Peter was not happy. He had done well at his first school, had enjoyed it, or seemed to, and when it came to choosing the next school, I thought, Well, why not stay with what has worked well up till now? Most of the children from the junior school moved up to its senior school, which was next door, near Notting Hill Gate. Peter at once became sullen and miserable and was at the bottom of the class. Then he said the headmaster had beaten him. No one had ever so much as smacked him before. I went to see the headmaster, who was an unpleasant little bully. He said, Spare the rod, spoil the child, and called Peter ‘Lessing the Blessing’. I knew that Peter was earning—far from the last time in his life—punishments for being my son. The children of the successful can have a hard time of it. The worst thing about this man was his cold, sarcastic, cutting voice, the voice which, when I was a child, shrivelled me up. He made drawling envious remarks about my books. There followed two unsuccessful schools. I thought that this most gregarious child was suffering from being so much of the time alone with me; he still did not sleep until nine or ten, still woke at five or six. He went to a school as a weekly boarder, coming home at weekends, but he hated it. He hated Warwick Road, as much as I did. During the time I had lodgers he was resentful and suspicious of them. He was used to a household with a lively family atmosphere—Joan’s—and now he had to be quiet for fear of disturbing these strangers who were in his home. I made a mistake and refused to buy a television, though he begged for one. Bad enough, I thought, the ‘comics’ which he read for hours every day. So he used to go after school to friends’ houses to watch their television. We became engaged in a battle of wills on this and it seems on every other issue. I knew that what he needed was a father. When Gottfried dropped him, just like that, and he was so unhappy, I made a point of creating a picture of Gottfried as a brave, heroic figure fighting for the poor and dispossessed. This was hardly the truth, but I believed it would be bad for the child to know too much about the failures of communism. I made up stories about how he—Peter—and Gottfried tackled all kinds of difficult and dangerous situations, from solving housing problems in slum areas to fighting landlords (this was the time of the landlord Rachman whose name is still synonymous with the wicked exploitation of tenants) or routing whole divisions of Nazi soldiers. Later, in his teens, when Peter went to visit Gottfried, he found that his father was vilifying me in every way he could and that he had been doing so for years. This is not at all uncommon, where one partner in a failed marriage, usually the woman but not always, builds up a ‘positive’ and flattering portrait of the absent one, only to discover that he, or she, is being made to look a villain to the children.
How to make better this bad situation? Meanwhile what saved us both was the Eichners, there in East Grinstead, in their old farmhouse among the rocks, and the other children there, a real ordinary family, mother, father, and the children, and it did something to balance me, who lived without a husband—much rarer than today—this unconventional mother, this writing mother, and he was at the age when children are most in love with respectability and the commonplace. The Eichners took their own children and visiting children on all kinds of trips, over Britain and abroad, to France, Spain, and Peter went too.
At the Eichners’, Peter was part of an instructive effort. Fred Eichner was a bit of a genius. He had invented something he called plastic foam, in two forms: one, blocks of substance full of minute bubbles, like sponges; the other, globules in various sizes. He had a small factory. He thought the stuff could be used in packing and by florists. As this caravan of adults and children travelled around and about Britain, Fred Eichner was trying to get some business or bank or forward-looking financier to back him, but when I knew him he constantly failed. Perhaps in the end he succeeded.
The oldest son, Michael Eichner, was Peter’s friend, and he came to London and they went about together. I took Peter on holidays, once to Spain for a month in the summer, and he loved it, but I didn’t, much.
There was a child in the flat downstairs for a while, a boy Peter’s age. The parents hoped the children would be friends, as parents so often do, but they did not like each other. One day this happened: I had started Peter off on a stamp album; we bought stamps, sent for stamps, he swapped stamps. The little boy downstairs took the album and stole half the stamps. Peter was miserable, in that frantic resentful way of children who feel themselves trapped by circumstances. I asked the mother to get the stamps back for Peter, but all she said was: ‘Poor little boy’—meaning her son. Peter was hurt by the injustice of it, and I felt an only too familiar cold discouragement—that so often things went wrong for him and I could not put them right.
