Basil Street Blues

by Michael Holroyd

  My father’s attitude was more complicated. When I handed him my Hugh Kingsmill, he placed it carefully on a table and asked in a tone of urgency how Lytton Strachey was coming along. When I eventually gave him Lytton Strachey, he inquired gravely after my progress on Augustus John. The public was notoriously fickle, he reminded me, and if I didn’t bring out a book each year, every year, readers would quickly forget about me. ‘Your name has not been mentioned,’ he volunteered after reading an article on contemporary writing in the Daily Express. I never saw him open one of my books and he was disparaging about my subjects (Strachey was a queer fish; John completely out of fashion; Shaw a cynic whose bluff had been called). His concern on my behalf was somewhat lowering to the spirits. So I was later surprised to find that, after I returned to London, he would go round the village boasting of my achievements to bewildered neighbours.

  During the late nineteen-sixties my parents marked time. My mother, who was still receiving a quarterly allowance from Egon Hessel, lived in a series of rather smart apartments taken on short leases. Over seven or eight years she moved from a flat near Sloane Square to another above Elizabeth David’s shop in Ebury Street overlooking Orange Square, and then to a mansion apartment near Earls Court. The future frightened her and, unlike William Gerhardie, she lived wholly in the present. It was an attractive quality, especially for young people on whom she spent her money – actually Egon Hessel’s money and Kaja’s. ‘I was young, inexperienced, rather gauche,’ my ballet student girlfriend Jennifer writes to me. She had come down to London from Lancashire at the age of twenty and ‘to be plunged into your world of expensive restaurants and clubs, taxis everywhere, apparently wealthy people, fashionably dressed was pretty heady stuff’.

  When I think of Ulla I think of champagne. Even her hair, her colouring and a lot of her clothes were the colour of champagne. There seemed a champagne-tinted aura around her… I remember Ulla for her enthusiasms and exuberance – the way she greeted the French onion man in Orange Square like a long lost friend; her childlike delight at purchasing in the Portobello Road two green Chinese vases which were to be converted into table lamps; and an evening at a restaurant called Chez Victor where, having said farewell to Kaja that day she was inclined to sob on the proprietor’s shoulder and had to be restored with champagne cocktails.

  In Jennifer’s eyes I was a young man with parents, but no cohesive family. She could discover nothing in common between my father and my mother. Certainly my father had an innate sense of fair play, but he believed that the rules of the game had been unfairly changed at half-time. A vast store of good will seemed locked in some secret chamber within him and no one could find the key. But he was still on the lookout for some woman or business partner who might know where it lay. I would sometimes go for a drink on Sundays and he would whisper over a sherry that he wanted me to meet someone he thought I’d like. There was a high-flyer from Epsom to whom he had given ‘one of your tomes’; there was a lady temporarily down on her luck who worked at Bobby’s of Bournemouth (‘the sort of place your publishers should try to get rid of your stuff’); and there was a woman he had met at the village pub who could type (‘might be rather valuable to you, Michael’). But it was difficult for him to sustain a relationship without money. After the collapse of timber and insolvency of Seamless Floors, he became ‘not exactly dour, perhaps sombre or withdrawn are better words to describe him’, Jennifer writes to me. The three of us would occasionally have lunch in the empty kitchen at his mock-Tudor refuge where he frantically pressed extra helpings on us. As his fortunes went downhill he would give me increasingly elevated advice on how to manage my literary career and issue darker warnings against fecklessness.

  The worst of times was beginning for my father, and the best of times for me. The revolution of the nineteen-sixties reached me late, but not too late. The sudden freedom between the sexes, the greater equality too, and the easy atmosphere that allowed us all to resolve many differences into games, came as a wonderful liberation for men as well as women – at least it did for me. A more natural life, with wider emotional horizons, opened up. I moved into it gratefully. To those dead men, my biographical subjects, who had laboured in their fashion for change, and to the living women who transformed my experience of the world, I owe all that I value most. For two or three of the latter I was more than a request stop along their emotional routes. Ideally I had always been ‘one for whom the visible world exists’. In these women’s eyes I recovered my visibility though some habits could not be changed and I remain invisible to myself. Observation and participation grew so involved that I cannot now separate them. Looking out of the window at the multitude of birds, squirrels and cats in the garden I easily forget myself (I am a cat person unlike my family who were all dog people). If I look out of another window I see the men, women and children walking past in the street, all part of a narrative, each with a story, and I follow them in my imagination. I never tire of watching. I watch, therefore I am; I am what I watch; and what I watch entrances me. This has been my exit from myself.

