We mourn with you the deaths of so many of your gallant comrades.
With all our hearts, we hope that your return from captivity will bring you and your families a full measure of happiness, which you may long enjoy together.
George R.I.
That was nice of King George VI, if a bit impersonal. Another letter from the Governor of Hong Kong to Lannie meant more.
Mrs Dora Lanchester
Government House
Hong Kong
1 January 1947
Madam,
The Government of Hong Kong would wish, if it were possible, to express to every individual concerned its high appreciation of the countless acts of courage, self-sacrifice and devotion to duty that were performed by residents of Hong Kong both in the course of the hostilities of 1941 and during the subsequent occupation of the Colony by the enemy. In very many cases lack of information prevents this recognition from being given, but, seeing that your conduct is known to me to have merited commendation, I take pleasure in expressing to you, with my personal gratitude and appreciation, the thanks and the approbation of the Government of Hong Kong.
Mark Young
Governor
Translated into English, that letter says ‘Sorry’. It referred to the time when troops were evacuated to Hong Kong Island, and Lannie and other women were left to be overrun in Kowloon. Instead of that apology, Lannie would have preferred news about the cache of papers she had been given by John Fraser and had kept through the war, at the risk of her life and probably Jack’s. She had handed them over to the colonial authorities before she boarded ship for Australia. But nothing more was ever heard of them. The war crimes trials over Hong Kong were rather muted, in line with the Japanese war crimes trials in general. There were widespread suspicions that the Allies downplayed the issue of Japanese war crimes as a way of easing the transition from imperial to occupied rule.
Bill stayed in Australia. In one way this seemed a natural thing to do: he had his year of service in the army to finish, and then two more two years of university. And he was a young man of nearly twenty now, not a boy. His friends were in Australia; it was the place he knew best; the place which, to the end of his life, he thought of as his real home. But at the same time, it boggles my mind that after five and a half years of separation the Lanchesters would choose to be separated for almost three more years. I think Bill’s ambivalence about the idea of going ‘home’ to England was a big part of this.
To understand a man you must know what the world looked like when he was twenty (said Napoleon). When my father was twenty, in 1946, he was a British citizen, because his passport said so. But he had spent only a couple of years in England, and had no memories of it. Since then he hadn’t been within six thousand miles of his notional homeland. Just to recap: he was born in Africa, was raised there and in Hong Kong, was educated in Australia, had been a private in the Australian army, and spoke with an Australian accent – and yet he was, as anyone except himself would have told you, British. (He would have said, I think, that he was Australian.) In the colonial world there is a Centre, a Home (or a ‘back home’): a fixed reference point. Even if you’ve never been there you know about it, can feel its presence, its gravitational pull and navigational utility – the district administrator in Malaya wondering about what’s on in the West End of London, the magistrate in Senegal dreaming about arguments in Paris cafés. There is a Somewhere Else whose imprint you bear. Despite the fact that England wasn’t a place in which Bill felt any desire to live, in 1946 it was still in some sense the centre of the world for him. In the words of a letter of Lannie’s: ‘London is still the hub of the universe even if it has to be ruled by America.’
Although my father’s passport was in one way wrong – the ridiculous idea that ‘home’ was thousands of miles from anywhere he had ever been – in another way it was true that England was a psychological lodestone. You can feel connected to a place you’ve never been, as Irish-Americans do to Ireland, or foreign-born Tibetans do to Tibet. It’s not that you are phonily nostalgic; it’s a real feeling, though the place you’re connecting to is a fantasy, which sometimes has things in common with the real place, but more often doesn’t. To understand my father, you have to grasp the feeling that something more compelling, something more real, was happening somewhere else.
After his convalescence in England, Jack had gone back to Hong Kong and to a scaled-down version of his old job, topping up his finances in the last years before he was due to retire. Again, the letterhead tells a story, as he was by now living in the YMCA; Lannie had stayed in Britain and got a job working in London as a teacher. He wrote to Bill with advice on what to do next. ‘The last thing I want is to push you into something you don’t want. I have hated dentistry like hell – and don’t want you to be similarly placed. My new profession is fun to me, not work. I would like you to get work that is fun. You’ll more probably be a success that way.’ (By his ‘new profession’ Jack meant playing the stock market.) There is great pathos here, given that six years before, he had been recommending the idea of becoming a dentist to his son. Four years of internment seem to have changed his mind on that score. He is back, though, to his habit of trying to bully Bill into being sensible. You empathise with Jack’s anxiety at the same time as you feel the disingenuousness of his attempts at pretending that he is just airing his views – no pressure, no attempt to get Bill to do what he wants, none at all.
