Semi-Detached

by Griff Rhys Jones

  So, anyway, I lied.

  ‘It was given to me,’ I said.

  ‘Given to you?’ Something in his tone gave me the impression that he was not going to let it go at that.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Who gave it you?’

  I was wildly groping now ‘A man on the bus.’

  There was a silence. Clearly he was next going to ask me ‘What man on a bus?’ But he didn’t seem to ask it immediately, as you would, which was a relief, because I couldn’t think of any man who might have wanted to give me half a crown, but it was disconcerting that he seemed to want to chew over this information for at least a quarter of a mile, and a noisy gear-change.

  ‘What did he look like, this man on the bus?’

  And this was where my powers of invention took flight. I gripped the loose leather loop which was used to pull the door of the Morris shut and glanced at my brother, who was still chewing. ‘He had a bowler hat on,’ I piped.

  People did wear bowler hats in those days, although I am not sure that at the age of five I had met many guardsmen or city workers, but it must have seemed a handy flag of identification. Instead of reassuring the pater, or even prompting a snort of derision at the very idea that a bowler-hatted man would dispense valuable coins on public transport, as one might have expected, my father fell to brooding. A worried frown appeared on his face. He became oddly solicitous. ‘What sort ‘of man? Did he ask you to do anything in return?’ This struck me immediately as some sort of cunning ploy. But there was no indication of any guile. Guile did not anyway come naturally to my father. He was generally a book in which emotions were printed in big print and underlined to assist the partially sighted. ‘No,’ I answered firmly and when we got home I was sent away to my room, to await further developments.

  My father summoned a policeman from Midhurst. Ordinarily, I might have been rather fascinated to meet a real detective face to face, but it was clear, even to this embryo criminal mastermind, that this was all getting a little out of hand. I heard of boys whose fathers threatened to take them to the police-station to see justice done, but we knew this was transparent hyperbole, a hollow threat uttered by an exhausted garrison which had long ago used up all its ammunition. This night was different. It had grown dark, and, as ever when serious matters are under consideration, nobody seemed to have bothered to switch on the lights in the hallway Supper had been hurried and eaten in silence. My brother and I were waiting in our room at the top of the stairs. We were summoned one after the other. I went second.

  This was all far beyond expectations. The policeman was not wearing a uniform, but a double-breasted suit. He was really quite stout and flush-faced and he had a lot more grease in his hair than the other adult males who usually visited the house. Clearly, I was about to become unstuck. All the elements that had been carefully prepared to put me at my ease, to ensure that I felt secure enough to tell these slightly smelly men — tobacco and wet serge — who were now leaning down to my level and thus breathing on me a little heavily, had the effect of scaring me rigid. Tears were already starting in my eyes; which only seemed to make my father even more concerned. The policeman gently asked me a series of probing questions, and I stuck to my story. The bowler hat was mentioned again and was joined, I think, by a mackintosh. After a short while he paused, and I was asked to leave the room.

  When I had gone, he briskly told my father, ‘I am sorry to have to tell you, Doctor, I don’t think your son is telling the truth.’ It was, for some unaccountable reason, a bit of a shock, accompanied by exquisite pangs of embarrassment, that the policeman had come all the way from Midhurst in order to come to this elementary conclusion.

  In fact, listening from the room at the top of the stairs, I rather-wished that the policeman wasn’t quite so easy-going about it: ‘No, no, Dr Rhys Jones, it was quite right of you to call me out … I was more than happy to drive out here … that’s very kind of you, but I am on duty.’ The door banged shut. The front door knocker rattled as usual. There was a significant pause as my father lingered by the door. It was The Winslow Boy in reverse. He was thinking up a cruel and unusual punishment, and who could blame him?

