by Maggie Wadey
The boy gave a lot of thought to which cricketer he liked and why. Even as a child he admired a player with style more than a mechanically successful scorer of runs. He liked a man who was casual and cheerful, who showed no pride when he did well and no petulance when he was run out. The sight of the players in their white ducks and pads was accompanied by equally delightful sounds: the cluck of the ball on willow ‘a noise like a trout taking a fly’ – deep male voices offering throwaway words of appreciation – the patter of applause from prettily coloured heaps of dresses which were the girls and women reclining on the grass or in deckchairs around the edge of the pitch.
My father was born in Slinfold, a small village in Sussex, in August 1918, shortly before the end of the Great War. On his birthday the following year, a peace pageant was held in the rectory gardens and the little boy, a lace-encrusted guest in his mother’s arms, never quite threw off the happy belief that the flags, the cheers, the songs and the cakes were all in his honour. David was the youngest son of the local wheelwright, and their blacksmith, Ted, carried the flag for the victory celebrations. Electricity came to the village when new cottages were built in 1928. Water came from wells, many of which were contaminated with medicinal salts, but the Wadeys’ own well was a source of good, sweet water and was supplied to the house by a rotary pump over the sink. Their house was big enough to host the Saturday cricket lunches, and it did so. The Wadeys’ business, though not thriving – few were – was respectable. They saw themselves as a family with a ‘position to keep up’, and my grandmother, Ella, was proud to do so.
This life – the village and the layout of its amenities – might have been designed with a small boy in mind. And not any small boy, this one in particular, as if his mind and character were not formed by the place but vice versa, as if he had dreamed it into existence to his own very precise specifications. I think of the exceptionally neat and exact architectural drawings he made as an adult, one of these being the drawings for a small house his uncle built on the outskirts of Slinfold in 1947. The name ‘Slinfold’ means ‘Fold in the Slope’ and this suggests its gently protected character, palmed in a shallow dip in the Weald. There was the forge with a deep pool full of goldfish close by; an old tannery; a small slaughterhouse beside the butcher’s; and next door, a neighbour who made sweets and sold them to the schoolchildren in their dinner hour. There was a railway station and a timber yard. Anything that didn’t fit his design – the Baptist chapel (into which his black-bonneted grandmother disappeared every Sunday and emerged even more sour-tempered than when she went in), the pub, the mobile library – these the boy ignored.
This was a knack he maintained for the rest of his life so that, far from becoming over-adapted to the life in which he was born – and correspondingly unfitted for any other – my father took his world with him: he perfected his natural inclination to see what he wanted to see, to eliminate from his field of vision what didn’t interest him and therefore cheerfully to fit in almost anywhere. But probably nothing ever compared with the thrill of cutting a fastball through the slips, or a straight drive all the way to the boundary.
From when David was seven or eight years old, his father was bedridden. This had its advantages. The boy was left remarkably free. At the same time, the only paternal example he remembers is one of invalidism and failure. He was the fourth child and, so he believed later in life, ‘a mistake’, born when his father’s health was already giving cause for concern. For the most part the little boy was ignored – ‘healthy neglect’ as he describes it now. But he received two important moral injunctions from his parents, injunctions he never forgot. In his workshop, his father had a verse up on the wall: ‘Right is right, and wrong is wrong, and no man’s wrong is another man’s right.’ From his mother, David had a story: ‘Two little boys are fighting in a lane and in the process they knock over a tramp. One of the boys helps the old man to his feet and the other says to him, “What are you bothering with him for? Who’s he?” To which the first boy replies, “It doesn’t matter who he is – the point is who I am.”’
Scarcity of money runs through my father’s childhood like veins through marble. Not something that crops up in my mother’s memories at all. But however much David was aware of it, it doesn’t appear to have distressed him. It was just one more problem to be solved, no more to be fretted over than the ‘from-we-takes’, as his mathematically challenged older brother called subtraction. My father’s presumption that the world makes sense and that practical problems can be solved is a characteristic that I inherited – not one you’d expect to stand the test of time but is in fact remarkably, idiotically resilient – another instance of the triumph of expectation over experience.