‘This is just to clarify my views,’ begins the next letter, from late June 1947:
I know that at 21 we are sort of bogged down in the field of knowledge. I was that way as a young man. One can’t put old heads on young shoulders I know. Everyone has to work out his own solution for no two cases are ever alike. We who have been over the course can see some of the pitfalls and I want to give you the benefit of my experience (and I think I have packed into my 59 years a good deal more than the average person). I’ve been places & seen & read a good deal. When one’s young it’s hard to sort out the grains of gold from the heaps of sand. To know where to look and, what is just as important, where not to look. Naturally, you with your sheltered position, haven’t yet joined in the fray.
I am just sort of entering the last phase – my working life is finished & mam is being very brave in trying to carry on as long as possible. She’s aged – quite a number of grey hairs now. So I feel we have to consolidate what we have – and at the moment it is quite a bit – at least for us who both started as elementary school teachers (which isn’t very high in the rungs of life’s ladder). Unfortunately we are now in the post-war stage – a time of settling down & perhaps more importantly of settling up after world global wars. This post-war phase is going to be long & austere. (Just the same as after the Napoleonic Wars.) Then they had the hungry forties (1840s) now we are in the hungry forties again, only it is a century later – action & reaction as usual.
‘Just to clarify my views …’ I can see here the thing my father perceived as control-freakery and bullying. This was the aspect of Jack that later made Bill unable to speak about money: his own father had used it as a means of control, so the feelings that money touched on were too painful to be raised. A nastier or more direct man than my father, or at any rate a different one, might well have replied: At the age of fifty-nine you’re living on your own in a YMCA, thousands of miles away from your wife and son, and you’re giving me life advice?
But this is not the letter of a bad man or an ill-wishing one. Although Jack is obviously keen to see himself as a wise man and someone who has done his fair share of living, the breadth of perspective is none the less impressive. To have survived parental alcoholism and a father’s descent into destitution and early death, to have qualified as a teacher, emigrated, gone to the imperial capital to qualify in a different trade, re-emigrated, married and set up in yet another country, had a child, gone to America to re-retrain, gone to yet another country and set up yet again, made some money, seen a war coming and gone into
government service, spent a few years in a Japanese prison camp, gone ‘home’ to recover and then gone back out to take up your old job at age fifty-nine – well, you would feel you were entitled to a few opinions of your own. It was clearly very important to Jack to feel that he had lived his own life and made his own mistakes. But he was reluctant to let Bill do the same. Every parent can identify with that: even though we know in our hearts that we don’t always protect our children by trying to protect them, the impulse is almost impossible to check.
Bill was finding things difficult at Melbourne University, and he let some of this slip to his father. The result was this letter.
YMCA
12 July 1947
Dear Bill,
This is a continuation of the air mail letter. Now tell me which or any of the following is bothering you.
1. Are you well mentally or physically? [Freudian slip – he means ‘ill’]
2. Have you any financial worries?
3. Have you got what I can only describe as post-war fever – I had it after the last war so I quite understand – It’s a feeling of frustration – of not being able to get going. I was very unhappy for about 4 years. This was the time I changed over from schoolmastering (which seemed a very poor occupation to me) to dentistry.
4. Have you lost taste for study? We do temporarily but somehow I feel it is up your street and feel sure it will come back naturally.
5. Are you in the throes of a love affair? There’s nothing to be ashamed of about this. We all do it including your father and it is perfectly natural right and proper but only at the proper time. This I can tell you from my own experience, which is pretty extensive. It’s just this … a love affair & study just don’t go together. The one is fire & the other water. One or other suffers, often both.
