A Life in Questions

Quite apart from the awful loss of life, the war deprived a generation of young men and women of the opportunity to enjoy their youth. I imagine the period after the end of hostilities to have been the happiest time of my father’s life – the navy then included great numbers of men who would never have joined in peacetime, there were endless practical tasks, the company of shipmates, and – by contrast with his wartime service – freedom from the prospect of imminent death. But what was he like as a Royal Navy officer? In the time I knew and tried to understand him, the blunt, salty humour of the wardroom always seemed his natural environment, and the reports from his commanding officers talk of him as a cheery mess companion, with a well-developed sense of the absurd. Another report, though, worried that he was sometimes too hard on his men. Whether this was because not so long ago he had been one of them is only speculation, of course.

None of the reports answers the great enigma of my father’s early life: why did he decide to give it all up? There is no one left to ask. Perhaps it was because his war service in the ranks meant he was older than most of the other ‘snotties’ commissioned with him. Did someone tell him that his late start meant he’d never make it to the very top? I have a suspicion that marriage and the fairly rapid arrival of three children made him think he ought to be spending more time at home. It vaguely troubles me, thinking about it, that I cannot imagine him feeling that he wanted to be at home more. Whatever the reason, it was a disastrous decision.

Though he continued to play the sailor all his life (the naval cry of ‘Two, six – heave’ accompanied any manual labour in the family, such as pushing the car), in 1954 he resigned his commission, bought a motor scooter and took a job as a typewriter salesman. Just about my earliest memory is of being woken by a commotion one night, slipping out of bed and creeping downstairs to see my father standing in the kitchen in a pool of blood. The back of his pale gabardine coat was stained a dark brown, and Mother was helping him take off his peaked crash helmet. When she succeeded, more gouts of blood fell onto the stone floor. Accidents can happen to anyone, but the contrast between this bloody spectacle and the glamorous wartime figure I had imagined in uniform, sword and even a cape, seemed for years to demonstrate the unhappy consequences of the decision he had made. My abiding feeling is that leaving the navy was the biggest mistake of his life. We cannot pretend to be what we are not, and my father was by no stretch of the imagination a family man. Like many others who never had a chance to enjoy their youth, being a sailor was his métier. He should probably never have pretended to be anything else.

Whether or not this was the reason, he had an appalling temper. He was accustomed to chains of command, and the merest suggestion of insubordination would send him into a fury, during which he’d grab the nearest hard object with which to beat whoever had provoked him. I was thrashed with sticks, shoes, cricket stumps, cricket bats or the flat of his hand. In the most intense row – or at least the one I recall most intensely – he sent me to my room for disobeying him, and when I stood my ground, he tried to drag me upstairs. Within a minute or so all that was left of the shirt I had been wearing – it was a black-and-white check – was the collar.

It is in the nature of childhood that we only know what we know. The phrase ‘dysfunctional family’ could certainly be applied to ours. But then, it describes just about every family in the land. Did I love my father? My feelings ranged from resentment to passionate hatred. It was not a sophisticated reaction, but I was too young for sophisticated reactions. Now, I see a damaged man. Many years later my younger sister told me that she had once walked in on him lying on the floor of the bathroom, sobbing. He asked her to leave him alone, which she did at once. It was a traumatic moment for both of them, and was never mentioned again.

Ours was perhaps not so different from many other families of the time, with their largely uncomplaining mothers making do and mending, and insisting that if you didn’t eat what was put in front of you for supper you’d get it again for breakfast. There were certainly moments of tenderness – the Saturday-morning visits to Woolworths in the local High Street with Dad to buy twisted little greaseproof-paper bags of salted peanuts, the times he’d help us build model warships, or his snorting laughter at The Goon Show on the radio. Jenny, his youngest child, seemed to bring out the best in him, and he could arrive home with posies of violets or anemones for her. But he could also change in an instant.

