Surviving

by Henry Green

  Behind the shouts of laughter and the talk, there was a strong streak of pessimism, even of fatalism, in Henry’s nature. Any setback, however slight, was a cause of intense and gleeful discussion about what worse horrors might ensue. It may have followed from this that the humour he loved was black humour – of a very raw kind. I remember when only ten or eleven, staying with school friends where an elderly relative of theirs fell on a landing and the next day a white bone, which was his nose bone, was found on the stairs by the cat. It proved impossible to re-implant the bone; the cat had partly eaten it. My father howled with laughter when I related my macabre school holiday adventure. He cross-examined me in detail about what had happened next, how the cat reacted, what they thought it was, what the doctor said, etc. Eventually he made a wild story out of this and retold it to his friends with gusto.

  He was not a mimic, nor did he like risqué stories, but he was a deadly tease, usually of girls. (As he turned the ratchet he would shout in excitement ‘Gone too far?’) He could be cruel. It is said that Maurice Bowra would never speak to him again after Henry teased him about a poorly drafted fire drill notice at Wadham College in the war. Due to mastoiditis in his youth, his hearing on one side was poor, though he always maintained it was the bombing, and at times the results were hilarious. Gogi Lee Thompson and Henry were talking about animals. Dig left the room as Gogi remarked to Henry how sexy she thought ostriches’ eyes were. When Dig returned, Henry said to Dig, ‘How extraordinary! Gogi must have been deep sea diving. She has just told me that octopuses’ eyes are sexy!’ As a raconteur of stories, many of which he must have made up, he was superb. Henry also had the odd habit of making disconcerting remarks. When he was fifty he introduced himself to an elderly and respectable lady with the words, ‘Henry Yorke – fifty-five – and I can’t do it!’

  In the thirties, there were difficulties with the publishing of Party Going. Dent would have nothing more to do with his books. Eventually Goronwy Rees made him show the novel to John Lehmann who persuaded Leonard and Virginia Woolf to publish it at their Hogarth Press. Henry always maintained that the Woolfs did not like the book; but John Lehmann was to remain a life-long admirer and support. When Lehmann moved on from the Hogarth Press after the war to form his own publishing firm, my father, in his characteristically cautious way, was unwilling to make a change, which was always a sore point with John.

  By the outbreak of war, Henry Yorke was a fully trained fireman, attached to Sub-station 34A5V ‘A’ Division, 79 Davies Street. In the blitz that followed, there were both short periods of dangerous physical activity and long lulls. Although his station was in a flying column and as a result went to many places outside London – as far as Manchester and even Chichester to defend the cathedral against a ‘Baedeker’ raid – there must have been many duty days when he was on stand-by. Pontifex did no munitions work and was just ticking over, and he was able to keep an eye on what little was going on there in his rest days. I was evacuated to friends in Bedfordshire and my mother, who did voluntary work in canteens in Bedford and in London, alternated between the two households – they had by then moved into a much smaller house in Trevor Place. His father, too old for both World Wars, based himself at Forthampton. This seemed to suit Henry’s writing. Pack My Bag, Caught, Loving and Back were all published between 1940 and 1946. He also wrote a number of short stories, three of which were published in New Writing. Concluding was published in 1948.

  Henry often spoke of a rescue he had carried out during the blitz outside John Lewis’s in Oxford Street. This he describes in his short story The Rescue. His mate Charlie in the story was Charlie Vincent who had worked before the war as the butler at 104 Harley Street. Right up to the sixties he and Charlie, now a greengrocer in the East End, would meet every year to swap reminiscences. Henry was always bitter about this rescue. He felt Charlie and he deserved medals, but they were both later reprimanded for not wearing the correct type of BA (breathing apparatus), and there was no officer present to make the official recommendation in any case.

  He had a fierce pride in the Fire Service. He told me once with emotion of a special joint parade held with the army in Hyde Park. He was there with his crew and an appliance. Their job was to direct a jet of water through a high pressure hose over the saluting stand. An arrogant army major strutted over and poked his swagger stick in the jet. To the delight of the fire crew, he suffered a double compound fracture of the arm for his pains.

  Henry once entered a burning house, axe in hand, to find a naked girl, oblivious of smoke and flames, making love to a Great Dane.

  For the rest of his life, ex-fireman that he was, my father was continually on the look-out for other fires. I remember once in the fifties walking back with him and my mother up Montpelier Street after a good dinner, when he ‘smelled smoke’. Neither my mother nor I could smell a thing, yet the fire engines were summoned. It was a false alarm. This was to happen again and again, according to my mother.

