Memoirs of a Private Man, Page 2

  We kept one living-in maid – or a succession of them, for my mother was not easy to please. All the same, some of them stayed a long time and became long-suffering members of the family. There was one, Patty, an Irish girl, who used to stand in front of the mirror in her bedroom and say to herself: ‘Aren’t I beautiful? Aren’t I beautiful!’ A precocious eight-year-old, I was sometimes present at these self-adulatory sessions. In the end too many young men were in agreement with her, and my mother decided that she was not best fitted for domestic service in a God-fearing household.

  Were we God-fearing? Not really. My mother kept steadily, if quietly, to her beliefs all her life, but her father was very much a free-thinker and associated with atheists and agnostics, one of whom, a Mr Jack Slaney, used to greet my mother when she came in from Sunday school with: ‘Well, Annie, have you seen Jesus Christ today?’ My father was pretty well a non-believer too – at least until his last and only illness, when he began to dabble in Christian Science and spiritualism. My brother never went to church, and I would go perhaps twice a year with my mother. The long walk was something that my mother – still relentlessly delicate – only essayed on special dates such as Christmas and Easter. One of the maids – I’ve forgotten which one – taught me to say my prayers, and later a fiercely religious headmaster indoctrinated a lot that had been missing at home.

  I always shied away from what might be termed overt religion. When I was twelve a curate from the church took to calling, with the aim of persuading me to attend confirmation classes. With equal persistence I would bolt into the garden at the sound of him so that my mother could truthfully – though ruefully – inform him that I was out.

  I often wonder why religious teaching was totally missing at home. I think perhaps my mother was so lacking in energy that she just couldn’t be bothered. But at least our household was the very reverse of one in which religion is practised but remains a sham (an enduring theme with novelists). With my parents it was ‘ do as I do, not do as I say’. (Never spoken but implicit.) I never heard a swear word – even from my older brother – nor an obscenity, nor really ever a vulgarism. Even if we didn’t go to church, we never played cards on Sundays.

  It is often said that only children make bad mixers. I was not an only child, but a worse mixer could hardly have been found. The fact that my brother Cecil was ten years the elder may have resulted in my being an only child in all but name, and the fact that he was more often at home than my busy and preoccupied father resulted in my taking my cue and my beliefs – or lack of them – from him rather than from someone who was older and wiser. Cecil combined a mild, inoffensive good nature – and a strong sense of humour – with curiously aggressive views, downright philistine and arrogant. He had no interest in religion (not even in his last days, when some hitherto unbelievers have second thoughts), little interest in books outside certain narrow spheres, no real interest in music or painting or poetry – though he would quote Omar Khayyam with relish. His interests were in the fresh air, the sun, the sea, the sands – and in his beloved Cornwall, where he made his home for nearly sixty years.

  His comically misanthropic view of life, his pessimism, his philistinism all had a strong influence on me, and although my passionate preoccupation with books from the age of eight soon helped me to throw off the last of the three blights, the former two – or at least the pessimism – have stayed with me in milder form all my life. Of course it would be very unfair to put all the blame on him for what I suspect may be a family predisposition.

  Among the maids we had, the one I remember most was called Evelyn – a bouncy, jolly, generous-minded girl from Northumberland, who came when she was seventeen (she told my mother she was eighteen in order to get the job) and stayed with us about five years, seeing us through all the traumas of those sickly years of the Twenties, when my father had his severe stroke, my mother had double pneumonia, and I followed with lobar pneumonia.

  Evelyn had had a bitterly hard life. Her father and mother had had to get married when she was on the way, and her father’s parents had taken against their new daughter-in-law. Her father, a miner, had a brother who worked on the roads, and one Sunday was called out to clear a blocked drain. Because this brother was drunk, Evelyn’s father went instead, climbed down the manhole and was overcome by poisonous fumes and died. Evelyn and her mother and sister lived in direst poverty, receiving the barest help from their relatives until her mother married another miner, who heard there were better prospects of work in Lancashire and so moved. When war came he volunteered, and his family had to try to live on the 10/6 a week allowed them by the government. Towards the end of the war Evelyn’s mother died of peritonitis and malnutrition, and Evelyn and her sister were about to be taken to an institution when the war ended and her stepfather came home. But he quickly married again, another child came along, and the new stepmother said there was simply not room in their cottage for them all. Evelyn’s grandparents said they would take the younger sister only, and Evelyn was on her own. She found work at a button factory and boarded out. Her wages were 10/- a week and she paid 9/6 a week for her bed and board.