I will leave this theme here. Women who have brought up a son without a father will know how difficult it is, and those without the experience will have no idea of it. One may easily describe a single dramatic event—like a traveller arriving at the door with a present for Peter from his father, a plastic whale, for instance, but there was no word from his father, no letter, nothing. One may describe the pain of that for the child, his bewilderment and the mother’s anger, but not the day-in, day-out slog of it all, trying to be what is impossible, a father as well as a mother.
When Jack finally left me, we were in Paris. He was going to some hospital abroad somewhere. I knew he had arranged it to break with me. We both knew this was the end but were saying things like: ‘Well, it’s only six months.’ He was off to the airport, but he went with me to the ticket office at the station, where I would buy my ticket back to London. We embraced. He left. I stood immobilised, tears flooding. The young man at the ticket window made sympathetic noises. No queue. Seeing I had a packet of Gitanes in my hand, he nipped out from his little office, put a cigarette in my mouth, lit it, clicked his tongue, Tsk-tsk, patted me, said ‘Pauvre petite’ several times, and nipped back to serve a customer. When I finally was able to ask for a ticket, he said love was a very serious matter, but cheer up, I’d find another lover soon.
It was very bad. The ‘affair,’ which had lasted four years, was in fact a marriage, more of one than either of my two legal marriages. I had been uncooked, raw, not involved with more than a small part of myself. But with this man, it had been all or nothing. How absurd that was: he had never ever said he would marry me, made any promises. And yet I had been committed to him. This was the most serious love in my life. So little did he understand how it was for me that he turned up later, three times in all, the last being in the seventies, to say that since we had done so well, we should start again. And with a look at the bed. That was where we understood each other….But surely in a good many other ways too? In Under My Skin, I describe leaving two small children, and I earned criticism for not going into what I felt about it. It seemed to me obvious that I was bound to be unhappy and any intelligent reader would understand that without ritual beatings of the breast. Now I feel the same. There is no one who hasn’t suffered over love at some time, and so it should be enough to say that being thrown over by this man was bad for me. It was the worst. I was unhappy for a long time. Men fell in love with me, but it was no good, I could not care for them. And then I did something foolish, after misguided reflection. My two marriages I did not think of as having been chosen by me: the first was because of the approach of war, always as good as a marriage broker, the second was a political marriage. My great love, with Jack, had ended badly. Why did I not do as people have been doing for centuries—choose a man for compatibility, similarity of tastes and ideas (at that time these had to include politics)? Among the men interested in me was one who could not have fitted the bill better, as well as being amiable with Peter, who liked him. We embarked on an affair. This was a bad experience for him. He was in love with me, but seriously, and I had to bring the thing to an end. I felt suffocated by him. There was no rational reason, and I have never understood it. We’d meet, with pleasure, talk, walk, go for a meal, I found him delightful—and then it would begin, an irritable need to escape, get away; and in bed it was th
e same, though on the face of it there was nothing wrong. I couldn’t breathe. It had never happened to me before, and it hasn’t happened since. I was shocked at myself for letting him in for such pain, because he was badly hurt by it.
And now my mother: the cruel story continues. She had been four years in London, that Elysium about which she had been dreaming for all the years of her exile, and she had spent them in a dreary little house, looking after yet another old man, who was not even her relative but my father’s. She had more than once come to Joan’s house to be with Peter while I was away. All this time she was saying, ‘All I want is to be of use to my children.’ When I left Joan’s to get my own place, she suggested—without much confidence—that she should come and live in it with me. ‘You need help with Peter.’ I did, most desperately, but not from her. She went to see Mrs. Sussman, to get her to make me see reason. Mrs. Sussman said, in a variety of conventional phrases, that young people need to live their own lives. Afterwards my mother complained that Mrs. Sussman was a Roman Catholic. I did not know what to say. She could have said that Mrs. Sussman was Jewish, that she was not English, was the very essence of European culture, was subjecting me to exotic un-British influences like Jung and Freud. But that she was a Roman Catholic? I knew there was nothing I could say that my mother would respond to, or even hear.
