1953 IN MY FATHER’S HOUSE XIII

The Chasm Between Home & Away

The story so far: In the January freeze of 1953, when I was ten and a half, I left sunny South Africa, my mother and siblings, to live with a father I barely remembered in his eccentric bachelor household, and go to an English boarding school. My father was one of the last socialist entrepreneurs to live life on a scale unheard of today. In Brighton I was detailed to share a bedroom with an eleven-year-old boy cousin I knew nothing about, nor why he was with my father. The household was presided over by two daunting presences, Mrs Ash and Fay. I was just getting used to the set-up, and beginning to establish a bond with my father and cousin when I was packed off to boarding school (see instalment IX.) This instalment starts at the beginning of the Easter holidays.

I’m on the train to Paddington, hamster in cage in the rack above my head and Belinda with hers is in her folks’ car on the way to Hampshire. It wasn’t so bad, the second half of the term, but oh! that stretched out, seemingly never-ending period of counting off the days. And now the Easter holidays were beginning and I was as excited as everyone else in our ‘Badminton reserved’ coaches, our excitement barely containable by the teachers who travelled down with us. One particularly exuberant girl, Pru short for Prunella, took off her felt school hat and threw it out the window. It landed on the railway line. We gasped as a train approaching in the opposite direction thundered past, no doubt flattening it.

‘Crikey, you’re going to get it from your mother, aren’t you?’ I remarked. Pru didn’t seem bothered: ‘Mummy’s a soft touch. She’ll be blubbing at the sight of her ‘dearest darling’, mascara running down her cheeks, it’s always the same – so embarrassing. My first day back she’ll forgive me anything –I could take off much more than my hat!’ The other girls laughed: ‘What would you take off next?’

A teacher hovered at our compartment door. She wore her hair in a Mary Quant fringe, had dark blue eyes and wore boots up to her knees, which we considered properly trendy. She taught biology, she was one of our favourites.

‘Pru, was that you throwing things onto the line and causing an obstruction?’

‘It was the wind, it lifted my hat right out of my hand,’ Pru retorted and had a fit of giggles.

‘Oh have a heart, dear Miss Owen, it’s the vacation!’ She planted a kiss on our teacher’s cheek. I couldn’t believe her forwardness.

Miss Owen moved on to the next compartment with no more than a friendly warning to ‘tone it down’. Pru asked me why I was staring at her. I shrugged my shoulders. It wasn’t just adults who were hard to figure out, it was sometimes the whole lot.

Now the talk was about Easter eggs and Easter bunnies and the people and things that they’d been deprived of at school and were longing to do again. ‘Mummy’s cooking’ scored high on the list, also wearing what they pleased, getting up late, trips to the West End for a panto or film. Seeing their dogs (for those especially lucky, their ponies) scored higher it seemed than seeing their siblings, especially if it was annoying younger ones still lurking at home and enjoying all the privileges.

What was I looking forward to? one of the girls in our compartment – to whom I’d promised a baby hamster – wanted to know. ‘A room of my own,’ I said, ‘except that it isn’t exactly my own, I share it with my cousin Marco, but I like that. And him.’

‘Does he look away when you undress?’ asked Pru. ‘Or how do you go about it?’

There were more giggles.

To turn the conversation I said, ‘I’m going to go canvassing this Easter with my father.’

‘What’s canvassing?’

None of us exactly knew.

‘It’s to do with the local elections,’ I offered.

‘Oh,’ they responded, and looked serious. But couldn’t hold it for long, spirits were too high.

I’m not sure how much new knowledge I’d gained from my first term at my presumably expensive boarding school. But I’d got a larger share of gold stars and, two years further on before I left the junior school, was destined to become Head of Urquhart: a development impossible to believe, then. I’d also won first prize for my age group at a Poetry Society competition for a poem about a spider which was reprinted in one of the national papers and did wonders for brownie points with my father. The spider had taken up residence in the shed above our hamster cages. Did the hamsters track its movements as we did, or were they oblivious? The school had entered the poem for the competition without my knowledge. I was startled when singled out in Assembly. And pleased, of course. Partly because it gave me fuel to return home to my father with the even more daring plan to ask for another hamster, a boy this time so that we could breed them and I could bring the babies back to school.