By the time my father was born, my grandfather, Charles, had become incapable of the physical work in the forge. Bright’s disease, or nephritis, is an autoimmune disease, rare now due to improved living and working conditions. Long after there were younger, stronger men to call on, Charles – the only qualified wheelwright in the business – insisted on doing his part of the physical labour, making the wooden wheel and then, all four men working together, manoeuvring the heavy, red-hot iron tyre. Once in place, the tyre was doused in water until it shrank into a tight fit, producing copious noxious steam in the process. An attack of acute tonsillitis turned Charles into an invalid. Aged only thirty-nine – and with Ella in charge of the bookkeeping – he had to be content with a general supervisory role. Sometimes he would fall down in a fit. Salty food, which he loved, especially brought on fits, which could be quite violent. He would crash to the floor and tear all the buttons off his pyjamas. Ella used to get Dorothy to go racing out for help and then they’d all sit on him. My father remembers none of this.
So Dorothy has a different story to tell. Or rather, she has an extra story, her own, that of the only daughter in a household where the mother made no pretence that girls were as good as boys. From when she was eight years old it was Dorothy’s responsibility to cook the Sunday breakfast. One morning, the frying pan handle caught in the lace on her vest, sending sausages all over the floor and hot fat down her legs. She fled crying to her mother, sobbing that she had spoiled their breakfast, to which Ella said, ‘There you go thinking of your stomach again.’ And Dorothy recalls either her mother or herself – never one of the boys – forever toiling up and down the stairs with the chamber pot her father filled with dark urine. The smell of urine, unpleasant because it was associated with the illness, pervaded the upper floor of the house. Charles, who had been scrupulous about taking care of his workmen, was less so in making provision for his family in case of his early death. Even after he’d become bedridden, when Ella begged him to make a will, he only replied, ‘Then all I have to do is die, isn’t it.’
He died anyway, in 1928, when he was forty-six, leaving Ella with four children under fourteen – David was only nine – and nothing to keep them on but his unpaid doctor’s bills. Chas’s doctor’s bills were unpaid because so many of the bills sent out to his customers were unpaid. The business was bankrupt. There was no pension and soon there was no home. My English grandfather had been a spectacularly bad businessman; too soft-hearted to collect debts from customers he knew were in difficulties.
For a brief while after her husband’s death – and still a sweet, pretty little thing of forty – Ella had hopes of a good-looking riding master, an Irishman, as it happens. In fact, it was understood that they were engaged to be married but, returning from a visit to his mother in Ireland, he jilted her shortly before the wedding. By the sound of it, Ella had a narrow escape. The riding master appears to have had a brutal, even sadistic streak. Still, when the prospect of marriage to the horse master failed, Ella became bitterly unhappy. Her independence, her status, had gone. Nothing mattered any more except survival. In this depressed frame of mind, in the summer of 1932, she accepted a position as housekeeper. Going into service was a painful humiliation for Ella, made worse by the fact that her two older sons, hav
ing left school at fourteen, initially had no prospects either. The family was finally broken up.
Yet in many ways my father’s life was unchanged. He was thirteen and his school days weren’t yet over. Although he went to live with his aunt, he continued at Collyer’s Grammar School for boys in Horsham. David’s education was now his mother’s priority. He became a prefect, and was made head of house. On Saturday and Sunday he played cricket. If asked, my father always says he had a happy childhood.
One spring day in 1935, my father travelled alone by train to London. He walked from Victoria Station to the Aldwych, following his street map and not needing to ask anyone for help. He was sixteen years old and on his way to an examination at the Vocational Guidance Department of the National Institute of Industrial Psychology – strange-seeming words to be placed side by side – and I have their report here in front of me now, kept all these years by my father and volunteered to me recently whilst talking over these times.
