Alfred and Emily (15 page)

I have written about my father in various ways; in pieces long and short, and in novels. He comes out clearly, unambiguous, all himself. One may write a life in five volumes, or in a sentence. How about this? Alfred Tayler, a vigorous and healthy man, was wounded badly in the First World War, tried to live as if he were not incapacitated, illnesses defeated him, and at the end of a shortened life he was begging, ‘You put a sick old dog out of its misery, why not me?'

This sentence ignores impressive things. He would ride, in Kermanshah, Persia, to his work at the bank. I've seen him go down a rough mine shaft in a bucket, his wooden leg sticking out and banging against the rocky sides. He ran, or hobbled, in fathers' races at my brother's school. He climbed a difficult tree to a tree house made by my brother and me. He would go stomping through the bush, more than once taking a fall, or clamber over the great clods in a ploughed field. The contraption that enabled him to do all this was called by him ‘my wooden leg', and it lived, in duplicate, leaning against a wall in the parental bedroom. Recently Burroughs
and Wellcome had an exhibition of their products past and present in the British Museum and there in a glass case, a museum piece, I saw my father's wooden leg. It consisted of a bucket shape in wood, into which the poor wasted stump was put, on a metal leg and foot, and heavy straps that held the device in place. The stump was fitted with stump socks, in knitted wool, up to ten of them, according to the weather and the condition of the stump. If the weather was hot, the socks were itchy and uncomfortable. When my father got diabetes and lost weight, he filled the well with layers of wool. The War Office supplied the wooden leg, and replacements when it wore out. On to the foot went ordinary socks and a shoe. The knee was flexible, in metal. This contraption in no way resembled the artificial legs of now, which are light and clever and can do everything.

That sentence resumé does not mention the diabetes, which, when they first found insulin, was managed with none of the subtlety they use now.

Reading what I wrote about my father, listening in my mind's ear to things he said, one thing stands out. Medicine generally has evolved so that probably most people now would not recognize its clumsiness at the time my father was wounded. He said that his mind was full of horrors as he lay in hospital: ‘Dr.eadful things, horrible, awful. I would wake up screaming.' My mother, nursing him, confirmed. ‘I was afraid to sleep.' This sounds like post-traumatic stress disorder, long before the condition was described, but surely not the idea. ‘Shell
shock' has in its syllables the sense of trauma. The doctor, called by my father ‘that nice doctor chap', suggested that my father was lucky to have avoided shell shock.

There are pills for it today, surely, and for what sounds to me like a major depression: ‘I was inside a dark cloud. It clung to me. You see, the men who were killed and wounded, the men in my company, oh, they were such fine chaps. I couldn't stop thinking of them. There was such a weight on my heart. My heart felt like a big cold stone…'

People who have experienced grief will testify that it is felt in the heart, like a weight of cold pain.

But no mention was made of medicines. Bromide, was it? If so, it didn't seem to do much for him.

If he had post-traumatic stress disorder or very bad depression these days, there would be miraculous pills, dulling it all.

And now, looking back at that life, it is evident to me that my father, during the dreadful slow end of it, was depressed. Now the grim and ghastly depressions of old people are common knowledge. He would be medicated out of the worst of it. But no one then suggested that my father was ill with bipolar or any other depression and needed serious medicines.

My father slept badly for all his life, what there was of it; he dreamed of his old comrades, and grieved for them. Yes, the pain of grief does soften and go, but at the breakfast table he might say to my mother, ‘I was dreaming of Tommy again,' or Johnny or Bob. ‘There he was, telling me a joke about something.' Quite right! Dead soldiers simply should not be angry ghosts displaying their wretched wounds. He was a great
joker, obviously, Tommy or Johnny or Bob, and I think the Bairnsfather cartoons, much relished in our house, were responsible for that. Old Bill, the archetypical British Tommy, didn't go in for grief or repining, whether up to his waist in dead water in a shell hole, or trying to hide from the shells under a bright moon. ‘The same dear old moon is looking down on
him
,' was the caption of one cartoon: a girl in England with her hair floating looks at the moon out of her bedroom window, and meanwhile her lover is cowering from it under shell-fire. ‘The same dear old moon is looking down on…' became a bit of a catchphrase for us, the children included.

Thus. It is bright moonlight, we stand on the hill and down there the great mealie field is rippling in the moonrays, just green, just not green. It is possible to see there are people too because parts of the field are gently agitated. ‘Thieves,' says my father, pleased because of the predictability of it all. ‘What's the sense,' he enquires of the night, the universe, ‘to go stripping cobs under a bright moon?'

‘While the same dear old moon is looking down on us,' says my mother.

Or, my brother off at boarding school, and she is mourning because of his absence: ‘The same dear old moon…'

‘Oh, come off it, old girl,' says my father, bruised by the sentimentality she enjoys. She had never understood why her higher flights embarrassed him. We, the children, were appalled by them. But some kinds of sentimentality have in them an antidote. She was
moved, her voice was rich with tears. She felt it, all right. But isn't sentimentality intolerable because it is false feeling? My mother was capable of weeping because of Oates going out into the snow – ‘I may be some time' – or the Last Post coming from the noisy radio that was so hard to keep steady on a wavelength. Yet when something terrible had to be done, like shooting an ill dog or drowning kittens, she did it, lips tight, face hard. She complained that my father had a cold heart.

When she was ill, shortly after reaching the farm, she was intolerably sentimental, and this leads me straight into the hardest part of what I am trying to understand.

Nothing that she ever told, or was said about her, or one could deduce of her in that amazing girlhood, so busy, so full of achievement, or of her nursing years, about which we had the best of witnesses, my father himself, or the years in Persia, so enjoyable and so social, nothing, anywhere, in all this matches up with what my mother became.

Nothing fits, as if she were not one woman but several.

