Basil Street Blues

by Michael Holroyd

*

  While getting a foothold in London, I kept being pulled back to Norhurst for short spells to see my grandfather. Things had looked up for him briefly after the war. Towards the end of 1947, at the age of seventy-two, he had gone out to visit the Rajmai Estate in India and came back with a report recommending new houses, schools and a hospital for the company employees and their families. The following April he was elected Chairman of Rajmai. It was a peak in his career. But the board meetings were nervous affairs. Though he armed himself with all the regular protective equipment, including a military-looking umbrella, correct gloves, polished shoes and a venerable double-breasted suit, he still could not ward off the terrible outbursts from his cousin ‘Mad Ivor’, and would sometimes arrive back in Maidenhead looking very miserable. It was a mystery how his brother Pat, the mildest and most innocuous of men, could have produced such an intemperate son. At Norhurst, a rumour soon sprang up that Ivor was having ‘an operation to his head’. The minutes of Rajmai Tea Company show that he resigned from the board in 1950 and that there were ‘circumstances under which this resignation has become necessary’. Attached to this minute is a note: ‘In case there may be repercussions legal or otherwise arising from letters which have passed between Ivor Holroyd’s solicitors and the Chairman, the Board desire to protect and indemnify the Secretaries against any such eventuality.’ The source of Ivor’s anger had probably been Fraser’s borrowing of money from Pat shortly before his death. As an act of reconciliation, Ivor’s wife was appointed to the board on his resignation; and it was from her that Kenneth bought extra Rajmai shares for himself and his father. When Fraser retired from the chairmanship in 1952, Kenneth became a director.

  Life would have been easier now if my grandfather’s health had not begun to fail. It was his wish to make one more journey to India and, after various false starts and amid waves of chaos and commotion at Norhurst – everyone running around in perplexity and the dog wringing its hands – this he achieved in 1955, touring the company’s gardens at Assam in his eightieth year. There is a picture of him there, smiling benignly while various estate workers are doubled up in laughter. Seven years later, as Chinese troops invaded Assam, we were privileged at Maidenhead to get our first glimpse of the Rajmai plantations, edged with Old Nan’s silhouette, on our television. But by then my grandfather was dead.

  He had not been well for almost a decade. Indeed for much of that time he had been stubbornly dying, on bad days in desperation and terror in front of us. He died a little upstairs in his front bedroom and then a little more downstairs in the morning-room where the family had made up a bed for him. He died on a stretcher going down the stairs and in the ambulance going off to the hospital; and then he went on dying as he was moved in and out of hospital, back and forth between the wards, again, again. It took a fearful time his dying, and we all felt we had died a little with him.

  Until I witnessed this, I had thought of death simply as a disappearance, someone walking into another room and shutting the door; or a trick performed by a conjuror, painless and inexplicable, leaving the sensation that behind the descending curtain everything was actually all right. I saw the process as we all saw it in films; a lying down and closing of the eyes on camera. Nothing more. I had known death only as part of fiction. My grandfather showed me the fact. I was wholly unprepared for the awfulness of his final years and could not credit what was happening to him. Ours had been the sort of life at Norhurst, blasted with quarrels, saturated with an engulfing misery, that naturally drove us to entreat death – until my grandfather began to die. It was then we realised, all of us, how preferable a living death is to a dead one.

  My grandfather died what is called a natural death (‘congestive cardiac failure’). He was in his eighty-sixth year by the time the last painful breath had been crushed out of him. So he had had ‘a good innings’ despite not quite being ‘a safe pair of hands’. Surely there could be nothing of which to complain? Yet I was horrified. My father, seeing my distress and suffering distress himself, remarked that through the long horrors of history many people had gone through worse experiences. He began to recite them as if finding comfort from this frightful litany.

