Memoir: 1953 in My Father’s House ii

Introducing a new character

So there I was, on the threshold of my father’s house in the first days of 1953. It is situated on a wide avenue that divides Brighton from Hove. At the top of it you reach Devil’s Dyke and the Downs. The houses are set apart from one another, Edwardian, solidly built and moneyed. His comes with a fair amount of land, perhaps half an acre in all, on a slope, exposed, getting the full force of any wind blowing off the sea, a grey strip of which you could just glimpse, on the days you could distinguish it from the sky, far below over the housetops.

Inside, you enter a square hall, and off it a sitting-room leading onto a small sunroom, my father’s study and library, the dining room, kitchen, and staff quarters. Upstairs is my father’s suite of rooms – bedroom, dressing room, bathroom, plus a twin bedded and single guest room, a second bathroom, and beyond it a door to the staff bedrooms. The staff at the house were a different category of staff to anything I’d imagined, I was quickly to discover.

In charge was Mrs Ash the housekeeper, a handsome well-deported woman, with pale blonde hair done up in a bun, a comely figure, blue eyes that looked as if they would brook no nonsense and a determined jawline. Below her in pecking order, Fay the parlourmaid, grey haired, less intimidating-looking but equally averse to having her routines in running the master’s house with a free hand compromised or inconvenienced by a ten-year-old newcomer. Then there was Griff the chauffeur who lived off the property but was there so regularly and from so early that it was as if he lived there. There was a head gardener and one or sometimes two under gardeners who alongside keeping the grounds in good order, tended the greenhouses; these provided year-round flowers for the house and the offices of the Building Society of which my father was managing director, and boosted supplies at the charity and other events with which he was involved. There was a cleaner who came in daily and someone else who did the laundry and polished the silver. In all a vast staff to support one man, who had been living as a bachelor, albeit one who entertained generously, while we’d been in South Africa. All this was a far cry from our Rachel.

Instead of an Edwardian ‘upstairs and downstairs’, the house had a spaciously appointed right half and a less spaciously-appointed left half with its own corridors, staircases and busy life being lived. The furnishings on our side tended towards the heavy: velvet curtains and cushions, lots of cushions, maroons and dark greens and gold braid and tassels and gilt-framed unmemorable paintings, country scenes perhaps and still lives. The carpets were thick. Everything gave the impressions of being hushed. There was nothing yielding about the interior, nothing intimate.

My father drew me into his study with its gigantic mahogany desk, its neat rows of books on the two walls of bookshelves. It may have been that first day that he told me I could take anything I liked to read, certainly it was early on.

            ‘Your mother tells me you’re an avid reader. What do you read?’

            ‘Enid Blyton.’

            There was a pause. Then, ‘Well, well as your taste develops, these books are here for you to borrow –Jo. There’s a lot of politics and history, and literature too, of course. Are you interested in the world around you?’

            I nodded but something more pressing was on my mind. ‘Where am I going to sleep?’

            ‘Now here’s the thing,’ he said. ‘Sit down’. I glanced around for my mother who seemed to have disappeared. He lowered himself into the leather swivel chair at his desk, there was a cane chair by the door. I sat in it. My eye was caught by the collection of glass paperweights on his desk. The first things to appeal to me inside this house. Their intricate designs. Like pin cushions in wonderful colours, inside the glass. How was this done?

            He swung his chair round to face me. ‘I haven’t told you about your cousin, have I?’

            I shrugged.

            ‘Marco, Mary’s boy. Mary’s my first cousin, so by rights you’re second cousins. He’s at boarding school, as you will be. In the holidays he lives here with us. He is eleven, a quiet boy, and loves birds. You’ll be sharing a room.’

