by Michael Foss
If it rained there was nothing for it but to eke out time in a café, reading and re-reading the timid offerings of the wartime menu, and settling almost inevitably on Heinz tinned spaghetti in tomato sauce, a dish known to us as ‘worms on toast’. My mother wrinkled her nose in disgust. She hated vulgarity.
I look now at a photo of her from that time. Heavy coils of fair hair gathered at the back of the neck, pale widely spaced eyes, a long upper lip trembling on the edge of a smile. There is an air of diffidence but a hint also of some new woman emerging beneath.
In Oxford she began, as she said, ‘to come out of herself’. With colleagues from her office she went to a concert or two, though she preferred operetta. ‘Such fun,’ she would say, ‘such gaiety.’ She was not musical though she would hum along strenuously to well-known classical pieces – Beethoven’s Fifth or the Tchaikovsky fiddle concerto – getting the turns of the melody wrong and beating time on the arm of her chair. She did have a remarkable memory for the voices of famous singers and gained herself some artistic credit by recognizing at once Galli-Curci or Conchita Supervia or Lily Pons. She would cock her head aside like an attentive bird. ‘Ah, dear Richard Tauber,’ she would murmur dreamily. Was it the voice or the fame of the singer that met her approval?
On the whole, the theatre pleased her more. She had an eye for fame here also, and later she used to speak of seeing ‘that young Coral Browne’ at the Playhouse. She attended most weeks for a diet of Pinero, Coward, Rattigan. She was suspicious of Shaw. Too Irish, too wordy, too argumentative, he invited cynicism and disbelief. ‘So clever-clever,’ she said disparagingly. Wilde was Irish too, and witty perhaps, but he laid souls bare in a most uncomfortable way. My mother liked to live in a nice world, with indecencies hidden. The motives of the propertied classes – those founts of authority – should not be exposed. ‘Heartless,’ she called Wilde – a grave criticism, for she attached great store to the heart. Shakespeare, apart from the whimsical comedies, she did not care for. The barbarism of murder, rape, treachery, madness, eye-gouging seemed to her grotesquely medieval. The power of ungovernable emotion was a distressing affliction. She wanted to turn her eyes from the spectacle, not investigate it. ‘We’ve come a long way from those days,’ she would say after the war, abandoning in some byway of memory Auschwitz and Stalingrad and the Dresden fire-storm and the nuclear night of Hiroshima, and even the bombs of the Blitz that fortunately did not fall on Oxford.
She never wanted to delve below the surface. Life down there was unbearably raw. ‘Why can’t people be pleasant?’ she used to lament. ‘It’s so easy.’ Her simple job at the Foreign Office gave some shape to her day, some stability. After that, she innocently craved what she called ‘fun’. She wanted to hold her head up, floating, in a world of knights and maidens. But she looked down and saw her feet churning the muck and refuse of a brutal civilization.
Most of all, when the evening freed her from the office, she loved to dance. She was poised and stylish on the dance-floor, keen to try the latest steps, and she reaped many compliments. When the American officers began to arrive in Oxford towards the middle of the war, my mother met these energetic young men, with their curious courtesy and unquenchable enthusiasm, in the bar of the Randolph Hotel. Her children were in boarding school. What could be wrong in going to a dance now and again? These young Americans seemed so eager and desperate to please. Surely they were officers and gentlemen?
So whatever the calls of the next morning, when an occasion came she would dance most of the night away, head high, eyes lighted on some blissful region of grace and movement, her partner held affectionately but at a proper distance. And if some green young fellow, aching with loneliness and giving way to the seduction of the dance, tried to get fresh, my mother was disturbed and frightened. She would break away in alarm and rush to the ladies’ room, her eyes brimming with tears. It was the world getting in the way again. Why couldn’t people be nice?