  In rooms close to where my grandfather was dying, we would gather to discuss his condition, discuss his life. I know more of his life now than I did then. I know that he did not enjoy a successful business career, or a happy marriage, or achieve anything of special distinction. His one romantic adventure had ended in disaster and he had done very little with the fortune he inherited from his father except lose it – indeed he would have ended up a bankrupt had he not been rescued by Kenneth after the war. Yet we spoke of him with reverence, as if he were a truly great man. Not that he ever said anything of greatness. His political opinions, which were expressed as a series of slogans (‘Jack’s as good as his master’) were a hundred years or more out of date and, I believe, copied from his father, the Major-General, who perhaps had more right to them. We thought of him as a Christian Gentleman, though he never went to church and the disgruntled clichés he aimed at socialists were profoundly unChristian. Once he had been a believer, or believed he had been, and he still wanted to believe. But he simply could not. During this last phase of his life, his bible was Gayelord Hauser’s Look Younger, Live Longer. All his life he had longed to look and feel younger, and now he was striving fearfully to live longer. It was the pathos of his predicament that touched us all so unbearably. Here was a gentle man whose home had resounded with vituperation, nothing if not well-meaning and now coming to nothing, whose long life had been largely unlived and whose fear of hurting others had now turned to a fear of being hurt himself, of being extinguished, buried, burnt.

  He had watched his own father die, his infant son Desmond, his brother Pat. And his mother had killed herself. These deaths, I believe, had destroyed his Christian faith. Now it was his turn, and there was to be no miracle. As the realisation spread through him that there was no place for him to go but into oblivion, the change in him became dreadful. His life, for so long incomprehensible and bleak, now appeared wonderfully desirable. He yearned for more of it, for another chance to do better. The remorselessness of his dying made him unrecognisable. All the resilience, good humour, niceness were gradually prised out of him. He did not know how to behave. He was afraid: afraid of more pain, afraid of the nurses, afraid of the medical instruments to which he was attached, afraid of everything. Of what use now were his gentlemanly standards? He had left his card, but the Great Gentleman above was not at home. He was nowhere.

  As a source of hope and strength, his vanished faith was replaced by drugs, and these also changed him. They allowed him to sleep, but seemed to give him no rest. His sleep was pitted with nightmares. He shouted out incomprehensible cries, struggled in his bed as if against invisible bonds, and then woke exhausted from hours of wrestling with his unseen opponent. His face sank in, the colour of his skin went to green and purple. The hospital ward was crowded with patients bandaged and strapped like grotesque babies lying in their cots, all alike, all waiting. One day, after a couple of taut hours at the bedside, I was relieved by my aunt who wearily pointed out that I had been sitting next to the wrong bed.

  I hated these sessions beside the bed. I seemed to become infected with all my grandfather’s fear and sadness. And I could do nothing to help. The wards were like parade grounds where the Last Post was constantly sounding, and marks were awarded for deportment and smartness. By such standards, his own until recently, my grandfather was not making a good death. He was drawing attention to himself, creating trouble, not going quietly, letting himself down, letting us down. This must have been in his mind when he looked across at me and gasped out: ‘I’m sorry.’

  Those were the last words I heard him speak. On 24 February 1961, the hospital telephoned to say that he had died ‘fairly comfortably’ early that morning. None of us had wanted him to die and all of us were relieved now he was dead. My grandmother sang out her grief in a frightful
dirge that scraped our nerves but gave us a target for our hostility. My Uncle Kenneth began talking, and went on talking, about farming matters to take his mind off it all. ‘My God, this is an awful place,’ my father unconsciously quoted as we stood together in the undertaker’s office. Then my aunt rushed in, looking tired and furious. It was almost as if she were preparing for another washing-up battle over the spoons and saucepans. But then she steadied herself. Her father had been her god. No one could match her sense of loss. We fell back as she advanced upon his corpse, plastered with frozen pink cosmetics. She leant over and lingeringly kissed the gaping face – something I had never seen her do to the living man, or any living man; something I could not do myself.

  I do not remember the funeral service, only the burying, so far down in the earth it was, at Braywick cemetery.

