INTRODUCTION
We must have seemed a thoroughly typical nuclear family of the time, those years after the second world war. Mum, Dad, my elder brother Ivor and me. Naturally only Dad went out to work while Mum stayed at home in the traditional role of housewife and mother. Granny came to live with us for the last seven years of her life, so, to be strictly accurate, there were five of us, not four. And then, Dad was eventually killed in a car accident, and, later still, Ivor was murdered. So, for these reasons at least, you’d have to say we weren’t in the end that typical.
Misfortune is not enough to justify a memoir. Our parents died close together during the 1970s, and neither event, not even Dad’s violent end, prompted the urge to write. That came only after Ivor’s death twenty years further on.
As many people do, he kept his life in compartments. I occupied one of them and from childhood onwards saw no more of him than he wanted me to. He was always elusive, unreachable; he recedes as I approach, even now. Much of his life was hidden, and loneliness was bred deep into him. Part of the instinct for self-concealment stemmed from his homosexuality, which was off-limits to most people including me, and neither of us referred to it let alone discussed it. His death, though, changed everything, and one of its effects is that though I still can't see the whole picture, at least more of it is visible. The sad uncomfortable truth is that I know him better now that he is dead, better than when he was alive, and better indeed than I ever would have known him if he had lived. I can also start to see an answer to the question of why his life took the direction it did and what caused it to end so tragically.
The original plan was that Ivor would be centre stage and the rest of the family somewhat indistinct figures at the back - not quite spear-carriers but not much more either. But it didn’t take long to realise this wasn’t going to work, and with each revision every member of our not very large family was moving further down stage, out of the shadows. Families make us what we are, and we all affect each other. One reason I was initially reluctant to acknowledge this truism was that it meant that, as his younger brother, I too had been part of what shaped his life. I was now forced to think about how I’d contributed to the large empty space that had always existed between us. Each re-writing was starting to involve everyone. It’s easy to see how our parents affected us; it’s much more difficult, more of an unexpected challenge, to look at the situation in reverse and consider how we in turn may have affected them. That thought opened the door to the larger question: how did all of us impact on one other? - Mum on Dad, Dad on me, me on Ivor, Ivor on Mum, Dad on Ivor, me on Mum, and so on. It was turning into a complicated study of family dynamics, involving the attempt to look at the world through the eyes of each of us as separate individuals, in order to gain a sense of what George Eliot called everyone’s “equivalent centre of self, whence the lights and shadows must always fall with a certain difference.”
Some aspects of this project would be easier to fill in than
others. Those that involved me would
obviously provide more material than, to take one example, the relationship
between Dad and Ivor where, so far as I could see, for much of their lives they
seemed to have little relationship of any kind.
I haven’t dealt with the four of us as discrete individuals living a
life independent of the others. In our
parents’ case, they mostly didn’t have one, though Ivor and I were luckier in
this respect and by the time we were in our twenties we’d each started to
create an identity separate from us-as-part-of-the-family. I was probably the more successful because I
managed to get further away. To
Any family, even one as inward-looking and claustrophobic as ours,
bears the imprint of a particular time and place, and for us that meant
lower-middle class
*
Trying to retrieve events and circumstances long past means having to deal with the unreliability of memory. I’ve tried to be scrupulous about what I am sure of and what I’m not, and if a particular recollection seems suspect I say so. There is almost no dialogue in what follows, because like most people I wouldn’t be able to recall the details of a conversation from yesterday, not verbatim at least, let alone one that took place half a century ago. Though some vivid scraps have survived in my memory unaltered, to go beyond them would have tipped over into fiction. Wherever possible, the incompleteness of memory and its possible distortions have been supplemented by independent testimony; and so I’ve drawn on diaries and other documentary material, as well as the recollections of friends and other family members.
One final element interspersed in this mix of family analysis, social history and metaphysical search is the occasional use of literary quotations and references. These are more than just the overspill from a working life spent as a teacher of English. Some have to be present because they form part of the story; and the rest are there in the hope that, as literature is supposed to do, they shed their own oblique light on the narrative.
Back to Ivor.
It's not his death I grieve for; it's his life. This is what I tried to explain to people, after I’d learned from the police and others just what he had gone through. Even the very manner of his death seemed somehow less awful than everything that had preceded it, the life that he had endured, of which until then I had been almost wholly ignorant. But that was not all. There was something else, deeper, more painful, and much harder to put into words, however sympathetic the listener. If Ivor had been killed in other circumstances, it wouldn't have affected me anything like as much. If a mugger had stabbed him in the street to get his wallet, it would have been equally dreadful. But that could happen to anyone in the wrong place at the wrong time. It would have been no more than an accident of circumstances. Accidents are random. By themselves they signify nothing. Sod's law maybe; that's about it. But the point about Ivor's death is that it wasn't random.
Why is it not a tragedy if someone just falls under a bus? I would ask my students this question during their Shakespeare course, inviting and often receiving the retort, especially from my Australian students, “It is if it’s you under the bus.” The idea was to set off a discussion about the distinction between tragedy as the term is ordinarily used and tragedy as literary form where accident is merely one element among others - character, fate, free will, society, and so on. Tragedy, like all art, involves some form of pattern making as part of the search for meaning. Accident alone has no meaning.
Ivor's death was emphatically not a case of sod’s law. He knew his attacker, and that fact changes everything; there was a history there, motivation, a chain of circumstances, something not just arbitrary but capable of being understood, partly at least. But the implications of his death went further. Too many of the circumstances surrounding it were instantly recognisable to me, and they completed a much larger pattern. His death was more than a tragedy in the ordinary sense of the word. It was a tragedy in the literary sense as well. But the pattern didn’t fit any of the templates of Shakespearean tragedy - and not just because of Ivor’s unheroic ordinariness. His whole life, from childhood to the moment of his death, formed a clear and unbroken arc; and that is not how Shakespeare’s tragedies work. Ivor’s life and death frankly looked too diagrammatic, too fearsomely carved out and consciously articulated, to be Shakespearean.
This claim is not offered as a fanciful embellishment to the essence of the matter, which is that he had met an undeserved and brutal end. But, far from being fanciful, it is what touched me most strongly at the time and has had the most lasting effect. It is why I was horrified and distraught at his death regardless of the fact that we had never been close. In Wordsworth's poem “The Ruined Cottage” the narrator is deeply affected by the story of the life and death of a young woman he had never even met. He concludes with the briefly eloquent phrase, “I blessed her in the impotence of grief”, accepting that she was now beyond any comfort he might want to offer her. In a similar way, all I can do for Ivor is write down what I know about the person he was and what he went through. The feelings generated by his death are inevitably less intense now. But it became clear in writing this memoir that what took place has implications not just for him but for the rest of his family, and some of the residual sadness is for all of us.
Chapter 1
When some one close to you dies it’s common to have dreams about them, often for a long time afterwards, months or even years. Our mother died in July 1971 when Ivor and I were in our early thirties. Whether, like me, he then had dreams about her and, if so, what form they took I don’t know. He didn’t say and I didn’t ask; the subject never came up. Mine gradually became less frequent and after a couple of years they stopped altogether.
They were always the same. I am back in the family home in Middlesex, and there is Mum, no different to how she was in life. Built into the dream is the dim recognition of the daytime truth that she is dead; but as a way of making her return to life convincing it is her death that is somehow relegated to the status of a dream. The effect is a version of Chinese boxes. “Reality” is that she is still alive; the knowledge that in fact she's dead becomes merely a dream. So she is there, in front of me, alive once more. Impossible to say how long the dream lasts, probably not long at all, and it develops to such a pitch of intensity that I wake up. While it lasted the dream had been so vivid, so convincing, that for a few seconds I lie there disorientated, not knowing whether I am asleep or awake, unclear what is reality and what isn’t. Then relief overwhelms me in a great flood. She is dead. It was only a dream after all, and I am safe.
This is not, obviously, how one is meant to react to the death of one’s mother.
Mum was
67 when she died, and had had high blood pressure for more than 20 years. She had also recently been in hospital as the
result of a stroke, though when I left
The miseries of childhood are difficult to get in proportion. One tactic that Ivor and I employed at the time was to try to tell ourselves that maybe things weren’t really so very awful. Although self-deceiving, it worked up to a point as a coping strategy, so much so in Ivor’s case that it became a life-long aspect of his personality. It also served to deflect any accusation that we were just feeling sorry for ourselves – assuming we’d been inclined to talk very much about life at home in the first place, and mostly we didn’t. But this is why I begin our family saga with the unseemly candour (as it may strike some people) of my reaction to our mother’s death. Distortion takes more than one form, and melodramatic inflation is clearly one, but so too is a failure to give the past its due emotional weight. Dreams such as the one just recounted represent a more truthful version because they tap directly into the actual experience, bypassing any temptation to impose a falsely civilising gloss.
Since
perspective is everything, I ought to make the point straightaway that some
people have childhoods very much worse than what Ivor and I had to put up
with. We were not subject to the
extremes of physical abuse that these days draw in the social services and
police, and certainly there was no sexual abuse. The relevant comparison is with what one
might call “normal” malfunctioning families.
On that basis at least, I feel a quiet satisfaction, even a certain
confidence and perverse pride. In fact
there's no doubt about it at all in my mind.
If there were a
*
Middlesex
is an undistinguished county, flat and featureless. But this was where Mum and Dad moved to after
they got married in 1936. They were
looking for somewhere quieter than
Although
now part of the greater
Our home
was next door to Heston airfield where Chamberlain had returned from
The
spelling of “Waye” was very much of its time.
While I was growing up it seemed unremarkable, but the final “e”
prompted amused derision when I arrived at university, its bogus archaism all
too reminiscent of “Ye Olde Tea Shoppe.”
The reason for this little curlicue was that in the estates being
developed around
When the
house was built, our garden had two pear trees, but at the start of the war the
one at the far end was chopped down in order to make space for an
Back
The
tree in blossom, springtime 1960s. By
now it had been greatly cut back.
Mum used to say wistfully in later years
that what she had always wanted was a nice garden, but that desire never
translated into actually doing any work there herself. The ground consisted of heavy unyielding
In the
1940s there were few diversions for children, and the situation for Ivor and me
was not so very different from how Dad described his own childhood: “In my day
we had to make our own entertainment.”
He said this, though, in the 1950s by which time television as well as
radio was in his view starting to reduce the youth of
We were not, as is obvious, particularly attuned to country living. But apart from the fact that we had no family roots there, Heston was anyway in the process of transforming itself from rural village to part of suburbia. We benefited from growing up during the early stages of this transition and gained at least a minimal sense of what it meant to live in the country. In the allotments that during the war had been carved out of the playing field of the local junior school and remained in place for a good ten years afterwards, we could recognise the red admiral, tortoiseshell and powder blue butterflies, along with the ubiquitous cabbage white. I remember, as well, how the seeds from the sycamores that bordered the allotments rotated like aeroplane propellers in their descent; the appropriateness of the name for the weed, shepherd’s purse; going blackberrying in the untended hedges bordering on Heston airport; and the variety and volume of the dawn chorus heard from our bedroom.
Most of the time, though, until we were about ten, we played in the street, which at that time we could do in complete safety. There were very few cars on the road, particularly after the introduction of petrol rationing in 1946, a move that effectively put paid to domestic motoring. Any car approaching us could be heard long before it was seen - we lived close to where Berkeley Waye turned sharply right into The Vale - and in practice we were more at risk from the silent arrival of cyclists who would have to weave their way past us as they came round the corner. Sometimes we played football with other children from the street, sometimes a more mechanical, even monotonous, game in which a ball would be kicked low towards the opposite kerb from which it would rebound for the other person to kick it in his turn. Even the slightest bounce would cause the ball to miss the kerb, so at the very least it was some sort of training in ball control.
Before
the war, Heathrow, three miles away, was merely one of a number of civilian
airports scattered round
Not all my early memories resonate quite as positively as these. In the late 1940s a virtually bankrupt nation was undergoing a programme of massive social reform, and the government was failing to carry everyone with them. Even I as a child was vaguely aware of disruptions going on all around: bus strikes, rail strikes, coal strikes. This affected the whole country, most of all in the winter of 1947, one of the worst on record, in which snow lay on the ground for three months. Although notionally a paradise for children, my main memory is of the one occasion I tried to make a snowman and of how unbearable the pain was as my frozen fingers started to unthaw. During that winter there was never enough coal, and it seemed impossible to get warm. Although feeling cold was a feature of much of our childhood, life at home produced more intractable problems than simply keeping warm in cold weather.
Chapter 2
A few years later, I found in Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations a phrase that encapsulated rather neatly that early part of our childhood. The hero Pip muses at one point on the implications of the fact that he had been brought up “by hand”, the hand in question being wielded by his elder sister who had become his surrogate mother on the death of their parents. Ivor and I also experienced what it meant to be brought up “by hand”. In our case, and unlike Pip’s so far as I could make out, this meant frequent thumps to the head. Never any other part of the body, just the head. No doubt we weren't beaten as hard or as often as many other children, either then or now. I’d be surprised if the frequency and force of these assaults would have counted as child abuse at the time, though it’s possible they might by today's more scrupulous standards. But being clouted was only part of it. The blows mostly fell during rages whose sustained intensity was unlike anything I have experienced or witnessed since, and it was these that had the greatest effect on us, both at the time and later.
These outbursts were also, as often as not, quite unpredictable; you could never be sure what would trigger them. Ivor and I were by and large not difficult children. We certainly weren't rebellious, because any tendency in that direction was knocked out of us at a very early stage. Of course we sometimes misbehaved, and, as with most children, this would be followed by the familiar: “If you do that again, you'll get a smack”. You did it again, and you got a smack. That was OK; it was, in its way, perfectly fair and reasonable. But that was not the usual pattern. For the most part, being hit was only tangentially related to misbehaviour. The more usual reason was that our mother was simply once again - to use a phrase often heard in our house – “getting in a state”. The phrase scarcely indicated the reality, because at these times, and increasingly as the years went on, she was like a woman possessed.
Her rages were an uninterrupted monologue. No doubt it would help if I could reproduce one here in detail, but I can’t recall more than their general flavour: intense resentment, outrage, hatred, accompanied - increasingly in later years - with a terrible sense of grief and isolation. Fragments of them remain, that’s all. The reason for the patchiness of my memory is in one respect obvious: they are a long way in the past, and they were not the kind of thing one would actually want to remember. But a further factor is that, even at the time, I realised I was trying to resist them, to not absorb them, to not let them get inside me. While they were going on, I - and I’m fairly sure, Ivor and Dad as well - kept our hands invisibly placed over our ears. The sound of her voice, the sheer force of what was coming out of her, were simply impossible to bear.
It was futile trying to remain unaffected, and the diaries I kept at the time are an intermittent record of their impact.
Ivor and I were both given diaries as a Christmas present in 1950, when we were respectively 12 and 10. This started something that lasted, for both of us, through the whole of the 1950s, and, in Ivor's case, off and on for the rest of his life. The fact that almost all of his diaries were missing after his death I put down to one of the many acts of vindictiveness by the man who killed him. Ivor was a hoarder who threw away very little, and without question he would not have got rid of them himself. But he was by and large not inclined to use the diary as a means of self-disclosure, and for that reason, though I would like to have seen them, the likelihood is that they would not have revealed much about what he felt in those early years.
When we started on our first diary all those years ago, neither of us had much idea what to do with it, and I think we both assumed it was intended to be a simple chronicle of daily activities rather than a record of anything we thought or felt. The result was that my daily entry for the first year almost always began with, “Woke up. Got up. Had breakfast.” After a year I dropped this opening gambit, probably feeling it was becoming somewhat dulled with repetition. But for the next few years I evidently still believed that a diary was a record of what one did. External events were what mattered, not what was going on inside. As a result, re-reading them for the first time since they were written has been a mostly tedious business.
Every so often, though, without context or explanation, a spasm of extreme unhappiness would force itself on to the page. It usually consisted of the simple statement, “I wish I were dead”. Note the use of “were” rather than “was”. Good to see that even in extremis I could still manage the past subjunctive. This appeared for the first time on 17th February 1953, when I was 12. The diary for 1954 is very patchy and incomplete – I suspect because at that time I couldn’t face writing anything very much. But in 1955 the same sentiment turns up again twice, once in the original form of "I wish I were dead", and then as "How I wish I were dead”. The period from May to September of that year must have been a particularly bad spell, because, as well as these two entries, I refer on three other occasions to suicide.
The most explicit is this superficially languid rumination on August 16th (I was now 15): “If I could be sure there is no god, I really think I would commit suicide if I could find a tolerably painless way of doing it”. Regardless of whether the baleful presence of my mother had played a part, one way or another I’d clearly come to believe in a universe governed by a harsh Old Testament god of wrath and retribution rather than a god of love; and as part of that belief I’d absorbed the traditional Christian view that suicide is the “sin against the Holy Ghost”, the one offence that God cannot forgive, guaranteeing its perpetrator an eternity in hell. Despite the laconic tone, the diary entry is contemplating the only two choices that life then seemed to present me: put up with things as they are, or endure an even harder time if I decide to end it all.
As to why there is no context for the other single-sentence entries, nothing preceding or following them, nothing that actually says why I wished myself dead, or why even suicide had its attractions - there was no need. The cause was always the same. I didn’t need to write, for future reference, as if I were in any danger of forgetting it: “Mum got in a state again.” Dad was the source of this phrase, and its wonderfully understated blandness was somehow typical of him. His full version was, “I don't know why you keep getting in such a state”, and it would usually be delivered half to her and half to himself in tones of weary bafflement.
These
rages, if my memory is accurate, started in the mid to late 1940s when Ivor and
I were about six and seven. That doesn't
mean they hadn't been going on before then, and my guess now is that they
probably had. But I have very few
memories of
any kind going back earlier than this, and it's possible they have been simply blotted out, along with much else during childhood and adolescence. Coincidentally or not, it was around this time that Mum was diagnosed with high blood pressure. Ivor and I would lie in bed upstairs, supposedly asleep, listening to her raised voice, accompanied by the sound of a dining room chair being lifted and crashed down again, either to vent her fury and frustration or to emphasise something she was saying. According to Dad, some years later, the point at issue was whether she should go into hospital for further investigation and treatment. This she absolutely refused to do. The reason she gave was that she had to be at home to look after the kids. In this way, it seems to me, she secured for herself two important benefits: the moral high ground of the martyr's crown (sacrificing herself for her two boys); and, secondly, as a reward for this self-sacrificial gesture, the right to vent against her family - including the very kids on whose behalf she was supposedly sacrificing herself - an ocean of deep resentment. I'm sorry if this sounds harsh, but I believe it's essentially true.
For by the time Ivor and I were growing up, resentment was the dominating fact in her emotional life. It had been built up over many years, against the hand she felt life had dealt her. In this respect, Mum was not so very different from Pip's sister. She too was someone with a strong sense of grievance against the world. As she saw it, her life consisted of little more than unsought burdens and undeserved frustrations. For her, the main burden was Pip, with her husband often coming a close second. In Mum's case, it's fair to say that Dad was the primary target, though one has to add that in practice he was often replaced by Ivor and me, not least because of the advantage, most of all during school holidays, of our greater availability.
As for the diagnosis of high blood pressure, this served a further purpose in creating an alibi for her every time she “got in a state”. She had high blood pressure; therefore it followed that, no matter how out of control her behaviour became, she couldn't help herself. Although never put in quite these bald terms, throughout our childhood and adolescence this was the only explanation for her behaviour that Dad came up with. Mum herself would concede every so often that she got “worked up” - sometimes it cropped up in mid-tirade - but that was as far as it went. There was no further explanation, certainly not any apology afterwards. In so far as she thought about the matter at all, and I don't think she did very much - or indeed was capable of doing so - her outbursts would have seemed to her an understandable response to the trials she had to put up with.
As the years went on, her behaviour had the predictable effect of creating an ever-widening gulf between her on one side and Dad, Ivor and me on the other. Her rages would then be intermixed with a terrible sense of her isolation and unhappiness. “Oh, I could howl!” is one tiny scrap from her outpourings that remains fixed in my memory. It's not possible to write these emotions off merely as self-pity writ large; they were torment and grief. Like her rage, they erupted out of deep within her, and their origins lay in who knows what sense of wrongs done to her in the past. A friend has suggested that her aggression, low self-esteem, chronic need for protection, bad relations with her own mother, arrested development that made her seem more like a child than a woman, these are all consistent with childhood sexual abuse, possibly from her father. This explanation at least has the merit of taking the full weight of her profound disturbance, and, speculative as it is, it could be true.
Towards the end of her life it seemed to me that Dad's more prosaic conclusion about her general state of mind was right as far as it went but that the explanation of it was wrong. Like him I believed then, as I still do, that she genuinely couldn't help herself. But his idea that high blood pressure was the cause was absurd. It had nothing directly to do with it. Hypertension doesn't lead to ungovernable rages. Aside from any other evidence, there is the simple fact that Ivor and I also developed high blood pressure, both at the same time, in our mid-fifties, and it had no effect whatever on our temperament or behaviour. Our mother's anger and emotional instability were not caused by her high blood pressure. At most they were symptoms. Whatever the medical explanation and whatever its precise origins, her condition clearly went back a long way.
