My Father and Myself

by J. R. Ackerley

  Mention of my mother brings me to another question: did my father fear that if I were allowed into his “secret orchard,” she, by way of indiscretion, might get a look-in too? This could be, though it does not explain that other secrecy he maintained towards his daughters. Yet I have a deep conviction that had my brother been alive he would, sooner or later, have been included among the “men pals.” I don’t see my father as a cunning, or even a clever, man (the muddlement in Southsea was pure French farce), and the surprising thing is that considering how much he must surely have fibbed to my mother at the beginning of his affair and over all those Richmond years when we were at school and she and my grandmother (who continued to live with us until her death in 1917 and whom he loved and respected) had him under observation, and considering how well instructed they both already were in his ways and the ways of the world, and considering how many other people with whom my mother was also acquainted were “in the know”—the surprising thing is that she never suspected or got wind of anything. I say “suspected” without knowledge; how much uneasiness (apart from her lack of marital status), if any, he caused her during my schooldays when he was busy laying down his second family, I am unable to tell; I can only say that, excepting for two strange episodes, my parents seemed, to my boy mind, during my holidays, to be leading happy and harmonious lives. To one of these episodes I shall come shortly; the other was a shocking struggle over Webster’s Dictionary. I can assign no date to this, but my recollection is that some word, its spelling or meaning, was in hot dispute between my parents and both determined to look it up and say, “I told you so.” My father commanded my mother to fetch the dictionary, which was in the library; when she was slow in returning with it he guessed she was consulting it herself. Rushing out after her he wrenched the heavy volume from her hands in a violent struggle that left her weeping on the floor. I remember no more about it, and it is the only instance of their quarrelling that I recall. But I don’t recall either how much of my father, in that pre-war Richmond decade, c. 1904–1914, we all saw or expected to see. Living with us though he then was, I believe that business excuses of various sorts, received by my gullible mother as an accepted though disappointing matter of course, took him often from our midst; he seldom, if ever, for instance, accompanied us on our summer holidays to the seaside; it was only in the post-war decade 1919–1929 that I picture him as the constant paterfamilias, the regular commuter. In the pre-war period of his liaison I expect he must have felt himself to be in something of a mess, but as the years of deception rolled successfully by, and especially after he married my mother in 1919, I wonder to what extent he continued to worry about secrecy—and to what extent she would have minded had she found him out.

  I have used the word “jealousy” in connection with her in this memoir. My Aunt Bunny used to say that she was very jealous in her youth, and my sister accused her of jealousy throughout their tormented lives together. My mother, as I recall her, was not a jealous woman, her mind was too capricious, her disposition too generous and undemanding, to harbor the emotion. Some small degree of jealousy she may have had; she was incapable of sulking or of nursing resentments. Had she learnt of my father’s duplicity when we learnt of it, she would have been as astounded as we were, it was on so grand a scale, indeed it took one’s breath away, and if you take people’s breath away much else goes with it. Retrospective memory is flummoxed, tears become absurd, recrimination knows not where to begin; what was there to say? and I believe that my mother, when her rambling, preoccupied mind had managed to take the staggering fait accompli in, would have got used to living with it as with a new parlor-maid or a new hat. I think she would have been curious to see his three daughters, and charming to them of course as she was charming to everyone. In fact I have sometimes regretted that I kept her in the dark, as I have regretted losing touch for so long with the other family; had I acted otherwise and brought us all together at once, the last seventeen years of my mother’s life might have been less dull and lonely. And, after all, was anyone ever so affectionately deceived? Whatever my father’s mistress received from him in the way of love, thought and attention, she, at any rate in the ’twenties, the decade in which I visualize them best, could have had no sense of neglect. He had for her the sweetest, tenderest feelings. Indeed the thing that might have puzzled her most, a thing hardly to be credited, was that someone who had belonged to her so fully could possibly have found time to belong to anyone else. Fully? Here again I can only conjecture, but if my conjecture is right I think she must have taken that too into consideration in any view of his behavior; I conjecture that in the matter of sex my father let her off it, at her request, quite early in their married life—and had to look for it elsewhere. She was the most nervous of women and never ceased to complain of her three confinements, of the pains and hardships she had endured, the subsequent illnesses, puerperal fevers, prostrations. Child-bearing had been for her unqualified misery and suffering, and my guess is that soon after my sister’s birth she began to excuse herself from the marriage bed. As I have said, she became at last what we called “a chemist’s delight.”