  All these new interests carried me further from my family but when matters began to go seriously wrong I was quickly drawn back. I began my biography of Bernard Shaw where he had begun his life, in Dublin, and was abroad in Ireland and the United States for some two years. The change in my parents after I returned in 1977 was striking.

  At the start of the decade Egon Hessel’s allowance had suddenly dried up. My mother retreated to a one-room flat in Chelsea Manor Street off the King’s Road where I had written most of my Lytton Strachey after leaving Nell Gwynn House. Like my father in Surrey, my aunt at Maidenhead, she looked out on a cemetery. ‘Moved to Daver Court,’ she noted in the account she later wrote for me, ‘where I still am – goodness knows for how long – getting too expensive. Bank owns my flat.’ She made several visits to Stockholm, but Kaja was not well and needed to borrow money herself. ‘Trying to sell my Swedish Pewter this year,’ my mother wrote to me. She also sold pictures and furniture that had belonged to Kaja.

  She still had a regular ‘boyfriend’. Jimmy was not sophisticated or wealthy or romantic. But he was kind and had a whacky sense of humour that agreeably bewildered my mother. He protected her from loneliness. But when she met a rather dashing gentleman with a title (who by a coincidence lived on the edge of Maidenhead Thicket) she could not resist one more escapade. It would be fun to escape again and forget her age, her financial worries. It was a short affaire and the only one, I believe, she truly regretted. ‘Wish I had not met him,’ she wrote, ‘as I lost Jimmy then.’

  In her late fifties she was obliged to start work. She took a job as a ‘floating supervisor’ at Bourne and Hollingsworth, but left it after one week. Then she started working as an occasional interpreter at business conferences and exhibitions. Her letters to me mention events at the Goldsmiths Hall, Earls Court, Olympia, Grosvenor House, the Hilton Hotel in London and the Metropole Hotel in Brighton. For short spells she was working ‘like billy-ho’. There are photos of her at gift fairs, electrical exhibitions, brewery conferences (‘no free samples’) holding a microphone and wearing the glazed expression I know so well (and struggle myself to conceal at committee meetings) as she translates what is unintelligible in one language into what is accurately unintelligible in another.

  Now that she was responsible for herself, my mother’s life grew bureaucratically more complex. I would receive letters from building societies, banks, insurance companies asking me how long Mrs Ulla Nares had been in my service, whether she was on my permanent staff, what the nature of her duties were and the amount of her monthly salary. ‘God help me with the dole!!!’ she exclaimed in one letter. She spent many indecipherable hours at the Inland Revenue headquarters being encumbered with the correct assistance. ‘Am shaking at the knees,’ she wrote to me, ‘but say to myself they are trying to help me. Waterford House seems like my second home by now!’

  In the autumn of 1976 she was sixty. I was then ab
road and did not particularly notice her birthday. Not that she ever forgot mine. She would write apologising for having no expensive presents or exciting news. ‘I am thinking of you all the time & wish you all the best in the world in every respect. Love Madam.’

  Her moods varied. ‘Sometimes I’m glad to be alone & not having to cope with difficult men and their tantrums & whims.’ These men, businessmen from conferences, would still telephone on the off-chance, but she could not pretend to enjoy their company anymore and now avoided them. Nevertheless it was not impossible that an incredible someone might ride up and rescue her. ‘No social life at all,’ she noted. ‘Too old & getting very tired of everything. Waiting for the next exciting thing to happen, but I think time is running out and age has taken its toll – but who knows?’

