Basil Street Blues

by Michael Holroyd

  I have written that he found it impossible to give praise or receive money, but that is not quite correct and I stand rebuked by two incidents from this late period of his life. In one of his last notes to me, after I had placed some money in his bank account, he wrote to thank me: ‘I never expected the sort of help you have given me and I can’t remember ever having received anything so welcome before.’ One afternoon I sat in the car with him, having to shout because of his deafness, telling him to spend his money on himself and go off at weekends to hotels with dog William (who was in the car at the time making communication more arduous). I tried to explain that it would be easier for me to help him financially if his capital fell still further, for then the State would assist me in helping him. I shouted that I had ensured in my Will that he would inherit enough money if I suddenly dropped dead. This was not charity, I yelled, but the natural dividend from a fatherly investment through childhood and adolescence, and in the allowance he had arranged for me in the nineteen-fifties. He sat staring out of the window and I could not tell whether he had taken it in. The dog leapt backwards and forwards between us. Then he said: ‘Your mother said we could not have had a better son’ – and he was fumbling desperately at the car door to get out. It was vicarious praise, of course, and very far from the truth, but it signalled a truce over all our animosities. Later I had a dream in which my father asked me if I’d like a smoke. He passed me a piece of iron piping with concrete knobs attached, bent like the starting handle of a car. It wasn’t easy to get going, but we managed eventually and I took a puff or two, remarking that it was surprisingly pleasant: after which he took it from me and began puffing himself. Then I woke, and lay wondering whether this had been the Holroyd pipe of peace.

  Gradually my father grew more confused again. His easiest moments now came over tea with Yolande. She had never noticed that there was anything wrong with him, and he no longer recognised that she was paralysed. Whenever they were together, they seemed to shed their injuries and impairments. What he said to her, what she attempted to say to him, had no connection – except an unspoken connection going back years – and neither of them grew irritable with the other any longer. These were occasions of excruciating hilarity over which, with my dual legal powers, I sometimes presided while my aunt’s helpers, Jean and Rita, poured the tea.

  But soon my father’s neighbours were complaining to the landlord. Was he not a fire risk? Did he attract mice? Why should there be so much noise from his flat at night? One night there was a terrible sound of crashing, cries and commotion. Having no close friends, he was not missed next day until dog William’s barking attracted people’s attention. They found him lying unconscious on the floor surrounded by smashed crockery, blood, excreta, chaos. No one knew exactly what had happened.

  But he was still alive and in the Sutton Hospital he began recovering physically, though not mentally. He imagined it was wartime again and he was back in the RAF. Looking round the ward at the patients walking on crutches, suspended in slings, caught in odd shapes by plaster of paris or attached to pulleys and plasma drips, he whispered to me: ‘I don’t think much of the new recruits.’ After some months, I was asked to find him a residential home. He was obviously confused by the move and on arrival in Epsom kept calling the staff ‘Mein host’, as if on holiday in Bavaria. Forty-eight hours later, they telephoned me to say that he was far too ill to be in such a place, or even in one of the private nursing homes which I had been reconnoitring. He was afflicted by persistent hallucinations, believing himself to be under attack from people crawling across the ceiling to his bed. Fighting back as best he could, he was spreading alarm among the elderly residents. I drove him away, with his suitcase of clothes and bundle of medical records, to Sutton Hospital, but the ward he had been in only a couple of days before was now closed and there was no bed for him. We sat in the car. I did not know what to do. Eventually I had him certified under the Mental Health Act and he was then admitted to West Park Hospital.

  Somehow my aunt’s helpers conveyed her to this hospital and she sat happily by his bed. He did not recognise her. ‘I can’t think why they’re keeping him there,’ she later said to me. ‘There’s nothing on earth wrong with him.’

  The specialists at the hospital thought they could bring my father some way back to normality, but their treatment was unavailing. He went on believing he was being assaulted, especially at night, by figures on the walls and ceiling. When I arrived one afternoon I saw him poised with a stick suspended in his hand, half-dressed, crouching but not moving. I tried reasoning with him. Who were these people? Why should anyone want to hurt him? He did not know. But it was impossible to reason with someone who had lost his reason. Then I entered his world of fantasy, assuring him his enemies had been vanquished and would not come again. This worked for as long as I stayed with him and could repeat it, but I could not calm his fears for long because he had no memory.

  He was rescued from these harrowing assaults, this harrowing of hell, by pneumonia, sometimes called ‘the old man’s friend’. That, and senility, were given as the causes of his death.