  When a friend told her there was a lady in Victoria Park looking for a living-in maid to whom she would pay 10/- a week including food and a bedroom to herself she borrowed money from her landlady to buy a new dress, called to see her new mistress and was engaged. Every Wednesday afternoon off thereafter she would take the long tram ride and walk to her old landlady’s and pay her back sixpence of the money she had borrowed. Later she was to take me in the afternoons to the local cinema – a fleapit indeed – where we were thrilled together by films like Intolerance and The Exploits of Elaine and Way Down East. I imagine my mother must have connived at these secretive ventures, for Evelyn could not have afforded the price out of her own pocket.

  Inevitably, of course, a young man, Arthur, came along, a sober, frail young man who wanted to marry her. My mother, naturally, was against it – they were far too young – hadn’t she been twentyeight herself when she married? – but inevitably the young man got his way. Poor Evelyn. She was dogged by ill-luck and her own warm, overflowingly generous nature. Perhaps she was plunged into marriage prematurely because by then my family was sick to death – almost literally – of the illnesses of Victoria Park – my father crippled and prematurely old at fifty-six, my mother saddled with bronchitis every winter, and I apparently threatened with further attacks of pneumonia – a lethal disease then, before the dawn of antibiotics – and my brother, the only healthy one, desperately wanting to get married himself and move to Cornwall, which he had lost his heart to after one visit.

  So Evelyn left us and married, and since they could not afford a house of their own she moved in with Arthur’s widowed father and four brothers, for whom she then became a permanent scrubber and cook and housekeeper. Eventually a child came – a boy – and they were able to afford rooms of their own, then a tiny house. They could do this because Evelyn got work at Lewis’s, the big Manchester store, first as an assistant in the dress department, then in the accounts department, where she established a reputation for efficiency and integrity. So began what must have been the best part of her life. Eventually they were even able to afford a small car; but her husband Arthur was always ailing – he worked in the cotton industry, and the flying dust affected his chest and made him a martyr to bronchitis. They always said that some day they would retire – like us – to the sea.

  Their son John was just too young for World War II but was conscripted at the end of it and drafted out to Egypt. When he was free he returned to England and to his work as a draughtsman. But a year after his return he developed a rare kidney disease and began to lose his abounding good health. The doctors could do nothing for him, and the War Office would accept no responsibility, as there had been a sufficient lapse between his discharge and the onset of the complaint for them to deny liability. Aware that he was dying, Evelyn put the situation to her boss at Lewis’s, saying that she h
ad worked there for twenty-four years and could not afford to miss her pension, due when she had been there twenty-five. Her boss told her to take six months off to nurse her son. Which she did. And when he died she went back to Lewis’s to work out the final year. When it came to settling her pension she was summoned before the board of the company and told that, alas, although she had worked the full length of time, because there had been a break in the time, company rules made her ineligible for a pension. So she got no pension at all.

  I do not know if Lord Woolton, who by then was owner of Lewis’s, ever heard of this case, but I hope that whoever was responsible for that decision rots in Hell.

  A few years later Arthur died, but when I came to meet her again, Evelyn was in her mid-seventies, a cheerful, God-fearing, churchgoing, hard-working widow – her life in ruins behind her but not a trace of bitterness in her disposition. She lived from hand to mouth, helping other people, respectable, a lady of some small dignity. She had never owed a penny that she hadn’t repaid, never, I’m sure, committed a mean act or a petty one. Her main concern was that when she died she would leave enough money behind for a proper funeral. This in fact occurred recently.

