1953 in My Father’s House XVIII

Oh woe, I’m in trouble.

In the summerhouse at 55 Dyke Road Avenue a couple of days after Queen Elizabeth II’s Coronation is a dismal scene. A dozen boys are sombrely sitting on either side of a long trestle table in trousers and shirts hanging stiffly like they’d been borrowed for the occasion, and faces so clean, hair so oiled, I barely recognise them as the Hanover Gang I’ve eaten faggots and mash with and larked about with on electioneering evenings. That they are at No. 55, in the same room Marco, Margaret and I had had our first rehearsals of Toad in, where my hamsters had lived next to the garden furniture and croquet mallets – from the gang’s furtive looks and constraint seems as unlikely to them as Fay and Mrs Ash make clear it is to them as they serve out plates of sandwiches, cucumber and egg, fish paste, strawberry jam, lemon curd, and cocktail sausages and cheese and pineapple on little sticks. In the middle of the table, as yet untouched (as if waiting for a starting gun to be fired before we can devour them) are custard tarts, raisin buns, biscuits with icing and ‘allsorts’ to decorate them, and, the centrepiece, a showy two-tier chocolate affair, with ‘Happy Eleventh Birthday Joanna!’ written on it in bright pink icing.

The only person in the room, it seems, who isn’t surprised that the boys are here is me. When I’d suggested it, it had seemed like the most natural thing in the world. Travelling back to Sussex after the Coronation on the old Brighton Belle, my father ¬– planning the remaining days of the school break– had proposed that he throw a belated birthday party for me as I’d been at school on the day. ‘We can’t let such a special occasion go unmarked, Jo. While you are still here, we must have a party for you.’

‘I can’t have a party,’ I objected. ‘Who would I ask? I don’t know anyone in Brighton,’

‘You could invite Carol Yonace.’

‘Yes, but that’s one person.’

He reflected. ‘I could see if anyone I know has an eleven-year-old daughter, if you like?’

Strangers, no. ‘It doesn’t matter, really Daddy, I don’t need a party.’

But my father had got one of his bees in his bonnet, it seemed: in his mind, this was what a loving father did for his daughter, apparently. ‘Damned shame Marco had to go back to school earlier,’ he lamented. ‘But leave it to me, I’ll fix something.’

‘No, Daddy no!’

Yet I was thinking hard. If I was going to have to have a party, there was one lot of kids I knew and did like.

‘Then can I have the Hanover Boys over?'

My father eyed me with the eyes that many years later after his death someone described as ‘diamond-like’, but now nothing obscured his surprise. ‘Are you sure, darling? I wonder if the boys would like it: sometimes —'

‘— they would like it, of course they would.’

A second or two’s hesitation, then he was chuckling. ‘Well, why not? I don’t know what your mother will say about this, perhaps we’ll keep it to ourselves —.'

So now here they are, and it’s not at all what I expected. Gone is my former friends’ insouciance. Scrubbed up and uncomfortable, barely speaking, they eat the food that Fay and Mrs Ash put in front of them with expressions daring them not to misbehave. There are slurps of orangeade and munching and an occasional cough or the scraping of something back onto a plate that has fallen off. They swivel around on their chairs examining the room, as if looking to find in it anything they can report back on.

Placed at the head of the table, in my skirt and cardigan with its pearl-embroidered collar (a birthday present from Auntie Norma and Uncle Harold), I’m awkward, too. My father collected jokes to thread into his public speaking; now, attempting to break the ice I retell one I’d recently heard. At the end of it, just a few faint, half-hearted guffaws. I don’t try a second.

‘Anyone got any new tricks?’

No-one speaks. There is an uneasy shifting on chairs. Fay refills the glasses, takes away the empty sandwich plates and inches the embarrassing birthday cake nearer to me. The boys look on, intent, alert. Oh such a distance between them and me! I feel miserably as if I’m on a stage in a play they’re watching. The one or two girls from the gang have been squeezed out on this occasion, just the twelve boys have come.

Mrs Ash lights the candles. I take a breath to blow them out but the boys get in faster and do it for me. Fay says I must have a wish. Twelve pairs of eyes study the knife as it plunges into the deep chocolate sponge. One of the boys whispers to another, ‘Got on the black market.’ A ripple of mirth travels round the table: mirth that excludes me. All this is a hundred miles away from the camaraderie of our sessions of tucking into faggots and mash after canvassing. I’m not Banjo now. I’m not sure which is worse, the mirth or the silently watchful chewing.

Then a new development: Mrs Ash was taking a tray of empty plates up to the house; there was only Fay with us, stacking more plates at a table by the door, and the boys began to flick the sausage sticks at each other, first just one or two of them, then more. Tommy, a gangly fifteen-year-old with a cocky smirk I’d never been certain of, threw a fork at a wall. It made a tinny, clattering noise as it hit.

