Swan River

by David Reynolds

  I knew that, if I said I didn’t want to go, I wouldn’t have to. My father would take very little persuading, although I would have to give an intelligent reason. That would be easy – I would simply point out that I would be helping to perpetuate the evil class divide by joining what he called ‘the upper classes’, ‘the idle rich’, ‘the snobs’, ‘the Tories’, ‘the toffs’.

  With my mother, too, it would be easy to get out of it. But I felt that to do so would be letting her down: in her opinion this type of education was a gift that one should accept gratefully; it would lead to Oxford, as it had for her father and uncles – the school was a few miles from that hallowed city and sending boys there was its speciality. I felt a duty to my mother.

  A few weeks before, when I had voiced my worries about the school – the beatings, fagging, bullying and silly rules – she had hugged me and told me I didn’t have to go. But that had made me angry because it had been her idea, not mine; it was because of her, and her father and uncles, whose photograph – three proud men in World War I officers’ uniforms – hung in her bedroom, and her aunt – the men’s sister, who had left the money – that I was going to this school forty miles away. I hadn’t been going to let her down, so why had she suggested I might?

  We came down from the tree and tramped on through the woods. Richard knew about birds, which together with the excitement of trespassing was what had first brought us here two years before. He liked woodpeckers in particular. We could hear one and stopped frequently, gazing in silence trying to see it. Eventually, we reached the northern edge of the sanctuary away from the river. Here, beyond the barbed wire, there was an empty field between the woods and the railway line that joined Marlow to Bourne End, Maidenhead and London. Although the sun had almost gone, the air was warm, and the dry, golden grass gave off a sweet smell. Dennis ran ahead of us to the centre of the field and flung himself down on his back with arms outspread; four or five birds which Richard immediately identified as lapwings rose from the ground and circled the field languidly before landing at a safe distance. Dennis lay staring at the sky and we lay down beside him, with me in the middle.

  We talked about girls and kissing, and I wondered fleetingly whether my grandmother Sis had kissed boys when she was twelve, and decided that she almost certainly hadn’t; there was no mention of such things in her diaries until she met the doctor in 1888 when she was twenty-one.

  Dennis lit a Woodbine, and we passed it between us. There was a discussion about inhaling which none of us knew how to do. Dennis managed to blow some smoke through his nose and then had a coughing fit. The smell of the smoke blended with the scent of dry grass as the air grew cooler.

  When the cigarette was finished, we walked to the end of the field and forced ourselves backwards through a gap in the hawthorn hedge to the field beyond. A group of Friesian cows stared with large eyes as we passed them on our way back to the towpath.

  * * * * *

  In November I took the entrance exam. There were papers in several subjects and the process went on over three days. I sat in the school’s staff dining room at a polished pine table. One other boy, Nick, a friend but not a close one, was taking the exam and sat opposite me; he was nice but dim and was trying to get into an even posher school than I was, Eton. An elderly man with a rounded back and jutting chin – he had been the school’s music master for about fifty years and had retired several years before – sat at the head of the table reading a book through wire-rimmed spectacles with his nose wrinkled and his teeth bared. He had a pocket watch on the table in front of him, told us when to start and when to stop, and beamed genially at us from time to time.

  Some way into the first exam, which was Latin, I found that Nick was staring at me and sucking hard on his Parker pen. He glanced at the old man who was absorbed in his book, took his pen out of his mouth, and almost imperceptibly shrugged his shoulders and raised his eyebrows. We had been instructed to write on both sides of the paper. I sat back in my soft-seated dining-room chair, held my paper up perpendicular to the table and read through what I had written. Meanwhile Nick bent over his paper and squinted upwards to read what I had written on the other side.

  In this manner, over a period of three days, I consigned Nick to Eton. He was profuse in his thanks and gave me a two-pound slab of Cadbury’s Dairy Milk chocolate.

  More significantly, I passed with high marks myself. My mother hugged me round the shoulders and kissed my cheek. My father slapped my back and said, ‘Well done, Sunny Jim.’ My shoulders and hands tingled as he handed me two shillings.

