would almost certainly bring internment and a long separation. So she is consumed with worry, while pretending not to be, which is where her letters get their tone of not listening to themselves, like a nervous person talking in the hope that he will be calmed by the sound of his own voice. Lannie’s habit of asking questions without question marks makes it look as if she wasn’t interested in the answers; and at times I think she wasn’t. Worry is supposed to be a sign of caring, even a way of expressing love. But I wonder about that. Sometimes, reading through these letters with their inexhaustible listings of things to do, their orders and injunctions, I feel that their worry and their bossiness is mainly a way of avoiding painful feelings. The real content, I think, is ‘I love you and I miss you and I don’t know when I’ll see you again and it hurts’. That’s what they’re really saying; perhaps that is what Bill really needed to hear. Instead he got one big To Do list. And perhaps, too, that was easier to take: it was easier to experience feelings of irritation at maternal bossiness and remote control than it was to face the great anxious void of separation and war.

  If it worked, denial would be the best thing in the world. Sometimes it does, more or less. This was not one of those times. The Japanese attack on Hong Kong began on 8 December 1941. Bill would not have known any details, other than that the fighting was fierce. I think he was prepared for the fact the defence would not, could not, be successful. It wasn’t. The Governor, Sir Mark Young, surrendered to the Japanese on Christmas Day. That was the last piece of news from the colony for some time. Bill did not know whether his parents were alive or dead.

  The war years saw Bill’s life divided in two. He lived an external life, in which he got on with the business of doing well in school and making friends. In that respect, the great blessing of his time in Australia was his virtual adoption by the family of a close friend from Melbourne Grammar, Tony Street. Tony was Bill’s best friend at school, and his large extended family took Bill in outside term-time. The Streets were big Victorian farmers, a well-established and respected family whose patriarch, Brigadier G. A. Street, was serving as Minister for the Army in the Australian wartime government. Edna Street, the Brigadier’s wife and Tony’s mother, treated Bill with a kindness and generosity he never forgot. The Streets were the only people who knew how difficult he was finding these years. Bill now spent his holidays with them at Eildon, the farm belonging to Mrs Thornthwaite (‘Dook’), a cousin of the family. Dook was a crucial figure in Bill’s life, taking him to her heart and, along with Edna Street, acting as the maternal presence he needed so badly.

  Bill loved being included in a large, busy family. And the farm life was also part of what he loved. The sheer spaciousness of the huge landscapes was a balm. He loved the work, too: mending fences, going out with the dogs, fetching and carrying and digging and, especially, herding sheep on motorbikes. One good thing about the work was that he didn’t have to do it, and was allowed to go and hit the books to study when he needed to. Farm life was a mixture of steady, satisfying routine – particularly satisfying if you knew you weren’t going to spend the rest of your life doing it – and occasional spectacular crises: floods, fires. One year he did his bit with bucket and pump to defend Eildon from a huge wildfire, and then joined a gang who burnt a firebreak and saved thousands of acres of farmland from destruction. Given the aching hole in the middle of Bill’s life – his journal later spoke of missing a sense of affection, of missing ‘family love’ – this was as balanced and happy a time as he could imagine.

  His internal life was another side of the story. Bill’s great difficulty was that he had nowhere to put the anxiety that was consuming him about his mother and father. He had convinced himself that the way to get along was to fit in, show a stiff upper lip, and not make any fuss. Australia was at war, and people were making all sorts of sacrifices; he did not feel his own situation counted for much in the overall scheme of things. As indeed it didn’t. But it was his situation, and it was not easy; it had to be lived, and the way he chose to do it was by ignoring the anxiety and fear he felt. He kept no continuous diary for most of the war years, but there are quite a few sections of journals and notes and letters, and none of them ever mentions his parents. The first news of them he heard was on 27 June 1942, six months after the fall of Hong Kong, when a list of civilian internees was published, and he saw his mother’s name on it. That day he sat down and wrote a letter.

  Dr and Mrs Lanchester

  Melbourne Church of

  England Grammar School

  Cr. Orrong and Balaclava Rds.

  Caulfiel

  Melbourne

  27th June 1942

  Dear Mum and Dad,

  A queer coincidence occurred today – I saw the lists of the H.K. internees & then later bumped into Mrs Garton, who, being in the Red Cross, told me that it is now possible, for the first time, to write to internees. I have seen your name, mother, in the lists, thank God. But I have not seen Dad’s: however, the lists have no claim to be all-inclusive.

  I hope that you are both well: I am in very good health. I have even been told that I am looking fat! My school-work is going very well. The school has been shifted: the junior school are at [blanked out by censor] and we are at Grimswade (one of the prep schools). The old school [blanked out by censor]

  I hope that you get this letter: I expect that I shall now be able to get letters through fairly often. Unfortunately this letter is limited to one page.

  Your loving & devoted son,

  Bill

  All through Bill’s letters and diaries, he uses words like ‘curious’ and ‘strange’ to denote something that causes overpowering emotion: it is the flag he flies over his biggest episodes of denial. Here he uses ‘queer coincidence’ to describe his learning that at least one of his parents is not dead. But there is a clue to the fact of how strong his feelings were, and how hard it was for him to contact them at all: this was one of only two letters Bill wrote to his parents for the duration of the war. I was always told that this was a huge thing in the family, and that my father felt guilt over it from which he never fully recovered – but it was my mother who told me that, and she did so as part of a campaign to emotionally blackmail me into writing home from boarding school more often than I could be bothered to do. I was told that this meant a great deal to him, and perhaps it did: he was a great one for taking things to heart, especially anything that could be construed as a failure or weakness of his own. But adolescent boys are notoriously bad letter-writers. It also seems to me that one of the main reasons Bill wrote so scantily was that he simply didn’t know what to say. You can see this in the other letter he wrote to Stanley Camp, from early 1943. By this point he
still did not know whether his father had survived the fall of Hong Kong.

  [‘read May 17 44’ in Lannie’s handwriting]

  To Mrs J. Lanchester

  Room 12

  Block 5

  Stanley Internment Camp

  Hong Kong

  From B. Lanchester

  Melbourne Grammar School

  South Yarra S.E. 1

  Melbourne

  14 February 1943

  Dear Mother,

  I am very well, and hope that you are.

  I got my Matriculation last year, getting English, Latin, Maths I and IV, and European History. I also came top of the second class honours in Ancient History Honours – Honours is the year that comes after Matriculation, and is equal to the first year of University. I am going back to school again this year to do honours English, Latin, Ancient History, European History and Matriculation Chemistry and Intermediate German. Next year I will go to the University (with a scholarship, I hope) and do Medicine and Surgery. I am 5 feet 11 inches tall and weigh 147 pounds – quite grown up. Have plenty of money.

  With all my love,

  Your devoted son,

  Billy

  Bill’s keenness to relieve his mother’s anxiety – a reflection, perhaps, of just how anxious he was himself – is apparent in the boast that he has miraculously zoomed up to five foot eleven. Since he was never in his life a fraction over five foot eight, this was an odd claim to make. Perhaps it is a clue to the fact that this whole letter is an untruth; its pretence at normality is a lie. And perhaps he wanted to say something comforting, because he thought he might never see his mother again, and he thought that his father might already be dead. The pain beneath what is being said comes through very clearly. But good news was not far away. A week after he wrote that letter, Bill received a Red Cross telegram – it had taken seven months to get to him, which was quick by the standards of the war – which told him his father was alive.