Chapter
3
Mum was born
and grew up in
The only surviving example of a photo that Mum had
cropped.
Dad was standing next to her, but part of his arm is all that remains.
Mum aged 12
Two studio portraits from the late 1920s and early 30s
Apparently,
as a child she always preferred to have her nose in a book. That is how she
described herself, and it was certainly true of her in later life. In her
bookishness as in most other respects she was a contrast to her older sister
Winnie. (Her name was
Mum in the 1960s
As for Granny herself, she apparently had a fierce temper when she was younger, but she had started to slow down, if not exactly to mellow, towards the end of her life, which is when Ivor and I knew her. An insight into what Granny was like in her younger days is contained in the only advice Dad ever gave Ivor and me on the subject of getting married: “Always take a good look at the girl's mother, because that's what she'll turn into later”. He probably didn't feel he needed to spell it out further. Relations between mother and daughter were fractious at best, based on Granny's domineering ways and Mum's resentment of them, a state of affairs that simply got worse over the years as it became obvious that the two of them were permanently yoked together. It fed into Mum’s deep sense that she was unfairly put upon, exploited, taken for granted, treated as of no account.
Dad's
family was originally from Aberfan in south
Their
father was a miner, an almost inevitable occupation for someone born in the
south
Dad left school at fourteen shortly after the war and took a
Uncle Reg and Uncle Eddie standing.
Auntie Eunice seated right, Auntie Phyllis
seated left.
Dad in between them.
variety of white-collar jobs. In the late 1920s he moved to
A complication at this point was that Mum was already married and had been since 1928. By 1930 she and her husband were no longer together, and when Dad arrived on the scene, she was in the process of getting divorced. Ivor and I only learned of this previous marriage when I was 18, because, on joining the Civil Service, I was required to produce my birth certificate, and this inevitably had a reference to her previous husband, the mysterious “Mr Gray”. Dad hinted that he had been violent to her, but that was as far as it went. Given the difficulty of dissolving marriages in the 1930s, something fairly serious like this would have been needed as grounds for divorce, and it raises the possibility that his maltreatment may have contributed to her instability and proneness to furious outbursts later on, maybe casting herself as a woman alone in an otherwise male household whose three members were a constant challenge and threat to her. Even though no more than guesswork, the theory at least has the merit of explaining what seems otherwise inexplicable, why she felt she had to take out her fury on her two sons. At all events, Mum and Dad started walking out together before the divorce finally came through, and it would be natural to assume that, as people do, they gradually grew closer, eventually getting engaged and then married.
It wasn't quite like this. The truth was rather less romantic.
Dad was mild, unaggressive and in some ways weak, though stubborn when he chose; but he was wholly incapable of violence, and for this reason he would have seemed to Mum in those early days a welcome contrast to her first husband. (I remember her incorporating the contrast between them into one of her tirades many years later, along the general lines of, “What another terrible mistake I made then, when I married you”.) Nevertheless, things did not go well during their courtship. Dad must have seen enough evidence of her instability and uncertain temper to make him wonder what he was getting into. Eventually he tried to back away and end the relationship. But by now it had progressed to a point where a break could not easily be made - not at least so far as Mum was concerned. Her insecurities made insupportable the prospect of losing a potential second husband, one who seemed on the face of it so much a better bet than her first. He made it clear to her that he didn't want to marry. Her response was that, if he didn't marry her, she would commit suicide.
At this time, Dad was sharing a maisonette with Auntie Eunice and Uncle Bert, who were now married, together with the mother of Dad and Auntie Eunice (that is, Ivor's and my other grandmother; like Mum's mother, she too was a widow). They were a very close family and he confided in his sister the threat that had been made and the dilemma he now faced. During our parents’ lifetime Ivor and I knew nothing of this. It was only many years later, when they were both dead, that Auntie Eunice felt able to pass it on to us. Could she have somehow got it wrong? Despite being so long ago, something as dramatic as this is not easily forgotten or confused. Her memory in general was extremely precise, and in her last year as she was becoming more frail I made a point of asking her again if it was indeed the case that Mum had threatened suicide if Dad refused to marry her. She wrote back that this is exactly what happened.
, 
... Auntie
Eunice with Uncle Bert, 1952
Auntie Eunice, 1955
An alternative explanation for the story is that she was simply making it up, as a slur against our mother. Mum detested Auntie Eunice with a deep and venomous loathing, so maybe this was her belated revenge. But I have never thought it likely. On the contrary, and despite being momentarily shocked when I first heard it, nothing about the story actually surprised me. Mum's threat to kill herself seemed to combine elements of weakness, desperate insecurity and violence, in a way that was consistent with the general set of her character. And it at last supplied a convincing answer to the otherwise baffling question: why on earth did Dad marry her? So, yes, I believe it was true.
Chapter 4
One of the principal aspects of Dad’s personality was that he would do almost anything to avoid a confrontation. Whether this tendency had always been there or whether it developed through having to accept what his marriage later became, I don't know. From one point of view, it showed an obvious weakness of character. But there was another element in his decision; and here I'm extrapolating from the consistent impression he made on both Ivor and me from childhood onwards. It was that he had an enormously strong sense of responsibility. Despite being presented with the crudest form of emotional blackmail, I suspect he felt he had no choice. He had raised Mum’s hopes and expectations, undoubtedly more than he had intended, and he didn't feel he could back off now: he was in too far. Marrying her had become, therefore, a matter not of desire but of duty. He must have had some sense, even then, of the kind of burden it was likely to prove, but he had created the situation, and he now had to live with its consequences as best he could. So, out of a strange combination of weakness and strength, Dad accepted what life seemed to be placing inescapably in front of him.
The marriage - easy to say this now - had failure written all over it from the start. Mum had put a symbolic gun to his head. You marry me, or you’ll be responsible for my death. In these circumstances how could she possibly feel that he had married her because he loved her? Nothing he might say or do afterwards could ever remove the memory of a marriage founded on compulsion not choice. Whatever her uncertainties and insecurities before, they could now only get worse not better, and inevitably they did.
They were compounded by a further factor. Dad had come from a close, supportive family, but he was now leaving it behind; he was supposedly embarking on a relationship with the woman who was going to be the new centre of his life. But Dad’s closeness to Auntie Eunice prompted a terrible jealousy on Mum's part. It must have started around that time and it lasted the rest of her life, growing rather than lessening in its intensity. Her fear - which, given both her temperament and her actual behaviour, was perfectly reasonable - was that Dad preferred his sister to his wife. Do you love me? No. Do you love Eunice? Yes. The consequence was a regular pattern: frequent outbursts of furious vituperative anger from Mum when she was obliged to meet her sister-in-law, and intermittent vicious hate mail from her when they were apart. Her loathing culminated in a fantasy in later years that Dad and Auntie Eunice were consumed with incestuous longing for each other. One occasion when Dad and Auntie Eunice met after a long separation, their embrace clearly struck Mum as both excessive and revealing, given that he was not as a rule physically demonstrative. This moment got recycled many times over the following years, enlarged and distorted through Mum’s paroxysms of loathing. I can still hear in my head the high-pitched, hysterical way she would repeat, “…cuddling her! cuddling her!…” Of all the stuff that spewed out of her when she was fully roused, her incest fantasies were probably the worst.
...............
Auntie Eunice at 16...................
.............Dad at 17
The fact was, though, that Mum was quite intuitive, and, in the manner of many neurotic people, she had the knack of getting to the heart of things, only in order then to get them completely wrong. Yes, Dad had a close relationship with his sister; but no, it was not unnaturally close in the way she fantasised - though I don't doubt there were times when Dad must have thought longingly about the peace and quiet of days long gone and of how much happier a life he might have led as a bachelor uncle, part of Auntie Eunice's extended family. This secret dream, which I'm sure Mum had wit enough to imagine passing through his mind from time to time, would have further reinforced her jealous hatred of her sister-in-law. It was not something our parents could ever rationally discuss, and as a result the jealousy and resentment festered away unchecked.
But Mum
was basically right in her sense of how strong was the influence exercised by
Auntie Eunice. She feared and dreaded
it, because it made her feel powerless, and this in turn reinforced her
loathing and detestation. One of Mum's
tactics was to refuse to refer to her adversary by her usual name. According to the family Bible, she had been
christened Lizzie Eunice, but because she didn't care for her first name, no
one used it - except Mum. She would
refer to her with fury and venomous contempt as “Lizzie”, or occasionally as
“little Lizzie Green”, an allusion to the fact that, although Mum was not very
tall, Auntie Eunice was even shorter; as she said herself, with characteristic
precision, she was just half an inch under five feet. Mum also used to refer to her, with heavy
sarcastic emphasis, as "She Who Must Be Obeyed", the protagonist of
Rider Haggard's novel, She.
Dad's
sister was, on the face of it, an unlikely target for such detestation. She was demure, quietly spoken, not in any
obvious way pushy or self-assertive. She
never responded to Mum's verbal onslaughts against her. But underneath, as Mum recognised, was a
woman of determination and enormously strong will. Mum felt its power, together
with the slyness of its concealment (as she saw it). Auntie Eunice's strength was most evident in
the benign domination that she exercised over her extended family, consisting
of her husband, her mother, another brother who had been briefly married and
was now divorced, her widowed sister, and her sister's children. She provided the main impulse behind their
various moves: first to
Dad, if
it were his choice alone, would very likely have gone. His whole family was now going to be in
After the
war John Bull went into decline and the market for Bullets dried
up. By now, with a wife and two children
to support, Dad took what employment he could find, which turned out to be that
of a Clerical Officer in the Statistics Department of the Board of Trade. A rare moment of rejoicing in the Powell
household occurred one day, a year later, when he brought home the news that
his temporary appointment had been made permanent. Now he had a job for life. It was a life sentence indeed. It gave him, and us, security; and Ivor and I
received the additional benefit of the conkers he brought home in the autumn
from nearby
Of course Mum wouldn't wear the idea for a second. She had established her own world in Heston, where she found herself in control at last, even if somewhat shakily. Her mother had come to live with us, which gave rise to terrible rows between the two of them. But even living like this was, for her, preferable to the prospect of a life circling as a minor planet within the orbit of Auntie Eunice and constantly subject to her influence. So the marriage, which had begun so inauspiciously, somehow limped on, Dad resigned to his lot, and Mum ever more vocally unhappy with hers. A pattern was established very early on that was to remain to the end. As she became increasingly hysterical and aggressive towards him, so he, out of a natural instinct for self-preservation, withdrew into himself. But the effect of his detachment and remoteness was to create, in turn, a vacuum that reinforced her sense of isolation and abandonment, and this caused her to lash out even more. Her reaction made him, again, continue to withdraw, which in turn... and so on. All of this was observable to Ivor and me as we were growing up. It was a pattern into which we too were being drawn.
*
No one
outside the family saw what was going on inside. How Mum behaved with her immediate family and
how she behaved in the presence of other people were utterly different. The gap was so great that it was almost as if
she had two personalities. As I said
earlier, when the malign energy of this other side took over, she was like a
woman possessed. I can imagine anyone
who saw her only casually and infrequently - such as the occasional callers to
the house - being incredulous at the picture I've presented so far. “Mrs Powell?
Losing her temper? Physically
aggressive? Come on. She wouldn't say boo to a goose.” Nor would she, most of the time. Her manner was diffident, self-effacing and
socially awkward. She was ill at ease
with most people. She could sometimes go
through the motions of sociability, but only with difficulty. In particular, she felt threatened by people
who were clearly self-confident (unlike her), and uncomplicatedly
self-assertive (as she was not). Her sense of self was so weak that she felt
herself in danger of being overwhelmed, even obliterated, by stronger
personalities. The slighting comments
she made about the mother of a school friend of mine illustrate what I
mean. They would run into each other
while out shopping, and although my friend's mother was no more than confident,
out-going and chatty, Mum found the energy of her personality too much to bear,
its force oppressive and exhausting.
I look at the family photos and search in vain
for some hint of her darker nature. None of it is visible, in part at least
because
.....
...Mum, mid-60s, in pensive mood....................One of her self-portraits taken in front of the
..............................................................................dressing table mirror.
she always enjoyed the business of having her photo taken. Filling up the old box Brownie with film was
something that took place only every so often, and so the taking of “snaps”, as
we called them, became a special occasion. She was always smiling and happy,
indulging at most an innocent vanity, making the most of the chance of
presenting her best face to the world.
More revealing perhaps - mainly of the depth of her self-absorption and
desire to improve the visual record of herself that she was leaving behind -
are the various photos that she took of her reflection in her dressing table
mirror. Dad got rid of most of them
after her death, and only one has survived.
. 
...
Dad and Mum, 1967..........................Dad and Mum, 1968
At home her general demeanour tended to be broody and withdrawn. Her pleasures were knitting and reading, both solitary activities. As a child it was reading that she had enjoyed most. She mentioned more than once her memories of her father taking the family to the fair on Hampstead Heath and how much she had hated it; most of all, she hated the noise and the crush of people. For a lot of the time at home, therefore, she was superficially similar to how she seemed outside. But recessive quietness is not tranquillity. She spent much of her life locked within herself, mulling things over, brooding over real or imagined slights, recent or long past, so that you never knew when an eruption would take place or even what might trigger it. The connection between the two sides of her nature was her sense of being put upon, taken for granted, treated as of no account. In conversation she couldn't bear to be interrupted or to allow some one to talk over her. If anyone did so, it brought all her insecurities and resentments rapidly to the surface, and her voice, which in her diffident, self-effacing mode tended to be quiet, would acquire a frenzied intensity. “Let me speak. No one lets me SPEAK!” It was almost as if, at some level, her periodic explosions were an attempt to redress the balance, to assert herself - quite literally, to make herself heard.
There was a pattern of sorts to her outbursts. Some of them in fact you could pretty much rely on. First thing in the morning and during the evenings were always bad times. Dad left for work before Ivor and I got up to go to school, and Mum always insisted on getting up with him to cook his breakfast. He would pay for this self-sacrificial gesture, however, by a fusillade of bitter complaint and abuse as he ate his egg and bacon, and it would accompany him as he left the house to get his bike out of the shed to cycle to work. The house being as small as it was, the sound of her voice would penetrate upstairs, drawing Ivor and me out of our night's sleep. This formed a not uncommon start to our day: no need of an alarm clock for us. The effect of being regularly roused from sleep in this way is that it was many years before I could make the connection between being in bed and feeling safe and secure. Following a period of relative stability in the middle of the day, she would as often as not get herself increasingly worked up from late afternoon onwards, with the result that Dad would be greeted on his return with a reprise of his morning send-off. The tedium of the Statistics Department of the Board of Trade must seemed, in comparison, an oasis of rationality and calm.
Ivor and I would receive clumps round the head as well as tongue-lashings until we were about thirteen and fourteen. Her usual practice was to swipe the side of our heads once, twice, three times, maybe more, but at some point we would start to snivel, and she would then usually stop, since it was a sign that we had capitulated. Curiously, the last physical assault I can remember was also one of the worst. On this occasion, the day was a bit overcast, and so in the morning she tried to persuade us to take our macs to school in case it rained. But cycling in macs was always uncomfortable, and we said no, it wasn’t going to rain and we'd take a chance. In the event she was right and we were wrong. Throughout the journey home it was pouring down, so that by the time we arrived we were soaked through. As we entered the house, dripping water, we grimaced at each other, both thinking the same thing. Now we're for it. I don't know why, but for some reason I expected we'd get nothing worse than a serious ticking-off. Foolish optimism. Mum must have spent the whole afternoon, while the rain fell, working herself into a rage unlike any I can remember up to that point. This time, unlike her usual pattern, she didn't stop hitting us when we started crying; she just went on and on, accompanying the blows with some of her frequent complaints: “You're more trouble than when you were kids... you just make work...” and so on.
The trigger for all of this was not so much the morning's petty act of defiance as what it represented in terms of her sense of powerlessness, her inability to assert herself, the way people ignored her, took her for granted, and even, in the case of her kids, disregarded what she'd actually told them to do. As to why it was one of the last times we were knocked about, I think this came down to nothing more significant than the fact that Ivor and I were becoming taller than her, and so she felt she couldn't carry on as before. A swipe directed downward at the head of someone smaller than you made some kind of sense. A swipe directed upwards presumably felt unnatural. All the same, for some time afterwards I often found myself hunching my shoulder as I braced myself for a blow that nevertheless failed to arrive.
Chapter 5
After this time things became worse, as Mum’s paroxysms of anger became more intense and louder, and carried on for longer. If I’d had sufficient detachment, I might have wondered where on earth she got the energy. Everything was now being vented from a deep core of lonely destructive rage. Unsurprisingly, the major cluster of diary entries, quoted earlier, in which I fervently wished I were dead, occurred when I was about fourteen or fifteen. This would have been around the time that she stopped hitting us and her attacks had become exclusively verbal. During this period my diaries also record stomach aches occurring once or twice a week. I was taken several times to the doctor and eventually was sent to the local hospital to check whether the problem was a grumbling appendix; the diagnosis wasn’t confirmed, and my appendix remained intact. The origin was almost certainly psychosomatic.
The effect of Mum’s outbursts was magnified by the fact that there was simply no escape. Even by the standards of suburban semis, ours was a small house. Following the usual design, downstairs consisted of two rooms, front and back, and a kitchen with a door out into a passage that ran alongside the house. These rooms had to accommodate five people. Granny had come o stay after the war, and until she went into a nursing home in 1953, she occupied the front room as a bed-sit, while also sharing use of the kitchen. The back room served as combined dining room and sitting room for the rest of us. It was roughly eleven by eleven feet. Mum and Dad sat in opposite corners in two over-large easy chairs, part of a three-piece suite the sofa of which remained in Granny’s room. In the absence of anywhere else, particularly in the evenings when both our parents were there, Ivor and I sat at the dining table, doing our homework, listening to the radio or reading. But when Mum became enraged, she would virtually take over the whole house, going from dining room to kitchen and back again, then banging up and down stairs, as she disgorged her bitter unhappiness.
While it went on we would sit in silence, inwardly disconnecting as far as we could, trying to let as little as possible filter through our defences. It was the psychological equivalent of huddling under a sheet during a violent storm. We said nothing, because we knew from experience this only made matters worse. Dad occasionally used to say something baffled and would-be soothing such as, “I don’t know why you’re getting so worked up”, and he would be further bemused when it had exactly the opposite effect. Whatever comment we made served only to prolong matters. And even if it didn’t produce a response at the time, anything we said, however innocuous and insignificant, was capable of being chewed over, absorbed, brooded upon, passed through a distorting prism, and then spewed out later as part of another of Mum’s tirades. We were in a situation reminiscent of the old police caution: “You do not have to say anything, but anything you do say will be taken down and may be given in evidence against you.” So there was no alternative to silence. As a result the three of us created an emptiness, an absence even, which Mum occupied – or rather, into which she rushed with tidal force – encountering neither resistance nor, for all practical purposes, any human presence, the effect of which was inevitably to reinforce her tormented loneliness. We could do nothing but wait for the surge to run its course.
As to what we talked about as a family in the periods of relative calm, the answer is hardly complicated: there was very little talk of any kind. Avoidance of potentially tricky topics was the chief object, and that was made easier by the simple device of saying as little as possible on any subject whatever, or even saying nothing at all. There is one representative memory that sums up this aspect of home life. It is lunchtime, and Mum, Dad, Ivor and I are sitting round the dining table. As so often, there is no conversation. Suddenly I realise that, for some time, Ivor and I have not been facing forward into the table, nor even looking down at our food except when we have to in order to fork it into our mouths. We have both been partly turned in our chairs, gazing out through the French door into the garden. There is nothing there, nothing to draw our attention. But we have both adopted the same position, and I realise that this isn’t the first time. Before I ask myself why we do this, the answer comes to me. For both of us, it is a yearning simply to be anywhere but here. There is a world elsewhere; and whatever and wherever it is, it has to be better than where we are now.
*
Years
later I came across a poem by Seamus Heaney whose title seemed to have a quirky
relevance to our situation: “Whatever you say, say nothing.” The phrase was a piece of folk wisdom in the
nationalist community of
For us, this piece of advice – say as little as possible in order to give nothing away – applied not only to what we said but also to what we wrote. When Ivor went off to do his two years National Service, he wrote home without fail once a week, and although his letters were moderately informative about what he was doing, they didn’t go into detail, they weren’t very graphic, and their general tenor could only be described as bland. At one level, so what? No one tells their parents everything. But I guessed that Ivor was pursuing the further self-protective aim of disclosing the absolute minimum. In the event, he managed pretty successfully the trick of saying something while really saying almost nothing.
Ivor getting ready to return
to his unit.