He had lost his own father, to whom, according to his sister, he had been devoted, when he was only eight years old. The death had apparently plunged the family into a financial crisis – an eccentric aunt once told me that even when he was on leave during the darkest days of the war, my father never went home because he had become convinced that his mother had decided to remarry for money. Although he was educated at a school in Bradford established for the sons of Methodist ministers, he had an absurd affectation of pronouncing selected words as he imagined Southern posh people pronounced them – so a waistcoat he always called a ‘wiskett’, and a hotel ‘an ’otel’. In material terms he had ‘married well’ – although Mum was certainly not posh, her father being a self-made man who spoke with flat Yorkshire vowels and talked of ‘having a luke in the buke’. With the marriage came a cushion of prosperity, but I have a strong feeling – though without any evidence to support it – that Dad later came deeply to resent the fact that it was his father-in-law who paid our school fees, and we all believed that the house was in Mum’s name.

Certainly, my childhood impression was of a man incapable of expressing affection, concerned with keeping up appearances and permanently on the edge of an explosion which might well be expressed in physical violence. In my late teens he was taken into hospital for some undignified operation on his bum. When I went to visit him I had only been there three minutes when he said, ‘You can go now. You’ve done your duty.’ He understood duty a lot better than he understood affection. Perhaps as an adult I might have come to forgive and forget and understand, but by then he had left England for the South Pacific.

It had been a wartime romance. Mum was working as an ambulance driver at Grantley Hall, an enormous seventeenth-century mansion near Ripon in North Yorkshire, requisitioned for use as a convalescent home for wounded servicemen. Dad’s sister Margaret was also working there, and it seems to have been through her that Joan and Keith met. It was an on-off courtship which lasted for several years before finally leading, in 1949, to marriage. Shortly before she died Aunt Margaret told me that Dad had said that if he didn’t marry Joan he probably wouldn’t marry anyone. Joan was twenty-nine when they married, he was twenty-seven, and the relationship seems to have been troubled from the start. Although they did not separate until over twenty years later, there had been some sort of tension on their honeymoon in the Scilly Isles, when, as Mother told us later, she felt Dad paid too much attention to a Wren whom they had met on a ferry between the islands. Children rarely imagine their parents being troubled by sexual feelings, but the incident clearly still rankled with Mum decades later.

Dad’s elder sister, our maiden aunt Kathleen, whom we visited many times, remained loyal to him to the end. She lived in a tall Victorian house in a leafy corner of Richmond in south-west London – or, as Richmondites then insisted, ‘Richmond, Surrey’. In practice she lived in two rooms on the ground floor, with the rest of the place let out to various slightly desiccated characters, from Sheila, a French teacher who rented the basement, to Mr Lewis, a bald, plummy chap who occupied rooms on the top floor, accompanied at weekends by his younger friend from the Isle of Dogs. Kathleen had bought the house after the war – a bargain, apparently, because of bomb damage. There were ancient Persian rugs on the floors, a payphone in the entrance hall, and extraordinary pieces of furniture she prided herself on having bought from junk shops and then repaired. Some of them were rather beautiful, and others just rather odd.

Long residence in Richmond had stripped Aunty Kathleen’s voice of any Yorkshire twang, and she spoke like a duchess slightly perplexed at the way the butler had laid the table. She was one of that great tribe of solitary women, stalwarts of clubs and voluntary organisations, whose representatives you could find in every corner of Britain in those days. I discovered from one of the nurses at the home in which she spent her last couple of years that there had once been a young man called Albert, but he been killed during the war. There were legions of women like her, forced to make their lonely way in the world, acquiring the necessary no-nonsense bustle that made it possible, but somehow always carrying a slight whiff of sadness about them. Several years ago, when I was giving a talk in Cheltenham about the English identity crisis, a middle-aged woman in the audience asked, ‘Have you thought about how much the problem of English identity is bound up in the disappearance of the maiden aunt?’ I hadn’t. But she was definitely on to something. Though they were often sniggered at, these women bereaved in youth carried forward an idea of nationality that is very hard to locate in any other group of individuals. With my mother’s unmarried sister Muriel, and Dad’s two unmarried sisters Margaret and Kate, I had a total of three maiden aunts.

