Growing Up In a War

by Bryan Magee

  My life contains two episodes which were literally traumatic in the effect they had on me, and this was one of them. The other was to come in my twenties, and had to do with my marriage. After each of them, I was not the same person again. With the death of my father, the human being I supremely loved, loved unconditionally, was dying in front of my eyes. At one point he said: ‘It feels to me as if I’ve been in this bed half my life,’ and that was how it felt to me too. I was in a state of intolerable and yet – of course, it had to be – tolerated anguish, unbearable yet borne, and so always at the end of my tether. I stayed at home most of the time, helping out, sitting for long periods with him, unable to think of anything else, not much wanting to go anywhere else. There were, however, a few times when I was overwhelmed by a need to get away from it, and then I would just go out, it scarcely mattered where. On one of those occasions something happened that I have always remembered with gratitude.

  It was a Sunday afternoon. I took a tube train to Green Park, blind with misery, and wandered around the park for a while. Then I crossed Piccadilly and began to drift through the empty streets of Mayfair. In those days London’s West End was notorious for its street prostitution, thick on the ground at every time of day, and since I had grown to adult height I was used to being accosted. For any full-grown male walking alone it was, literally, an everyday occurrence. I was ravenously tempted, but I had never been with a prostitute, not out of anything to do with rectitude but from fear of venereal disease. One of the salient themes of wartime propaganda had been the dangers and horrors of this, and it was also the subject of many schoolboy jokes, so I thought I knew about it. On me, at least, the propaganda had its effect. Occasionally I might be lured into conversation by one of the girls, especially one close to my age – sometimes they stopped you by blocking your path, and then it was difficult not to speak – but in any case they were usually (not always) asking for more money than I had. It was only by the narrowest margins that my resistance stayed unbroken. My custom, when accosted, was to veer past the girl saying nothing at all, possibly shaking my head, usually avoiding her eyes, and no doubt looking as scared as a rabbit. But on this occasion, lost in grief, I hardly noticed.

  One, however, caught my eye. She was standing looking at me as I approached her: older than the others – old enough to be my mother – and very expensively, yet well, dressed. When I drew level with her, instead of the usual opening she said: ‘You’re unhappy. What is it?’

  I stopped beside her.

  ‘My father’s dying,’ I said. I made no effort to remove the devastated look from my face, but I did, as it were, engage with her.

  ‘Do you love him very much?’

  ‘Yes.’

  She began to talk to me about this with ordinary sympathy. She had a French accent and was a person of warmth and charm. There was a fellow feeling here that I was not used to. After a few minutes of this we turned and walked along the pavement, very slowly, side by side; and for something like half an hour we wandered the streets, she comforting me. Because I was in the state I was in, I do not remember anything she said; but she provided me with such solace as no one else did in all that terrible six weeks. When I got home I found it bordering on the impossible not to talk about her, and yet I had to stop myself. I knew that my family would be unspeakably shocked at the very idea of my spending time with a prostitute, and would probably not believe that all we did was talk.

  Most of the time my father spent dying he was sitting up in bed, and always had someone sitting in the chair beside him. He assured us he was not afraid of death, and I think it was true. When he said it he did not seem to me to be protesting too much; and he was concerned for us, reassuring us. I was struck by the fact that each time he said it he added that he had never been afraid of death. I envied that, and could not understand how it was possible. After my grandfather’s funeral he had said to Joan: ‘I’ve never been sure whether there’s anything after death or not, but now I’m sure there is something.’

  He was frightened, though, of being left alone. It was essential for him to have someone always there beside him. And he wanted to hold the hand of whoever it was, even my mother. It was always he who held their hand, not they his. Each of us in turn would sit with him for hours with our hand clasped in his, sometimes talking, sometimes not. One’s hand would become cramped, or tired, or begin to feel awkward; but if we tried to change its position he would grasp desperately at it as if it were being taken away. My mother hated this, and spent as little time with him as she could, so it was usually either Joan or me, or one of his many visitors. We always warned them before they went in to see him that he would want to hold their hand.