This is
more than I always managed to do. When I
went to university I was expected to maintain the tradition of the weekly
letter home that Ivor had started. Much
as I tried to follow in his stylistic footsteps there was at least one occasion
when something I wrote turned out to have a delayed-action fuse attached. The weather should have been an adequately
safe topic. No danger there, one might
think. Unfortunately I made the mistake
in one of my letters of saying, “The weather has been kind recently...” This rang noisy alarm bells with my
mother. She recognised the phrase as one
that Auntie Eunice sometimes used in her periodic letters from
That was the worst possible betrayal, and when I went home next, the atmosphere was vibrating with tension from the moment I stepped through the door. What was up? Oh God, what had I done this time? – assuming I was the cause. I wasn’t in ignorance for long. Her repressed anger soon erupted, directed both at me and the Machiavellian Auntie Eunice. I made the mistake of protesting feebly that I hadn’t the least intention of becoming some kind of surrogate son for her. From past experience I should have known better. Say nothing. Always say nothing. My denial served only to prolong the torrent.
*
Like other children brought up in bizarre and unhappy domestic circumstances, Ivor and I had two opposed perspectives on our life at home. At one level, it was what we had grown up with and what we were used to. That made it normal. At the same time, since none of our friends lived lives that were remotely like ours, so far as we could tell, part of us knew it wasn’t normal. The two perceptions couldn’t be reconciled, but they had a paralysing effect on us. What could we possibly say about our life at home – and to whom? Since there was no answer to the question, that alone would have kept us silent; but in addition, Ivor and I were defensive of our mother in a way that made it impossible to criticise or complain about her. It grew out partly out of the residual chivalry towards women that was a feature of the pre-feminist attitudes of the 1950s. An aspect of this inhibition was the unspoken assumption that it is allowable to slag off one’s father, which our friends sometimes did, but not one’s mother. Even if we had tried to convey the flavour of home life to any of our friends, I doubt if we could have succeeded, because what people hear is filtered through their experience and expectations. Anything we might have said would have been transposed into something more recognisable: “Your mother loses her temper sometimes? So does mine. What’s the big deal?”
Looking back on it, our loyalty to our mother was remarkable. And not merely during the time we were growing up but even more later on, as adults, when we might have said to ourselves, and then to our parents: Enough was enough; we’d had as much as we could take; we were pushing off for good. These things happen. I can think of several cases where adult children cut themselves off from one or both parents in what, from the outside, seemed acts of appalling callousness and selfishness. Our parents had it lucky, since at no time did Ivor and I contemplate anything of that kind. No doubt part of our reluctance was because we were the product of our time (the 1950s) and our background (the un-self-assertive lower middle class). Today’s emphasis is primarily on what one owes to oneself; “entitlement” is the current phrase: and as a result psychological self-preservation may well necessitate getting shot of a parent, even at the cost of some guilt – though in the cases I know of that burden seems to have been carried remarkably lightly. In theory, and in practice too for some people, there is a potential conflict between the obligations we have to ourselves and the obligations we owe to others. But whatever a resolution might have looked like in our case, the simple fact is that Ivor and I didn’t properly recognise that a dilemma of this kind existed and so had not much chance of resolving it. As life at home got progressively worse, we simply accepted the situation as it was. We put up with it because we had no choice. We didn’t discuss the matter, not just because we didn’t talk much anyway but because there was nothing to talk about. We did our best. Our best wasn’t perfect, but it was probably as good as could have been expected in the circumstances.
So, for all these reasons, I felt no guilt at the time about my reaction to Mum’s death – the nightmares described earlier – any more than I feel any embarrassment at revealing them now. It wasn’t that I was glad she was dead; I hadn’t rejoiced at her death; and at no time before it happened had I looked forward to it or wished her dead. But gratitude and, above all, relief that she was no longer there? Yes, that, overwhelmingly.
Chapter 6
As we were growing up I realised from time to time how special Ivor was to Mum. “Ivor takes after me, and you take after your father.” That was one way she marked out for the benefit of both of us the respective places we occupied in her emotional life. I was never clear what she meant by the second part of this statement aside from the possibility that she saw both Dad and me as suspiciously bookish. The first part, that Ivor took more after her, struck me even at the time as untrue; the basic set of his personality - remote, unreachable, recessive - was much more like Dad’s than hers. What the claim represented, though, was her sense of connection with him. She laid a claim to him in a way that she did not to me. Not that I resented Ivor this distinction or felt envious. It always seemed to me safer to keep a decent distance from Mum and her capricious likes and dislikes. Certainly his supposed position of advantage did him no good on those occasions when we both experienced the full rigour of being brought up “by hand.”
Mum in the back
Even so, I would have assumed that even if I hadn't been wanted as much as Ivor, at least I had been, in some sense of the word, wanted. As I discovered much later, this wasn’t quite true. On one of my visits back home from university in the mid-Sixties Mum admitted to me that I had been an “accident.” Since children are very often unplanned, the admission should have been unremarkable. But the admission was being wrenched from somewhere deep inside her, clearly accompanied by some guilt. Mum was not prone to such feelings. As a rule she felt no need to defend or account for any aspect of her behaviour. On the contrary, she had the habit of quoting every so often, with brittle defiance, the aristocratic tag, “Never complain, never explain.” It was her way of saying that she had no intention of apologising for anything she said or did. That would have been a sign of weakness, and inside she felt weak enough as it was.
So what was she feeling guilty about? It appeared to go beyond the fact that I was just an accident; it was that I had been positively unwanted. In this brief exchange she seemed to want to assure me this didn't mean she hadn't come to love me later on. She didn't actually say she loved me, but that seemed more or less what she wanted me to understand. She was in an emotional state, not far off tears. She was perhaps seeking some acknowledgement from me that I understood and that somehow it was all right. Or maybe she simply wanted to get it off her chest. Unfortunately, I was less moved than embarrassed by her unspoken plea. The appeal was coming from a side of her that I had not seen before. I had not anticipated this admission, didn't know how to respond to it, and wanted the conversation to be over.
Given what was going on at the time, it was obvious why she wouldn’t have wanted to become pregnant again and why the prospect of another child would have filled her with apprehension and dread. I was conceived just after the second world war started, and she gave birth in the middle of the Blitz, one week after Churchill’s radio announcement to the nation that the battle of France was over and the battle of Britain was about to begin. Shortly after that Dad was called up, and he remained at RAF Chipping Norton until the end of the war. Apart from the few occasions when he was able to get home on leave, she was on her own.
For a
brief period in 1941 she and her two babies decamped to Porthcawl in
RP in Porthcawl
Granny was at this time still in
The shops were not very convenient, about fifteen minutes’ walk away, but the main practical problems facing her lay at home. In the garden shed there was an old copper, supposedly for doing the larger items of the wash, though how that worked when the shed was without any source of hot water I never found out. It was never in use when Ivor and I were children. Smaller items were always washed by hand in the kitchen sink, never in the hand basin in the bathroom, because the kitchen was the only place where we could boil hot water. Drying nappies would have been a vexatious chore, particularly in winter. Later on, most items of washing, whenever it was too wet or too cold outside, were left to dry festooned on an improvised clothes line running from left to right of the mantelpiece in the dining room. There was no washing machine; no refrigerator; and certainly no immersion heater, so no hot water for baths or washing up, only what could be produced with a kettle and saucepans on a gas ring in the kitchen; no central heating, just a coal fire in one room; and, on top of it all, nothing very much with which to distract a baby and a toddler. Add to all of this the general stress of wartime - she was living next door to an airfield, after all - and one can see why Mum would have been less than overjoyed at the prospective arrival of a second child. If at times she felt overwhelmed, she had good reason.
*
Despite not being a natural mother, Mum had been desperate to have a child. Part of it may have stemmed from the assumption that, if you got married, giving birth was necessary in order to complete yourself as a woman. Equally if not more important would have been her desire to have one over her hated rival, Auntie Eunice, who was unable to have children. As Mum saw it, Auntie Eunice was leading an almost ideal life. She had a contented marriage and the love of everyone around her including that of her brother, Trevor. Effortlessly happy; fulfilled; and in control of her life through the exercise of her sly but powerful will: that was how Mum saw her. She had everything, in short, that Mum didn't have. With the single exception that she couldn't have children. So when Ivor was born in 1938, Mum had succeeded in doing the one thing that her much-loathed sister-in-law had tried to do and failed. Her triumph over her, in this area if in no other, was therefore complete.
Regardless of her motives for having a child, Ivor's arrival almost certainly became the most emotionally significant event in Mum's life. Whenever in later years, as happened from time to time, the tone of her monologues turned to unhappiness, loneliness and disappointment rather than just rage and resentment, she would recall that initial period after he was born as a kind of short-lived paradise. She would refer briefly but passionately to his first two years as the happiest of her life. One sign of how much her new baby meant to her is an envelope I came across among Ivor’s
Mum with Ivor, at home in
Berkeley Waye
effects that Mum had shown us once. It contained a lock of Ivor’s hair, and on the outside she had written, “Ivor's hair at 14 months (First lock cut).” As to how long and how uncomplicatedly her happiness at his arrival continued, that's hard to guess. It would have lasted at least for his first year or so, but maybe not a lot longer, since by then she would have found herself inconveniently pregnant a second time just as the war started, and that discovery would have disturbed her already precarious equilibrium. Probably this brief period of her life wasn't quite as idyllic as she later made out, but there seems no reason to doubt the genuineness, at least to start with, of her love for her first-born.
*
The more enduring reality, though, was that if Mum loved Ivor or me, it was only in our absence: what she loved was not who we actually were, rather some dream version of the relationship with us she might have had in other, happier circumstances. Only when Ivor or I were away could we become the object of her yearning to express a love that was mostly buried beneath feelings of grief, loneliness and rage. If Dad had had to be away from home for a time, if his job had required him to spend time abroad or even somewhere else in England, that might have transformed her feelings towards him as well - temporarily at least. But it never happened, because he was always around. The long-established pattern of absolute dependence on him and need for his support combined with a furious resistance and resentment continued right up to her death. The wholly intractable problem was that her need for love and her desire to express it were constantly thwarted by the person she was and the way she behaved. She craved warmth and intimacy but her actions served only to repel the three people closest to her.
Neither of our parents was physically demonstrative, not to each other or to us, and no terms of endearment were ever used. As in so many other respects, it was simply how things were, and I don’t think it occurred to Ivor or me to feel deprived on this score. In fact the middle class practice of addressing children as “darling” - something we would have come across only in films - sounded foreign, even embarrassing. Working class terms like “love” and “dear” were also outside our range. After all, we may not have been middle class, but we certainly weren’t working class either. As part of the lower middle class we were uneasily poised between the two, deracinated and lacking communally sanctioned traditions of behaviour or speech. There were in practice infinite gradations within lower middle class life, but they were primarily economic. On that scale we didn’t stand particularly high, though it did not prevent Mum becoming very indignant on one occasion when, having bought some lucky heather from a gypsy going from door to door, the seller expressed her gratitude by assuring her, “It’s the poor as ‘elps the poor,”
Nevertheless, in our early years Mum maintained one at least of the traditional rituals of affection. Until we were about ten or so she would always come and kiss us goodnight before turning the light out - although this was not always without anxiety on our part, since we never knew what mood she was going to be in, and we were often aware, especially if the evening had gone badly and the kiss was more than usually perfunctory, of what was seething away underneath. Dad had no such little rituals to draw on and, probably typically of men of his generation, I can’t remember physical contact with him of any kind. Nevertheless I prefer to believe that, despite everything, we were not just one more item in his list of burdensome responsibilities and that he was genuinely attached to us. But his remoteness was an obstacle that we never overcame, and it didn't exactly help that he frequently addressed us by the other's name. (“Dad, there's only two of us...”) Whatever his feelings, they weren't close enough to the surface, or maybe they just weren't strong enough, to make him do the one thing where we most needed his help: he failed to protect us from Mum, and, more than that, he seemed not even to recognise that we needed protecting.
*
Mum was at her best when we were ill. If we had a rash or a fever Mum was attentive and sympathetic even though she couldn’t do much more than be at our bedside. We were vulnerable and needed her, which meant that from her point of view we were at our least self-assertive and therefore least threatening. At other times, though, when matters were less serious, her reserves of patience would rapidly wear thin. On one occasion I’m in bed with a persistent dry cough. It’s the middle of the night, and I try to minimise the disturbance to everybody in our tiny house by coughing under the blankets. Suddenly I hear Mum getting out of bed and stomping into the bathroom. Sound of tap running. More footsteps, and I can feel my heart pounding at the threatening sound of her approach. Then her shadowy figure is by the bedside. Now I’m for it. She hands me the glass of water, and accompanies the action with a smart clip round the head and the wonderfully disingenuous assertion delivered in a furious hiss, “You’re keeping Ivor awake”.
In the absence of other exchanges of affection, food became important. As a cook, Mum offered a very limited menu - after the war it could hardly have been otherwise - but her meals were always tasty. Ivor and I certainly thought so. Sunday dinner was either a half shoulder of lamb or, more commonly, roast beef, together with Yorkshire pudding, roast potatoes, a green vegetable of some kind, and thick gravy. Ivor and I got in the habit of saying at the end of the meal, “That was really nice, Mum”, as we pushed our chairs back and prepared to do the washing up. This little ritual was not for form's sake; it was genuinely meant. (Dad didn't join our chorus and would make no comment of any kind. Some years later I asked why, unlike us, he never said anything appreciative on these occasions. His reply was, “She would only come to expect it.” The implications of his words didn’t sink in at the time, and it was only many years later that this remark came to encapsulate for me the whole history of his attitude to his wife and the distance between them.) Sunday dinner - this is what we called it: only after university did I grasp the different usages of lunch and dinner - was the highpoint of the week. On Mondays we would have the remains of the beef or lamb. On Tuesdays we would have stew and dumplings. For the rest of the week it would be sausages, chops or occasionally fish.
Christmas lunch 1964
It must have been a sign of the quality of her cooking or the robustness of our constitutions that Ivor and I never suffered from indigestion, despite the fact that we had to cycle nearly three miles from school to Heston, start eating the moment we were through the door, and then cycle three miles straight back again in order to be there for the start of afternoon lessons. She disapproved of school dinners, thinking them not adequately nutritious, though the other reason for our lunchtime dash was that she preferred to have her main meal at mid-day. So the last meal was tea, taken just after 6.00 when Dad got home; it consisted unvaryingly of Marmite or fish paste sandwiches and from time to time a cake such as a piece of Battenberg. He would earlier have had a cooked meal in the canteen at work where, regardless of its quality, at least the surroundings would have been more peaceful than what he was used to at home.
Dinner came in two stages, the main course being followed by custard, usually served on its own, though as a special treat it would sometimes be poured over a Lyons individual fruit pie. It was always Birds custard. Our brand loyalty was absolute, and no substitute was offered or expected. We appreciated it most at weekends when it could be savoured at greater leisure. On one occasion I volunteered to make it, and this turned into my regular culinary contribution. Because I used almost twice the recommended amount of custard powder and sugar, the finished product was unbelievably thick, and for me the test of its success was that the spoon, even if it didn't actually stand upright in the bowl, should only fall towards the side as if being filmed in slow motion. Despite having the heat and consistency of molten lava it had to be eaten without delay, because it would otherwise rapidly congeal into something so solid as to require cutting with a knife. In the late 1950s we got ourselves a small fridge, and Ivor and I were occasionally allowed to put a slice of Walls ice cream into the hot custard, creating an effect of exotic glutinous richness. The sensation was reminiscent of the rare occasions during the period of sweet rationing after the war when - again, as a special treat - we would be allowed to dip a teaspoon into a tin of Nestlé’s milk. The trick then was to get the tin as cold as possible, because that way more of it would adhere to the spoon.
If food was a complicated ritual in which, sometimes at least, a sense of communal warmth was fleetingly present, the same can hardly be said of our infrequent family holidays. The change of surroundings and the sea air made little improvement to the tensions that were always present. Our parents were no more at ease with each other than before, and, as a result, they were no more affectionate towards us. My main memory of the week we spent in Thorpe Bay near Southend, when Ivor and I were ten and eleven, is of all of us sitting silently in a bus shelter on the sea front, having been expelled by our landlady until we were allowed to return for the evening meal, looking out towards the rain-lashed horizon and the clouds driving across, and hoping that eventually it would clear up. Southend's muddy beach provided few opportunities for the use of bucket and spade, which in any event we were now too old for. Ivor and I muttered discontentedly every so often, a response that was not well received by either of our parents, Mum especially. After all they were not exactly having a great time themselves. Taking us there was a financial sacrifice, and Ivor and I didn't even manage to seem grateful.
For the
most part our holidays during the summer months consisted of occasional day
trips. Over the years we went several
times to
Chapter 7
Our family was unusual, no doubt about it. The question was: how unusual? After all, unusual is not the same as unique. Rather pointlessly I used to wonder at times whether out there somewhere there were families just like ours. Then when I was fifteen I learned that, if literature is any guide, there probably were.
One of the texts on the 0 Level English Literature course that year was Dickens’s Great Expectations. When I read it for the first time one element made a disproportionately strong impact. The family triangle made up of Pip, his sister, and her husband Joe Gargery the blacksmith, seemed unnervingly close to life at home. Dad was in many ways like Joe Gargery - mild but ineffectual, and with no idea how to deal with his termagant of a wife. I saw myself in Pip, “morally timid and very sensitive.” (Sensitive I may have been, but being also self-absorbed, I gave no thought to how Ivor was supposed to fit into this neat little picture, except as maybe another, probably less sensitive, version of myself. That is, if I thought about him at all.) At the apex of this triangle, eaten up with frustration and angry resentment at the unlooked-for burdens life had placed on her, was Mrs Gargery, all too obviously a version of our mother. They both gave the same impression of having a quantity of permanent, stoked-up rage that required release from time to time, and if an occasion for doing so did not spontaneously present itself, one would be created.
The depiction of Mrs Gargery’s outbursts of temper held me more than any other aspect of the novel. There is a vivid summary of a typical incident at the end of Chapter 12. Here she has just learned that Miss Havisham had asked for Joe to accompany Pip the next day to discuss his indentures, but the grand lady had made no mention of the blacksmith's wife. She was not invited. This casual rejection provokes in Pip's sister a sustained “going on the Rampage” directed, however, at the hapless Pip and Joe. The underlying cause is clearly her sense of being ignored, taken for granted, undervalued, and treated as of no account, and she takes out her sense of grievance on those in front of her who, obscurely but powerfully, she feels are to blame. This was exactly like Mum. The overlap between this episode and what I had intuited about Mum's own sense of her place in the world and the way it effected her treatment of those around her was a revelation. I was no longer alone.
In Chapter 15 Dickens presents one of her Rampages in detail, prompted on this occasion by Joe's generosity in giving his labourer Orlick a half-day off. I want to quote it in full, because even at the time I could see not only the similarities but also some clear differences between Pip's sister and my mother:
My sister had been standing silent in the yard, within hearing - she was a most unscrupulous spy and listener - and she instantly looked in at one of the windows.
“Like you, you fool!” said she to Joe, “giving holidays to great idle hulkers like that. You are a rich man, upon my life, to waste wages in that way. I wish I was his master!”
“You'd be everybody's master, if you durst,” retorted Orlick, with an ill-favoured grin.
(“Let her alone”, said Joe.)
“I'd be a match for all noodles and all rogues,” returned my sister, beginning to work herself into a mighty rage. “And I couldn't be a match for the noodles, without being a match for your master, who's the dunder-headed king of the noodles. And I couldn't be a match for the rogues, without being a match for you, who are the blackest-looking and the worst rogue between this and France. Now!”
“You're a foul shrew, Mother Gargery,” growled the journeyman. “If that makes a judge of rogues, you ought to be a good 'un”.
(“Let her alone, will you?” said Joe.)
“What did you say?” cried my sister, beginning to scream. “What did you say? What did that fellow Orlick say to me, Pip? What did he call me, with my husband standing by? O! O! O!” Each of these exclamations was a shriek; and I must remark of my sister, what is equally true of all the violent women I have ever seen, that passion was no excuse for her, because it is undeniable that instead of lapsing into passion, she consciously and deliberately took extraordinary pains to force herself into it, and became blindly furious by regular stages; “what was the name he gave me before the base man who swore to defend me? O! Hold me! O!”
“Ah-h-h!” growled the journeyman, between his teeth, “I'd hold you, if you was my wife, I'd hold you under the pump, and choke it out of you.”
(“I tell you, let her alone,” said Joe.)
“Oh! To hear him!” cried my sister, with a clap of her hands and a scream together - which was her next stage. “To hear the names he's giving me! That Orlick! In my own house! Me, a married woman! With my husband standing by! O! O!” Here my sister, after a fit of clappings and screamings, beat her hands upon her bosom and upon her knees, and threw her cap off, and pulled her hair down - which were the last stages on the road to frenzy. Being by this time a perfect Fury and a complete success, she made a dash at the door, which I had fortunately locked.
