by David Lodge
Every stage in his development was slow, and completed much later than if he had been a normal child, but gradually he learned how to speak, how to walk, how to use a knife and fork, how to tie his own shoelaces. He attended the same admirable nursery school as his brother and sister and this helped him to make the transition to a junior Special School for children with Moderate Learning Difficulty that was only a mile from us, where he learned to read and write. From there he went to a Special secondary school, Victoria School, which at that time took both physically and mentally handicapped pupils. It was superbly equipped and staffed and we could not speak too highly of it. Among other achievements they taught him to swim, for he had completely lost the confidence he had as a water-winged infant, and later he did a monitored one-mile swim.
As time went on, educating children like Chris in special schools fell out of favour. Instead they are now usually placed in ordinary schools, with teaching assistants helping them in the classroom. The aim is admirable – to integrate them into the community and accustom normal children to their existence – but Mary and I were unconvinced that this policy was educationally as effective as dedicated special schools, and we remain grateful that good ones were available to Chris in Birmingham in the crucial years. He was always a very confident boy and achieved a considerable level of independence – learning to use public transport to travel to school, for instance – and we attribute this in part to the fact that he never felt inferior or out of place in his peer group; in fact he was usually at the top of it. He benefited of course from belonging to an educated and articulate family, and considering his IQ rating in the low 60s as an infant he became remarkably able in speaking and reading, perhaps due to genetic as well as environmental factors. Capable of quite witty repartee, he would make speeches at family celebrations, and learned to plan his own TV viewing (which we rationed for all our children) from the Radio Times. He was addicted to soaps and popular dramas, and the family next door to us in Northfield would sometimes invite him round and watch him watching Dallas on their set, so entertaining was his total engagement. Later he was devoted to the James Bond movies, saw them all on their first release and again on video, and assembled a considerable library of books about Bond and the film actors who played the role, until he was almost up to Mastermind standard on the subject. He was timid in some respects – he hated heights, was uncomfortable on steep staircases and escalators, and would only ride bicycles several sizes too small for him. But from infancy onwards Chris was exceptionally at ease with animals and they with him. It first struck me when he was five years old, but still a toddler by normal standards of development. We were on holiday in Switzerland, renting an apartment in a chalet in Morgins, a winter ski resort in the mountains above Lake Geneva. We lost sight of Chris in the garden one day and after a brief but anxious search found him sitting placidly, upright and cross-legged on the grass, beside a large Alsatian. Mary, who had had a bad experience in childhood with such a dog, was alarmed at this sight, but it was obvious that the animal was calmly enjoying Chris’s company until, very gently, we led him away. I can’t help wondering if there is something in his condition which has this effect on animals.
We chose Morgins for that holiday because our college friends Martin and Jeswyn Jones had a chalet there, Martin being currently employed in Geneva. They had several children by now and our two families got on well together, but I found I did not really like mountains, beautiful as they are to look at from a distance. When the clouds came down on the slopes above Morgins, as they not infrequently did, blotting out the sun, draining the colour from the landscape and imparting a damp chill to the air, I succumbed to what John Ruskin called ‘Mountain Gloom’ and eloquently analysed in a famous chapter of Modern Painters. To escape it we often drove down the twisting road to Montreux where it always seemed sunny and warm beside the lake, and where I lived in hope of one day glimpsing Vladimir Nabokov, perhaps returning from a butterfly hunt with net in hand to the Montreux Palace Hotel where he and Vera lived in their last years.