But when I think of my formal lessons, I draw a blank. Worth mentioning if only to remember the extent to which educators were working in the dark in the 1950s. Learning was still mostly if not entirely by rote. I remember trade winds in Geography and enjoying the drawing of maps, of using coloured pencils (mostly blunt) and being told that mine were messy and could I please try harder for a clean copy. I remember History and our teacher reading regurgitated chunks from a history text on the Tudors. When I raised my hand with a question which was preoccupying me as she read, I was given short shrift; apparently it was of no interest, while for me it seemed so important even central to the way I was trying to understand the world that my mind wasn’t able to move forward unless the thing I was pondering was cleared up. And since this wasn’t going to happen I got left behind.

With maths, I barely got started.

In English, the essays I believed to be lively were passed over due to the sprawl of my left-handedness and the way the ink blotched as my hand moved over the page. But here I persisted because we were reading King Lear, and the idea that Lear couldn’t discern which was his good daughter filled me with a thrilling indignation. Also, unlike most of my class it seemed, I loved the language of Shakespeare from the get-go. I learnt passages by heart effortlessly and declaimed them in the dorm to a chorus of: ‘Oh shut up, Jo!’

Away from my father, in this environment, my mother’s view of me constantly dogged me: that I was slow and disappointing. And it would take more than a poetry prize, more than becoming a writer myself, half a lifetime, or perhaps not fully ever, to totally ease that long-held fear.

Yet in the Rough Patch something else was unfolding. In the shed, Belinda and I had mothered our hamsters, fed and petted them as they’d nestled in our laps, cleaned out their cages, topped up their water, tried new positions for their climbing frames and wheels, with the eternal questions – are they having a good life? do they mind being in captivity? providing a distraction from the confinement of boarding school life with which we ourselves were struggling. We’d named them the first half of our surnames, Cole and Bur – oh attachment, they were ‘ours’! Then, for some reason – perhaps to do with my mother’s mention of the Colman’s Mustard family – my pretty peach-coloured Cole morphed to ‘Mustard’. ‘Bur’ always remained ‘Bur’.

The Rough Patch offered something different. It was a miracle to me that Belinda looked forward to our time there as much as I did. She was such a pretty, popular girl with her impish brown eyes and bouncy curls. She had a trio of other friends she could have chosen to go off with in the after-school hours we spent in our private place. She had other times with her trio, which she even tried half successfully to draw me into, and provided an entry into a larger circle than I would otherwise have had. But our time in the Rough Patch – the last hour of daylight in these first winter months – she seemed to have an equal thirst for. This was where the fetters of being mentally boxed in, fell away.

The mound, the low tree branches, the flattened muddy patches became our theatre. Here we acted out our plays, our made-up stories. I was at the stage where I loved disaster. People behaving badly to one another and getting their comeuppance. I loved mad things and funny things and improbable scenarios. We acted them all out. We invented dialogue and fresh endings and twists to stories we knew so outlandish they had us collapsing into giggles. I can still see Belinda in her school tunic, her legs in the regulation thick brown stockings splayed out on the ground, her coat splattered with mud, having laughed so hard she’d fallen off the low branch of the oak on which we perched.

Belinda had the quicker wit and just as vivid an imagination. She was drawn to fairy-tales and myths and mythical beings in peculiar shapes and sizes, usually with human sensibilities we could identify with. When she was leading, we would career round the Rough Patch throwing our bodies into the shapes she suggested with all our bottled-up energy.

Everyone seemed to love Belinda; her parents, her siblings, our classmates, our teachers. She rarely got into trouble. I used to think, then, that she lived a charmed life. And that I was lucky to be touched by a bit of it. Outside of our time together, she was this quiet-spoken, even-tempered, pleasing person, used to pleasing. Now, I wonder if in the Rough Patch she was able to secretly experiment with other aspects of her personality contained in our stories – that she wouldn’t have had the courage to try elsewhere. Was that the lure?

