My Father's Fortune

by Michael Frayn

  I also came to share his enjoyment in learning the geography of London. Another source of stories for him, though, was my slowness at this, as at so many other things. One night he lent me the car to visit relatives in Hampstead. Next morning, to amuse him, I told him that on the way home I’d found myself driving through the Elephant and Castle five times. ‘Five’ probably meant ‘three’, but it wasn’t the number of times that caught his attention – it was the fact that I had gone through the Elephant and Castle, in south-east London, on a journey between north-west London and the southwestern suburbs, even once. I never heard the end of that. Any subsequent car journey that I mentioned to him, even if it was through the Highlands or the Alps, was likely to remind him of it. ‘We went over the St Gotthard,’ I would boast to him, ‘then back over Great St Bernard.’ ‘Much traffic at the Elephant?’ he would inquire.

  *

  My slowness is causing problems long before then. By the time I’m four or five it’s already clear that the son-and-heir project is not going as well as Tommy might have hoped. Little Michael’s a bit of a disappointment. Tommy coaches the lad patiently with a tennis ball in the back garden, but I think he’s already scaling back his ambitions for him as a batsman. Any hopes of the boy one day playing for England, or even Surrey (the club he himself supports), must have been abandoned by this time.

  There’s a problem getting the bat to connect with the ball. My father runs up to the imaginary crease, about fifteen feet from where I’m standing at the imaginary wicket, and bowls no more than moderately fast, to which I respond with a perfectly well-executed off drive – but somehow the ball’s not where the bat is. It has already gone past me; it hasn’t got to me yet. I can’t find any snaps of myself at the crease (which may suggest that my father was waiting for me to develop my style a little before he put anything on record), so I can’t see exactly what’s going wrong. There are a couple of pictures of me around the age of two, not with a bat, but with a large coloured ball at my feet, and I’m not trying to hit it, or even to kick it. I don’t seem to be intending violence towards it of any sort – I’m just gazing dubiously at it, as if considering the geometry of a sphere. There is, however, a picture not of me but of my father taking guard in front of the imaginary wicket which may offer a clue to the difficulties I’m having.

  The problem is the bat. The picture’s dated summer 1939, when I’m five. By this age other boys have been given rather solid pieces of oiled willow with sprung handles and rubber grips, serious sporting instruments that reach all the way down to the ground and a long way out to leg and off. The bat my father’s holding is a toy bat. It’s the only bat we possess, and it reaches about halfway down my father’s shins. This is the trouble. It’s too short to reach the ball.

  I remember that bat. It has none of the springing in the handle that enables a real bat to leap out at an approaching ball before it has gone past, none of the oiliness that makes it bide its time until the ball has got to it. Even if this feeble mockery of a bat were somehow to connect with the ball, it doesn’t have the authentic bulge at the back that gives a real one the heft to drive the ball to the boundary. Instead of a rubber grip the handle has a piece of string wound round it. The string’s coming undone, and hanging down distractingly. Attempting to hit a ball with this bat is like adjusting the saddle of the fairy cycle with the rusty pliers, or hammering nails in with the back of the blunt chopper. I’m the victim once again of my father’s failure to learn the usual skills of acquisition and possession.

  Well, even if I can’t be a batsman I can perhaps be a bowler. The inadequacies of the bat, though, affect bowling practice as well. However my father springs about, the shortness of that pathetic little paddle makes it difficult for him to reach my cunningly placed wides to leg and off, my unexpected overhead volleys. Even a good fielder’s worth having, of course – and you don’t need a bat for fielding practice. But you do need a ball that doesn’t move about so suddenly, in the way that the mangy tennis ball we have acquired from our rich relations in Enfield seems to, so that it’s shot past your left ear before you know what’s happened, or bounced painfully off the end of your extended thumb and gone over the fence once again into Miss Hay’s garden.

  My father becomes a little impatient. Not with the bat or the ball, but with me. He must sometimes feel that he would have had more success in training up a cricketer if he’d got rid of me and kept the wire-haired terrier.

