So she drove. I sat beside her, my sight had not yet begun to fail. Mine was a pair of eyes to lend to hers. She fought the car, foresaw death in every charging lorry, swerved lavishly, cursed the rain. There was no question of visiting Peter Collins’s father’s garage. The journey was gruelling, long, ill-tempered. She indignantly rued the presence of other vehicles on the road, railed at stupid old fools and young louts. She got us there in the end.
John Ogg sorted out my father’s eyes. And four years later I got to ride from Eskdale to Ravenglass.
Four years too late. At the age of eleven I considered myself too mature for miniature railways, model villages and so on. I defined myself as something other than a child preoccupied by cut-down-to-size representations for the little ones. I resented the indignity of still having to wear shorts to school. My favourite book was no longer John Maurice’s The Iconium Mystery. I was through with Enid Blyton. I still read the Eagle and Tiger, and the monthly 64-page adventures of Buck Jones and Kit Carson. But soon the only comic strips I read were Super Detective Library: Buck Ryan and Roderic Graeme’s Blackshirt. Nothing, though, remotely matched Alex Raymond’s exquisitely drawn Rip Kirby, whose adventures, transposed to England, often involved stern beauties dressed in what I did not realise was bondage kit. They were as beguiling as the pipe-smoking, houseboat-dwelling crone Mrs Malarkey was frightening. I devoured green Penguins. The writers I read were, supposedly, not children’s writers: Edgar Wallace, John Creasey (sometimes ‘writing as J. J. Marric’), Margery Allingham, Nicholas Blake (C. Day-Lewis), E. C. Bentley, Josephine Tey, Victor Canning, Mickey Spillane, Ian Fleming, John Dickson Carr, A. E. W. Mason, Seldon Truss, Geoffrey Household (whom I have never lost the habit of rereading).
Nonetheless, on the afternoon of Sunday 3 August 1958, I was, despite myself, excited by the cute railway’s reek of oil and anthracite, by sudden bursts of steam, by the crisp unsummery wind, by the scarf of smoke that now and again enveloped us. Besides, our fellow passengers were not all children or the parents of children. They also included snugly wrapped fully mature males, smiling never-met-the-right-girl smiles, validating the line’s appeal to adults. Having earlier taken the road to Eskdale through Ulpha and across Birker Fell we returned over Hardknott. This time there was no struggle, so no shame: indeed, my father was hummingly smug. The slopes had been within the Morris Minor Traveller’s capability, though perhaps not by so generous a margin as he wished to believe.
We got back to Newfield in the late afternoon. Tony Duckworth, an amiable cricketer five years my senior from Lytham St Anne’s, was skimming a newspaper in the lugubrious brown lounge. He nodded a greeting.
I settled down with the engrossing Mystery Mile. I had been reading for about five minutes when Tony asked: ‘Oh, did you hear?’
‘What?’
‘On the news just now.’
‘No.’
‘That racing driver, the one you were talking about … oh, what’s his name – he was killed this afternoon.’
Something electric raced up my spine.
‘Who?’ But I didn’t need to ask. I knew. I spoke his name with dread. ‘Peter Collins – do you mean?’
‘That’s the chap, in uh … the—’ replied Tony.
‘German Grand Prix.’
My body felt unprecedentedly cold, pierced by iced needles. I was a helpless child. I ran upstairs to my bedroom to hide my tears. Peter Collins was my idol. I guess I had a mildly homoerotic crush on him. Dashing blond hell-raiser; glamorous American wife; yacht in Monte Carlo; he lived fast, died like a fated fighter pilot. The death toll among racing drivers of that era was high: Luigi Musso had died four weeks previously at Reims; Mike Hawthorn would die, dicing with Rob Walker on the A3 at Guildford, five months later. Collins died at the Nurburgring in the Eifel Mountains, at a corner called Pflanzgarten. That was the first German word I ever knew: the garden of plants. There’d be no going to his father’s garage at Kidderminster now.
That night I dreamed that Winston Churchill had died. Inconsolable, I woke my parents and sobbed, a child in my mother’s arms.
