1953 in My Father’s House VI

Last Weekend Before School

Dear Readers, this is my continuing memoir of arriving from South Africa, aged ten and a half, to live with my father (who I barely knew) and boy cousin, in my father’s somewhat eccentric Brighton household – and go to an English boarding school. Read on –

By the time the school term began, my hair had been cut by a razor (and had leapt into a round fuzz-ball), Marco and I were firm friends, and the house was, if not becoming ‘home’, definitely less intimidating. Marco and I hadn’t conquered the drawing-room yet, that was to wait for our Easter break.

Meanwhile my father, alongside asking about my day, had broadened his evening inquiry to include whatever was topical in the news. Eisenhower was about to be sworn in as President of the US, what did I think of that? Did I know why Albert Schweitzer had been awarded the 1952 Nobel Peace Prize? Did I think he was a good choice? Did I know that weeks before I’d arrived in Britain a London smog had been so dense many people had died in it? (I didn’t, but thinking back to the day we had walked across the tarmac at London Airport, it wasn’t difficult to imagine!) Now my father wanted to discuss the ins and outs of the plans being drawn up to prevent one on that scale happening again. Finding myself flawed on all counts, and wanting to be up to the recognition he seemed to be affording me as a reciprocal mind, I decided I needed to do something about it.

He read three papers over the breakfast table, The Times, The Manchester Guardian, and, I think, The Daily Express, then left them for any takers when he went off to work. Marco had a quick look at The Times, turning to the sports pages first. Fay squirrelled The Daily Express into the kitchen. Uncle Jumbo, if he’d lingered, might decorously roll up either of the others and take it off with him. But in the gap between all these happening, I poured over whatever was available. A new kind of education was afoot!

True to his word, on the Saturday morning before we drove up to Bristol to deposit me at Badminton Junior School, my father and I walked the length of the Undercliff Walk from what was then Black Rock, before the Marina was built, to Rottingdean – where we stopped for a hot drink and rest. Then we walked back again. Both my parents were veteran walkers and, being over six-footers, strode out fast on their long legs.

My mother even subsequently told me (with seeming amusement, or was it bemusement?) that once she had been stopped in the street by an outraged woman who’d said that the speed of my mother’s walking was unfair to her children and if she didn’t slow down the woman would report her!

On the Undercliff with my father I skipped along, with sporadic runs when required to keep up with his pace, joyful to have his undivided attention and that he hadn’t said anything derogatory about my crew cut.

 Marco, when I’d returned from the hairdressers the day before, had remarked, ‘Now why did you want to do that?’ I’d had to explain that I hadn’t expected it to come out as it had, it was all very distressing.

‘She used a razor instead of scissors.’

‘Why didn’t you stop her?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Where was whatshername, the friend of Mrs Ask who took you?’

‘She was chatting to someone at the desk. She noticed when it was too late.’

Marco frowned and the frown confirmed what the mirror told me: it was a really bad thing.

‘Well,’ Marco commented, ‘It’s going to grow out, Jo. Hair does. Cheer up.’

Miraculously my father didn’t seem to notice. Or if he had, didn’t mind. And it was raining again but not so cold, and the wind was whipping the waves up in a way I found exciting. The tide was just turning. There were regulated aprons of wet and shiny stones strewed with seaweed between the tide breakers, with occasional patches of sand. There were pools between the rocks to see, and hundreds of white gulls swirling in the wind.

We held hands as we walked and swung our arms. There were many people going our way or coming towards us, and other dogs – which Mooney, from his giant-poodle-height, skirted around in a stately manner, barely acknowledging. Occasionally he would deign to saunter off after a piece of chalk that we threw for him. Just to oblige.

The rooks, or was it crows, had built precarious-looking nests right on the chalk face. Amazing they didn’t blow off in the wind. Or did they sometimes? I wanted to ask my father but thought that kind of question might be no more to his liking than little dogs approaching Mooney with wagging tails, eager for an undignified runaround. We were so close to the cliff everything we said echoed back. I loved being wedged like that between the substantial white face of the cliffs and the sea full of movement and splashes of colour below.

My father told me about the feat of building the Undercliff Walk. How it had provided employment to some 500 people in the 1930s, at a time of high unemployment in the country. It took 13,00 tons of cement and 150,00 concrete blocks. The Borough’s idea being to provide a pedestrian walkway along the seafront at the same time as improving the sea defences. He said that some Welshmen had been brought over to work on the construction and that that ‘brought a spot of trouble with local people when jobs were scarce’, but overall it was a ‘jolly good thing’ and a real asset to Brighton.

I hoped this would segue into talking about ‘our’ plans for Brighton’s future. Soon after, it did. I gave my father my ideas which I’d been savouring, and now – in remembering – can only bring to mind two, neither noteworthy.

I’d waited in the rain for a bus on my way back from the hairdresser. There had been lots of older people waiting with their shopping bags, some appeared really old. Some had crying babies and small children with them. One woman pressed her hand into her back as if it hurt, the way my grandmother had done on her visits. I thought my father might not go on many buses since he always seemed to have Griff to drive him here or there, so maybe he wouldn’t know that all these people were waiting with their shopping and that they had no-where to sit and rest their feet, and no cover from the rain. And I thought a good town of the future would take account of people using buses and give them shelters to wait in.

I also thought about the seafront and how on an earlier day (also in the rain) I had gone on the pier then walked along the esplanade by the sea. And I thought, when it was dark and gloomy like it never was in South Africa, that Brighton should have loads of cheerful sparkling lights along the front and even if it wasn’t magical like Cape Town was when lit up, still if the lights were good enough, it could present a real show, ‘ you know, Daddy, exciting lights that everyone would want to drive down to the front to see…’

He congratulated me. ‘I see you’ve really taken the task to hand.’ With such a honeyed reaction it was nothing to keep up with him, doing a sprint here and there. ‘What ideas have you had, Daddy?’ I asked judiciously.  Being dreamy and in my own world were complaints often levelled of me. but breathing in great gulps of that salty, tangy sea air, the rain drippling off my forehead and eyelashes, I was one hundred percent attention.

In preparation for writing this memoir, a friend and I spent a day at Brighton’s state of the art depository of local history records, The Keep. There, remarkably, we came across the very article in the Evening Argus, spread over two weeks, in which my father’s ideas for Brighton’s future were sketched out. Living only six miles away in Lewes now, it was fascinating to read these articles three quarters of a century later, and relate them to how Brighton is today.

My father speaks of ‘a town hesitating on the brink of the future.’  What Brighton needs, he proposes, is a ‘courageous clear-sighted ambition: a bold sign-post to the future. Wealthy visitors have abandoned Brighton for ‘foreign shores’ he laments, its hotels are out of date.

In his vision pressure hydrants would wash the beaches’ dirty shingle at nights; rolls of coconut matting would allow surfers access to the surf; bathing pools would be built for non–bathers. The ‘tawdry aches’ would be swept aside. In their place, a ‘plage’ would be created with a continental atmosphere. Some of the older buildings would be demolished and replaced with ‘pleasant gardens’ along the front. Madeira Drive, he deplores, is ‘a giant open-air garage for coaches’, while the seafront thoroughfare past Brighton’ shop windows resembles ‘an arterial road.’

He talks of there being ‘two Brightons’– that of tourism, and of the population who live and work in the town. He advocates the building of a coach station; a modern conference centre; an expanded housing programme; provisions for mothers and children on wet days (ah, did my bus shelters feed into this?); an annual theatrical festival on the lines of Stratford… an expanded industries area around Brighton: a new local industry: a ‘canning industry’, and more.

His most ambitious – either crazy or imaginative plan, depending which way you view it, one which I even wonder if we cooked up that day on the Undercliff – is for a subterranean river to be brought to the surface, creating a beautiful thoroughfare from Preston Park to the gardens at St Peter’s church, providing ‘a tree-lined vista to the sea’.

Viewed retrospectively, some of his ideas were sounder than others, but in all of them you see his commitment and thrust – forwards, and even better! He was a man whose vision was so often focused on the future. This led him to a somewhat casual attitude to the historical, which got him into trouble on numerous occasions. His most unpopular proposal – not in the article, but later – was to knock down Brighton station and replace it with something more ‘fit for purpose’.

He always thought he was right. He chanted the rhyme to me and my siblings as we grew up:

If the sky above is blue

And you know it to be true

If your father says its black

Then it’s…

– ‘Black! we were meant to shout.

–‘Blue!’ we bellowed.

Over our buns and milky tea in Rottingdean that day we tossed ideas back and forth. Heaven knows if I made even a dint in his thinking (except perhaps for the shelter) but didn’t we have fun.

On the way back the tide was coming in. The waves were crashing over the defence barriers and the parapet onto the walk itself. As they did, they made a terrific sound, echoing off the chalk cliffs, spraying hard little pebbles in all directions. The chalk floor of the walk was strewn with pebbles and seaweed. Pools of water by now submerged parts of it.

My father didn’t want to get sprayed. Possibly exaggerating his concern for my benefit. I didn’t mind the possibility of being drenched, I had a taste for disaster. We moved along quickly, making sprints for it between the largest waves, ‘negotiating’ the waves, as he put it. Above us the rooks and gulls competed with the waves in the racket they made.

We didn’t talk any more, coping with the immediate as we were. We’d talked so much I was happy now just to swing arms and be the one to save him from the waves by keeping ‘those sharp eyes of yours’ peeled.  I was all child. The worries about what lay ahead at this boarding school – and about what my siblings were doing with Mummy and without me in South Africa – were tossed into the whirling cauldron of the sea.

Back at No 55, I hugged to me what I thought of as me and my father’s ‘proper discussion’ that morning, and later came to think of as a talk about ideas. I looked forward to the next one. Though I imagined it would have to wait till I returned home from school.

But that afternoon Carol Yonace was coming to tea, and tomorrow, my father told us, he was taking Marco and me to Plumpton Races. Two more goods things to store up against what was ahead.