As a child I was desperately sorry for my mother, even when I was planning to run away (how? in the bush? where to?). I was sorry for her because she was hardly silent about her sufferings. And that is where we begin with the question, when was Emily McVeagh ever self-pitying, complaining, sorry for herself? I don't think it was in her. And yet it must have been, the self-pitying tears welled up when she was sick with ‘a heart-attack' and took to her bed. Now let's look at this superbly healthy, energetic woman, who has brought two little children, five and three, all the way
from Tehran to London, by ship to Cape Town, to Beira, by train to Salisbury, who helped her invalid husband choose a farm in uncharted, unworked wilderness, got the house built, from materials she had never seen and knew nothing about, got the house furnished, as was the way with ‘the settlers', making curtains from dyed flour sacks, cupboards and tables from paraffin boxes, making everything herself – and then she and her husband got malaria, twice. Is there a clue there perhaps? Very debilitating, is malaria. And then, in that house, made of mud and grass, matching it with what she thought she was coming to, stuck there, and she knew it, she took to her bed with a heart-attack.

This was a nurse. She had nursed for years in one of the world's great hospitals. She had nursed the wounded of a world war, and now it is easy to see she was in a state of dreadful anxiety, she was full of panic, she could look ahead and see she was trapped, with no way out. A heart-attack. So she said. She lay on her bed while my father coped with clearing bush, buying machinery, employing labour – about which he knew nothing at all – looking after the two little children, with the aid of a drunken widow calling herself a housekeeper. It was not like her, my mother. This was simply not what she was. She called her little children to her, and she said, ‘Poor Mummy, poor, poor Mummy.'

To this day I can feel the outrage I felt then. I was outraged, in a rage, furious, and of course desperately sorry for her. Was she ill? She was, if not with a heart-attack. She was ill, all right. And not herself. That was the point. And what were we sup
posed to do? Kiss her? Give her a good hug? But she did not only demand our pity with tears to match hers. That was not all she did.

The man who ran a sawmill, four miles off, admired her, and had made her a contraption to swing into place over her bed so she could read. He was one of the people I remember who thought my mother a marvel. To this reading device she summoned us and gave us our first lessons. I don't remember what they were. I was too hot and angry. ‘You must look after your little brother,' said my mother, in a voice sick with sentiment. But looking after my little brother had been my burden, my task, my responsibility, my pride always. Why, suddenly, did she insist on it now?

She was in bed, so she would tell us later, for a year, but it was not as long. Was it the drunken housekeeper who made it essential for her to get out of bed? Or was it the drunken housekeeper's out-of-control twelve-year-old son, who beat up cats and dogs and bullied us?

She got up, and what that must have cost her I cannot begin to imagine. She was saying goodbye to everything she had expected for her life in this colony, which must have been something like Happy Valley in Kenya. (But if she had experienced Happy Valley she would have been disgusted by it.) In the trunk behind the Liberty curtain lay the evening dresses, the gloves, the feathers, the hats. In a purse put away somewhere the visiting cards she had made especially for this life. But the piano stood in the living-room, whose windows were shaped like portholes, looking out over that bush, and
she played. She played, well, everything – but I was brought up knowing that the right accompaniment to Chopin and Beethoven was the thudding of native drums.

Now I look back and know that she had a bad breakdown, of everything she had been and was. That woman whimpering in her sickbed, ‘Pity me, pity', it was not her.

But I have got ahead of myself, or beside myself. It is because of the impossibility of making sense of Time in its boundaries. Known boundaries and that is the point. I was having my fifth birthday on a German ship in the Atlantic, and when I was seven, was sent to the convent. Two years and perhaps a bit more. Into that time have to be fitted the following. The family went by slow train to Salisbury, where the children were left in a guesthouse, ‘Lilfordia', while my parents went to look for a farm. Not in a nice, speedy car, but in a pony and trap. The farm found, we children and the trunks followed in a covered wagon, of the kind we see in films.

There being no house on our farm, the family were lodging with the Whiteheads, small-mine owners, while the house was being built and the lands marked out from the bush. Well, it need not take long to throw up mud walls and a thatched roof. And malaria – twice, for all of us. And now I have to fit in Biddy O'Halloran, who was supposed to be aiding my mother with her two little children. An au pair, she would be now. For both parents this girl was trouble and annoyance. The watching Fates must have been getting a good laugh out of the situation. Biddy was a modern
girl, an entity much defended, or attacked, in those days. She smoked, had her hair in a shingle and wore lipstick, which my mother was doing herself very soon, but meanwhile she thought Biddy shameless. The trouble was that my parents were in Persia in the feverish post-war years. They missed the jazz, the Charleston, girls cutting off their hair with the
élan
with which girls burned their bras later. Dr.esses were at knee-length – or mini-length. Girls swore and drank, demanded the freedom to be like men.

Biddy O'Halloran appalled my father, too. Young men kept turning up, because of the new girl in the district. Many wanted wives, wanted them badly. No one could make a success of farming if he had no wife. My father hit one youth who asked for Biddy. ‘I think you must mean Miss O'Halloran?' he demanded. ‘But I am
in loco
parentis
. I am responsible for her.' Were there darker currents here? Did my father ‘like' Biddy – as we children would primly put it? Was my mother jealous of Biddy? Emily Tayler's years in Persia had been all pleasure to the point that my father protested, ‘I had no idea I was marrying a social butterfly.' In England, not much fun, but there was the boat. She and the captain got on famously. My father was sick in his berth. No one was ever better fitted for a sea voyage than my mother: she adored deck games and dances, and dressing up – all of it – and the German captain clearly admired her. The belle of the ball she must have been, with that trunk full of delicious frocks, but then there were the farm and impertinent Biddy, and everything went wrong, and very fast.