Everything I Have Always Forgotten (2 page)

A few years later, I discovered the enormous leather suitcases that were custom-made for the luggage rack of that car. There were two of them, almost one and a half metres long and quite shallow – so one could lay out a full ball gown or suit of tails in one without folding or creasing them. I also found Father's motoring clothes, worthy of a First World War fighter pilot: an ankle-length, tight-waisted white leather greatcoat, with elbow-length gauntlets and helmet to match. Hardly practical attire for getting in and out of a little biplane, or even a motor car, for that matter. He must have cut quite a figure driving his gleaming, dark green, 3.5 litre two-seater Bentley, tall and slim as he was then, the brilliantly successful, the lionized young novelist that he was, with a dark beard and such a romantic air – that first time in 1931 when he went to stay with Mother's family in their country mansion.

Father was discovered there prowling around upstairs by a Bavarian cousin, a Baroness Pia von Aretin (who later helped him enormously with his last novel by introducing him to people who had known Hitler when he was on the lam after the failed Munich Putsch) pacing the corridors of my grandmother's house, barefoot. Naturally, being a well-bred German girl, she waited for him to introduce himself, but all he said was: “Do you speak Chinese?” Of course, his romantic, creative, exotic aura was given another lift. Then, when he went to change for dinner, the valet had laid out a tent for him on his bed! He rang for the valet and asked about his tent: “Well sir, we found not a single bag in your motor, all we could find was the tent and seeing as we'd heard in the servants' hall that you'd been to Arabia and such foreign parts, we thought perhaps that you might be in the habit of wearing tribal robes instead of trousers and tails.” The aura gained yet another tone of intensity. Mother's family was at once impressed by his fame, but fearful of the scandalous controversy around his first novel. That children could be such wicked little savages when left to themselves – not the ‘little angels' brought downstairs by nurses, washed, combed and forced to behave. ‘His' children managed surprisingly well in the captivity of pirates, much as Golding's boys later survived on a desert island. Children are not by nature innocents; they are already learning survival techniques.

What a time-warp the Second World War created! Before then, the ‘haves', the 1 per cent, drove motor cars, which, like their clothing, were bespoke. Mother knew only the name of the Head Gardener, because there were too many other gardeners and, anyway, no instructions were to be given without being passed first through Mr Edwards. He wore a three-piece suit with a gold watch chain across his prosperous paunch. The others, the ‘have nots', still walked to the pump down the street for water and hoarded coal to warm the house a little on Christmas Eve – coal in your stocking was a blessing, not a scold in those days. This 99 per cent who produced everything, died in wars ‘for their country' and served the gentry hand and foot. Only, twenty years later, there were no more servants and everyone bought what they could afford and find.

There certainly remained anomalies, such as the barber whom Father occasionally visited in London. I remember the place after the war, with its dark wood-framed bevelled mirrors and great high, stuffed leather armchairs around which glided the Gentleman Barbers, armed with hand clippers and scissors, long razors which they stropped on leather – the same genteel old men who had regularly trimmed the beard of King George V. They were masters of conversation, no doubt researching the interests of the morrow's client the night before – sport was not the dominant subject as it is today, but gentle mention of Politics, Art, Literature and (for Father) even Sailing! Or Jacksons of Piccadilly, where you could still see an immaculate ‘Gentleman's Gentleman' tasting a little aged stilton, only to declare that “His Lordship would not approve, it's under-ripe, you see”.

In general, while still hugely divided, there had been a giant leap towards egalitarianism. When working on his second novel, Father had consulted a Chinese laundryman (who spoke enough English) on details of local colour from his past. He was researching his next book (which came out in 1938) and when the man mentioned that he would like to open his own laundry, instead of working for someone else, Father gave him five pounds and asked him to bill him when he had used up his credit. He posted his dirty dress shirts to London and they came back immaculately starched and ironed – and he was never asked for another penny – those five pounds had been seed capital that started a small Chinese laundry empire! Not that Father wore dress shirts by the time I was around in North Wales – well, perhaps once a year. He wore modern nylon shirts that he washed himself and hung to dry in the bathroom. Unlike his old friend Dylan Thomas, he had several shirts, whereas Dylan only bought one for his first lecture tour in the States – he said he tried to wash it every night, but since it was never dry in the morning, he always put it on wet next day. Much like the vicar who announced that his dog collar was made of plastic, so he could “lick it clean in the morning and it was ready to wear!”