  When it was me sitting beside him he liked to talk about either my interests or my future. Why did I like Sibelius so much – what was so special about his music? How sure were my teachers that I was going to get in to Oxford? What did I want to do after that? My seventeenth birthday fell in the middle of all this, and he gave me the biggest single present I had ever received. It was a complete recording of the third act of The Valkyrie, on eight discs, secretly procured by my sister. I unwrapped it at his bedside, and will never forget the expression on his face, and in his voice, as he said simply: ‘What you wanted.’ It was something he himself would have loved to have, and had never felt able to afford.

  While he was on his deathbed my grandmother sold him the shop. This was the outcome of months of family negotiation, and was the cause of resentments that never afterwards faded. My grandmother, having agreed to the deal before she realised how ill he was, thought she had to keep her word to him before he died. The documents were signed and witnessed on his bed, with only the participants in the room, while my mother was in the kitchen. Since he was obviously never going to get out of that bed, my grandmother was in effect selling the shop to my mother, and yet not allowing her any say in the matter. I think my grandmother’s point of view was that it had taken her and my father months to reach an agreement, and however favourable to him its terms were – and they were – my mother, not having been party to it, would be under no obligation to accept it, and would almost certainly not accept it, because she could be relied on to think, of any proposal, that it was doing her down. So if my father died before the deal was done, my grandmother would face the impossible task of reaching a reasonable agreement with my mother, as the only alternative to disinheriting her son’s family by selling the business elsewhere. My father, I expect, took the same view. So I believe they both saw themselves as forcing a bargain on my mother. Their intentions were good, on both sides, and the financial consequences of their action were fair, even though it meant that death duties had to be paid twice in six months on the same small family business. My mother and sister bitterly resented the whole proceeding. They saw my grandmother and Aunt Hilda as acting in an underhand way, taking advantage of a man drugged with morphine, and on his deathbed. It is certainly true that my mother was shut out of a deal to which she was, in all but a technicality, one of the main parties. But she could not contest the legitimacy of the deal without, if successful, losing her own inheritance. It ensured the utmost acrimony within the family after my father’s death, when my mother found herself landed with a shop that she was even more incapable of running than my grandmother had been.

  The period during which my father was unable to run the shop was quite short, only the last couple of months of his life. During that time my grandmother was there nearly every day, and had the full-time assistance of Mr Davis, who had worked part-time for us ever since I could remember. My aunts Peggy and Hilda had long ago been used to helping out at Christmas, and now contributed to the best of their ability. So the shop remained open full-time. But the whole arrangement had a desperate air about it, an air of emergency. Mr Davis, though well meaning and honest, was unintelligent, and passive to a degree, with not the slightest initiative – and it is not possible for women to run a men’s clothes shop. They cannot take a customer’s meas
urements, least of all his inside leg. Fittings and alterations offer endless opportunities for embarrassment, and did this a great deal more in the social atmosphere of the 1940s than they would today. The situation was fraught with difficulty. And this was the state the shop was in when it passed to my mother, who knew next to nothing about the business. Not surprisingly, she was to sell it after a couple of years. And that is why I, born and brought up as an only son in the third generation of a family business, never inherited it.

  During that desperate period before his death, my father continued to supply management consultancy from his bed. But his energies were fading fast, and his judgement must have been affected by the morphine. After several weeks of sitting up in bed he developed a bedsore, and this became a torture to him, the plague of his life. That tiny sore caused him a degree of physical pain and mental distress that was almost unmanageable, more so than the cancer that was killing him.

  My problems were nothing compared to his. But I too, in my way, was living at a level of stress that I could almost not bear. My capacity to love unconditionally was being impaired, since the suffering it now involved me in was more than I could take. It was, after all, not the first time. My infant relationship with my mother had been a disaster for me – and now there was this. Drawing back from emotional involvement was not a conscious decision; in fact it was some years before I realised it had happened. I had – altogether unconsciously – become unable to give myself totally, because I had not once but twice, and before I was fully grown up, been devastated by the consequences of doing so.