Reading this passage again, I'm more aware now than I would have been then of the shift in tone as it goes on, from the coolly objective to the sardonically comic. Everything is filtered through the consciousness of the older Pip who, we are to assume, has achieved not only a decent emotional distance from his childhood experiences but also a better understanding of them. On my first reading such nuances would have been largely lost. I was transfixed by the mounting crescendo of his sister’s tirade. It was the first time I'd come across something like this, outside our family. The fact that it was fiction signified nothing. It felt real.
Even at the time, though, there were differences. The obvious one was that Pip's sister had nothing on our mother in terms of the intensity or venom of her rages. The main evidence for this was their impact on Pip, with whom I obviously identified. I was baffled that, beyond a certain obvious point, Pip seemed so little affected by his sister when she was “on the Rampage”. How did he manage it? What was his secret? What could I learn from him that would help me when I was back at home? I was fifteen, and the entries in my diary for 1955, the beginning of my O level year, which I quoted earlier, indicate clearly enough what I was then going through. “If I could be sure there is no god, I really think I would commit suicide.” The only answer to these questions was the not very helpful one that had come to me as part of my very first impressions of the novel. Put simply, Pip just didn’t have it that bad. I remember thinking, with sour complacency, if it ever came to a competition between the two of them, Mum would see off Pip's sister any day of the week.
I wasn’t impressed by the older Pip's claim that “passion was no excuse” either for his sister’s behaviour or for similar examples that he’d seen acted out later by other women. In his view “passion” was being artificially stoked up, its expression nothing more than a self-dramatising and self-regarding charade. By implication, the same effort used to create such vulgar exhibitions could equally be employed in preventing them. Fair enough, at one level, in the limited sense that when people make an anti-social spectacle of themselves an element of the histrionic is bound to be present, however large or small the audience. But so what? Pip’s contention was offered as if it were a universal truth and the fact is it wasn’t. Mum was the example to disprove him. We didn't have much to do with our next-door neighbours - or perhaps it would be truer to say, they didn't have much to do with us - and I often used to wonder what they made of the sheer volume of Mum's tirades as they penetrated through the thin party wall. But nothing she produced was calculated or premeditated. The force she generated was powerful and primitive, welling up from inaccessibly deep roots. The strongest impression she made, increasingly as the years went on, was that she was quite simply out of control.
*
There was one other respect in which the two were very unlike. Pip's sister had a social life - not much of one, admittedly, consisting as it did of the likes of Wopsle and Pumblechook, but a social life nonetheless. Our parents had none. They had little to do with our neighbours, and Ivor and I found it awkward dealing with them, even at the simple level of knowing which ones we were expected to say “Good morning” to. A symbol of our isolation was that when our parents moved into Berkeley Waye, they paid extra to have a proper wooden fence put round the back garden, in place of the concrete posts and open-mesh chain link fencing the developers installed in the rest of the road. Because all the back gardens in Berkeley Waye consisted of identical rectangles laid out next to each other, this form of fencing meant that when you went out in your garden, you were on view to left and right, as far as the eye could see. In theory you could see and carry on a conversation with a neighbour up to three gardens away. Our parents claimed, no doubt genuinely, that all they wanted was a bit of privacy. But it also seemed to stand for the withdrawal from social contact that characterised their time there. They had no friends. They went to nobody's house. Nobody came to theirs.
Dad
accepted this situation, as he did most things, through taking the line of
least resistance. But he was in his way
sociable and gregarious. He was not
especially close to his two elder brothers, Reg and Eddie, who stare out of the
earliest photo with a sturdy self-confidence that Dad plainly did not
share. Later on he got on well enough
with Auntie Eunice’s husband, Bert, though their interests did not overlap and
in any case the friction between the two sisters-in-law ensured they never
became close. From the few things that
Dad volunteered, it seemed that his strongest friendship was with his other
brother-in-law, Auntie Phyllis’s first husband, Laurie. They paired up in the thirties in the attempt
to become door-to-door salesmen – an enterprise that now sounds more like a
lark than a serious attempt to make money.
He was also briefly involved with Dad in the writing of Bullets, which
suggests that they had literary interests in common. The friendship was not to last long. Laurie was killed in the second year of the
war when the factory in
*
Our
isolation at Berkeley Waye was nevertheless not total. Even if there were no friends to speak of,
there was at least the family. This meant
in practice the periodic exchange of visits between us and Auntie Winnie and
her family in
Even less
frequently, we would receive visits from members of Dad's family during their
periodic returns from
Some families maintain an open house. Ours was largely closed, not through deliberate policy but as a tacit consequence of Mum's complex of insecurities. If she felt secure anywhere, it was here. This was her territory. This was where she felt, more or less, in control and in charge. But, by the same token, anyone entering her domain was a threat; any arrival was a potential invasion. She didn't know how to cope with people, and consequently her reactions were that much more unpredictable. Everything was dependent on her mood, and it’s true that at times she was capable of a diffident, awkward hospitality. Her body language would consist of nervous nods, strained smiles and placatory gestures. It was obvious, though, that she felt threatened, and that fact alone could be a trigger for one of her outbursts. She could really only cope with personalities that were as self-effacing, and therefore unthreatening, as her own.
*
All this inevitably created problems
for Ivor and me as we were growing up: could we risk inviting home any of our
friends from school? In general we opted
for prudence and tried to make sure they passed over the threshold as
infrequently as possible. Although,
fortunately, none of our friends ever did see her shadow side, the nerve-wracking
possibility was always present that one day they might and they too, like us,
would become the object of her capricious wrath. The absence of any verbal attacks while they
were in the house certainly didn't stop her making extremely tart comments
about them afterwards, particularly about any who had
Mum, 1970
seemed overly self-confident or had been inclined to make themselves too much at home. Her commonest phrases of condemnation were that so-and-so was “a bit too full of himself”, and, worst of all, “he comes in here as if he owns the place”. The easier option, when anyone came to the door, was to keep them standing outside. It was only many years later that I finally absorbed as second nature the social convention that, if some one comes to your house, you invite them in and don't keep them outside conducting a conversation on the doorstep.
Mum's dislike of people being, as
she put it, “too full of themselves” meant that any manifestation of
self-confidence was, in her eyes, just a form of bumptiousness. This carried over into deploring anything
that seemed to her pretentious or arty.
One evening I asked if I could sit up late after everyone had gone to
bed to listen to a radio production of a play I didn’t know,
Both parents in fact had mixed feelings about my academic progress. They took a diffident pride in my success, coming to Speech Days at school when prizes and certificates were distributed and, later, attending the degree ceremonies for my BA and PhD. But they were concerned about any tendency to get a bit above myself – and on one occasion, entirely justifiably. I’d done well at A level, and when the certificate arrived, I proudly pinned it up on the wall of my bedroom. Unusually for her, Mum later intervened to point out that it wasn’t very nice of me to do that, because Ivor didn’t have one; he had failed all his O levels. For virtually the only time I can recall, I think she was genuinely concerned for some one else’s feelings and was not indirectly venting her own. I had given no thought to how my casual self-advertisement might have affected Ivor, but the unthinking oafishness of my actions struck me as soon as she spoke, and, embarrassed and ashamed, I removed the certificate at once.
After this unusual sensitivity, the other side of her nature came through some years later. In 1971 I was getting my stuff together prior to taking up a post at the University of New South Wales, and although I hadn’t intended to take them with me, I noticed that my BA and PhD certificates were missing, as well as those for O and A levels, all of which I had made a point of keeping out of sight in a cupboard in my bedroom. Their absence hardly mattered, because I could always get confirmation of my qualifications if I needed to. As usual, it was easier to say nothing. I just accepted that, in my absence, Mum had gone through my things, seen the certificates there, and in a sudden rage had hauled them out and chucked them in the dustbin.
Chapter 8
Pip’s assertion in Great Expectations that all violent women could control their rages if they really wanted to didn’t convince me when I first read the novel, and a few months later I rejected the idea entirely. Dad had brought back from the local library a book by Kenneth Walker called Venture With Ideas, which I picked it up out of curiosity and within a few pages was transfixed. In part a spiritual autobiography, its main purpose was to introduce the ideas of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky.
George Gurdjieff was a spiritual teacher or
charlatan, or maybe both. His wanderings
and searches had led him eventually to a chateau in
Ouspensky taught that there is no unitary self and that everyone is at the mercy of the various “I”s who take it in turns to speak on behalf of the personality as a whole. The reason this state of affairs goes unrecognised is that the level of consciousness in which we pass our lives is closer to sleep than proper wakefulness. As a consequence of being “asleep” and lacking a permanent “I”, the notion that we are capable of exercising free will is an illusion. Any hope of inner change must start from a recognition of these admittedly bleak propositions. The main reason I had no difficulty accepting them was that I discovered, as had Kenneth Walker, that if you practise the exercise called “self-remembering”, which tested the central claim about our consciousness, or lack of it, you discover that the claim is irrefutably true. With the enthusiasm of a convert, I read over the next few years everything of Ouspensky’s that I could get hold of.
What made the greatest impact on me, however, was the way Ouspensky’s teachings related to my mother and her behaviour. Because we are all machines, lacking true self-awareness, we are at the mercy of unconscious identification with largely negative emotions. I could accept the general truth of this proposition, but it seemed obvious to me in my mother’s case that the identification with negative emotions was so extreme that there was no way she could escape their frequent manifestation in the form of uncontrolled rage.
As a result, I became convinced that she couldn’t help herself, and so she could not be blamed for how she behaved. Which is not to say that I didn’t resent the fact that I was the undeserving recipient of so much bile. But that was as far as it went. Resentment is one thing, blame something else. You may resent the misfortune of being caught in the pouring rain without a mac, but unless you’re King Lear you don’t take it personally, shaking your fist at it and cursing.
I never felt the need to forgive her because it followed from everything I now believed that there was nothing to forgive. But I need to add, having the benefit of hindsight, that this stance was more ambiguous and less admirable than it may appear. Through having soaked up Ouspensky’s teaching, I was denying her one of the most commonly regarded aspects of our humanity, that of being an autonomous individual, responsible for her actions. There was something unintentionally patronising about categorising her in this way (we are all machines, but she is more of one that the rest of us), and in fact I’m fairly sure that it led to my being always slightly dismissive of her. This is something that she would have picked up on because her antennae were so sensitive to being belittled and treated as of no account, and it would have contributed to the friction that was always there between us.
There was, though, one clear positive effect of seeing my mother as not personally responsible and therefore not to be blamed for what she did. So far as I can tell, I never hated her, either then or later. Or rather, any toxic reaction of that kind, if it existed at all - and if any of it still does - must have been buried at a level that is now inaccessibly deep.
*
My main feeling towards my mother during childhood and adolescence can be simply put. It wasn't hate; it was fear. Fear of her temper and of its unpredictability. This reaction manifested mostly as a mixture of anxiety, apprehension and dread, a kind of distant hum, so low you were almost unaware of it, but the state was always capable of being transformed into something more intense. Lying in bed in the early morning, barely emerged from sleep, was a particularly risky time, because she was often then at her worst. The sound of her footsteps clumping up the stairs, getting closer and closer, caused anxiety to mutate into something close to panic even before she flung open the bedroom door.
Two early memories. Ivor and I, aged about six and seven, are out shopping with Mum. She has met a neighbour, and the two of them are having a chat. We are standing to left and right of her, silent, as usual. The neighbour looks down at us, and says, “What well-behaved little boys you have, Mrs Powell”. Mum is obviously pleased. My unspoken reaction (not in these words, but this is what I felt): “We're too scared to be anything else.” A few years later, in 1952, Dad, Ivor and I had a week's holiday at Westcliff-on-Sea. Mum had decided to stay behind in Heston, having apparently ruled herself out on the grounds of her high blood pressure. As we prepared to return, after a rain-soaked seven days, I felt an increasing sense of dread. What sort of mood would she be in? My stomach was turning over as Dad put the key in the lock, and I hoped to slip inside more or less unnoticed, so that if anyone was going to cop it, for whatever reason, it wasn't going to be me. I was wrong. When we arrived, I thought I'd muttered some kind of greeting to Mum, but if I had, it plainly hadn't been loud enough for her to hear. Within minutes it was obvious that Mum was getting worked up, and that I was the cause. From outside our dining room, I could hear her voice getting louder as she started her tirade: “That boy... THAT BOY... he couldn't even say hello to his own mother!” It's easier now than it was then to see that what lay behind the bitter outrage was a terrible sense of hurt. She had been rejected by her own son. But her malfunctioning emotional machinery, as usual, transformed her pain into furious anger, with the result that the manifestation of her sense of isolation and rejection alienated still further those around her. At the time, needless to say, I was aware of none of this, nor frankly would I have cared even if I had been; I was too caught up in my own misery.
*
No doubt during our childhood and adolescence there were happy times, and it troubles me that I can’t recall any now, in order to give a more balanced picture of what our early life was like. But the fact is that memory makes its own choices, however selective and however unfair, and in this way it creates its own truth. Shortly after I first met Miriam more than thirty years ago she asked for an example of a happy memory from my childhood, and I had to confess, even then when such memories were inevitably less faded than they are now, that I couldn’t actually think of one. It’s not that there were no happy times at all, I’m sure of that, merely that there were neither enough of them nor were they of sufficient intensity to override the more powerful effect of our mother’s outbursts. No doubt too there would have been periods of humdrum ordinariness, as with all other families. But day-to-day reality at home remained one of anxiety and apprehension, spreading like a stain, colouring everything. Or that at least is how it seems to me now, and how I think it must have seemed to me then.
Even though I didn't hate my mother, I didn't love her either. Much as I would like to say that I did, in spite of everything, it wouldn't be true. However far I go back, I can't recall a time when I felt for her anything that I could call love. I still find it hard to imagine how children can suffer appallingly at their parents' hands, infinitely worse than anything Ivor and I went through, and yet say, and presumably mean, that they still love them. The only explanation that made sense of this for me at the time came as a result of thinking about the line in John's First Epistle: “There is no fear in love; but perfect love casteth out fear.” If perfect love casteth out fear, then the converse would also have to be true: perfect fear casteth out love. Nothing’s actually perfect, of course. But Ivor and I had had enough fear and apprehension in our lives to ensure that, for me at least - though I’m not sure this was also true of Ivor - the source of that fear never became an object of love.
Her self-absorption meant that she reflected little if at all on how her behaviour might be affecting us. The only exception I can think of was an occasion when she came into my bedroom one morning during one of my trips back from university and asked, in a tone, unusual for her, of puzzled anxiety: “Were you so very unhappy as a child?” If I’d been sharper I might have reminded her that, when I was about eight and she had been delivering a series of what I felt were deeply unfair reprimands, I’d broken into her flow with the bitter wail, “I didn’t ask to be born.” Startled by this opening of an emotional window that was always kept closed, she had instantly cut off all such talk with the primly embarrassed, “Don’t be so silly.”
On this
occasion, though, I knew at once what lay behind her question. During my absence at
From time to time she would express the vain hope that one day Ivor
and I might bring a nice girl home, and she was baffled as well as deeply
disappointed by our failure to do so.
She would like, so she said, to have a daughter-in-law. When we were in our twenties, she would ask
occasionally, in mid-rant, “Where did I go wrong?” The question would be delivered rhetorically,
without pause for reply, which was just as well, because, as so often, no
response was possible. I could have
said, for instance, that, apart from not reading my diaries, she might also
refrain from reading my personal letters.
Despite the episode with the diary and forgetting that my mother, like
Pip’s sister, “was a most unscrupulous spy”, I made the mistake on one occasion
of leaving in my bedroom a letter from a girlfriend at
By now I was well beyond being surprised, let alone outraged, at
anything she might do. There was nothing
to be said or done. All of us were being forced further and further apart, and
we were hanging on in our different ways and surviving as best we could. For Mum there was only hurt, regret, anger,
incomprehension, and loneliness. “You
bring kids into the world, and they grow up to be strangers.”
Chapter 9
Ivor was marked by our upbringing at least as much as I was. But neither of us would have been much aware of what the other was going through as the tensions at home forced us apart not together. We bickered, we didn't confide. Nothing shared, not even misery. The examples I can call to mind that indicate how much home life must have affected him stand out because they are so few. It’s probably significant that they date from the time when childhood and adolescence were thankfully behind us and we were able to communicate a little better.
The first
comes from the period shortly before Ivor was due to start his National
Service. It involves Tony, a life-long
friend of Ivor, who lived opposite us in Berkeley Waye. They were in the same class at grammar school
and, like Ivor, Tony left school in 1956 at the end of his 0 level year. Shortly afterwards he entered the police
service and became based at Heathrow. In
1959 he got married, but the marriage didn't work out and eventually he and his
wife were divorced. On the day in
question, Ivor and I went to visit Tony and Kay in their rented police
accommodation on the edge of Heathrow.
There was an awkward atmosphere
Ivor, Mum, RP & Tony,
1962
when we arrived, the reason for which soon became obvious. A row was in process, of a kind with which we were only too familiar. When it started up again, Ivor and I were in the kitchen; Tony was standing in the hall; and Kay shortly went upstairs, from where we could hear her raised voice as she continued to harangue him in what had now become an uninterrupted monologue. Tony had ceased to argue and was simply letting her carry on, as she complained bitterly about whatever it was that he had done or failed to do. He looked down the hall at us, rolling his eyes upwards with a half-embarrassed shrug.
As domestic rows go this was probably not especially serious and it didn't last long. But for Ivor and me it was extremely uncomfortable. It was a muted version of our experience at home when Mum would go stamping upstairs, then downstairs, and sometimes upstairs again, in unstoppable fury. Even though the intensity and duration of Tony and Kay's little marital spat were less than we were used to, the pattern was broadly the same. Despite finding it disturbing, as I was sure we both had, we didn't discuss it as we cycled home. Not that this was anything unusual; we rarely talked about anything personal. By the time we arrived home I was no longer thinking about what we'd just witnessed. Ivor, though, had been much more affected by the whole episode. Shortly after we got back he mused in a troubled way, seemingly as much to himself as to me, “If I were ever married and my wife went on like that, I don't know...” It seemed as if he was going to add, “... what I'd do”, but he broke off, his whole body giving a short involuntary shudder, and he shook his head as if to dispel the nightmarish image that was starting to form. I had never seen anything like this before and never did again. The spasm was over in a second. But the more I think about it now, the more significant it seems that what I remember most vividly from the whole incident is not my reaction but his. Partly, I suppose, the sheer infrequency of such moments made it unlikely I would forget it. But the fact that he had clearly been much more affected than I by what we'd witnessed raises at least the possibility that, throughout our shared childhood, he had not just suffered as much as me - which I don't doubt - but that its effect on him had in some ways been greater.
The unspoken “...what I'd do” would never have involved physical violence. He was not capable of it as I knew well, because, when we were younger and I was at my most irritating he never lifted a finger against me and it never occurred to me that he might. Maybe our experience of being “brought up by hand” had inoculated us against using this method on anyone else. The implied message behind his words was, nevertheless, clear: regardless of his sexual orientation, of which anyway I knew nothing at the time, the dangers of marriage outweighed any likely appeal. If he ever found himself in such a situation, trapped there like Dad out of duty and obligation and unable simply to walk away, then whether or not he would have contemplated suicide, he would most surely have wished himself dead.
*
At the
time of the second incident, I was coming to the end of my first year at
This would be an unusual observation for one brother to make to another in any circumstances. But you would have to know Ivor, particularly at that time, to realise just how remarkable this pronouncement was. He would never normally come out with something of this kind - nothing emotional, nothing disturbing. He would stay on emotionally safe territory. And this wasn't; it went to the heart of the life that we had known. There was certainly no need to ask what he meant. He was referring to the poisonous influence going back who knows how many generations, passed from Granny to Mum, and then on to us - and on to any child that either of us, hypothetically, might have in the future.
I don't remember how I responded. Probably I mumbled some kind of assent. But underneath I silently resisted what he was saying. Despite or because of my experiences I still cherished a vague aspiration about starting a family some time - only, a better, happier one than the one I'd known. “Bad blood”, if true, implied something far too insidious and powerful for either of us to challenge. I've wondered since then whether Ivor did in fact mean it in the sense of some kind of deep mystical family curse. Maybe he did. But he might equally have been using it as convenient shorthand for something more mundane. As Philip Larkin helpfully puts it, although your mum and dad may fuck you up, '”they were fucked up in their turn.” But the fact that emotional patterns within families can get passed on doesn't mean the process is immutable, and in principle they can be transformed. I hoped so, at least. It took a long time for me to accept that Ivor had been right all along, and that there was too much unfinished business left over from childhood for either of us to be capable of the proper nurturing and unconditional love that any child has a right to expect. I learned after Ivor’s death that, not long before, he had said how much he would have liked to have a son of his own. Sadly, I think his judgement was sounder 30 years earlier in that evening in the Elm Tree.