The next week I pondered the loss of someone I knew only from magazines, photographs and newsreels: someone, then, whom I didn’t know. I hadn’t reacted this way when Grandma died the previous summer: indeed, my indifference had caused me to feel guilty. I walked the fells, scrambled up the courses of rushing gills, negotiated the rubble rocks, climbed Wallowbarrow Crag, crossed and recrossed the Duddon by stepping stones and a bridge suspended by ropes. Flat-hatted Harry Braithwaite, the Longmires’ single employee, had heard of my chagrin. He clouted me manfully on the back.
The next time we went to Seathwaite, in 1961, the Edinburgh University veterinary student Richard Waters told me that Harry slept with his flat-hat on: he had once been obliged to share Harry’s rudely scented single-storey quarters next to the cowshed. His mother, wife of a Middlesbrough GP, proudly confided to me that the pretty girl whose photograph was sellotaped to the dashboard of Richard’s Standard 8 was likely to be ‘the next Mrs Waters’. I never found out. My father feigned jocular concern about the effect of repeated exposure to hexachlorophene soap on Richard’s chapped hands and forearms.
I was fourteen: my voice had broken through the late summer and autumn of the year before. Mary Longmire had heard a rumour that Tony Duckworth had joined the police; now, that was a good career. It wouldn’t be long before I left school: what was I going to do? Anything but join the police. Her cooking seemed even better than before – the bacon, the eggs, the kidneys roasted in their suet, the fat chops. I ate voraciously, I was growing at an alarming rate. My trousers didn’t reach my ankles, my cuffs stopped short of my wrists, my windcheater rode around my ribs. My sartorial sensibility was offended. My parents argued that I’d outgrow new clothes so refused to buy any till my current ones no longer fitted: it was they who decided on what fitted. This was to be my penultimate holiday with them. I wanted to be with ‘young people’, especially girls. But my self-consciousness, caused by my freckles (and, I guess, by my very existence), was exacerbated by embarrassment at the joke clothes I was obliged to wear, as though I was still a child.
Mrs Handley (née Marjorie Fox) had married in the tiny church at Seathwaite in 1937. After the war she and her husband Alec went to Tristan da Cunha as missionaries. She a teacher, he the island’s chaplain. One of his predecessors had been Lewis Carroll’s brother. Alec Handley was also an amateur vet and, alarmingly, an amateur dentist. He died in 1948. Four years later Mrs Handley returned to England, to outermost north London. In her charge was a girl called Valerie whose island parents wanted her to receive an English education. I had never previously heard of Tristan da Cunha. Soon it became impossible not to have heard of it, for the minor seismic activity (earth tremors, rock falls) the island had suffered was reported in English newspapers. This summer was the first time that Mrs Handley had brought Valerie to the site of her wedding. Valerie’s surname was Glass, one of seven the 300 islanders of Tristan da Cunha bear. Richard Waters enthusiastically explained to me the effects of inbreeding. I covertly scrutinised Valerie for telltale signs but found none; not covertly enough – Mrs Handley was rightly suspicious of me. But my sac of testosterone was directed at Francine, Valerie’s bored, tanned, short-fringed scholastic exchange from Moulins whom I set out to impress by speaking French. She scoffed and repeatedly corrected me: I, of course, did not dare criticise her impoverished English. I offered her my hand to help her across the beck that tumbled down the hill from White Pike. She refused it. I told myself that this was due to Mrs Handley being present, tried to tell myself – I wasn’t even capable of convincing self-delusion. When I led them through the woods to the suspension bridge across the Duddon Francine complained petulantly about the metre-tall anthills beside the path. They seethed with stinging ‘red’ ants, actually the colour of barley sugar. She accused me of subjecting her to potential danger. It was as though it was my fault that they were there. Could we not hav
e taken a different route? I retrieved some pride from her fulminations being cast in French. It was an acknowledgment of our common language, an admission that she could not have begun to express her chastisements in English. My humiliation was mitigated, a bit, maybe.
Early in the morning the day they were to return south, Francine came and sat, less than a foot from me, on a bench outside Mary Longmire’s kitchen.
Had we time for another walk in the woods? I foresaw kisses of the utmost tenderness. I longed for the scramble to undress each other – which I knew happened offscreen in Beat Girl and Troy Donahue’s movies. I would gallantly protect her from acidic ferns and those ants whilst making her feel like she had never felt before.