  In the post-war years, Pontifex flourished like all manufacturing firms but a serious decline had set in by the early fifties. In 1952, an effort was made to improve the situation by buying another engineering business in Leeds. This at least was a step forward, since it was a diversification into other markets, but it did nothing to address the fundamental problems of the Birmingham factory, which was operating under capacity and losing money hand over fist. Henry faced increasing difficulties with his aged father, now strapped in a wheelchair and accompanied by a nurse, who insisted on continuing to come into the office every day and interfering with everything he did. Although he made grotesque stories out of these visits, retold to all and sundry, he must have resented his father even more deeply.

  It was easy for other writers to assume that the novelist Henry Green had little interest in business and only ‘worked’ at Pontifex to give himself a comfortable income so that he could write. Certainly his choice of colleagues on the Board, who were close friends without engineering qualifications, appointed by him and not Vincent, seemed to confirm this assumption. One colleague was the Welsh don, Goronwy Rees, a great crony and a wild character. At times the drinks must have flowed and their talk ranged far beyond the finer points of ‘jig and tool design’, but it would be a mistake to believe that Henry did not take his work seriously. Before the war, very much in face of opposition from Vincent, he had set up a subsidiary business dealing with the sale of food and chemical equipment, quite separate from Pontifex’s main business, which was the manufacture of counter-pressure filling machines for beer. He visited Moscow on a sales trip and just after the war, sold a series of penicillin plants to the Russians. I can just recall a wild and riotous party held at Trevor Place to entertain the Russian Trade Delegation, and I can remember him telling me that Russian peasants swarmed over the train carrying the equipment across Russia, scraping the grease off the pump casings for food. He toured Canada on a government trade mission after the war. He became Chairman of the BCPMA (British Chemical Plant Manufacturers’ Association), a position of some importance in industry. He also confided in me that he had a secret ambition to emulate his father’s career in the City where he hoped to ‘inherit’ his seats on various banking and insurance company boards. This never happened. Either Vincent was not prepared to push his son’s name or the days of nepotism in the City were over.

  He was a weak business man, and he was impatient with detail. He could not or would not stand up to his father, and he lacked decisiveness. His prevailing moods of pessimism and fatalism made it almost impossible to move in any direction. In typically blunt fashion, Gerald was to describe a fateful visit he made to the office in 1958. ‘I found what I had thought was a glass of water on Henry’s desk – it was gin – and he was really incapable of making any decisions. So I had to get him to retire.’ Henry’s business life, while it lasted, was a key source of inspiration for his novels, but increasingly, as things started to go wrong, it was to prove a drain on his energies for writing.

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bsp; In 1949 Loving had been published in America and for a short time it figured in the best-seller lists. He felt that at last he was going to earn popular recognition and make some money out of his books. In 1950, my parents and a lawyer travelled to New York with the idea of setting up a trust in favour of my mother and myself to avoid paying UK tax on the royalties. Such was his passion for anonymity that they travelled to New York and booked into the Gotham as Mr and Mrs H. V. Yonge, the initials matching the initials on their luggage. It was also about this time that he started to insist on being photographed only from the back. He was fêted as a literary celebrity, attending parties with writers and film stars, and one of the highest points of his trip was meeting his greatest idol after Céline, William Faulkner. It is said that as he booked out of the Gotham for the trip home, the doorman, who had seen all this before, bowed him farewell with the words ‘Good-bye Mr Green!’ Sadly, this novel had only a brief success in America.

  He published Nothing in 1950 and Doting in 1952. He also broadcast on his theory of the novel and did more reviews and articles than at any other time in his life.

  After Doting, his tenth book, my father never spoke of doing another novel. He wrote a play for television called Journey out of Spain which was never performed. Next he became immersed in writing a stage comedy to be called All on his Ownsome. He wrestled with this play non-stop between 1955 and 1956. It was set in 10 Downing Street with a woman Prime Minister and involved sex and politics. The writing and re-writing of this play became a long drawn-out nightmare. He submitted draft after draft to the impresario with whom he was collaborating. They could not get it right. The manager of the Worthing Repertory said he found the subject matter ‘in questionable taste’. John Lehmann read it and did not think it a success but added rather hopefully: ‘In fact the odd idea came to me that if you made a novel of it, it might be very good indeed.’ In November 1956 he abandoned it, ostensibly on the grounds that ‘the political side of it has been completely stultified by the Russians’ actions in Hungary.’

  He started a book about his experiences in the Fire Service, to be called London and War 1939–1945. He completed a long section and then abandoned that.