I tried to mix a love affair with my first college course. The result was disastrous. I just scraped through about the last on the list and the anxiety to me for the last six months preceding the final exam was terrific, for I suddenly realised that for over a year I had been dreaming – consequently hadn’t done the work I should and was afraid that I might fail the exam. This atmosphere was not conducive to good work. I tried to cram which is distasteful. I made up my mind I would never try to mix study & a love affair again. This romance was broken up when I went to South Africa. (Propinquity is the be all and end all of a love affair.)
Well I’m damned if I didn’t do the same thing again in South Africa. After deciding to make a try to get a degree to go along with my teaching certificate – I failed inter twice & didn’t marry that girl. So I flopped again for the same reason as before.
You’ll now see I speak from experience – so I want to give you the benefit of my 59 years to keep you out of the pitfalls I fell into. Unfortunately I had no father who could & would discuss this kind of thing with his son although I know he did something similar or worse than this.
When we become conscious of sex it is very difficult to steer a course away from this – you are at a co-ed institution – this has advantages but I still think co-ed university education is a mistake because of the extreme instability introduced by sex. (Thank goodness Guy’s hospital didn’t take woman students.)
I can’t offer you much advice except one thing – it’s hopeless to try & see how close one can get to the flame without burning one self – no – in this the only remedy is to get as far away as possible – the only safe course.
Dad
The reason was number five – the love affair. Bill had finally found a girlfriend, Joan Miller. He did not love her, but she loved him – loved him, I think, for his gentleness and sweetness of nature, and for the fact that he listened to her. To a man with Bill’s capacity for guilt, this made things difficult. He was worried about using her, worried about getting her pregnant, worried about the fact that he did not love her, and worried about how he was ever going to dump her; worried about why he was not in love himself, and whether he was even capable of feeling love. He also worried about whether this love affair was getting in the way of his swotting, and whether he was thereby failing to do his duty to his parents. Hence the letter to Jack. The distance – the literal physical distance – takes a toll here: it’s almost impossible to write a letter like that and have it not seem heavy handed, overbearing in its anxiety.
Bill eventually took Jack’s advice, in the worst form possible. He kept the affair with Joan going until he began preparing for his exams, and then dumped her, cruelly and directly: she came into the library looking for him one day, and he looked straight through her as if she were not there. She looked back at him, at first smiling, then disbelieving, then incredulous, then devastated. She ran out of the library. When Bill came out, an hour later, she was still sitting on the steps, being comforted by a male friend whom she later married.
Bill was in a state. When he took his finals he was convinced he was a genius or a worm or both. Everyone was sure he was going to get either the top first or the next one down. He tried to answer two questions at the same time; he tried to be brilliant; he failed to read what he was being asked. Bill hoped to get a first, perhaps even a good first; if things went badly wrong he feared he might get a two-one. But he got a two-two. More than thirty years later, he told me that the day the exam results were posted was the worst of his life.
YMCA
Dec. 23/48
Dear Bill,
I have your cable. Well it’s not so bad, considering you hesitated so in the middle of the course – I mean in summer of 1947. Of course to get a first one has to enter the thing with gusto & keep in front all the way. But you seemed hot & bothered in 1947 – about something. Couldn’t make up your mind whether you wanted to go on with it or abandon the course altogether.
At least you now have something to show you were at a university for 4 years. I’ve told you I leave here on Jan 21st for England on the Canton – so you go straight home. I’ve got a passage only thro’ knowing someone in the know (as is always the case). You can take 50 lb of food into England. Fats, butter, bacon & meats are the things to go for – seeing you soon I hope.
Dad
I have to say I rather love Jack for that letter – for ‘it’s not so bad’ and ‘seeing you soon I hope’. Anything more gushing, anything out of character, might not have been a comfort. And perhaps Jack was also secretly relieved: if my father had got a good degree, he might have been offered an academic post, and that would have meant he would not have been going to England with Jack, who was now retiring. So his happiness at being reunited outweighed his disappointment at Bill’s exam results; you have to quite like him for that. A few days later he wrote another letter of semi-consolation.
Now don’t worry about the exam results. This may be your first major disappointment but it’s nothing new to us older people. We’ve all had this & other disappointments even where we thought we had provided for everything. ‘Man proposes, God disposes.’ It would be very useful of course to know where your calculations went astray for future use.
