The history of architecture, the study of human habitations great and small, was not then fashionable. The National Trust was on a rescue mission, no mistake. The heritage business did not exist. Progress was the watchword; new was good. This leads me to a complicated personal muddle. It never crossed my father’s mind that what might be called a ‘social’ interest might be taken in great houses, but it may cross that of my reader, so much have the times changed. Great houses were being pulled down at the rate of one a week in Scotland, more in England, during my childhood; my father was, as it were, their protector, champion and physician. My father had no interest in who was who and indeed rather regretted anybody being anybody on account of his shyness about the personal. Naturally this made him an ideal friend of anybody who was used to being sucked up to; such people found themselves refreshed by his disinterestedness, his consuming interest. He engaged with houses, less so with home.
Where this is muddling in any account of my own life became clear to me in a horrible but revelatory way after the first ever interview I did when my novel A Case of Knives came out 1988. My trajectory, which has felt to me, naturally enough, just like my own life, is legible in various disobliging ways and it’s not lost on me that one of these involves what that genius Kingsley Amis calls hypergamy. He meant that a clever man who can make people laugh can marry any woman he wishes, even the most beautiful. It’s not the same for women. I mean that I started off what I think I still am, an Edinburgh girl, but somehow time and events have made me seem to be an Englishwoman; an Englishwoman, at that, of some privilege.
Then we did just stay in, visit, talk and think about houses. Some of these were small and some were not. What they had in common was that they were at that time imperilled.
Where were you when you first read Struwwelpeter? I don’t know if you can buy it now; it may be available from antiquarian or ‘special-interest’ booksellers. The first copy of it I found was certainly from the century before last. Its terrifying vigorous bossy pornography has set some of my rules for life. The red-legged scissor-man visited me only last night, oddly enough with the face of Richard Dawkins, with whom, how can one’s dreams be this trite, I was playing chess. Augustus the chubby lad–‘fat ruddy cheeks Augustus had’–is still, on bad days, my picture of myself, and, even when I got down to the pin man Augustus in my thirties, I still felt like the fat boy before he started rejecting his nutritious soup. I found Struwwelpeter under a bed I was sleeping in at Culzean Castle in Ayrshire, built by Robert Adam on a cliff over the sea. Daddy was restoring it, quite considerably with his own hands; the castle has a high oval rotunda with a sweeping exaltation of staircase, arising with composure like written music up inside its shell. Daddy would be up a trembly ladder with his cigarette, re-limning cartouches or re-plastering crumbled bits of Vitruvian scrollwork. I was never, while he breathed, not worried about my father. When he died, there was at least that; he couldn’t fall off a battlement or dive through a skylight. Or, indeed, he couldn’t ever again get arrested for trespass or burglary.
The grateful nation of Scotland had just given a wing of Culzean in perpetuity to the American people for the use of their President should he find himself on the Ayrshire coast. I was left to potter about while Daddy worked. I had at the time a broken right arm and dislocated shoulder so I had learned to draw and write with my left hand. I was four but was very proud that I had a duffel coat made for a fourteen-year-old to accommodate my plaster. I was sleeping in President Eisenhower’s bed, or at any rate having a rest in it, when I found Struwwelpeter. Who the Dickens can have left it there?
Culzean sits on the Ayrshire coast in replete beauty among its gardens. We would always be there for daffodil time, later in Scotland than in England, and the creak of daffodils as I walked among them and smelled the sea from within the castle ramparts was safety itself. The spring of the broken arm I spent secretly memorising Struwwelpeter, being spoilt by the tea-room ladies who gave me glacé cherries, and sitting atop one of the stocky little cannons that defend this gracefully parodic masterpiece. I tried daily, failed daily, to lift a cannonball. The balls were arranged in neat pyramids beside each gun. In the evening after a sunny day they held warmth until the light had gone and if you licked them the rusty salt taste was delicious. It’s the taste of oysters. Blood, iron, iodine.
Around 1960, the National Trust for Scotland hired a cruise ship from a Norwegian shipping line and invited archaeologists and other enthusiasts to take a tour of the Hebrides on the SS Meteor. Particular attention was to be paid to brochs, early structures sometimes so early as to be hardly perceptible to the uninitiated. My father was overseeing some aspects of the tour and giving informative evening talks.