  The other disharmonious event I have mentioned as belonging to my schooldays, a curious, tragical episode in her story, may help to illumine her character and her relations with my father. At about the same time that he was embarking upon his liaison with his mistress, she made a gentleman friend. Harold Armstrong had been a rubber planter in Sumatra. A smallish, paunchy, balding middle-aged man, with a blunt tip to his long nose and rather splay feet, we met him during a seaside holiday in Lowestoft or Margate. I was a preparatory schoolboy and recall that I never felt quite at ease with him, sensing that he did not like me much, or as much as my brother, to whom he wrote far longer letters in his sloping hand. This man fell in love with my mother, he would have married her if he could. She used to say that they were “soul mates,” and I believe they were, more than she and my father had ever been or ever could be. His love for her was of a compassionate, tender, sheltering kind, the sort of love we feel for a small, nervous animal: indeed he called her “the Rat” and had the line-image of a rat, as drawn by herself, engraved upon the silver backs of her hair-brushes and other toilet utensils, because she hoarded things up; if anything in the house was missing it was sure to be found in her room. But Harold Armstrong was her alter ego, he appealed to something fundamental in her, her reality, the little girl in her nature, she could be herself with him. The world they inhabited together was a fairy-tale world of pure romance and eternal youth; all her jokes and foibles, which often seemed to us so silly, had for him the utmost charm, he laughed with her, not at her as we did; they invented a private childish language between themselves (her boudoir in Grafton House, for instance, was known to them as “the P. J. room”—which stood for “the Private Jaw room”); he called her “Little Lady” and always kissed her hand.

  He became a frequent visitor to the house and, outwardly at least, got along amicably with my father, but I fancy that the latter was disturbed by this friendship. I was too young to understand the rest of this matter, but I believe that Armstrong was in some financial strait and asked my father for employment in Elders and Fyffes. His request was refused, and perhaps because he was generally lonely and frustrated and saw no endurable future, he committed suicide in a Reading hotel. Standing before the mirror in his bedroom he watched himself put the muzzle of the revolver into his mouth: this much was reconstructed by the police from the position in which he was found, fallen forward over the dressing table. My father, I remember, called us children together and said to us gravely, “Be particularly kind to your little mother.” In later years we were not kind; when she spoke of Armstrong, as she sometimes did, we would pretend to believe in our teasing way that there had been more to this friendship than the “purely platonic romance” she always vehemently asserted and which I have no doubt was the truth. One evening she burst into tears at our beastliness and fled from the room. How deeply she care
d for this man I do not know, or how deeply she was capable of caring for anyone: it is a question that applies as unanswerably to myself.

  She did not appear to miss my father when he died, I don’t recall her grieving for him; she seldom spoke of him and no photographs of him, as I remember, stood about Blenheim House or the smaller house, in Sheen Road, to which I afterwards moved her. In this respect she differed from Aunt Bunny who, up to the day of her death at the age of ninety-three, kept always on her bedside table a photo of the detestable “Doc” and hoped she would be so blessed as to be able to warm his carpet slippers for him in Heaven too. She, I am sure, would have been profoundly upset if, after his death, there had been revelations of his infidelity to her, indeed she would have refused them credence, however damning the evidence, her loyalty to her unworthy old friends and her need for devotion being so great. But my mother had no conception of religion and gave no thought to an after-life. To consider the life after death naturally involves envisaging death, a perfectly horrid subject, and she regarded such heavenly hopes as her sister entertained as extremely unhealthy and what she called “morbid.” To stay alive and well was problem enough for her, and the recipe for that was to keep the bowels open, to try to be cheerful and light-hearted, to take plenty of exercise (inside the house was safer than outside), not to lean out of railway-carriage windows, or spill the salt, or walk under ladders, to hide the knives and drape the mirrors at the approach of thunderstorms, and always to spit if there was a bad smell. One of my few early recollections of her is raising her veil to spit vigorously in the street, exhorting us to do likewise. I remember too a time when, before going to sleep, she would place her loose cash and rings on a chair outside her bedroom door, together with a note to burglars generally, which read: “Take my money but spare our lives.” She wrote always with a quill, a large dashing hand, full of exclamation marks and underlinings.