  Soon my parents received a letter from the housemaster saying how pleased he was with my exam results, that I would be in a class with scholarship boys, even though I had not taken scholarship papers, and that he looked forward to seeing me the following May. He enclosed several sheets of paper containing lists: required clothing and sporting equipment; dates and times of terms, half-terms and old boys’ weekend; daily and weekly routines, which included chapel every morning at 8.50 except Sundays when mattins would last an hour starting at 10 o’clock; advice about money – he suggested my parents provide me with £3 per term, which he would look after – and something called ‘tuck’, which meant food; rules – I would be allowed to leave the school grounds only with written permission from a prefect and only on Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday afternoons and on Sundays – parents might visit to take me out every third Sunday after mattins.

  The tingling sense of dread reappeared in my shoulders, arms and hands, and moved on into my stomach. But I managed to make it go away. May was still six months away. I didn’t have to go. Even though I had passed the exam, I could still get out of it.

  5

  Dinner in Dalston

  On a freezing Saturday, shortly before Christmas, my father and I drove dangerously through ice and sleet to High Wycombe to buy my mother’s Christmas present. He was feeling flush.

  ‘I’ve decided to buy her a gramophone,’ he had confided to me that morning during breakfast, while my mother was out of the room.

  I was thrilled. At last! ‘You mean a record player? One that will play singles and LPs?’

  He had to think for a moment. ‘Yes… although I don’t see why it can’t be called a gramophone.’ He pointed at the huge walnut-veneered radiogram in the corner of the dining room. ‘It does just the same as that, except it will play records that go round more slowly.’

  I didn’t argue. Everyone I knew had had a record player for at least two years. ‘It’s not really a present for Mum, though, is it? We’ll all use it, won’t we?’

  He shrugged. ‘She’s always playing records. It’ll be hers.’ I must have looked worried, because he went on. ‘All right, we’ll buy her something else as well… bath salts. What about bath salts?’

  Every year cousins and aunts gave my mother bath salts, and every year she gave bath salts to other people, sometimes carefully recycling the previous year’s offerings. I could think of nothing more dull than bath salts. ‘We ought to buy a record, an LP. Otherwise she’ll have a record player and nothing to play on it.’

  He smiled. ‘You’ve always been very bright, Sunny Jim, very intelligent.’ He grabbed my hand across the table and squeezed it. Then he felt in his pocket and handed me two half-crowns. ‘There you are. Five bob. You buy her a record with that, and you can get some bath salts with the change, and I’ll buy her one too. We’ll need more than one record; otherwise we’ll go mad listening to the same one all the time.’

  ‘A single is six and fourpence.’ I knew, because I had helped Richard and Adam choose them in Martin’s, the electrical shop in Chapel Street. ‘She probably won’t want a single, because she likes Bach and Beethoven and symphonies. They’re on LPs. They cost twenty-one shillings, I think.’

  ‘Good God.’ He smiled and looked at me over his glasses as he took back the two half-crowns. ‘We’ll see what we can do when we get to the shop.’

  We got stuck in traffic on the steep h
ill down into High Wycombe and sat for long minutes with the engine turned off, gradually getting colder and periodically wiping condensation from the windscreen with a duster. He talked about his mother and his father, telling me a lot I didn’t know, as he rolled one cigarette after another. He had never been so open with me before – my mother had told me truthfully where babies come from when I had first shown curiosity at the age of five, and she had told me about homosexual men when I was seven, and lesbians when I was eight. Now that I was thirteen and he had something to say, my father mentioned sex for the first time ever as he told me about his parents.