  *

  A month later a terrific storm broke out at Norhurst as to whether my grandmother was older than Old Nan. Yolande claimed that Old Nan was now the senior member of the household, and Nan herself forcefully nodded her agreement. But my grandmother, bitterly disputing this, appealed to me to get her birth certificate from Cork. This was not easy. The Corbet family, which had once teemed so prolifically over Ireland in the late nineteenth century, dazzling my grandfather, had left no sign of their existence in the Register Office in Dublin, or the National Library, or National Archives. They had vanished. But eventually I did get the birth certificate and was able to show that for the last quarter of a century my grandmother had been lying over her age, and that she was indeed older than Old Nan. The rage this provoked in Yolande took me aback. She shouted that it was a forgery, that you could never trust Irish records, that I had somehow invented it. She put it under a light and stared at it disbelievingly. She was tempted, I could see, to destroy it and swear it never existed. This was my grandmother’s one triumph over her family.

  She needed a triumph to compensate a little for the shock of not having been left Norhurst outright by her husband. He had given the house jointly to Yolande and herself, and made Yolande his sole trustee ‘of my family’s financial interests’. It was this deprivation, this sense of being under her daughter’s control, of feeling almost a lodger in her own home, that prompted her to assert her seniority and also, perhaps, to commit some strange acts of demolition. She tore up and threw away a number of innocent objects from her past, mainly photographs of better days. I saw the pieces littered across her bedroom and can see now the rents she made with a knife through some of the family albums, obliterating figures she had known.

  My aunt believed, or affected to believe, that she had finally gone mad. She pointed to the scoldings my grandmother would give invisible servants, the way she broke inexplicably into French. But she had done such things for years. I could remember as a child hearing her cry out the word ‘Jamais!’ and thinking it was some kind of confectionery. Besides, the mad have perfectly sane reasons for their madness. Her destruction of these photographs struck me as an act of revenge for the loveless disappointment of living.

  She had so often called upon God to take her that her quiet death in hospital, on 21 January 1969 at the age of ninety-two, seemed an anti-climax, like the opening of a play we had long been watching in rehearsal. I remember the funeral service in All Saints Church at the end of our garden: the sudden piercing beauty of a hymn, then nothing.

  We kept the news of her death from Kenneth who was himself dying (I visited him in a Sussex hospital and he braced himself on his deathbed to be a perfect host). My grandmother had made a Will at the beginning of 1968 in which she left Yolande and Basil £100 each. But her estate was valued at only £217 and there was nothing left after the payment of debts and funeral expenses. She had signed her name, Adeline Holroyd, on the Will, but added ‘also known as Adeline Genevive Holroyd’. None of us knew the name Genevive and it does not appear on her birth certificate. Perhaps it was a special name Fraser had called her in Ireland before their marriage, or a name her father used when she was a child, or possibly an invented name signifying her wish to become someone else.

  19

  Missing Persons

  It took longer to publish my Life of Hugh Kingsmill than to write it. I finished the writing when I was twenty-four, but did not see it in print until I was in my thirtieth year. The book was a labour of love but much of the labour was wasted and the love did not shine through. The words seemed strung across the page like dumb notes on a piano, and my judgements relied too much on other people’s opinions. It was also rather incompetently put together, an apprentice work, fumbling, defensive, gauche – otherwise fine. Dorothy Hopkinson never sent the unpublished material I expected, writing from South Africa to say that she was composing a book on Kingsmill herself.

  But what chiefly deterred publishers was the towering commercial impracticality of a biography about a forgotten author by an unknown writer. I sent the typescript eventually to sixteen publishers who insisted on returning it to me as if it were a tennis ball sent over to them for that purpose. The rally lasted four years, and I noticed with surprise, as the battered package came back and I posted it off again, an obstinacy mounting in me to a point of exhilaration. Perhaps, as Purple Parr predicted, I had some determination in me after all.

  William Gerhardie and Hesketh Pearson did whatever they could to help. Gerhardie wrote a long characteristic article in the Spectator entitled ‘The Uses of Obscurity’. With my two grandmothers, he told readers, I had already achieved the status of Grand Old Man of Letters. My Hugh Kingsmill, he continued, had received such glowing rejection notices from so many publishers that ‘it may fairly rank as the best book never published’. On the strength of this piece I wondered whether to produce extra copies of my typescript to meet the demand. Unfortunately the author of ‘Success: and How to Avoid It’ had slipped in a sentence indicating that I had once been a promising squash player. ‘His father,’ Gerhardie revealed, ‘though encouraging a literary career, regrets that in pursuit of the quite hopelessly neglected Kingsmill, Michael should be seriously neglecting his squash.’ Others appeared to agree. From publishers, even from poets and historians – James Michie, Robert Skidelsky – I received letters exclusively on squash rackets. Kingsmill again had been neglected.