In the intelligence test, my father scored ‘considerably above the average for boys of his age and type of education’. Of his temperament it was noted: ‘He is a rather quiet, retiring boy who does not find it easy to take the initiative in making fresh social contacts. [Speaking of my father now, aged ninety-five, my husband remarks, “You could have fooled me!”] We feel, however, that he is of a fundamentally social disposition… During the examination he was very willing and co-operative. He is perhaps a trifle lacking in forcefulness. It is not that he is wanting in firmness; should the occasion arise we feel he would not easily be over-persuaded. We would not, however, expect him to develop permanent leadership characteristics…’ The conclusions of the institute were that my father had a ‘general level of intellectual ability very considerably above the average. We feel his work should be predominantly mathematical, with a practical bias, if possible. We feel he should aim at an occupation which will afford him a reasonable degree of security.’
There’s an almost eerie sense of accuracy about these observations, as if the examiners, in their brief encounter with this sixteen-year-old boy, had X-rayed their subject, seen, indeed, into his very soul. Of course, my father was, apart from his shyness, a very open character – both in the sense that honesty was characteristic of him and that he was ‘an open book’, easier to read than many. This examination may have amounted to the most concentrated attention he had received in all his short life. How much, I wonder, are we affected by reading such ‘objective’ descriptions of ourselves? Suggestibility is a deep, hidden response. The very accuracy of the report in some areas might incline us to accept other of its observations that are less certain. Is it possible that in defining a young person so clearly, setting out in black and white his limits, a report like this could act as a self-fulfilling prophecy?
My father stayed overnight in London with his cousin. Mary Remington was ten years older but unmarried, a forceful, attractive woman who was an artist and already a Royal Academician. It was the kind of encounter that could have had some profound effect, that might even have been life-changing. But it wasn’t. If my father thought Mary was selfish and a snob, he wasn’t alone, and he was sufficiently self-assured to know that her febrile world of social ambition and aesthetic values was of no interest to him. Five months later, having received a printed and bound copy of his psychological tests, my father was articled to the borough surveyor at Lewes, a pretty, ancient town famous for its anarchic and militantly anti-Catholic celebration of Guy Fawkes Day – the guy burned on the mountainous fire is usually an effigy of the Pope. Twenty-four years later, I was to have my first job in Lewes, too, in the public library, earning £4 10s a week and desperate to find a way out of the boredom – desperate, in fact, for a world more like Mary Remington’s, but as yet having found no way into it.
In 1935 – indeed, for the first two years of his being articled – my father had to get by on an allowance of £1 a week. For his midday meal he bought milk, and bread with a scoop of yeast on it from the brewer’s. Hardly enough to keep even a very modest body and soul together. But, his position being without pay, he was fortunate to have so much. My father had a mentor. Mr Henderson, a master at Collyer’s, had been prepared to give David his small weekly allowance and to provide the £100 premium due to the surveyor. Without this support he would have been unable to take the opportunity. My grandmother had to pay two subsequent sums of £25 to the surveyor. In this she was helped by Dorothy, who contributed two and sixpence a week from her tiny wage as a nanny to help support her brother through his training and on up the professional and social ladder to better things. His mother’s and Henderson’s generosity my father remembers with deep gratitude, but he doesn’t remember – he quite possibly wasn’t told at the time – that Dorothy contributed quite as much as she did.
My father’s aunt Ruth, with whom he now lived, had meanwhile moved house. Aunt Ruth was fat but her husband, Bert, was a lean, sinewy man like something carved from dark wood, known as Tigger Garton for his fearsome reputation as a fighter. Bert had taken the post of gardener at a ‘big house’ in Lindfield, east of Haywards Heath. There they lived in a tied cottage – just as my Irish grandparents lived in the house on Knigh Hill – and my father lived with them. He paid Aunt Ruth 12s 6d for board and lodging. Ruth was a good cook and they ate fresh produce from the garden. Her first and only child, Joan, was a little girl of three or four who adored my father even though he teased her mercilessly. A shrew lived under the stairs, and in the woods giant puffball mushrooms grew as bald and white as stellar observatories. In the evenings they often sat in the firelight singing songs accompanied by Ruth on a pretty, upright piano which, until very recently, stood in my own spare room. Ruth’s voice was alto, Bert’s tenor, and David’s a very sweet baritone.
