But why, I wondered, hadn’t my father joined up at the same time as Kenneth? His service record, which refers to ‘rheumatoid polyarthritis noted in 1932’, suggests that his entry was delayed by poor health. He did not become a member of the Royal Air Force Volunteer Reserve until the spring of 1941, his civilian occupation during 1940 being given as a sales manager in Birmingham. I never heard him refer to this job (he was probably selling off his glass company there), nor did my mother mention it in the last pages of her account, simply covering this period with a note: ‘Couldn’t stand the strain.’
It is clear that by the end of 1940 their marriage was pretty well over. At Maidenhead they slept in separate rooms, though this was partly because there were no proper double beds in Norhurst, and my mother always insisted on nine hours’ sleep at night – otherwise she had ‘no eyes’ in the morning and would have to place teabags on her eyelids during the siesta hour. In a Will my father made on 20 March 1941, shortly before joining the Royal Air Force, he appointed his brother and sister as his joint executors and trustees and as my guardians. There is no mention of his wife in the Will, and in his service record he gave his father as his next-of-kin (though in a moment of absent-mindedness describing him as his wife).
Later that year Flying Officer Basil Holroyd was posted to Wilmslow in Cheshire – and my mother went too. It was their last chance together. Once they had settled into a boarding house (the first of four), she came and fetched me from Maidenhead. I had been attending a small nursery school which I was taken to along a lane known as Folly Way. The school was called Highfield and all I can remember now is learning to crochet and ‘colour in’ surrounded by an indiscriminate noise as the boys rushed around the top of Castle Hill. At Wilmslow I went to a new school of which I recall nothing except a big green field. But my mother wrote about a prize-giving day in the summer of 1942 with crowds of parents in the garden. It was evidently one of those amiable occasions when the sun shines and ‘all shall have prizes’. But when my name was called out I was too shy to go up to the headmaster’s table, and my father had to collect the prize himself. It was too literal a version of what he wanted from me.
My mother worked at the refreshment bar of the Church Army Canteen inside the RAF station at Wilmslow. Pumping the milkshake machine and cutting the fruitcake passed for glamour in those days – it was certainly livelier than Norhurst. She made several friends, in particular the vivacious Shirley Morton whose husband Ivor became a semi-celebrity playing the piano with Corporal Dave Kaye at the entertainments which included Gracie Fields among the visiting stars. We sometimes heard them on the ‘Light Programme’ of the BBC too playing chirpy dance tunes, and patriotic songs, ‘Roll out the Barrel’ or ‘Hang out the Washing on the Siegfried Line’. I remember the great hangar where they played against a clatter of plates and cups and glasses in the background. In the evenings, as one of the ‘Wilmslow Wheelers’, my mother (they still called her ‘Sue’ in those days) would join the convoy of bicycles off to the pubs. Bicycling back in the black-out on her upright but uncontrollable Raleigh was always a tricky business and there were many spills. Though this was the time when I heard loud arguments at night between my parents, the wartime spirit of forced gaiety and compulsory conviviality in public never seemed to flag. ‘Basil was always one over the 8 in those days,’ my mother wrote in her idiomatic English.
But my father did not like my mother’s new friends or approve of her going out with them at night, leaving me in the boarding house. He was often away himself at RAF stations in the north of England arranging the supply of provisions overseas and would have preferred my mother to go back to Maidenhead, taking me with her. But she would not go. They argued violently. ‘We really could not stand each other by then,’ my mother wrote. Though she makes no mention of another man in her account, she told me never to mention the name of a certain RAF officer there, and not having mentioned it, I have forgotten the name.
It was at Wilmslow that my mother began having affaires. In his novel The Directors, my father wrote: ‘Thelma’s first affairs hurt him bitterly… She was constitutionally unable to exist without the admiration of men… She didn’t even feel very deeply about any man she went to bed with and usually forgot all about him as soon as the brief intrigue was over. Then the excitement of a new affair would prove irresistible.’ I have no doubt that this passage comes from these times at Wilmslow.