  If the family had stayed in Midhurst would we gradually have fitted in more? Would I have felt less like an outsider, less willing all my life to be a voyeur, looking in on the lighted window across the square, or the gravel drive, and the Georgian house glowing in the sun, or the clink of glasses and the bray of public-school certainties? After all, ‘in the local kindergarten one of my classmates was Lucy Cowdray Her father, Lord Cowdray, came and stood with a red face and flat cap at the sports days watching us do somersaults. Jimmy Summers, my best friend, had a maid who wore a uniform. Their house was huge. When we played at Jimmy Summers’ house he could reach into a toy chest and pull out a set of lead toy boats which, astonishingly, included scale models of every ship that took part in the battle of Jutland — Germans too. It took us hours to lay them out across his vast playroom floor. It must have come from some family connection. The sort we lacked. There were fancy dress competitions at the local church fete where I was dressed as a Mexican with a burned cork moustache, but they were always won by some damned people who had the same elaborate costumes every year and fooled the visiting judges. I sang the treble opening to ‘Once in Royal David’s City’ at the local carol service. ‘Jab’ and the Benicky boys and the general Tory heartland benevolence of this pre-war English Eden easily sucked my mother in. She loved the social whirl. Who knows, it might have even broken down my father’s natural defences. I would have gone to a public school, like my boyhood friends. We would have had chintzy furniture, and my father would have had to learn to like cocktail parties. But when I was seven, my father started looking for another job. In some shadow world, down at the hospital, there was another, rather different father, the dedicated, stern and diligent chest physician who had toiled, between woodwork projects, to get more qualifications and who was now expecting promotion but not getting it, in the cloistered and class-ridden atmosphere of what was after all an ex-RAF hospital. It was time for him to move on. My mother’s friends could hardly believe it. It was not just the idea of promotion, throwing up the world of the sanatorium and the close-knit society to which they were all so firmly attached. It was the location. ‘How will you cope, Gwyneth? It will be too awful.’

  We were moving to Essex.

  4. Swimming in Essex

  The M25/M11 intersection, a colossal masterpiece of road engineering visible from Mars, lies slumped in the bottom of the valley of Epping Green. Wendy Davies’ architect father had a house there, where I first listened agog in the semidarkness to Leonard Cohen. I’d be lucky to hear him now. The traffic whistles in all directions at once, but the nearby hill is still topped by a castellated beacon: Epping’s water tower.

  I see this turret of my old home virtually every weekend, but I never ever venture off to look at where I lived for fourteen years. When I did, I didn’t know how. ‘You presumably have to come off the M11 early,’ I explained to my wife, Jo, who was driving. The map-book was under the dog, and the dog was asleep. ‘You’ll have to come off where it says Loughton.’

  ‘If you want to come off for Epping,’ chimed in my mother from the front seat, ‘you’ll have to come off for Loughton.’

  My mother is a little deaf. The noise of the car made it more difficult for her. She obviously heard things, but confused them with instructions from her subconscious.

  ‘It’s just up here, the next exit.’

  ‘It will be the next exit, I should think, said my mother. There was nothing familiar at all about Loughton in the damp autumn of 2004. Like planned post-war housing estates everywhere, it managed to look utterly haphazard. We could have been in Bremen or the outskirts of Leeds.

  ‘Just head north,’ I said, following my nose, and we did, until the blank international rubbish suddenly gave way to more familiar, mock-Tudor rubbish. We were in the outskirts of Theydon Bois and beyond tha
t was the soggy fuzz of Epping Forest, my playground around the age of ten. It is peculiarly watery. These days, the once private, once enormous, royal deer shoot is little more than a thick beard of trees on either side of a high road on a crest of hills, but there are bits of bog everywhere. If you walk it, you’ll plunge into a chocolate, composty gloop soon enough. I certainly did. I fell through the ice when I was nine. A little unhelpfully, the other kids with me stripped me off and tried to warm me up in front of a fire made from my sketchbook. It is quite easy to spot the fishing lakes and their sandy parking areas, but less so the spiky-headed needles that mark patches of marsh. Why it doesn’t all slide off down the side of the hill and swamp Waltham Abbey I have no idea.

  We were climbing up to and into it. In a few moments, after we had missed our turning, we would go down and out of it.

  We sluiced up to a roundabout. ‘Which way now?’ called Jo, and though I recognized the roundabout (revered the roundabout, indeed, as one of the key roundabouts of my youth), it was familiar like a dream. But perhaps any roundabout in the middle of a wood, with trees all around, would have been familiar in the same way.