In the years that followed we had several family summer holidays in Connemara, a stretch of the west coast of Ireland which runs from north of Galway Bay to south of County Mayo. It has mountains – a symmetrical row of them called the Twelve Bens – but nobody lives on them as far as I know. They are essentially a scenic frame for a low-lying landscape of turf and rock, reeds and water, rimmed by broad beaches washed by Atlantic rollers. It is a place of incomparable beauty when the sun is out, but you have to accept a variable quota of days when the air consists mainly of fine rain. We would not have thought of it as a holiday location if Mary’s sister Margaret and her husband Ioan had not owned a cottage there. Ioan went on to have a distinguished academic career in English and Welsh studies at the Universities of Warwick and Aberystwyth, and was Dean of the Arts Faculty at the latter institution before he retired; but his real passion was, and still is, building: restoring, renovating, extending and modernising dwellings of various kinds and sizes, doing much of the physical work himself. This is one of several respects in which we are antithetical in character, for as soon as I could afford it I gave up all forms of DIY domestic maintenance and employed professional experts for the purpose. One of the earliest of Ioan’s projects was to render habitable the shell of an Irish smallholder’s cottage which he and Margaret discovered in the course of a holiday in the west of Ireland some time in the 1960s at a place called Cashel in Connemara (not to be confused with the more famous Cashel in Tipperary) situated at the innermost point of an elongated bay. The cottage, one of the last dwellings on the road that leads out of the hamlet towards the open sea, consisted simply of four stone walls when they bought it freehold for not much more than a hundred pounds. Ioan put a roof on it, and over the years that followed extended and improved the property as a holiday home for his growing family. It is now, I understand, a spacious and comfortable modern house, but when we first saw it in the mid-seventies it still consisted mainly of one large, rather dark room, with peat smouldering in the open fireplace, much as it had been in the time of its former occupants.
On that first Connemara holiday we rented a modern bungalow about half a mile from the Williams’ cottage, but in subsequent years we stayed at a hotel called the Seals Rock in the charming fishing port of Roundstone, about half an hour’s drive from Cashel. The hotel was well named because on a fine summer evening you could sometimes see from its front garden a group of seals swimming past with their snouts out of the water. It belonged to the O’Toole family and was a somewhat ramshackle residence in those days. If you opened a casement window too forcefully it might come off its hinges in your hand. The walls of the partitioned bedrooms were thin and the springs of the beds when you turned over sounded like a quartet of percussionists tuning up. When we were amorously inclined Mary and I spread a quilt on the floor. The food was acceptable though not brilliant. But the ambience of the hotel was hospitable to children, and one of the O’Tooles’ was a Down’s boy, so we felt at ease there. Superb beaches were within easy reach, sparsely populated even in August. The sand was clean and golden, and the Gulf Stream warmed the sea. But there were days when it rained from dawn to dusk, and then all you could do was take the car and drive to the main town, Clifden, or to a gift shop with a café near Renvyle which advertised its attractions with the scrupulously qualified claim ‘Possibly the Finest Gift Shop in the West’, a phrase which became a family joke. It was a long journey from Birmingham to Connemara – up the M6 to Liverpool, a night ferry to Dublin sleeping in a cabin, and a day’s drive across the waist of Ireland to Galway. But we went back several times because when you got there you had a real sense of being on holiday, in a place with an utterly different and more relaxed tempo of life from busy, crowded England. Even the farmers in Connemara didn’t seem to get up until nine or ten in the morning.
In 1978 however, we had a different kind of summer holiday. Ioan had a rubber dinghy with outboard motor, and later a small boat simi
larly equipped which he used to fish for mackerel, and this gave me the idea that if Julia, Stephen and I learned to sail a dinghy it would greatly enhance our holidays in Connemara. Accordingly I booked a week’s introductory course with a sailing school in Salcombe, Devon, preceded by another week in a hotel near Boscastle on the north coast of Cornwall. I had supervised an MA student working on Thomas Hardy’s novel A Pair of Blue Eyes, which is set in that spectacular and romantic landscape and has many connections with Hardy’s courtship of his first wife. I had conceived the idea of writing a television dramatisation of the story. It seemed to me that Hardy had a very cinematic way of placing human figures in landscape, and there was one scene in particular in A Pair of Blue Eyes which cried out to be filmed, when the heroine rescues one of her two rival suitors, who is clinging perilously to the edge of a high cliff, by stripping off all her Victorian underclothes and making a rope of them. We had a most enjoyable week exploring the location of this story in and around Boscastle before moving on to Salcombe for the sailing course.
