As for how she thought of herself and of her illness, I don’t know. But I do know that one of the main reasons I am a writer is because she couldn’t be one. And the reason she couldn’t be one is because she couldn’t tell the truth.
FAMILY ROMANCE
1
Because we lived in the same small block of flats for all these years, and because my father kept working at the same job, I saw his life as entirely static. It never occurred to me that his working life involved a trajectory of hopes and feelings and experiences.
For a couple of years after our return to Hong Kong from Labuan in 1966, Bill was working, first as deputy and then as manager, at the North Point branch of the bank. In career terms, he felt that his best years were in front of him; he was serving a long apprenticeship as a relative junior, but that wasn’t unusual for the bank in its colonial days. He would still have expected to rise and for big opportunities to open up. That might seem like a naïve hope for someone who had spent seventeen years working for the same company; but the pace of banking life, like that of other forms of work, was slower in those days. His chance might yet come.
When it did, in the late 1960s, it was in the form of a transfer to head office at 1 Queens Road Central. Today, that address is occupied by a famous building designed by Norman Foster – at the time it was built, the most expensive privately owned building in the world, and a highly ugly and impractical one too. When my father worked there, though, the bank was a chunky stone structure with a lovely central hall illustrated with a mural of striving workers; it was so low, relative to the Hong Kong of my childhood, that it was impossible to believe that when my grandparents were first in the colony it was the tallest building in South-East Asia. This was where Bill was to spend the rest of his working life. It’s where I best remember him as a working man, when I used to drop in on him, semi-unannounced. I would either ring up to his secretary from the banking floor, or simply sneak into the staff lift and go up to his section before asking to be taken in by the ‘boy’ – a Cantonese man in his thirties who was the administrative manager of this section. Dad was always pleased to see me and I him, and there was something very reassuring about my father in his office at the centre of all this bustle, a picture of me and my mother on his desk. Lunch, in theory a quiet time, was often the worst moment to drop in, because he would often be having a snooze.
Although I didn’t know it then, Bill was a disappointed man. He had climbed to the stair below the top one, in terms of the bank’s hierarchy. He was now a senior member of the overseas staff, well paid and as secure as any worker in the world, the beneficiary of a pension scheme that, as it happened, Bill was to help design. (He didn’t benefit from it much, but my mother did.) The next level up was that of the head honchos, the people who decided things and set the course, as opposed to running things and keeping them on course. Bill never got to that next level up. He had a platform with a perfect view of the personalities and politics at the highest tiers of the bank, and he worked with three men who were eventually to run the organisation, and oversee the process that took it from being a minor colonial bank to one of the biggest financial institutions in the world. One thing he told me I often remember: two of the chairmen he had known were, he said, diametrically opposite in their behaviour to colleagues. One would scream and shout and berate colleagues; but he never sacked anybody. The other was mild-mannered and calm and never raised his voice, but was utterly ruthless and would sack and demote people without hesitation. I’ve kept that in mind ever since Dad told me, and it’s been borne out: in every organisation I’ve ever seen at close range, the bosses tend to be either shouters or sackers. People have either a bark or a bite, almost never both.
The next promotion never came. Bill was the deputy head of the personnel department – in other words, he did all the work. (An observation of my own from institutional life is that deputies do either all the real work or none of it.) There were attempts by other senior figures to poach him – once, by a friend who was setting up a merchant bank to wheel and deal, in what was to be the far more buccaneering style of banking prevalent since the 1980s. But Bill’s superior fought off the move, mainly it seems because he needed Bill to do all the work and run the department. Bill saw this as a disappointment and so it was, since the main thing in life isn’t so much what happens to us as what we think happens to us. I do wonder, though. The cure for being a banker wasn’t to be a more interesting kind of banker; it was not to be a banker at all. But it’s hard to accept, once you have been doing a thing for twenty years, that you have been doing the wrong thing. Julie and I were an important alibi for Bill in this respect. I think he would have stayed in the same job whatever happened; I think his childhood had left him with a desperate need for security and structure, which the bank provided. But I think he told himself that he had a wife and son to support and school fees to pay and a standard of living to maintain, and so he had no choice but to keep on doing what he was doing.
