1953 In My Father’s House X

Half-term: First Day Back

Dear Readers, for those of you who are new to my Memoir, and those who are returning to it after a gap, here is a brief overview of the story so far:

Aged ten and a half, in the first days of January 1953, leaving my mother and siblings behind in South Africa, I arrived in England to live with a father I barely remembered, and go to an English boarding school. The first weeks at school were harrowing (see installment 10 ), now I’m back in Brighton with my father for the half-term break – read on.

In Badminton’s reserved carriages of the train pulling into Paddington there was general jubilation, spirits were running high. The doors had barely opened before irrepressible girls, tossing off their school hats, ran along the platform in their navy uniforms and into the arms of their waiting parents or relatives.

I couldn’t see my father. But at the edge of the crowd there was Griff. He took off his chauffer’s cap to me. I caught our Matron’s eye to get her acknowledgement that I was released. That done, squeezing the handle of my case tight, I edged toward Griff, hoping to blend into the crowd.

He nodded towards my case. ‘I’ll take that, Miss.’

‘No, it’s okay. I can carry it.’

‘Had a good first half of the term, did you?’

‘Not bad, thank you, Griff. Is Daddy at work?’

‘He was planning to meet you. But this morning some trouble arose at The Alliance. I’m not cognizant of the nature of it, but he directed me to come in his stead – and to tell you he’d see you later at the house. He might even be at 55. when we arrive – don’t look so cast down, Miss. If not by then, you’ll find he’ll be back for dinner, certainly. I happen to know he’s asked Mrs Ash to cook something special for your return.’

‘What is she cooking?’

‘That I can’t say.’

‘And is Marco at 55?’

‘No, Marco isn’t there.’

‘Why not?’ I was still carrying my case. We must be parked miles away.

Griff paused. ‘Possibly his half-term dates don’t match yours?’

I’d simply assumed we’d share the half-term. I was bitterly disappointed.

It wasn’t the Bentley we eventually arrived at but another car in my father’s ‘stable’ – he owned three, painted in the identical racing green –this was the run-around car, possibly an Austin – the one he used to go to the farm in.

‘Suit you better, Miss?’ There was a hint of sarcasm in Griff’s tone. I imagined it was a downturn for him to have to drive in it to London rather than be Prince of the Road in something smart and gleaming.

‘Sorry Griff but I’m much less likely to be sick on the seat of this one.’

He afforded me a half nod of acknowledgement.

My father had thought of that! Hugging this knowledge, trying to let it console me for Marco not being at home, I got into the back seat of the car, the door to which Griff was holding open.

As we drove, I didn’t feel at all sick and was able to look out at the winter countryside.

I remember that at some point on the journey down, Griff mentioned that my father’s birthday was in March: ‘I imagine you’ll be back at school at that point, Miss, but if you care to leave a present for him with me, I’ll make sure to see he gets it.’ I was thrown by this. What would he want? Griff appeared to know. ‘Golf balls would do nicely. Your father can never have enough golf balls.’ ‘He’d like that?’ ‘I’m sure he’d appreciate it from you, Miss.’ Golf balls? I’d have to get hold of some.

When we got to Brighton and drove round Seven Dials, I knew which road we’d take. I found I could distinguish one road from another: was I getting used to the grey?

Later, I sat in the drawing-room at No 55, where a coal fire had been lit. Case unpacked upstairs, clothes ship-shape tidy in the drawers, a follow-on from Badminton. The bedroom and the whole house felt like something was missing without Marco’s presence. And there was another being missing, Fay, my father’s parlour maid, told me that poor Mooney had become ill when I’d been away and had had to be put down.

I read my book, sitting on the puffed-up sofa cushions. The main part of the house felt solemn when there was nobody in it but me. But the quietness after the constant noise, the activity, the absence of the endless push of other bodies against your own, were as welcome as water drunk from a spring. I soaked up the stillness, taking off my shoes, making a nest in the cushions, not caring.

Fay came into the room. She brought me a cup of Ovaltine, with a plate of star-shaped biscuits she said she’d baked for me. I felt like I imagined someone might on returning from an expedition to the jungle. Exhausted, happy just to exist, to be here even without Marco, on this sofa in this minute. Waiting for my father.

Just the two of us at dinner. He was all blustery: ‘There you are, there you are, Jo! I’ve missed you. Pleased to be home?’

Home? ‘Yes.’

‘Griff looked after you, and Fay?’

‘Yes’

‘I would have come, Jo, if I could have.’

‘Yes.’

‘Good girl. Hungry?’

‘A bit’

‘Tuck in then. That will be all, thank you, Fay.

Fay, in her black uniform and a white frilly apron and cap, said, ‘Very good, sir.’

My father helped me with gusto to the roasted stuffed lambs’ hearts (sounds awful now!), carrots, mashed potatoes and rich gravy which were on the hotplate. Then he shut the hatch to the kitchen and came back to the table.

He told me about the ‘bit of trouble’ they’d had at the Alliance. Something to do with an ex-employee with a grievance who had returned with a bread knife and demanded a large amount of money out of the till.

‘Goodness gracious!’ I exclaimed.

