Growing into War

by Michael Gill

  Out the back there was a water tap (this was a recent luxury; beforehand they had had to use a pump at the end of the terrace); a clothes line, a heap of coal (part of my grandfather’s wages was a sack of coal a week) and a shed housing an outside lavatory shared with the neighbours.

  Reviewing it, I’m struck by how efficiently it covered the bare necessities. No radio, no TV, no CD. No supermarket range of goods. My grandfather had one week’s holiday a year. He always spent it with us in Kent. While with us, he and my father would take a day trip to Calais or Boulogne. He would send French postcards to all his cronies in Dewsbury. It was the high point of the year.

  I cannot remember my grandfather losing his temper, or seeming discontented with his lot. I never met his wife, my grandmother. She was said to be highly strung and to adore her clever younger son Arnold, my father. During the First World War she received an official telegram informing her of his death in action. It was untrue – he was not even wounded – but she suffered a stroke from which she never recovered.

  My grandfather accepted this loss with the resignation that he showed in so many different ways. He had a consolation. He was a brilliant wood-carver. He could make cabinets and bed tables and chests of drawers of a perfection that made it a pleasure to touch them. I still have a bed table he made for me in my years of illness and a smoothly articulated tool chest. And, as often with a skilful craftsman, he acquired a companion to compensate for the long lingering death of his wife. Because of this unmarried woman friend I was never allowed to spend as much time with him as I would have liked.

  III

  A mouse robbed me of a sister. Running across the kitchen floor, it so startled my pregnant mother that she jumped on a chair and had a miscarriage that evening. At the time I was three and a half and knew nothing of such things. I missed my mother at breakfast (she went on a recuperative cruise to the Canaries with my Aunt Mabel). In compensation I saw more of my grandparents.

  I was in awe of my grandfather, William Taylor. He was very kind, but he often seemed far away. His white imperial beard made him look like the King (I sometimes mixed them up). There was no mistaking my grandmother.

  Emily Ann Thomas was handsome rather than beautiful, dark and vivid. In her youth she looked Spanish, her eyes deep pools in the powerful angles of her face. She was always very trim and erect. In her thirties, when she had spent some eight years married to her cousin William Taylor, a charming but improvident farmer, she looked quite different. A wild defiant gaze must have reflected the pains and disappointments of life with an alcoholic. It was her inheritance that kept the farm going.

  The money came from the piano factory that my great-grandfather had set up in Kilburn in the 1860s. A skilled craftsman in furniture, he made the casing while his German partner provided the musical parts. When my grandmother was in her late teens she was entrusted with collecting the weekly wages for the factory hands. She carried this considerable sum of money in a leather briefcase that was chained to her wrist. One Friday she was walking back from the bank along the busy Kilburn High Road. A man darted out of an alleyway and grabbed the bag. He nearly dislocated her arm, but was unable to break the chain. She resisted as best she could, but was dragged further and further down the deserted alley. None of the hurrying passers-by took the least notice. She was thrown from side to side and retaliated by beating at the man’s head with her free hand. He was quite a small fellow, she remembered, when she told me half a century later.

  ‘Didn’t you call out?’ I asked.

  ‘No, that was the strange part. We neither of us said a word.’

  When she felt her strength was nearly gone, a policeman appeared at the end of the alley. Her assailant ran, leaving her with a bruised and torn arm.

  ‘Did you carry the money the next week?’

  ‘Yes, but one of the bigger factory workers came with me.’

  That was my grandmother. She would not let a small misadventure put her off carrying out her duty. Brought up in a mid-Victorian house in London, where music was played and German spoken as a second language, where there were regular visits every few years from relatives across the Atlantic, she acquired a sophistication and poise she never lost. Even though I knew her only in the last few years of her life, I was aware of the close relationship she had with her only daughter, my mother. My grandmother’s strength of character was always a support for her gentle, inherently shy and sensitive child. My mother also visited America, first when she was twelve and then she spent a whole year there when she was eighteen, but she preferred the moorlands of the Brontë country to the hustle of the New World. That might have been all right for my mother, but for my grandmother a small farm in Yorkshire was not a good exchange for a mansion in Kilburn.