  Then he that patiently wants burden bears

  No burden bears,

  But is a King, a King.

  Chapter Two

  My brother went to the Hulme Grammar School and I was destined for the Manchester Grammar, but at seven I got meningitis, and when I began to recover the doctor said, ‘Don’t worry about schooling, just concentrate on keeping him alive.’ So I was sent to Longsight Grammar School, which had moved into a vast house in Victoria Park and therefore was only five minutes’ walk away. I hated it.

  Whether such schools could exist today, with the Department for Education maintaining a supervisory interest, I don’t know. It was presided over by an extremely brilliant, extremely religious, extremely eccentric clergyman called Arthur Frederick Fryer who ran the school almost on his own, with the aid of his wife, a couple of women teachers, another man whose name I can’t remember – only his nickname, Snowball – and a couple of masters who came in occasionally.

  Running the school was almost literally true of A. F. Fryer. My memories of him seem chiefly to consist of seeing him in flight from one place to another, mortar board perilously perched, gown fluttering like the Witch of Endor. He was also immensely kind when his poisonous little charges gave him the opportunity to be. At the annual school concert the school song ended on a very high note, and each year someone screamed his way well above the others. It was darkly whispered among small boys that Old Fryer was responsible.

  Teaching at the school was chaotic but moderately sound – the bright sparks came to the surface, the dullards sank without trace. I was a bright spark and floated upwards easily enough without having to exert myself. I won prizes every year – not because of any supreme cleverness on my part, but because the competition was so mediocre. The only reason I can imagine people sent their children to Longsight Grammar was because it was fee-paying and because it carried some small cachet by being both a grammar school and ‘ within the Park’. Or because of proximity – as in my case.

  I was taken to meet the high master of the Manchester Grammar School – a man called Paton – and was accepted for the school, but then pneumonia arrived, the doctor told my parents I would not live the night, and, when I did, they decided to play safe and not commit me to a three-mile trip in all weathers, half of it walking, twice a day. So I stayed where I was.

  The fact that I hated school need not be taken in itself as a criticism of the school I went to. I would have hated any school. Many years later it dawned on me, looking back over the evidence, that my mother badly wanted a girl when I was born, and although she mostly disguised her feelings she would dearly have loved to dress me up in buttons and bows. When it turned out that I was ‘ delicate’ – unlike my brother, who ailed nothing – she was able to sublimate her mixed feelings on my mistaken gender by lavishing every care and attention on me, guarding me against every chill or ill, ministering to my every want. So I was a spoiled brat. She even somehow delayed sending me to school until I was seven; but when I did go I did not at all care for the new and abrasive life it offered me.

  My mother was a very strong character. Even when I criticize her I never forget her many sterling qualities. She was a faithful and loyal wife, a devoted mother, generous and guardedly warmhearted, struggling always with debility rather than real ill-health, a singularly pure woman – as indeed my father was pure. (I have written a little about them in a short story called ‘ The Island’.) It was not so much that they didn’t see the evils of life as that they chose to ignore them. Both born and brought up in Victorian times, they seem to exemplify so much that was best in that age. They believed in English liberal democracy, and in the perfectibility of man. My home was always warm and sheltering.

  Loving too, but in a very undemonstrative way. Kissing was almost unknown – as indeed was praise. Praise might make you get above yourself, and that would never do. Self-esteem was the cardinal sin. ‘Side’, as we called it. It’s ingrained in me even today.

  I remember when I was about nine finding my mother in tears because of the racking uncertainty of having her eldest son in the trenches and liable to be killed or maimed at any time. My father said: ‘Go and comfort your mother.’ I went across and perched on the arm of her chair, and kissed her and stroked her face. I did this willingly and sympathetically, but I was horribly embarrassed in the act. It wasn’t quite the sort of thing that happened in our family. We loved, but we didn’t demonstrate our love.