Aunt Kate was accident-prone. At some point she had broken her right leg, and her injuries never healed properly, so that every time she went outside the shin shone through her hosiery in a lurid shade of purple and black. Once she somehow managed to track down a distant relative in training for the Catholic priesthood and arranged to meet him at the entrance to the coffee shop in Brown Muff, the great department store in the centre of Bradford, the nearest city to his seminary. As the young man shook her hand she felt the elastic in the waistband of her knickers break, and they began to slide down her thighs. She strode towards the table she had her eye on for tea, and with ‘Just a minute’ to the putative priest at her side, reached up under her skirt, grabbed her pants and stepped out of them. That sort of thing was always happening to her, like the seven attempts she made to pass her driving test at the age of fifty-something, at least one of which included her reversing her primrose-yellow Triumph Herald into a six-foot-deep hole in the road, watched by half a dozen astonished labourers. She was wonderful.

When we were children she often came to stay, taking us all on walks which somehow always ended at an ice-cream parlour. Once a year she would meet us off the train at Paddington and take us to the Boat Show at Earl’s Court, where we ogled floating gin palaces and she considered various labour-saving devices she might install on Kirsty, her horribly unstable little cabin cruiser moored on the Thames. She usually decided that she really didn’t need them, and our excursions on the boat retained their fish-paste-sandwich flavour to the end of our teens. Mercifully, none of us had been on board when her previous boat, Lorac, caught fire and sank – an event indelibly linked in my mind to Sir Francis Drake’s ‘singeing of the King of Spain’s beard’ at Cádiz in 1587, which we must have just tackled in a history lesson. Kirsty met her end one day when Aunt Kate asked me to row across the Thames to the mooring and bale her out after several days of heavy rain – Kate had broken her arm, and couldn’t do it herself. On board the boat I lifted the decking and was baling away when a vast pleasure steamer passed by, sending out a great wash. I lost my balance, stuck my foot through the bottom of the hull and unleashed a Buster Keaton-style fountain in the cockpit, after a few minutes of which Kirsty settled on the bottom of the river.

None of us quite knew what Aunty Kathleen had done before the war, during which she served as a nurse. Apart from the Richmond and Twickenham Times, which she read from cover to cover, mainly for the items of staggering unimportance reported as if they were the invasion of the Sudetenland, the only other publication in the house was the Draper’s Record. In the 1960s she acquired an old barber’s shop which she turned into the ‘Kate Paxman Boutique’, appealing, she explained, to ‘the sort of women who’d like to shop at Harrods, but can’t afford to’. (Harrods at the time was still considered a smart shop.) The business seemed to do all right – there must have been some shopkeeping gene on that side of the family, because Aunt Kate’s stepsister Margaret kept a haberdashery shop in Selby.

In her last few years poor Aunt Kate developed a brain tumour, which triggered what she tried to laugh off as ‘the shakes’. She endured the pointless interventions of brain surgeons with a stoicism which humbles me even now.

In early 1957 – the year that the Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan declared that ‘most of our people have never had it so good’, my father took a job with a steel company and uprooted the family from Hampshire to the Midlands. With help from Mother’s parents we moved into a tall, gloomy house in the Lickey Hills near Bromsgrove in Worcestershire, alongside what had once been a main road to Birmingham. High Lea was an austere brick Victorian building, which must once have dominated the hillside on which it stood – it had the stamp of a man who’d done well in Black Country metal-bashing and would rather like people to know. It still had tumbledown stables, haylofts and garages, a kennel block and a paved yard. There were acres of garden, paddock and orchard, a vile-smelling septic tank at the bottom of the adjoining fields, and an enormous lime tree on the central lawn. Another lawn surrounded a circular ornamental pond which was drained after my infant sister had been discovered one day lying almost drowned among the water lilies. There was also a tennis court, the surface of which had been wrecked by grazing horses.

