Private Papers

by Margaret Forster

  *

  — a betrayal, direct and deliberate. A betrayal of the family so dear to us both. Oliver did not need to go to war. He was a doctor, he was already doing valiant war work. By 1941 the casualties were streaming into London’s hospitals. There were hardly enough doctors available. The danger for Oliver, on duty night and day in a central London hospital, was as high as, if not higher than, it was for a doctor serving in the Medical Corps anywhere in Europe. He worked so hard patching people together (obstetrics mostly forgotten) that whenever I did see him he was utterly exhausted. All he did, at home, was sleep. All I wanted to do was sleep, but it seemed the very thing denied to me. Rosemary and Celia were no trouble at night but Jess regularly woke, screaming, and took hours to comfort. Then there were the air raids, and the endless rush to the shelter, usually on my own with all three children. Talk was one of the many luxuries denied to us. If we’d talked, Oliver might never have joined up. All we discussed, if our snatched conversations at that time can be called discussion, was the necessity for me to move to Brighton.

  I refused to leave Oliver. I read somewhere that the Queen had been urged to go to Canada with the Princesses but that she had said, ‘The children cannot go without me and I cannot possibly leave the King and he will never leave his people.’ That was more or less how I felt: my place was with Oliver and, if Oliver believed his to be with the war casualties in London, then in London I would stay. But Grandmother Butler was ill, and on her own, and when, in the spring of 1941, her companion of several years died this created a crisis for us. What were we to do with Grandmother Butler? She was seventy-five and in poor health. We could not possibly have brought her to London. However hard we tried, we could find nobody to replace her companion (a post we had had to fill and re-fill many times, since Grandmother Butler did not inspire either devotion or loyalty in any of her staff). Oliver thought the solution was simple: his mother must go into a Home. But that was a monstrous suggestion which it shamed him to make. I would not sanction it. So we were obliged to take the alternative and move ourselves down to Brighton, at least for the duration of the war. It would get us out of the raids, which were increasing in intensity, and, though the south coast was hardly a healthy place to which to move – a little like going from the frying pan into the fire – we believed it to be not quite as dangerous as London. It was at this point that Oliver betrayed me. He joined up. He applied for and was given a commission as an M O in his father’s old regiment. He told me the night before we moved to Brighton, told me, as a fait accompli. It was the last night we were ever to spend all together in our London house, and, as Rosemary tried inexpertly to toast crumpets, at the fire, where the wood we had collected that afternoon was burning and while Celia banged on the tray of her high chair with a spoon and Jess was for once asleep in her small pram, Oliver quietly stated that, when he had escorted us to Brighton, he was leaving London to join his regiment in France.

  It is no use. I cannot write about it. My pen congeals even now with bitterness. He did not have to go, but he went. We could have stayed together, as the Royal Family did. We might all have died in the Blitz but we would have been together. He told me I had to realize there were some things more important than one’s own family. The war was being fought to make the world safe for families like ours. Surely I could appreciate that if —

  *

  No, she couldn’t. What an awful send-off my poor papa must have had. There were other women, bursting with pride at their husband’s courage at joining up when they didn’t have to and there was my mother talking about betrayal. I really don’t need to read all the pros and cons, all the arguments she’s about to relate. I know exactly what stance she would adopt, all of it based on this family-is-sacrosanct stuff. She would go haughty and stiff, the way she does when one dares to go against her. Unyielding, contemptuous. No wonder my father waited until the last minute – so have I, often. What a hellish time my father must have had moving us down to Brighton, with my mother speechless with rage. And what madness, what insanity to go there. There can be no justification for it. Of course Grandmother Butler should have been slung in any Home that would have her – she deserved no better. They should have tied a weight round her neck and dropped her into the sea. But my mother was full of these Sydney Carton ideas of it being a far, far better thing she did, and so she sacrificed us all on the altar of the family responsibility.