  My mother had died of ‘disseminated carcinoma of breast’ on 22 January 1986 at the age of sixty-nine, her occupation being given simply as ‘Retired’. From life, as it were. My father, a ‘Businessman Retired’, was eighty when he died on 27 July 1988. Medical records are now kept for twenty-five years, but in the nineteen-eighties they were destroyed after only six years. No records therefore remain. I wrote to my father’s doctor in Ewell where he lived his last thirty years, but his doctor cannot remember him. The Patient Affairs Officer at West Park Hospital cannot help me, since releasing medical case-note data would contravene the codes of confidentiality laid down by the Mental Health Act; and the Record Department at the Royal Marsden Hospital, though several times promising to send me clinical information about my mother, never does so. The waters of oblivion have quickly closed over them both.

  This surprises me because for most of the nineteen-eighties I was engulfed by the bureaucracy of illness and death. Over this decade, on behalf of my parents and my aunt, there were hundreds of letters to write, documents to send back, telephone calls to make. I had to ensure I was doing the best for them, to understand the support systems and confirm that they were dying properly. I corresponded with a Citizens’ Advice Bureau in London, the Department of Social Security in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, the Review Section of the Disability Benefits Unit in Blackpool, a benefits agency in Surrey; I wrote to Age Concern and Willing Hands, to nursing groups and homecare services and health centres; also general practitioners, consultant geriatricians, nursing homes, hospitals and undertakers; I was in communication with landlords, residents’ associations, the taxation department of banks, the Inland Revenue, the Post Office, solicitors, accountants, estate agents. Much of this exchange, ingeniously obfuscated by developing information technology, was hardly interrupted by my parents’ deaths. ‘I keep writing to say that my father, Basil Holroyd, is dead. British Gas insists he is alive. If you have any information I should know, please give me access to it.’

  The files that blossom round my aunt’s simple life are the most voluminous and complex of all, partly because she lives on into the late nineties, and her late nineties. The number of forms I must tick and cross, denying she is pregnant or divorced, the quantity of pages on which I must go on copying the words ‘Not Applicable’ leave me with the sense that I am giving evidence against her, invalidating her life, with these reiterated denials. No. None. Never. My answers cover the pages. Each time she has an extension of her stroke or an ischaemic attack and goes into hospital, each time she makes a partial recovery and comes back to her flat, a ‘change of circumstances’ is electronically signalled and the interrogation begins again. No. None. Never. I must refer to her as if she were a conscript in the army, a number, not by name, so that she can become compatible with the Social Services computer. That someone whose life was essentially so straightforward (who has no i
ncome beyond a State pension and the drops that still trickle through that old Heath Robinson machinery, the Holroyd Settlement), that she, at her age, should be forced into a world so alien goes beyond a joke, beyond my irony. I long to murder some of the courteous, patient, well-meaning officials from these departments, units, bureaux, centres.

  My aunt was shocked by my father’s death. It came as a total surprise to her and she misses him dreadfully, frequently calling me by his name. She has only happy memories of him, his kindness, his generosity, his fun. All their past furies have evaporated. She now resembles to a startling degree her mother Adeline whom she hated, but hates no more. Her temperament is perpetually sunny – no falls, no fractures, can cloud it. Her doctor recommends that she be removed to ‘correctly structured’ sheltered accommodation. He puts the facts as my father had once done, encouraging me to get my aunt to ‘gracefully accept’ them. Otherwise, he warns me, ‘serious illness or death’ might one day ensue. My aunt is ninety and does not want to move, and so I follow her wishes rather than her doctor’s, employing more people to care for her in the flat she never wanted to go to, and now does not want to leave. To Jean and Rita and the others she owes the happiness of this period and the prolongation of her life. They keep her going, and going well, for over six years following my father’s death.

  After a fall in the autumn of 1995, she has to be moved from hospital to a nursing home at last. By then it no longer matters where she is because she cannot tell where she is. Sometimes she says that she has just come back from Ascot or Wimbledon, but as she retreats further into the world of her imagination she communicates less, then almost nothing.

  But who is this coming to see her on her ninety-sixth birthday, this person in his sixties who, aiming a jovial wave at the doctor, a barking laugh at a nurse over the raucous lullaby of moans and shouts, steps so cheerily through these heaps of the half-dead, balancing a miniature cake marked ‘Yolande’ in red icing? Surely it must be Basil Holroyd, man of many businesses. Jean is there. She clasps Yolande’s brown and bony hand and shouts, ‘IT’S MICHAEL COME TO SEE YOU!’ My aunt, bent double in her chair, her hair like fine white silk, her bruised skin thin as tissue paper, does not stir. She is far away, beyond recall. ‘MICHAEL!’ Then suddenly she looks up and gives that dazzling smile I recognise so well from the old albums, as if to say: Yes, after all and in spite of all, surely this is the best of all possible worlds.

  ENVOI

  20

  Things Past

  Hugh Kingsmill required of the biographer some account of his or her own life as a passport for travelling into the lives of others. If this, my passport, is stamped with the travels of others more than with my own, it is because their travels determined mine which, by themselves, hold little interest for me. Metaphysical journeys are not undertaken alone, but together and alone – at least mine have been.

