1953 in My Father’s House iii

Doors opening and closing

Breakfast arrangements in my father’s house were a surprising affair. The first person to arrive was his youngest brother, my uncle Jumbo, so called in his childhood because he had been small with rather large ears. And the name stuck.

Uncle Jumbo was a man of boundless energy, up with the dawn chorus and keen to be of service in any way he could to his oldest brother who he revered and who tried to keep him out of mischief – which I discovered from Marco meant some notable scrapes when under the influence. Every morning Jumbo drove to a farm on the outskirts of Brighton in which my father had a share, and at 7am promptly arrived with freshly-laid eggs.

There he was in all weathers the first on the doorstep of 55. He would leave the eggs with Mrs Ash, then mount the stairs to my father’s bedroom. After a conversation between my uncle and father, Jumbo would go downstairs to the dining-room where he would give his breakfast order through the hatch to Mrs Ash, or Fay.

It seemed you could have what you liked for breakfast. It was like the hotels my mother, brother and I had stayed in on our trip to Rhodesia the year before.

‘You mean I can have scrambled eggs, or boiled eggs, or fried eggs?’ I asked, bemused.

Fay, who’d come into the dining room and placed me to the left of my father’s empty seat at the head of the table, nodded.

‘What about grilled tomatoes on toast?’

‘Would you like them with mushrooms, with sausages, or both? Marco tends to have all three, with a fried egg.’ Marco wasn’t down yet.

I couldn’t make up my mind.

‘Perhaps you’d like kippers, or liver and bacon? Your father likes that.’

‘Um – do you make French toast?’ Rachel used to make the lightest, crispiest French toast.

‘French toast it will be then.’

Tomorrow, I thought, I’m going to ask for a poached egg, she didn’t mention that. I couldn’t get over so much choice. It was more like a restaurant than a house!

The next person to arrive was a business associate of my father’s, a slick dark-haired man with, I think a moustache, called Jack Sykes. Jack Sykes, I grew to understand, was someone my father had property dealings with; he would bring land to my father’s attention to develop, or a consortium ready to do business with him. He was a good sounding-board, apparently, with an ear to the ground. His morning visits kept my father informed more immediately than the local paper did.

After a while he too would descend the stairs to give his breakfast order.

Third to arrive was my father’s second-in-command at the Building Society, Harry Leonard. All this would take place before 8am. My father sitting up in bed with his tray on his knee, his fresh-squeezed orange juice, his cooked breakfast, his wedges of brown toast, his pot of tea, his three papers and large amount of post. Before 8am he had showered, shaved, looked in in us in the dining-room –

What are you planning to do with your day, Jo… Marco? – that sort of thing, wandered through the garden, gathered his papers into his briefcase, to be driven off by Griff in whichever car he favoured at the time to the Building Society’s Brighton headquarters. At the office, I was to discover, he had a daily manicure before he started the days’ work.

Breakfast was business-like. The three men who regularly sat at the breakfast table at 55 had different relationships with Fay and Mrs Ash, and cordial though not friendly ones with each other. Only Jumbo took time to chat with Marco and me. At weekends my father joined us. He read the papers and his post, only stopping if he caught something interesting being said.

The hatch to the kitchen was his delight and curse. When I arrived he had recently had an electric door installed. He would demonstrate it to anyone who came to the house. Frequently it got stuck at a half-way position, and nothing would get it moving again. Then the aperture became too small to put things through. He would become enormously exercised by the door’s intransigence. Like it was pure cheek to defy him. Then we would take our orders into the kitchen and Fay, in her starched white apron and cap and black dress, would bustle in carrying the plates all the way round, muttering about how much more simple it has been when you just opened the hatch door by hand!

My father also had a bell under the table to call for the staff when he was entertaining. The bell was hidden under the carpet, which appealed to his sense of fun. All was okay till extra leaves were put into the dining-table. Then from where he sat at the end of the table he couldn’t reach the bell. Sometimes at meals were people he wanted to impress. (Though I wouldn’t have known it then, I think he was always conscious underneath of his family’s pinched circumstances: after his father’s early death, he’d had to leave school at fourteen and was self-educated.) A situation like this, not finding the bell with his foot, made him huff and puff. He would deploy me and Marco to crawl under the table to find the bell to press it for him. This didn’t give quite the effect he wanted. It made him uncomfortable and irritated. ‘What the d….!’ But the guests seemed more amused than anything.

His GP, Sam Caller, came regularly to Sunday lunch. He was a bachelor, it was explained, and my father thought it important to invite him over otherwise he’d be at home on his own.

Hospitality was lavish. Years later, I went to the north London flat of old friends and fellow campaigners of my father’s, Joe and Phoebe Pole, to interview them about their memories of him. By then the Poles were elderly and frail, and independent living was proving a struggle. Over a somewhat rudimentary lunch what they reminisced about initially was not the campaign trails they’d shared with Lewis, the Aldermaston Marches, the speeches at the Labour Conferences, the foiling of a Mosley rally in Brighton in 1934 by playing ‘La Marseillaise’ at full volume through a loudspeaker from Lewis’ office to drown out the speaker’s words. None of these scenes, or similar. No, what they remembered first, wistfully, was the generous scale of hospitality at No 55 … oh those meals. They remembered Mrs Ask and Fay and smiles broke over their drawn faces.

By then that part of my father’s activities, along with the rest, was consigned to history.

For a child, arriving from the informal suburbs of Cape Town, Mrs Ash and Fay represented something different. They were the arbitrators, the chatelaines, the gateposts to life in the house. After my father departed to work they held sole sway.

With my father gone, the men at the breakfast table disbursed, Marco not in sight, probably off with the one or two friends he had in the vicinity, I had to figure out where to spend my day. And crucially if it was too cold – as it mostly was that first week of January to be outside– inside the house, where to spend it?

Sticking with Enid Blyton I wandered into the sitting-room. There were two sofas covered with green velvet facing each other on either side of the unlit fire. I eased myself down in the middle of one of them, attempting to get comfortable. The seats were deep, my feet didn’t touch the ground. The sunroom at one end of the sitting room with its cheerier flowered cushioned garden chairs, red Azaleas and pots of early snowdrops looked promising but there was no heating and the wind rattled the single panes. This had to be saved for a warmer time which surely must come eventually.

I arranged a few cushions and tried to get comfortable. I found the sitting-room eerily formal. A few minutes went by. I was nervous and it made me need to pee. I got up to go to the lavatory. Mrs Ash and the cleaner were in the hall talking to each other close to the sitting-room door. The moment I left they came in and puffed up the cushions, looking at me reprovingly when I returned. I read on. They stayed on either side of the door like the sentries my mother and I had seen at Buckingham Palace. A little later I got up to get a drink of water. They dashed in once more to rearrange the cushions. The master’s house was clearly to remain in pristine state awaiting his return. After one more try, I gave up.

I wandered into the kitchen and there I found Marco, who must have returned from wherever he’d been, still wearing his hat and scarf, laughing with Mrs Ash’s fourteen-year-old daughter Margaret, while been treated to fruit cake and milky coffee. They were sitting at the near end of the kitchen in a nook containing a table with a cushioned bench on three sides. It looked way more cosy than anything on the other side of the door. Above everything it was warm! I slipped in beside them.

Marco later told me that this is where he had basically lived until I arrived.

Meanwhile, how the transition occurred where he and I overcame our inhibitions and actually took over the sitting-room is hard to contemplate. But folks, it happened. And I must retrace my footsteps to it bit by bit.

Wait for the next instalment.