Duty was important for Bill. He was a good man; in his unostentatious and shy way, one of the best men I have known. He grew up in a culture in which duty and reticence and honour and privacy and lack of ostentation were regarded as forms of goodness and public-spiritedness. Plenty of people still believe in all these things, but they have vanished from our public culture, or at least from our publicised culture, and no one celebrates them any more, or even admits that they were once seen, and not so long ago, as virtues. One aspect of his sense of duty was the good deeds he did, and another was that he never spoke about them. I knew that he was appointed to sit on the Hong Kong rent tribunal, overseeing arguments between landlords and tenants – a highly sensitive position in that place and time, and a great tribute to his reputation for fair-mindedness. It was also a tribute to the fact he had taken the trouble to go to night classes and learn functional Cantonese, something very few expatriates bothered to do. But there were other things I did not know. In our latter years in Hong Kong, from the early 1970s on, we came to know a group of Catholic nuns; they did a variety of demanding jobs, mostly linked to poverty relief – one was a surgeon, another the private secretary to Cardinal Wu, others we met later were involved in medical aid work in Guangzhou. They had the unusual virtue, in Hong Kong, of being equal-opportunity sceptics, as unillusioned about the Communist Chinese as about Britain and the self-serving billionaires and big shots of the Hong Kong business community. I had always assumed that we met them through ‘the Murphia’, my mother’s Irish friends. It was only recently, on a trip to Hong Kong, that I learned that that wasn’t true: we knew them because my father served unpaid as the treasurer of a local hospital, where some of the nuns worked. I had had no idea: he never mentioned it in front of me, not once. That is how you are supposed to do charity, with the left hand not knowing what the right is doing, and it was the best side of my father’s reticence. On the same trip to Hong Kong in 1997 I found out something else I had not known: that my father had paid the fees of Ah Man, our cook’s son, who was my near-contemporary and friend, to study electrical engineering at university. I was by now in a position to know that although we were well off, we weren’t that well off, and that my father had had his worries about life after retirement. So this was no small gesture, and as it happens, it changed Ah Man’s life. He founded a business making boilers and is now a multimillionaire. His parents, once our cook and maid, now live in a spectacular duplex by a marina at Sai Kung in the New Territories. It would have made my father so happy to know that, and it made me glad that such a private man, who had in most respects left so little mark on the world, has at least one place other than in my heart where his memory is revered.
My awareness of Bill’s unhappiness at work was not a vivid thing. He did not complain at length, only in muted asides. He felt that he was brighter and more able than the people he worked for. This is something I learned more about from my mother than from him. As for his work, he hardly ever spoke about it. Only once did he show me papers
he had brought home: there was a choice between three candidates applying for a senior job. He spread out the papers, explaining who the men were, then said that although one of them was obviously the best and brightest, he wouldn’t get the job because he was spiky and cocky and probably wouldn’t fit in. That, he explained, is how things often worked. People want to have a quiet time and don’t like to be disrupted, even if it is by someone who in other ways is the best man for the job. That seemed distressingly timid to me, though since then I’ve seen that about 90 per cent of the time what my father said happens, happens.
I didn’t learn much about Bill’s work from him directly. I didn’t learn much about his life either. The defining event of all these years came in 1974, when my father had a serious heart attack while in the office. Until this point he had not, in twenty-five years’ employment, missed a single day’s work through illness, something of which he was very proud, especially because he had so often been sickly in his childhood. He was forty-seven years old and a smoker, getting through a pack of Benson & Hedges Gold a day, but apart from his being overweight – not obese, but overweight – and sedentary, there were no warnings. There may have been a connection, it occurs to me now, with the tuberculosis of his childhood. Years afterwards, he told me two things about his heart attack. The first was that one of the most disconcerting things was that the first symptoms were so like those of indigestion that he never quite got free of the worry that what felt like indigestion was actually something potentially fatal. At the time I did not understand what a glimpse this was into a world of constant, tormenting anxiety. He also told me that at the moment of having the heart attack he felt himself falling over, losing his footing as he collapsed, so that now whenever he began to lose his balance, say on a carpet slipping over the smooth floor underneath, he had a flashback to the moment of losing consciousness during the heart attack. Again, I didn’t understand how terrible the ensuing anxiety and sense of apprehension must have been. The main thing I saw was the physical caution that never left my father afterwards, and the regular angina attacks he used to suffer when out walking, which would make him pause and catch his breath with his fists resting on his hips – a syndrome I now know is called ‘window shopper’s angina’. He kept his nitro-glycerine pills on him at all times, and latterly we had an oxygen cabinet in the coat cupboard. He gave up smoking, began to take regular exercise in the form of walking, and never ate so much as a mouthful of butter or bacon again.
This doesn’t mean we ever properly discussed it, though. I was told, at school, that my father was not well, and I remember the house matron smiling at me in an unusually and unnaturally ‘nice’ way – but as far as I knew, he was having an operation on his feet. Is it possible my mother wrote to me about his heart and I misread the word as ‘feet’? Looking over my parent’s correspondence, I see that the heart attack is mentioned directly in letters to friends and to Lannie, but not to me. In any case, just as my parents didn’t have a clue about my pre-occupations at school, I didn’t have a clue about things at home, and it was only very gradually that it became clear to me what had happened. My father spoke about it over the next years in asides, and from these I pieced the story together. The only time he directly mentioned it was in the summer of 1979, when he told me that he would be going to a London specialist to assess whether he ought to have a bypass operation. I was planning to go on a school-organised expedition that summer, to learn hang-gliding, but cancelled it because I wanted to be around if he had the operation. In the event, he was told that he didn’t need it: his changed diet and the exercise he had taken had done him so much good that the bypass was unnecessary. This turned out not to be true, but he was deeply relieved.
They were trying to protect me, I think. My parents did not want to frighten me by going into too much detail about my father’s health and about the risks involved if he had another heart attack – and in one sense they succeeded, because I had no conscious fear that he might die. At the same time I internalised a great deal of his worry, and began to think, not consciously but vividly, of death as something that might descend out of a clear sky at any moment. This unconscious belief or conviction was to cause trouble in the future.