  Hesketh Pearson wrote to several publishers and gave me a generous quote that could be used on the jacket. It was partly through him that Martin Secker at last offered to bring out the book from his Unicorn Press in the Royal Opera Arcade, allowing me an advance of £25. Though this, to use a phrase of Kingsmill’s, may have ‘looked more like a retreat than an advance’, it was a generous gesture since the money came from his own pocket. Equally generous was the long Introduction Malcolm Muggeridge contributed free of charge. Early in 1964 Malcolm Muggeridge, Hesketh Pearson, Martin Secker and myself lunched at the Café Royal, and Martin Secker was able to report that, following a favourable review in the Observer, sales had topped thirty-nine copies.

  I had, as Dickens might have said, ‘commenced biographer’.

  To the C.O. it was immediately clear that something extra was needed to transform the book into a popular success. His dog knew the dog belonging to a man he believed to be a band leader. From two leads’ distance he suggested interviewing this man and, if his answers proved satisfactory, engaging him professionally for a special launch party. We would have to see our bank managers of course, but it should not be impossible to put on something modestly spectacular. In any business, he explained, some form of advertising, some promotion of good will, was essential. I would be a fool to ignore this. In a spasm of fantastical magniloquence he appeared to be peopling Maidenhead Thicket with literary celebrities such as J.B. Priestley and Daphne du Maurier. He saw them sipping their drinks, moving gracefully around as in some ballet, and putting my book on the map. This plan, or some version of it, was frustrated barely in time by the intervention of a libel action from Dorothy Hopkinson.

  Unknown before I came to write about him, Kingsmill has stubbornly re
mained unknown since the publication of my book in 1964 and the selection from his writings entitled The Best of Kingsmill that I brought out six years later. But he had started me on my way. In so far as he wrote biographies himself, Kingsmill had been described as a follower of Lytton Strachey, a categorisation I attempted to refute. So began the pattern of my future work where a significant minor character in one biography develops into the subject of the next.

  During the nineteen-sixties and nineteen-seventies I became increasingly absorbed in my subjects’ lives. ‘Writing is a form of disappearance,’ the poet Simon Armitage writes. From my parents I certainly began to disappear. I was like a science fiction character, travelling across time, stretching out and trying to make contact with people I had never met. I travelled on a current of energy ignited by their work, concentrated in their loves and spread around widening circles from their deaths. I was attempting, or so I sometimes felt, to retrieve something from death itself, having been so shocked by my grandfather’s dying. Kingsmill and Strachey, Augustus John and Bernard Shaw became the maverick teachers I never had at a university. I learnt emotionally as well as intellectually: and then there was the archaeological digging up of facts. With these I plotted patterns and contours showing different aspects of cultural and political history between the mid-nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries, and endeavoured to give my answer to a contemporary question: how did we get here?

  I led a gregarious and solitary life. My research journeys took me eventually all over the world. Then, back in London, I would shut my door against the world and write for days and weeks in bed. There was no one ‘at his desk’ earlier than I was, I explained to my father, who seemed determined to catch me napping. All this distanced me from my parents, the C.O. and Madam as they now were.

  Ignoring the libel action over Hugh Kingsmill (which obliged me to utter an apology, pay costs and rewrite some pages on Dorothy Hopkinson), my mother was happy to see me become self-supporting, as a man should be. The sort of career I had chosen was incredible, but then she had never taken any interest in men’s business affairs. The Sunday Times’s serialisation of Lytton Strachey and Augustus John in the late nineteen-sixties and early nineteen-seventies was evidence enough for her that I was properly employed. But her relief could not altogether conceal her wonder that such books could find a single reader.