  It took us more than an hour to get into Easton Street. We parked and sat in the car as my father continued to talk; his hands gripped the steering wheel as he told me how clearly he remembered the day in 1902 when his father packed two suitcases, said goodbye to him and walked off down the street. The windscreen misted over and my father opened the small, triangular window beside the steering wheel. He flicked his ash through the opening. ‘Before he left, he bent down and kissed me quickly on the lips and said, “Goodbye, old chap. Don’t worry. I’ll see you before long.” I was crying. They told me I would see him again soon… But I never saw him again.’ He reached for his handkerchief, sobbed sharply twice and blew his nose. He pulled hard on his cigarette and tossed the butt through the window. He patted my hand. ‘I’m sorry… but you did want to know.’ He was looking straight ahead at the condensation on the windscreen.

  I put my arm round his shoulders.

  ‘He didn’t go to Canada until 1906…four years later, but they wouldn’t let him see me.’ There was a catch, like a small hiccup, in his voice. ‘It was cruel, but they did what they thought was right.’ He reached down and patted my thigh. ‘If Uncle George had been in charge, I think he’d have arranged for him to see me.’

  There was a long silence. I continued to lean against him with my arm across the top of his seat, my hand on the warm felt of his overcoat. Then, he turned, kissed me on the forehead and spoke in his normal voice. ‘That’s the whole story. Let’s go shopping.’

  We took our time to choose a Dynatron record player. I liked the modern look of its case which was covered in cream and blue plastic material and had a stainless steel strip at the front with three slits in it through which just the tops of three white plastic discs protruded: ‘on/off/volume’, ‘treble’, ‘bass’. With many mentions of Marconi, my father explained to me and the shopkeeper exactly how it worked. The man, red-faced and with thin black hair stuck sideways across his head with what I guessed was Silvikrin, smiled and raised his eyebrows attentively, and managed to maintain this attitude when my father moved on to the transistor, which he informed us had been invented in 1948, ‘the year Sunny Jim was born’.

  My father placed his hand on my head and I knew what would come next. ‘His mother and I had been married for sixteen years.’ But for once he carried straight on without pausing for the usual expressions of astonishment. ‘Three men were awarded the Nobel Prize for the transistor, but only two of them deserved it. Their boss tried to steal the glory.’

  The shopkeeper’s lower lip sagged as his eyebrows went up again.

  I slipped away to choose a record for my mother. ‘Typical of the boss class… and you can guess which of them made a fortune.’

  ‘Well, this is it.’ The shopkeeper spoke for the first time in several minutes, smiling in agreement once again.

  My father joined me by the racks of records. I swiftly picked out a recording of The Pirates of Penzance while he took a little longer to decide on Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony.

  Although, according to my mother, he was tone deaf, he then sat for twenty minutes in a glassed-in, sound-proof booth humming and waving his hands about as he listened to the slow movements of recordings by Otto Klemperer and Sir Adrian Boult. I fingered the new LPs from Elvis, Billy Fury and the Everly Brothers and wondered what my father would think if I put Brylcreem in my hair.

  In the end, ignoring the composer’s nationality, my father pronounced that my mother would prefer the English cadences of Boult, especially after what she had been through during the war. The shopkeeper nodded deferentially, as though my mother were a war hero, and told my father that he had made an excellent choice.

  After that day, even though he had said that was the whole story, I questioned him often about his childhood, his parents, his numerous other relatives and his friends from the 1890s and 1900s. He told me plenty of funny and colourful stories, and answered serious questions candidly. Over the next three months, he wrote seven chapters of about twelve pages each, detailing as much as he knew of the lives of his forebears and giving an account of his childhood up to the time when he left school, aged sixteen, in 1908. He gave it to me to read chapter by chapter.

  That night I heard my father going out to the car after my mother had gone to bed. I knew he was fetching the record player, and heard him carrying it up the two flights of stairs to his room, where we had planned he would hide it in his wardrobe. I was lying in bed reading my grandmother’s diary for 1888.

  * * * * *

  Sis celebrated her twenty-first birthday on 1 March 1888, a Saturday. At some expense her brother Ernest booked four seats in the stalls for that evening’s variety performance at the Alhambra in Leicester Square. Sis was pleased and looked forward to what her father called her birthday treat; Ernest, her father and her other brother, George, would come – the three men she was most fond of. Although they lived together, they hadn’t been out together – just the four of them – ever, at least not since they had all been adults.