  I was only six when we moved and I don’t remember it very clearly. But since we stayed there three years, a little over, my first real memories are of that house in Brighton. They are hideously dominated by Grandmother Butler’s dreadful presence looming over us everywhere. My very first clear memory that belongs to me, and owes nothing to things I have been told, is of Grandmother Butler blocking the entrance to her house with her corpulent body and shouting, ‘Stones! Stones! I will not have them in my house!’ and shaking her stick. I remember sitting on the step while my mother emptied our shoes of tiny gravel-like stones and then got a bucket of water and washed all our feet. Then Grandmother let us in. It became a ritual, in fact Mother left the bucket by the door for our return from the beach, where we went most days (illegally, never in the least put off by the snaking coils of barbed wire). Not a single microdot of a stone was allowed into the house. Of course I couldn’t understand Grandmother’s hatred of stones. But such things were never explained, not even by Mother who was a great explainer. She made us accept our Grandmother’s most absurd obsessions and prejudices as law. She was Head of the Family and must be accorded unchallenged respect. This applied even to her attitude to poor Jess.

  She constantly bitched about Jess. I grew up with it. She took against Jess from the moment of her adoption, probably before. She was outraged that the family blood should be polluted and the family name sullied. I see now that this was, of course, also an attack on my mother, but I didn’t see it then – all I saw was Grandmother Butler being consistently mean to a small child. ‘Rosemary sit here and Celia there. Oh, Jessica, do you want to listen too? Are you sure, my dear? Are you sure you will understand it?’ she would say when she was going to read us a story (she was a bloody awful reader). Then she would pick on Jess for making a mess at meals when Celia and I had made much the same sort of so-called mess. Any noise and Jess would get shouted at – ‘Jessica, you must learn that in this family we do not cry for nothing.’ It was awful and very hard for my mother to combat. Mother was scrupulous about fairness – God, it was boring. She didn’t let Grandmother Butler get away with anything, but standing up to her was hard. If Mother said something sharp in defence of Jess, Grandmother Butler would come the frail old lady lark. Either that or she would go all aggrieved and remind my mother it was her house and she had ‘taken her in’.

  When we arrived,-! think my mother had had ideas about splitting the house in two so we would have some privacy, but something must have gone wrong with that little arrangement. In my memory, Grandmother Butler was ever with us – eating, sleeping, listening to the radio, everything seemed overshadowed by her. I always woke up to the sound of her banging her stick, and then I would hear my mother getting up and going in to her. Of course, Grandmother Butler’s version of our move to Brighton was different: she had magnanimously taken in her son’s family and waiting upon her like a slave was the least my mother could do. What a bargain she got. My mother looked after the old sod beautifully. She even coped with her incontinence. And she did all of this because Grandmother Butler was family and you couldn’t neglect family, however horrible and loathsome and awful they were. Their claims were sacred, their crimes against humanity forgivable. Over and over again my mother would remind us that Grandmother was old and ill, she couldn’t see very well and she couldn’t walk very well and we must be kind. It would have been easier if Grandmother Butler herself had shown any evidence of kindness, but she did not. I say that with authority because I was her favourite. It was me she chose to show her Indian treasures to – ghastly tatty shawls and stuff. Gran
dmother must’ve been the Memsahib to end all Memsahibs – arrogant, uncaring, imperious, demanding. She’d drone on about her life in Hyderabad, all the usual stuff about the heat and the parties and how sodding wonderful the scenery was, and I was kept at her side supposedly entranced. I did quite like the stories about my dead grandfather and his daring deeds. He had been a general. She had some brilliant photographs of him in his dress uniform, one of them on an elephant, and, whenever what she was twitting on about got too deadly, I’d just ask her if I could look at the photographs. ‘Rosemary is fascinated by the family history,’ Grandmother Butler would say to my mother. ‘So nice for her to be able to go right back. The Butlers have such an interesting history, don’t you think?’ Mother would flush a dark red and smile and say yes she did, how lucky Rosemary was.