We stayed in a hotel, Mary spending the days onshore with Christopher, while Julia and Stephen, then aged eighteen and sixteen, did the course with me. They told me later in life that they hated every minute of it, and I didn’t enjoy it much myself. None of us had any previous experience of, or natural aptitude for, sailing, and such courses inevitably generate a competitive atmosphere which is depressing to the less adept, so we felt more and more marginalised as the week progressed. It ended with a race in the course of which we ran aground on a sandbank and had to be towed off. We did however learn the rudiments of dinghy sailing, and I was determined to apply this knowledge on our next holiday in Connemara. The following summer (having had no sailing practice in the meantime) I rented a Mirror-Class dinghy from a supplier in Birmingham, a very basic boat built of wood, so heavy that Stephen and I only just managed to lift it on to the roof rack of our Ford Cortina estate, and drove it all the way to the west of Ireland. (As I write this I wonder at my commitment to such a foolish and laborious project.) I had divided the holiday into two parts: one week at a hotel at Renvyle, a beautiful part of the coast at the north-west extremity of Connemara, and a week in a rented bungalow near the Williams’ cottage in Cashel. Julia, now old enough to be independent, had wisely arranged some other kind of holiday for herself, so Stephen and I were the only sailors.
The first week was wet and windy and Renvyle is much more exposed to the Atlantic weather than Cashel or Roundstone. It could not have offered more different or more challenging conditions than the sheltered Salcombe estuary. Stephen and I made an attempt to launch our boat from the beach and were soon beaten back by the Atlantic rollers. A photo survives, taken by Mary, of the enormous empty beach under a threatening sky, and in the middle distance our boat lying on its side in the shallows with Stephen and I stooped forlornly over it like survivors of a shipwreck. The weather did not improve enough that week to encourage us to make another attempt, but I thought that Cashel Bay, being a long inlet from the open sea, would offer more favourable conditions. The weather also improved, and on an encouragingly sunny day we got our dinghy into the water, and set sail. At first all went well. A strong breeze from off the shore filled the sail, and we sped along at an exhilarating pace – much faster than anything we achieved at Salcombe. This, I thought, is the real thing at last. Then I became aware that around us and ahead the waves were flecked with crests of white foam that in some cases were caused not by the wind but by the projection of rocks. A collision with one of these at the speed we were going could hole and sink the boat, which was already taking a good deal of water over its characteristic blunt prow. Stephen and I both wore life jackets, and he was a strong swimmer, but I was not, and by this time we were well down the bay, and at some distance from either shore. Scanning the land I could see no sign of any person who might observe us if we got into difficulties; nor was there another craft to be seen on the water. I pointed out the rocks to Stephen, and said: ‘This is too dangerous, I’m going back.’ I managed to turn the boat round without capsizing it and tacked back to our starting point, so I suppose some of the Salcombe training had stuck. We dragged the boat out of the water, put it on the roof of the car, and I never sailed in it, or any other dinghy, again.
In fact Mary and I have not been back to Connemara since, and it wasn’t because of the sailing debacle. Julia and Stephen were getting too independent to relish a traditional family holiday of the kind we had enjoyed there. And towards the end of our week in Cashel something happened which, in retrospect, broke the spell the place had over us. We were sitting in the garden of our bungalow in the late afternoon looking out over the bay when we heard on my portable radio the news that Lord Mountbatten, one of his twin grandsons aged fourteen, and a local youth aged fifteen employed as a boat boy had been killed when a bomb planted by the IRA exploded on their yacht at Mullaghmore, County Sligo. Sligo is some way north of Connemara, but its coastal landscape has the same kind of enchantment, as I remembered from my attendance at the Yeats Summer School back in 1961, and this violent, cowardly and callous crime seemed a violation of everything we valued in the extreme west of Ireland: its beauty, its tranquillity, the slow, easy-going rhythm of life there. I believe that, without consciously articulating the thought, both Mary and I felt afterwards that we had experienced Connemara at its best, and had no urge to return there, though our children and grandchildren have done so and enjoyed themselves.
