1953 in My Father’s House iv

Feeling My Way

I decided to give up Enid Blyton. The adventures of The Famous Five, The Secret Seven, Mallory Towers and St Clare’s had been enthralling reads out in Cape Town on my old mattress on the stoep. But now the books no longer seemed adequate for all the new sensations and feelings I was going through. I wandered into my father’s study and contemplated his shelves.

Other writers talk of fully entering the world of adult literature and consuming volumes from public libraries, or should they be lucky enough from their parents’ shelves, by the time they were my age. Queen Elizabeth 1 as we know was reading not only in English but in Latin and Greek before puberty. But I was a backward child I’d gleaned from disparaging comments from my mother and teachers in South Africa. It took all my emotional energy to negotiate the pitfalls of our leaky life. There hadn’t been sufficient space over for sufficient spurts in brainpower.

One evening after supper I waylaid my father in his study. I stood, my legs wide, my stomach protruding to give me more confidence.

‘I need a book.’

He pointed to the library shelves. ‘No good?’ With eyebrow raised in a seemingly amused question mark.

I nodded.

‘Very well. You’d better come into Brighton tomorrow and we’ll see what we can do.’

‘How? I mean, how will I get there?’

‘You’ll take a bus to the station, then walk. Marco will tell you which number you’ll need to catch. Or Mrs Ash. Here’s the address’ – he handed me a piece of paper. ‘When you arrive just go through the revolving desk and ask whoever is on the desk for me.’

‘Then will you come and get me?’

‘You’ll take the lift to the 1st floor. 11 am, Jo, and don’t be late.’ Twinkling eyes, warm beam when he smiled. ‘Maybe, we’ll stop off at Zetlands on the way back and have a cream cake, would you like that?’

Cake was an unequivocal ‘Yes!’ What with breakfast choices and cakes, and sweet rations kept in an accessible drawer I’d discovered in the living-room bureau, homesickness and cold in the bones found one way to be assuaged, and soon I would be putting on weight at an alarming rate.

In Bredon’s bookshop in East Street my father introduced me to the store’s manager as his daughter, sounding happy to say it. I took a good look at him at that moment. Maybe beforehand I’d been too daunted. There was something about his tone, the upbeat cadence like a purr as he said it, like he was indeed happy, that made me feel able to scrutinise him undercover as he talked to the manager. To examine, almost like an equal, who this man was who was claiming me. As if his very apparent pleasure gave me permission.

There he was, a tall man, powerfully built, broad-shouldered, rather barrel shaped. He wasn’t a good-looking man in a traditional sense. Like me, according to my mother, his face didn’t have good bone structure, but he had charisma, presence. And force. Right then his eyes – his most noticeable feature, along with his strong jaw – were kind and lit up with this twinkling benevolence which seemed to spread from him to me and the manager outwards to everyone in the bookshop. But they weren’t soft eyes, either. They could be kind, they could be sentimental I was to discover, they could be loving, very loving. But the depths of them was shielded from all of us. I saw that then in the bookshop. I never stopped feeling it: the cut-off place. Years later, after he died, someone described his eyes as having as many planes as a diamond.

When I was around eight in South Africa, a couple of years before I arrived in England, I’d witnessed my mother crying because, ‘Your father wants to divorce me.’ I’d found it unbearable, my proud, dignified mother, so distraught, crying unrestrainedly on the sofa. I must have walked in from school and found her like that. She was holding a letter, and gasping. There had been just the two of us in the house. I’d tried to put my arm around her to comfort her. Then I’d started crying in unison. I didn’t know what the word divorce meant. But her words, the letter she waved in her hand, ‘Your father can be very cruel to get his own way,’ stayed with me.

Why remember this now, when I am writing about his and my first enjoyable outing together? Why spoil this present pleasure? I suppose because for all the fun I was about to have, the love I was about to relish and warm my hands in as by a good fire, or the sun gifting your body with warmth as you lie on a beach, my mother’s dissatisfactions with me (and with him), my inhabiting her grief that day in South Africa as if it was my own – along with her tantalizing distance I’ve tried to close the gap on all my life (she now dead fifty years) – all this originated before I got to England. They left emotional memories in my body I could never quite expunge.

Now I went forward eagerly to embrace what was being offered. Who would not? But a little bit of me, just a little bit, was like someone going into marriage with one hand behind their back, in the Jewish saying. Unbeknownst to me, the critical voice, the defensive voice that was warning me not to be hurt as my mother had been, was at that stage way more prematurely developed than my numerical or literacy skills. A voice it would take hard work and more than half a lifetime to rout out.

Could I, I wonder, say this more straightforwardly? As a very young child I’d adored my father. He’d been my world and my stability. I remember, aged four, waiting impatiently daily for him to come home, so I could show him my treasures, tell him what I’d been up to. And then suddenly he wasn’t with us. Only my mother, who was labile, hormonal, given to rash decisions, with three young children on her hands. I must have missed him dreadfully, felt the bottom of my world had fallen in. I must have inevitably believed that he left us. Now we were together again, and it was a different time, as I entered adolescence. As so often after a divorce and an absence, trust wasn’t going to come ready-made. It had to be re-built. That’s why his eyes mattered so much. I was searching for the man my father was.