From her purse she produced a photobooth photograph of a wall-eyed youth with quiffed hair and a negligent attitude to skincare attempting to sneer like Eddy Mitchell, himself a laughably failed Elvis. This was Yves. To whom she was committed. Isn’t he handsome? I replied maybe, yes, perhaps, to certain girls, possibly. Francine evidently reckoned me insufficiently appreciative of her smalltown tombeur. Did I know how old he is? He is seventeen. Seventeen. Almost a man. Not a fourteen-year-old. He smokes American cigarettes: Kent, Philip Morris. He is in the lycée technologique. He dances the Twist. He dances the Madison. He owns a Solex. He drinks beer – from the bottle.
I tied a knot in the corner of my brain to remind me not to emulate Yves’s properties and never to look like the berk, who was presumably training to be a garage mechanic.
After breakfast I waved them goodbye as they set off for Mrs Handley’s house between the exotic poles of Friern Barnet and Cockfosters (which my father pronounced Co’Fosters). Valerie returned my wave. Francine didn’t. I wished her ill.
My malevolence was misaimed. My hate-rays must have struck Valerie, for less than two months later, after further intermittent tremors, a volcano erupted on Tristan da Cunha for the first time in three centuries and the entire population was evacuated to a former RAF base at Calshot on Southampton Water where a number died from diseases to which, in Atlantic fastness, they had developed no immunity.
Seathwaite in Dunnerdale (i.e. Duddon dale) is not quite as wet as Seathwaite in Borrowdale, a dozen miles due north, which was said to suffer the highest annual rainfall of anywhere in England. But that August it poured down. For several days I did little but play canasta with three spinsters, the Misses King (sisters) and their friend Miss Hopper – I feared ending up like them. When Ted and Dorothea called to collect my mother to take her to the bothy for the afternoon I looked out of the lounge window. A forlorn girl was sitting in the back of their car. My mother put her head round the door to ask whether I was coming. I was about to say yes when the spinsters replied decisively for me: I was going nowhere when there was canasta to be played. My mother shrugged at my inability to extricate myself.
That evening she told me that Ted and Dorothea would like to see me: their niece too could do with the company of someone of her own age. She was being harassed by Ted because of her northern accent, the accent he himself had sloughed en route from Yorkshire to Oxford at the age of eighteen. The next morning I crept out of the hotel before the spinsters could find me and stumbled through the fat rain’s grapeshot to the bothy. Its whiteness was inviting as I squelched towards it. But, on a day that was all dusk, there were no lights on. It was deserted. I walked round to the back door. It was locked. Cursing and resigned I set off back to the hotel. A drenched dog-walking neighbour told me that I had missed them by five minutes. They had just left to take young Susan back to Ripon. Apparently she was ‘homesick’.
I slunk back to the hotel. The spinsters pounced.
My father boomed: ‘He’s coming to Berthe’s.’
He directed me to the car. My mother joined us. She told me that I was not to submit to bullying by the old trouts.
Major Johnstone and his German wife Berthe lived in a large austere late Georgian house some miles downstream from Seathwaite. They owned a pack of savage Alsatians. Canasta with lifelong virgins seemed a better option than being subject to their attention. I refused to leave the car till they were locked up. Berthe introduced me to the delusional defence that dog-people invariably make of their quadripedal weapons: ‘Prince/Rover/Mervyn wouldn’t hurt a fly.’
But he might bite me, sever an artery, detach a limb, scar my face.