            My mother had called me to her the evening before we left South Africa. She had looked serious and told me that there were two things she ought to advise me of so that I didn’t get shocks when I got to England. So that I was equipped. She started her address as she frequently did when she spoke to me those days with, ‘Well, Jo…’ The two things were curious as last minute advice to the daughter she’d be leaving, the daughter who was entering adolescence. I was waiting on her words. I had many questions about England, it seemed so vague and fuzzy from my early memories and our grandmother’s stories. It had seemed a gigantic and terrifying shift ahead to weather on my own. I had hoped what she had to say would be illuminating. So I listened with more attention than usual. I was frequently being chastised for my mind wandering. The two things were that there may be black girls in my dormitory at school. And that our name Coleman was not the same name as the Colman mustard family, I mustn’t be surprised if someone made that mistake.

I hadn’t known what to do with either piece of information. On the scale of things they seemed pretty asinine and to offer me no clues as to what was ahead. I’d been interested rather than taken aback that there may be black children at the school. And if they were like Rachel’s children as she’d described them to me, what would be the problem? Besides wasn’t this one topic I’d heard my parents discussing and rather than fighting, actually being in agreement over. That the apartheid where we lived was unjust and should be brought to an end as soon as possible. Well then in England where there weren’t those barriers apparently, of course I might be sharing a dorm with people of all sorts of different races, I supposed. Although, come to think of it, the depictions of boarding schools in Enid Blyton’s books didn’t go into that aspect much. Still, I hadn’t, as I remember it, been phased by my mother’s bit of news. Only disappointed that these weren’t helpful nuggets to hang onto in the time ahead. And, generally, angry that all was changing so fast around me, and perplexed. Perplexed to a sort of numbness and passivity. But now this new news, this was entirely different. Share a room in my father’s house with a boy I didn’t even know, even if he was quiet and loved birds, this really did phase me. I couldn’t think of anything less appealing. And why had no-one warned me?

            The room the housekeeper Mrs Ash showed me to on the first floor was similar to the rest of the house, neutral, impersonal, grown-up. It was kitted out for adult guests. Not one thing in it, not one gesture had been made to indicate that it was going to become the room of two children. Marco, Mrs Ash informed me in what I later learnt was a dry Yorkshire accent, was away with his mother (she managed to give me the impression she didn’t approve of this mother) and would be returning on the Tuesday.

Mummy came back an hour or two later and said I had to make the most of it, she had vague memories of having met this Marco as a young child before we’d left for S.A. and was sure he was very nice and very well-brought-up she said, giving me the look which implied that perhaps I wasn’t and that had I been I would accept that grown-ups know best, and to stop making a fuss.

 I duly unpacked my belongings into the empty shelves of the wardrobe allotted to me, trying but failing to block out the image of the distinctly boyish vests, pants and socks in the adjoining shelves.

Mummy stayed in England just long enough to take me by train to London to see a specialist who pronounced that the brace I’d worn for the past six months was an old-fashioned and altogether deleterious treatment for broken discs, and should be removed, while instead as much exercise as possible to strengthen the surrounding muscles should start forthwith, and to have me fitted at Daniel Neal for my school uniform. These tasks performed, she kissed me hastily, and left me with my father. And with the boy who loved birds, who was yet to appear.

Marco, when he eventually did, was of average height, he had enviously silky light brown almost blond hair, a square forehead and regular features. I would have been reluctant to admit it that first week but he was a good-looking boy. He was quiet with my father, rather deferential, but not with me, oh no. I imagined he was no more happy to find me sharing what had been his room on his return than I was, but viewed it as something he could do little to change. (That was his good manners perhaps.)

The night after he arrived we had an almighty row. He was a Catholic, I was uncertain what this was. Another thing that Enid Blyton hadn’t mentioned. It was he who told me about his Catholicism, he was at a Catholic school – and about my own Jewishness. If anything, I’d had a vague feeling that we were agnostics, humanists, now this. I was Jewish it turned out.