  As a family, we dropped parties along the road to Epping. My brother William stayed in the Midhurst grammar school where H.G. Wells once taught. My sister, metaphorically, stayed behind there in the comprehensive school. Harlow was a new town and a new experience for us pampered southerners. ‘We’re not going to live here! It’s not even detached,’ I said as soon as I saw the terraced house my father had been allocated, until he got himself settled in nearby Epping.

  School in Harlow wasn’t much solace to the young master. In Conifers I had been one of fifty or so. In ‘The Downs’ there were many hundreds. Did I make friends? Was I bullied for speaking posh like a twat? Probably Most of my memories of the six months we lived there are of being alone, playing self-absorbed fantasies out amongst the big beds of spiky plants on the windy pavements between the huge recreation grounds.

  For some weeks I became a detective, with a toy spy kit. I had an FBI pass in a plastic wallet and a fingerprint kit made out of drinking chocolate. I wandered the streets in a mac with a tightly drawn belt, ‘spying’ on people. I was occupying myself with myself, while my parents searched around for a house to match my father’s new status as a consultant to three hospitals.

  One of his hospitals was in Harlow, where we had been provided with our temporary residence, one in Waltham Abbey, fifteen miles to the south on the other side of a spur of Epping Forest, and between them was St Margaret’s in Epping, where it was almost inevitable that we should settle, on the right side of the main road, just up from the underground station, in White Lodge, Hartland Road.

  We went round the roundabout twice.

  ‘I can’t remember where it is,’ my mother chimed in.

  ‘No, I’ve just said that.’

  ‘But if we go straight on we’ll probably find it.’

  ‘I just said that too. This will take us down to Waltham Abbey’

  ‘This will take us down to Waltham Abbey They’ve demolished the hospital now Daddy once decided he would cycle here. He only did it once, though.’

  I remembered Waltham Abbey, because we always went to the cottage hospital on Christmas morning. As soon as we’d opened our presents we’d be bundled into the car and taken on a little tour of my father’s wards. Sister (the unmarried one) had marooned herself in her staff room, almost hidden behind a colossal display of sweet sherry, peach brandy and ginger wine. She and an unshaven priest with a red face would be steadily knocking back this Christmas largesse, from grateful relatives, in a stifling, overheated atmosphere, waiting for soggy turkey They relished the opportunity to force a couple of mince pies and some warm lemonade on to us. And then my father would go and wish his charges ‘Happy Christmas’ and have a little chat with the poor old ladies with no one to take them in. (The ideal was to send the walking back to their families for the festive season.) We didn’t want to go. The hospital was smelly We had a new Slinky, or the Dan Dare Helicopter Gun that launched red plastic spinners up on to the top of the wardrobe waiting back at home, and we’d hardly played with them at all yet.

  The sister would want to hug us too tightly and slobber over us too wetly And the poor patients were yellow After I’d been held up to give one of the old crones a kiss, I remember my father walking away down the nearly empty ward and quietly saying in a matter—of-fact tone to my mother, ‘She’ll be dead by New Year’s Eve.’ But, you see, he was a good man, who did good, by performing his duty. We would go straight on to St Margaret’s — bigger and noisier — and do it all again.

  He took us, I think, because we were life. His medical work was mostly with the chronically ill, wheezing their way towards death. There were few glamorous cures. But I have met a surprising number of them. In unexpected places people seek me out, and sometimes I make the mistake of thinking they want my autograph, but they want to tell me about my father, and his care for them. Chronic illness and private practice don’t match. He was a National Health doctor all his life and watched the erosion of the discipline of doctor-led medicine with despair. When he retired he solemnly made us promise that, if he were to fall ill, we wouldn’t take him to his own hospital.

  Personally I only rode as far as the roundabout. It was definitely part of the cycling years for me. What age was that? I had a yellow bike, and later a blue one, with drop handlebars with special pale blue racing tape wound around, like a plastic bandage, for extra grip. I bought a water bottle carrier to attach between my legs and a very beautiful square chromium-plated bolt-on mirror.