I now look back on that exchange between us - non-exchange, more accurately - with great regret. It was one of the very few opportunities that came up where we might have properly opened up to each other. It was the road not taken. And despite Ivor’s general reluctance to talk about matters of any consequence, the responsibility for not taking it on this occasion was mine not his.
The antagonism between our mother and grandmother had also clearly made a deep impact on him. Even though their rows didn't involve us directly, I'm not sure their effect wasn't as great as when we ourselves were the objects of Mum's rage. Only a few years before he was killed, he commented on the tensions between them. His words were so brief and indirect that at first I wasn’t sure what he was getting at. When I asked him to repeat what he’d said, he replied, "Don't you remember?" Then he mimicked Mum's tones in the middle of one of her rants: "'GET OUT OF MY KITCHEN!’” It all came back, in a great wave: the raised voices from the kitchen; Granny giving (almost) as good as she got; Dad, Ivor and I huddled in the dining room, out of sight if not out of earshot. Until he'd reminded me, I must have wiped these images from my mind. But for Ivor, those memories had never gone away.
*
The only surviving photo of
Granny, here with Ivor.
Granny's life was about as separate
as it could be, given that we were all living on top of each other in a small
house. The front room was her domain, in
effect her bed-sitter. Nevertheless she
had to emerge from it to cook her meals, and, as I’ve just indicated, this led
to inevitable friction with Mum when the two of them wanted to use the kitchen
at the same time. The kitchen was tiny,
about eight feet long and six feet wide.
You entered it through a door from the hallway. Just inside the door was a built-in cupboard,
and at the far end, under the window looking out on to the garden shed, were
the sink and draining board. The wall to
the left was taken up with an oven, and next to it was the door into a passage
running along the side of the house and leading through to the back
garden. The other wall had a table
against it for stacking and preparing food.
It was a tight fit, so there was barely room for two people to stand
side by side at the sink doing the washing and drying up. There certainly wasn't enough space - let
alone enough gas rings - for two cooks to manoeuvre round each other while they
prepared separate meals. Reinforcing the general
In the kitchen, 1967
inconvenience, the effect of the heat
generated by cooking in a confined space, taken together with their
long-standing animosity, ensured that the period before dinner was all too
often the occasion of terrible rows.
Granny would always take her meal to her room, while we would eat in the
dining-cum-living room. The room was
dominated by the dining table, the four sides of which served neatly to
accommodate our little nuclear family. An extension leaf could be inserted into
the table on the rare occasions when we had visitors, but there was never any
question of Granny eating with us on a daily basis. My guess is that this arrangement was as much
a relief to her as it would have been to us.
Ivor and I accepted that Granny lived in this semi-detached way, just as we accepted everything else at home. We rarely went into her room. Whenever we did, the air always seemed stale and musty, and the room with its bed, rocking chair, cupboards and general clutter all seemed faintly alien, just as Granny herself did. I suspect another reason why we instinctively kept our distance was that, since she and Mum clearly didn't get on, we didn't want to risk becoming piggy in the middle between them. Our regular moment of contact with her was once a week when she would emerge and give each of us two pence pocket money. This was not a lot, even in the 1940s and 1950s, and I suspect that our expression of thanks was not very effusive. We would not have realised that four pence had to come out of her sole source of income, her old age pension. Nevertheless she seemed well disposed to us on the whole, addressing either or both of us as “Sunny Jim”, her eyes twinkling behind black horn-rimmed spectacles. She made a point of telling us that she was a real Cockney, having been born within the sound of Bow bells. At the time I thought this implied that the bells had to be tolling at the precise moment you entered the world, which meant that being a Cockney made you a member of a very exclusive club indeed. She rarely went out of the house. Her hips caused her a lot of trouble, and she always walked with a stick. For that reason we used to do small errands for her, usually in the form of getting her a packet of five, or occasionally ten, Players Weights. She always preferred them to Woodbines, which she regarded as rather low class.
*
For all of us, keeping warm was never easy. In wintertime in the 1940s and early 1950s both downstairs rooms were heated either with a coal fire or with a paraffin stove. In the back room, the fire was lit during the day only if it was particularly cold, and, inevitably in the days before central heating, the rest of the house varied from cool to freezing. Bedtime required Ivor and me to get undressed and into bed before our body heat was completely lost, but the sheets in winter were usually cold enough to finish the process.
Washing our hair never took place in the bath or even in the bathroom. The obvious place was the kitchen because of its handy gas ring and kettle, and the chipped enamel bowl in the sink, mainly used for washing-up, served this additional purpose. The soap was got rid of in the rinse water with the help of a good splash of vinegar, the smell of which I loathed but I had to admit it did the job, and at least we never got head lice. So far as I recall, our parents followed exactly the same personal hygiene routine as us – and I suspect with not very much more enthusiasm.
Both coal and paraffin were delivered to the house, and as with everything else, Granny's supplies were kept separate from ours. Dad, Ivor or I would carry a scuttle of coal into her room from her personal store in the cupboard under the stairs, access to which was from the passage that ran along the side of the house. Our coal was kept outside in the garden, in the corner between the garden fence and the side of the shed. Because the coal was uncovered it was frequently wet, with the result that it didn't burn well, and the rain also created a permanent unusable gritty paste out of the coal dust that filtered to the bottom of the heap.
Gradually, though, over the years things started to improve, particularly after we had a more efficient grate installed that burnt a new form of smokeless fuel, Coalite. Both changes followed from the Clean Air Act, a consequence of the lethal pea-souper fogs of the early 1950s – a combination of fog and smoke from domestic fires known cheerfully as smog. Dad also bought one of the new generation of paraffin stoves, which had a mesh dome that glowed red and gave off more heat and fewer fumes. An even more important step forward was the eventual installation of an immersion heater. We didn’t have it on all the time, as that would have been far too expensive, but it meant that having a bath ceased to be the grim experience it had been in the past. Friday night now became bath night. Most Fridays at least.
Granny,
though, was not able to enjoy any of these luxurious developments. She died in 1954, having gone into a nursing
home for the last few months of her life.
The news of her death arrived one evening when Dad was summoned next
door by our neighbours who were among the few in our road at that time to have
a telephone. When he returned, he said
simply, “She's gone.” Mum didn't
cry. She gave a convulsive gulp, and
that was it. Given their relationship I
didn't know whether to be surprised at the meagreness of her response or by the
fact that it was even as much as this.
My own response was nothing at all, a blank, an absence of anything,
followed almost immediately by a fleeting sense of guilt that I should be so
little affected. I have no memory of the
funeral, or even of the day on which it took place. Ivor and I were not present, as we had to be
at school. Neither, though, was
Mum. Dad was there, as were Auntie
Winnie and cousin Vic who came over from
Chapter 10
So where was Dad throughout our
childhood? Both there and not there,
always receding into the background.
Semi-detached or unreachable are other ways of putting it. This is not to say that he was
temperamentally cold or indifferent, and under happier circumstances I think he
would have been a better father, more
Dad in the 1930s.
fully involved. But the combination of a grim marriage and a job that gave him no satisfaction had drained his spirit. Everything became hard work, and he had little energy left over for his two sons. He never involved himself in matters of discipline; for that we were left to the haphazard mercies of our mother. Over the years, since he lacked the capacity or instinct for dealing with his wife in any more direct way, he had been obliged to desensitise himself in order to cope with her verbal assaults – at least she was never physically violent to him. My guess is that that was the major reason why he seemed to take so little notice of what life was like for Ivor and me. In my last conversation with Auntie Eunice, a few weeks before she died in July 2003 at the age of 97, I asked what Dad was like as a young man, and she replied without hesitation, “loving and affectionate.” Looking at the photograph of him at the age of seventeen I can well believe it was true. Unfortunately this aspect of his nature must have been mostly ground out of him by his marriage, because Ivor and I felt little of it. Nor did he ever try to intercede for us with Mum. Life had become for him a matter of endurance - putting up with things, making the best of them, getting on with it - and so he must have seen our lives as children in those terms as well.
Nevertheless, by the time Ivor and I were about ten and eleven Mum's rages had become so marked he must have felt he could no longer avoid saying something about them. Some comment was required, maybe even some advice on how to cope. One day when Mum was out of the room after one of her tirades he turned to us and offered the following brief words of advice that, even at the time, struck me as limply inadequate: “You will have to be very patient with your mother.” In other words, we were to continue our roles as unresisting punch-bags. It occurred to me much later that, if we'd all known King Lear, he might have done better to say to us, “Boys, there are rough times ahead. Let our watchword be, ‘Pour on, I shall endure.’” Something, at least, that involved a stiffening of the sinews rather than just accepting with inert passivity what was happening to us. There was of course no discussion, certainly not even the sketch of an explanation as to why exactly we had to be “very patient.” The explanation, such as it was, in terms of her high blood pressure, only came later. In the following years he would add from time to time the hopeful mantra, “We must try and keep your mother on an even keel.” This statement seemed to me, and probably Ivor as well, a wholly vacuous and empty aspiration. The words were never accompanied by suggestions about how the aim was to be achieved, and although it must have been obvious that her states were beyond any influence that Ivor and I could bring to bear, we nevertheless refrained from asking the obvious question, “So how do we do that, then?”
But at least we could recognise that Dad was making a move in our direction. Not a very effective one perhaps, but at least it was something. The inevitable effect was to draw Ivor and me towards him and away from Mum - not a difficult thing to do in the circumstances - and that's how things stayed for the rest of our adolescence. What he'd said reflected the observable fact that, if the storm broke over one of us, it usually fell on the other two as well. All three of us were therefore in the same boat. Mum, however, was out there somewhere in a different boat, the one that required keeping on an even keel. But the fact that the three of us huddled together in this way merely exacerbated the underlying problem, as I realised much later. It increased Mum's sense of isolation and loneliness, and that in turn fuelled her rage. She must have felt at some level that not only her husband but also her two boys were turning their backs on her. Sadly she was right.
*
Slowly, during adolescence, I came to realise that Dad's emotional withdrawal had contributed much to the problems between them. The first time I had a hint of this was when I was about seven or eight. It must have been at the weekend, because we were all having breakfast together. Mum had only just started the pattern of early morning disruptions, and she was going back and forth from the dining room to the kitchen, alternating bitter complaints and tears. As she returned, I looked across at Dad, and when he caught my eye, he gave what I can only call a nervous giggle. He was embarrassed. Partly it was because of this unseemly hullabaloo over the cornflakes, but partly it was because he so obviously lacked the will or instinct to do anything about it. Her monologue and the emotions that accompanied it were filling an empty space; and it occurred to me, with great vividness, that what she wanted was to be taken seriously, to meet some resistance, to be brought up short. A part of her at least - this is how it came to me at that moment - wanted him to put up a hand and say, “That's enough. Now stop it.” But even if he had tried, would it have worked? Given the history of their relationship, one wouldn't have bet much on his chances of success. Unless done with much more confidence and authority than he could usually muster, it could well have made the situation worse, which was the usual result of his ineffectual interventions in the years that followed. For that reason alone I can well understand why, on this occasion, Dad said nothing.
To a large extent he lacked imagination; or he lacked empathy, at any rate. This is another factor that lay behind his total failure to protect Ivor and me from Mum's physical or verbal assaults, and he must have seen quite a few of them. As I said, it wasn't that he was deliberately unkind or indifferent. But I suspect he felt that, like the rain from heaven, life's blows fall on the just and unjust alike, and while it wasn't a very happy situation, Ivor and I had no more choice about putting up with them than he had. Complaining about the emotional weather indoors would have been as pointless as complaining about passing thunderstorms outside. He also lacked the imagination to realise that, when Mum was in mid-outburst, his saying to her in tones of genuine bemusement, “I don't know why you're getting so worked up”, was almost guaranteed to infuriate her further. His comment could, theoretically, have been re-stated in the form of a question: “Why are you getting so worked up?” But to that, if she were honest, she could have given only one answer: “Because you don't love me.” I don't think either of them spelt matters out to themselves, or to each other, quite as starkly as this - not even Mum, who used to claim with some pride that she always said exactly what she felt. Certainly on Dad's side, and possibly for both our parents, being in denial about this basic aspect of their marriage was a condition of its survival, though partial survival was the most you could claim, given Mum's despair and aggression and Dad's emotional evasiveness.
Another sign of everything that separated them was that Dad had a different family doctor from the rest of us. Mum, Ivor and I were registered with Dr Lloyd, a small, spry Welshman, balding, with a three-piece suit, who looked rather like Mr Attlee. Dad, though, was with Dr Hansen, a tall, stooping, slightly intimidating Dane. His surgery was quite a bit further away than Dr Lloyd’s, so why did Dad choose him? Since in our household nobody asked questions, any curiosity Ivor or I may have had on the matter remained unsatisfied for a long time. Then in one of her tirades Mum’s contempt for Dad’s Welsh origins suddenly incorporated a side-swipe at Dr Lloyd, another Welshman and therefore randy and untrustworthy, in which she implied, clearly if obliquely, that at some point he had made a pass at her. Was it true? Who knows? But if true, it would certainly explain why Dad had himself transferred to another doctor’s list. It would also be consistent with how I would imagine him responding to such a provocation. He would not have wanted to challenge Dr Lloyd regarding what happened. Avoid confrontations at all costs: that was the important thing.
Mum and Dad on holiday in
Mum, a keen reader, always had books with her.
This last quality - the sense you could never really get to him, or pin him down - I found hugely exasperating, both during adolescence and later on. What I didn't recognise at the time is that I contributed to this reaction and made it worse. My exasperation would, from Dad's perspective, simply have been a lesser version of what he had to put up with from his wife, and his response to it was the same, namely putting up the shutters and withdrawing. If I had found this side of Dad wearing and frustrating, how much worse it must have been for the woman he married who had had to live with it the whole time.
Since then I have wondered how far he was aware of the effect he was having on Mum. It was, in the literal sense of the word, maddening. One of her complaints was that he didn't address her as anything at all. He had a way of talking that seemed not fully to acknowledge her presence, or even her existence. Not using her name when talking to her, or at least using it as little as possible, was part of it. “I have a name! . . .” she used to cry out in desperation. At such times there was real anguish present, a howl from her deep sense of rejection and loneliness. It's possible that he was completely unaware of the effect of what he was doing, but maybe too, at some level, a part of him did recognise it. Maybe, he partly knew and didn't care. Even - to plunge further - a part of him may have been inflicting it on her as a kind of subconscious punishment or revenge for what she was continuing to put him through. If I as a child could see it was counter-productive when she was in mid-rant to come out with the seemingly innocuous, “I don't know why you're getting so worked up,” surely he also must have been able to. Unless, of course, part of him understood well enough what it was doing, and with feigned innocence he was poking a stick at an enraged animal through the bars of its cage.
Dad, I'm sure, would have been shocked if he’d ever been confronted with speculations of this kind, and if they answered to something deep within him - which I prefer to think not - it would have been at a level into which he had no insight and for which he could not be held responsible. The questions are anyway, at this distance, impossible to answer.
Closer to the surface were the visible dynamics of the family unit. However unstable Mum had been before she got married and had children, Dad's clumsy attempts to give Ivor and me a minimum of support ("You will have to be very patient with your mother") drew the three of us together in a tacit alliance against her, in a way that could only make her worse. It was a terrifying but silent form of exclusion, and when I came across the writings of R D Laing later on in the seventies it seemed almost a textbook case of his thesis that a family, ganging up on the one designated as scapegoat, can drive that member mad.
Chapter 11
Even if he lacked imagination Dad didn’t lack a sense of humour. Unsurprisingly, much of it was downbeat, and no doubt it developed that way as a result of his domestic life. During our teens he would deliver himself from time to time of various sayings he'd come across. Most of them had simply tickled his funny bone, though in some cases they also expressed for him some truth about life of a generally disillusioned kind. Ones that I remember are:
The 11th
beatitude: blessed is he who expecteth naught, for surely he shall not be
disappointed.
Money doesn't bring happiness - but it does allow you to be miserable in comfort.
Man is born to trouble as the sparks fly upwards.
Call no man happy... (Intentionally or not, he didn't add the rest of the quotation: “... till he be dead.”)
The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.”
I remember the occasion when he came out with this last one. I looked up as he spoke, because it seemed such a strange thing to say and I had no idea it was a quotation; and then I realised, with a sudden shock that of course he was talking about himself.
He had a volume of Longfellow’s poetry which, according to the inscription, was a present to him from Auntie Eunice for Christmas 1924 when he would have been seventeen, and occasionally he would recite from memory part of the opening two stanzas of “A Psalm of Life”:
Tell me not, in mournful numbers,
Life is but an empty dream!
For the soul is dead that slumbers,
And things are not what they seem.
Life is real! Life is earnest!
And the grave is not its goal;
Dust thou art, to dust returnest,
Was not spoken of the soul.
Dad didn’t seem to take these ponderous sentiments entirely seriously, and his rendition seemed to send up the bathetic line, “And things are not what they seem.”
Elsewhere, in better functioning households, such contributions might form part of the usual desultory ebb and flow of family conversation. They wouldn’t just emerge out of silence. There would be a context, something to prompt them; and in turn they would invite a response, even if no more than a nod of assent or derisive grunt. Not in our family, though, where silence was always a safer bet than talk. With Mum present, conversation was a treacherous minefield where one trod as sparingly as possible. In any event, these comments of Dad’s had an almost solipsistic quality, as if he was talking more for his own benefit than anyone else’s. They seemed to proceed from somewhere within him that both invited and yet discouraged any further engagement from the rest of us, to whom the words were supposedly directed.
*
Despite Dad's remoteness, Ivor and I absorbed some aspects of his personality and many of his attitudes. One of the most influential was a general stance of: don't complain; don't feel sorry for yourself; put up with it; don't take yourself too seriously. Some of his favourite phrases were: “Worse storms at sea”; “There's always someone worse off than yourself”; and the slightly more chirpy, “Not to worry”. During the 1950s Dad followed many of the newspaper stories about sightings of alleged UFOs, and when I asked him some time later whether he believed they existed, he said, yes, he probably did. It occurred to me later that his belief that life existed elsewhere in the universe possibly gave him release from the pressures of his life at home; it provided another, larger point of reference from which to view the ant-like insignificance of his own pains and sorrows; it put them in perspective and made them manageable.
As a response to life, beleaguered stoicism has its limitations, even when the stoicism is sometimes humorous as well as grim. One consequence in particular, which Dad passed on to Ivor and me - unconsciously, of course, but it formed part of the air we breathed - was that of having no very high expectations about our own future. We weren't encouraged to be ambitious, and so consequently neither of us was. Although Dad’s position as Clerical Officer at the Board of Trade was below what he was capable of, that remained his grade from when he joined it in 1945 until he retired, over 20 years later. He never spoke of applying for promotion to the Executive grade, even though in principle he should have had a good chance of making it and the money would have been useful. But he didn't bother.
It was therefore faintly embarrassing that, when I left school at eighteen and entered the civil service, it was as an Executive Officer. After two years at the Home Office I left to go to university, but this decision was mostly driven by the need to escape and had little to do with love of learning for its own sake and none at all with career advancement. Despite eventually becoming an academic I'd had no ambitions in that direction. I simply nurtured the one talent I seemed to have and waited to see what would happen next. There was no plan or goal; everything rested on chance and serendipity.
In Ivor's
case, a lifetime as a teleprinter operator for Air
I should add that I have no complaints about Dad's influence on this area of our lives. There are advantages in having no goals or ambitions. We avoided the restlessness and dissatisfactions of believing the perfect vocation existed out there somewhere, if only we could find it, and were consequently able to put up with the more tedious or vexatious aspects of our respective jobs without too much complaining.
*
In the matter of expressing anger our parents could hardly have
formed a greater contrast. Dad would
grumble occasionally, but that was as far as it went. His habitual mildness was such that only on
one occasion can I remember him actually losing his temper. Ivor and I were about seven and eight, and we
were all staying in Southsea for a week's holiday. One evening we'd gone over to see Dad’s aunt
and uncle who lived near
Dad’s problems were not helped by the fact that he was fairly short, not more than five foot five. He said to me once, “Just be thankful that you and Ivor aren’t my height.” I can still remember his tone of voice at the time: he wasn’t bitter exactly but, as he went on to say, throughout his life he’d had more than his share of humorously patronising comments about his size. He was very slightly taller than his two elder brothers, Reg and Eddie, but he entirely lacked their compensating self-assertiveness.
Dad’s evenness of temper, general ineffectualness, and inability to stand up for himself formed another part of his legacy to Ivor and me. All three of us could probably have done with some assertiveness training, and in fact Mum, whose black energies would fill the house to bursting, could have used some as well. In her case, though, anger management to start with and learning how to assert herself afterwards. Somewhere in the middle of the four of us there was an empty space marked “assertive without being aggressive.” But none of us succeeded in finding it.