Bill had had difficulties with phobias and anxieties in the past. Wide-open spaces triggered moments of irrational fear, and so did moving from dark places into sunlight; he once told me he thought the feeling might be linked to traumatic hidden memories about being born. He dreaded social situations that he couldn’t get out of, and had a particular fear of restaurants; he would have to walk up and down outside, summoning the nerve to go in. These anxieties were intensified by the heart attack, since he now had reason to worry that he might overtax his heart by panicking and suffer another infarct. In other words, the anxiety gave him a powerful, legitimate reason to feel more anxiety, a classic anxious spiral.
I don’t want to make Bill’s life sound grim. He was a popular colleague and people were quick to like him; he was unpompous in a time and a place when that wasn’t a common trait in men. (How many middle-aged men, in truth, are unpompous? A minority, certainly. One in five?) He was gentle, funny, intelligent, kind, and also had the deeply rare quality of actually listening to what people said. Women liked him. He had very few close friends and, I sometimes think, no intimate ones. He almost never spoke of his deepest feelings; I may be the only person apart from Julie to whom he did. But that made him seem not a closed or secretive man, merely a private one.
The material comfort he provided for his family was a source of pride to him. We were comfortably off, and Julie very much enjoyed that; Bill himself liked the resulting sense of security. In retirement, when money was much tighter, he told me, ‘I like the feeling that if I wanted to go down to London and stay at the Ritz for a night or two, you know, I could.’ Not that he ever did, but I know what he meant: he liked the wiggle room, the psychic sense of space, that earning a good living brought. As I have already pointed out, this sense of potential freedom came at the cost of spending his days in wage slavery, and of effectively mortgaging his life away – but nevertheless, at least in some sense he felt free. He was proud of the good education I was getting, and very proud when I got into Oxford, and then even more proud when I got a first in my moderations, the exams at the end of my first year. Later, when I won a couple of university prizes, he was prouder still. He saw this, with reason, as a set of opportunities he had created. When my mother told me about his pride in these things, she would always use the same phrase: ‘He opened the window and flung his chest out.’
By 1979, though, I was coming up to my last year in school, and therefore the last year of school fees; in those days, university education was paid for by the state. (Obviously, given that he never discussed money, the fact that he kept working to pay my school fees was never mentioned. It’s a connection I worked out in retrospect.) Bill had spent thirty years working for the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank. His health was what it was, a source of great anxiety, but it could be managed with gentle exercise and a lot of medication, much of it with unpleasant side effects – specifically, the eczema he suffered thanks to the combination of beta-blockers and blood-pressure medication. But he now had a place he could retire to.
This was Alderfen, the house he and my mother bought in Norfolk in 1972. There was no ancestral connection of any sort with the area, but my aunt Peggie lived nearby in Norwich with her husband, Vincent, and daughter, Siobhán. Their presence was one reason I had been sent to school there. In many ways Alderfen was an unfortunate choice. Village life proved to be unfriendly even by the standards of English village life – read: very unfriendly indeed. The site was windy and bleak; the house itself was an unlovely ‘chalet bungalow’ of recent construction (a bungalow with a room upstairs that had a balcony). Because I was at a boarding school, in the summer holidays my friends were scattered all over the place, and I didn’t see them much; for my parents, there was no ready-made social life – Peggie and her family moved ba
ck to Ireland in 1973 – and next to no culture in Norfolk. But Bill nevertheless loved the idea of owning his property, with no street address beyond that one word ‘Alderfen’. It had nineteen acres of land, most of it unusable, indeed unwalkable, marsh; but beautiful nonetheless. Bill now owned a piece of somewhere, and for someone who felt he didn’t belong anywhere and who had lived all his life in property belonging to other people, that was a novel and consoling feeling.
Thanks to those three decades with the same employer, Bill now had the option of taking early retirement. This might seem a no-brainer: to have reached fifty-three and now to be rid of a job you are bored by, on a comfortable pension, free to do anything you wanted with the rest of your life. What’s not to like? It was difficult for Bill, though, because it involved accepting that he wasn’t going to get any further at the bank and therefore that his central work ambition had failed. Retiring involved facing and accepting the fact he was disappointed. He decided to do it anyway, and 1979 was our last year in Hong Kong; rather than take a summer holiday in England, he worked through and left the territory for ever in September.
For me, that summer was great. Once an atomised place with a random collection of people coming and going, Hong Kong was now somewhere I had some friends from holiday to holiday – specifically girlfriends, with the emphasis on ‘friends’, but still. There were parties, there was hanging out, there were bars and clubs where the idea of somebody asking for proof of your age never crossed anyone’s mind. It was, I suddenly realised, a good city in which to be a teenager. Then I went back to school to start my A-Level year, and Bill and Julie took the long slow trip home that they had been discussing ever since he had decided to stop working: Thailand, Cyprus, and then Sweden, to buy a new Saab and drive it home across northern Europe. At school I received a sequence of postcards. Bill and Julie arrived in Alderfen some time in early November, and the open-ended years of retirement began.
Family Romance Page 29