  There came a morning when I was woken by the sound of my mother thundering past my bedroom door to my sister’s room, shouting: ‘He’s gone! He’s gone!’ Then both voices were raised, and they went back past my door to my parents’ room. I got out of bed and went into the passage, and was about to go in to them when I found myself rooted to the spot outside the door. I could not bring myself to do it. I was paralysed with terror at the prospect of seeing my father’s dead body. It was the same immobilising terror as had engulfed me in Victoria station.

  From inside the room the women called out: ‘Come in!’ But I could not.

  And I never did see him dead. The fact that he actually was dead, there in the next room, was itself nightmare enough. I did go into the room once before the funeral, but by then he was laid down flat on the bed and covered by a sheet. Even so, I was horrified by the knobbly bumps in the sheet where his knees and shoulders were. This experience was followed by some days when he was lying uncovered in a coffin, and most of our visitors went in to see him. One of these declined the invitation with the words: ‘I prefer to keep a happy memory as the last one I have of him,’ and I seized on that gratefully, docketing it in my mind for my own use.

  English’s, the undertakers in Hoxton Street, arranged the burial of my father next to my grandfather in St Pancras Cemetery. Again I wore my Christ’s Hospital clothes. The whole occasion was so like my grandfather’s funeral, which had happened six months before, that it felt dream-like. We went through exactly the same motions: the same cars, the same drivers, the same route, the same rituals; only the corpse was different. But whereas I have never forgotten the concrete-like inner misery that filled me at my grandfather’s funeral, I remember nothing at all of what I felt at my father’s. Or perhaps, rather, I felt nothing. It was as if my whole world were dead, and my feelings dead too.

  Nor do I remember anything of the journey back home: I think we must have travelled in silence. The first memory I have is of my mother and me entering the flat and flopping down in the living room. She looked at me for a long time, as if reflecting on a new, serious thought, then said: ‘If you think I’m going to keep you at your age, you’re mistaken.’

  That these were the very first words she spoke to me was a shock greater than I can express. I looked at her, stunned. This was an aspect of my father’s death that I had not considered, the implication that henceforth I would be financially dependent on my mother. It was as if an ice-cold waterfall poured over me. In an instant, the feeling that everything was finished was superseded by the realisation that a whole new, unlooked-for world was about to begin.

  I just sat there taking it in.

  She went on: ‘You’re old enough now to look after yourself.’

  I still sat there, trying to come to terms with the fact that my life was being transformed even more than I had bargained for. From now on everything was going to be different, in startling and unpleasant ways that I had not begun to consider.

  ‘As far as I’m concerned,’ she said, ‘you’re on your own from now on.’