As Ivor and I were growing up, our parents offered what amounted to two contrasting templates for how to deal with anger: completely uncontrolled on the one hand, and suppressed almost out of existence on the other. There was no middle way, in which anger represented a part of normal emotional functioning. A means of standing our ground; getting things out in the open; simply clearing the air: all these were beyond us. It was a short step from being frightened of our mother's anger to becoming wary of all manifestations of anger, including our own. It’s true that, when we were children, Ivor and I bickered and squabbled in a low-level way, but these altercations didn’t amount to much and they petered out in our teens. During adolescence, the necessity of coping silently with Mum’s outbursts took up much of our emotional energy, and if neither of us gave the other emotional support, at least we’d mostly learned how to avoid needless confrontations. In fact we’d seen enough of the destructive power of anger to put us off it for life. Which didn’t mean that we didn’t get angry, merely that we found difficulty in expressing it. This was not a healthy situation, but given the symbolic options that life seemed to offer us - Dad's example or Mum's - there was no question which one we were going to follow.
Even so, Ivor and I differed to some extent in the way we absorbed Dad’s influence. My own difficulty in expressing anger tended to turn inwards, in the way of such cases, into a proneness to depression. Ivor, though, was always more able to express what he felt. There were certain topics that, in later life, would provoke him to short bursts of sudden and uncharacteristically vicious anger, mostly after he'd had a few drinks: the royal family; politics and most politicians; the church and religion in general; car-drivers; Cliff Richard; Manchester United; and Geordies - even though he made an exception for the Geordie who was his boss at Heathrow. Because his manner was normally so equable, these outbursts were all the more disconcerting. But they were also puzzling. Although no fan of the royal family I found his animus against them out of proportion. It struck me later that what linked all these topics was that he could let off steam at them without any risk. They couldn't respond or retaliate. They were “safe” targets. I wondered whether these outbursts were not a form of displacement activity, enabling him to get rid of anger, mostly suppressed, which he could not vent in the course of everyday life.
*
Probably Dad's most important, legacy to us concerned responsibility. Knowing what were one's responsibilities, fronting up to them, fulfilling them: this, more than anything, was what enabled him to steer a path through life. It was transmitted to us not consciously but through example - and, to be fair, not just from Dad alone.
It was in the matter of food that we first became aware of how seriously both our parents took their responsibilities towards us. Keeping two boys well nourished after the war was no easy matter when there was little money, and such food as was available was rationed, scarce, and lacking in variety. But throughout our childhood, whatever else was going wrong, Ivor and I never went hungry. Their sense of responsibility showed itself in other areas as well. Dad told me once that until Ivor and I were ten neither of them had apparently gone out for the evening. Not once. Not to the cinema, not anywhere. Not a single evening off. It didn't occur to me to ask the obvious question, which is why Granny couldn't have occasionally baby-sat; but the probability is that the friction between her and Mum made such an arrangement impossible. Dad wasn't boasting exactly, but he wanted me to understand the extent of the sacrifice both of them had made. What he said left mixed feelings. A sort of gratitude to start with, as I thought about the extent of the self-denial that had been involved. But then, guilt as well, as if it was somehow our fault. This was then replaced by slight irritation; after all, it wasn't as if Ivor and I had told them they weren’t ever allowed to go out for an evening at the pub.
Being aware of the responsibilities one has to one's children is clearly admirable. But for both our parents the sacrifices - summed up in that claim never to have had an evening off - became simply too great. For Dad, bringing up two children under these self-imposed conditions meant that the whole joyless business became just another part of the larger burden he'd taken on when he married our mother. If Ivor and I ever represented for him a source of at least occasional pleasure, it must have been when we were very young and not later on when we were growing up. For Mum, though, self-sacrifice and self-suppression never came easily. Latent feelings of resentment were always there, just waiting to be stoked up by the presence of unwanted and seemingly undeserved burdens (“You're more trouble now than when you were kids.”) Whatever constitutes the right balance between what one owes to oneself and what one owes to others, even one’s children, our parents didn't find it, any more than Ivor and I achieved it later on in regard to them.
Where Dad
had the greatest influence on us, most of all, on Ivor, was in his unshakeable
sense of responsibility to our mother.
Despite everything, I'm certain that, while Ivor and I were growing up,
Dad at no time thought to himself, “I've had enough”, and proposed to walk
out. Not at that time, anyway. Later, though, in 1970, when I was living
briefly at home before my move to
I hope that last comment doesn't sound like an implicit call for the usual answer to such problems nowadays: that they both would have been better off if they'd separated and started a new life apart. That was never a possibility at any stage of the marriage; not in the early years when they were bringing up two kids, and even less after Ivor and I had left home. Dad could have coped with a separation, but Mum, never. She didn't have what it required, not at any level. She hadn't worked for her living since the 1930s, and she wasn't going to get another job now. Dad's income was barely enough to maintain one establishment, let alone two. And, more important than any of this, she wholly lacked the strength of character and confidence in herself to set up a new life - with or without the encumbrance of her two young sons (and what a prospect that arrangement would have been, for all three of us...) Her inner state was so depressed, brittle and unstable that the break-up of her marriage would have destroyed what little sense of security, self-esteem and possibly selfhood that she possessed, and my guess is that she would have gone to pieces, ending up in a mental hospital. No, there was no choice for either of them. She was stuck with Dad, just as he was stuck with her.
Dad's influence on us in the matter of responsibility proved to be, in the end, both good and bad, though in Ivor's case it was catastrophic rather than just bad. The positive aspects are obvious, principally that one should accept at least some responsibility to the people one is close to, so that one considers their welfare as well as one's own. But in Ivor's life it went too far. Later on, finding himself trapped in a relationship with someone more unstable and more vicious than our mother, Ivor nevertheless, like Dad before him, accepted the burden of what he had committed himself to and struggled with it, for thirteen years. It was one of the factors that cost him his life.
Chapter 12
Dad’s emotional evasiveness and unreachability, which I found so exasperating, troubled Ivor a lot less; he seemed better able simply to accept him as he was. I gave no thought at the time to how the two of them got on, and wondering about it now, my general sense is that there was in fact very little connection between them. This impression is based partly on Dad’s recessive personality and partly on a reciprocating element in Ivor’s; like the two negative poles of a magnet, the similarity of their natures kept them apart. As his friend Tony commented in an idle moment of one of the scratch games of cricket that punctuated our childhood, “You never really know what Ivor’s thinking”. But maybe the most important factor was the onset of puberty, which brought with it changes that were more disconcerting for him than for the rest of us, and his way of dealing with them was to withdraw further into himself. Sex was never referred to at home, nor did it even figure in the school curriculum, where we were all left to the playground to exchange whatever semi-accurate information we might pick up. So there would be no question of Ivor confiding to Dad, or to anyone else, that he might be gay. There was no friction or hostility between them that I could see; they merely moved in their separate orbits - as we all did, really.
After leaving school, though neither of us realised it at the time, what Ivor and I needed most was to get away from home, not just from Mum whose generally unhappy effect on us was obvious enough but also to separate ourselves from the less dramatic but in some ways more powerful influence of Dad. But the gravitational pull of home was so strong that it was hard for either of us even to contemplate such a move let alone do anything about it. We had not been brought up to be decisive about anything, or to feel that we were autonomous individuals with the right to decide how best to live our lives. Leaving home would inevitably be disruptive, and there was no question where the greatest impact would fall. Not on Mum but on Dad.
Coming to the end of sixth form with no ambition, no curiosity, and no idea what to do next, I took what seemed the obvious option in front of me, which was to follow Dad into the Civil Service. In 1958 I took what was then an annual nationwide examination for entry to the Executive grade of the Civil Service, whose various papers were roughly based on A level syllabuses, plus additional papers on maths and general knowledge. To my amazement I came top, having scored the highest marks. In most people’s eyes, including I suppose my own, that unexpected success seemed to settle matters.
No one
had suggested I should try for university, which was fine by me as at that time
I had no interest in going; and since careers advice at school was, like sex
education, non-existent, I wasn’t troubled by the thought that maybe there
might be something else I could do. So
on leaving school I continued to live at home and commuted each day to the Home
Office in central
By this
time, Ivor had returned from his two years of National Service - a fate I’d avoided
through the lucky accident of being born some eighteen months after him, his
being one of the last cohorts to be called up.
He went back to Air
Then, as
Ivor undoubtedly saw it, I made my escape to
Dad and Ivor watching television, 1963.
Mum lost in her own thoughts.
Dad told me some years later that
Ivor in the previous months had become increasingly morose and withdrawn. He would come back from work, eat supper, sit
in a chair, and not say a word. Getting
somewhere on his own was a bid to make a life for himself while he still
could. It wasn't as if he was going to be
cutting all links with his parents, any more than I had. In fact, for the rest of their lives until
Dad retired to Devon, he conscientiously called in at least once and usually
twice a week, on his way to or from his shift at Air
That was
the low point of their relations. In
time they got on better, particularly after Mum’s death in 1971, my own
contribution to this improvement being that by then I was living in
Ivor & Dad, 1967
Ivor’s concern and loyalty during this short period. But short it was. After three years Dad sold Berkeley Waye, which had only unhappy memories for him, and within less than a year of his move to the West Country he was dead.
*
Through our adolescence I differed from Ivor in trying every so often to get through to Dad. These attempts mostly took the form of ineffectual gestures for help and support. On one occasion, I launched into the usual teenage complaint about how no one liked me, and his response was the gnomic advice: “If you want a friend, you've got to be a friend.” I was baffled by this, since I had a dim sense that, if anything, I was trying too hard to “be a friend.” In practice, my attempts at friendship tended to be seriously askew, out of a neediness that at the time I didn't even recognise let alone understand. It was very many years in fact before I eventually twigged that friends are not there to supply the love that should have been received in the first place from one's parents, and that using friendship to plug these deeper emotional holes is a certain recipe for strains and failure. At all events, Dad's suggestion didn't strike me as helpful. Part of the problem was that I had no idea then, and haven't much even now, what the phrase actually meant.
Around this time I must have concluded that confiding in Dad was not going to get me very far. All children instinctively look up to their father, or at least seek to do so, but after this episode I must have decided that I no longer did. Learning not to look to him for support seemed a painful but necessary part of my progress through adolescence. Some time after this incident I must have let slip a further hint about my general unhappiness, and when he responded with an awkward invitation to talk about it, I in effect brushed him off by saying something like, “No, it's all right.” His reply, “It's a poor thing if a boy can't talk to his own father”, had a sadness and sense of rejection that has always stayed with me. I felt a brief spasm of guilt, even at the time, but not enough to try to bridge the gap between us. Only after his death did I realise how much my increasing withdrawal, together with the accompanying judgement that he wasn't worth talking to, must have hurt him. Too late then, of course, to do anything about it.
Unlike the mutual standoff of Dad and Ivor, which seemed to work well for both of them, relations between Dad and me were more strained. If there was one single underlying cause, it came down to the fact that I was continuing to do well at school. And my progress affected not just Dad but Mum as well, and in similar ways: they were proud of my achievements and yet also felt threatened by them.
The gap between Dad and me was reinforced when, at about thirteen, I showed him an essay I'd written for my English teacher. At Isleworth Grammar School, if you wrote a good essay you got 7 out of 10; if you wrote a very good one, you might get 8; one that was quite exceptional could conceivably achieve 9, though that was rare; 10 was held in reserve and in practice never used. On this occasion I got 10. That evening I showed it to Dad, with a mumbled request for what he thought of it. He read it through without a word, and as he handed it back, his only comment was that I'd got a comma in the wrong place. That was it. Years later I reminded him of this exchange, and asked why he hadn't said something a little more positive, even just a simple, “Well done.” His reply was, “I didn't want you to get swollen-headed.” I said nothing. Writing did not come easily to me and every essay was an effortful performance, as he could hardly not have known; when they were finished, I usually directed a lamentation at anyone in earshot that it probably wasn't any good anyway. Despite this, it apparently hadn't occurred to him that I lacked self-confidence and might benefit from a bit of encouragement.
Dad’s
reluctance to risk giving me a swollen head went beyond simple lack of
imagination. Part of it had its origin
in the insecurities of his status as first generation lower middle class. He clearly found the middle class ethos of
Apart from his anxieties regarding Parents Evenings, I half-realised even then that in some way I too threatened and intimidated him. He was an intelligent man, who, like most of his generation, had left school at fourteen, and here was I enjoying educational opportunities he had never had. His consequent lack of support was not jealousy exactly - at least I don't want to think it was - and, like so much else, I was only partly aware of it at the time. But it certainly contributed to some unspoken tension between us. At base, the major source of the problems between us was that, because I was brainy, he feared that I judged him and found him wanting. He was almost certainly right. One way or another, all children judge their parents. But judging takes different forms, and some ways are more wounding than others. Dad must have felt it particularly hard, coming as it did on top of my evident reluctance to confide in him or seek his advice.
On a later occasion, when I was at university, he asked me for some personal details to help him fill in his tax return. As I well knew, he was entitled to a tax allowance, because my grant was based on the assumption that he was also supporting me financially. When I asked if any part of it might possibly come my way, the answer was a brusque No, implying it had nothing to do with me. This was despite (or maybe because of) the fact that up to then I had never asked him for a penny in support; I was able to get by with the state grant, supplemented by vacation jobs, and when I was at home I paid Mum for my keep as well.
*
The underlying truth is that he and I were scarcely in competition, because our abilities were so different. Apart from humorous or whimsical essays of a rather dated belletristic kind, my only real talent was analytical, whereas his was genuinely creative. In addition to his pre-war career as a writer of Bullets, he had written poems and short stories on and off throughout his life, mostly before he was married, and he eventually returned to writing following his retirement from the Civil Service and Mum’s death shortly after. He would submit short stories to the London Evening Standard, and I later found a drawer full of them, each one accompanied by a note from the reader along the lines of, “This one didn’t quite make it, but it shows real promise, so keep at it.” How sad that he was almost but not quite there, so many times.
The difference in our abilities was highlighted on one occasion when my English homework that week was to write a poem on the less than original subject of spring. My efforts seemed to me not so much hackneyed as simply dreadful, and in despair, and for the first and only time, I asked if he would write something for me. He took less than fifteen minutes to produce the following sprightly piece of verse, which he called “Ode to spring by a park keeper”:
Now winter’s gone, the larks are larky,
And in the park it’s not so parky.
As spring comes in I’m feeling fitter;
This litter really makes me titter.
The breeze flaps washing on the line –
Underwear both coarse and fine.
I hoe and weed among the flowers;
There’s nothing now beyond my powers.
Each breath of air has something in it;
I could sink a pint this minute.
Birds rise and swoop, so full of zing –
Oh, that one was a dirty thing!
Ah Spring, you help to keep me going.
But look, what’s this? – by gosh, it’s snowing.
My English teacher, I’m glad to say, was very impressed by his efforts.
Many years later Dad wrote another poem about spring, this time in less facetious vein. Life with Mum had become increasingly hard after his retirement, not least because, with Ivor and me having moved out, he was now entirely on his own; and this is the truth hidden in the poem. The major influence on its style was, I guess, Keats, because he had a leather-bound copy on his bookshelves in the dining room, though I don’t remember him ever taking it down to read; like much else it must have belonged to the period of his life that came to an end when he married. Sentimental and clichéd the poem may seem to anyone who didn’t know him, but the reality is that it opens a window into feelings that sustained him through the pains and disappointment of what his life had become. Its effect is of positive endurance, the sense of life endlessly renewing itself making it possible to put his troubles in a healing perspective.
Like many amateur poets, Dad couldn’t always sustain a whole poem. Often they started well and then tailed off. But in this one, unusually, the ending is exceptionally powerful. The shift away from cliché starts with the unexpected use of “quietus” in the final verse, almost certainly a memory of Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” speech (“When he himself might his quietus make / With a bare bodkin”). And the very last two lines, contemplating a life ending in stoic loneliness but curiously uplifting for all that, have a lapidary strength that haunts me more than any short passage of poetry that I know.
Welcome Spring
It must be bliss to die
In nature’s time
When spring is crowing over death,
To lie upon a sun-warmed bed
Of virgin grass and bluebells
While blackbirds carol overhead.
When spring is crowing over death
It could be bliss to die.
The sun does such sure promise give
I’d be content to lie
With flowers only as my friends
As careless birds sing endless hymns
To fleeting life.
With flowers only as my friends
Not fading in funereal wreaths,
Their mute tribute to joyous life
Gives the quietus to grief.
For this, it must be bliss to die
With comfort only from the sun
Before my wintry body’s cold.
Chapter 13
When we were growing up it might have been expected that Ivor and I would turn to each other for support as we bobbed along on storm-tossed seas. But, as is obvious by now, we didn't.
The bed had a lot to do with it. I'm not sure it wasn't the main reason, at least at the start. Until we were fourteen and fifteen we had to share, and it wasn't as if it was a full-size double, merely a three-quarter size, not the standard four feet six. It was scarcely adequate when we were young and became progressively less so as we got older. (By the time we finished growing, Ivor and I were a lot taller than our parents. Ivor was just over six foot, a couple of inches taller than me.) Our discomfort was increased by the fact that the bedroom was unheated. For half the year it was extremely cold, and so both of us would try to envelop ourselves in the bedclothes in order to keep out the column of cold air that would otherwise form between us as we clung to our respective sides of the bed. But the blankets weren't wide enough for the purpose, and if one of us ever succeeded in creating a warm cocoon out of them, it wouldn't be long before cold air woke up the other, leading to a frenzied tug of war that would leave both of us in a state of mutually exasperated wakefulness.
Although our bedroom had an electric fire, the need for economy in the years immediately after the war meant that we weren’t allowed to use it. This prohibition was partly relaxed when we were about ten, at which time we were permitted to hold our pyjamas in front of the fire for about half a minute to warm them up before pulling them on and diving into a bed that remained, however, as cold as it had always been. I whined to my parents that my feet were so cold they were stopping me getting off to sleep, so could I please wear socks I bed? Unusually for him Dad took a strict line and refused my plea on the grounds that it would turn me into a cissy. Among the other advantages of going to university was that I could now suit myself, and then and for many years after I kept an old pair of football socks within easy reach of my bedside.
The original mattress was filled with kapok, which was thin, lumpy and uncomfortable, but much worse was the mattress support. This consisted of the traditional latticework of wire, saggy in the middle, which created a V down the sides of which we would inevitably slide during the night, however hard we tried to cling to the upper slopes before drifting off to sleep. One of us would then kick the other awake, who would kick back in return, the whole thing accompanied by mutterings of “Get over your side”, “You get over your side.”
Maintaining our territorial rights in the disputed middle of the bed meant that the lightest physical contact - knees, elbows, backside - became the source of further skirmishing under the bedclothes. These experiences can only have helped to create the instinct to withdraw from any contact with each other emotionally as well as physically. Sad to say, but putting a distance between us was something we both wanted, and for many years the thought of having a bed to myself constituted my dream of freedom, away from my parents and away from Ivor as well.
It’s not as if we could look forward to going to bed as a refuge from what was going on elsewhere in the house. We weren’t allowed to read, because arriving there was instantly followed by lights out. The reasoning behind this edict may have been that for one of us to keep the light on would have been unfair on the other who just wanted to go to sleep. We were always packed off to bed early, regardless of whether we were tired or not, and no doubt for the same reason that we were sent to Sunday school, the main aim, in our cynical but maybe accurate view, being simply to give our parents a break. Self-deceiving or not, Mum was a great believer in the importance of getting enough sleep. “You won’t be fit for school in the morning if you don’t go to sleep now.” This phrase reduced me to helpless insomniac anxiety at the prospect of not being able to answer the questions that would be put to us in class the next day by Miss Andrews, our terrifying class teacher, whose frequent response to ignorance was a slap until the correct answer was disgorged. On at least one occasion, as the long sunset shone through the bedroom curtains and I still felt as far from sleep as ever, I got up and knelt on the bed and prayed to God to be allowed to get to sleep so that I could stay out of trouble at school tomorrow. What Ivor made of this absurd pantomime I have no idea.
If family life had been reasonably normal, the effect of our bedroom arrangements would have been less marked. But, in the prevailing atmosphere, these minor irritations grew out of proportion and festered. Ivor and I didn't get on then, and it was years before we did.
There is one memory to set against our mutual scratchiness. When Ivor was nine, he caught scarlet fever and for several weeks had to be whisked off to an isolation hospital. It must have been a lonely and frightening time for him, as the only contact possible with visitors - in practice, our parents - was through a glass screen. The seriousness of the illness would have caused them a lot of anxiety, but fortunately after six weeks he made a full recovery. As the day of his return home approached, I painstakingly constructed a message, each letter individually cut out and painted and then strung together on a length of thread fixed by drawing pins to the ends of the mantelpiece: WELCOME HOME IVOR. This was probably as close as I ever got to expressing any affection for him. At least I hope that’s what it was and not merely the recognition that his illness had been serious, and that it was something just to have him back again safe and sound.