Unwilling to let him get too much of the upper hand but curious, I asked him to explain the difference. He informed me with some energy that it was my lot who had killed Christ. Now Christ I did know about of course from my school’s countless Assemblies and Bible lessons. What, Christ on the Cross had been betrayed by ‘my lot?’ This was going too far. I was not equipped to point out that Christ himself was Jewish, but still I couldn’t help feeling that I had to come to the aid of the group I had just been identified with.

There was only one way to deal with such a gross misassumption. I got out of my bed, went over to his twin bed (divided by a mahogany chest of drawers), jumped onto it, grateful to be freed of the heavy support, and thumped him one. He was bigger, and a year older. Well brought up or not, and knowing he was dealing with a girl and my father’s daughter, there was still only one way a self-respecting boy could handle the situation. He thumped me back. I expect he did a fair bit of fighting at his school. He was in striped flannelette pyjamas, I can’t remember what I was in, probably similar.

We knelt up on the bed, reared up and thrashed at each other. Somehow I managed to give as good as I got. He pinned me down at one stage. I kicked and bit him. As you have guessed no doubt, with so much passivity and sense of things being organised for me that I had no say in and didn’t like, I had a lot of angry energy to get rid of. He manoeuvred free of me and attempted to pin me down again. I kicked him furiously on his bum till he gasped. I was a squirling octopus flaying out, writhing, he couldn’t get quite all of me in his grasp in one go. As we fought we eased nearer the side of the bed. I think I saw a possible move before he did. Next moment I’d tripped him out of the bed onto the floor. Of course he pulled me down with him. And he was the bigger of the two, the heavier. Now on the floor he had me fully in his grip. He sat astride me forcing my head back, pinioning my legs and arms.

‘Give up?’ he demanded.

I nodded. He took his hand from my face. I don’t know why but I immediately started to laugh. It came bubbling up inside me. He rolled over and laughed too. Suddenly it seemed hilariously funny. We lay on our backs and kicked our feet in the air and laughed and laughed. But being a boy (sorry) he had to point out that as a budding wrestler I’d made a few tactical errors that had given him the lead.

‘I could teach you,’ he offered benevolently. ‘You’re not bad for a girl. You could be my second when I fight the local boys if you like. There’s a group round here always taunting me, I’ve been meaning to have a go at them when I meet them next.’

And so my life at 55 Dyke Road Avenue began.

Over breakfast the following morning my father lowered whichever of the broadsheets he was reading at that moment, there was a pile of them by his plate, and studied me. ‘There was a heck of a lot of noise coming from your room last night, Jo? Your mother wouldn’t think much of my looking after you if you and Marco did yourselves injuries on your first week here. Mm?’ His expression seemed quizzical, half-amused. ‘Everything alright between you now?’

‘Nothing to worry about,’ I said. He must have heard our laughter too? And suddenly the imp in me that I’d hidden in a box for years and years popped out, and I grinned back at him as if we were sharing, without words, a joke.

Marco always claims, even now, so many years later, that the house changed after I arrived. That it had been a formal place for a child up to that point and his preferred place in it had been the staff kitchen. But then I turned everything around. That somehow (‘God knows how’ his words) I ‘magicked’ my father’, and life at No.55 was never the same thereafter. Far more enjoyable.

As I remember it, it was a less straightforward progression. Initially fraught with all manner of ambiguities to be deciphered. But something occurred that I like to think did have a sprinkling of magic in it. Simply put, I, the girl who never seemed to be quite the girl my mother wanted, more often than not a disappointment, turned out to be just what my father wanted. He fell in love with me and, grateful, I naturally fell in love with him. And the house, not without initial resistance in some quarters, creakingly shifted from public space deemed suitable backdrop for an affluent bachelor’s entertainment of his mix of acquaintances, business colleagues and political buddies – what my mother called ‘Lewis’s circus’ (with even the décor chosen by others) – to one where the everyday things, the mundane and the not-so-mundane, the homely and sometimes the chaotic, breathed into it a more intimate life.

For how this transformation occurred, dear readers, and the inevitable bumps and set-backs on the way, I beg your patience to await the next instalment.