Whatever it was, our stories and the mad times we had together were a lifeline to me that term. I also started playing the piano – probably with feeling but equally badly – and enjoying it. And enjoying our once-a-week dancing lesson. The rest I don’t remember. The second half of the term hadn’t been as bad as the first half, though I was also, definitely, along with the rest, glad to be on that train heading towards Paddington. And in all our exuberance in the compartment, for a while I’d forgotten the sight that had caught my eye before leaving Badminton: two men had been repainting the swimming pool.

It’s early evening of the next day. The time when Belinda and I would have just been coming in from the Rough Patch for supper. Mustard is safely installed in the garden house with the croquet mallets. Marco is spending the first weekend of his holiday with his mother in London. He’ll be arriving in Brighton on Monday morning.

It’s just my father and I at this moment sitting in the sitting-room, he in his armchair feet up on the pouffe, me on the sofa. There’s been a bit of sun today and the fire is not lit though I wish it was. We’re trying to find our way back together. Or I am. I’m doing all the work, it seems. I’m asking him about his day and things and trying to properly listen with interest. It’s as if I have to get my feelers out towards him again. If I were honest, honest to myself, after all the excitement of getting here, it’s a bit of a disappointment, a let-down. This going to boarding school seems to be a topsy-turvy kind of thing, a whirlygig. I’ve worked so hard, it seems, to half fit in at school, to survive. It’s taken all my effort, I want to plead with my father, can’t he understand that? But instead, for the fearful last half hour we seem to have been cast asunder. Oh my god is he going to be disappointed in me, too?

The trouble arises because I can’t give a good enough account of myself. Of what I’ve been doing: crucially, what I’ve been learning. My first evening back he’d had an engagement he’d had to keep, and tonight we will be having guests. Rather alarming guests, it seems. But he has come home especially earlier than usual so that we can have what he calls ‘a quiet time together, just the two of us.’ He wants me to account for myself. Not in an unkind way, I don’t feel it like that, but nevertheless in some way. He is a man who likes to get a thing done in the time allotted, to get results. He wants to show interest in me, probably as much as I him, his intention is to feel again that we are on even tracks, that my mind is running along behind his in a way that feels like – well, connection.

And I want it too, of course. Long for it. But can’t seem to deliver my part. What can I tell him? Not about the Rough Patch – that Belinda and I have sworn to keep to ourselves, and besides that doesn’t feel like something that has any part in this room, in a life with him. Suddenly it seems flimsy and ephemeral. Then what? The poetry prize? Lear? He isn’t as much interested in Lear as, privately, I think all fathers should be. The girls are in my head and the conversation in the train coming down. Silly things pop into my mind he couldn’t be interested in. Even the Tudors – or perhaps it’s the few inadequate sentences I can muster about them tonight – fail to ignite any spark. He is more interested in whether we have a debating club (what is that?) Or whether the venerable Miss Sanderson and her staff have been keeping us up to speed with the Marshall plan (and what is that?) or Churchill’s latest statements about the Russian threat.

The more I fluff, flounder, the more disquieted he becomes. His eyes are still kindly but I can read them, or think I can. He has sent me to this boarding school against his own better judgement and not only at financial cost but in the face of the stick that is going to come his way from certain Socialist quarters. He’s done it because he has been won over by my mother to believe it offers the best opportunities for an education. And where are the signs? Of course, at 10, I don’t know all that but what I do know is that he wants something from me that I can’t deliver. I can’t cross the bridge from the world that it seems has become my whole world, to this. I’m on a bridge of fragile planks and underneath me is a chasm. It is best to shut up. He looks at me. Then picks up the Evening Argus.

So it goes for a while. From the school, what have I really learnt so far that is interesting? That I can survive, perhaps.

