Swan River

by David Reynolds

  Sis ran to her room in tears. She saw that Little Alice was in the kitchen and must have heard all they had said. That evening Tom went to the Norfolk Arms after dinner and returned at 12.30 banging doors and stumbling up the stairs.

  The following Tuesday evening they hugged and kissed and apologised. Sis told Tom that she had been silly and that she did want to move to the new house. Tom said that he had thought it over and, if she really wanted to stay with her father a bit longer, he would ‘adjust his expectations’ – there was the advantage that he would be able to save up more money; it was just that she hadn’t told him that that was what she wanted before. She confessed, tearfully, that she didn’t really know what she wanted and they agreed to leave things as they were for the time being.

  In May, the next year, 1891, Sis discovered that she was pregnant. She was excited, if a little fearful; Tom was euphoric and the house filled with flowers that he bought for her every evening as he passed through Liverpool Street Station.

  In September – to avoid the crowds – they had a week’s holiday in Margate, where Tom had often been as a child when his father was alive. They stayed in a guest house facing the beach and spent the days walking, talking and sitting in tea rooms; in the evenings they played chess and Tom read Tristram Shandy aloud while Sis lay on the bed.

  She decided that her love for him was growing; she felt more at ease than she had on their honeymoon almost a year before. And she liked being on holiday. In London the running of the house and the men’s constant need of meals and clean clothes were tiresome, even though – funded by Tom – they now had Big Alice coming in more often to cook. She thought again about living with Tom and her child in a smaller house, and remembered that he had said that they could afford a live-in servant; perhaps it would be better? But she said nothing.

  15

  Looking over the Bristol Channel

  My father was born at 7 am on 10 December 1891 in Sis’s bedroom on

  the brass bed that Old George had bought as a wedding present. It was a Wednesday and he had not been expected until the following weekend. Doctor White, the family’s doctor for more than twenty years, delivered him with the help of a local nurse.

  Sis’s labour had begun at six o’clock the previous evening. Tom and Old George spent most of the night awake in Old George’s room playing chess by candlelight. Young George slept on the drawing-room sofa, so as to be away from the inevitable noise and disturbance; Ernest and La Frascetti were away performing in St Petersburg. Little Alice stayed up all night, keeping the cooking range and the fires alight and carrying towels and bowls of water up and down stairs; she was even admitted to the labour room – she kept her eyes averted and rushed away as soon as she could.

  A few minutes after seven Tom was called to Sis’s bedroom where Doctor White handed him his son wrapped in a cream shawl. Sis lay smiling, propped on several pillows; Little Alice had already brushed her hair. The doctor and the nurse left, and Tom held my father, stared at him and saw that he had dark hair and blue eyes just like his. He stroked his cheek and whispered ‘My son’ and ‘My hat’ several times before sitting on the bed next to Sis where they admired him together. My father ignored them and went to sleep.

  The new family had a few minutes alone before the two Georges came in to congratulate them and examine the baby. My father woke up as his grandfather held him on his knee and rubbed his nose gently with his own before passing him to his uncle. Young George held him at arm’s length in such a way that Sis feared that either he would drop him or her son’s head would fall off. With Sis’s permission, Tom handed my father to Little Alice who rocked him in both arms in a manner much approved of by Sis. Throughout this ordeal my father, who was less than an hour old, gazed around wildly but made no sound.

  Kate had been summoned by telegram and arrived with Kathleen in the afternoon – it had been planned that she would stay for two weeks and run the household so that Sis could rest and concentrate on her baby. Kate thought her great-nephew was ‘a true Thompson’ with ‘his grandfather’s piercing blue eyes’ but also liked his mouth which was ‘wide and firm like Tom’s’. She spent time alone with her niece, discussing the details of the birth and giving advice, particularly that Sis mustn’t forget Tom; men often felt ignored when a baby arrived and this could lead to trouble. He was a good dutiful husband and she must make him, as well as the baby, feel loved.