  Dan Leno and Marie Lloyd were to be the star turns that night; Sis loved to laugh, to hear the latest popular songs and to sing along to her favourite old ones. The other aspects of music hall – the lesser acts, the jugglers, conjurors and acrobats, the drinking and the vulgarity – appealed to her less, but it was the Alhambra, probably London’s grandest variety theatre, where the seats were in rows and there was a shelf for her glass, and it was her birthday. She knew that she would enjoy herself.

  Ernest had bought the tickets, and as soon as they arrived her father bought four glasses of champagne and announced that the rest of the evening was to be at his expense and that the three of them should order whatever they wanted. The elder George Thompson was strong and broad-shouldered with grey hair cut short at the sides, a moustache that flowed downwards and around his lower lip, and a beard that was a continuation of the moustache and covered only his chin; all this straight, strong hair was thoroughly brushed for this, and every, occasion. He was forty-seven years old, imperious with waiters, servants and the craftsmen who built furniture to his design at a factory in Shoreditch, but for the most part benevolent towards his family.

  Leno was at his best, Marie Lloyd sang beautifully and with much emotion. The four Thompsons cried together with laughter and sentiment, and continued to drink champagne. But the evening was to become even more memorable for a quite different reason. While Sis was strolling around with Ernest in the first interval, her brother bumped into an acquaintance called Stanley Andrews. On learning that it was Sis’s birthday Stanley bought champagne at the bar, toasted her formally and complimented her politely on her appearance. She was wearing a maroon taffeta dress with a fashionably narrow bustle; her hair was up and her long neck was decorated with a new beaded-jet choker with an agate cameo pinned to it, an extravagant birthday present from her father. Stanley told her how beautifully the choker suited her. When it was time for her to return to her seat, he kissed her hand and said that he hoped they would meet again.

  They met again, perhaps purposely on both their parts, an hour later, when Sis took her brother George for a walk around the gallery at the back of the auditorium. Sis introduced George and there were smiles and pleasantries; this time Stanley commented on her fan, which was tortoiseshell and fringed with feathers. A little before midnight, as she climbed with her father and brothers into a growler in the rank outside, sh
e glimpsed Stanley smiling and waving at her from the steps.

  A week after their first encounter Sis met Stanley again, this time at the Britannia Music Hall in Hoxton, where Ernest worked as an assistant stage manager. Stanley had prevailed on Ernest to arrange this second meeting and he had readily complied. Though he was only seventeen, Ernest was already a rounded character, an extrovert, handsome dandy with carefully combed dark hair, who believed that he and everyone else should have a good time whenever possible – but he was not irresponsible; it is clear that he cared a lot about his elder sister. No doubt he had noticed that she was struck by this tall, blond, amusing fellow, whom he knew to be a doctor of some kind, and likely he felt that, at the age of twenty-one, she deserved something more than to be housekeeper for her father and her brothers.

  Sis only pretended that she needed to be persuaded; Ernest reintroduced her to Stanley in the foyer at the Britannia, and went off to do his night’s work.

  After that Ernest was no longer needed as a go-between. Stanley would send a note to Sis at her home by messenger, and she would send Little Alice, the servant, who was pledged to tell no one, with a reply. For a few weeks Sis’s friendship with Stanley was known only to Ernest, Young George and Little Alice; whenever she went to meet him Sis told her father that she was going to visit a female friend.

  Sis fell quickly in love with Stanley Andrews, and he with her. For Sis it was a new and overwhelming sensation. At the end of August she confided in her young aunt, Kate, her father’s youngest sister, who was just ten years her elder, a kindly married woman who thought she knew how Sis was feeling. And she probably did; she used the word ‘passion’ and gave Sis her opinion that it was a form of love that, if all went well, would lead to a still greater form of love. She directed her to a poem by Sappho, lines from which my exhilarated grandmother copied into her diary: