Try to Tell the Story

by David Thomson

  And there was my dad, fit as a flea, the life and soul of every gathering he ever agreed to, and home just these odd weekends, but behaving as if his schedule were the height of normality or even duty.

  “Isn't the war over?” I asked eventually. It was my way of wondering when he would be home all the time.

  He drew in a deep, thoughtful breath—he did that very well. “Not really, old chap,” he'd say. “Not by a long shot.” There was a war in Asia, too, he explained, and he found maps to make it seem so. I swallowed that until I heard that the Japanese had surrendered too. But Dad's timetable persisted. There he was on Friday nights getting off a 49 bus at the end of the road—in time I would be there to meet him, and he was always on the same bus. He was so reliable, yet so lost. Then we had Saturday morning—shopping and stamps, with sports in the afternoon. Then on Sunday mornings we'd go to Mitcham, to see Grandma and Bert. Back for lunch, and then he'd read the papers in the afternoon and stick his new stamps in the albums. Sunday evening Grannie would come upstairs for a sandwich supper and we'd listen to the radio for the Sunday-night theater serial. Mondays, before seven o'clock—so I often missed him—he was gone.

  It was a little like a military program, and I suppose that encouraged the half-thought that Dad was on assignment somehow. And I wondered if the term of duty would soon be over.

  “Well, there's the Cold War, isn't there?” he pointed out.

  “Cold War?”

  “Here's Mr. Churchill in the paper,” he'd say. “Going on about the Iron Curtain. You see, the funny thing about the war was that, big as it was, maybe it wasn't the real war. Maybe we should have been fighting the Russians?”

  He explained that we had lots of men in uniform still, with armies stationed all over the world. So there was the same old need for radios. “Radios and radar,” my dad said judiciously. “They really won the war.” And I was left to imagine that he had been the necessary glue in the whole trick.

  You see, he understood the war. He could explain the history to you. Once we walked over to Grandma and Bert's—a three-mile walk—and he gave a brilliant narrative of the whole show And we were there just as Hitler went into the bunker. Story-telling is a knack, and he had it. Whereas Reg and Tommy, who had been there, if you asked them to talk about it, they waved you aside and said, “You don't want to hear about that,” rather as if they'd been there, but in a daze. I had heard grown-up talks where Dad explained the war to them, and they nodded and drank it in—the big picture. And it was part of his theme that wars one and two had only been preparing the way for the big thing—the Cold War, where war was never really declared, and never settled. No need—it was the natural state of things. And then he'd give me a big smile and tap me on the shoulder as if to say everything was going to be all right. He looked happy, and I began to get the idea that perhaps some people liked war because it kept dull, ordinary life at bay. And I am not sure, still, that ever since 1939 we haven't had war, a knowledge that everything could be over before we heard the bang—so why count on, or be accountable to, anything as stupid as ordinary life?

  Was that what it was all about? The fear of being ordinary? And was that what Dad and I had in common beyond the same know-all attitudes and the moment when our faces twisted in stammering?

  I grew into a terrible anger over it, so that I sometimes wonder whether all my capacity for anger was drawn off into that feeling about my father and his lies. Because, you see, it went on—Jesus, it went on, in its crazy way, until my mother died in 1976. So you could be furious or amazed, and long before the end you could see that my father was nearly mad living that way. He had a terrific air about being the best-informed and most far-seeing person in the family—really, we were lucky to have him, poor souls— but it left him looking deranged. If you're that smart, we said with wicked giggles, how did you end up with us? Except that, obviously, he did have his other life.

  I knew he left at about a quarter to seven on Monday mornings and sometimes I was sorry to see him go because he played with me and took me to sports and told me things like the history of the war. And I still think about those things. But I was “at home,” and I had a mum who would look after me. I trusted that. I had seen the checks he left her in his neat hand-writing, which worked out to about ten pounds a week by the mid-1950s. Her money, for looking after us.

  But think of it from his point of view. In the dark of the early morning, he has to get away to catch the bus to be back at work—by nine, let's say—carrying his small suitcase like a commercial traveler. And then after a Monday at work, he goes back—where? He told me he had a room in a boarding house but he never gave me the address or a phone number. Suppose it was more. Suppose he had another home—and even another woman? And this started in 1941, or soon after, and don't forget that it went on until 1976. Of course, there was another woman. And all she did was cling to this man who went away every two weekends out of three, and at Christmas, Easter, Whitsun, and August Bank Holiday, and on a “family” holiday with his wife and son, though only for the first week of the two.

  7

  ON AND OFF DURING THE 1920S and ‘30S, Grannie (her given name was Violet Edith Wharton) and her husband (Alexander, dead in the bath) had had a theatrical company. I'm not sure of its status. But, maybe for charity or hospitals, they went around and put on plays. This was in South London and Surrey, because the family lived in Sutton then. Grannie was the star actress, and though she had—I thought—an unkind, hard face, she had a great voice with unusual carrying power and perfect diction. In our three-storey house, she could talk to you from the ground floor to the top without raising her voice. And Dad had played cameo parts— villains and comics—and I think he had been very happy doing so. He preferred supporting actors at the movies and was reliable for his “turn,” no matter that he got no direction or attention. He believed Peter Lorre was a great personality—and so do I, still do. But hardly Dad material. When Mum got enlisted as Dad's girl friend, she played a few small parts, but she admitted that she had been nervous and shy. She also told me, in a matter-of-fact way, that Dad was actually quite good—that you saw something of him onstage (a kind of fun) that was not always there in life. And I could see that in pretending he flowered, like the hyacinth bulbs we kept in the dark. He liked to make people laugh: I know it because I have the same weakness, or the same shy habit of telling stories.

  Here's one of his jokes, to give you an idea. He often had jokes to tell, and they were usually quite long and grew longer with every telling. This is a joke from soon after the end of the war, and I'll try to do it in his voice, or his way.

  “Did you hear about the King and Uncle Joe?” he'd ask me.

  “No,” I said. I had great childish respect for the King, George VI, and I knew that Uncle Joe was Josef Stalin, supreme commander of all the Soviet Union and another big mustache in the papers.

  “Well, the King thought he'd try and help with the Russian problem, so he sends Uncle Joe a letter and says, ‘Why not come on a state visit?’ And Uncle Joe decides that it's a good idea. And he comes to Britain, and the King and the Queen greet him at the railway station and Joe says, ‘Where am I staying?’ and the King says, ‘Ah, well, I've got you the best suite at Claridge's. It's just up the road from the Palace. I think you'll be very comfortable.’

  “But Joe says, ‘I want to stay in the Palace. Buckingham Palace. With you.’

  “The King sighs and says, ‘Well, Joe, to be honest with you, the palace is on the chilly side. We had some bomb damage, you know, and we can't get the builders over.’

  “Uncle Joe sulks and says, ‘Palace, or I go home.’

  “Well, the King does what he can. He gets the Queen to hurry back home and find the best guest room, and they patch the broken windows. To make a long story short, Joe stays at the palace and he seems to enjoy it.

  “So the King says, ‘Joe, the Royal Tournament is on— big military show—and I thought you might like to see it.’

 
; “Joe's mouth droops. ‘Vould like to see grand assembly of British fleet—at Scapa Flow,’ he says.

  “This is a tall order. The British fleet isn't what it used to be, and the ships are scattered all over the place. The King tries to explain this and Uncle Joe says, ‘You are the King—you fix it.’ And the King does his best at short notice. They can't go to Scapa, but the King gets twenty or so ships to Spithead—and Joe seems very pleased. ‘Good fleet!’ he says.’Good show!’

  “The King relaxes, and he tells Joe about a big treat. They're going to see Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh do Macbeth—a command performance—the full flower of the English theater.

  “Joe frowns. ‘Hmm,’ he says. ‘I prefer Hamlet.’

  “‘But they're not doing Hamlet at the moment, Joe,’ says the King. ‘Macbeth is the play they've learned. And, anyway, Hamlet is long, you know’

  “‘I hear Hamlet is the greatest play,’ says Joe. ‘You're the King …’ Et cetera.

  “Olivier has a fit, but he agrees to do it—Hamlet, the works. Uncle Joe falls asleep, but he wakes up clapping and pronounces it very good.

  “So far, so good. Well, Saturday's coming up, football day, and the King says, ‘I thought we might see a match.

  And it happens that Chelsea are at home to Manchester United. Should be a cracker.’

  “‘Arsenal,’ says Stalin. ‘I like the name Arsenal.’

  “‘Very good team, too,’ says the King. ‘But they're playing away this Saturday at Newcastle. Too far to go.’

  “And Joe looks at the King and says, ‘You are the King—have the game played here, in London.’

  “Whereupon, King George VI, bless him—because he never wanted to be King and wouldn't have been but for Edward VIII and Mrs. Simpson, and it was hell on his stammer—says, ‘Look, Joe, I've done a lot for you, and I'm happy to do it—but I'm not going to let you spoil my Three Away Winners on the pools.’“

  While British readers are rolling on the floor in what used to be called “mirth,” I will explain to others that every week in Britain there was heavy gambling— especially among the working classes—on the football pools. The punter had to forecast results. The biggest prize was for predicting eight draws. But obviously the King (a humble man) favored the Three Away Wins pick.

  As you can guess, this story could be enlarged with many other steps, even to the point of Uncle Joe demanding a sunny day at Wimbledon. When I was a child, it seemed to me that my dad was a fabulous teller of such stories, and I know when I first heard this one I took it for granted that his special war “service,” the being away, had brought him into direct contact with both the King and Stalin. There's something about this story—and its hangdog intimacy—that gets at the “private” life of harassed monarchy, a theme that goes from Charles Laughton in The Private Life of Henry VIII all the way to Helen Mirren in The Queen. What is the royal family for? So that shaggy-dog stories may be told about their absurd status. What does that do? It makes them human and trivial. With what result? We knock along with them. Yet somehow the silliness of royalty excuses us from final realities—we can't cut off their heads again because … well, they'd be offended, wouldn't they. The way they are if you talk to them first. It's a fatuous rigmarole, but it helps explain why an allegedly grown-up nation still drags along with these poor idiots.

  But my Dad showed this mystery in himself with the story. In life, he said nothing about himself or his life or what he felt. But in the story-telling, he became large, full of nuances, nooks, and crannies. His King was someone you wanted to put your arm around when words of consolation were beyond the point—and not allowed, because you are not supposed to address the King and Queen until you're spoken to first. Of course, even then there were hints from grown-ups that they'd heard all these stories too many times before. But I was touched and opened up. I'm sure I saw a potential for myself in the expansion of narrative voice—and even a way of seeming frank and honest, while drawing the wool across your eyes.

  By which I mean to alert you to the modern disquiet over the “memoir” as a reliable literary form. I am trying to tell you the truth—but I don't think I know the truth. I am still, years after his death, bewildered and pained by my father, and trying to love him—or find his love for me. But he lived in true shadow, and even if he was vivid in telling a story or playing a part, he sometimes left the impression that there was nothing else there. I think I'm reaching out for the idea that, having written a lot about actors, I realize now how far my father raised me to it. And I have very mixed feelings about actors.

  But as my father moved so regularly from one household to the other, I wonder how close he came to seeing that lying itself, that becoming a figure in a story but not belonging in life, was his impetus? Whenever I see great pieces of English cross talk—Morecambe and Wise or Harold Pinter—I long for the Pinter play about the state visit of the Russian premier or president or whatever he was and the put-upon King. With my father playing both parts and the farcical melodrama going on forever. Until Uncle Joe says one day, “I vish to see this Kenneth Douglas Thomson …” and the forlorn King has to admit, “Sorry, Joe—not possible. He and I have never been caught in the same room together.”

  Stalin sighs and twists his mustache and is bound to tell the King that this is war, then.

  The sad comic was a feature of those postwar years usually on the radio. The fellow would come on, with a whining voice about the glories of peacetime and having won the war, and of course he sounded like someone from a ruined nation. I still don't understand why the British tolerated such a bleak victory for so long, but we did, and the horror of it all was in the melancholy voices of Al Read, Max Wall, Tony Hancock, and even Archie Rice.