The world, of course, was very far from nice. Just when she thought her life was in some equilibrium, she was thrown into turmoil once more. It was too difficult to make the equation of happiness balance. The bad moments struck out the good. The bleak lodging off the Woodstock Road where she sat on empty evenings, trying to overcome the static on her radio, clutching misery about her like a shroud. The grubby kitchenette for the lodgers at the end of the passage, rustling with angry draughts, where she opened tins of spam and powdered egg (in one can she discovered a dead mouse), and stared in dismay at slabs of whalemeat. The shuffling of ration-cards, trying to work out when she would have enough points for a new dress. Queueing for everything, feeling the wetness of the pavement creep into the cracked soles of her shoes. Where was the money to mend them, with so many other calls on her purse?
Waiting for the bus, and on the long slow drives to the convent, she would reflect on the unhappiness of her children and how painful that was for her.
‘Oh how I suffered for you poor darlings,’ she told me later, ‘but I felt it was for the best. And besides, what else could I do?’
Her own helplessness absolved her from any responsibility for our grief.
The school holidays were the worst times for her. Whatever could she do with us? By chance, the husband of the manageress of the Randolph Hotel, a wartime soldier, was one of my father’s junior officers in the Middle East. For the school holiday a place was found for us in the hotel, a grand double bedroom with a bathroom attached, at a special low rate. We would eat in the restaurant. This generous arrangement was a great relief for my mother but her satisfaction did not last long. Released from the convent I could not control my pent-up rage. It flowed from me like lava through the quiet dim spaces of the hotel, boiling into the hush of the writing-room and lounge, crashing like dropped pans and smashed crockery amid the snowy covers of the restaurant, finally expending itself at bedtime in an exhausted hysteria, the gasps of a disturbed child clinging to the pillow for safety. After several days of this, my mother smacked me on the bottom with the back of a hairbrush. Then she fainted.
Soon we both knew that we could not continue to live at this high pitch of drama. Nor could the hotel afford our presence. My brother and I returned to the convent and arrangements were made for us to stay there during future holidays.
‘I wept when I had to leave you,’ my mother confided later, ‘but you were such a handful. I couldn’t do a thing with you, and you made me so unhappy. What I did, I thought it was for the best.’
*
So we knew we were different. Other children went home for the holidays. We were abandoned to realms of silence and dust. Shifting aimlessly between empty rooms we hesitated in corridors, weighed down under the shadows and gloom of those long tunnels that seemed both a part and a cause of our despair. Often they led to mystery or to forbidden territory, to locked doors, dead-ends or notices saying PRIVATE and NO ENTRY. In these places we took to talking in whispers, haunted by dreads that we could not resolve into the clear light of day. Other children had homes. We had the corridors, or certain specified rooms left unlocked and void, with too many hard chairs arrayed around the walls and threadbare carpets that spoke of penury and dearth. Outside, the playground mocked us with memory of childish uproar. We threw stones, or squabbled half-heartedly, or dug in the sandpit, too dejected to make anything better than holes.
At night, still whispering, we told each other stories, trying to console ourselves with fantasy as we awaited the oblivion of sleep. We were the sole occupants of ghostly dormitories. The other beds were stripped bare, the place smelling of pine-scented disinfectant. The plaster statue of Christ at the end of the room was shrouded in a white sheet. In the night, I woke often, drifting in the vast darkness. Going to the lavatory I stumbled back bemused by the dead rows of beds. My heart thudded at the increasing muddle in my head. Where was my bed? I could not find my way and curled up like a foetus onto the nearest mattress. When we opened our eyes we saw morning light dribble through the big east wind
ow onto the shrouded Christ standing as the sentinel of the day.
Set apart in this way, we began to value our difference from others, even though we suffered for it. How had it come about? We were refugees clinging, in this sepulchral world, to a faint memory of heat and light in the India of our birth, though in my own case the memory of the past was so unformed that I had to take it on trust from my elder brother. From time to time this conviction was confirmed by a sudden surprise, such as the arrival of a box of Turkish Delight as a gift from our father in the desert. The spongy jelly, perfumed with attar of roses and covered with a light dust of sugar-powder, seemed to us like a promise deferred.
Such a promise was thin fare to live on. In the meantime I was realizing the worst fears of Sister Mary Bede. My temper was becoming uncontrollable. I was a little liar. I began to wet my bed. I was a naughty child and God did not love me.