Crabs in my stomach. I’d promised Mrs Ash and Fay that there would be no ‘bad behaviour’, that I knew these boys and it would be perfectly okay. Fay turned around at the sound and noticed the strawberry jam mark on the stone-coloured wall. She looked at me with assessing grey eyes; they were saying, I shouldn’t have trusted you. Without your mother here…

Alarmed, I got up. I longed for the old camaraderie with these boys. Not this distant, shifty observing, ‘Be on your best behaviour in Mr Cohen’s house,’ that set us apart, or – now worse – the unleashing of bottled-up energy which threatened as tea finished. The boys in this new mood were even more strangers. And I, on the other side of a divide that I seemed unable to escape, felt a panicky responsibility for what occurred. Any minute now it could be a plate that got smashed. Might they do that? I didn’t know, didn’t know what would happen next. If things got broken the blame would land on me, that I did know.

It was a dismal day and starting to drizzle: not one for being outside. The Shove Ha’penny board and other games I’d brought to the summerhouse now seemed tame offerings unlikely to engage. In that moment I could think of only one solution. Mrs Ash had returned and was keeping an eye on the boys. As fast as I could, remembering from last time, I tore to the house, threw off my dress and cardigan and got into trousers and a sweater. I raced back to the summerhouse.

The tables had been cleared in the interval. The crumbs brushed off the table, the no-longer-so-white tablecloth folded and set aside. At my arrival, Mrs Ash and Fay left with the last remains of the tea. The boys sat at the emptied table, restless.

‘Let’s wrestle,’ I panted, getting my breath back. ‘’Anyone want to wrestle?’

A snort of disbelieving laughter. ‘You can’t. You’re a girl!’

‘Girls wrestle. My cousin Marco taught me. I wish he was here. If we fold up the table there will be enough space.’

They looked uncertain. A whispered conversation so low I couldn’t decode it, but then Pete, who played the harmonica and was one of the tallest of the boys, asked ‘Would Mr Cohen allow it?’

I kept my fingers crossed behind my back. ‘He would, I’m sure.’

We packed the table away against the far wall. We chose our opposite numbers. I got into a pair with Bobby, a small boy I liked with almond-shaped eyes and long lashes: he was not much bigger than me. The two oldest boys, crew-cut blond-haired Eddie and Pete, took control of the terms of procedure – it would be a match with the winners of each pair going into the next round, and so on.

Soon, we were back to being ‘Banjo and the Hanover Gang,’ back to our unconstrained selves, whooping and shouting and making a hell of a noise out there. I won my first fight, I suspect Bobby let me win, and plunged into the second one which I lost. It didn’t matter. I threw myself back into the fray. It was okay, we were okay, now.

How much later? A shocked Mrs Ash stood at the door. ‘Boys, the van is here to take you home,’ she said in her fiercest tone. Find your coats and smooth your hair. Look at you! Look at you, Miss Jo!’ What mattered was – when they grinned at me, if slightly sheepishly – we were on the same side. And that, in the end, everyone had had fun, wasn’t that what a party was about? Bobby wanted to see the glass houses: so keeping the van waiting a bit, we made a detour through the rose garden to see them.

But my father raised an eyebrow when we talked in his study, later. ‘Mrs Ash tells me there was rather a rumpus at your party today, Jo?’

‘After tea, yes. Well, it was awkward at first and I had to think of a way to break the ice—’

‘—I gather Mrs Ash and Fay were put out?’

‘I was desperate, Daddy. Nobody hardly spoke at the tea, it was horrid. Then afterwards when they started throwing stuff, I had to do something —’

The way he looked at me with a steely glint in his eye – he wasn’t on my side this time, I could tell.

Then all the tension and misery of tea came bubbling up, and the unfairness.

‘You wanted me to have a party. I never wanted one! And it was awful at first, like they didn’t like me anymore, like they were just looking at me and the house and everything. So I tried to think of something to make it right. I don’t know why you are cross —' my voice rising to a crescendo, tears erupting and though I struggled to halt them, they made my voice wobble. ‘Nothing got broken or smashed, or ruined. Why are you looking at me like that?’

‘Come here’ He put his arms around me. ‘Sounds like it wasn’t the easiest of birthday parties.’

‘It was okay in the end,’ I mumbled into his chest.

‘You know, Jo,’ he said, ‘when you invite people into a new situation, it isn’t always easy for them and they don’t necessarily behave as you expect. Perhaps I should have warned you, but you seemed so set on the idea. Poor old Jo!’

‘But in the end it was okay,’ I insisted. I was still trying to work out what had really happened.

He ruffled my hair. ‘You’re a funny duck. And your solution was ingenious, I’ll say that for you.’ His tone was affectionate again. ‘Now have you thanked Mrs Ash and Fay for all the hard work they put in this afternoon for your birthday tea?’