  In 1957 his father had at last died. Completely demoralised by the problems at Pontifex, which was now in a serious state of decline, Henry toyed with the idea of getting out altogether as soon as I joined him from university. On doctor’s orders he went on a cruise to South Africa to make up his mind. The first night out in a bad swell in the English Channel, exhausted and depressed, he fell against the door knob in his cabin and badly bruised his ribs. He used to recount with sly glee that the captain was so concerned about his near suicidal state of mind that he seated him beside the ship’s young and pretty nanny at meals so that she could keep an eye on him for the rest of the trip.

  In 1959 he finally resigned from Pontifex on the grounds of ill health. I took over as Managing Director and Gerald loyally served a stint as Chairman. By a cruel irony, it was the Birmingham factory which had finally ended his business career; he could not bring himself to close the works and make redundant those foundrymen whom he had described, thirty years before, as ‘magnificent’. Just before his resignation he and Dig had moved to a much larger house in Wilton Place, with a separate study for him – in Trevor Place he had written his novels on his knee in the drawing room. Despite these advantages, his energies for writing seemed to desert him altogether.

  There was a vague plan for him to write another autobiographical piece to be named Pack My Bag Repacked. He dictated drafts to Jenny Rees, the daughter of his old friend Goronwy, but this petered out eventually. In 1964 he dictated a piece which he put aside uncorrected in a drawer, about his childhood passion for fishing and Forthampton Court, the family home which he had steadfastly refused to visit for twenty-five years or more.

  The walk around our garden, hidden at the bottom where it went along what was left of the moat, and nearby the Bishop’s causeway, from the sixteenth century, so designed that he could keep his feet dry until he got into his boat to go across a flooded Severn right to the doors of his Abbey, already visible across those floods as though built on one of the lagoons of Venice, our house having been His Eminence’s summer residence.

  In summer down our way gray days are best because they bring out the incredible green of trees and grass. Best also to fly fish for chub from a boat.

  Or even if to fish in sunlight, which was hopeless, one beached the boat at dusk to turn and see Tewkesbury Abbey’s Norman tower in Caen stone glowing rose above dying light – the Rose, darling Rose – he did not know it yet but of whom he was to write, never even having met her, written of not until after the Second War, muddled as she was, unthinking but always right, the dear Rose he would love at that time just to lose the agony of air raids.

  When the wind was right with not too much sun, the art was to cast one’s fly close to where those withies dangled in the water, underneath which slowly rocked the chub waiting for a grub above to fall off those green leaves. It was wet fly fishing and only a swirl would show when the whitewinged fly was taken and it was time to strike. And what harm in that when fish are cold-blooded? None of course, instead there was pure joy. The ache was to walk back less than a mile home imbued, though he did not realise this yet, with his love for red-haired Rose, the very stuff of dreams, the whole of everything to him then. Those evenings were magic to a boy alone.

  Although he still read at least one novel a day from the Harrods library, he did not leave the house any more, even to go to the local pub, nor did he go out of his way to see his friends, whom he called ‘my much hated old friends’. There were exceptions, of course. He liked the young company of my friends, but by then I was working in Leeds and visiting London seldom. Occasional visits from strangers, usually fans, academics or students, were welcomed and, at these times, all his old fire and enthusiasms returned. He watched the television a lot, particularly the sports programmes.

  His hearing got increasingly bad. I remember once ringing the house from Yorkshire and getting him. In a hurry and without time to explain who I was, I asked to speak to ‘Mummy’. The dour answer was: ‘So sorry, I have absolutely no money.’

  In 1968, after some persuasion, I took him to see the Howard Winstone/Seki world flyweight championship eliminator in the Albert Hall; he came unshaven and in slippers. He had not been out of the house for several years, and I was terrified that, being so deaf and only accustomed to the background rumble of Knightsbridge traffic, he would find the sound of a hyped-up fight crowd baying for blood too fierce and intimidating. Not so. He loved it, and when it was over, being stopped in the ninth round on a controversial cut eye decision, I took him down to meet the disconsolate Seki in his dressing room. By the time we reached the car a slipper had disappeared.

  However, this expedition was never to be repeated.

  Two things my father never lost were his love for cats and his gifts for laughter and talk. However ill or depressed he was, I only had to tell him a story about something that had gone wrong, and he would give his distinctive yell of laughter. For me it was his mark.

  Henry Yorke and Henry Green died on 13 December 1973 at the age of sixty-eight. When my father was buried at Forthampton Church, Sid Cutter, the grave digger, had dug the grave too short for the coffin and it could not be lowered – in fact it stuck fast. My mother remarked to Gerald at the graveside: ‘How Henry would have laughed!’