  The only thing I think I ever heard about my father's other life was years later. I was in my late teens and he was living—I knew from my mother, but not from him—in the St. Albans area. But still he came home. Somehow or other, he learned I was reading Chekhov at school, and out of nowhere one day he said, “I'm doing Chekhov in a play.” This was a great surprise, not just of having a life filled in to the least degree but because his manner was not quite right for Chekhov. Still, he admitted that he was in an amateur theater company, and he was playing one of Chekhov's old people. He said he found it very empty, and he was amazed that the play was labeled a comedy when there were never any laughs. I fear he may have labored to create them.

  “You don't have to laugh out loud at comedy,” I said. Say I was sixteen then, and very snooty.

  He looked at me as if he thought—for the first time-that I might not be his son. And he told another story.

  One day, a farmworker was putting manure on a field of strawberry plants. There was another man watching, from over the fence of the local lunatic asylum.

  “What are you doing, then?” said the watcher.

  “Spreading shit on the strawberries,” said the laborer patiently.

  “Oh,” said the man. There was a pause. “We use cream here—but, of course, we're daft.” Maybe Dad had felt more in Chekhov than I had.

  8

  IWAS VERY YOUNG when I was taken to the pantomime, and I think we went because my father knew people in the show from the old theatrical days. And we sat in the front row of the circle. I can remember holding on to the brass rail on top of the upholstered ledge. Hold on so you don't fall over, I suppose. And the pigeons came and sat on the rail too. Of course, you can do almost anything you like in a pantomime. That's what makes it so rich and interesting. And there must have been a man who did stage magic in which the pigeons flew up to the rail and then flew back on his command. Something like that. And the pigeons came to the rail near me—did Dad arrange for that?—and I cried out “Pidgies!” in my piping voice. I have the vaguest recollection of it—it was always very hard to extricate what had really happened from Dad's account afterwards. Suppose he was telling himself stories all along!

  I think the pantomime was Aladdin. When it was over we went ba
ckstage to meet the actors. They seemed to be about twenty feet tall, and I was terrified of them, especially the Grand Vizier, who seemed to be Dad's friend. But there were boys in tights and high-heeled shoes who proved to be girls when you got close to them. There was an extraordinary smell, sick but sweet, and I asked what it was. No one knew. No one noticed. Until my mum suddenly said, “He must mean the greasepaint.” That was it, and not long after as a kid I was given Leichner makeup sticks, and I had a game of making people up. And I wondered quite early whether, while it was enchanting to see a woman put on makeup—I watched my mum do it very carefully—it was a man's job to put it on for her?

  Might have changed the world.

  Anyway, I wouldn't talk to the Grand Vizier because he was so huge and villainous. My dad said, “He's scared of everything,” and I know I was. But it hurt me that he thought it, and said so. So I clutched the Vizier's outstretched hand, huge and warm and slippery with coffee-colored greasepaint. To think that an actor colored every part of his body with the paint.

  “Why do they wear paint?” I asked Mum.

  “To shine in the lights,” she said.

  The Vizier gave me some colored handkerchiefs, which were part of his act. He wore shoes with curled toes and I could not guess how he ever got them on and off. But it was strange that characters who had been enemies in the show were now talking to each other like people standing in the same queue for a bus. While still being as big as the bus.

  Not long after that, I was given a toy theater. It was a cut-out book where you made a proscenium arch and then the box for the stage. There were printed plays with cutout pictures of characters. They were made by Pollock's— until recently you could still get them at their shop in Covent Garden—and mine was a treasured possession. I needed help with the cutting out, and my mother found tiny lightbulbs and a battery so I could light the stage. I had two plays in the next few years: one was Treasure Island and the other was a version of Hamlet based on the Olivier film. I experimented endlessly, way beyond those two texts, and I had a story in which Hamlet and his long-lost father, Long John Silver, beat back the world. I noticed that the two plays were alike in that Hamlet and Jim Hawkins had both lost their dads. It worked very well that the cut-out characters were about the same size as my toy soldiers. I saw that the illuminated box was a precious place where any story could be told.