Family Romance

by John Lanchester

  We’re back to the idea that money is freedom. Except it isn’t, a lot of the time. I don’t know if Jack ever looked at his life and traced causal links: search for freedom = search for money = ending up in Hong Kong = ending up in prison. If he had stayed in Rhodesia he could have had as low-key a time in World War Two as he had in World War One. To me, his quest for freedom through money seems a version of the much-told story in which a hero is given a prophecy, goes to extraordinary lengths to avoid its fulfilment, only to discover that his very efforts are the thing which makes the prophecy come true. (Appointment in Samara. Oedipus Rex. The ones in which a king locks up his daughter.) Jack, though, certainly didn’t see things in those terms, and his advice to Bill helped ensure that my father spent his whole life working at something that he hated. As a fairly direct result, I’ve never believed in the version of freedom which people say comes from working for a big company and being well paid. It seems to me a version of life whereby the things you are supposed to control or to own end up controlling you. Many, many people are owned by their possessions. They seem not to see it that way, but that’s the truth.

  So Bill couldn’t become an academic because his father wouldn’t let him, and he couldn’t go into the civil service with his colonial 2.2. (He could have if he’d got another degree, but again, Jack wouldn’t let him do that.) Bill applied for jobs where his skills were useful, and found himself, thanks in no small part to his near-fluent Japanese, landing a job with a firm he knew well from his childhood: the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank. Or, in Hong Kong parlance, the Bank. He was to work for it for the next thirty years, until boredom and the release from the need to pay my school fees led him to take early retirement.

  HSBC is now one of the biggest and most successful banks in the world. In 1949 it was a well-run provincial company, highly conservative in its working practices. That conservatism was one reason the bank was popular with the financially adventurous, risk-loving Cantonese. Bill’s choice of employer meant that my father could spend his adult life moving around the margins of the former Empire, as far away from ‘home’ as he could get. This was no accident. It was not that he hated England, just that he felt it didn’t really have anything to do with him. It was cold and grey; he wasn’t used to that. He was used to being a long way away from his parents, too. It was as if, having allowed Jack to make the central decision of his life – as it turned out to be – Bill wanted to escape, like a victim fleeing the scene of an accident.

  Bill spent a few months in London training and enjoying the amenities. His journal has him rather self-consciously going to the Albert Hall with a new bank mate, John Allen (later to be my godfather), to hear Yehudi Menuhin play the Elgar and Mendelssohn violin concertos.

  The Mendelssohn started well, with that lovely theme, which is however unfortunately the only meat in the whole piece: the whole piece is simply and entirely a decoration with nothing substantial under the fairy icing. The romantics have the virtue of being easy to listen to – except, as with Mendelssohn, when they do not have enough to say. Nobody would say this of Elgar: he must be one of the most idiomatic of composers. I mean one of those who have built their own private language – Elgar seems to have two main strains in him: mysticism, and also a curious streak of vulgarity – those loud, raising, trumps on the trombones, the blasts of horns and cymbals; yet this is not quite vulgarity though it is both showy and ‘effective’ – somehow Elgar got away with it, and this very fact makes him all the greater. Perhaps it would be fairest to say that this quality of his is not vulgarity, but the common touch, an earthiness which makes his mysticism the more valuable. (For mysticism must well from our deepest roots if it is to be healthy.)

  Hmm. The next day Bill went to a movie called The Glass Mountain about a married composer who falls in love with an Italian girl after being shot down in wartime. The film’s main attraction for Bill was Valentina Cortese, the love interest: ‘Not a model beauty, but so alive it made me ache, as all things you long and yearn from your stomach for, make you ache. Ah me! Will I ever meet someone like that? The universal ache and dream.’ There’s quite a lot of yearning going on here: I can’t help feeling that twenty-two-year-old men are better off spending their time chasing women, rather than brooding over how nice it would be to be the kind of person who chased women.

  If you think that this mind-set, introspective and high-cultural, is the wrong one to have if you’re entering an externally uneventful life of office routine, you would, I believe, be dead wrong. Thousands, millions of people divide themselves between a monotonously conformist work life and a private world of intense, consoling pleasures and interests. In fact, this division of private and public is almost the norm. The trouble for Bill was not his Elgar-appreciating, Mendelssohn-critiquing side, but the unappeasable ache of a greater life being led elsewhere. It was that sense of a ‘universal ache and dream’. This was obviously connected with his sense, left over from a colonial childhood, of having had his nose pressed against the sweetshop window of other people’s more exciting lives; or with his childhood months in plaster (which is what he thought it was). Perhaps it had to do with not having a girlfriend; or perhaps it was just the way he was. But he had an unshakeable feeling that real life, and real drama, and big exciting things, happened only to other people; and it is not possible to be happy, or fully occupied in your own life, if you think that.

  The day after Valentina Cortese moved Bill to reflect on ‘the universal ache and dream’, he got on a boat and set sail for his new working life, back in his childhood home, Hong Kong. He began a decade and a half in which he hardly ever spent more than a year in the same place. At first he spent a few months in Hong Kong doing more training and learning more ropes. During these months, he lived in the mess – the communal quarters for foreign bachelors who worked for the bank. This brought home, and reinforced, as it was intended to do, the fact that young expatriate bankers were not expected to marry. Not yet, anyway. Their first years abroad were to be spent lashed to the wheel, working long days, including Saturdays until early afternoon; they slept and ate at their mess; their main recreation was, as my father told me, ‘steaming out to get drunk every weekend’. In one way the mess was convenient, and the lack of privacy involved in communal living was less of a problem for a generation used to boarding school and the war. As for the loss of liberty involved, well, that was just part of the deal. The mood in the mess, a low building half-way up the Peak, tended to vary: there were large collective ups and downs. One night there was a general gloomy silence until a young banker called Sandy McCall cracked under the strain. ‘I just can’t take it any more!’ he shouted as he jumped to his feet, picked up his plate of curry – it was curry night, the kind of old-school curry with sultanas in it – and smashed it against the wall. The dye in the curry was so powerful that the mark was still visible when my father left the mess six months later.

  The existence of the mess showed that the bank was still firmly rooted in the colonial world-view. Dad saw the funny side of that, and liked to tell stories about it. There were plenty of men around who missed the good old days: people who had worked, before the war, in places like Mukden in Manchuria, where Bill’s great friend ‘Daddy’ Soul (the universally used nickname alluded to his kindness and gentleness) had had to carry a revolver in the course of his bank duties. The bank’s training manual gave an occasional whiff of this more vivid past. One of the sample phrases, in the section on using codes for telegraphic transmission, was the sentence: ‘The marketplace is dominated by small Manchurian bears.’ My father told me this when I was about ten, and it immediately became my favourite ever sentence: the first time that I remember taking conscious, almost physical pleasure in a piece of language for its own sake. Even after Dad explained what it meant – that the market for some commodity or other was being influenced by Manchurian investors who didn’t have much money and who thought prices would go down – I still loved to think of the image, resembling something out
of Tintin, of a town square overrun by small fierce bears, knocking over trestle tables laden with food, biting people on the leg as they tried to run away, defecating on the ripped canvas awnings …

  When Bill left Hong Kong, it was to go to Tokyo (because of his Australian-army Japanese), then on to Osaka. That was one of the happiest periods of his life, and one of the most interesting too, as Japan recovered from the war, approached the end of the Allied occupation, and began to adjust itself to various new post-imperial, post-militaristic realities. Bill loved Japanese culture: he loved the complexity and subtlety of the language, and he loved judo, which he studied with a local master. (This was before colour-coded belts were introduced, as a way of making the sport accessible to foreigners; my father, when pressed, reckoned he got up to the standard of a not quite black belt.) He bought a terrifying samurai sword, which I still have in my study, in defiance of the law. (For years my mother pretended to have lost it; I found it hidden in a trunk, wrapped in blankets, after her death.) The main recreational activity was drinking. In Osaka, where the bar and red light area occupied a sizeable warren of indistinguishably crowded streets, tiny bars would produce matchboxes that showed their name and a little map of how to find them for a subsequent visit – if you took pot luck and just wandered about, you would never make it to the same place twice. So when Bill and his friends and colleagues went out on a bar crawl, which was at least once or twice a week, they hit on the brilliant idea of putting matchboxes in their right pocket if it was a good bar, and in their left if it was bad. Or was it the other way around? In the course of the evening, the exact details of the system would be forgotten, or sudden improvements would be thought of, such as the inside pocket if it was a very good bar, back pocket for very bad one, top shirt pocket for otherwise uninteresting but cheap bar, hip pocket for local colour … no, wait, was it hip pocket for the place where we got thrown out? Inevitably, on the weekend mornings after these experiments, Bill would wake with a head-splitting hangover and an unusable database of mixed-up matchboxes. In any case, there were so many streets and so many small bars that nobody went to the same place twice.

  Although Bill loved Japan, he was there only for a year or so. His next posting was to Malaya, which was uneventful except for when the bank driver pulled a knife on the bank cook. Bill felt he had no choice but to sack him, so he drove to the police station, and everyone gave statements explaining what had happened. No one wanted to press charges, so Bill wrote out a good reference for the driver, paid him his wages owed and a month in advance, all in front of the duty sergeant – Bill wanted a witness to his treatment of the driver, so there would be no basis for complaint or vendetta. Everyone parted on good terms. Forty-eight hours later the boiler at home exploded, demolishing the back quarter of the house and part of the kitchen. By chance, because it happened early in the morning, nobody was killed. The boiler engineer diagnosed the problem: someone (i.e. the sacked driver) had filled the boiler with paraffin rather than diesel fuel. The police went looking for the driver, who had vanished and was never found. The one good thing that came out of the incident was that Bill made friends with the boiler engineer, a former U-boat captain who’d gone to live in the Far East at the end of the war. The man would come over and listen to Bill’s new record player – mainly Wagner – and they would practise the German that Bill had begun to learn while staying with his aunt Louie, Lannie’s sister, who lived in Bavaria.