Suburbia was creeping in upon the metal-basher’s mansion, and the land around the big house was increasingly occupied by infill housing. It was a time when living standards were rising, which showed itself in the new religion of do-it-yourself. The Messiah was Barry Bucknell, a dull man in striped tie and cardigan who seemed never to be off television, instructing his disciples how to tear down Victorian cornices or ruin the interesting features of doors by nailing hardboard all over them. Every man aspired to a bench and a vice, and Dad was soon sending away for kits to make glass-fronted bookcases and a not-very-attractive workbox in which Mum could keep her wool, thread, buttons and stuff. Dad was not a very effective devotee – he seemed to hammer his thumb a lot, and he didn’t look after his tools particularly well. A corner of our vegetable garden had been sold off to another DIY enthusiast who built an entire new house which, although he moved his family in, never seemed to be finished – the man lost interest, and settled for living among piles of bricks and timber with a big black dog called Bimbo which didn’t do much except fart.

Like most houses of the time, High Lea had no central heating, and the place rang to constant cries of ‘Close the door!’ Once we had stopped toddling, all the children were given domestic chores, the worst of which was bringing coal up from the basement. Every few months the coalman would empty jute sacks of coal down a chute which ran from the front garden into the cellar. The task of shovelling it into a scuttle for delivery to the sitting room was unpleasant, not only because the place was cold and damp and lit by a single lightbulb, but because it was infested with frogs. When you struck the shovel into the heap at the bottom of the chute something black and sparkling with coal dust was liable to leap up at you.

That aside, High Lea was a terrific place. There were endless war games among the ruined outbuildings, and den-building and camp-outs in the garden with my closest friends, Paul Davies, who lived with the smelly black dog in the permanently unfinished house in the sold-off corner of the garden, and Gerald Mullen, the son of an Irish assembly-line worker at the Longbridge car plant a few miles away. When, a year or so after our arrival, we recorded a message on the new-fangled reel-to-reel tape recorder Grandpa had bought, my brothers and I sounded as if we had been born and bred in the Black Country.

My mother’s mother, who had been born in a Glasgow slum and escaped by joining the Salvation Army, once told me of Mum’s insistence that ‘Only the best was good enough for you children.’ In that belief my brothers and I were sent to different schools from my friends Paul and Gerald. For a couple of years we attended The Mount, a local pre-preparatory school of which I remember little, which probably means it was a happy place. The only clear memories I have are of my youngest brother reciting verse after verse of Hiawatha from memory over tea, and an occasion on which he was cornered by a gang of girls who pinned him to the ground so that their leader – now doubtless a highly respectable grandmother – could clamber on top to kiss him. On our first day of term there we returned home to find that Mum had given birth to a baby girl who would be named Genevieve – which, after Jeremy, Giles and James, at least had the advantage that when someone was to be shouted at, there was a reasonable chance that the first syllable might come out right.

The next stage of 1950s private education required ambitious parents to commit their children to the care of a bunch of drunks, pederasts and cashiered army officers at a local preparatory school. There is said to have been a question posed in the New Statesman of the time: ‘Has anyone ever met a sane prep school master?’ I do not know whether any was found, but there were certainly very few at the Lickey Hills Preparatory School.

The place had originally been built as another Victorian mansion for a successful Birmingham businessman, and over the years had had various classrooms added on to the original structure. The headmaster was – or appeared to a small boy – a tall man with straight brown hair swept back from a face which seemed to have been sculpted from sandstone. He wore cavalry twill trousers and tweed jackets, and turned an exceptional shade of violet when angry, which was much of the time. When he was in this state you could see the pulses in his temples throbbing. I imagine something had happened to him in the war.

But then, something had happened to more or less every grown-up in the war. Colonel Collinson, who taught us French (more precisely, he taught us how to make an invisible margin down the middle of the page, on either side of which, at some vague date in the future, we might perhaps write French words and their English counterparts) was missing a finger, and Mr Thomas, our gym master, was minus an eye – if you asked him nicely he’d pop out his glass replacement and let you have a look inside the socket. It was hard to imagine Mr Steer, the classics master, in uniform, since he found it hard enough to puff his way up the three steps into our classroom, pinching out his roll-up at the door with mahogany-brown fingers and slipping the dog-end into a matchbox which then went into the pocket of his astonishingly filthy houndstooth jacket. There were a few older masters who might, I suppose, have seen action in the First World War, and the occasional young man about to go to university or seminary – the only thing I learned from them was that the Prayer of Humble Access in the communion service was ‘almost certainly blasphemous’.

