‘You’d go into work, find a couple of streets roped off,’ Dad told me, ‘do your day’s work, go home, turn on the World Service, and hear the news begin: “Good evening. Jakarta was in flames tonight, as …”’
In the bars and clubs, a typical conversation turned on just how many, or rather how few, men it would need to take over the city and overthrow the government. Estimates would start in the middle hundreds and gradually decrease.
‘Two hundred. Properly armed and trained, two hundred.’
‘If I had the right men, a hundred. Radio station, airport, lock up Sukarno. Or just shoot him. Maybe even seventy-five.’
‘The right men – the right men – no more than fifty. You could do it with fifty.’ And so on.
Bill lived in quarters on his own and used to like the tropical nights of Jakarta, standing on his balcony with a beer and hearing the city going about its business. His great consolation was listening to music.
Then he was back in Singapore, more senior now, as the deputy accountant – the third most important figure in the branch. He had a girlfriend or two, and a red sports car. One day he and a girlfriend had an argument. He drove home in a rage, went too fast, lost control of the car and rolled it over into a storm drain. A concrete footbridge above the ditch stopped the car from falling in. He was held upside down by his seatbelt and managed to climb out. A foot further over and the car would have gone fully into the ditch and he would have been killed. A foot in the other direction and he would have hit the bridge head-on and been killed. And the luckiest thing of all was that he hadn’t hit a pedestrian, because if he had, it would have taken two lives: he would have been pulled from the car and beaten to death.
He was still bored by the work, still glad to be away in the world, enjoying the feeling of independence which came in flashes between the oppressive realities of office routine. And then somehow three years had passed and he was due for leave again. He spent the holiday the same way he had spent the last one, half in London and half in Bavaria. Jack was frailer, Lannie was much the same as ever. Bill had clothes made in Savile Row, and liked that, and the fact that he could afford it; he liked being able to wander around London and feel he had a place there, and could compare it now with other cities he’d known. Nonetheless, it was a relief to get to Germany and to its different otherness. The three months went by in a rush of European sensations – cold, culture, live music, being surrounded by white people all day. Without admitting it, he found it soothing to be back in Singapore. And then almost immediately the news came that Jack was very sick: he had pancreatic cancer and was not expected to survive.
There wasn’t much Bill could do except express his love and support. There wasn’t much Lannie could do either, except nurse Jack as he grew iller. Jack was stoical. On one of their last outings together – they had taken a coach tour of the Lake District, to visit landscapes they had both loved in their northern childhoods – he turned to Lannie and said, ‘I’ve always loved you, you know.’ As she later told my mother, it was the only time in his life he ever said anything like that to her, and it gave her a surge of happiness and reassurance that she never forgot.
Jack died on 12 February 1955. Bill was in Singapore, where he received Lannie’s telegram. He wrote back.
Mrs John Lanchester
8 Sutton Lane
Chiswick
London W4
Hongkong and Shanghai
Banking Corporation
PO Box No 896
Singapore
Sunday 13 Feb. 1955
Dear Mother,
I got your telegram last night – they phoned it through to me – and hope you got my reply this morning: I only hope that Dad’s death was a release for him. I’m sure it must be for you too, after the very heavy strain of the past months. It was no great surprise to me – thanks to your having warned me so well that it was to be expected.
I am very happy that I got to know Dad well during my leave, so that I now have a clear picture of him, less warped by the antagonism which till my leave, I am afraid, prevented me from seeing him as he was. What a good man he was in so many ways – not petty or small minded, charitable, kind, not bearing any malice. Only by a hairsbreadth was he not a very good man: for he was a difficult man. But that stemmed inevitably from his childhood & his parents, & he could not help. All we can do for him now is to remember him as he was, in some ways good, in some ways bad, in all very much better than most. I have never thought much about life after death; so far as I have I think I believe in reincarnation. It would be so right, somehow, to think of him as being born again, with new possibilities for good & evil.
It must be so much more difficult and painful for you than me, for you have been through so much together. But time is the Great Healer, if you can keep your heart open to your memories of him. I am sure that your courage and commonsense, of which you have such a very great deal, will enable you to bear it.
And so do not be too sorrowful, for he would not wish it for you.
But at the moment you will need rest and a change more than anything after this long strain.
Your very loving son,
Bill
Twenty-eight is not the worst age to lose a parent. Your grief is at least the grief of a person who is whole (more or less): it’s still a wound, but you suffer it as a grown-up, not as a child. In a perfect version of Bill’s life, he would, after grieving for Jack, have felt that he had done his filial duty by him, in spending his six years of drudgery getting a thorough grounding in the reality principle. He would have felt that he had done his time. But as I said, that didn’t happen. Bill stayed where he was, despite being increasingly oppressed by the repetitive, uninteresting, but precise and, in its way, demanding work of the bank. The problem was that it was demanding in ways he didn’t find interesting. There’s nothing unusual about that. We fight for autonomy over so many areas of our lives – for decency and democracy and freedom, for suffrage, for the right to have some say over our lives, some control – and then in the central question of what we are to do with our days, with our working lives, we give all that freedom away in return for a pay cheque. And are content to be bored and obedient, resentful and uninvolved and tired. This is such a standard, universally accepted feature of the modern world – that we will dislike and be bored by our work – that we have forgotten to notice that it doesn’t make sense.