By now Peter was finding the Eichners’, that paradise for children, more attractive than my mother’s outings. I tried to suggest that a very energetic nine-year-old boy was bound to find a place full of children of various ages more interesting than the company of adults.
‘Who are the Eichners?’
‘They have four children of their own, and they have children at holiday times.’
‘Yes, but who are they?’
‘They are Austrians. They came here as refugees.’ Never had I heard from either parent the slightest hint of anti-Semitism, so when she said, ‘But they’re foreigners,’ she didn’t mean Jews. ‘They aren’t Roman Catholics, are they?’
‘I don’t know. I never asked.’
Why Roman Catholics? Was it that Emily Maude McVeagh had had her childhood affrighted by Roman Catholics because her stepmother was the daughter of a Dissenting minister? But if Roman Catholics were so terrible, why had she sent her precious daughter to a Dominican convent? All of it incomprehensible, exasperating…impossible—as usual.
When, on one of the trips to the south coast, she had Peter baptised, she told me later. Defiantly, but she knew she was in the right. It wasn’t the baptism I was angry about—as far as I was concerned, it was something not far off a pagan ritual—but that, as usual, what I thought didn’t count. ‘And now you’re going to have to take him to church,’ she ordered. As it happened, he was going to church, because it turned out that he had a beautiful voice and he was singing in the choir. ‘And you could ask Joan to be his godmother.’
‘But how could she be a better friend to Peter than she is, if she were his godmother?’
She came to see my flat soon after I got into it. She stood there in her good hat, with its little veil, in good gloves, her fox stole, her polished shoes, and she looked at my ugly furniture.
‘You didn’t buy that stuff?’
‘No, it came with the flat. You know, they went to Australia.’
‘You’d better have mine; I’ll take it out of store.’
When the stepmother died, my mother had the furniture from the Victorian house put into storage, and paid to keep it there, year after year, even when there wasn’t money for the grocery bills. When at last they ‘got off the farm’ and went back to England, there might not be a place to live at first, but at least there would be a houseful of furniture. This was not because she liked the furniture. On the contrary, she had hated the heavy dark house she had been brought up in, and everything in it.
Now she could not see that for me to fill my flat, the first place I could say was really my own, with her furniture would be like putting myself into her power, into a prison of the past, into a shirt of Nessus.
‘I don’t want it, Mother. Sell it.’
‘You can’t, you can’t prefer this rubbish….’ And she looked at what filled my rooms, and then at me, and we looked at each other, in our usual hopeless, helpless misery. She could have cried out then, as she had when I was a girl, ‘But why do you hate me so much?’ Or I, to her, ‘But you never liked me, did you?’
What had liking and disliking, hating or loving, to do with anything now?
For God’s sake, Mother, just go away and leave me alone. No, I didn’t say it. And that is what she did. First laying briskly on the ugly desk some papers. ‘These are the receipts for the furniture. Do what you like with it.’
And she went back to Southern Rhodesia. To her son.
The furniture was, of course, Victorian. The mere word Victorian then earned a superior or a contemptuous laugh. Very soon indeed it would be worth a great deal of money. I did not want to be bothered with it. I wrote to my cousin, my aunt Muriel’s son, and asked did he want it. He came to see me, said he had no use for any old furniture. He does not remember coming. He was very hard up then.
So I told the furniture storage to sell the stuff and send the money to my mother. It was hardly worth sending, there was so little.
There is a mystery here. For a quarter of a century, my mother had been writing to her great friend, Daisy Lane. When my mother was in London, about which she had been dreaming all those years, she needed a place to live, and as it turned out, so did my aunt Daisy. Why then did they not live together? At the time, I thought of it with the bewildered exasperation that went with all my thoughts of my mother: I could make no sense of it and so did not think of it much. But now I put two mental images together. Aunt Daisy, younger than my mother, a tiny little bent woman in heavy black, was an old woman. But my mother, at seventy, could be taken for fifty, was vigorous and healthy. To whom was my mother really writing for twenty-five years?