  Here, in vicarious fashion, is my story, my still unsolved mystery. To have a good walk-on part in one’s own autobiography, as I have tried to give myself, is as much as any biographer can reasonably expect. For it is not exclusively my life I am telling. The story line I have drawn runs intermittently parallel, I believe, with that of many people who feel the impulse to make some reconnection with their earlier lives. This book, my patchwork, the prequel to my biographies, may seem to present an unusual family saga, but beneath the patina of conventional respectability acquired by many families lie secret episodes and half-suspected dramas, sometimes unacted yet still influential, that grow invisible over time. My purpose has been to pare back a little the cuticle of time and to apply the research methods I have learnt as a biographer to my own life for a while, letting the detective work show through the narrative at some places for those who have a similar curiosity in human nature and its reworkings on a family chronicle. Echoes of what I have forgotten, as well as memories of events I have been unable to forget, linked where possible by discovered facts, have been my signposts.

  There are, of course, many unexplored trails: the legend of my Swedish grandmother’s purloined diaries and the rumoured disappearance of the sketchbook Picasso gave her with its outlines of Guernica; the continuing adventures of Agnes May Babb, my grandfather’s femme fatale, and other inviting sidetracks. These are different stories, other histories.

  I have made journeys to places known and unknown – from the weather-beaten expanses of Barkisland to the fixed industrial archaeology of Borås – where the messages were too faint for me to decipher. But there seems to be no holiday restaurant anywhere that is not still playing one of my mother’s favourite tunes. At Braywick cemetery, my grandfather’s gravestone, some of its letters and numbers now missing, still possesses a surprising resonance. Scaitcliffe, my school, is agonisingly familiar in its every detail – yet is also crucially changed, having become co-educational. Sheffield Place, The Links, Brocket: all these family houses are now owned by public institutions. And then I come to Norhurst.

  Outside, the house does not appear greatly altered. But when I step inside, except for a few details (a banister on the staircase, the panelling in the dining-room) all is unrecognisable, though conveying strange hints of the past, and I feel I am walking in a dream (Maidenhead itself, with its convoluted road system, is my nightmare). Norhurst is still owned by the family which bought it after my aunt’s stroke almost twenty years ago, and they remember my father coming down to warn them of the submerged air-raid shelter near the end of the garden. This has become part of their own family lore.

  All is changed. But in a recess of the attic, behind an old piece of curtain, stands a pile of lost books. Here is my nursery alphabet and my picture history of the United States. Here is Mumfie, given to me by my aunt on my sixth birthday: how could I have forgotten the wanderings on which I accompanied this excellent elephant which come instantly back to me when I see the author Katharine Tozer’s pink and blue illustrations? The Mathilda stories my aunt read to me by the kitchen stove have gone. But buried away I spy something I have never seen before, a set of designs for glass light fittings drawn and coloured by my father in the distant days of Lalique. Further back, I find a large photograph of my great-grandfather, the Major-General, looking so much more robust and happy than in the Eastbourne family group taken after the suicide of his wife Anna Eliza Holroyd.

  Finally, there is her book, my great-grandmother’s, she who ended her life at the age of thirty by swallowing carbolic acid. It is an enormous, sombre-brown calf-bound volume with the gold embossed letters AEH at the front and, on its spine also in gold letters, the word FERNS. Her husband must have given it to her while they were in India in the early eighteen-seventies. Into thirty or more of its spacious pages she has beautifully pressed these unusual fern leaves. Then, like a poisoned chalice, the book passes to her daughter, Norah Palmer Holroyd who, in her twentieth year, has had her name tremulously written in it by her father after his stroke above the date 18 September 1896, the time she became so mysteriously ill at The Links. But she adds nothing herself to the volume which after her death passes eventually to my Aunt Yolande. She pastes into its blank pages, between the pressed ferns from India, illustrations of early nineteen-twenties film actors and actresses, scissored from magazines: Mary Pickford, Lillian Gish, Pearl White, Jackie Coogan, and then, suddenly looking out at me, the handsome features of my mother’s ex-father-in-law, the ‘matinée idol’ Owen Nares. At the end there are some unused pages for the next generation, vacant pages left to me. This ill-omened folio volume, tracking the destinies of three generations of women in the family, would have meant nothing to me before I began my own little book in which it finds a final place, and which I must now let go.

  Go little book, go little tragedy,

  Where God may send thy maker, ere he die,

  The power to make a work of comedy…

  And wheresoever thou be read, or sung,

  I beg of God that thou be understood!

  And now to close my story as I should.

  ~


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  Playwright, wit, socialist, polemicist, vegetarian and charmer, Bernard Shaw was a controversial literary figure, the scourge of Victorian values and middle-class pretensions.

  This is Michael Holroyd’s essential biography of George Bernard Shaw for the general reader, with its pace and verve, its comedy, drama and politics, it shows a provocative and paradoxical figure sympathetically and movingly portrayed.