  While I was out of the country I asked my parents to telephone each other. ‘I spoke to your mother a few evenings ago,’ my father reported. ‘She seemed very depressed. It’s understandable as everything is going from bad to worse. She is complaining bitterly that with your departure she has no one to advise her & I have a nasty suspicion that I’ve been selected for the post.’ In fact he had been selected for another post: that of storing her clothes in the spare room of his flat. ‘She arrived down here to collect her winter clothes,’ he notified me later. These exchanges of winter and summer clothes marked their first meetings for almost thirty years.

  My father’s letters over this period are as despondent as my mother’s, but written in an aggrieved tone. Shortly before I went abroad he had started a new company called Indus that specialised in brick buildings. Nothing, he remarked, would ever replace bricks and mortar. He wanted to get this business off to a brisk start, but one morning careered his car into a bollard and landed up in the cottage hospital with his leg in plaster. His dog Jonathan was really at fault. My father had bought what appeared to be a miniature schnauzer to keep him company after his wife left him, and this puppy got into the habit of sitting on his lap as he drove around the country looking for work. Unfortunately it soon grew to an enormous size and insisted on its right to occupy the driving seat of the car, squeezing my father to the side, his head and much of his body hanging out of the window in summer and, in the winter months, being displaced largely on to the passenger seat, from which position he did his best to continue driving. He had to chauffeur Jonathan each week between Ewell, the Surrey village where he lived, and Maidenhead because he shared the dog with Yolande (who took sole command while my father was in hospital).

  It was a worrying time for my father. He worried, at the age of seventy, that he might be pressed into ‘the Great Army of the Unemployed’, and become bankrupt as his father had almost done. ‘I’ll probably end up in quod,’ he wrote to me. ‘Not a bad way to save money.’ He worried too about his dog Jonathan because the Maidenhead vet never agreed with the Ewell vet and both were wickedly expensive. He worried, of course, about me: ‘I imagine you may have to do something as well as write about Shaw if you’re going to make two ends meet. By the time Shaw comes on the market there’ll be no one to buy the book.’ But ‘I am most worried about Yolande,’ he confided.

  By the mid-nineteen-seventies Yolande had lived and worked in the house for forty years, looking after her parents, looking after Old Nan. At last, in her early seventies, she owned the house. She felt that she had earned it. She knew she had. She enjoyed having half a dog to exercise, but she dreaded her brother’s visits to Norhurst.

  What he was writing to me, he was saying to her. To live in a five-bedroom house by herself was utter madness. She had almost no money and ‘was trying to live on less and less’. She hardly dared switch on an electric light in case it cost too much, and she never used the heating. She would kill herself and drown the rest of us in guilt. The rooms were so cluttered with rubbish that ‘it’s hard to find room to put down a plate’. Nevertheless she ‘is so set in her ways (like the rest of us) that it’s impossible to alter things at all’. He longed to alter things for the better. But how could he when she refused his offers of help? ‘I go down weekly and do what I can,’ he wrote morosely. He would buy and cook some food for her – a brace of partridges, say, at which she nibbled with distaste. Otherwise she never ate anything cooked at all: only biscuits, bread, cake and fruit washed down with lavish cups of tea. The situation was so bad that ‘it really needs me to be there for a month or more’, my father concluded. But this was impossible because he was starting up a new company, Framed Building Installations, that made special use of steel.

  My father could never understand why anyone should quail before his offers of help. Unfortunately, to help people, he had to make sure that they were worse off than he was. This was increasingly difficult. He was so impoverished now that being the target of his help became a peculiarly depressing experience for the beneficiary. He tormented Yolande with his generosity and advice. Everything he said was factual. But he did not see her fundamental need to keep Norhurst, a need that, though she could not explain it, was stronger than his battalion of facts. ‘Yolande won’t of course think of leaving as long as Nan is alive,’ he reasoned.

  Old Nan had stayed on at Norhurst until 1975 and was then moved to the St Mark’s Hospice in Maidenhead where Yolande would take the dog to visit her each day. She was to die on 17 May 1976, four months short of her hundredth birthday. My father naturally concluded that ‘Yolande is more inclined to think of selling up & getting out, but the trouble is where to get out to.’