  Despite her virtues, my mother, as the custodian of a highly strung, oversensitive and over-imaginative child, had a number of signal disadvantages. She loved to make your flesh creep – and God, did she not make mine! It was not of ghosts of which she spoke but of ill-health. Her brilliant china-blue eyes would focus on you when she told you for the tenth time about her cousin Ernest, who went to a danceand, coming home in the train, when still very hot from his exertions, gave up his seat to a lady and stood with his back to the open window. He was dead within a week, of pneumonia. And of his brother Henry who died the following year from the same thing: they were twenty-one and twenty-two. And of Cousin Essie, who when playing in the garden used to say to my mother, ‘ Feel my heart, cousin, feel how it beats so fast.’ And she too died, at nineteen. Speaking of our doctor, that eminent man who when much younger had saved my grandmother by taking her off the bottle, she would say to some visiting friend, ‘Of course our doctor, Dr Scotson, is a very good man, but’ – in lowered voice but never too low for me to hear – ‘far too fond of the knife.’ Her attitude to me was embodied in the words: ‘Wrap up, Winston’, ‘ Take a scarf, Winston’, ‘Put your other coat on, it’s a nasty east wind’, etc., etc., da capo.

  Of course there was some reason for the concern. For a year after my bout of meningitis I would start screaming in the middle of the night, and my father would pick me up and carry me about the room, eyes open, still screaming, but not awake. I had the most ghastly dreams, some of which I could recall even into middle life. There is one I still remember about breaking knuckles. For most of my early youth if I ran fifty yards I would begin to cough like a broken cab horse. After the lightest, most casual rough and tumble with a friend I would feel sick for an hour. Although naturally highspirited, all this was a constant brake on high spirits, so that I often appeared even more reserved and more shy than I actually wanted to be.

  Not that I didn’t have friends. I was not unpopular at school – except with a few hearty oafs – and had my own coterie of four or five boys, with whom I had a lot of fun. Also there were another four or five, who lived in Curzon Avenue but did not go to Longsight Grammar School, who formed another circle of which I was the sort-of leading spirit. Never the leading spirit when it came to any kind of athletic prowess, but almost always so in other things. I used to read some book of adventure and then they wo
uld sit round in a circle while I retold them the story – this often at great length. They would shout with annoyance if I tried to break off too soon. They adopted names I invented and games I devised.

  A few girls used to be about too, though they were never part of the group. I remember kissing Hilda Carter fifty-four times in one day, which was considered a world record. But it was all very matter of fact, and she didn’t seem to mind.

  What was not matter of fact was a meeting with a girl called Amy Warwick in Morecambe when I was thirteen. It took me five years to get over that. I think it was Edith Wharton who wrote somewhere: ‘One good heartbreak will provide the novelist with a succession of different novels, and the poet with any number of sonnets and lyric poems, but he must have a heart that can break.’

  The last two or three years at school were not so dislikeable. Freed of the necessity of making a new life in a new and better school, I continued to coast along, doing just enough work to come top, growing much taller and a bit stronger, senior to the majority of the chaps in the school, and eventually a prefect. The number in my class lessening until there were only seven, avoiding school sports but taking up tennis; it was not such an agony turning out every day. All the same, the tuition was eccentric and sometimes inefficient.

  But in the early school years, alongside my many genuine ailments were psychosomatic indispositions fostered by my dislike of school and the fact that on a day-school basis one could have a day off or even a morning off without too much difficulty. Compare the horrors of an early breakfast, a five-minute tramp through the rain, an uncongenial desk and an uncongenial task with a group of fairly uncongenial boys, an irascible master or mistress, scribbling in exercise books, learning verses from the Bible or from poetry, struggling with French, then wild affrays in the passages and all the other undesirable moments in a tedious and tiring day – compare it to a day at home: reading over a more leisurely breakfast, reading in the lavatory, reading in the dining room in a comfortable armchair before a blazing fire, reading over dinner, reading in the afternoon, reading over supper, reading in bed – the only discomfort being that I didn’t know what prep I should have been doing for the following day. It’s little wonder that a feverish headache or a bout of morning vomiting occurred too often to be true.