  There was one long, five-in-the-morning trip down to a pond somewhere near Woodford, to go fishing. (Why? I never fished.) Even at that time in the morning, the lorries thundered out of the night in an intimate rush: one tiny wobble, lose your nerve and … kerrang. It was downhill the entire way, all thirteen miles on a slight disabled-ramp of an incline. Too scary for my dad, I suspect.

  But more usually we cycled off to High Beach.

  ‘Is it because of the beech trees?’ Jo asked.

  ‘Yes,’ said my mother. ‘Though I’ve never been there.’

  ‘You have been there.’

  ‘Have I?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I don’t remember it.’

  ‘And I think it’s spelled the other way — “High Beach” —because of the gravel or something.’

  We came to a sign, and it said ‘High Beach’.

  High Beach was a Victorian place of resort with a huge pub and a stretch of open heathland dropping away to the Lee valley below John Clare was thrown in a loony bin here.

  Tennyson had lived near by John Betjeman’s father used to take his work’s outings here.

  ‘That pop star lives down here now.’

  ‘Rod Stewart.’

  ‘He lives somewhere here.’

  The surrounding villages of the Forest had the ancient rights to farm the wood, but strict enjoinders to leave the deer alone. So the beech nuts were collected for pigs and the trees were coppiced for firewood. The trees today owe their magnificent squiggliness to all this. Then Queen Victoria gave the whole thing to the Corporation of London, and it became where East Enders went for a day out.

  ‘When Aunty Betty heard we were moving to Epping she was horrified, my mother told us. ‘She said, “You’re going to the place where the murderers bury their bodies.”‘

  ‘We used to come here in the summer to swim in the huge pool behind the pub.’

  There were steps up and the remains of buildings. I clambered on and looked through the close-boarded fence. I was looking at another pool from my childhood. It was still there. I didn’t recognize it at all. Surely it had been much bigger.

  ‘It’s bound to look smaller,’ said Jo.

  ‘I know that.’ But, there had been huge diving boards, the biggest in the region. I remember finally plucking up the courage to go up to the top board, which meant a very narrow and slippe
ry ladder, and, once I got up there, it was much higher than I’d ever been before. Higher than Loughton and Harlow, and they had proper boards for show-off twisty divers in Olympic-sized pools. I stood shivering, clutching the metal side rails for several minutes, before I decided that I couldn’t do it and ignominiously had to climb down. But the pond I could see through the crack couldn’t have sustained such a death jump. And there had been changing rooms too. Where were they?

  Londoners don’t come to drink at High Beach much any more. The breathalyser has killed the trade. In the woods, the litter stopped a few feet from the road. It was probably quite a good place to bring the bodies now. We drove on.

  ‘Your father proposed to me on the Isle of Wight.’

  This was all new ‘What were you doing there?’

  ‘There was a special hotel for nurses. He was studying for his Membership, and I was going away, just for a short holiday, and he came running down the platform and shouted, “Get a hotel room for me.”‘

  Yes, that sounded both romantically delightful and presciently typical.

  ‘Why couldn’t he book it himself?’

  ‘He was very busy He didn’t want to come away at all. They had dragged them off just after qualification, for the War. He always said that when he came back it was as if they had to start all over again. He didn’t feel that we could get married until he had his Membership.’

  ‘Of the Royal College of Physicians.’

  ‘He was made a Fellow, you know’

  ‘Yes, I know’ But she was just going over his achievements, in his honour, paying him his due, as she always did.

  Until later that morning, when I stood on the corner of the crossroads where Hartland Road was bisected by Kendal Avenue, plunging away down a hill fringed with red-brick walls and dripping evergreenery, I had never really been aware of how comfortingly suburban our house was. I decided I would quite like to live in one of these dignified Edwardian mansions now: not the new ranchero-style maisonettes, with their steep drives, fake clapboard and hump-backed miniature lawns squeezed into the former gardens of the grander homes, but in one of the grander homes themselves, of course. Suitable for middle age, security and routine, I suppose that was why my father liked it. Naturally, I found it suffocating at the time.