The sole women in this odd world were the headmaster’s long-suffering little wife and the school matron, a thin, beaky figure who bustled about the place in dark-blue uniform and starched nurse’s cap, dispensing ‘malt’ to boys who weren’t growing quickly enough, ‘tonic’ to boys who were growing too fast, and laxatives to anyone who hesitated in answering her questions about their bowel movements. Since the lavatories were housed in an outbuilding which regularly froze up in winter, daily bowel movements were low on the list of priorities. Matron also supervised the compulsory once-a-week bath.

Why did our parents surrender us to the care of such a bizarre institution? The short – and correct – answer is that they thought they were buying us a head-start in life. Neither Paul nor Gerald, my friends at home, seemed to be especially disadvantaged by being spared the experience – though it was hard to tell when we were playing war games or cooking bannocks on the ovens we made in the woods out of old bricks and a sheet of corrugated iron.

Slowly but surely, though, the chasm widened. There were new friends among the fellow inmates of the Lickey Hills Preparatory School, and they were the sons of doctors and architects. Which, I suppose, was one of the things my family was paying for. British class divisions were much deeper then (though the subject is still endlessly written about in newspapers and magazines, as if nothing has changed). The truth is that, for those who can afford it, education has been for generations a way of translating the children of one class into the adolescents of another. The parents made things and generated wealth. Their children emerged from education for careers in the professions. On the way, they have been hived off from the mainstream. Few of us ever recover. The obvious solution is to make the education provided by the state so good that no one but a lunatic would want to go elsewhere.

My parents’ pockets weren’t deep enough for me to feel entirely at ease with the boys who genuinely belonged to the professional classes. One day, at my friend Philip Kelly’s house, I saw the milk delivery. It included yoghurt, a substance which had never darkened the door of High Lea – or 262 Old Birmingham Road, as it was less portentously known – and of which I had indeed never heard. Phil’s father was an architect. My own father’s sally into sophistication was to bring home an avocado pear one day. We were all rather baffled by it.

Life at High Lea had a predictable routine. In the morning, after a teaspoonful of cod-liver oil followed by another of viscous orange-juice concentrate – both of them provided, I think, by the National Health Service – my brothers and I set off in our grey shorts, blue Aertex shirts, navy blazers and caps to walk the mile to school. Occasionally we were waylaid by other boys, notably the son of the local butcher, who once boasted to us that he could hold a piece of liver in his hand for longer than any of us could imagine. Sometimes the encounters got physical and we had to run for it. On the way home in the evening we might stop by the post office to see if we could extract any forgotten coins by pressing button B in the telephone box, money we would then spend on sweets – the penny chew was particularly popular.

The sixty or so boys in the school ate together in one great dining room. There was tea from an enormous urn, at break there was a small bottle of milk (again provided, I think, by the state) and chunks of bread coated in beef dripping – delicious when heavily sprinkled with salt. Lunch was generally a stew or some variety of shrivelled offal – liver or kidneys or whatever was cheap that week, I suppose. The evening meal was usually something like tinned pilchards in tomato sauce, washed down with soapy-tasting tea from The Urn.

For the last year or so of my time at prep school I was expected to live in as a boarder, the final enrolment into the repressed self-reliance of what the middle classes took to be ‘a decent education’. We slept in dormitories of four or five beds apiece, in which the only visible contact with home was the rug we had each been given by our mothers. Mine was in some odd artificial fibre, striped in yellow, grey and white – testament to the family’s unfamiliarity with boarding-school life: everyone else had some species of woollen tartan, sometimes claiming it to be that of the family clan. Sunday mornings were spent writing letters home. This was done under the eye of a member of staff, and followed a strict formula: