31st Of February (5 page)

That was in 1918, just before the end of the war. His father had been upset when he was rejected for service because of his flat feet. A quiet little grey man with an inoffensive moustache, he said little, but after his rejection mowed and trimmed the front and back lawns with fanatical care. His mother was upset also; but his parents’ distress seemed to Anderson, when he looked back on it, to have been more social than patriotic. It was the right thing to go to the war, the thing other people were doing, and it was an unpleasantly individual mark to be separated from service by flat feet. The flatness of his father’s feet had always been a joke, but after his rejection for national service it was treated very seriously. “He suffers from a disability in a manner of speaking,” his mother would say to visitors, adding with a sigh, “It kept him out of the army.”

The war went on, there were shortages, Bessie was replaced by Elsie, Anderson went to a local high school. And then the war was over, the cost of living was high, and there were thousands of people who kept it high by deliberately refusing to work. Anderson’s father spoke about them with a passionate anger, an anger the more noticeable and impressive because he was usually so quiet. “If they can’t work let them starve,” he would say. “It’s not can’t work, it’s won’t work. There’s work for everybody to do that wants work. Those miners.” And words would fail him to describe the treason of the miners, whose positive refusal to hew coal for the nation he compared with his own readiness to serve his country.

But the treachery of the miners was not sufficient to wreck the financial stability of Tudor Vista, although Mr Anderson pulled his small moustache upon occasion with more than customary vigour. When Anderson was twelve years old, an event occurred of some importance in his life. He won a scholarship, but did not take it up. Acceptance of the scholarship would have meant attendance at a public school as a boarder, and a certain financial strain upon his parents. It was, therefore, superficially surprising that his father was anxious to take the scholarship, while his mother’s influence was thrown, in the end decisively, against it. Why had she not wanted him to take the scholarship? Anderson wondered afterward, and decided that the incident provided a clear indication of the extent and limits of her snobbery. The limit of her ambition had been reached with occupation of Tudor Vista, dainty teas and people in for auction bridge. She understood the social scale represented by attendance at the local grammar school, and membership of the tennis club; public school and university, however, meant nothing to her but an alien world whose inhabitants had queer aspirations beyond anything she could conceive. Mrs Anderson divided people into three social classes: “Stuck up,” “a nice class of person,” and “rather common.” It is probable that she disliked those who were stuck up even more than those who were rather common.

It was beside the imitation Tudor fireplace and within the leaded light windows that Anderson grew up, a curly-haired boy with an easy smile, exceptionally intelligent and reasonably good at games. His parents were, it may seem, exceptionally snobbish, exceptionally unimaginative in regard to any way of life except their own. But is such complacency really exceptional? Mr and Mrs Anderson had moved into the lower reaches of the middle class, and were effectively able to conceal their comparatively humble origin; such worldly success may be thought adequate for one lifetime. In the morally ambiguous but practically distinct division between satisfied sheep and unsatisfied goats, they belonged to the sheep. Sociologists have remarked that such satisfaction carries with it an illusion of security within their class by observing approvingly certain institutions outside their reach (Mrs Anderson had an encyclopediatic knowledge of the genealogy of the English royal family) and regarding with uncomprehending disapproval the behaviour of dissatisfied goatish figures (like those treasonable miners) well below them in the social scale.

When it had been decided that Anderson should not take up the scholarship, his parents planned their child’s career in a simple and satisfactory way. Grammar school would be succeeded by bank or insurance office, at first in a junior and later in a managerial position: such a course appeared to them not only desirable but almost inevitable. They were baffled, therefore, as well as distressed, by their son’s deviations from their own way of life. The first of these deviations might, indeed have upset any parents; for Anderson was expelled from his grammar school for theft. The affair was altogether discreditable and disturbing; he was found in the changing room engaged in transferring five shillings from the pocket of another boy’s trousers to his own. His parents were most injured, perhaps, by the social disgrace to themselves that attended his expulsion. As far as their son was concerned personally, they were pained equally by the fact that there was no possibility of belief in his innocence, and by their inability to induce in him knowledge of moral wrongdoing.

It would clearly, have been rash to expose such a boy to the monetary temptations of a bank; Anderson became office boy in a firm of shipping merchants. Here his conduct was for a time exemplary. He was promoted after a year to the position of junior clerk, wore striped trousers and a black jacket and carried a carefully rolled umbrella to work every day. At the age of seventeen, however, when he was earning thirty shillings a week, Anderson showed an extraordinary inability to produce the pound which his mother deducted for his board and lodgings. Mrs Anderson kept careful watch upon her son, and discovered that he was constantly in receipt of letters addressed in a backward sloping hand upon salmon-pink envelopes. It was a short step from realization that the backward hand was a woman’s to execution of a parental duty in steaming open the letters; and another disturbing and discreditable affair was disclosed. Anderson had become mixed up (the phase was his mother’s) with a girl named Ethel Smith, a shop assistant whose father was a railway brakeman. The missing weekly pound had been spent upon Ethel, and the process of mixing had gone so far that she was expecting a baby. What was particularly distasteful to Anderson’s parents in the affair was the revelation of their son’s taste for low society. “How could you?” Mrs Anderson asked him. “With a girl of that class?” But the time was one not only for reproaches, but also for swift and decisive action. Mrs Anderson saw Ethel, Mr Anderson saw the railway brakeman. Hard words were exchanged; but money was exchanged also. One more letter came in a salmon-pink envelope, to tell Anderson that Ethel had taken a job in Bradford; and that was the end of the affair. When Mr and Mrs Anderson talked the affair over in later years they agreed that their son had narrowly escaped a shameful marriage through their promptness; but at the same time they were able to convince themselves, by a curious feat of mental legerdemain, that the whole of Ethel’s mixing-up story was false. “That girl certainly pulled the wool over our eyes,” Mr Anderson, who had now retired, would say to his wife; and this instance of duplicity in the lower orders of society afforded them a satisfaction which was at least some compensation for the money laid out on their son’s behalf.

And what of Anderson himself? The central figure in this small drama appeared hardly interested in the fate of this carefully cultivated and costly relationship. His only comment when his parents tried to discover a reason for his actions seemed to be ridiculous. “Why don’t you find some nice girl of our own kind?” his mother said. “I can’t think what you could see in a common girl like that.” Anderson said then, as though the remark had some relevance: “She always had dirty fingernails.” He added after a moment’s reflection:

“She was rather dirty altogether. Her feet were never clean.” His mother was triumphant. “There you are,” she said. “Disgusting. I don’t suppose she took a bath once a month.” Anderson said nothing more, and since his father and mother never spoke of disagreeable subjects if they could be avoided, the affair was dropped.

It is perhaps instructive that the fact that a letter addressed to him had been opened never became a subject of argument between Anderson and his parents, because such conduct seemed to all three of them perfectly natural.

Soon after the end of the Ethel Smith affair, Anderson began to write poetry and short stories. One or two of his poems appeared in a local Ealing paper, and one was published in the
Poetry Review
; his short stories, however, were all rejected. At about the same time he gave up the striped trousers and black jacket and began to wear a bright-coloured shirt and a sports jacket when he went to work. He was sacked from the shipping firm for slackness, and for nearly two years was out of work. Most of his time was spent at the public library, or upstairs in his bedroom reading. He made little effort to look for a job, and it took all his parents’ skill in mental conjuring to separate the lower-class won’t- works who were a menace to the country from the unfortunate can’t-get works represented by their son. He did not make life at home very pleasant for his parents, and at times his attitude seemed to them quite incomprehensible. When his father tried to have a heart-to-heart talk Anderson said simply: “You’ve taken responsibility for me. Very well, keep me.” When his father asked what kind of work he would like to do, Anderson said he was not interested in any office job. When his mother asked again why he didn’t find some nice girlfriends, he said that he feared she would not approve his choice of acquaintance.