Back to the books. He told the manager that ‘My daughter has just arrived from South Africa to live with me and is in need of reading material. Isn’t that right, Jo?’

I merely nodded, fearful to open my mouth in this august setting and say something that might displease him. I was directed to the young adult section where I was told I might find something of interest. After a while I returned with Little Women. My boyish namesake and her sisters in the impoverished March family had already aroused my interest when mentioned by a more advanced reader in the treehouse of our secret society in the woods in South Africa.

My father wasn’t through, though. What, we’d made this trip for one book? No, that wasn’t enough. I’d soon be finished – he pointed out with more assurance than I felt, looking at how many lines there were to a page. The bookseller suggested The Secret Garden as a second option, perhaps seeing some parallels between a girl of my age forsaking hotter climes (India or South Africa) for Sussex or Yorkshire. That was settled then.

‘And a third,’ insisted my father, heartily, ‘we’ll go for a third. What shall it be? How about Uncle Tom’s Cabin?’ He told me it was a story about slavery that I’d find interesting. ‘Very sad, Jo, but moving, too.’

The bookseller pinched his nose, reflecting. ‘She’s still a young girl. What about Sweet William, that’s livelier and amusing?’

‘Well, what’s it to be?’ My father asked me.

‘I’ll go with Uncle Tom’s Cabin.’

‘Good girl,’ rejoined my father.

The books were parcelled in brown paper the colour of toffees, with the Bredon’s name written aslant it. We left the shop, me looping the string round my finger and hopping down the street.

At the counter at Zetlands he chose a coffee éclair and possibly a coffee to drink, I don’t remember. I chose a chocolate éclair. What I do remember was the mysterious third cake he ordered. Was someone coming to join us? I hoped not. He saw me eyeing it when the cakes were brought to our table.

‘Why a third?’ I blurted out after a while.

‘Don’t tell your mother I’m getting you into bad habits!’

From the way he said it, I had a sense that upsetting my mother wouldn’t entirely displease him. Was he playing a sort of truancy? Well, my goodness if he was, I was ready to join him.

‘Is it for us, in case we …we’re still hungry after the first one?’

‘It could be that. Or it could be that we liked two different tastes, don’t you think?’

‘I often like two different tastes,’ I agreed emphatically.

‘Good girl.’

My mind was ticking away now. ‘If you only have one you might regret it, I mean wish you’d chosen another…’

‘Just so.’

When we parted at his office, I had the sense that we were in perfect agreement. Harmony: the lingering sense of it sat with me on the bus back, and it was lovely.

I made headway with Little Women, sitting at the staff table while the days’ bustle went on around me, and the smells of the kitchen provided some sense of grounding. But nobody could read all the time. Mrs Ash said to go outside for walks. I was still in shock missing the sun and resisted. Mrs Ash told my father I needed a second coat, that my school wool one was fine for certain occasions, but a long, padded jacket would see the girl getting out and about more, not hanging round inside all day, it’s not healthy.

So Fay was detailed to take me shopping. And a padded jacket was purchased which kept the shivers at bay. I don’t remember there being any heat in my father’s house, except in the kitchen, from the time he left till the time he returned. Something I must check with Marco.

Marco remained elusive. Well, he was a boy at a boy’s school and a full year older than me. A stocky ten-year-old girl, a homesick transplant from South Africa with little to say for herself no doubt, wasn’t the kind of company he was on the look-out for. But something had to be done. Now I had the coat Mrs Ash made it clear I wasn’t to sit all day reading in the kitchen.

So, I reminded Marco that he’d suggested teaching me to wrestle. ‘If you felt like it,’ I tried, ‘I’d be quite interested.’

He laughed. ‘Why not? If you’re sure you want to?’

I was getting adept at emphatic nodding.

The place we found to carry out our wrestling practice was an unused summerhouse to one side of the rose garden. It had various items of garden furniture stacked along one wall but was otherwise empty. In length it was about twenty feet so a fair size, perfect for the task in hand. I kept my coat on till fighting Marco raised my blood temperature sufficiently.

I don’t remember so many years later all the manoeuvres Marco taught me. They involved compensating for my lesser strength by quick-thinking, balance, and certain moves that exposed an opponent’s vulnerabilities. They were classical moves like the single and double leg take down, the penetration step, the sprawl, the whizzer, the switch, and so forth. Oh, how at the time I relished those terms.

Marco invariably won each fight we had. That made it pleasurable for him, along with being the one doing the teaching, which he took extremely seriously. I picked up a few crucial points along the way, and on the rare occasions when I did gain a momentary advantage, I pinned him down with all the gusto a more seasoned fighter might have approved of.

Marco must have thought I was getting better because after one such fight he solemnly announced that we were ready to take on ‘the boys up the hill.’ There was a certain time pressure with this, the days left of the holidays were shortening. It wouldn’t be long before we both went off to our boarding schools, something I was dreading.

Into our so-far-formless days there were now to be two events before that happened. The Fight, and a Potential Friend to tea. My father had another doctor friend, a Doctor Yablon who it turned out had a daughter my age. “Carole’s like you, she’s a girl with spirit,’ my father said. ‘You two will get along famously.’

I had spirit?

For what happened at both events, watch out for the next instalment.