  Why did my grandmother throw herself away on her fecklessly charming country cousin? He was the youngest son of the Taylor whose factory processing shoddy or woollen waste was one of the many polluting the atmosphere of Dewsbury. There was nothing for William to inherit but the farm, which his father had acquired only as a hobby.

  My grandmother with her sharp business sense must have realised it was never going to make an adequate return. Why did she not insist that William follow the example of her own brothers, who were doing extremely well in the booming Midwest? William had no ambition; he liked the country life and the chummy drinking bouts that followed the local cricket matches. There was no cricket in America. He himself had been an elegant batsman. Perhaps it was his physicality that kept the unlikely couple together.

  My grandmother had had many other admirers in her youth. One was still with us in Winchester. Henry Talbot had fallen for her when she first appeared in Yorkshire society some forty years before. His devotion never flagged. He never married and lived with a spinster sister on a small inheritance. He and William used to go up to London to watch the test matches, staying in Henry Talbot’s club. When his sister, his only close relative, died, it seemed the natural thing for him to move into a spare room in the farm and later into Pitt Corner. In Winchester, he had his own bedsitting room and bathroom. I took his presence entirely for granted. He would take me for walks.

  We would go to a big pond in a hollow and throw the ducks scraps of bread. I was probably not a very accurate thrower. The ducks would come clamouring out of the water and once I was bitten by an importunate drake. I can still remember how curious it felt; like being slapped with wet rubber. Climbing out of the hollow, I would take Mr Talbot – Tor as I called him – by the hand. In it would be a boiled sweet wrapped up in paper. Nothing would be said, but when I had finished it another would miraculously appear.

  These satisfactory excursions cannot have lasted long. Tor vanished out of my life with no more explanation than went with the appearance of the sweets. Years later I was told that he had been arrested strolling down Winchester High Street in his shoes and spats. He was always a meticulous dresser, but on this occasion he was wearing nothing else. Shortly after he had a brain haemorrhage and died.

  His old drinking companion soon followed him. I knew my grandfather was ill. Even on the warmest days he would sit wrapped in a rug in a sheltered corner of the garden. I would take advantage of his somnolence to creep up close and study every aspect of his appearance. I was particularly fascinated by his hands. Long and slender, his fingers lying on the rug seemed almost transparent, as fragile as our best-quality china, which I was always being warned not to drop when it was brought out for Sunday tea.

  2

  A FRIEND FOR LIFE

  I

  The Scottish soldier sat at the entrance to his tent. He was a blaze of health and colour: scarlet jacket, scarlet and green kilt, fair moustache, pink cheeks, pink knees, a dirk sticking in his fat stockings. His Indian servant stood at his elbow, impassive and attentive in immaculate white. Beneath their feet the grass was bright green. Behind them, I imagined, loomed the gloomy defiles of the Khyber Pass and beyond, glittering peak on peak, the Himalayas. I had to imagine that, be
cause what I actually saw were the upraised noses of the Bisto Kids, sniffing appreciatively at the cardboard steam. There were other cut-outs in the window of the village shop: a prancing golliwog advertising marmalade, the gleaming teeth of the Eno’s girl; but it was this big central group for liquid coffee that held my attention when I first passed by in my baby chair.

  I still got whoever was pushing me to stop. It was a sort of indulgence, because now I was eight years old and could read in Wizard the adventures of King of the Khyber Pass and his squat servant, who cracked the heads of recalcitrant tribesmen with his battered cricket bat, Clicky-ba, and in The Times of the bombing of villages in the region by the RAF. It seemed there was always trouble on the Frontier. My father thought they should send T.E. Lawrence to deal with it. Would he grow a beard and carry two long curved knives like King? Was he really needed? Surely nothing could be more imposing than the Scottish soldier. I would have looked longer, but my dog, Patch, grew impatient and jerked at his lead. It was tied to a spring of the spinal chair and the bouncing told me it was time to move. Patch was lifted onto my lap and I stroked him quiet. He was small and fluffy and a wire-haired fox terrier. He had replaced Teddy, my bear, as my closest companion.