It is impossible to know what might have happened to this unhappy household had not the pattern of their family life been suddenly altered. The habit of ignoring unpleasantness can extend from mental to physical matters; when Mrs Anderson paid a long-delayed visit to her doctor she learned that the fears which had often kept her awake during the night had become reality. It was nine months before the cancer finally killed her, and during that time she was hardly ever out of pain. Her physical suffering was appalling; but the doubts she may have begun to feel about the way in which their son had been brought up were cancelled by the remarkable change in his behaviour. Anderson attended his mother in her illness with extraordinary devotion. He brought her breakfast every day, played endless games of cards with her, and behaved almost in her presence like the charming curly-haired boy she remembered. During the last weeks, when she was too weak to leave her bed, he sat by her side for hours reading light romantic novels to her. In the three days before she died he was with her almost constantly, although at this time her appearance was ghastly, and the stench that surrounded her was so unpleasant that her husband could hardly bear to enter the room. It was Anderson’s hand that his mother grasped when, pitifully yellow and gaunt, unrecognizable as the plump middle-aged woman who had visited the doctor nine months before, she completed the long journey to death.

Soon afterward Anderson, now twenty-one years old, obtained a job as a clerk in the accounts department of the Nationwide Advertising Company. At the same time he left home, and went to live in lodgings. His father sold Tudor Vista and became a paying guest with some distant relations in Birmingham named Pottle. Communication between father and son was spasmodic, and soon became limited to two or three letters a year. When Anderson last met his father he greeted a little grey bent man who seemed bewildered by the lack of purpose in his life; his father saw a young man with thin, hard, keen face, unusually serious for his age, who wore a neat blue suit, carefully brushed and pressed. Transferred to the Production Department of his firm, Anderson had attracted the attention of his superiors by making rough layouts embodying new advertising ideas for their clients, which he left lying about on his desk. He had been tried in the firm’s Studio, where he showed insufficient artistic ability for a layout man, and then in the copy department, where at last he settled. “Your mother would have been proud of you,” Anderson’s father said to him shakily. “She always said you’d make good.” The young man made no reply. Some three months later his father died suddenly of a heart attack.

Anderson was not a great copywriter, but he possessed a combination of practical common sense and verbal ingenuity which is unusual in advertising. After three years he left the Nationwide, and from that time onward moved from firm to firm, each time improving his position a little, making a reputation as a figure of solid talent. In 1939 he came to Vincent Advertising, a firm which people either left in a month because they could not stand Vincent, or stayed for years because they liked him. Anderson stayed. During the war Vincent Advertising, like other firms, handled their share of government advertising. Anderson was first deferred and finally exempted from the war service, because he was employed on the work Vincents were handling for the Ministry of Knowledge and Communication.

In 1942 Anderson married a girl named Valerie Evans. They had no children.

6

There is a part of London near the Buckingham Palace Road, behind Eccleston Bridge, where the large stucco seediness of once-fashionable squares, Eccleston and Warwick and St George’s, fades into a smaller shabbiness. There are streets here of small, identical red-brick houses, fronted by ugly iron railings; these streets branch off the main stem of Warwick Way, that backbone of Pimlico where large houses converted into a dozen one-room flats offer typists and secretaries the chance of developing an individuality untrammelled by the presence of parents or the inhibiting eyes of childhood neighbours. Such self-contained lives typify the decay that is spreading slowly over the fabric of our great cities; to be part of this decay, to visit the ballet frequently and to fornicate freely, to attain a complete irresponsibility of action – that is, in a sense, the ideal life of our civilisation. And if such a life can be worked comfortably enough in the four-storied houses of Warwick Way, it can be lived more easily still in the little red-brick houses of Joseph Street. You might find similar houses in any London suburb, where they would be the homes of clerks, schoolmasters and small businessmen; but the people who lived in Joseph Street were male and female prostitutes, unknown actors and film extras, artists and journalists who had given up worship of the bitch-goddess Success and were content to earn a few pounds here and there which they drank away at the Demon round the corner in Radigoyle Street while their teeth fell out and their tongues grew furry and their eyesight failed. Among these characteristic occupants of the small red-brick houses, however, were a few eccentrically successful figures, people whose presence in this raffish area could not have been easily explained, even by themselves. Joseph Street numbered among its inhabitants two company directors, a dress designer, an important gynaecologist and a retired trade union official. Anderson, who might also be regarded as eccentrically respectable, lived at Number 10 Joseph Street, in a house distinguished from its fellows only by the window boxes carefully cultivated by the Fletchleys, who lived in a self-contained flat on the first floor. Anderson had bought a nine-year lease of the house at the time of his marriage.