You have to be grown up, really grown up, not merely in years, to understand your parents. I was middle-aged when it occurred to me that I had never known my father, as he really was, as he would have been, without that terrible war. Young, he was optimistic and robust, played football, played cricket and billiards for his county, walked and—what he enjoyed most—danced at all the dances for miles around, thought nothing of walking ten miles to a dance, dancing all night, walking back again. The war had killed that young man and left a sombre, irascible man, soon to become a semi-invalid, and then a very ill man. If I had ever met that young Alfred Tayler, would I have recognised him? And, similarly, my mother. Yes, I knew that the war had done her in too, not least because it killed the great love of her life, so that in the end she married one of its victims—and spent the rest of her life nursing him. But it took me a long time to see something else. This was the girl who had defied her father to become a nurse, standing up to years of his refusal even to speak to her. This was the woman who impressed everyone she met by her vigour, her competence, her independence, her humour. I cannot imagine that had I met the young Emily Maude McVeagh I would have had much to say to her, but I would have had to admire her.
I think what happened was this: When she arrived on that farm, which was still virgin bush, with not so much as a field cleared on it, not a house or farm building—nothing; when she knew that this would be her future, a lonely one, because of her neighbours, with whom she had nothing in common; when she knew that the forward drive of her life, which had been towards some form of conventional middle-class living, was blocked; when she knew her husband was an invalid and would not be able to keep his grasp on life—when she knew that nothing she had hoped for could ever happen—then she had a breakdown and took to her bed. But words like ‘breakdown’ and ‘depression’ were not used then as they are now: people could be suffering from neurasthenia, or low spirits. She said she had a bad heart and probably believed it, as she lay in bed with her heart pounding from anxiety, looking out over the Afr
ican bush, where she would never ever feel at home. She lay there for months, saying to her little children, ‘Poor mummy, poor sick mummy,’ begging for their love and sympathy, and that was so unlike her it should have given me reason to think. And then she got out of bed, because she had to. But who got out of that bed? Not the young Emily Maude (she had become Maude by then, the Emily had gone—she had dropped her mother’s name) but a woman who kept telling her children she had sacrificed her life for them, that they were ungrateful and unfeeling and…all the litany of reproaches that are the stock-in-trade of the female martyr. A creature I am sure she would have hated and despised when being herself and still young—and undamaged by war.
She went back to Southern Rhodesia, after four disappointing years in England, told her son and his wife—again—that she would devote her life to them, and—again—her daughter-in-law said to her son, Either her or me. And she began on a round of visits to friends. In the letters she wrote, she said, I hope I shall make myself useful; I don’t want to be a burden.
The nicest result of the visit to the Soviet Union was that I became a friend of Samuel Marshak, one of the prominent Soviet writers, a winner of the Stalin Prize for Literature. He was a poet, translated Burns and Shakespeare, wrote children’s stories. At that time writers unable to write what they wanted, because of the persecutions of serious literature, chose to do translating work: this is why the standard of Russian translation was so high. I had not noticed him more than the others, when I was there. But suddenly I got a telephone call from the Soviet Embassy. That must have been 1954 or ’55. Would I visit Samuel Marshak in his hotel in Kensington. Things were loosening up, because Stalin had died, but even so, I was on my guard. After that, when he came to London, which he did several times, I was telephoned—and I went. I would arrive at about nine or ten, when the child was asleep, and leave probably about one or two. In between, I listened. That was my role. As a very young man, he had been in London with his first wife. That was before the First World War. They had no money, but they were in love, with each other and with London. Those were the happiest times in his life, he told me. He wanted to talk about that old London: the British Museum, trips to the country, the parks, the bookshops. I reminded him of that wife, he said. But then she died, and there was another wife. She died in the Second World War, of hunger and cold. He liked talking about what that war meant for Russians.
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