  In existing circumstances, the only place I could go to from home was school, and I had anyway arranged to go there next day. Years later I discovered that it was already an established policy with Christ’s Hospital to waive all further fees for any boy if either of his parents died while he was at the school; so the reality of my situation was that I could live at school free henceforth, until the normal time came for me to leave. But I had no idea of this. No one told me. Communication on this point between the school and my mother was not mentioned to me by either party. Transactions at such a level had always gone on above my head, without anyone talking to me about them. The consequences of this piece of ignorance on my part were to distort my life for several years. All I knew was that my fees had been raised by the school to £24 a year, and I took it for granted, without even thinking about it, that if the payments stopped I would have to leave. In any case, apart from money, my mother was now my legal guardian, the one with the power to make decisions for my life. And if she refused to keep me on at school it would put paid to my hopes of going to university. My heart was now firmly set on going to Oxbridge; and David Roberts thought I was pretty well bound to get in. He was going, he said, to enter me for a scholarship to Balliol when I was ready, which would be in about eighteen months’ time, when I was eighteen and a half. He said he was pretty sure that even if Balliol did not give me a scholarship they would offer me a place; and in these new days of government grants that came to almost the same thing. In the event, my complete failure to understand my situation resulted in my not going to Balliol. But that is a story that will have to wait until we come to it. I went back to school the next day, assuming that my fees had been paid only until the end of term.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  ON THE TRAIN back to Christ’s Hospital I found myself disturbed not only about my father’s death and my endangered future but about what I was going to say regarding my mother’s attitude. It seemed to me so base, so ignominious. I felt not so much ashamed of her as ashamed for her – and I did not want others to see her in this light. I came to the conclusion that although I could see no farther ahead than the end of term, I nevertheless did have until then before being compelled to make the decisions that I was going to have to make; and therefore it would be foolish not to give myself the full time to consider them. I ought to do this before rushing to talk about the situation to other people. It was characteristic of my young self, then and for some time after, to make my most important decisions inside myself, without discussing them with anyone else, or asking for advice. I took it for granted that only I could know what I wanted to do, and I did not see what anyone else could contribute. In my experience, people always tried to get you to do things you knew you were not going to do, and then themselves became part of the problem.

  As a matter of routine, the first thing I had to do when I got back to school was report to my housemaster. He had unexpected news for me. I was to go to France for several weeks, and as soon as could be arranged. Christ’s Hospital had set up an exchange with the Lycée Hôche in Versailles, and a number of seventeen-year-olds were going from one to the other for the remainder of the school year. Four boys from Christ’s Hospital had gone already; and in my absence a decision had been made that it would be good for me to go too. Indeed it was. I was plunged immediately into the distractions and practicalities
– and excitements – of preparing for it.

  Never had I been out of England. I needed to get my first passport; but in this and other respects the school had already made preparations: since I was under age, and legally the school was in loco parentis when I was there, it had acted for me. David Roberts was especially supportive. He gave me excellent advice, and not too much of it, about what to see and do in Paris. He also commanded that I send him regular reports in the form of a long letter once a week; and if, he said, I did this to his satisfaction he would give me my buttons when I returned. This was Christ’s Hospital parlance for making me a Grecian, one of the school’s elite. It meant I would hand in the standard blue coat I wore in exchange for a longer one of finer material, with velvet collar and cuffs, and an outpouring of big silver buttons down the front. Grecians were Olympian figures. They trod a different earth from the rest of us.

  I could not bring myself to talk even to David about my mother’s refusal to keep me, so although I expected to have to leave the school I accepted his offer with what I hoped would appear a good grace. It also seemed to me that going away would help me to think. In any event I was caught up in the excitement of the coming trip. Between 1939 and 1945 none of the inhabitants of Britain had been allowed out of the country except on war service, unless they had some extra-special reason. The fact that the whole of Europe was under the heel of fascist dictators doubled the feeling we all had of being cut off, as well as different, living in a fortress with the drawbridge up. During those formative years of mine, between the ages of nine and fifteen, I lived in a society in which private foreign travel did not exist, and could be thought about only in daydreams. I had had many such daydreams. But we were still scarcely two years from the end of the war, and still living on a semi-war footing: hundreds of thousands of people were still in the armed forces (the post-war Labour government staggered demobilisation over a period of years to prevent civilian unemployment); the whole population still had food rationing; there were almost prohibitive currency restrictions on foreign travel. It had not as yet occurred to me to think of such travel as available to me. In any case, aside from all this, and leaving the war aside too, people had travelled independently a great deal less until then than they do now. Before the war a majority of people in all social classes took their holidays in the British Isles – those who went abroad had a high profile but were a minority even among the well-to-do. The other members of my family, and almost everyone else we knew, had been abroad either once or not at all; and I believe this was typical of the population as a whole – I am talking, of course, of private travel. So I was now on the point of a tremendous experience, a Big Thing, to a degree not easy to convey.