FOUR
Banana Man
GRIPPED BY RELIGIOUS discipline, both in term-time and in holidays, I grew used to a daily life of small dangers – arbitrary and sneaky punishments, petty meannesses, little mind-controlling tyrannies. We all became wary, recognizing the signs of trouble: the stealthy swish of long black robes, the click of rosary beads; the harsh intake of breath and the command to stop at once, followed by an enraged middle-aged face thrust towards us, framed by the weird bonnet of the wimple; then the scolding, in a fierce undertone, often accompanied by a good shaking – ‘stupid child, naughty boy, wicked little nuisance’ – which led to the rap of a ruler across the knuckles, or banishment to stand in a dark corner, or the long trek to an early bed without supper.
After a time I no longer knew that life could be otherwise. I was inured to misery, which became endurable so long as it avoided actual bodily pain. Life was bleak, but were not greyness and emptiness the colour and the shape of the times? ‘Some little boys,’ Sister Mary Bede used to say with heavy emphasis, ‘will never learn when they’re well off.’ I acknowledged what seemed to be the facts, hard though they were.
So I accepted the judgement of the nuns on my own behaviour, being forced, in the usual manner of childhood, to navigate by the only moral map available, the one licensed by guardians and teachers. But I came to feel, in loneliness and the peculiarities of our situation, that I was marked out, set apart from the common lot. It was a distinction of a kind, and I learnt to take comfort from it. The daily blows and insults became easier to withstand. They were seen, most perversely, as marks of status. In the battles of the playground, in the everlasting boyhood contests between Cowboys and Indians, between Authority and Defiance, I knew instinctively which side I was destined to be on. For was I not, both by birth and present circumstance, a person separated out, a natural ‘Indian’?
To be different becomes a source of secret pride.
*
I did not understand much about prayer, though we were only too often on our knees. But I knew well enough what it was to beg. We all learnt how to do that. Roused into the sombre shadows of another shoddy morning we begged for a few more moments of sleep. In timid voices we asked for an extra slice of bread and a spoonful of jam. Hopping from foot to foot we shot up our hands for leave to go to the lavatory. In the winter, denied permission to wear gloves and forbidden to put our hands in our pockets, we tucked frozen hands into our armpits. Indoors, we tried to thaw out by sitting on the hot radiators, though this too was not permitted for fear of getting piles. Often reduced to tears, we would hold out ashamed hands for a handkerchief. As we sniffled and wiped our eyes our creased and anxious little faces appealed for more kindness and fewer slaps. And of course we continually begged, either in the confessional or under a nun’s basilisk gaze, for forgiveness of our many sins.
There was so much to ask for. In fact, all my obstructive, morose and violent behaviour was a petition begging for my release.
Then that release came suddenly, for reasons that were hidden to me. In summer towards the end of the war our family moved from Oxford to the south Dorset coast. This move indicated, I suppose, an easing of our money worries. My father, a professional soldier with plenty of pre-war experience, had risen rapidly in wartime, and his pay went up with his rank. For me, quitting the low-lying Thames river-valley that was so intimately connected with the fever-haunted, almost hallucinatory oppression of the convent was only another mysterious shift of fate.
Now even the weather seemed kinder – the bracing sea airs, the dash of spray off the breaking waves, the sun glinting like hide and seek between driven clouds. A new mood settled on my mother, one of almost dangerous complacence. Her walk had a swing to it, as if she were now on her way with some purpose. She shed her dowdy suit – the appropriate wear for the Foreign Office – and took to flowery summer frocks with sandals on her feet. Her hair, once closely pinned up, was now looser and often wind-blown. She smiled, lingered in company, and forgot to annoy us with her fidgeting and her nervous fears for our safety. In her own estimation she deserved a rest (could not the whole of England say that also?).
