1953 in My Father’s House VIII

What Is It to be a True Socialist? Further Education of a Young Mind

The day for boarding school arrived. We set off straight after breakfast in my father’s highly-polished racing green Bentley. Griff, with his soldier’s upright bearing and uniform of a similar green, in the driving seat. My father, with a bulging briefcase on his lap, in the passenger seat, Marco and I in the back – our school cases, labelled with our names, in the boot.

Our first stop was Brighton station, where we dropped Marco off. He was to travel to London on his own, and spend a couple of days with his mother. At the station he shook my father’s  hand. ‘Goodbye and thank you, Sir.’ At eleven and a half he was very deferential when it came to my father. Griff retrieved his case from the boot. Marco took it and thanked him.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                     

What were he and I to do? For weeks we’d been room-mates, comrades-in-arms, fellow strays in my father’s house; shaking hands seemed too formal. Yet boy and girl as we were, in 1953 we were miles from the spontaneity of hugging one another. From inside the car I peered out at him, my stomach clenching at his imminent departure. I rolled down the window, willing him to make some gesture, or offer a word or two that I could store up like a lucky charm against whatever lay ahead.

‘Right then I’m off. Er – take care Jo. Bye,’ he said awkwardly, and made off into the crowd, swinging his case. Head held high.

For the first part of the journey, my father worked and Griff drove silently. The Bentley purred on the open road as we left Brighton behind, heading towards Horsham. I sat in the middle of the back seat (no safety belts, then) leaning forward, concentrating on the white line at the centre of the road through the windscreen in the gap visible between the backs of the heads of the adults. When occasionally I travelled in the Bentley, I still found it too soft sprung to withstand my tendency to car sickness, and I was giving it my all to stave it off. Hoping not to have a repeat of our journey from the airport.

It was a long drive, no motorway then. We had to have at least two emergency stops. On one, my father encouraged me to take a brief walk with him in an avenue of trees by the roadside. At his urging, I took deep breaths of winter air into my lungs to try to bring the bouts of retching to a finish.

‘Is it nerves, Jo?’

‘Maybe.’

When we got back to the car Griff wondered to my father whether I’d be better sitting up front. We still had a further hour and a half to go.

‘Do you think it would help, Jo?’

I was anxious about dislodging my father. Him with his long legs and big body sitting in the back? That would upset the order of things. ‘Let’s go on as we are and have the windows more open, if you don’t mind – I can probably cope.’

My father said he had finished reading the material he had earmarked for the journey (he was intending to inspect a potential site for a new office in Bristol after I’d been deposited) and he would sit in the back with me. He apparently thought I needed distracting. So, the order of things was going to be upset anyway. But, if he wanted to, I didn’t have the will to object. He told Griff to cut his speed and drive as smoothly as he was able to round the corners.

The back of Griff’s neck went a shade deeper pink at this. ‘Very good, Gov,’ he said. And then after a minute, more to himself than us. ‘I always do take the corners smoothly.’

On duty, Griff usually maintained a poker face, while his eyes conveyed that little of the human comedy escaped his private amusement. Between him and my father there seemed to be an unspoken, impenetrable bond; mutual respect. But in this moment, he clearly objected to being told how to drive! I squirmed, conscious of being the cause. It wouldn’t be till I entered my teenage years that I would feel less daunted by him, and perhaps earn a modicum of his respect, certainly his affection.

My father got in beside me, leaving his briefcase in the front.

We travelled quietly for a while, while I tried to regulate my breathing and subdue the wobbly, feathering feeling in my stomach. When it seemed more or less under control, I said to my father in a low voice so that Griff couldn’t hear. (I didn’t want him to think that, in my mother’s terms, I wasn’t a well-brought-up girl),

‘Why do I have to go to boarding-school, anyway? I’d much prefer to go to day school and stay with you.’

My father sighed. He told me - which came as a surprise - that he didn’t, in himself, believe in private schools.

‘Do you mean boarding schools?’

‘Almost all boarding school are private, Jo. But your mother determined that you children should have the education and advantages she and I couldn’t have dreamt of when we were young. We want you to do well in the world, make something of your lives – create a new medicine or find out how to grow two blades of grass in the space where now there is only one, something to benefit the world.’

I couldn’t see it, the one blade business, and all the retching was making me feel quarrelsome.