For a greedy only child who was the only child on the ship, it was a taste of the high life. One evening there really was a swan made of ice at the Captain’s table and, during the day, a childless American couple made much of me. We passed the great organ pipes of Staffa and Fingal’s Cave, we stopped at Iona where I heard the turf praying. No one had yet spoken directly to me of God, so I had built him for myself.
I had not become a liar yet and I am not a liar now, but I do believe that we made harbour at the island of Colonsay, disembarked and toured its surprising tropical gardens that surround the pretty open-armed big house. It only takes one more squeeze of my memory to have it believe that we met the handsome wife of the island’s laird. She was nice to me, my false memory tells me, because I was the only child aboard and she knew that plurality can nourish a being.
One of seven children herself, and mother of six, she seems in my mind’s eye to be wearing a flowered dress and gloves. Knowing what I know now, I realise I must have made it all up.
Perhaps on account of my father’s absent-mindedness about my mother’s birthday, I felt some unease around 3 September each year. On her thirtieth birthday, her cat Nancy Mitford fell two stone storeys from her bedroom. My superstitious mother really did take this as an ill omen, to which she often referred, to do with cats having nine lives but herself just the one and her birthday being the day the Second World War began. On my own thirtieth birthday, I was making supper when a large white rabbit fell from the sky. It screamed horribly, for its back was broken. Our neighbour from the flat next door kindly despatched it. Or should that be our neighbour from the flat next door despatched it, kindly?
A large and floppy-eared rabbit, the poor thing had been bought by the tenant of the top flat in our building as part of his pet python’s supper. The RSPCA visited in due course and found quite a selection of reptiles, including, tear-jerkingly predictably, a crocodile, diappointingly not resident in the lavatory.
Even at six, though, I had come to see that birthdays were the teeth of time and that things were not improving between my parents. My own high-summer birthday was celebrated with strawberries and cream. I was allowed a friend over. I chose a girl at random because I didn’t have a best friend yet. She was called Gillian. I thought her very dainty and pretty. When the time came for cake and strawberries and cream she cried and cried because she did not like what she called ‘real cream’. She was scared of my parents’ English accents and had met cream only once before, when it had been nice, between two pieces of meringue. It was ‘shop cream’. Real cream, she said, was dirty because it came from cow-juice and gave you an illness that made you cough up blood.
In embarrassment made worse by the need for festivity, my parents said goodbye to our poor little guest with her white socks and angora bolero. Later, the childish part of the day was over and the dinner table was full of adults, the blue and white plates, hot food. In the sky were both the sun and the moon. There was one more, and most beautiful present, a dress made of the best velvety cotton, cut exactly to my dimensions and embroidered inside its neck with lavender silk thread spelling out my full name Candia Frances Juliet in beautiful clear handwriting made with a needle. This gift was to go deeper with my mother than any tattoo on skin and I was one year clos
er to becoming a fat little liar.
A vacancy had been filled in our family, no larger than a needle’s eye.
LENS II: Chapter 2
In the life of the present I am reading, that is listening to, Paradise Lost. It is read by Anton Lesser, whose intelligent doubt-filled voice somehow emphasises the clouded giants and rivers of pearl he speaks of through the mind of Milton. So far in my blindness only my accountant has been sufficiently innocent and jolly to mention Milton to me, over the receipts.
How consoling and terrifying it was to hear the words: ‘the mind is its own place; and in itself / can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven’. When first I became blind, Fram, who lives sixty miles away, suggested that I would never be quite alone because I have ‘my art’. I felt at once consigned to live off something that I was not talented or morally courageous enough to address. It was like telling a deer to build its future around raw meat. I’m doing my best and I’m quite aware that whatever my ‘art’ was, it will have been changed by my blindness. It remains to be seen, if I may use that word, how. I was never alone when I could read.