  The following Sunday Ernest and Rose returned, after a three-day journey from St Petersburg, and suggested that there should be a party to celebrate the birth, especially as – in accordance with the family’s radical views, which originated with Old George – there was to be no christening. Sis and Tom liked the idea, but Kate counselled against; there should be no upheavals until mother and baby were thoroughly settled. Ernest and Rose were disappointed but set up their xylophone on the landing outside Sis’s bedroom door. While Ernest struck the keys and sang a music-hall ditty called ‘There’s a Baby in Our House’, Rose cartwheeled and somersaulted in and out of the room. From his cot next to the bed on Sis’s side, my father waved his arms and made a few noises and then went silent during the lullaby ‘Sleep Pretty Baby, Sleep’, played as a xylophone duet.

  For several days the family discussed names. Tom wanted to call him Thomas Clifton, his own names and those of his father; Clifton was an old family name of the Reynolds’. Sis liked Thomas and she liked Clifton even more – it was unusual and sounded distinguished – but insisted on George; the eldest males in the Thompson family were always called George. A suggestion that he should have three names was quickly dismissed; only girls and toffs and swells had more than two. Thomas George and George Thomas were considered, but Sis had decided that she liked Clifton, which meant that either Thomas or George had to go. In return for Clifton, Tom agreed to drop Thomas on the understanding that their second son be given his name. With two Georges already in the house, they decided to address their son as Clifton and put it first; it soon got shortened to Cliff or Cliffie.

  * * * * *

  He was a small child surrounded by adults – the second son did not appear – and he noticed things when he was very young that he remembered decades later, including his grandfather in the mellow light of candles resembling the painting of God that he saw in a Bible, his Uncle George always reading, the servant Alice being kind and very pretty and, of course, his aunt Rose walking around the house on her hands. He learned that his mother sniffed when she was annoyed and that his father sometimes came home drunk and had to be left alone while he slept on the sofa in the breakfast room.

  While he was too young to be allowed out in the street on his own, Cliffie often played in the garden. One afternoon he heard a voice singing a song about someone called Sweet Rosy O’Grady. A curly-haired boy was standing on the wall at the end of the garden. When a voice from the back of the boy’s house shouted ‘Stop that blasted noise,’ he sang even louder, ran along the wall and began to jump up and down on the corrugated iron roof of a neighbour’s hen house causing the hens to add to the din. The boy’s name was Toppy Wheeler and he and Cliffie became close friends, although Sis disapproved because Toppy was ‘common’ and an ‘urchin’.

  Occasionally Cliffie went to Toppy’s home and he was always shocked at how different it was from his own. A rusty bookbinding machine covered in dust and cobwebs took up a large part of the basement kitchen, which was also the living room; Toppy told him that his grandfather who now worked in a factory used to make his living from it. The rest of the room was filled by a big table which was always covered in gin bottles, unwashed crockery and empty tins, most of which had once contained condensed milk. There was a sour smell, like vomit. Along the passage, where the WC, whose door wouldn’t shut, opened off the scullery, the smell was worse; it was caused, Toppy said, by something that was wrong with his own bowels.

  Toppy’s mother – he had never known his father – always dressed in black and generally sat without moving in front of a fireplace ov
erflowing with cold cinders. Toppy said that she had ‘bad legs’ and she told Cliffie that she suffered from dropsy. She usually had a bottle of gin within reach and Toppy often fetched beer for her from the Norfolk Arms. Toppy had an adult brother, who slept in the front basement room and kept the back garden well tended. Unlike his own garden which backed on to it, it was a paradise of flowers and blossom in which Cliffie loved to play.

  When he was still quite young, Cliffie decided that his family was unusual; his grown-ups were always reading, or having serious discussions about people and things that sounded important – they hated two men called Salisbury and Joe Chamberlain and they liked a man called Gladstone. Cliffie knew that they were in favour of something called the rights of man and that that was also the name of a book, and that they wanted people to be nicer to a creature called the bottom dog; his uncle Ernest, in particular, talked a lot about this dog.