  *

  Family snaps weren’t taken indoors in those days, and none of the photographs I have of the back garden features all the multiplicity of my father’s family who would sometimes be packed into the dining room on Sundays. Perhaps they were wedged so tight that it was impossible to get the French windows open. The back garden, at any rate in the photographic record, is reserved for my parents, my sister, and me – and for my mother’s side of the family. Nanny makes an occasional appearance, braving the uncertainties of the weather, nervously perching me or my sister on her knee, visibly anxious that we’re at any moment about to fall off and concuss ourselves. My grandfather’s sometimes there, massively overspilling a deckchair, with one of us safely clamped between his all-embracing plus fours. And in a lot of the pictures there appears another member of my mother’s family, also a weekend visitor – Auntie Phyllis, my mother’s younger sister.

  She seems to me a dream of glamour and sophistication, as slim and ethereal as her father is large and solid. Her blonde hair is permed. She trails chiffon scarves and delicate perfumes. While she’s in the garden, being photographed laughing at my father’s jokes, I creep into the bathroom and intoxicate myself with the sight of all the various suavely sculpted jars and tins that she has brought for the weekend. Cold cream … vanishing cream … face powder … talcum powder … foundation … mascara … Some of the slimmest and suavest containers have the elegant cursive inscription ‘Evening in Paris’. and show the Eiffel Tower and other well-known landmarks silver against a velvet-blue Paris night set with a new moon as slim as my aunt, and a discreet handful of stars … I can almost see my aunt herself in the picture, gliding laughingly among the spires and domes, around the moon, among the stars, trailing perfume, chiffon, a hint of talcum powder …

  Auntie Phyllis has a glamorous professional life. She’s a typist, and those slim well-manicured fingers fly every working day over the keys of a gleaming black Remington or Underwood. She works not just for any old company, but for Carreras. Carreras! One of the most famous names in the world! The sound alone is as romantic as the skyline on the talcum powder. Carreras, as everyone knows, is the company that makes Craven A, the slim white cigarettes with the yellow cork tips which are manufactured, as the packet explains, ‘specially to prevent sore throats’. They’re packaged in brilliant scarlet, and they bear the logo of a black cat. My aunt brings packets of Craven A for my parents when she comes at the weekend, and tiny black cat charms for me and my sister.

  She sometimes also brings Uncle Jack. Who Uncle Jack is no one ever explains, but he seems to be a major in a Welsh regiment, and to ride a motor bike. He’s also, I think, pursuing my aunt, but with a tongue-tied bashfulness that advances his suit extremely slowly, until it comes to a halt altogether and he’s replaced by Uncle Sid.

  The letter from Phyllis announcing Uncle Sid’s entry into my aunt’s life arrives one day when my mother, my grandmother and I are eating tinned sardines for lunch. Nanny reads it and begins to laugh nervously behind her hand. ‘Sidney Bubbers!’ she says to my mother. ‘Wouldn’t it be funny if it was two g’s in the middle instead of two b’s!’

  Perhaps the letter came later, the formal announcement of their subsequent engagement, because I’m evidently already fully literate. ‘Buggers?’ I say, as quick with words as I’m slow with bats and balls. ‘Why would it be funny if he was called Buggers?’

  Nanny utters a little appalled cry from behind her concealing hand, and my mother turns on me with as much fury as if she had seen the dining-room door
handle move in the middle of the nine o’clock news. ‘I never want to hear you utter that word again!’ she shouts. ‘But I only said what Nanny said …’ I begin, stunned by the incomprehensible injustice of her anger. ‘Never, do you hear?’ cries my mother.