  I believe, therefore, that long ago, at the beginning of the century, she had managed to disengage herself from the sexual embraces of my father, that large heavy man whose weight upon her small nervous organism must have been crushing, and that she would have adjusted her mind, such as it was, to the knowledge that some other woman had been bearing the burden she had renounced, even though the “peccadillo”—a word she used—had resulted in three more children. What concerned her, and continued to concern her without cause, was not the disappearance of her “dear old Punch” from her scene, but her financial situation as his widow. She was a woman entirely without skills or the common leisure occupations of her generation; although she had devised our menus throughout our lives, her housekeeping was always conducted through a staff of servants; she could not knit or sew (Aunt Bunny and their mother were fine needlewomen); her piano, to which she had once turned for amusement, was gradually given up; avoiding the horrors if possible, she read nothing but the newspapers, chiefly for the racing news (she put small bets on horses, selecting them for the personal appeal of their names), prize competitions and crossword puzzles, at which Aunt Bunny was far cleverer than she; she played patience, chattered exhaustingly on the telephone or to her female helps or visitors, seldom left her small house except for little toddles round the corner with her current Sealyham and, in the late ’thirties, took secretly to the bottle. Ending up as I am with animals and alcohol, one of her last friends, when she was losing her faculties, was a fly, which I never saw but which she talked about a good deal and also talked to. With large melancholy yellow eyes and long lashes it inhabited the bathroom; she made a little joke of it but was serious enough to take in crumbs of bread every morning to feed it, scattering them along the wooden rim of the bath as she lay in it, much to the annoyance of Aunt Bunny who had to clear up after her. Apart from my continual intervention in the wretched warfare that was waged between her and my sister, of which I had to bear the telltale brunt from both sides, I don’t remember ever having had a serious, intimate conversation with my mother in my life; yet when I think of her, as I sometimes do, or look at her photos with that sad face she always put on for photographers, I take much of her psychology to myself.

  I have now put down a number of possible reasons to account for my father’s decision to exclude me from his confidence. The word “decision” may be queried as too definite; it is very probable that, after a time, as in his long irregular life with my mother, he ceased to bother himself. Had he wished to consult me in his affairs, he could not have done so until 1919, the year when I was back from the war and had come of age, and although this was also the year of his marriage to my mother, so that some tidying up got done, I daresay that by then a good deal of laissez faire and laziness had set in. Things with him had always slid, he let them slide—they seemed usually to slide the way he wanted—not exerting himself, muddling along, hoping for the best. Good-humored, easy-going, tolerant, his motto, I imagine, was “Live and let live” in this “wonderful old world.” Yet when he took up his pen to write to me in 1920, again in 1927, he made decisions; he decided, for some reason, that in this posthumous way, and not by personal interview, I was to be informed and instructed.

  When I started this memoir, in the ’thirties, my inclination was to blame myself for this failure in communication, indeed I still do not let myself off; inattentive always, I simply did not attend to him, he was my good old father who kept me comfortably and independently on my feet and sent down cases of champagne every year for my boat-race parties in Hammersmith, to which he himself, though invited, never came; beyond that, except in the matter of health, I never gave him a thought. How should one expect confidence from a person whom one regards more as a useful piece of furniture than as a human being? Yet that is all very well. If I took no interest in him, he did not make himself of much interest to me. He was, after all, my senior and a man of the world, incidentally my father; whatever the obstacles, any move towards a closer relationship should have come from his responsible and more experienced side, and he could easily have captured me had he wished; he had only to ask me to lunch or dine with him alone at Romano’s and say, “Look here, Joe, you’re a selfish fellow, wrapped up in your own affairs, but I have something important to tell you and would like your attention for a change.” To such an approach I, the natural subordinate, would have been readily, agreeably open: either he did not realize this, or could not make it, or did not want it. This brings me to my last account with him.