‘Not very much, Daddy,’ I suddenly blurt out to the backside of his paper. ‘Not very much at all!’ And I burst into tears.

‘Okay Jo, okay my darling’. A bear, he clumsily gets his feet off the pouffe, gets out of his chair and comes over. He doesn’t sit on the sofa beside me but goes around the back of it and puts his arm around my shoulder. ‘It’s okay, Jo. Don’t upset yourself.’

‘Well, you started it!’ I shout.

Fay arrives at the sitting room door. ‘Anything I can get you, Sir?’

‘No, it’s quite alright, Fay. Or perhaps Jo would like a drink?’ I burst into tears again and sob and sob. And the sobs turn to hiccups.

Fay says, ‘I’ll get her a glass of water.’

When I’ve drunk it, my father from back in his chair says, ‘You alright now, old thing?’

‘Yes.’

‘Good.’

Then he tells me who his guests will be at dinner and suggests I might want to wash away my tears and brush my hair. This, I think, was one of the only times when I heard myself saying, to my amazement, ‘I want Mummy.’

‘It’ll come right,’ he said. ‘You’ll see. Have patience.’

The company assembled in the dining room that evening consist of my father’s old friends, Jo and Phoebe Pole, whom I am meeting for the first time, plus, possibly, Jenny Lee, certainly a tall, dynamic woman who talks a lot, gesticulating with her hands as she does so. She smokes and my father – who doesn’t like people smoking in the house – makes a show of lighting her cigarettes most courteously, I notice. I can no longer recall the other men and women who were around the mahogany table.

Mrs Ash has made an extra effort. We are having a fish and a meat course. We start off first with pots of prawns and little eggs - quails eggs? – in aspic. I leave most of mine and apologize to Fay when she comes to collect the plates. She tut-tuts then whispers in my ear, ‘A nice boiled egg in the kitchen would have been fine for you, tonight, Miss, but Sir wouldn’t hear of it. Just eat what you can.’

I’m to sit to the left of my father, with the tawny-haired gesticulating woman opposite me to his right. I don’t remember her talking to me, perhaps she was one of those who believed that children should be seen but not heard? Phoebe and Joe Pole, sitting down from me on the other side, ask questions about how my family are doing in South Africa (they know my mother) and what plans my father has for me for the Easter holidays. I tell them I hope to breed hamsters.

I feel suddenly tired. The adults’ talk comes and goes like waves in my consciousness, passing over my head. I study the pattern of green flecks of the carpet, or the Chinese print opposite me of an old man with a long beard and a magnificently decorated gown sitting at a desk being handed a bottle of ink on a little cushion by a bowing servant. It is made entirely of stamps and always fascinates me.

Fay comes back with a fish dish with grapes and a sauce. While we eat I become more alert to the gist of the conversation. It seems that in the build-up to the local elections my father is leaning on those present for help in getting some of those high up in the Labour party – Gaitskell himself, Aneurin Bevan, Jennie Lee’s husband, Frank Cousins to speak at an event coming up in Brighton. They, it seems, want something from him in return.

The tawny-haired woman says:

‘The thing is, you’ll do no good if you stick to your Brighton platform. We need you in London with us. Break your habit of having to be in your own bed by ten o’clock, Lewis, it limits you.’

I look from one to the other anxiously. Hoping he’ll say he can’t do anything till after the Easter Holidays, not because he likes going to sleep after the 10 o’clock news and in his own bed, but because he has to look after me. The movement those people wanted my father to become involved in (as later he does) in London, was one advocating for the end of nuclear testing. All the people round the table that night, I later discovered, were in on the grass roots of what would eventually become the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.

But tonight this is too much to take in. Fay brings in a roast beef which my father gets up to serve from the sideboard. I get up too and tip-toe over to him.

‘Would it be alright if I go to bed?’

He says to me, ‘You go, Jo. Say good night to everyone and go.’ He is carving while he says this, but then he put down the knife and looks at me. His eyes affectionate again.

‘You’ll feel much better tomorrow.’