‘Not yet.’

‘Off you go, then.’

‘So you’re not annoyed?’

‘You’re growing up. And I think you learnt one of life’s lessons today.’ He picked up a bundle of papers he’d put down earlier when I’d come into his study.

I hesitated, wondering whether to say anything more. To my mind, Mrs Ash and Fay hadn’t put the boys at ease, they’d been part of the trouble. And I’d have been happier with a less grand tea, just bread and honey and a small cake, if it had made the atmosphere easier. Also, there were things my father hadn’t addressed – about equality, about us all really being the same inside; there were all sorts of loose threads puzzling me after this conversation.

He was absorbed in his papers by now, looking concerned. So I left and I went down the corridor, not entirely sure what lesson I was meant to have learnt. If you meet people in one circumstance and then meet them again in a different place, they might behave differently, was that it? Personally, I thought it was much more simple, it was because my father lived in a posh house and the gang were out of place, like I was when I first arrived here, that was all. But down on the floor we were all just the same; just kids fighting.

*

The next evening I’m on the verge of being in trouble again. In 1953 politically my father’s circle of influence was primarily at a local level, but he had wider ambitions. He hadn’t managed to swing Brighton’s Kemp Town to Labour yet and indeed it was only in 1964, after he stepped down to let the mantle of the fight be taken over by a younger man that Dennis Hobden for Labour won the seat from the Conservatives. But my father had played his part by whittling away at the Conservative majority election after election. In 1931 he had entered the Guinness Book of Records as being the candidate with the largest number of votes against him. At the count, when the massive number of votes for the Conservatives was declared and the paltry number for the opposition, with a twinkle in his eye, he said, ‘I demand a recount!’

In 1953 under the leadership of Clem Attlee my father was still optimistic that Labour would break through in Kemp Town when they won the next election and he would enter parliament. Though he had a reluctance, always for late nights in London and preferred to return to his own bed if he could, he was gradually extending his circle in the party at a national level, building on alliances and friendships and entertaining lavishly at 55. His home was always a comfortable place for political gatherings, and a discreet one.

The evening after the infamous tea party, he had a clutch of politicians to dinner, along with familiar faces, Joe and Phoebe Pole, and a relatively new friend, Lord Longford, soon to be invited to sit on the Board at The Alliance.

If Marco and I were in the house on these occasions, there was never any question of us avoiding the dining-room and eating in the kitchen instead. On the contrary, my father revelled in having ‘the young people’ around, and rather worse, more intimidating for me, he was always keen for our impressions and views to be added to the heady brew being stirred at the table. This particular evening there was no Marco as a foil.

Though my father welcomed, indeed solicited, our young views, he was exacting. Were we alone with him at table, were I alone with him, any ‘daft’ or ill-thought-through answers were greeted with a grunt and a swift raising of whatever newspaper was nearest to hand which he would then studiously read. He didn’t need to agree with your opinions, indeed he relished a good discussion. What he disliked were lazy answers, ill-founded arguments or a repeating of any received wisdom without ‘thinking for yourself.’ This was a potentially exhilarating intellectual atmosphere to grow up in; it could also be daunting.

I found I was sufficiently comfortable with him to not worry when it was just us. We seemed to be able to talk about many things with ease. But in company, aged eleven, I was still shy. Particularly in exalted company where I knew the impression I made mattered. And this was the very day after a discussion with my father that had left unfinished threads, or sense that something was not quite complete between us.

The day following my birthday party was the last of my break. I was tired and the usual bit emotional about going back to Badminton and as a consequence in a not quite engaged sort of mood; thinking about Jaggi and whether he’d fully recovered and about Belinda and my other friends who I would be seeing shortly. And thinking about swimming and whether I would get into the team this term, that sort of thing,

I suppose I was eating whatever we were eating but all the adults’ conversation was going over my head, when suddenly to my horror I heard my father say, ‘It would be interesting to hear what Jo thinks. After all she and her generation are our future.’

Now what were they talking about? It was the Coronation I realised, but which aspect of it? I hadn’t been listening. Dare I admit it? Then Phoebe, dear Phoebe must have seen my perplexed look and guessed. ‘Are you for England becoming a republic, Jo? Of course you’re not. You don’t want to do away with the Royal Family I’m sure, especially not after that wonderful show we’ve been treated to, and young Queen Elizabeth just on her throne. Shame on your father to bring up the topic!’ She was teasing him, and giving me time.

‘Well, Jo?’

Marco’s words came to my aid. ‘Do you think they bring us stability? Though we’ve been doing the Tudors at school and it wasn’t very true then…’

It was enough, just enough. My father nodded, let the conversation ride, and soon after I kissed him (I meant to on his cheek but it ended on his jaw) and went upstairs to pack for the following day.