  Illness had grown imperceptibly from a temperature, which would not return to normal after a cold. I was moved into my parents’ bedroom. The flower patterns on the wallpaper took on strange shapes, fluctuating and twisting. I watched them from the end of a long tunnel, infinitely receding. Just to be lifted up while the sheets were straightened was exhausting. One day the doctor stood with my parents upside down on the ceiling at the foot of the bed and told me I must hang on. The voice that answered did not seem to be my own. For some time I existed on lemon ice cubes and vitamins fed through a tube rectally. It was an odd, soothing sensation and used to send me to sleep. Eventually, wrapped in blankets, I was taken to London to see a famous children’s doctor. He looked like the photograph of J.M. Barrie in my Peter Pan book. His name was Sir Frederick Still. I sat on his knee and he probed me with gentle, bony fingers. It was decided I had a disease from milk, bovine tuberculosis, with complications. The treatment was rest. I rested – altogether for five years. The first three I was mostly flat on my back.

  I did not regard this as an imposition, except during the ferocious attacks of vomiting which were among the complications. Indeed, especially after the first few months when I could be pushed out in the long wickerwork spinal chair, I thought of myself as singularly privileged. I knew I got more attention than the ordinary boy. So many interesting people would come up and talk to me. An only child, I did not miss the company of children. How many enjoyed the friendship of a talking raven? He would join us near the village shop, and pace alongside the carriage like a black hunchback, causing Patch to retreat between the wheels, growling quietly. Occasionally the raven would hop onto the wickerwork side of the carriage and utter a cry so wild and desolate that it prickled my hair. His actual conversation was more mundane. He could say ‘How d’ee do’ and ‘What’s your name?’ over and over again in a tiny mechanical voice. Often he refused to say anything. He was the pet of an old bachelor with a straggling moustache and watery eyes. He persuaded me to read Bevis: The Story of a Boy, by Richard Jefferies, and Kenneth Grahame’s The Golden Age. I think now this must have been a form of inverted pity, as both were stories of active youth. I found them very boring.

  Much more to my taste were the anecdotes of a couple who lived on the edge of the village. They often came out and invited me into their big old house. The carriage crunched over the drive between dark pine trees and neglected flower beds, bumped up the stone steps, eased through the door and into a world of dusty marvels. Lion and leopard skins, the head of a rhinoceros, the heads of deer with twisted horns, barbaric masks, shields, spears and lumpish clubs crowded the walls. Huge tusks stood in racks in the corners, there was carved ivory from Zanzibar, knobkerries from Zululand, drums covered in monkey skin and tufted with the beards of gnu. The man had been a district officer in Africa in Edwardian times. Plump now and a little moth-eaten like his trophies, he told terrible things in a kindly way. He would let me finger the gnarled surface of the thirty-foot-long rhinoceros-hide whip. One flick could lift a strip of skin ‘as thick as your finger’ off the back of a recalcitrant servant.

  He pointed out the grains of greyish powder in the grooving of a spear.

  ‘Deadly poison.’

  ‘Would it still work?’

  ‘Oh, I expect so.’

  I fingered the dry, almost weightless, skin of a mamba, the coarse hide of a zebra, the bristles of a wart hog, and touched the sharp barbs of a fishing spear. I learnt how the lightest tap could set a drum vibrating, and how it was speed of impact rather than force that could send the sound ringing round the ceiling.

  They were a childless couple and they never seemed to mind lifting things off the walls, or bringing them down from the attic, so that I could touch that hot dusty continent that had dried them and weathered them and finally exiled them to this untidy house in Kent. They had been friends of Cherry Kearton, the writer and lecturer on wildlife. At his suggestion the wife had taken up photography. She had mounted her pictures in many albums and would point out the exciting ones.

  ‘That elephant is about to charge the camera; see how he’s spread his ears and put his tail up.’

  ‘Did you take the picture?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘Frank shot him.’ Small and practical, her hands flicked through the sepia pages.

