Swan River

by David Reynolds

  This time Sis decided to say nothing, to go away to another room when he was drunk, to ignore him as her father always had.

  In January 1900 the Welsbach company sacked Tom and allowed no discussion.

  * * * * *

  Cliffie found out on the day it happened. He was playing cricket with Toppy against a lamppost in a side street and saw his father walk past the end of the road; it was a Saturday morning and normally he returned from work much later. There was a strained atmosphere at lunch and Cliffie knew something was wrong. His father had promised to buy him some white mice that afternoon – and had already made a cage for them out of a soapbox. When they went to buy the mice, his father told him. Cliffie started to cry; he knew that this was the worst thing that could possibly happen. But his father seemed all right; he told him not to worry, and called him ‘old chap’ as he always did when Cliffie was bothered about something or sad.

  Everyone except Sis was sympathetic and tried to help Tom. He curtailed his drinking and sat every day at the kitchen table writing letters to companies who were advertising jobs. Over the next few months he was interviewed several times and his references were taken up, but he didn’t receive a single offer. The problem was his reference from the Welsbach company; it praised his work over the fifteen years he had been there, testified to his skills as an accountant and a manager of others and even listed his professional qualifications – exams that Tom had passed years earlier – and his ability to speak and read German. The man with the white hair had done his best, but, probably because he was a good man with a conscience, he had written a final sentence: ‘I cannot testify to his sobriety.’ A man of forty could not get a job without a reference from his previous employer.

  In April 1900 Uncle George at last married his fiancée, Marie, and they moved into their own house, a mile away in Upper Clapton; he had saved for it for seven years. Sis was bereft; for a large part of his life she had played the part of his mother, and more recently – through what she now saw as her unfortunate marriage – he, unlike her father or Ernest, had always been there. And he had contributed to the family’s expenses.

  In the summer, after months of effort, Tom gave up answering advertisements and earned a little money mending watches and writing letters applying for jobs for other people – he had fine handwriting and a reputation for being able to write a good letter – but the money was not enough.

  At the end of the summer term Cliffie was taken away from the Birkbeck School, which he had grown to like and where he was in his third year, and was registered at Sigdon Road Board School, for which there were no fees. Although Toppy was there, Cliffie had a sense of dread every time he walked up the three flights of stairs, ‘tiled in white like a public lavatory’, to the boys’ classrooms on the top floor. Many of the children came from the nearby slums and were dirty, scruffily dressed and unruly, and Cliffie didn’t like their constant swearing and their thick Cockney accents. Most of the teachers’ time was taken up with trying to keep order, and the cane was their ever-ready weapon.

  Lack of money soon forced those who remained at Norfolk Road to do without servants. Little Alice left to marry her long-time sweetheart – Little Bennett who worked in the ticket office at Hackney Downs station – and was not replaced; and Big Alice, who had been living in since Gladys was born, was asked to leave. This seemed to hurt Sis even more than the departure of her brother. Although the bright and popular Cousin Minnie, who always looked after the small children at family gatherings, joined the household in the role of mother’s help, this was not the same as having servants.

  * * * * *

  That summer, 1900, Gladys was three and allowed to play with friends in the street. Cliffie was told to look after her and make sure she didn’t get her clothes dirty, a responsibility he undertook willingly and with pride, even though he had to watch and stay alert while she and her friends played with hoops and a skipping rope. He would stand in the road, just beyond the gutter, ready to catch Gladys in his arms when she slipped off the pavement, as she often did, towards the mud and dung on the street. Sometimes he pulled her around in a cart, which Tom had made out of a wooden soapbox and some old pram wheels, but this led to trouble with his mother; traces of dirt were found on Gladys’s skirt after he and Toppy had filled the cart with buckets of horse dung, scraped from the street, for sale to keen gardeners at a penny a bucketful.