  But he was wrong. He need not have worried where Yolande was going because she was absolutely determined to go nowhere. Why should she? Why didn’t other people mind their own business? The thought that some of the contents of the house belonged to her brother and that their sale would come as a great relief to him, did not occur to her. I argued that since Norhurst was gaining in value it should be sold later. But my father thought differently. He saw the future as so bleak that Norhurst might soon be unsaleable. Its condition was deteriorating rapidly. Besides, everyone knew that property prices would soon take a dive. ‘It’s on the cards,’ he wrote to me, ‘that a five bedroom house occupied by one person could be taken over by the State to solve the housing problem. One might get paid some small compensation in a worthless currency.’

  We had reached this point in the debate when, one day in 1980, everything changed. Even when my aunt was not looking after her brother’s dog Jonathan, she would still charge up to the fields and into Maidenhead Thicket as if leading a phantom pack of all those dogs she had aired and exercised for half a century. She moved amazingly fast for someone now in her late seventies, urging herself on, looking utterly absorbed, fighting old battles. Then, coming into All Saints Avenue from the children’s playground, she suddenly staggered, fell, picked herself up, lurched sideways, and began calling incoherently for help. A few people in the street stared and hurried past, probably thinking she was drunk. She tried to stop a car, but it swerved onwards. Eventually she was assisted on to a milk-float and driven slowly back with the rattling bottles to Norhurst. The milkman helped her in, but she refused all other help.

  My father, telephoning that evening to make arrangements for Jonathan’s next visit, got no reply. After a couple of hours, he spoke to the police. They went round, saw my aunt through the window lying on the floor, and broke in. She was then rushed to hospital.

  After her stroke she was severely paralysed. There was no question now of her returning to Norhurst. How could she? But this was what she wanted. She would have preferred to die there, I think, than live anywhere else. The house was full of painful memories. There was no room that had not absorbed years of reverberating anger and the awful atmosphere of our unhappiness. But these echoes from the past now seemed to bring her a ghastly satisfaction. The place was in a terrible state, barely inhabitable, yet she took a grim pleasure living there, a bitter comfort. After all, she had come through. Norhurst was her home. She belonged there: and it belonged to her. There was justice in that, and she did no
t want to be deprived of justice. To abandon the house, whatever the circumstances, would be a betrayal of her father who had left it to her. She would not abandon it. No one could make her.

  Yet she could not go back. She was in a wheelchair, able to move one arm and one leg, but unable to dress or undress, unable to wash, eat or do anything else without help. Years ago the question had been: ‘What shall we do with the boy?’ Now it was: ‘What shall we do with my aunt?’

  Until her stroke, I had used whatever male arguments I could summon to support my aunt’s need to continue living at Norhurst. But once her course of physiotherapy showed that she was unlikely to regain much movement in her body, I changed my mind. If we sold the house, I told her, we could buy her a flat on the ground floor of the building at Ewell where my father lived. We would have enough money to adapt it for a disabled person, to make it comfortable, and to employ someone to look after her. My soft words sounded so pleasant – almost as if it were worth becoming paralysed to qualify for such luxury. But my aunt would have none of it. From her hospital bed, unable properly to form her words, she fought us all the way. But she could not win because she had granted power of attorney to my father. We were taking away the shell of her life, she believed, wherein her powers of speech and movement might marvellously be restored. She attacked the estate agents even when they brought flowers; she told the auctioneers who sold the contents of the house that they were crooks; and she accused my father and myself of acting as her enemies as we struggled with landlords, bank managers, doctors, the social services and local authorities on her behalf. One day, when she had been particularly dreadful, it seemed to me, about my father/her brother, I stood over her hospital bed as she lay there, still and fearful, shouting at her that she should have had the nerve to leave the house years ago, shouting that her brother had at least tried, and tried again, to make something of his life and been given nothing for his pains, shouting that he was trying now to salvage something of her life as best he could. It was a wretched confrontation.