  Next Bill was posted to Singapore. He was rising in the bank hierarchy; he was bored by the work but liked the pay; he liked living abroad, its mixture of the exotic and the familiar; he liked the tropics; he liked the feeling of rootlessness from moving so often, but disliked the way it made it difficult to form lasting relationships, especially with girls, who were in any case – in the tight expatriate world – in short supply. There was a contrast between the life the men tended to live in Asia, which was often to do with wanting to get away for reasons which would not always have seemed respectable at home, and the restricted, rule-bound life choices available to women. This was the 1950s. The regular moves gave Bill the impression his life was changing, even though at the time he knew it was really standing still.

  In those days bank employees could choose between having an annual month’s holiday or saving it up and taking three months off every three years. Bill did the latter, so he had no holiday at all between 1949 and 1952. When he went to England he was shocked by how much older Jack seemed. Lannie was her usual lively, brisk self, but Jack was weaker and more crotchety than Bill had realised. They had moved to Chiswick, and Lannie was still teaching part-time. It was a relief to go and spend a few weeks with his aunt Louie, skiing and learning German.

  Louie was Lannie’s younger sister. Bill and Louie got on well; better, in fact, than Lannie and Louie did. She had fallen in love with and married a German man in the 1930s, and moved to his home town, Garmisch-Partenkirchen. When war came Herbert was conscripted and was sent off to fight on the eastern front. He did not come back – but there were persistent rumours that some of the men who had not come back were still alive, dispersed throughout the Soviet Gulag. Some of the rumours were true, too: the very last German prisoners to be released were let go by Khrushchev in 1956. Louie, like millions of other German women – except that, of course, she wasn’t German – had to wait for news, and chose to nurse the flame of hope that Herbert was still alive. It was this waiting, more than the actual events of the war, which dominated her life. Louie told many stories of the hardships of war, the main theme being the same as that of her sister’s stories: hunger. Food shortages were savage and large parts of Germany were reduced to rubble by bombing. (There’s an irony, or something, in the fact that during the war both these Lancastrian sisters were bombed by the Allies, Louie in Bavaria and Lannie in Hong Kong.)

  Louie was in her late sixties by the time I got to know her, Lannie being a few years older. Louie was skinny, frail-looking but not frail, lively, which was like her sister, and neurotic, which was not; a hypochondriac, and a great one for fussing over her liver. (Instant coffee was a particular no-no. Very bad for the liver.) She had lived in Germany until the 1960s and then retired to Cleveleys, near Blackpool and near where she and Lannie had grown up. Louie was particularly fond of Bill, who in some ways served as the child she had never had; he had visited her a number of times in Garmisch. Louie was also a little bit silly, or a little bit of a fool. She had that tendency to blurt things out which people see in themselves as a form of shyness or innocence but which others often find indistinguishable from malice; she couldn’t see the distinction between what it was and what it wasn’t all right to say.

  The interaction between Louie and Lannie was a source of entertainment and instruction to me. I have no brothers or sisters, and have always been fascinated by all aspects of sibling dynamics. It was highly educative to see how completely Louie still occupied the role of the youngest in the family, even into her late seventies. Her silliness, need for and expectation of attention, and air of expecting subtly different treatment, were all qualities belonging to the youngest of a big family, and were described as such by everyone who knew her. They were all, equally clearly, sources of irritation to Lannie. When Louie told her stories about how grim it had been in Bavaria during the war, Lannie would ostentatiously read a book or look out of the window. Once when Louie was doing her spiel at dinner, I – aged about twelve and noticing Lannie had gone quiet – said ‘Gran, are you all right?’ ‘I’ve heard it before,’ she told me. Louie and Lannie were an education in just how unalike close family members can be.

  While he was staying in Garmisch on his 1952 holiday, Bill got news of his next posting: he was to be sent to Jakarta, the capital of Indonesia, in those days under the dictatorship of Sukarno. This, he felt in later life, was the strangest place he had ever lived, with a constant sense of chaos and menace and impending violence. It did not help that Indonesia had been colonised by the Dutch, who had a reputation for being the
most brutal and racist of the colonial powers in the Far East. It was said by internees that people locked up in former Dutch colonies had the hardest time of all POWs, because the local people hated them and did nothing to assist the internees. During Bill’s time in Jakarta everybody seemed to be drunk all the time. He once saw a man come out of a bar to discover that his car had been blocked in by double parking. The man took out a flick-knife and shredded all four tyres on the car blocking him in. Then he crossed his arms, leaned back on the bonnet of his own car, and waited for the driver to come out so they could have a fight.