My parents and I visited England only for very specific familial reasons. I was always carsick and usually moving between anxiety and terror, relieved by daydreams, at this period all about being a doctor of great bravery during a selection of historical scenarios; I suspect I was usually disguised as a boy in these roles. My father had never passed a driving test, braked on corners and both parents smoked in the fuggy leather cupboard that was our car within. It wasn’t our car, really, but the National Trust for Scotland’s. This non-ownership was significant to my sense of our hardly holding on to our ledge in life.
Our reasons for visiting England included my parents’ bookseller friend Ben Weinreb and his family. Ben gave me the dummy of a book called London 2000 to draw in. Both date and city seemed lifetimes distant from me and my life; now we are years beyond it and Ben is dead. We visited other friends, a couple called Myrtle and Bear; he was known as Bear, since, as a diabetic, he couldn’t have sweet things. He too was a book dealer. Myrtle was a potter. There were some rather glamorous friends in Hampstead, he perhaps a sculptor, she certainly a sexpot. She struck me as the best sort of sexpot because her warmth went out in all directions, not merely to men.
The main reason that we ever went as a family to England was to visit grandparents. This was never comfortable. My widowed paternal grandmother lived at Windsor Castle in a tiny house in the cloister that nonetheless had a speaking tube to call long-departed servants. She had been a nurse at Great Ormond Street Hospital and bore the loss of her husband with a daily exercised Christian faith and ingrained modest fortitude. My grandfather, Ormiston Galloway Edgar McWilliam, a man whose temperament was made for peace and the arts of peace, fought as a teenager in the trenches in the Great War and was killed at the end of the Second World War while laying a smokescreen in the tail end of an aeroplane that was shot down, I believe, by our own side. Among his close friends was the painter Henry Lamb, and the letters between them show a relish for family life and a sensitivity to preposterousness both at war and in the smaller frays of family life. Lamb’s letters are often illustrated with quick sketches of his children being dried after a bath, paddling and so on. In one of his letters my grandfather describes tucking my six-year-old father back into bed after the child had been awoken by the flare and crackings of the Crystal Palace burning down, of which my grandfather gives an eyewitness account. My grandfather wrote and illustrated a published book before he was twenty. It is about the battle at Suvla. He must have known he was going to die then.
But he didn’t, or not in that war. I have the photographs of him as the captain of both rugby and cricket teams at Charterhouse. On the back of each photograph he has written in almost every case the date and place where each smiling young man in the fading picture had fallen in war.
His widow, my grandmother’s was not a false piety; she was a deeply believing Anglican whose daily notebooks used to shock me with their probity when I was ten and thought I knew a lot. Clearly I knew nothing. What decent child goes through the notebooks of her grandmother? Each day she recorded the church services she had attended, to whom she had written, and from whom she had received, letters, and how much money she had spent. The amounts were very small. She had an expressed quality of humility that enraged my mother and there is no doubt at all that my humble grandmother looked very far down upon her tall, ostensibly worldly daughter-in-law. The word, though it was never used, would have been ‘vulgar’. Certainly my paternal grandmother regarded my maternal grand parents as being ‘not quite…’ or, that damning deprecation, ‘too grand for us’.
My mother teased my father unkindly about his attachment to his mother and referred to her mother-in-law, also unkindly, as ‘Navy Blue Throughout’. These had been the words that my grandmother had replied with when my mother’s mother asked her what she would be wearing to the wedding that would conjoin their ill-matched families.
I called my paternal grandmother ‘Grand’mère’. I suspect this was to get over some difficulty about my own mother refusing to address her as ‘Mother’, as convention might then have asked. In due time, my stepmother would address her thus.
My mother’s own mother wasn’t that fond of Mummy either. My grandmother Clara was from theatre people; her own mother and grandmother, with their long beautiful legs, had been male impersonators on the stage. My maternal great-grandmother was a friend of Vesta Tilley. There are lost photographs of my transvestite ancestresses looking wonderful in tails and tights. How I wish I had them now. I packed them away in a trunk before I moved into my first marital home. The trunk was stored by a friend. The friend died sadly, surprisingly, dreadfully, young. How could I even mention my trunk of keepsakes to a family that had lost its head? As it is, the trunk of travesties sounds like the framing device for one of those dull novels that are meant to show us some flat tale of parallel lives separated only by time, whose moral is that we are all sisters under the skin. I worry, too, that my long-lost trunk may contain things of which I might be ashamed, satin trousers, proposals of marriage, lists of things to do that will resemble in every way those lists I write thirty-five years on.