‘But why do I have to go to boarding school for that? I could go to day school and just as easily –’

He cut me short. ‘Your mother believes…’

He and I looked at one another. I understood there was no point going on. The perplexing thing was that he looked sad, almost apologetic. My mother appeared to have the greater say when it came to our education. But how could that be, that he had to give in to her when he was such a strong person and everyone around I’d seen since I’d been staying at No.55 seemed to march to his tune? And then it got even more baffling when he told me that he didn’t believe in the entire private school system, ‘No, if I were to have my way, Jo, there would be a single state system for education like in so many countries. Ours perpetuates the class system, and hopefully Jo, in your life time, with successive Labour governments you will see great changes there…’

I could see that my immediate concerns were not going to be rectified, and since I had no control over my school fate I tried simply to control the feathery movements in my stomach.

Both of us were quiet. I don’t think my father liked quiet when he was with other people. I could tell he was thinking of some way forward.

‘At least your new Headmistress, Miss Sanderson, is a true Socialist, and that’s unusual, Jo. Oh, she is a very fine woman, we got along like a house on fire. An intelligent woman too, double first from Cambridge, you know.’

‘Can I have a hamster,’ I blurted out.’ I mean, can I have a hamster at this school.’

‘I don’t know about hamsters, Jo. But you could ask.’

He looked so flummoxed, to my own annoyance I found myself taking pity on him, thinking I had to look after him, after all he had come to sit in the back with me and perhaps he was regretting it, perhaps I’d better make more effort and, ‘be more grown-up,’ as my mother would say – as in, when my sister was at her most annoying – ‘You’re the older one, Jo please try and be more grown-up.’

So, I took a deep breath of air through the open crack of the window, tried to calm the dance in my stomach, and said to my father, conversationally-like,

‘Well, what is Labour, what is it to be a true Socialist?’

And in an instant, as if the sun had suddenly appeared from behind the clouds, he was off, explaining, beaming, giving me a history and politics lesson that was certainly, if nothing else, distracting.

I got caught up in it, I took his hand, ‘I believe those things myself,’ I said, when, finally, he came to a halt. ‘Everyone should have equal opportunities.’

‘Good girl. Free education, free health, homes fit for purpose for everyone, proper living wages, no more stranglehold of the privileged classes – these things must be the basis of the way forward if the world is to be a happier place.’

It would take another year or two before I dared to ask him what he was doing being driven in a Bentley, in that case? And his answer – that he needed to look like he’d made it, look convincingly as if he was a man of power and influence, to be able to have a platform to make the changes that needed to be made – never totally satisfied me. Also, he’d set a train of more questions jumping around in my mind – like the rights of black people, would they also be equal, and when it came to it, what about children’s rights? – that I thought it wiser to not probe at that moment, when all was going so well. Besides, I don’t know if I could have articulated them. The main thing was that at heart I liked what he said; he was sprinkling seeds in my receptive mind. Time passed quite quickly after that and before long we were in the Bristol suburbs.

‘Only another ten minutes, now. Right, Griff?

‘Right, Gov.’

‘Jo, do you think you can make it without another break?’

‘I think so.’

He had one last sentiment about my education to convey before we arrived at my uncle’s home – my mother’s brother – where we were going to stop off for lunch.

‘In South Africa, you, John and Maddy were living under an Apartheid, unnatural regime. You would have grown up taking for granted that there were separate buses, hospitals, even benches to sit on in the parks for whites and blacks. Different rights. I persuaded Mummy to come back to England so you could be schooled in a country where that isn’t the case.’

He squeezed my hand. ’I know it’s hard on you that you came back on your own. But Badminton had a place vacant this term, and they thought it best that you had a full two years in the Junior School.’

I said, ‘I never took it for granted that black people were treated differently from white people,’ and then I whispered – I don’t know why, but perhaps because I’d never said it to anyone else – ‘it always seemed wrong.’

He looked thoughtful, then squeezed my hand some more. Like that we arrived at my uncle’s house.

We’d climbed up out of the town and were in another breezy sort of place. We passed a large open green where children, buttoned up in coats and scarves and hats, were flying kites with their parents.

In my uncle and aunt’s house, the child – my cousin Hilary– was too young to be playing any sort of games yet, except the game of refusing to be put down to sleep in his cot, causing my glamorous Aunt Norma all manner of trouble. Uncle Harold, another tall family member, had a neat beard and kindly eyes. He seemed to be old to be a father of such a young child – even older than my father who was fourteen years older than my mother – and pre-occupied with his young wife’s apparent inability to calm their son. The two men went away to talk. Norma apologised to me, then rushed upstairs to the baby.

I stood in their pretty sitting-room, looking out on a garden and a frozen pond which I wondered if I could try ice-skating on at some point, listening to the screaming. After a while, with nothing better to do, I wandered upstairs to where a very red-faced little boy of about nine months was clearly unhappy about something.