She took a room in a small hotel in Uplyme and prepared to bring her life back in line with her own sense of normality. For her, that meant being wife and mother. No matter that her husband was fighting a war two thousand miles away and her children were shut up in a boarding school. She regarded these circumstances as somehow unreal, having to do with a shadow-life of wartime, whereas her real life, modelled on her past days in India, lay in the return to India. No longer burdened with the drudgery of office work, for which she was almost wholly unsuited, she could now devote herself to the thought of the future. There was much domestic business to take in hand. Most of our family goods had gone to the bottom of the sea in 1940. Her little world of household effects had to be re-gathered, packed and stored.
Then it was necessary to recuperate her health and her looks and her good humour. She relaxed. No need to get up quite so early in the morning. No need to join the bus queue, to jostle with crowds for a hasty lunchtime sandwich, to tread pavements homewards to the stark suburban room, fumbling shillings for the one-bar electric fire, staring in hopeless resignation at the faded regency stripes of the wallpaper and the stain of the water-leak in the corner of the ceiling that looked like a map of Nowhere. And no need also to fret herself ill out of worry for her children.
We too, her children, were busy getting acquainted with a type of normality that was new to us. From the popish dark of the convent, so baroque and un-English and blighted by a suspect religious enthusiasm, we were put into the care of the English middle-class system of private schooling. Though we did not know it, we were exchanging the subtle intellectual cruelties of the Jesuitical Counter-Reformation for the hearty violence of Dr Arnold’s Anglo-Saxon invention, a regime still bearing the imprint of the whiskered old goat himself, with his love of floggings and cold baths and many hours on the muddy playing fields.
This was a part of our English bourgeois inheritance. And it was not hard to see that there was a certain grandeur to it. An imposing gateway, with tall stone piers and a wrought-iron gate thrown open, embraced us with a large gesture. Then a long driveway marched boldly through the pitches of the games fields to a gravel circle before the front door of a big eccentric Victorian house. The house had been built with all the lapses of an over-rich, whimsical domestic taste, but was now transformed into a school with too many odd compromises for either convenience or comfort. From the front door, the main passage was lined with hunting trophies, the large heads of slaughtered animals, their old fur scruffy with dust and bald patches and the glass eyes looking unbearably despondent. Another place, an administrative office off the passage, had walls prickly with the tines of many antlers.
Unavoidable draughts swept through the house, enough to please even the most austere of muscular Christians. Great, rattling windows seemed to sail over the sea. The views were magnificent. From the dormitories, clattering with wind noise, we looked across rabbit-bitten turf and over the low cliff to the sun setting o
ut in the dizzy vista of the ocean. We were tempted to hug ourselves, though unsure whether from cold or wonder.
In the convent, we had inhabited a world of sullen whispers, sidelong glances, secretive, cautious, withdrawn. Our new world was ringing with loud halloos, voices perpetually raised, doors slammed, feet stamped, instructions roared as if from passing ships. Our amusement in the convent had been solitary and painstaking and private. In our new school we were taught the steamy satisfaction of corporate effort, how to work for a team, and take our knocks like little men, without complaint. Strange English excesses, such as cricket, were revealed to us by sport-besotted schoolmasters. Footballs were kicked around, not in the wild chaotic rushes of the convent playground, but with the communal aim of goal-scoring in view.
The convent had taken the individual soul in hand, for rigorous discipline on the road to heaven. Our new masters looked askance at that. It sounded to them selfish and ungentlemanly. Teamwork was what mattered. Play the game and life would follow from it.
At last, I was beginning to get the hang of how to be English.
In a short time, adaptable as most schoolboys, we had learnt to fit in. Only our Catholicism held us apart. There were no other Catholics in the school, but our peculiarity was treated with the respect that a liberal tradition gives to puzzling metaphysical anomalies. On Sundays, my brother and I put aside the hard-boiled eggs from our breakfast – the ration was one fresh egg each per week – and we set out alone for Mass in a nearby village.
In good weather we went across the fields, stopping to crack our egg-shells on the stone pillar of the gatepost. On weekends, nothing disturbed the tranquillity of the wartime countryside. No traffic, the farm tractors at rest. Working men with their boots unlaced pottered amid the vegetable patch, a full pot of tea on the hob. A woman sat in the sun with her skirt hitched up on her thighs, shelling peas into a white colander. Thin cigarette smoke rose over a hedge.