3
During the years when we took our family holidays in Connemara I also made several professional trips to countries in Continental Europe and further afield which could be described as working holidays. They were usually arranged in my university vacations or periods of study leave, so did not interfere with teaching duties. Most of them were organised by the British Council, usually in response to requests from foreign countries, and known as Specialist Tours on which one lectured at several universities. Being both a published novelist and an academic specialising in modern literature and critical theory, and able to speak in both capacities, I was very eligible for this work, as was Malcolm Bradbury. One was not usually paid for it, though occasionally a university would offer an honorarium. But the Council arranged the travel, and paid a reasonable per diem allowance which was seldom used up because of the hospitality provided by one’s hosts. As well as affording opportunities to meet scholars in one’s own field, it was a great way to see the world free of charge, staying in decent hotels, being shown around interesting foreign cities by knowledgeable escorts who spoke fluent English, and eating in restaurants which at that date were superior to their British equivalents, at least on this side of the Iron Curtain. These travels also yielded material for future novels. Occasionally, if the dates coincided with school holidays and we could make arrangements for the children to be looked after, I managed to include Mary in such trips, paying only for her travel. In 1973 she accompanied me for the first week of a tour in Austria visiting Innsbruck, Salzburg, Graz and Vienna before she had to fly home while I carried on to Linz alone. It was the first time either of us had seen any of these places.
I regretted that I was not able to take her with me on a more leisurely tour of Italy in the spring of the following year. It was my first visit to that country and I prepared for it by learning a little basic Italian from a BBC book and LP record for beginners. My itinerary began in Naples, and continued to Rome, Florence, Bologna and Milan. The journey to Naples entailed a change of planes at Rome. Here a security alert required passengers on the second flight to identify themselves and, if requested, open their luggage which was spread out on the tarmac beside the plane. This exercise delayed our departure considerably, and it was late at night when we landed in Naples. I took a taxi to my hotel through what seemed a sinister city of shadows and sparse street lighting, with rough-looking men and short-skirted prostitutes gathered round fires made of tyres and refuse burning on street corners. They stared, balefully or hopefully according to gender, a
s my car passed rattling and bumping over cobbles and potholes, confirming the stereotype of Naples as a hotbed of crime and vice which I had acquired from the media. Eventually the taxi deposited me at a large hotel on what appeared to be the city’s waterfront, though I could see little of it in the pitch-dark night. I scurried into the lobby, checked in with the night porter and fell into bed in a vast high-ceilinged room. When I woke the next morning I drew the curtains on a scene of legendary beauty – the Bay of Naples, with the calm sea in its arms, reflecting a blue and cloudless sky.
The British Council representative in Naples had left a note for me in the hotel. To my surprise he did not propose to meet me until the following day, when he would take me to lunch, and invited me to amuse myself in the meantime. I took a hydrofoil to Capri and spent an enjoyable day exploring the island. While eating lunch on a restaurant terrace I got talking to a young Japanese mathematician who spoke English. He was attached to the University in some capacity, and we kept each other company for the rest of the afternoon. The next day the British Council rep, a middle-aged expat of few words, took me to lunch as promised, escorting me through the crowded crooked streets, festooned with drying laundry, of the old quarter, and I discovered for the first time how delicious authentic antipasti and the rest of Italian cuisine can be. So passed the second day. I never discovered whether it was by accident or design that I was given such an extended period of acclimatisation. On the third day I gave my lecture at the University to a large number of students on a topic chosen by members of staff because it interested them, and I had an uneasy impression that it went over the heads of my audience. In fact it was also well above their level of competence in English, as I realised when I finished and one of the teachers spoke at length to the students in Italian, evidently summarising my discourse for their benefit.