  By the time he was five, he understood who the bottom dogs were and saw that his friend Toppy was one of them – and he became confused by the attitudes of adults. His mother was on the side of the underdog, and especially the bottom dog, but she didn’t want him to be friendly with Toppy because he was a common urchin.

  The adults were also confusing about God and religion. His mother made him kneel down every night and pray to ‘Gentle Jesus, meek and mild’, but he heard the grown-ups saying that they didn’t believe in God and his mother telling a man on the doorstep that God was a lot of nonsense because, if he existed, he would help the poor. She told the man to stop bothering her and to go away and look after the underdogs. Afterwards she said, with a sniff, that he was a silly man who had come from the church.

  His mother had an opinion about everything and argued a lot with other people, and with his father more than anyone. With him, Cliffie, she was very loving – always smiling, lifting him up and kissing him – and she was always polite and friendly to his grandfather, but with other people she sniffed a lot and was often cross. His father was different; he was friendly towards everyone and, though he had opinions, was less argumentative and hardly ever got cross. His mother was always there, but she was often busy with food or making clothes or talking to other people or bossing Little Alice; when his father wasn’t at work or out at the pub, he was always ready to talk or play games. As Cliffie grew up, he asked lots of questions and found that his father, more than anyone, would answer them properly – and, if he didn’t know the answer, he would get out a book called Whitaker’s Almanack and read bits out loud.

  As time went on his mother seemed to get more cross with his father and to tell him off more often. Cliffie was worried one night when he heard his mother shouting and his father murmuring apologetically. A few weeks later he heard his mother shouting again and caught the words ‘You drunken sot!’ His father walked out of the house slamming the basement door. He knew that his father sometimes got drunk, but then lots of people did, especially men; he often saw them in the streets and he and his friends imitated the way they wobbled as they walked and spoke without leaving gaps between words. It was something men did; he hadn’t realised that there was anything wrong about it.

  Then Cliffie noticed that his father was drunk more often, on Sundays as well as Saturdays, and that a routine had developed. At lunchtime on Saturday his father would go out to the pub. In the afternoon, when Cliffie heard his key in the door, he knew that he would be drunk and would sleep on the breakfast-room sofa until dinner-time. Then he would go to the fried fish shop on the Balls Pond Road and come back with fish or saveloys, and pease pudding for dinner. After dinner he would go out to the pub again and return when it shut at 12.30, often sleeping the night on the breakfast-room sofa.

  On Sunday mornings Cliffie and his father would go for long walks together – on which for a time Cliffie regularly wore his highwayman’s outfit with a cape and a triangular hat. They would call at several pubs on the way and at each one his father would order ‘three fingers of Johnny Walker’ and buy a cake for Cliffie to eat while he waited outside, which was never for more than a minute or so. When they got home Sunday lunch was usually ready. Though drunk, his father would manage to carve the joint and, after it was eaten, do the washing-up with the help of the Alices.

  Soon after he had heard his mother call his father a drunken sot, his father gave him a cake outside a pub on a Sunday morning and told him not to tell his mother, when she asked him, as she always did, how many pubs they had visited. Cliffie realised that there was something wrong about getting drunk. But he loved his father and from then on enjoyed the secret side of their outings, and soon became a good liar.

  * * * * *

  While I was reading his account of this, Cliffie had been snoring in the room next door. Suddenly he was standing in the doorway in front of me wearing a brown and red checked dressing gown and sky blue pyjamas. His hair was sticking up at the back. ‘I saw the light on. Are you all right, old chap?’

  ‘Fine. Just reading about your childhood.’ I looked at my watch. It was a quarter past one.

  ‘Oh!’ He smiled and rubbed his cheeks with his palms. ‘I just put that there because it seemed to belong with my mother’s diaries… How is it the second time?’

  ‘Great. I love Toppy Wheeler.’