  In spite of this unfortunate beginning, Uncle Sid turns out to be the most wonderful addition to the family. He’s a man of great solidity, already balding in a responsible kind of way. He has fair, reasonable opinions about everything, public and private, and he’s a good deal more reliable than the Bank of England – exactly what Phyllis needs in her life after her feckless father and the dilatory Uncle Jack. Like her he works for Carreras. Perhaps he’s already on his way to becoming what he was when he went back to the firm after his war service, and what he was surely born to be: a personnel officer. If you had to sum him up in one word it would be ‘avuncular’. This is fortunate for the personnel of Carreras, who could scarcely have a more reassuring figure to pour out their ambitions, grievances and sorrows to – and even more fortunate for me, the nephew on whom his avuncularity can be most literally exercised.

  He’s a keen cyclist (like his future father-in-law, it occurs to me now that I begin to notice all these hidden connections – though what he rides is not a rusty old iron mangle like Bert’s but a gleaming blue-and-chrome lightweight sports machine), and soon he’s got my glamorous aunt cycling, too. They ride all the way over from North London at the weekend to stay with us. My father and the new boyfriend get on well together, rather improbably, since their temperaments are so unlike. Sid has a good loud voice, which helps, because my father’s hearing is beginning to go the same way as that of all his siblings. And they’re both adept at the bantering manner which is the common social currency of the English lower-middle classes. Tommy, even smarter and quicker and more Tommy-like with the slow-spoken Sid than he is with the rest of the family, joshes his future brother-in-law about the likelihood of his getting the wheels of his bicycle fatally caught in tramlines. Sid joshes Tommy slowly and loudly back. ‘You want to try a bike some time, Tommy. Strap the samples on the handlebars. Get round to twice as many customers as the other reps.’ ‘Hotchamachacha,’ says Tommy.

  Some of the snaps show Phyllis and Sid in the back garden with Bert as well as Nell. So on these weekends my father has four members of his wife’s family boarded on him. Where do they all sleep? One of them, I suppose, probably good-natured, uncomplaining Sid, must be lodged on the Bentalls settee in the lounge …

  They bring presents for everyone. For me, the sets of Carreras cigarette cards that the general public can get their hands on only by patiently smoking their way through packet after packet of health-giving Craven A. What I’m even more enchanted by, though, are the little scenes from around the world that the firm produces to be stuck in the empty packets. Inside the back of the packet you paste a backcloth of the Pyramids, say. On the front of the packet you stick a foreground – the Sphinx and a carvan of camels – then cut around their outline to make a a miniature theatre with two receding planes of scenery. I’m not much better at assembling them than I am at making flicker books out of my father’s commercial stationery. Uncle Sid helps me, with endless avuncular patience.

  Does he ever have a presentiment, I wonder, as the little stages accumulate on the sideboard – the gondolas of Venice, the skyscrapers of New York, even the sights of Paris that I know so well from the tins of talcum powder – how the work’s going to escalate over the years? Does he even begin to see the long corridors of Christmas and summer weekends stretching ahead of him, or guess how many old razor blades he’s going to wear blunt as he cuts and scores the printed cardboard, how many tubes of stinking fish-glue he’s going to squeeze dry, how ever more complex the models he’s assembling will become – locomotives with cardboard wheels glued on to matchstick axles, a cardboard Tower Bridge with working cardboard machinery, an electric motor clipped improbably to an insufficiently rigid cardboard base? His daughter Jean says he always wanted to be an engineer, so perhaps he actually enjoys the work. I hope he does.

  For my parents Phyllis and Sid bring the packets that will be used to make the little theatres. First, of course, they have to be emptied of their contents, and Uncle Sid helps with this as well. Phyllis won’t share in the work, so the others have to make up. Hundreds, thousands, of cigarettes they smoke their way through. Even my father, who normally smokes a pipe, and my grandmother, coughing nervously. Most of all Sid himself, even while he’s at the same time helping me with the cutting and gluing. The house fills up with scenes of the world’s better-known tourist destinations, and blue smoke, and ashtrays heaped with corked-tip cigarette ends. Each weekend must be as good for everyone’s throats as a month in a sanatorium.