*
During the four years we overlapped at grammar school, I was no doubt tiresome, and Ivor certainly found me so. If we passed in the corridor, he would always ignore me, particularly if he was with his friends, though that’s no doubt how many older brothers behave to younger ones. In addition, when we got our bikes out of the bike shed and were wheeling them together across the playground on our way home for lunch, he refused to acknowledge my presence much less speak to me until we were outside the school grounds.
One
incident that sums up Ivor’s understandable desire to have as little as
possible to do with me goes back to the last holiday that we had as a family
when he and I were sixteen and fifteen.
We were due to have a week on the Isle of Wight, and the arrangement was
that we were all going to meet up in
In so many early memories Ivor is either saying very little or he is silent.
Apart from the enforced sharing of the double bed, the more significant and long-lasting cause of why we didn't get on flowed at a deeper level. From the start, it was obvious that I was good at school. Even at infant school, I had my essay on “How I help the milkman” read out in class. So I stuck out as brainy, and that gave me a role and identity, both there and at home. Unfortunately, the way it was often phrased is that I was “the brainy one.” If I was “the brainy one”, it followed that Ivor was left with the alternative role of being, well, not so brainy. Apart from being damaging to his self-confidence, this designation, although never made as crassly as I've expressed it here, could well have been expected to generate some jealousy or resentment on his part. If it did, it couldn't have amounted to much, because I wasn't aware of it, either then or later. At the most, it would simply have added a bit to our general fractiousness. While I'm sure our parents didn't labour this supposed difference between us, I remember someone coming to the house not long before Ivor took the eleven plus exam and saying something along the lines of how well I was doing at school, and Ivor - well, (casting round for something positive to say) - he was probably more suited to working with his hands. This statement was made in ignorance of the fact that both Ivor and I took after our father in having no discernible practical skills at all. Even I found this moment faintly embarrassing.
*
In fact
this disparagement of Ivor's abilities was unjustified. It’s obvious, looking back on it, that
Berkeley Junior School, for all that it was a bog standard state primary
school, provided a good education from which we both benefited. In the immediate post-war years all classes
had about 45 children, and the teachers needed to keep a firm grip. We were expected to
work hard, and mostly we did. But it
wasn’t all slog. We were read to at the
end of the day provided we hadn’t misbehaved.
Miss Roberts was nice and used to read us Dr Doolittle stories, whose
vocabulary at the age of seven I’m not sure I always understood.
Class 1,
middle row, extreme left.
In our last year we were even furnished with the start of a classical education, mainly centred on the fall of Troy and the adventures of Odysseus: Cyclops and Polyphemus; Scylla and Charybdis; the sirens; Circe; while Penelope kept her suitors at bay with endlessly knitting and unravelling the winding sheet for Odysseus’s father.
We learned some poems by heart through simply chanting them out loud. There was generally little discussion, but in John Masefield’s “Cargos” our teacher insisted that we notice the shift in rhythm in the last verse:
Dirty British coaster with a salt-caked smoke stack,
Butting through the Channel in the mad March days.
I was mesmerised by the pounding rhythms of “Hiawatha” and Browning’s “How they Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix”, while being obscurely moved in a way that I didn’t understand at the time by the desolate ending of “The Pied Piper of Hamelin” and the plight of the abandoned children in Matthew Arnold’s “The Forsaken Merman”. In music lessons we were coaxed laboriously through the delicate but complicated melody of Purcell’s setting of Dryden’s “Fairest Isle”, but more appealing to us were the simpler, more rousing tunes of “Men of Harlech” and “The British Grenadiers”:
Some talk of Alexander
And some of Hercules,
Of Hector and Lysander
And such great names as these.
But of all the world’s great heroes
There’s none that can compare,
With a tow-row-row-row-row-row-row,
To the British grenadier.
So far as the real work of the classroom was concerned, some of the teachers maintained discipline and attentiveness in ways that would not be tolerated today. Miss Wallace’s favourite method of punishment was the use of her thumb and forefinger to tweak the hair just above the ear; properly administered it was quite exquisitely painful. Miss Andrews’ force of personality alone could reduce a tough little urchin like Pete Taylor to incoherent snivelling for his repeated failure to get a sum right, though the slap that punctuated each failure no doubt contributed.
But at least by the time we all left to go to
secondary school, those in the top stream knew enough about the English
language to identify the eight parts of speech: noun, pronoun, verb, adverb,
adjective, preposition, conjunction and interjection. Even questions of style got an airing, as we
were exhorted to think of an alternative to the universal “nice”. In theory the whole school knew the
importance of grammatical rules. On one
occasion in morning assembly, the remote but equally intimidating and
moustachioed headmistress, Miss Brown, announced that she would personally cane
any child who was reported to her for writing a sentence beginning with the
word “And”. Maybe she explained the
basis of her threat, maybe she didn’t; I can’t remember. But for most of us there was no need. “And” was a conjunction, a joining word. Its place was in the middle of a sentence,
never - under any circumstances - at the beginning. I doubt that the threat was ever carried out,
but then, fear being the useful weapon that it is, that was probably
sufficient, and the prohibition was seared into me so thoroughly that I never
questioned it through all my years at both junior and secondary school. And for some time after that too. But we were almost certainly the last
generation to be drilled in this way. At
There
were eight classes at
This
suggests that academically Ivor was doing well. Nevertheless, despite being in
the A stream, by the time he was due to take the eleven plus, there were apparently
doubts as to whether he would pass. I
never really understood why this should have been so, since all the children in
class 1 would normally be expected to pass without much trouble. Regardless of whatever reservations his class
teacher may have had, he did pass, and in 1950 he went on to
Chapter 14
Like many others of that era,
mug shots, age 11 and 16.
What I found most incongruous, though also at times genuinely stirring, was our school song. It had a rollicking tune and rousing words, and the whole school would bawl it out on Speech Days and suchlike occasions. The first verse and the chorus have stayed in my memory for nearly fifty years:
Now in the flush of our strength and prime,
We store in mind for a future time
A treasure of golden-tinted days,
Of tasks performed and their meed of praise.
The warmth of friendship' s generous flame,
The joy of a hard and well-fought game,
The playing field with its sturdy trees,
We shall always remember these.
Finis Coronat Opus,
Nobly the words resound.
Finis Coronat Opus,
The task by its end is crowned.
Later I was better able to recognise in these sentiments the fruity, patriotic, character-building tradition associated mainly with Henry Newbolt (it’s not quite up there with, “There’s a breathless hush in the Close tonight”, but not far off it either), and even now I still find them strangely compelling as well as more worthy of respect than I once did. But the picture they conjure up was nevertheless bogus. It represented a culture and was written in a style that had nothing to do with us. What was an archaic noun like “meed” doing there? I didn't know what it meant and I was supposed to be good at English. Almost certainly Ivor didn't either. As for the playing field, with or without “its sturdy trees”, this was frequently unavailable for what was called Organised Games because too many classes wanted to use it at the same time, so we'd all have to pile on to our bikes and cycle a mile and a half to a muddy rented sports ground at Bush Corner.
There was
one moment in particular that brought home to me how much the school
represented alien territory. It was when
my English teacher, whom I greatly respected, told the class that we should not
use the term “Auntie”, certainly not when writing a letter, because this
childish diminutive was acceptable only from the very young. The correct form of address was “Aunt.” Since Ivor and I used “Auntie” all the time
because our parents did, and because our aunts themselves used it in referring
to each other, I was baffled. But that
didn't stop me mentally noting the advice for future reference; its use would
obviously depend on the company in which I found myself. Unlike Ivor, I absorbed much of the school's
middle class ethos, and, again unlike Ivor, I finished my time at
The
majority of us were a bunch of lower middle class boys benefiting from the
greater availability of grammar schools after the war as a result of the 1944
Education Act. This arrangement lasted for the next two decades until they were
mostly phased out in the 1960s by being converted into comprehensives. Politicians who used to vent the nostalgic
plea, “Give us back our grammar schools” rarely accompanied it with the
parallel demand, “Give us back our secondary moderns”, despite the fact the
latter were the price that had to be paid for the existence of the former. The evident injustice and, apart from that,
the sheer waste of generating each year another crop of eleven-plus “failures”
was the spur for introducing the comprehensive system. Less well recognised, though, is the fact
that waste was also a feature of the grammar schools. Like most others,
The immediate reason for his indifferent academic record was that he may have been bright enough but he wasn't willing to work. Not hard enough anyway, bearing in mind that to get an O level in the 1950s was considerably more demanding than achieving a pass at GCSE nowadays. As to why he wasn't disposed to make the effort, it's possible that the middle class, sub-public-school ethos in which he now found himself may have had something to do with it. But the deeper reasons lay further back, because he was already under-performing even before he left junior school. Partly it was a matter of temperament. He was by nature disinclined to push himself, and this applied not just academically but in other areas as well. He was a good footballer and cricketer, but he made no effort to get into any of the teams while at Berkeley Junior, nor did he when he moved on to Isleworth. Temperament, though, was only part of it. There was another factor at work, and for this I need to fill in a bit of family history.
*
In 1953
Auntie Eunice, her husband Uncle Bert, her sister Auntie Phyllis together with
four of her five children, were all back in England. They were now running a guest house in the
The
twins, who were slightly younger than us, were very different. Christopher was dominant, outgoing,
personable, confident, and centred in himself.
The
boarding house venture did not prove successful and not long afterwards the
whole family returned to
At the
age of eighteen, he had fulfilled his great ambition of joining the Royal
Canadian Air Force. He was driving home
across the
Never,
that is, had it not been for Christopher's death. My impression was that the death of his twin
had been the making of
One
reason, maybe the main one, why he hadn't made any effort at school was the
inescapable presence of his “brainy” younger brother. The fact that he was better at football and
cricket didn't remotely even things up.
An implicit comparison had been established, and it was one that could
hardly have helped his self-confidence and general development. Because he wasn't competitive by nature, he
may have decided early on (while at
It came
to me vividly during that visit to
Chapter 15
Although I gradually sensed the effect I’d had on Ivor's life, it didn’t weigh on me to any extent, certainly not to the point of actually feeling guilty about it. I had barely been conscious at the time of the negative ripples I was creating by doing well at school, and even if I had been, there wasn’t much I could have done. Not without being a great deal more sensitive and aware; and as an unhappy self-absorbed adolescent, that was beyond me.
That’s only part of it, though. There are other memories of my relationship with Ivor from this time that are uncomfortable to recall even now.
As with
adults, so with children: how others see us is rarely how we see
ourselves. As a child, I had a general
sense of injustice, convinced that I was at the end of the queue for whatever
was going. Money was tight after the
war, and as the younger brother I had to wear Ivor's clothes as hand-me-downs
when he outgrew them. I was often
resentful that he had new clothes and I didn't, that response reinforced by my
impression that, at least in her calmer moments, Mum always favoured him over
me. This belief carried over into meal
times when custard was being ladled out and both our voices would be raised in
the traditional cry: “He's got more than me.”
At such times I'm sure my complaints were the more shrill. So I had a fretful sense of being put upon,
which in turn reinforced a more or less pervasive state of nervousness, anxiety
and insecurity. That is not, however,
how I seem to have struck others. A
member of the short-lived
I'm not sure what I'd expected, but it wasn't this. But as I thought about it, I could start to see what he meant. There were a couple of incidents that quickly came to mind. In the first, I was talking to another boy in Berkeley School playground, at the age of eight or nine, and I can still hear the words coming out of my mouth as I confidently assured him, “Churchill's a war-monger.” Churchill was what? The accusation presumably stemmed from the 1930s, well before he became the famous wartime leader, and I hadn’t even been born then. Where on earth had I heard it? It’s not as if politics was ever a topic of conversation at home. Along with most of the rest of the country Dad had voted Labour in the 1945 election, and probably that fact along with the spirit of the times served to form my political views, such as they were: Conservatives were selfish, lived in big houses, and talked posh, which is why ordinary people didn’t vote for them. Or nobody we knew anyway. I remember the Labour poster for the 1950 election a couple of years later, which had a photo of the Prime Minister with his trademark pipe in his mouth and underneath it the slogan, which to me was a statement of the obvious, “You can trust Mr Attlee.” Only years later did I realise that people existed, quite normal and reasonable in every other way, who actually voted Conservative. Still, I had picked up this view of Churchill from somewhere, and I must have been proud of it. Clearly, I was a bit of a know-all.
The
other incident goes back goes back even earlier to when I was at
My scepticism about fairies probably had its origins in part in another bit of our childhood. One day I asked Dad why Ivor and I had never been brought up to believe in Father Christmas like other children. His answer was that, for him, learning the truth as a child had been such an upsetting experience that he wanted to protect us from having to go through it ourselves. This moment was an indication of a concern for us which I should have borne in mind later on more than I did on those occasions when it seemed that he was leaving us pretty much to fend for ourselves in the maelstrom of family life. His unresponsiveness concealed the fact that he was sensitive and easily hurt. When he and Mum were first married they had a spaniel called Joe to which Dad was devoted. Joe died before Ivor and I were born. They never had another dog, and anyway Mum seemed to prefer cats, but Dad’s brief references suggested that Joe had been irreplaceable and the pain of his loss was not something he wanted to repeat.
In neighbours' garden, 1937.
Mum is standing on the right.
Dad is holding Joe
*
It's not difficult to imagine what it must have been like for Ivor, having as his younger brother someone who was not only threateningly brainy but who also came across as a rather self-satisfied little smart-arse. No doubt this fact contributed to the amount of bickering that went on between us. But what is remarkable to me now is how tolerant he was. We never had fights. At most there was a certain amount of irritated pushing and shoving; and if he was at any time tempted to use his greater physical strength, he never did. Most likely, he just accepted that I was another part of what he had to put up with at home. At some point when we were kids he must have decided, quite understandably, that he didn't like me very much and that he wanted to have as little to do with me as possible.
An incident that summed up a large part of our relationship as well as our respective characters took place in 1954. Earlier in the year, after a short period in a nursing home, Granny had died. One practical effect of her departure from Berkeley Waye - although nothing happened until she'd actually died - was that the house could now be re-arranged. Stuff such as Dad's bureau that had been kept in the box room could be brought downstairs into what had been Granny's room. Thus “the front room”, as we continued to call it, became effectively the new sitting room. We hardly knew what to do with all this extra space, and for some time it was kept for use mainly in the evenings - increasingly so after 1959 when we got our first television. The more immediate consequence was that Granny's bed was available to be moved upstairs into the now emptied-out box room, thereby creating at last a third bed room. But who was to be its occupant?
So far as I know, this proposed re-arrangement was not discussed, or, if it was, I was never included. One day in the autumn of 1954, as a result of rehearsals for the school play, I arrived home quite late. Mum, Dad and Ivor were all there. Dad then informed me about the new sleeping arrangements. It had been decided that Ivor was to remain in what had been our joint bedroom, and I was to move into the box room. At this point something in me snapped, and I broke forth into peals of loud and bitter protest that carried on for the next five minutes. As a rule, I was not given to losing my temper: low-level whining, grizzling and complaining were more my style. This time it was different. Maybe being tired at the end of a long day had something to do with it. At all events, what welled up in me was a disproportionately powerful sense of the sheer injustice of it all, not so much the decision itself (which even I could see was not unreasonable) but the fact that the decision had already been taken in my absence and that I hadn't been consulted. It drew on a lifetime's sense that Ivor was favoured over me, that he was Mum's favourite (insofar as she had one), that I didn't count, that I had had to wear Ivor's cast-offs... and so on. “It's not FAIR... I should have been asked. I should have been ASKED!” In the way of people who are usually repressed and then find themselves suddenly exploding, a part of me was standing on one side, watching with some amazement as the torrent poured forth. Certainly I held the floor with a satisfying lack of interruption from the audience. But I couldn't help noticing at one point Ivor's reaction while it was going on. The expression on his face was one of pained embarrassment, almost but not quite disgust, and when I finally came to a halt, he said simply, “Oh look, let him have it.”
After all this frenzied self-pity, Ivor's words ought to have brought me to a more chastened frame of mind. I wish I could say that I discovered in myself some corresponding generosity and as a result offered back to him the larger bedroom he had just renounced. Unfortunately, I can't. As the red mist cleared, I too was starting to feel embarrassed, but I hardly felt I could climb down now. Part of my outburst had obviously been coloured by the belief that I had at least some claim to the larger room, even though it clearly wasn't as strong as Ivor's. I didn't feel I could now say, “No, it doesn't matter. You have it.” Besides, the fact that Ivor had just said I could keep it indicated - didn't it? - that he wasn't really that bothered, one way or the other. If he wasn't bothered, well, that was all right then; he wasn't bothered; and so there was no reason why I shouldn't stay put. Which is what happened. Ivor moved into the new smaller bedroom, and I kept our old one.
Such is the power of rationalisation that I felt no particular pricks of conscience on the matter, either then or for a long time afterwards. It was helped by the fact that Ivor himself never brought it up again. Maybe it genuinely hadn't mattered to him all that much. Maybe. No doubt his dislike of arguments also played its part, and this would have combined with a life-long inclination, probably inherited from Dad, always to take the line of least resistance. The fact remained that he had been less insistent about his rights than I had about mine. Unlike me, he had acted with some forbearance and magnanimity.
*
That
incident brings to mind another episode that occurred many years later. During my time in
Later
that summer I invited Ivor to come and see us.
The weekend in question coincided with a visit my mother-in-law was
making to the big house. I remember
little of Ivor's two days with us, apart from the impression that it went well
and he seemed to enjoy it. In fact the
only thing I remember clearly is the moment on Sunday when Ivor was getting
ready to cycle back to
Ivor didn’t realise it, but in four words he had identified himself as the kind of person with whom my mother-in-law would expect to have nothing socially to do. Since getting married two years earlier, I had learned much that was new to me about upper middle class speech patterns and behaviour, and about what was acceptable and what wasn't. Miriam wanted me to know these things, not because she cared about them or thought they mattered, but because I was going to meet her family for the first time, and she knew I wanted to avoid unnecessary gaffes. The important thing was to fit in as seamlessly as possible. I had learned that the correct form of words on being introduced is “'How do you do?” or, at a pinch, '”Hello”', and that, conversely, “Pleased to meet you” was unacceptable in any circumstances. That was her sole meeting with my brother. Even his name - in the unlikely event that it had registered with her - never passed her lips. From the moment of his introduction until her death 17 years later in 1992 she neither referred to him nor made the most perfunctory of enquiries about him. He simply did not exist.
I colluded with her silence for a variety of reasons. Miriam's relationship with her dominating mother was a difficult one, and I didn't want to make it harder than it already was by raising in conversation someone in whom her mother had signalled she had no interest. Naively, I'd assumed that she would sooner or later go through the standard motions of social hypocrisy by enquiring after Ivor, though without of course expressing a wish to meet him again. But the longer it went on without a word from her of any kind, the more impossible it became for me to mention him. I was further constrained by the awkwardness of my role on the periphery of a family whose background and lives were so unlike anything I had known. My mother-in-law's attitude was not peculiar to her; no other member of her family evinced any curiosity about what my own family might have consisted of. By coincidence, when Ivor was killed in 1995, Miriam's brother called in the day afterwards on a pre-arranged visit. He had known me by then for twenty years, during which time I had heard in great detail about all the members of his family, near and far-flung. For his part, he learned in that visit, simultaneously, that Ivor had existed and the fact that he had been murdered the previous day. This side of my life during those twenty years is a matter of some shame. The stance I took was all too reminiscent of the anxiety and awkwardness about his origins experienced by Pip in Great Expectations (though without anything like Pip's excuse), most of all when he goes to London to embark on becoming a gentleman and is then embarrassed by the arrival in town of his de facto big brother, Joe Gargery the blacksmith.
Miriam
and her mother had passed virtually all the second world war as civilian
prisoners of war of the Japanese. While
incarcerated, her mother kept a pencil-written diary in a series of exercise
books. It was a risky and brave thing to
do, because, had she been discovered, she would have been shot. After the war, a publisher expressed interest
in the diaries; a journalist was engaged to re-write them in order to give them
more of a narrative flow; and the book was eventually published in 1975. On our return from
When Ivor heard about it, which was not long after his momentary encounter with my mother-in-law, he was extremely keen to learn more about this person whom he had heard about from us and had recently, though all too briefly, met. Despite our warning that he might find it disappointing, he borrowed the book and told us later that he had read it in its entirety. He said, too, that he felt enormous respect and admiration for what Miriam and her mother had undergone in the prison camp, and that Miriam's mother was clearly a very remarkable woman. Because of the impact the book had made on him, he hoped he would be able to meet her again some time. To this I made vaguely encouraging noises which were, however, more vague than encouraging. Eventually it became obvious, without the matter being spelt out, that we were not going to bring the two of them together, and in the end he ceased to ask. Even so, he continued for some time to enquire after her and always asked us to pass on his good wishes.
There are many observations one could make about the various aspects of this episode, but the main one is that Ivor’s response displayed a generous human interest. Nothing exceptional in that, perhaps. But in the context it does rather stand out.