Bill gave away the best years of his life to a job he disliked, a job that bored him. Many years later he told me that I mustn’t do that, and I have tried not to. He knew he was doing it, but couldn’t stop himself. The realisation gradually grew stronger towards the end of the 1950s. His journals are all about this sense of boredom and misfitting.
*
I have always been wary of listening to music of the Romantics: my defences were up against it. I could not properly pay attention to it, and I would dismiss a piece before hearing it. I have just realised that this was because much of it captured for me so well just the very atmosphere of vague longing, grandeur, and yearning promise of something perfect which I had for so many years and with such pain carried round unsatisfied inside me. ‘Womb music’ I would have called it if I had thought of the phrase, and that would have been accurate, not as a description of the music, but of my reaction to it. I was afraid it would upset me, and I covered my feelings by jeering mildly at it.
Tonight, though, I put on Rachmaninov’s 2nd Symphony. It must have been the first time that I have listened – been able to listen – to it properly. I must before have exaggerated the emotionalism of it to excuse my dislike for it, for on listening tonight I heard instead a freshness of spirit unstaled by the world, an adventurousness, a reaffirmation of the happy possibility of greatness in the world, which suddenly brought me up short. It suddenly came to me how much the self-recriminations of guilt and loss of confidence in myself and in life have filmed me over and reduced me to dull automatism and spoilt my life. It made me realise that I have lost t
he expectation that life had something to offer other than disappointments and difficulties!
Romanticism can be dangerous, in that it may offer us the promise of perfection greater than we can find in life and by so doing spoil life for us by making it seem worthless in comparison: if it does that it is our own fault for abandoning the world and turning to the Dream – a return to the womb. It should rather serve us as a reaffirmation of its value, a reminder of the promise that life should hold for us. We must dive into the waters of Romanticism to refresh ourselves for the hot and dusty world, not lull ourselves to drown there.
He is so hard on himself. And there, perhaps, is the answer to why Bill stayed in the bank doing the job he hated: he was punishing himself. For what, I don’t entirely know. Perhaps the boredom and confinement of the job matched the boredom and confinement of the formative year he had spent in plaster; perhaps he felt he had to abide by his father’s wishes, despite, or because of, the fact that they were a kind of punishment, an attempt to bend him into shape (just like the plaster, again); perhaps he never got over all the guilt and rage he felt during the years of separation, and was taking them out on himself; perhaps he was choosing to be in a prison, just as his parents had been in a prison. Or perhaps it was some or all of those things. Here, though, is a diary entry that directly talks about his sense of boredom.
I worked till 8 tonight. Being tired, I felt depressed. What a strain boring work is. How many people dislike office work? Surely few like it. What a waste all this earning a living is – especially earning a good living. I must save money, and buy leisure, buy the time to be myself.
I must tell Father that we are alike in this desiring leisure. (It is curious how alike we are: Father disliked his dentistry, and worked only for the money that would set him free from it; it is the same with me and my banking.) These reflections are awakened by something that happened today – Champ Jones said he was resigning and going to go on a tour of Australia to see where he would like to settle: here is a man not daunted by the fear of insecurity. I envy him his courage, and hope to be but a much paler version of his brighter purpose.
That sentiment is not, in itself, tragic. But it is tragic that Bill realised the depth of his own boredom in 1950, and kept working at the same job for another twenty-nine years.
Perhaps it was the movement and the constant re-posting that kept him from acting on his feeling of stuckness. Or perhaps it was actually that sense of stuckness that he liked, and that kept him at the bank. In any case, his next posting was to Calcutta, where he was again deputy accountant, the third most senior figure in a busy and important branch of the bank, in one of the world’s great cities. It was in Calcutta that Bill encountered his first case of criminality in the bank’s staff. A young clerk was found to have been stealing from dormant accounts – accounts whose customers had forgotten about them or died, or whatever. ‘The thing that was so awful about it was the scale of it,’ he told me. ‘Not that it was big, quite the reverse. He liked to give people Johnnie Walker Red Label whisky. He’d hand out Benson & Hedges and he’d pat you on the back and say, “There you go Bill, I know you like Benson & Hedges, none of those horrible Indian cigarettes, nothing but the best for my friends.” And that mattered so much that he stole for it and ended up going to jail. It was so sad. And most corruption that I’ve seen is like that. It’s not people going off to buy a tropical island for themselves, it’s people wanting the next lifestyle up.’
The yearning for a better life – Bill was sensitive to the way this could be a tragic feeling. And he was becoming more and more conscious of the sheer artificiality of the expatriate semi-colonial world, living this strange, constrained life in one of the world’s greatest, liveliest, most overwhelming cities. As Christmas approached he found himself describing expat Calcutta to a friend: ‘Basically, a life of getting up at 8, in office by 8.45 or earlier, working till 7, home, drink, dinner, & in bed by about 10 doesn’t leave time for much else at all.’ But Christmas was worse.