Neither Mummy nor I inherited the great legs. My grandmother Clara’s first speaking role on the stage was as Little Lord Fauntleroy, aged five. She was so symmetrically and astoundingly elongated and so facially beautiful that she was continually stopped on the street. I have one photo of her, singing the part of Mad Margaret in Ruddigore. Considering the town’s later importance in my life, it is odd that I should, for the earliest part of it, have thought that ‘Basingstoke’ was an invented word that you employed to calm female lunatics. In the Mad Margaret photograph, my glorious grandmother’s glorious hair reaches to her calves. Later when she cut it off her father, who owned a string of theatres in the East End and on the South Coast, didn’t speak to her for months. He could eat twelve dozen oysters at a sitting. My grandmother Clara was known as Clare; she had two sisters, Ruth and Edna. Edna married and lived in Guernsey, impossibly exotic. I remember meeting Great-Aunt Edna only once, during a half-term out from my English school. We sat in some silence. Nobody’s accent sounded real except my grandmother’s self-invented grande dame tones. Poor, blind Ruth became a counter in my parents’ stony game that no one could win.
My father was a dab hand at playing ducks and drakes, making flat stones bounce off the, I suppose, epilimnion. As their marriage worsened, my mother would say, ‘Throwing stones can blind people. My Aunt Ruth was blinded, aged seven, for life by a boy throwing stones.’
You could see my father was getting bored with my mother. This boredom made her anxious. I was anxious for them both, with their separate damaged hearts. I can’t remember a time when I didn’t know that my father’s heart was literally fragile since he had had rheumatic fever during his National Service. He was meant to avoid physical risk and exertion; of course he didn’t. And since I lived wi
th my face as far up my mother’s sleeve as I could get it, so as to smell her, I knew all about the heart that was worn there too.
Our visits to my maternal grandparents were approached with sublimated satire and some dread by my father. God knows how my mother felt. I think the person with whom she was easiest was Ernest, who had been her father’s soldier-servant and stayed on. She was adored by Ernest in a way that she was not by her parents to whom her gender, height, appearance and marriage were all a disappointment. Her father called her ‘Scruff’, not kindly meant.
The Folly, West Drive, Sonning-on-Thames, Berkshire, was England to me, and how it scared and stifled me. I could not then have placed what it was about this single-storey brick residence made, as I could never forget, with my grandfather’s blood, toil, tears and sweat, that took the air out of me but I never entered it without knowing I was going into another country where they did things differently. I recognised the claustrophobia when encountering it again in Elizabeth Bowen’s great wartime novel about escape from a certain England, The Heat of the Day. There is in it a house called Holme Deane, that is not The Folly, naturally, but has some of its effect.
I don’t eat ham or pork, sausages or bacon. I have a number of Jewish friends who really like sausages or will eat a bacon sandwich. My refusal to eat pig-meat started off as a gesture of wholly pointless identification, and maybe its motives aren’t as grand as I thought they were, when I was seven. Maybe they are a pettifogging, grandiose and utterly pointless boycotting of a certain England. I was scared of the flatness, the enclosure, the sense of being tinned. One could not, as in a home in the North, stretch and shout and breathe in and out. One was in a tin and on a shelf and set in place, the place to be, to sit and stay sat, set.
Ham and salad was what we had for lunch at The Folly, the ham like big wet hangnails, the salad made of units, one lettuce leaf, a quarter of tomato, a slice of egg, a pinch of cress, and that incontinent flitch of beetroot. My father loved Heinz Salad Cream and got his lunch down with the help of this; for pudding it was ice cream and tinned fruit salad. This was for the times a perfectly festive family meal. My mother had spoiled me by her Italianising of our life, her olive oil, aubergines, herbs. At The Folly, meals were taken because what you did at one o’clock was have lunch. It was almost an act of patriotism, a contribution to the resettlement of the world post-war, the healing deployment of routine against chaos or otherness.
What to Look for in Winter Page 10