They inhabited a reeking slum. The stench of dog was pervasive: dog pee, dog hair, dog food. The Johnstones were inured to it or didn’t notice it. They were perpetually drunk. Their stretch of river was supposedly more abundant in sea trout and brown trout than the Newfield’s where, despite the rain, the water was frustratingly low. I suspect that my father had simply turned up at the house and asked if he could fish it. They had welcomed him as someone whom they could ply, competitively, with gin (him) and port (her) whilst they screamed, shrieked, swore, tried to throw things and passed out in their sullied playpen. And if he would insist on fishing then my mother and I could provide the audience their exhibitionist intimacy demanded. The house was wilfully gloomy. There were curtains so old, so weighted with dust that their rods were partially detached from the walls: drifts of plaster bordered the wainscot. Warped shutters didn’t shut. Stapled drapes made do. Blinds were skewed. Screens propped each other up parlously. Light beams invaded through cracks. The Johnstones were too lazy, too chaotic to be vampires: it’s a calling that demands application. Their marriage was all inchoate bickering and nagging resentment, not hatred, not loathing, yet. On a dusty console table there were framed photos of a handsome young officer and a pretty blonde woman. They were unrecognisable as the couple who now swayed grievously beside that table. Yet even the oldest photos had been taken only a decade or so previously. There were some that were evidently more recent. He in mufti, she with her features still uncoarsened. Their decline had been precipitous. He was now pallid and prematurely white-haired (a sign of charlatanry, according to Max Beerbohm). She was bloated, going on blonde. Her teeth might have been smeared with bitter aloes, they had not recovered from a neglect which had perhaps begun during the war: in its death throes the Third Reich was short of dentists, which caused its cities to stink of mass halitosis.
He had resigned his commission upon inheriting the house, its farms, its river. She taunted him: beside the grand Pomeranian estate her family had fled when the Soviet army invaded, this Dunnerdale estate was a mere cottage with smallholdings.
He gently reminded her, as he must often have done, that they owned this house, that they owned everything they could see from it, the fells, the forests. In contrast, the palace near Neubrandenburg was, so far as they knew, now a military police barracks. That was the difference.
One day, she boasted, she would go back to reclaim what was rightly hers. She improbably lived to see that day.
My mother doubted that the palace existed. Or, that if it did exist, it was somewhere she knew from far off and had no familial connection with. She suspected that Berthe was like ‘The German Girls’ but had got lucky because of her (now lost) looks. ‘The German Girls’ – my nannies Christine, Ruth, Lotte – were constantly on the qui vive for a husband who might offer a permanent escape from the DDR. If Berthe’s past was an invention it was a convincing one. Her husband appeared to believe it. If she deceived him she also deceived herself. They had met in Hamburg, in the British Zone, where she had suffered the humiliation of sharing a one-room walk-up apartment with her mother and sister. This tale of conventional indigence might have been devised to cover up the lurid truth that she was a hostess, even a Strassenmädchen. Major Johnstone may have been complicit, he may have drunk vodka to erase the memory of his wife’s horizontal ignominy.
As the day drew on their mutual insults became coarser if less barbed. The blunt instrument replaced the stiletto. Major Johnstone’s repertoire included no allusion to his wife having been a prostitute. It surely would have done had she been. As he slurred and slumped towards blackout he sneeringly reminded her th
at she was German. He mockingly reproached himself for having married a German. He dared not accuse her or her aristocratic family of having held Nazi sympathies, though the allegation was implicit. Marrying her, he had married into disgrace and buried culpability, he had married into a squalid nation, he had married into a fallen race. Domestic sniping was interrupted when either party had to refill a glass. This was discharged with such adroitness that the drunkenness it effected might have been an act put on for anyone entrapped in their hellish theatre: they cannot surely have comforted themselves with this sustained animosity when alone.
It was near dusk when my father turned up. In the state of exhaustion he often suffered after several hours’ piscatorial concentration he seemed not to notice that his wife was tipsy nor that his son was blotto. Or if he did notice he didn’t mind, for he was carrying three glistening sea trout which he displayed with childish pride. I was embarrassed that he felt obliged to justify himself with this catch to an alcoholic landowner twenty years his junior, who had not fought in the war and who had initially gone to Germany to do his National Service, a form of conscription my father routinely mocked, casting himself as a professional soldier. Callow civvies resented being called up when there was nothing to fight for. They considered it punishment. They were a shirking embuggerance which hampered martial order.
Berthe scowled at the fish. She complained that despite the freshness of the fish she could not prepare Forelle blau. The fish turns blue, or blueish, due to the reaction of the mucus on its skin with vinegar, wine vinegar, proper vinegar, vinegar unknown to the English who consider malt spirit to be ‘vinegar’. Gastronomic barbarians! A characterisation that my mother would, in any other circumstance, have seconded. So began another skirmish. The war was of course still being fought when we returned later in the week.
An Encyclopaedia of Myself Page 19