  Tom’s drinking took hold again that summer and Sis’s diary filled with cryptic reports of violence and verbal abuse. This time she was unable to ignore him, because the rows were about money as well as drunkenness. He would plead, sometimes in tears, for her to give him twopence, the price of a drink at the Norfolk Arms, and sometimes she would throw it at him. The money had been earned by her father, and not by him, but she would give it to him to get him out of the house, although she knew that, if he could buy himself one drink, he could win the price of others at billiards – he was an excellent player, drunk or sober – or sponge off friends and acquaintances. If Sis wouldn’t give him money, he would approach others including Little Alice and some of the other neighbours – but never Old George.

  A row broke out when Sis saw him leaving the house with a toy steam engine that he had given Cliffie for his birthday the previous December. He confessed that he was intending to raise a few shillings by pawning it. In Cliffie’s presence, Sis demanded to know what he had paid for it. The answer was twenty-five shillings. Cliffie blubbered that it was all right, Daddy could have it, but Sis took the money from her purse and threw it at Tom, screaming at him to go away and get drunk.

  A day or two later Cliffie was alone with his father in the breakfast room. ‘Daddy, why do you get drunk?’ he asked. Tom looked at him for a long time before his face collapsed and he muttered, ‘Shame on me. I don’t know. I can’t help myself.’

  On a Saturday in October, Tom came into the kitchen after drinking in the middle of the day. He was hungry and Sis passed him an open tin of salmon. He tasted it and asked how long the tin had been open.

  ‘Long enough to go bad and poison you, I hope.’

  Tom swung his fist at her. She jumped out of the way and his hand smashed into the glass of a large framed map of the British Isles. His hand was cut severely and he was led to the nearby hospital by Cousin Minnie. When he had gone, Sis wept and Cliffie knelt down by the wall and prayed.

  Sis had written before that she wished Tom would go away and never come back. That night, she wrote, ‘I cannot bear it any longer. We must get rid of him.’ In the morning she and her father discussed how they might get Tom to leave what was still legally – and, in Sis’s view at least, morally – their home.

  * * * * *

  The next year, 1901, on 22 January, a Tuesday, Tom came into the kitchen and announced, ‘Daisy is dead.’ Cliffie didn’t find out till later that Daisy was Queen Victoria. His mother was more concerned about a persistent cough that Gladys had developed, and Tom was sent to fetch Dr White.

  Cliffie watched the white-haired doctor look into Gladys’s throat while holding her tongue down with a teaspoon. He looked grave and, after what seemed a long time, turned to Sis and said, ‘Diphtheria, I’m afraid. She must be taken away.’ He asked Cliffie to run downstairs and fetch another teaspoon, which he used to look into Cliffie’s throat. He pronounced him free of infection, but said he must not go near his sister while they waited for her to be taken to hospital. The bedroom he shared with her must be sealed up until it could be sterilised; he would have to sleep somewhere else.

  Cliffie watched from his parents’ bedroom window as Gladys, wrapped in a cream blanket, was carried to an ambulance. After she had gone, he sat with his parents and Minnie in the kitchen. No one else was at home and there wasn’t much talk. Everyone, including Cliffie, knew that diphtheria was a disease that killed small children. His father told him that Gladys had been taken to the fever hospital in Homerton, beyond Mare Street. No one – not even her parents or her brother – was allowed to visit
her.

  The next day Cliffie walked with his father across Mare Street and through the gloomy graveyard of Hackney parish church to the hospital. He waited outside while his father enquired about Gladys; she was neither better nor worse.

  Wednesday, January 23rd. No news. I want to be with her but they have guards at that place.

  Tom and Cliffie went the next day and the day after and received the same message.

  Thursday, January 24th. No news. I am in purgatory. Cliffie lies on the sofa staring at the floor. Tom fiddled all day with the Herfords’ clock, drank small glass of port when I had one. That was all. Minnie does everything.

  Friday, January 25th. No news. Father home now. Sat with him. He is philosophical, says it is not my fault. I will make it up to Cliffie if my darling lives. And to Tom – poor man.