It was Bertie who said one day to my father, ‘Are you going to the New Year’s Eve dance then, boy?’
My father had heard there was to be a dance in the village hall but, as his uncle perfectly well knew, he’d not thought of going, and said so.
‘Well,’ said Bertie, ‘there’s a girl at the house who’s looking for someone to take her. She’s the new cook, and she’s very nice. I think you should ask her.’
My father decided a look would be a good thing before committing himself. The effect of this look almost made him lose his nerve. On the cook’s day off, he waited by his aunt’s gate until the new girl came cycling down the driveway, holding her skirt down with one hand, a lit cigarette between her fingers. David was eighteen, handsome, with a natural wave to his hair and a graceful way of standing. He wasn’t unaware of these things but at the same time he didn’t expect this young woman with her proud, pale profile to even glance in his direction. Then at the last moment, a light flitted over her face and, almost invisibly, Agnes gave him her reticent country-girl’s smile.
2
‘During most decades since the 1880s more women than men have emigrated from Ireland. The vast majority of these women were single, younger than their male counterparts and travelled alone.’
– Irish Women in England, by Clare Barrington
There is a series of paintings by de Chirico of Ariadne in exile, motionless and melancholy. Two things about Ariadne most define her: she provided the thread – in the case of the ancient story she provided a literal, physical thread to lead Theseus out of the labyrinth, but also a metaphorical thread, as in the thread of a story; secondly, she went into exile where she was alone until rescued by a lover who took her up to Heaven – is this an early instance of the later Romantic convention in which love and death are conflated? Or is it more a case of love being an earthly paradise? In any case, Ariadne spent a long time alone on a rock, abandoned, and that’s how de Chirico pictures her, lost in a state of deep contemplation. If there’d been someone there on the rock with her, would she have told her story, or maintained an enigmatic silence?
When my mother left Tipperary, she took very little with her. But what she had was beyond price: her chaste whit
e body, her skills, and her inspiring ‘notions’. She also had a hatbox. It was Mrs Minchin who had given it to her. Old, but in good condition, it was in dark blue leather with a striped silk lining (I still have it). On one side there’s a little ruched pocket, on the other, a buttoned-down pocket in which Agnes found a new £5 note and – what she had most needed – an excellent reference as to her character and her professional ability. Yet when I asked if she’d been excited setting out for a new life, she had replied, ‘I wasn’t excited. I was terrified.’ Along with everyone else, at Dublin she would have had to go through a humiliating ‘delousing’ procedure because the English authorities were still afraid of disease coming in from Ireland.
In north-west London, Agnes had four Kavanagh siblings already established in marriages and in work. Church was all-important. But on Saturday nights they could, if they wished, socialise at one of the clubs and dance halls that were just beginning to be part of the emigrant Irish life. These were men and women having a good time, a touch defiantly asserting their exiled Irish identity here in the heart of London. But Agnes bypassed London altogether. It was no part of her intention to declare herself one with a minority, to ‘wear the shamrock’, or go to Mass as if her mother was still there looking over her shoulder. No, my mother took the train to a village in Sussex where she joined Nancy.
Why Nancy, the baby of the Kavanagh family, should have come to Sussex, I don’t know. It’s not explained by the fact that she had recently married an Englishman, since Bill was himself a Londoner and, at the time of my mother’s first meeting him, he wasn’t employed locally – or anywhere else. Bill was not to my mother’s liking. He doesn’t seem to have been much to anyone’s liking. It turned Agnes’s stomach to see Nancy curled on his lap in the mornings, drinking his kisses. And she was distressed by the conditions in which Nancy was living: happy, poor as the proverbial church mouse, and, by now, pregnant. Her knowingly raffish young husband had no sooner married than he was out of work. Nancy had never had a spare ounce of flesh on her small frame. Now, employed as a laundress, she was owed a few ounces, and her pregnancy showed as a tight little bulge she kept cupping with her red, chapped hands. When the buttons dropped off her cheap flowered shifts, Agnes was the one to find them, where they’d rolled away into the dust, and sew them back on.