This is the ‘social season’ – basically a dead loss unless one really enjoys ‘parties’. Am slowly getting a picture of the social scene in Calcutta: it seems to be a. a small, possibly-by-now-non-existent, group of rich, smart, (horsey?) people whose imagined style of manners and life inspires b. a larger group who feel that they must emphasise the difference between themselves and c. Scotsmen and cockneys who work as radar mechanics, artisans in factories, and jute mills. Groups a. and b. have strong Oxford accents, c. speak dialect; all wear evening dress to cocktail parties, or any other sort of party for that matter. Many, indeed most, people are badly off by normal European-in-the-East standards, and one has to be very careful, on our pay which is (relatively) good, not to give the impression of showing off – the fact that I have a car, for example, tends I think to upset people who, having done 20–30 years here, have not got one or have only just got one from the company. All this matters, terribly. It is the England of 30–40 years ago transplanted, crystallised – dead.
So why put up with it? The answer is that this life, and especially the weight of the institution, made Bill feel safe. He never again wanted to have the experience he had had when he took a boat to a continent where he knew nobody, and had ‘oh what a feeling of “where do I fit in?”’ Even if being in the bank was a living immurement, at least he knew where, and who, he was. The stolidity of it all was what he complained about, but it was also what he liked. He was not emotionally illiterate; on the contrary, he knew his own feelings, and understood them. He understood them well enough to know that he wanted to avoid the things that upset him, at almost any cost. That was Bill in his early thirties. ‘What a liking I have for spaciousness,’ he told his journal. ‘Reaction against the small space my obsessions have been trying to force me into?’ The reader thinks, well, yes, probably. He also made a list of ‘Work Points’, as he called them.
Narcissism. Need to be lost in drink, sex etc. Pride.
Self-centredness.
Drive for perfection – perfective self.
Distrust of women.
Need to be full always – drink, food, cigarettes etc.
Storytelling – imagining.
Oversexual interest in women.
Too close to womb.
But the list leaves out the most important item of all: ‘Stop being so hard on self.’ That was a lesson he never learnt.
In 1959, Bill’s triennial leave came around again, and once again he made the trip ‘home’ to England. He stayed with Lannie, and visited relatives, and did all the things he usually did. But this time, before he went back to Asia, Lannie did something she didn’t usually do, and gave a dinner party where she introduced him to a friend she had made at Avondale, the school where she was teaching in west London. The friend, a new colleague who taught English, was about Bill’s age, a lively, funny, vital Irishwoman who had spent time in India. Her name was Julie Gunnigan. At the dinner, Julie and Bill got on famously. They spoke about all sorts of things, especially poetry and writing; two particular shared enthusiasms – which I would have thought were mutually exclusive – were for Robert Graves and Lawrence Durrell. Both Bill and Julie agreed it was a pity they had met so late in his leave. He was returning to Calcutta the next week, but he promised to write to her with the full title of a book of essays by Graves, which she said would help her with a class she was teaching.
B.T.J.
1
The year between leaving the convent and meeting Bill had been eventful for Julia. On the evening of 30 October 1958, Sister Eucharia of the Presentation Nuns got off Air India flight 107 to Heathrow, passed through customs and immigration, and was met by Vincent Geraghty. They took a taxi to the flat in Tachbrook Street where Peggie, nine months pregnant, was waiting for them. It was dark when they arrived, which helped ease Julia’s sense of shame at going into the house dressed in her religious habit. She came in and embraced Peggie. And then she went into the bedroom and changed from her nun’s uniform into cast
-offs and hand-me-downs Peggie had waiting for her. Julia Immaculata Gunnigan picked up the identity she had laid down in 1944.
The experience of leaving a religious order is overwhelming. This is still true today. In the world of the Catholic Church before Vatican II, it was even more so. But Julia did not have time to be overwhelmed. Peggie and Vincent could not support her; it was not just desirable, but essential, that she quickly get a job. Luckily, she had her teaching qualifications and four references from people she had known in Madras, one of them the Chief Inspector of Schools. Teachers are never paid well enough, and in much of the English-speaking world they aren’t sufficiently respected; but they can, at almost all times and in almost all places, find work. The first place she looked was where Peggie was teaching, City of Westminster College. This was a college of higher education, attached to Regent Street Polytechnic, which specialised in offering pre-university courses for students who had enrolled in British universities but first needed to brush up their qualifications or their English or both. The college attracted ‘lots of ex-army, air force, Americans completing their education after the war, people of all colours and creeds from far-flung places’, as Peggie remembers it. Julia asked Peggie if she could find her work at the College, and as it happened there was an immediate need for a qualified teacher of English as a Foreign Language, several evenings a week. So Julia found work more or less straight off the plane. Peggie remembers that she was particularly anxious to earn money for new clothes. These were both practical necessities and the symbolic core of the new identity she was having to construct for herself in civilian life. She bought one or two things and then, on Peggie’s advice, decided to wait for the January sales.
Family Romance Page 21