  On the fourth day, Saturday, Tom came out of the hospital smiling. He hugged Cliffie. ‘The crisis is passed. She’s out of danger.’ When they told his mother and his grandfather – who had returned from some distant place after receiving a telegram – Cliffie saw his mother break down in tears and smile for the first time since Gladys had been taken away.

  Saturday, January 26th. They say my darling is out of danger. Can this be really true? I must believe it. Cliffie with George. Father and Tom play chess. No drink.

  The good news quickly spread around the family, and Auntie Marie asked Cliffie to come and stay with her and Uncle George in their new house until Gladys was completely better and home again. Cliffie was glad to go there. As well as a servant called Clara whom he liked, they had the new electric light; he marvelled at the dim glow of the carbon lamps and was allowed to play with the switches as much as he liked.

  On Sunday evening Uncle George was even kinder to Cliffie than he usually was. Since his marriage he had visited his old home every Saturday and had always taken Cliffie a packet of chocolate cigarettes; Cliffie was pleased, but a little puzzled, when he gave him this same gift on a Sunday and he wondered why his aunt’s eyes were watering.

  Uncle George didn’t go to his office the next morning. He told Cliffie that his mother was coming to see him. She arrived with his father, and hugged him and called him her darling boy and said that she would never be unkind to him again. His father stood looking on, and Cliffie saw the familiar lines on his temples as he tried to smile. He sensed that something was wrong. He enquired eagerly about his sister.

  Gladys had died the day before.

  Monday, January 28th My darling is dead.

  * * * * *

  On 2 February Sis noted mechanically that there had been a funeral service that afternoon at a cemetery in Friern Barnet called the Great Northern, and that Gladys was buried afterwards. She wrote a list of the seventy-three people who attended the funeral. She wrote nothing about how she felt.

  Then she gave up diary-writing for ever.

  22

  The Vanishing Lady

  I read Sis’s last diary entries on the day before New Year’s Eve, 1966, in my room, at my father’s home. He was downstairs, cleaning and hoovering in preparation for his party the next day. I looked out of the window at the bare apple trees, and then back at my room, at Deborah’s drawing of La Frascetti; she would have been at Gladys’s funeral. I had only my father’s account of what happened next and I hadn’t read it since soon after he wrote it, when I was thirteen. I picked it up and read it again.

  * * * * *

  He was nine when his sister died and he wrote that he remembered little of the grief that followed because he was taken away from home and spent much of the next year travelling with his grandfather, and sometimes with his mother as well, in Britain and Ireland, and he stayed for a long period with Aunt Kate and Uncle Gibson and his cousin Kathleen in Braintree. He was taken away because the drinking and the rows started again soon after his sister’s funeral, and grew so bad that, at times, Old George and Sis abandoned their own home to escape from Tom.

  Cliffie barely went to school that year, but he can’t have been away all the time, because he remembered things that happened in London – and time spent with his father. They went together to the Oval to watch Surrey play Middlesex and saw a famous batsman called Bobby Abel take a diving catch right in front of them. On the way Cliffie had his first ride on the tube, travelling under the Thames from Old Street to Elephant and Castle; when he asked what would happen if the tunnel burst and the river came flooding in, his father took his hand and said, ‘Don’t you worry, old chap.’

  He helped his father with his watch-mending, and saw him spend days emptying and cleaning the outdoor water tank, which was thought to have been the source of his sister’s infection. At the same time a plumber installed a pipe that brought mains water directly into the house for the first time. Above the new tap, his father fixed an enamel label that said ‘Drinking water’.

  Uncle Ernest and Aunt Rose moved away, not far, to their own flat in Islington, and it felt as if another cornerstone of his life had been removed. But they still paid him a lot of attention, bringing him presents from their travels and, most excitingly, taking him to the music hall. He remembered riding on a tram with Uncle Ernest from Dalston, along Essex Road, to Collins’s Music Hall on Islington Green; his uncle told him that, as well as playing the xylophone during Aunt Rose’s act, he now did conjuring tricks – and his best trick, which Cliffie would see later, was called the vanishing lady: ‘Auntie Rose is the vanishing lady, but she don’t always vanish when she should.’ Cliffie liked his uncle’s funny way of speaking; he knew he had caught it from Aunt Rose and that his mother disapproved.