  The state of my own throat probably still leaves something to be desired, and so does that of my sister and our friends. Although the cigarette ends that we collect from the overflowing ashtrays, and recycle with the help of a rolling machine and packets of Rizla cigarette papers stolen from one of my grandfather’s old tobacco tins, are mostly health-giving Craven A, we can find no practical way of incorporating the cork tips. Even so they’re probably better for our throats than the straws that we have smoked hitherto. They’re less dry – in fact distinctly soggy. They certainly taste more authentic; probably even more authentic than the original cigarettes did, since the goodness must be so much more concentrated.

  And we’re so much more concentrated ourselves. We smoke not casually in the garden or in a well-lit dining room, like the adults, but in the darkness, in one of the long bedroom cupboards under the eaves, reclining on the heaps of junk stored there. The only light comes from a paraffin lamp we’ve found in the coal shed, and its pinprick reflections in our pupils. It’s like the scene in a Chinese opium den, as shown in the engraved illustrations of Sherlock Holmes stories. The lack of cork tips is made up for by the disinfectant powers of the oily black paraffin fumes from the lamp and the acrid little firework displays of the matches as we struggle to keep the wet tobacco alight.

  Any time my Uncle Sid can spare from smoking he devotes to sport. Carreras have a club for their staff out at Edgware, and Uncle Sid seizes all the opportunities it offers, particularly for tennis and riding. He also enjoys cricket, though, and he takes up the challenge, from where my father left off, of making a cricketer out of me. His patience is inexhaustible, unlike my father’s, and he’s perfectly prepared to go back to first principles. No run up to the crease, no overarm, no fast bumpers or leg breaks. A tennis racquet instead of a bat. Not even a tennis racquet. Just me standing with both hands outstretched and ready, while he places himself three feet in front of me, in a good light, and lobs the ball very slowly and precisely into them … Out it bounces again. ‘You have to close your hands, you see, Michael, as soon as you’ve got the ball in them.’ We retrieve the ball from the flower bed and he lobs it to me even more slowly. I smartly close my hands. The ball bounces off them and hits me on the nose. ‘Yes, but the thing is, Michael, you need to wait until the ball’s got there. Let’s try again …’

  The work continues on fine summer weekends for the next three years. I can trace it in the snapshots, from when Uncle Sid first appears, in 1939, until a solution to the problem suddenly emerges in 1942. Spectacles. My mother has taken me to S. J. Best, Chemist and Optician, in his low-ceilinged cottage shop in Ewell Village. Mr Best has gone through his entire tray of lenses and his entire stock of test cards with me, reached the end of his resources, and sent me on to Mr Cameron, Consultant Ophthalmologist and Ophthalmic Surgeon, in a large Victorian mansion in Sutton. Mr Cameron has at last discovered what the trouble is. I have an acute astigmatism. No wonder I was gazing so thoughtfully at that coloured ball when I was two – I was trying to make out whether it was a ball or a pot of geraniums. No wonder I can’t hit anything, or kick anything, or catch anything. I’m engulfed in a wave of belated sympathy. Even my father’s understanding.

  By this time the Second World War ha
s broken out. Uncle Sid has been called up; my father’s the local Fire Captain. Whenever Sid can get a weekend’s leave, though, or my father can manage a break from his duties, cricket practice resumes. Only now with our new wartime fighting spirit, and my new spectacles.

  So where’s the bat in this new order of things? Where it always was: somewhere the ball is not. Where’s the ball, then? The ball, too, is where it always was: in the goldenrod, over the fence, bouncing off some part of me it had not expected to come in contact with, hurtling straight at where my powerful new spectacles would have been if I hadn’t smartly closed my eyes and ducked. The only thing that has changed is my appearance. I no longer even look like a future cricketer. I look like a weedy small boy in specs. I have started school, and to the ferocious little Amazon there who runs the gang of which I find myself a member the glasses evidently make me appear to be some kind of intellectual, so she appoints me Gang Scientist. My job is to produce explosive. I do my best with the only materials I can find, ground-up chalk from the Downland soil and crushed elderberries from the elders by the coal shed, but even in my spectacles I can make bangs no more than runs.