  I went to school in Brighton. It was a small primary school not far from Grandmother’s Bedford Square house. My going there caused some trouble. I remember Grandmother Butler being scandalized when my mother told her which school I was going to. She need never have known, but the fact that I wore no uniform would’ve given it away. She thought I’d be resplendent in the green gymslip and blazer of the private kindergarten to which she had given the Butler seal of approval. ‘Only riff-raff go there,’ she said of my council school, ‘and Rosemary is a Butler. I am sure Oliver would not approve.’ Mother said he had fully approved. He believed in State education. I think Grandmother thought she was mad. She’d never in her life been in a State school of any description but she thought of them all as versions of Bedlam. My ability to read and write never failed to amaze her, but even that was turned against Mother. ‘Think how well Rosemary could do if she went to a good school,’ she would say. Mother would reply that I would do well wherever I went.

  I used to long for Grandmother Butler to die. There seemed to me, as to most children, no sense in being alive if you couldn’t do anything or go anywhere and if you complained about pains all the time. When I discovered she was seventy-five, nearly seventy-six, I was furious. She had been alive much too long, it wasn’t fair. Nobody wanted her alive, what was the point. My mother told me not to talk about wishing people were dead when so many people were being killed in the war and in the bombing. But I couldn’t help it. I used to fix Grandmother with an intense stare and repeat die, die, die in my head. She spoiled our life. She made Mother and Jess unhappy, she stopped us all from enjoying ourselves. We couldn’t ever go off all together because we couldn’t leave Grandmother alone. We couldn’t jump up and down the stairs or play tag, because it would disturb her. Grandmother Butler, it seemed to me, was always put first. She interrupted all our normal family activities and yet Mother never stopped her. It was a case of endless reverential care. Grandmother Butler was not worth it. She had never done anything for anyone in her life. She’d always been waited on hand and foot, never done any work, ever, not even as a mother. She was old when she had my father, forty-eight – he was a menopausal miracle you could say – and she never looked after him at all. Out in India she had servants for all that. She simply didn’t understand, as my mother repeatedly told me, what real life was like. But that was my point – that she did not and ought to. Every time I said I was going to tell her how thoughtless she was, Mother would beg me not to. She said she couldn’t bear any rows and anyway it was a waste of time, Grandmother wouldn’t understand.

  She was right about that. Once I actually spoke up. Grandmother Butler had been especially vicious to Jess and then said to my mother, who had probably been too slow about bringing her wretched tea, something which implied that Mother’d been lolling around enjoying herself. I suppose I was about seven at the time and very rebellious. What I shouted at Grandmother Butler I can’t claim to recall, but it was some defence of my mother. At any rate, I was reprimanded by my irate grandmother for being rude. Then I remember clearly what I did. I rushed up to her, very close, a brave thing in itself because I loathed her smell, and I thrust my face into her podgy, squashy one and yelled, ‘Rude, rude, rude!’ about a hundred times, covering her powdery old nose with spit as I did so. She hit me, one almighty whack with her heavy, truncheon-like arm, catching me on the nape of the neck so that I fell against her coughing and spluttering and then screaming to escape the nightmare feeling of being trapped by some scaly, oozing, heaving octopus. Mother pulled me away and carried me forcibly out of the room, out of the house, out across the road and on to the beach and there she held me tight and kissed me and soothed me. She cried. She cried. I suppose with tiredness and humiliation and perhaps the awful certainty that she had made a terrible mistake: she knew Grandmother Butler hated and despised her and that I was learning to hate and despise my grandmother in turn. A cycle of hate, when all she had wanted was the family to close in and be sustained by mutual love and toleration. It was very hard for her.

  My father, on one of his leaves, must have been aware of how hard – he would have had to be a total fool not to notice – and he did his best to ease the situation. A lady called Miss Clarke came to live with us. Where she came from I don’t know but we were all glad, Celia, Jess and I, even though we didn’t like her. Mother didn’t much like her, either, though she was always very nice to her, and Grandmother Butler loathed her. Miss Clarke’s sole function was to look after Grandmother. Mother explained to me that she was not a servant and that her privacy must be respected always. We were never to go and knock on her door, even if Grandmother Butler told us to. We were to come to Mother instead. Miss Clarke had to have proper hours, Mother said. The mere thought of her companion having time to herself was enough to put Grandmother Butler into a permanent rage, but I suppose she had to accept it.