My father said that he’d confronted this man and tried to persuade him to come to his office for a talk but it was a tricky situation because the man ‘had gone off his rocker’ and was waving the knife around wildly at the girls downstairs, who were needless to say terrified. ‘We managed to waylay him long enough for the police to get there, it was quite a drama I can tell you. I don’t mind admitting I was unnerved myself for a while. But fortunately the police were quick off the mark.’

‘And where is he now. The man?’

‘I understand a sister of his in Hastings persuaded the police she’d take care of him till his case comes up. He’s been cautioned to stay away from Brighton for the next six months. Whether he’ll stick to it remains to be seen.’

‘Still,’ he said, ‘that’s good enough for today. Now, Jo, tell me, I had another chat with Miss Sanderson. She seemed to think things were looking up for you. You’ve found a friend I gather, and settled down a bit? No more night escapades, is that right?’

‘Yes, sort of.’

‘Are you happier?’

‘A bit.’

‘Good for you Jo, that’s a start. Now, we’ve got a busy week ahead.’

‘Oh?’

He told me his plans.

We ate a prune soufflé, a Mrs Ash special, with cream. After he’d finished his helping, he fiddled with the Evening Argus. I could tell he wanted to read it but he put it to one side, like he’d made a decision not to. Instead, he told me all the news from South Africa about ‘Mummy’ and ‘John and Maddy’ and the plans my mother was making for them to sail back via Venice in August, then take a train to Nice where we would be waiting….

An hour or so later here we are back in the drawing-room, me more or less in the same place on the sofa, with legs dangling but resisting the urge, this time, to kick off my shoes and curl up. My father sitting opposite on the other side of the fire, to which in our absence a few logs of wood have been added. He is in his armchair with his feet up on a square pouf. He is reading a volume of Winston Churchill’s The Second World War. I peek and see it is called Closing the Ring.

Every now and again he grunts, or is it ‘snorts’? And mutters to himself. I ask him if he is liking it, certain he can’t be, but he says, momentarily looking up, ‘Damned fine, damned fine.’ Then he fixes me with his eyes – they are twinkling as they haven’t been since he arrived – and he says, ‘Churchill has a highly personalised view of history, he skirts round anything unfavourable to himself or his country. There are omissions but you have to give it to the chap, he is a damned fine writer. His reach is phenomenal. He was at the epicentre, of course, and where he wasn’t, he has access to material no-one else would be able to get their hands on.’ He snorts again, takes off his glasses and looks at me gently. ‘Pleased to be back, are you Jo, mm?’ To my agreement that I am, he returns to his book.

When I look back, I don’t remember tranquil times like this with him very often. I see us either talking, or up and busy doing things. That evening, though, I read on my sofa, or watched the flames from the fire. And when the wood was low, I wondered if he noticed and, since he didn’t seem to, I got up and as gently as I could levered another chunky log onto the burning bed of the fire.

I wasn’t reading anything that took much attention. At school my emotional world had once again become too leaky, too unsafe for intellectual development. The best I could manage was the quick fix of escapism. It wasn’t Enid Blyton anymore. That, in just a couple of months, had come to seem babyish, belonging to a world of my past.

In its stead came historical romances with settings predominantly in the indeterminate ‘olden days’ of the eighteenth and nineteenth century, with gaping gaps between rich and poor and heroines or heroes held captives by hateful masters or fathers or Ogres, or fate. And sometimes the promise of sex, though what was on the page never went more than kissing or thrillingly a man’s hand on the bare flesh of a thigh where a girl’s virginity was about to be threatened if she wasn’t saved at the eleventh hour by some lifeless boy/man (who never in my mind seemed quite up to the job) or, better still, by her own cunning.

At school, passed around from girl to girl and read under covers, was a supply of these paperbacks. Aunt Norma could also be relied on to supplement our stock, if I asked her out of the hearing of Uncle Harold. In return I’d rock cousin Hilary or take him out in his black pram and he would sit up and I would talk to him about things in the garden.

But for the half-term holiday I had brought with me a copy of the writer Josephine Tey’s The Singing Sands, and this was a new development, a mystery story set in Scotland I had borrowed from the school library. Though I liked it and found it promising, I couldn’t read much of it that day as my mind was still too jumpy, too ‘unsteady’ is the way I’d describe it.

So there we sat.

At some point I looked at my father over my book. With the same question as I’d had earlier in Bredon’s bookshop. Who was he, could I trust him? Except that I wasn’t the same girl as the one he’d left at the school door five weeks before. Some new adjustment had to be made. I’d let my guard down during the weeks at his house. I’d ‘gone over to him’, so to speak, I’d attached. I’d wanted just more of him, more of this budding connection that we had seemed to have, more of his love, his precious attention.

But then he’d sent me away – he and my mother – even with the qualms he’d expressed about private schools in general, he had, surely, united with her in believing this was ‘best for me’. And he was surely so wrong? And he hadn’t thought that Griff and the Bentley would signal me out. And then, whatever he’d said to me, if he had said anything when he took me to Weston-super-Mare, I’d had to tackle my troubles myself. And there was the tuck incident – all those boxes of chocolates that had to be turned in. Then there was my mother in South Africa and her lament: he hadn’t been kind to her. But I was different, a voice inside me said, and I was his daughter. And he seemed to care for me. And how brave he’d been with that man brandishing a knife! Despite those other things, would he look after my world? Could I trust him with my love?