‘Do you know what it is?’ Norma despaired to me. ‘He is not wet, he can’t be hungry again, he doesn’t have a nappy pin or anything sticking into him. He shouldn’t be crying but he is. Your uncle thinks I’m hopeless, and perhaps I am?’ She looked at me. Very sorrowful and very beautiful, in a Grace Kelly sort of way, according to my father. I didn’t know who Grace Kelly was. Norma had coiled blond hair and was wearing a soft blue woollen frock that matched her eyes.

‘Maybe he just wants cuddles,’ I offered.

She patted her hair, and looked askance. ‘But I’ve just put him down,’ she protested. He has to learn, doesn’t he, and besides, I’ve changed for lunch?’

I didn’t know what to say. From downstairs Uncle Harold was calling irritably,

‘Darling, Lewis and Joanna need their lunch. They’ve a school appointment to keep.’

Norma looked at me again, indecisively.

‘You could bring him down with us?’ I suggested. ‘Perhaps I could rock him, I’m not very hungry.’

At this she snapped out of her predicament and turned her full attention on me, with a girlish, apologetic laugh. She took me arm, ‘It’s a big day for you, Jo. No wonder if you are a bit nervous. Look, we’ll leave him, there’s nothing wrong with him, he’s just obstinate. If we close the door and he knows I mean it, he’ll settle, don’t you think?’

We descended the stairs together. The four of us went into the adjoining dining-room, also looking out over the garden, where a buffet of chicken and salad awaited us. Both my uncle and aunt were very kind to me. They explained that though I would be going back to Brighton for the half-term, for the shorter weekend ‘exeats’ this was to be my home and they were looking forward to getting to know me better. They asked me how I felt about school, and also asked for recent news of my family in Cape Town.

I thought of my siblings in South Africa and, at a glance of the pale chicken flesh remaining on my plate, suddenly the feathery feeling began to rise up in my stomach again. I breathed for all I could. I didn’t want to have to run from the table. I just managed not to but I wasn’t able to answer any of their questions.

My father talked for me. He said, ‘We had a long chat in the car, didn’t we Jo, and she’s going to make the very best of it, isn’t that right?’

‘Well, if there is anything you need, you just have to tell us,’ said Uncle Harold.

All this while my young cousin had not yet learnt that he had to make the best of things. I was impressed at the single-mindedness with which he could keep up his objection to being left upstairs. Unaware that I was glimpsing, in embryo, the single-mindedness that he would later put to good purpose as a philosopher, author and broadcaster. Or that, ten years younger than me as he was, he was to play a significant part in my life. All I felt at the time was a bit of fellow feeling, with more than a smidgeon of identification in the mix. I offered to pick him up and maybe walk about a bit with him to comfort him. I won’t drop him, I reassured them.

Uncle Harold said that was kind of me but that it was his mother he needed. ‘Go up to him, Norma,’ he instructed.

She left the room.

Then he said to my father, ‘It’s odd, she hasn’t the faintest idea what to do with a child.’

‘She’s young,’ my father said, ‘and a very new mother, she’ll find her way, go easy, Harold.’

Soon it was time for us to depart. Griff must have taken his own lunch somewhere else. Now the Bentley was sweeping back onto the gravel drive. Uncle Harold saw us out to the car. I didn’t have a chance to say goodbye to Norma.

It was a short drive to Westbury-on-Trym where Badminton School was situated. Too short. I wondered if my father would sit in the front but he sat in the back again and I held his hand. He asked me if I liked Uncle Harold. ‘He is a good chap you know, he’ll look after you. As you heard him say, you just have to tell him if you need anything. And Norma’s a lovely girl, very sweet-natured. Of course she was distracted today, but they will look after you. When it comes to the half term, you’ll go on the school train to Paddington with the other girls. I’ll pick you up in London if I can. If not, Griff will meet the train, or Fay, or …someone will. No need to worry about that.’

‘How many weeks is it?’

‘Five, I believe.’

‘Five.’ I sighed.

‘It will go in a flash. You’ll make pals, the lessons will be exciting, you’ll love it, Jo, and learn a lot.’

And that was it, as I remember it. Ahead, an imposing stone building with turrets and casement windows. The front door was open, inside a mass of girls in uniforms were milling around, laughing, talking in high, excited voices, greeting one another. Reminding me I was coming in the middle of a school year.

A woman with her hair in a bun swept up to me, and tried to bear me and my case away from my father. But I wanted to hug him first, and came back for one last minute. As my father hugged me he said,

‘I’m going to miss having you in the house, you know, Jo.’

*

For the first weeks at boarding school, dear readers, please wait for the next instalment.