No doubt you’re sorry to leave your friends. We all are but there are times when one has to think of the future. It’s just this inability to pull up one’s roots that keeps millions trudging along on what they realise is a poor outlook – but they can’t make the break.
Since these letters are the only place I ever directly encountered my grandfather, I have to record my feeling that he had reservoirs of love and warmth that he found it movingly difficult to express. He is clearly not an easy man, but not an unloving or uncaring one either.
I think, if I had been my father, the eight-year separation from my parents would have left me feeling very touchy indeed about their attempts to advise and admonish and control. Lannie intuited that Bill felt resentful; but I’m not sure that he himself was aware of it. At the end of January 1949 he left his friends and his familiar Melbourne and boarded a ship to begin his adult life in England, the country he had no memory of and no feeling for, but which was officially ‘home
’.
5
‘In the forties and fifties,’ my father told me, ‘when Australians arrived in London for the first time, it had a hell of an impact. It seemed so old, so rich, so sure of itself. Aussies going there for the first time either started to wear big hats with corks dangling around them to keep the flies away, smoking roll-ups and saying things like “fair dinkum, cobber”, or put on a three-piece suit and a bowler hat and became more British than the Brits.’
I was in my teens when he told me that, and I didn’t realise that he was talking about himself. The impact on him of London – still, just about, an imperial capital in early 1949 – was strong. Finally, he felt he was at the centre of something. Admittedly, the city was exhausted, dingy, depressed, austere, rationed – knackered. In a way, though, all those qualities were more apparent to anyone who could remember it from before the war. To people who couldn’t, it was still a place that expressed history, confidence, a thoroughly marinated sense of its own centrality, which was all the more powerful for being so unconscious and so unexamined. That, I think, was why Jack retired there, at the end of his travels and his labours. He was tired of bouncing around the periphery; now, past sixty, there was something soothing about being somewhere that felt to itself like the centre of things. There were no more places to go. Lannie, not one of nature’s retirees, was working part-time in a school and gave the remainder of her energies to nursing her increasingly unwell husband who, it was apparent, had not fully recovered from Stanley Camp, and never would.
Bill’s reaction to this feeling of centrality was to want to get as far away from it as possible. This was not an instantaneous decision: he knocked about for a bit, went to job interviews, and tried to persuade himself and his father that it could be a good idea to take an advanced degree. That would need Jack’s permission and, more, his financial support. But Jack was immovably resistant to the idea. He had never wavered from his view that Bill had his head in the clouds. Bill needed to be more firmly rooted in reality. The way to become that was to spend some time doing a proper job – something well paid, not necessarily with great room for imagination or flights of fancy, something secure, something reliable both physically and in terms of status. Jack did not intend for Bill to spend the rest of his life doing that same boring, repetitive job – so Lannie told my mother. The idea was for Bill to have some training in the world’s dull realities. In making that plan for Bill, Jack was, he felt, passing on the main thing he had learnt. The great lesson of his life, Jack felt, was the need for financial security, because financial security was freedom. Bill should do something boring but well paid to set himself up in life and get himself inculcated with the reality principle. It was an expression of love, an attempt to harden Bill in ways in which he needed hardening; but Jack would have been doing better by his son if he had steered him towards a way of life in which hardening wasn’t needed. He had said that it was best to do something that was fun, with the very Jack-like reason being that you’re more likely to be a success that way – not, heaven forbid, because things that are more fun are more fun. But it wasn’t advice he was prepared to stick to giving. The idea was that Bill would do the boring job until he had found out about the reality principle, and then he could go and do something more stimulating. This is like those people who announce that they are going to do a well-paid job for a few years, then quit and do something more interesting – sail around the world, write screenplays, open a B & B. (These are specific examples from people I know, not hypothetical ones.) In every case I’ve known when somebody says that, it doesn’t happen. People find it impossible to give up the money. There seems, where money is concerned, to be no such thing as enough. In the very rare instances when people do give up, they go off to try and make even more money. I’m told there are exceptions to this rule, but I’ve never met one.
Family Romance Page 19