  ‘Those are Watusi; they’re over six feet tall and they never wear a stitch of clothing.’

  ‘That crocodile has caught a pigmy deer.’

  ‘Beastly things, crocodiles,’ said her husband. ‘Used to give me the willies.’

  ‘What about snakes?’

  ‘Oh snakes are all right. A snake won’t hurt you unless you hurt him.’

  Since then I have met other couples that sufficiently reminded me of them to make me think they are a type that endures in harsh and alien environments: modest, quiet, bound together by mutual loyalties, too lacking in self-regard to notice the idiosyncrasy of their enthusiasms; commonplace in every way, really, except in what they expected of themselves and of each other. At the time I hardly thought of them at all. I was occupied with the world they showed me.

  In bed at night I would remember some photograph of an expedition weaving its way through tall grasses and baobab trees, Frank in front, pith helmet on his head, rifle across his shoulder, and behind the line of bearers, half-naked, anonymous, black skins gleaming. Travelling with them along that twisting trail, the heat sweating my back, stumbling past roots and vines, caressed by hot winds, wrapped in dark rich smells, inhaling the aroma of exotic flowers and nameless beasts, entranced by the flutter of vivid wings, I felt the fear of unknown danger. Would I be the one who caught the flicker of velvet skin stalking through the yellow grass? Over thirty years later, as the jet circled down to the landing field and I saw for the first time such paths crisscrossing the bush and the bright splashes of colour of the women’s djellabas as they went in groups to the waterholes, it was then that I thought of Frank and his wife.

  Our house stood on a hill. On top was the village; below, the small seaside resort of Herne Bay. Sometimes my parents would push me to a tea-shop there. It was run by a friend of my father’s. He was a thin sallow man who had lived for years in China as the agent of a tea company. His café was full of bric-a-brac from his stay – red pagodas, and huge blue and white jars and tiny model gardens, perfect in every detail. The man himself interested me most.

  ‘Show me, go on, show me.’

  He would glance at my parents and then with a deprecatory laugh, bend towards me, lifting the grey hair from his ear. But there was no ear; only a dull red hole.

  ‘Now show it to me.’ He went to a lacquer-work desk beyond the potted palms and brought back a small cardboard box. He offered it to me.<
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  ‘You sure you want to see? You open it then.’

  ‘Ugh, no I couldn’t.’

  ‘It won’t bite you know.’ Lying on cotton wool, it looked like a piece of dark brown rubber. It felt rather like rubber, too, when I could bring myself to touch it; something as difficult to do as stroking the back of a pet toad – fascinating and disgusting at the same time. He had lost it during the Boxer Rebellion in 1900. Bandits had taken advantage of the unquiet times to kidnap him. They had held him to ransom for months in a cave in the mountains. Growing impatient, they had sent down an ear as proof of his captivity.

  ‘Didn’t it hurt?’

  ‘I suppose it did. I was really more worried they were going to cut off my head.’

  Eventually the ransom was paid, and a friend returned the severed ear. He had kept it with him ever since. Oddly enough, I found this the most disturbing part of the story: to live with your ear, but separate from it, all those years.

  This old China hand upset our family in a more concrete way. Occasionally he would sell a piece from his collection and my father bought a Buddha. It was about two feet high in gleaming highly coloured ceramic. My father put it on a table in the hall. Obscenely fat with shiny bald head and wide smile, it immediately commanded the space around. It even dominated the grandfather clock, the oldest member of the household, which had been with my mother’s family for nearly two hundred years. It was not only that it seemed incongruous among those familiar sober furnishings. It introduced an alien presence into the house. You could feel it as far away as upstairs, silently gathering power. A mysterious realignment of forces was in progress. The hall was no longer our hall, but its shrine. The next morning my mother announced that it must go. She had experienced horrible nightmares and she knew it was a nasty wicked thing. We did not disagree. My father wrapped it up carefully and took it back. The clock resumed its old peaceful dominance of the hall, as it was to continue in other halls, ticking away, the metronome of my parents’ lives, and later of my own.