  He grinned. ‘So did I.’ He looked at the carpet while nodding his head. ‘Long ago. Long, long ago.’ He looked up. ‘I went to Spurs for the first time with Toppy.’

  ‘I know. I just read about it.’ I stood up.

  ‘Well… don’t stay up too late.’ He went out and shut the door carefully. The door opened again, and he put his head in. ‘And don’t smoke too much, or you’ll end up coughing like me.’ His head disappeared before I could say anything.

  By the time I went back to school I had read my grandmother’s diaries as far as 1897. After 1892 she wrote progressively less – there were many days and, in the later diaries, weeks – when she wrote nothing. In 1897 she wrote more fully, probably because she had something to write about.

  * * * * *

  For two years or so after the birth of her son, Sis felt that she had come to

  love Tom. He was kind and attentive and proud of her and Cliffie. She liked the way that he put one arm around her waist while pushing Cliffie’s pram with the other when they went walking in fine weather on Hackney Downs. And she was charmed when he bought a camera and set up a dark-room under the stairs, because he wasn’t satisfied with the posed portraits of her and Cliffie taken at the studio in Kingsland High Street.

  Occasionally he mentioned his dream of owning his own house and living in it with just her and Cliffie and a maid – and the rest of their children, who, annoyingly, had not yet begun to arrive. She deflected him by saying that Cliffie was too young for such an upheaval, but the truth was that she didn’t want to spend most of her time alone with a child and a maid-servant – Tom had only Saturday afternoons and Sundays away from work; she had grown used to a home where many people, especially her father, came and went.

  Eventually, in the heat and humidity of the summer of 1894, Tom’s resentment surfaced. He said again that he hadn’t expected to be married to her father as well as her – and this time he added in her brothers and her sister-in-law. There was a row, and a week later another, and then another, and he began to attack her character – calling her an opinionated bully and telling her how exasperating he found her unwavering belief that she was always right. And, always an enthusiastic drinker at social occasions, he started to drink at other times and to come home from work late and tipsy; there were words over late, re-heated dinners and afterwards he would retreat from her to the Norfolk Arms, returning after midnight properly drunk, singing, staggering and, sometimes a little abusive.

  Many times he told the Georges and Ernest of his frustrations – especially of his inability to be master of his own home – and they sympathised; they knew that Sis could be difficult and knew what he didn’t: that she had been near-destroyed by a man. And they thought Tom was
a good man – he had an important job, earned more than any of them and, above all, tried hard to make Sis happy – but they, even Old George, couldn’t tell Sis how to behave. She was an adult and a mother – and, more than that, their daughter and their sister; their loyalty was instinctive and lay far deeper than their reason.

  Only he could persuade her and he tried many times, but he always failed. Once she reminded him that, a few years ago, soon after they were married, he had said that he would adjust his expectations. He couldn’t remember saying that, but, in the end – sometime in 1895 – he did adjust them; he stopped suggesting that they live elsewhere – and his acceptance of defeat was probably more palatable because, long ago, he had begun to replace his dreams with drink.

  His work – a place where he was respected and prized – was another consolation, and he made sure, for a while yet, that there the drink didn’t hurt his reputation for diligence and good sense. His third consolation was his son, whom he loved as much as he loved Sis and who returned his love without question.

  Sis’s Aunt Kate gave him more than sympathy; she had always liked him and continued to stick up for him – he never drank excessively when he visited Braintree. On 25 April 1896 Sis and Kate talked in Kate’s kitchen while Cliffie played with his cousin Kathleen. Sis moaned about Tom and his drinking.

  ‘Why Sis, you don’t know how to manage him,’ Kate said.

  ‘How can I love a drunken sot?’

  ‘But he wouldn’t be one if you really loved him.’

  * * * * *

  On a cold morning as we trudged across a field, damp with melting frost, I asked my father if he really remembered the actual words spoken by his mother and Kate on 25 April 1896; Sis had mentioned the conversation in her diary, but he had written the words down just two years ago, early in 1962.