  Miss Clarke was not the pathetic, weak creature that one might have expected to take on such a terrible job. There was nothing cringing or deferential about her. She was unmistakably in it, I now see, for the very substantial financial reward, a fact which Mother of course realized. Pay enough and there are always people who will do anything. Miss Clarke was one of them, a severe, strong, determined lady of about sixty who refused to be browbeaten by her difficult employer – not that it was Grandmother who employed her. If she had, she would have sacked her the first time her commands were not obeyed. I suppose one of the good things about having Miss Clarke, apart from the obvious advantage of freeing Mother and giving us all some life of our own, was that it put Grandmother Butler in a different and much more sympathetic light. Miss Clarke, as she was fond of saying, stood no nonsense. To hear her tell Grandmother Butler that she would certainly not pick up the handkerchief quite deliberately thrown on the floor, was at first thrilling – imagine refusing to do what Grandmother said! – but then it became somehow cruel, even to my eye. Mother would pick up handkerchiefs or anything else, because she pitied Grandmother. Miss Clarke didn’t pity her and suddenly it made me see why Mother did. Watching Miss Clarke ‘discipline’ this cantankerous old woman so mercilessly made me see how sad Grandmother’s plight was. I didn’t feel any love for her, I didn’t feel any real ‘family’ connection, but I did in the end, thanks to Miss Clarke, begin to feel that Grandmother’s life was awful. The thing she had always enjoyed most in life was dominating other people. Now she couldn’t even do that. She was at the mercy of Miss Clarke. Because of my mother, this couldn’t get out of hand, but the threat was there: if the last vestige of family vigilance went, then she’d lost everything.

  *

  — worried about the prospect of invasion more than I did. If there was an invasion. Oliver thought we were even more at risk living on the south coast than he was. But I liked our life in Brighton in spite of Grandmother Butler. It was healthy. We prospered. All the children looked better and were happier.

  The Brighton they knew was a Brighton of sandbags and sirens, of tin hats and water tanks, not of seaside jollity, and it is true that they were as familiar with the sounds of loudspeakers and guns as they were with the crash of the waves on the shore and the cries of the seagulls. All the same B
righton was still a pleasant place to live, it still had its charms. We had air raids, of course, fifty-six altogether and a great many houses were destroyed but, compared to what was happening in London, it was nothing. There was only one occasion when I was seriously frightened and that was in May 1943, when a bomb fell on a school and twenty-four people were killed, including some children. I did think then how ironic it would be if we were killed in Brighton after escaping from the London Blitz. But on the whole I felt confident of our safety and my confidence was subconsciously absorbed by the children. Grandmother Butler, of course, never for one moment imagined a bomb would have the audacity to fall upon her. She would point out the barrage balloons to the children as though they were absolutely foolproof protection and, when they told her of the big naval guns they had seen on the cliffs, she glowed with pride at how invincible we were. So the children were brought up feeling secure in very insecure circumstances. Their father not being with them was the only true indication for them that all was not quite as it should be.

  Oliver had leaves, of course, six of them in all, each both agonizing and precious. The strain was unbearable both before and after, especially after. We would get little warning that Oliver was coming home, but that was perhaps fortunate – my own anticipation of his arrival I found hard to endure and would not have liked prolonged. I used not to tell the children until the very last minute and even then they would become almost hysterically excited, especially Rosemary. The emotion of those reunions was always traumatic, leaving me battered for days afterwards. I never got out of them what I most wanted, a normal, peaceful stretch of family life. Nothing was normal, how could it be? None of us felt normal, it was all a case of constant re-adjustment. Oliver was an interloper in our tight little unit: we had forgotten what it was to have a father in our family. His very maleness was perturbing. His physical presence made us shy and ill at ease for the first day. It made me see that a family is always more than the sum of its parts. Oliver changed the way in which we behaved towards each other. The children seemed to feel subconsciously that an alliance had been formed against them and were determined to break it up. Oliver could never be alone with me until they were asleep, and they even resented and fought sleep so long as he was with us. It was all very tiring and debilitating. The euphoria of greeting him would quickly give way to despair at the impossibility of really being with him.