During one of the school holidays in 1943 (‘it must have been summer’, my mother wrote, ‘although you were wearing your pale blue overcoat’), my father announced that he was taking me down to Maidenhead. ‘But he never brought you back to me,’ my mother continued. ‘...After a few months, when the Mortons left Wilmslow, I went with them.’ She stayed with her friend Shirley Morton for several weeks in London and then moved to a boarding house in Cresswell Gardens, off Drayton Gardens where she had begun her marriage. I have no memories of this upheaval, only of the repercussions that would follow.
My father, soon to be promoted to Squadron Leader and unexpectedly benefiting from his exile at Chillon College, was being trained as an RAF interpreter. In 1944 he was posted to Paris. Before leaving, he drove me over from Norhurst to begin my first term at Scaitcliffe, the boarding school he had described as ‘absolute hell’.
10
Notes from Norhurst
‘What shall we do with the boy?’ That cry comes back to me whenever I think of my early years at Maidenhead. As if to answer the question, my father, in the intervals from his career in France, would turn up at Norhurst with some devastating present – an air rifle, chemistry set, conjuring tricks or even golf club – and after a few flourishes and gestures, a few words of encouragement and a laugh, leave the fine tuning of my tuition as rifleman, chemist, magician or golfer to my aunt while he returned to fight the Germans or encourage the French. My aunt did her best, but I remember thinking one rainy day as we quarried out some lumps of ice to put on her forehead while waiting for the ambulance to arrive, that we shouldn’t have chosen the dining-room to play cricket.
Most of these events passed my grandfather by. He got little sleep at night and would catch up during the day with a series of ‘forty winks’. Besides he had his own disasters to occupy him. The post would arrive, he would shake his head and on the backs of the envelopes begin a sequence of calculations that never seemed to come out well. Distracted, he would suddenly stand up and crash his poor head against some unexpected corner of furniture and then, blaming the government and all its works, stick on another piece of Elastoplast.
This Elastoplast, like the impasto of an expressionist painter, covered the dome of my grandfather’s head which, because he was bald and somewhat bent, he appeared to be accusingly presenting to us all. His face too, with its changing surface of bumps and bruises, was something of a battlefield largely because of his shaving habits. He was not a skilful shaver. His chin and cheeks, as well as his nose and neck, were sometimes dotted with tufts of cotton wool and crossed with thin red lines like alleged Martian canals. Late in life my father gave him an electric razor. After some experimentation in the privacy of the garage, he found this gadget easiest to use while standing on the seat of the upstairs lavatory from where he plugged its dangling cord into the overhead light. In the darkness the whole operation lasted nearly half-an-hour, for he sometimes submerged part of his kit in the cistern. It was impossible for the rest of us to use the lavatory over these periods. My aunt, my grandmother, Old Nan and myself would line up outside, rattling the door handle and crying out in exasperation. But he felt protected by the comfortable whining of his machine. Occasionally he would shave the same side of his face twice since there was no soap to guide him. But over a week things would even out.
From time to time, amid panic and pandemonium, my grandfather was required to travel up to London for a meeting of the Rajmai Tea Company, and once or twice I went up with him on the train. When he arrived at Paddington he would hand up his neatly-folded copy of The
Times through the smoke of the hissing engine to the train driver who touched his cap and nodded his head as he took it. My grandfather always came back looking worried from these days in London, and the dogs themselves would sneak into the corners of the rooms.
Part of his difficulties arose from increasing deafness, though this also afforded him protection from the perpetual squabbling that filled the rooms at Norhurst. As a child I had the double experience of my parents’ marriage that had unhappily broken up, and my grandparents’ marriage that had been unhappily kept going. At one point I was to make an attempt to run away from Maidenhead to join my mother in London; at another point, I attempted to run back from London to Maidenhead. The family was baffled: but I do not feel so baffled.
Norhurst was to be my intermittent home for twenty years. Everyone was very kind to me, but the atmosphere had become saturated with unhappiness. It was a ritualised unhappiness, repeated in the same formula of words through the awful succession of meals, housework, and more meals that was our routine, every day, all year. I can hear their voices still:
I declare unto goodness I don’t know what’s wrong with you… Are you perfectly potty? Are you insane? Sometimes I think you should be certified… Shut up! You bitch!… You are disgusting! How dare you speak to me like that? I do have ears you know… One can’t open one’s lips in this bally house… Sorry! Sorry! Sorry! Sorry! Will that do? Or would you like me to go down on bended knees? Why don’t you arrange for me to be shot at dawn?… I’m sick to death of you all. I wish I were dead! I wish we were all dead, dead and gone.
Sometimes they shouted all this and more, much more, from separate rooms. At other times I would come across one of them practising these same words under her breath. During meals, above the immaculate reports of wars, natural disasters, weather and sport issuing from the huge wooden wireless in one corner of the dining-room, they confronted one another with the same shouted phrases yet again. From another corner of the room my grandmother’s parrot ‘Mr Potty’ (though we realised after she produced an egg that we had got her gender wrong) croaked back to us our shrill invective from her vast cage.
Into this echoing pit of abuse had tumbled ‘Josh and Bang’ from their heady days in Ireland; also their daughter Yolande who had looked so engagingly bold and lively in her early photographs, so happy with her friends in the South of France; and even the kindly Kate Griffin, the ‘Nan’ who had nursed my father so carefully through his illnesses and was now called ‘Old Nan’ by me. It was their collective unhappiness I had tried to recreate in A Dog’s Life that so distressed my father – and that probably accounts for my avoidance of arguments today. ‘They sat around in dismay, bowed, overcome,’ I wrote. ‘The words came from them mechanically, as though they existed under a spell...They had passed and repassed on the same staircase, twisted the same door handles, sat in the same old chairs around the same old table, and heard the same monotonous voices… and as time wore on they had somehow grown into strangers – strangers to themselves and one another.’
We lived at Norhurst as if in a capsule. No one visited us – we would never let anyone in. If by some mischance a person came to the door and rang the bell, we suddenly stopped our insults and froze into silence until he went away. When the telephone rang (Maidenhead 336) we panicked, rushing with frightful cries from room to room until it ceased ringing and we could relax again into our hostilities. We were certain the telephone was not ‘safe’, that the world could hear every syllable we said, though we had nothing to say and could hardly hear what others were saying to us. We did not want to hear. The truth was that we were frightened of the world outside. We had locked ourselves in an awful embrace and forgotten how to communicate with strangers.
And yet, because of its familiarity and my insecurity, I was attached to Norhurst as my father had been to Brocket, which was only round a corner but a generation away. That house lay in sunshine, this one in darkness. On the ground floor the ‘morning-room’ was without light and occupied by the telephone, like a monster in its cave; in the large hall, like the remnants of a beleaguered army, had been assembled the last cracked pieces of Lalique glass: the jardinière with gazelles and the eglantine powder box; the archer ashtray and the water grasshopper in opal, green and blue; the goblet with dogs and the vase with egrets; the amber carp, the dahlia bowl, the mulberry and mistletoe lights, the cockerel mascot. One or two of these, with a cry and a curse, we smashed each year until there was almost none; at the back of the house a gloomy dining-room gave on to the garden where the sparrows, chaffinches, thrushes and blackbirds waited noisily for their three meals a day; also at the back was the kitchen, the only warm room in the house, and a dilapidated scullery where frightful battles over washing-up raged. Off the landing upstairs stood five small bedrooms and two bathrooms – one for my grandmother, the other for the rest of us. But baths were discouraged. A bath a day was unthinkable. As my grandmother remarked (referring to my mother): ‘Some people must be bally dirty if they need that amount of washing.’ The boiler, which was encased in a shed outside the kitchen and which we fed night and day with coal and coke and much else besides, seemed to have fallen asleep. Whatever mixture we gave it, whatever knobs we twisted or levers pulled, it continued dozing and we got barely enough tepid water for our washing-up contests. The trouble was that we all had contradictory notions of how the boiler should be operated. ‘Now look here,’ my grandfather would begin, taking out a pencil and the back of an envelope to demonstrate his theories to Old Nan, the only person who was obliged to listen to him (though he would raise his voice so that his message reached everyone). On Fridays a gardener called Western came in to help with the leaves and twigs, enabling the rest of us on Saturdays and for the rest of the week to blame him for getting everything wrong. ‘Western must have been putting grass in the boiler again,’ my grandfather would grumble, shaking his head mournfully. He was very fond of Western whom he often called ‘a damn fool, and no mistake’, beaming as he said it.
It was the garden I loved at Norhurst, with its hovering dragonflies and bumblebees, its ladybirds, butterflies, chaffinches, robins. It was a long and narrow garden, divided into three sections. Nearest the house was a lawn which belonged to the crowds of birds except in wartime when we turned it into a vegetable patch. In peacetime, it reverted to green grass with rosebeds, a place in which to savour Rajmai tea on a summer afternoon, and get my aunt to send down her lethal-sounding leg-breaks to me with a tennis ball. The middle section was wilder, incorporating a small rock garden and a dangerous pond with its mighty toad, and a large tree in which I could hide. Further down, where the shelter had been dug, was a sandpit for me to jump in. It lay beside some enormous marrows and elongated hanging beans. At the end stood a garden shed and, over the fence, the peaceful insecurity of All Saints’ cemetery.
Though once or twice a cousin was invited to play with me (the boy who was whispered to be Rex Harrison’s son and who then suffered from an ophthalmic illness that made his eyes bright red), on the whole I played alone. I hid and found myself in the tree; captured and released myself from the shed; raced myself up and down the length of the garden past the sundial and the dogs’ graves; threw a tennis ball high on to the roof and, as it spun down out of the blue sky, caught it; and contrived a complicated game with a ball against the garage doors, simultaneously winning and losing.
The garage, guarded on one side by a peach tree and on the other by a walnut tree, was a sombre fascinating place, an Aladdin’s Cave, piled high with treasures from the past – a broken rocking-horse, a strangely-painted screen, a still-working radiogram, pictures of girls and horses by Lewis Baumer and Anna Zinkheisen, suitcases, ladders, illustrated catalogues and mildewing books, one or two imposing pieces of furniture and large threadbare carpets with faded colours, a bowler hat belonging to my aunt, a walking stick that turned out to be a gun, and bottles of cider that I was sometimes allowed to drink in the evening with my grandfather. It was obvious treasure. Ther
e was even room for a car, a little eight-horse-power Ford that my aunt no longer used.
I sometimes sat in my aunt’s old car and listened to records on the radiogram. My grandparents had no interest in music and my father seemed actively to dislike it (he could be propelled to his feet if told that a piece from Gilbert and Sullivan was the National Anthem). But my aunt had a collection of ‘seventy-eight’ records – ‘Miss Otis Regrets’ or ‘Dinner for One Please, James’, ‘Bye-bye Blackbird’, ‘It Had to be You’, ‘Who’s Sorry Now’, ‘Always’, and Charles Trenet singing ‘La Mer’. They were scratchy but curiously poignant and appealing. My aunt never took them into the house to play – she never played anything. I did not know why. But I played them, and then I played my own records. How I first heard classical music, how I got hold of my records, I cannot remember. I daresay I listened to the wireless and then demanded these records as birthday and Christmas presents. I would take Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony, Verdi’s Requiem, Wagner’s ‘Ride of the Valkyries’ out to the garage, and sit there absorbing them in the dark. My favourite composers were Tchaikovsky and Beethoven whose symphonies I got to know by heart. I suppose these garage concerts began when I was aged about nine, and continued for eight or nine years. I would turn up the volume, open the car door, and sit enthralled. Sometimes I could not sit still but had to stride up and down through the dusty bric-à-brac waving my arms, lifting up my voice, joining in. This music, and the imaginary adventures I was led on upstairs by Conan Doyle, Rider Haggard, H.G. Wells and others, were no artistic luxury for me but the essence of my life. I would come in from these hours in the garage, or down from my bedroom, glowing with happiness and fortified against the family warfare that was more real to me than any combat against Germans, Italians or Japanese. I was at the centre of this domestic warfare and regarded the world war as mere orchestration for it.
Basil Street Blues Page 12