  That evening, Cliffie stood in the wings and was surprised and proud to see hundreds of people shouting and clapping while his aunt did what she did at home as his uncle played cheeky little flourishes and dramatic rolls on his xylophone. He was even more astonished when the audience stood up and sang and swayed from side to side as, followed by a spotlight, his aunt walked on her hands down a flight of stairs playing ‘Daisy’ on her violin; he had seen her do that lots of times, but nobody in his family sang when she did it.

  Uncle Ernest reappeared wearing a top hat and tails and showed the audience a box which seemed to have no holes or hidden compartments. The audience clapped as Aunt Rose squeezed herself into it with her knees beside her ears; Uncle Ernest closed it, strapped down the lid and played a tune on the xylophone which ended with a long roll; then, holding his hat high in the air, he revealed that the box was empty. From his viewpoint in the wings, Cliffie was thrilled – and was startled a second time a few seconds later, when his aunt tapped him on the shoulder.

  Ernest and Rose’s room was taken by Cousin Bertie, a vacant youth, whose father, rich Uncle Charlie, paid Old George for the inconvenience of putting up with his son. Bertie was nineteen, had been thrown out of the army and was now, at his father’s insistence, training to be a stockbroker. He was much disapproved of by Sis because he went out drinking with Tom, whom he called ‘squire’, and she was certain that Bertie paid for the drinks. When Old George heard of this, Bertie was summoned to his bedside. Cliffie was tucked into bed beside his grandfather, and watched Bertie stare awkwardly at his feet as Old George told him in his deepest rumble never to go drinking with Tom again. ‘Do you not understand that his only hope is to give up the drink? Cliffie here understands that.’

  After Bertie had gone, Old George told Cliffie that it was his brother Charlie’s fault that Bertie was a wastrel; Charlie had brought him up to believe that money was more important than anything else. Cliffie remembered what he said next because he had heard it before, and was to hear it again: ‘No person of quality esteems another merely because he is rich.’

  On a Sunday afternoon in the spring of 1902 there was a big row in the kitchen. Cliffie listened from the top of the stairs. It wasn’t just his mother and father who were shouting; he could hear deep bass bellowing from his grandfather – a frightening sound that he had never heard before. The kitchen door was shut, so he couldn’t
make out what they were saying. Cousin Minnie came and stood behind him with her hands on his shoulders. She led him into the drawing room and stayed with him after shutting the door; she said that he shouldn’t worry. Soon he heard the slamming of doors and rapid footsteps on the basement steps. He looked out of the window and saw his father hurrying away.

  In the evening his father returned, spoke to his grandfather and packed two suitcases. Cliffie stayed in the kitchen with his mother, who seemed pale and nervous, but hugged him and told him that his father was going to live somewhere else for a while, not far away.

  His grandfather called him to the basement door, where his father kissed him and said, ‘Goodbye, old chap. Don’t worry. I’ll see you before long.’ Turning away, his grandfather took Cliffie by the arm – but Cliffie resisted, lingered and watched his father walk up the basement steps and along the pavement with a suitcase in each hand.

  He didn’t see him again.

  * * * * *

  The next afternoon, as my father napped in his armchair, I found it hard to concentrate on Tender Is the Night. I stared out of the window at the unmelted frost, poked the fire from time to time and walked about the room, picking things up and putting them down. I had never had a sister and no one close to me had died, and I had always been in touch with both my parents, so I couldn’t imagine how my father had felt. I wondered when he had realised that he would never see his father again.

  I was standing by the cabinet that held the Encyclopaedia Britannica when my father opened his eyes and smiled. ‘What are …’ He croaked and swallowed and started again. ‘What are you doing over there?’

  ‘Nothing. Just thinking.’ He went on looking at me. ‘I finished reading your mother’s diaries yesterday… It’s a pity she stopped writing after Gladys died.’