*
Throughout our lives, Ivor both acted and felt more generously towards me than I did towards him. It is true, though hardly much excuse, that I never felt I could get through to him. His remoteness left me frustrated, irritated, and ultimately bored, because the areas where we could communicate became so narrow. Tony, his oldest friend from Heston, was well aware of this quality about him. Around the time of the funeral, he said to me that he would tell Ivor things about his life and what he was doing but he would get very little back about Ivor himself. He was like Dad in this respect, not wanting to tread anywhere that might become contentious, preferring to keep as far as possible on the surface of things (a family characteristic of the Powells in fact: it was equally true of Auntie Eunice.) I remember, nevertheless, a phone call from Ivor one Christmas, not long after his partner had moved in with him and before their life together had started to deteriorate. They had both obviously been having a Christmas drink, and when his new friend came on the phone, he was garrulous and expansive. As he rambled on, he included, almost as a throwaway line: “Ivor really loves you.” I wish it were possible to say that I felt the same for Ivor. But it wouldn't be true.
The reasons for the chasm that established itself between us are easy to list: that awful bed and the mutual irritation it created; a lack of shared boyhood interests – not even plane spotting, despite the time we both spent over at Heathrow; the academic gap that opened ever wider as we moved from primary to secondary school and encouraged his instinct not to compete and to withdraw further into himself; his homosexuality, which reinforced his sense of isolation and could not be shared with anyone, least of all a brother fixated on doing well at school; and the sheer dysfunctional weirdness of the whole family with its terrifying mother and inaccessible father. One sign of how little we shared things is that when we first started keeping diaries at the ages of ten and eleven, it never occurred to either of us to show the other what we had written, despite the absence of anything that was remotely confessional.
Family life had alienated me from Mum because of her violence and from Dad because of his remoteness. The distance between me and Ivor was partly because we didn’t have enough in common and partly because of what I would once have said was his psychological withdrawal but which I now recognise as the tendency in both of us to self-protective detachment. The truth is that I probably removed myself from him at a very early age, and even when we had left home, even when our parents were dead, I failed to re-connect with him except at the most superficial level.
It is too
late, and would be partly disingenuous, to claim that I feel differently about
Ivor having learned so much more about him after his death. It's not for me now to register a change of
heart similar to that expressed by Hardy in his anguished love poems to his
late wife. Even in Hardy’s case there is
the crass, though understandable, retort: If you love her so much now, why
Ivor & RP, 1963
Ivor & RP, 1966
couldn’t you have been nicer to her when she was alive, when you had the chance? If Ivor had not been murdered and was continuing to struggle with his appalling life but keeping it to himself, as before, I also would have felt, as before, the old mixture of frustration, fellow-feeling, irritation and bafflement. We were joined at the root, but we grew apart.
Chapter 16
Although our paths increasingly diverged as Ivor and I hit adolescence, one requirement that our parents had imposed on us from the time we started going to junior school was to attend Sunday school at Heston Congregational Church, otherwise known as the Heston Congoes. Neither of our parents attended services, and both Ivor and I took the cynical view that the reason for sending us there was to get us out of the house so they could have a quiet afternoon. The routine was always the same: Sunday lunch, followed by washing up, with “The Billy Cotton Band Show” on the radio in the background, then Ivor and me off to Sunday school while Dad had forty winks. Looking back, I’m not sure our cynicism was fully justified. Like other parents around that time, they probably felt it important that we received some basic grounding in Christianity, regardless of their own practice. They certainly took a strong line on blasphemy, and on one occasion when I let out the expletive, “Good God”, they both made it clear that this shocking outburst was never to be repeated.
Constant exposure to Christian teaching had its effect, and in a temporary surge of religious enthusiasm around the age of ten I fantasised about becoming a missionary, bringing the Gospel message to benighted but grateful heathens in foreign climes. But as we moved through the ranks of Sunday school and ended up when we were fourteen in the confirmation class conducted by the vicar, Mr Shaw, these meetings proved a difficult and, in the end, insuperable barrier.
I’d
already been bothered by some of the things I’d heard in Sunday school, such as
the claim, emphasised for us as an apparently important part of the Easter
story, that Jesus had suffered the shameful death of a common criminal. By comparison with the long agony of dying
through nails hammered through feet and hands, which I found too horrible to
imagine and yet impossible not to, the question of whether such a death was
shameful seemed utterly beside the point.
How could it possibly matter? At
confirmation class I then worried away at the story of the conversion of
But in rejecting God’s presumed offer of salvation it seemed to me both then and for many years afterwards that my decision, which had not been accompanied by a shift to atheism, had merely succeeded in incurring His wrath without securing any compensating benefits. From that moment on, the God of love, never more than a theoretical postulate at any stage, was replaced in my imagination by the much more viscerally real God of judgement and retribution. His ever-looming presence led me, for instance, late on a Sunday evening when I was recovering the ball from the outfield during one of our scratch games of cricket, to kneel in the semi-darkness and deliver a brief, furtive, conscience-stricken plea for forgiveness at not being in church.
Ivor, in contrast, went ahead and was confirmed, and for some time he was an irregular worshipper at Sunday service. This phase didn’t last long, and I suspect that he had found himself there mainly because, as always, it was easier to take the line of least resistance. Whatever the reason, it was not long before he came round to what he really felt about religion, which was that he wanted nothing to do with it. In later years his resistance to all forms of organised religion was so strong that I wondered if he had had some bad experience of which I knew nothing. I didn’t ask, and I doubt if he’d have told me. But his nature was always the tolerant one of live and let live, and at no time later on did he deride my own religious wanderings.
*
Through
early adolescence the main thing that Ivor and I had in common was our
membership of a gang of local lads who got together to play football and
cricket. These games took place on
The team getting ready for an
important match, as indicated by the full complement of 11 players. Ivor is standing second right, Sam standing
extreme left, RP kneeling second right.
We didn't
need much equipment, but after a while we discovered there was a risk that, if
tempers flared, the owner of the bat, ball and stumps might stalk off in a
huff, taking his property with him. It
was therefore decided to put matters on a more stable basis. Everyone would contribute three pence a week
to buy equipment for the “club”, and all of it would then be held in
common. Ivor and I had always been core
members, mainly because we lived next door to
....
Ivor sending down one of his faster Ivor, left of picture, at a school deliveries Sports Day, 1954.
ceased to exist. Both Ivor and Tony, who lived opposite us in Berkeley Waye, left Isleworth Grammar School at the end of their fifth year; Sam, the other survivor of the Adams gang back in our junior school days, went on to the sixth form at Latymer; and I was starting the time-consuming demands of my 0 level year.
*
Before our loose-knit gang finally dissolved I saw quite a bit of Sam, together with another friend, Ralph, who was in the same year as me at Isleworth. One reason why Ralph and I got on was that neither of us was very good at football and we didn't always take it very seriously. I used to describe myself as “a scheming wing half”, the scheming consisting largely of keeping out of the way of the ball. When our side took the game into the opponents' half, I would keep back in a defensive position, and when we were defending I would hang around the half way line, supposedly waiting for a loose ball to be booted forwards. This ploy gave Ralph and me the leisure to lob bits of mud at each other, and these occasional mud fights enlivened many a game, for us if no one else. It also gave me the opportunity to try out a sub-Wildean epigram that I’d just coined: “If a game’s worth playing, it’s worth playing badly.” Ivor, though, who was a good player, was often understandably irritated at our lack of commitment.
What reinforced the bonding of Sam, Ralph and me was the discovery that we shared the same sarcastic sense of humour, which in practice we exercised mostly against each other. At its root was a shared view of ourselves that later, in a spirit of celebratory self-flagellation, led to the establishment of The Failures Club. We were the founder members. In fact, we were its only members. Its origin lay in a moment of candour when each of us acknowledged that we were total cowards, physical and moral. Give us a challenge, of whatever kind, and we would duck it. If we ever had to stand up and be counted, we would remain seated. Above all, should anyone advance towards us with hostile intent, we would run a mile.
By happy coincidence, we all had a tie with the same boring check pattern and so we decided to make this the club tie. In order to render it more definably our own and to bear coded witness to the chief characteristic of the club members, we proposed to get our mothers to sew a large yellow dot in the middle. Sadly perhaps, I don't think we actually got round to doing this. Our sense of being failures permeated every aspect of our lives including school, despite the fact that Sam and I were doing reasonably well. But in our eyes this in no way disqualified us from club membership. I felt, for example, that just as a boxer is only as good as his last fight, so in a similar way, despite being good at English, I was only as good as my last essay. If I received a rebuke for one that wasn't up to standard, this was not a challenge or stimulus to do better next time; it meant merely that I had been found out at last.
Predictably, much of our talk at that time was about girls, and of that a large part consisted inevitably of our actual or anticipated failures with them. We were products of 1950s single-sex schools, and none of us had a sister - nor, for that matter, did anyone else we knew - so girls were wholly unknown territory. Despite the lack of any actual contact with them till we were about fourteen or fifteen, we were fully prepared for that first encounter when it came - which is to say, we were braced and ready for the inevitable brush-off. My fantasy love life wasn’t doing much better either. The diary entry for Sunday 26th September 1954, when I was fourteen, ends with the note, “A.H. married.” Behind its laconic brevity lay the tragic recognition that she was for ever out of my reach, it was all over between us, and however long I lived I would never now be able to marry Audrey Hepburn.
“Do you think girls spend as much time talking about blokes as we do talking about them?” we asked ourselves on one occasion. The question answered itself. “Of course not. No chance.” The difference between the sexes, as we understood it, was that, unlike females who were mostly preoccupied with romance, males were sexual beings. This conviction followed with seemingly irrefutable logic from the fact that males got erections, often at inconvenient moments, whereas females were not similarly burdened. It was obvious really as soon as you thought about it.
Our views were probably typical of the time, and they still existed in the early part of the next decade before the Sixties as a whole achieved its slightly misleading reputation for uncomplicated sexual equality and freedom. When I got to university in 1960, one of my new friends who was considerably more worldly and experienced passed on his view that, “Nature rouses man but man rouses woman,” a formulation redolent of the influence of D H Lawrence, then a powerful influence in English literature departments. Even though my friend hadn’t got her pregnant, he fulfilled his ideological destiny by marrying his girl friend at the end of his second year. Unsurprisingly perhaps, the marriage didn’t last and they split up three years later.
Back in
1956, when the main political events were the invasions of
.......
Ivor at 17 and 22
These matters were becoming of pressing concern, because after taking my 0 levels in the summer of 1956 I joined Sam and Ralph at Heston's premier dance academy, the “Margot Sampson School of Dancing.” Here we were introduced to the quickstep, waltz and foxtrot, with the enticing prospect of moving on to the Latin American stuff later if we showed promise. I had little interest in dance for its own sake, but I had been assured it was an indispensable social skill, and there seemed no other way of meeting girls.
*
So where was Ivor while all this was happening? Not at Margot Sampson's, that’s certain. He expressed no interest, and I don’t think he and I ever discussed it. By this time we had different sets of friends. He'd left school the year before, and his life was moving on. With hindsight, it is easy to assume that the reason he wasn't interested in learning to dance was that he had no interest in girls, but that was not self-evident at the time. He had joined a cycling club during the period between leaving school and being called up for National Service. Although he didn't talk about the club much, one thing I noted (it was the only thing that might have induced me to join) was that it included both sexes. Since attending dancing classes was only a means to an end so far as I was concerned, the cycling club, for all I knew, may have been serving the same function for Ivor: same end, different means. We didn't get many letters in our house, but he received one or two whose handwriting on the envelope was clearly new, and when Mum pressed him, he conceded they were from a girl in the cycling club. There were only a few, and they stopped after a while, and so sadly, from Mum's point of view, nothing came of the relationship.
Ivor was not remotely camp. Or rather, he may well have had a separate camp persona, but if so I never saw it. One reason for this would have been his life-long obsessive need to keep his homosexuality hidden, a desire that may well lie behind a quotation that I came across after his death, jotted down on the back of a notebook he kept during the 70s in which he had been writing his responses to books he was reading. The fact that he took the trouble to copy it out is significant, suggesting that this may have been how he saw himself. It is both poignant and haunting: “Like many such people, he was basically an extremely kind person, sheltering under a protective cover of bitchiness. He understood loneliness and its problems better than most, because he had been born with secrets, which had blossomed within him in the fullness of time.”
One of
his colleagues at Air
My guess
is that he was situated somewhere between gay and straight, though tending more
in the former direction, and that his sexual orientation was finally determined
during his time in National Service. Its
aim was to turn a bunch of reluctant eighteen or nineteen year olds into a
disciplined unit, capable in theory, and in practice too, of fighting in
war. It started with six weeks Basic
Training, which was intended to be hard, and according to Ivor it was. At the end of this period, the National Servicemen
were then dispersed to their new units or regiments and never saw each other
again. Friendships made in the intensity
of those six weeks were therefore broken.
When Ivor came home on his first leave he spoke about one friend in
particular. He didn't tell us much, but
it was the fact that he did so at all that was striking. At one level, it seemed to be the
understandable, but manageable, regret that anyone might feel at the loss of a
good mate, someone whom you had got on really well with, and then had to accept
that he had passed out of your life for good.
None of this made that strong an impact on me at the time. Ivor never paraded his emotions, which made
it easy to miss its significance. Only
much later did it occur to me that there might have been more to it than
Ivor in Nation Service
uniform, 1958. This was Mum's favourite photo,
and unlike all the others which were endlessly rotated, it was kept on
permanent display.
transient regret, and the reason is that nothing else he said about his time in National Service hung around in my memory in the same way. What Ivor had told us somehow witnessed to a strength of feeling that had nevertheless been largely suppressed. There was something about it that made it closer to grief than just sadness or regret. It came to me that, maybe, he had fallen in love, and that he was bereft.
Chapter 17
Ivor and I made the break from home at roughly the same time, he to do his National Service, me to university. But at the end of his two years in the army he was back once again with our parents in Heston. Even though his two years of army life had left him deeply unsettled, it was a while before home life became so intolerable that he too moved out for good.
Whereas Ivor had no choice about National Service, going to university was entirely my decision. In order to get their slightly grudging acquiescence to this proposal I emphasised to my parents that I’d been granted three years’ leave of absence, so there was nothing to stop me resuming my civil service career after I graduated. Which was true as far as it went, but I'd already told the Home Office that I very likely wouldn’t be coming back, and the prospect of being trapped again in Heston was unthinkable. When the time came, something else would surely turn up.
In fact
I’d mostly enjoyed my civil service years, which were passed in what was then
known as the Aliens Department, the rebarbative title being a fair indication
of the spirit in which its affairs were conducted. Most of my time was spent in a unit known by
its initials, DMG. This was the
Deportation Machinery Group, which operated out of one small room and consisted
of a Higher Executive Officer, three Executive Officers of whom I was one, and
a Clerical Officer. That was it. At the end of the 1950s, when admittedly the
number of foreigners in the
Most
cases were routine, some even sad, such as that of the Polish ex-soldier who
had come here after the war and was deported back to his home country because,
in his loneliness in the farm in Cumbria where he worked, he had formed too
close a bond with some of the sheep in his charge. Occasionally some lively files replete with
newspaper clippings from the News of the World passed across my desk,
the most memorable of which were the ones for the notorious
Before leaving for university I decided to make use of the only opportunity I was going to have to look at the file for T S Eliot, but disappointingly, when I called it up from the archives most of it had been destroyed. All that remained was his naturalisation application, and of that the only remotely interesting bit was some official’s sniffy comment that Mr Eliot seemed unable to follow clear Home Office instructions about how to fill in the form.
The case that over the years has stayed with me rather more vividly, though, concerned the application from a German woman for permission to come here to join her lover, an English Catholic priest. At that time the Home Office had a reasonably liberal policy on foreign mistresses, the main criteria being the stability of the relationship and the hopeful expectation that the mistress wouldn’t end up as a charge on public funds. But in the eyes of those dealing with this application, the situation was not only unique, no precedents being available to help formulate a response, it was also fundamentally deplorable, simply unacceptably scandalous. As the case file was referred ever higher from Executive Officer to Higher and then Senior Executive Officer, the view universally expressed was that the application should be refused. Eventually it reached an Assistant Secretary with a reputation for independence, eccentricity and lunch-time drinking, who in a long detailed minute presented the contrary view, supporting her claim to come here to be with her lover. His main argument was summed up in the sentence, “I really do not see that it is part of Home Office responsibility to safeguard the celibacy of the Roman Catholic priesthood”, and he added, “My wife says, why we don’t let her in and keep him out, but sadly that is not an option.” At the end he wrote, “I apologise for the length of this minute and the delay in submitting it, but as Gwendolen says in ‘The Importance of Being Earnest’, one should always have something sensational to read on the train.” The file was then passed up to the Assistant Under Secretary of State who nodded it through.
A mixture
of motives lay behind my decision to go to university. At one level it was an opportunity to extend
my education - to know when you've found your intellectual ceiling by banging
your head against it, as one of my teachers put it. More significant though less high-minded was
the fact it would also get me back into some warmly familiar grooves. My final three years at school had consisted
of not much more than working for one exam after another, and a part of me
wanted to return to this routine as to a drug on which I had become unhealthily
dependent. Being out of the educational
loop by this stage and knowing nothing about Bristol’s academic reputation - or
even whether there was much difference between one red-brick university and
another - I chose it for no better reason than that Sam had gone there the year
before to study law, and that was good enough for me. At the interview for my chosen course of
English and Philosophy it was made clear that applying only to one university
was unusual and imprudent, but fortunately they accepted me anyway.
Theoretically
I could have applied for admission to one of the
Going to
This conviction was rooted in two separate thoughts. What makes childhood unhappiness particularly hard to bear is that you can neither change it nor walk away. In adult life there are always choices, however difficult. At least that is the theory, though in the case of Dad and, later on, Ivor the pressures on them to accept their situation rather than try to change it were overwhelmingly strong. The second thought was really a resolution for the future: it was the determination never to find myself in an emotional situation that even remotely resembled the one with my mother that I had left behind in Heston. It hardly needs saying that this teeth-gritting, defensive posture had certain disadvantages when it came to negotiating relationships with women. Being an immature twenty year old, I couldn't see this very clearly. But at the very least, even if I didn't quite know what I wanted, I knew what I didn't want, and that was a start.
*
With adolescence behind us, Ivor and I evolved different ways of dealing with the memories of our shared past. As mentioned earlier, I had always felt it better to be less rather than more deceived and to accept things as they were, regardless of how uncomfortable that proved.
I’m not sure now that this stance has as much to be said for it as I once thought. It easily slides into permanent low-key pessimism, which, regardless of whether that corresponds to the way things mostly turn out, doesn’t have much to recommend it as a principle for getting through life. Maybe one argument in its favour is the often-made claim that at least a pessimist, unlike an optimist, isn’t always setting himself up for disappointment. Or in Dad’s re-formulation, "Blessed is he who expecteth naught, for surely he shall not be disappointed." On this matter at least, I must have soaked up Dad’s influence more fully than Ivor, because it became obvious that he was choosing a different way of accommodating those early memories. In order to minimise their effects I believe he set out consciously to put them behind him and think about them as little as possible. In effect, a form of denial.
One day, talking on the phone we somehow got on to our early days, and I quoted the first line of Philip Larkin’s possibly best-known poem, “This Be The Verse.” Ivor seemed intrigued, partly at least because it hardly corresponded to the sort of thing he expected from poetry. He asked how it went on, so I recited the rest:
They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.
But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another's throats.
Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don't have any kids yourself.
When I finished, Ivor asked if I could make a photocopy of it and send it to him. He then added, almost as an afterthought, “It doesn't really apply to us, though, does it?” The obvious response was, “Hang on, if it has nothing to do with us, why do you want a copy?” But I'd been taken aback and could think of nothing to say. We didn't talk about the poem again. Nevertheless, the copy I'd sent him was still among his papers after his death.
A similar incident occurred on one of his last visits, a couple of years before he was killed. By now we had mostly come to an unspoken agreement to leave the past alone. But on this occasion his reply to whatever I’d said about it consisted of the startling summing up: “It wasn't really that bad.” I couldn't contain a brief outburst of incoherent exasperation. “For pity's sake, Ive, it was that bad. It was worse than that bad.” He didn't respond, and, as so often before, we didn’t pursue it. It was the last time that we talked about the past. Even though I found this exchange frustrating, it encapsulated rather well the different ways he and I were still dealing with that period of our lives.
There is only one test of denial: does it work? For Ivor, much of the time, it did. He was generally cheerful; he had a capacity for enjoyment; he made the most of his life, if not throughout then at least for a good part. My guess is that, when he moved out of Berkeley Waye, he felt he was also putting his past behind him, a belief that could only have been strengthened by Mum's death in 1971. Now at last he must have felt himself free. Denial took the form of trying to finesse his past, in an attempt to render his childhood if not wonderfully happy, then at least “not really that bad.” But even in that limited claim he was kidding himself, and the final effect of his denial proved catastrophic.