Sixty years on, I found the car again, when my brother sent me an e-mail with an attachment: a couple of black-andwhite snapshots of it at its very worst, slumped by a stone wall in a small field belonging to our friend Hamish, high up in the Welsh mountains. Pieces of body were hanging down to the ground or removed and loaded onto the seats. Then there were glossy colour photographs of it immaculately restored, with its original licence plate: KU631, outside an expensive suburban brick house somewhere in England, its distinctive body changed beyond recognition. The gracefully long, sweeping wings – so modern for a car built in 1922 – had been replaced by small individual mudguards. The only access door was on the passenger side because the handbrake was exterior. Even the gear stick was on the outside of the driver, though inside the car. This left more room for the passenger and an easier slide-through for the driver when getting in. I suppose it also left no excuse for groping the skirts of attractive young flappers while changing gears. His was the 113th Bentley to leave the workshop, the original body built by a private coachbuilder – as was the custom in those days.

Just as Fords came “in every colour as long as it's black” and all early Bugattis came in bright blue, so all Bentleys were British Racing Green, a green so dark as to be almost black. It had last changed hands for £75,000. I believe Father had bought it second-hand in 1928 for the phenomenally high price of £2,000 (say, £100,000 today). He was doing well in those days.

II

THE FIRST WINTERS

W
as that really my very first memory: when I was six? Or was it, more likely, when I was sitting on my wooden lorry, called Borry, pushing it up the incline of flagstones in a huge kitchen at the age of three? After the Second World War, there were no metal toys to buy, no Dinky or Tonka Toys, just what local artisans could make from bits of wood and nails and wire. That was how Borry was created.

The floor of that kitchen seemed to stretch and slope as far as the eye could see. There was a great, hot coal stove to cook on that kept the whole room cosy. I wonder how we had any coal, in that post-war time of rationing and penury – when women in the cities were queuing up for their coal rations with prams in which to take it home. Yet we seemed to have coal and no doubt that was why I was playing there when it happened. The winter of ‘46/'47 was particularly cold in Cumberland, just south of the Scottish/English border. We stayed there, at Lyulph's Tower (which belonged to Hubert Howard, one of Mother's first cousins), for a winter because our house in North Wales was still impractical for winter living. For a start, our new home had no legal access (save by sea) and it was hard work bringing coal two miles across the estuary by boat at high tide. Besides, petrol was still rationed and Father could not get petrol coupons for his outboard motor, so he had to use some of the precious supply intended for the Jeep.

So it was that we spent those two winters in different houses in Cumberland (also known as the Lake District). They belonged to one or another of Mother's numerous cousins: Howards, the Catholic side of the family. Some of their ancestors had lost their heads rather than renounce their faith during the Reformation of the sixteenth century. The Doyen of that family was John, first Duke of Norfolk (1430-85)… the present Duke is so far removed from my family as to be beyond my sight. Lyulph's Tower had been built as a hunting lodge almost a hundred years before, in Victorian times, in a bizarre style of ‘Gothic Castle', a nineteenth-century version of some 1940s Beverly Hills folly. It had a vast kitchen and dining hall in which to prepare and enjoy the spoils of the hunt. Its Gothic style left complicated joints in the roof where great weights of snow accumulated. Leaks occurred where the lead flashing had failed. The leaks wet the heavy plaster ceilings below, until…

Bang! – there was a terrific crash as a huge piece of thick ceiling plaster plummeted to the floor, throwing up a fountain of dust about it. I remember watching, fascinated by the cloud of dust that rose, spread like a mushroom, and then slowly fell back to the floor. The chunks of plaster had whiskers of horsehair (added to the plaster to give it greater structural strength) protruding from its sides, where it had broken off and landed – just where I had been on my lorry only a few moments before. That startled me and no doubt, startled Mother even more.

That time in the Lake District, I first heard the word ‘
terrific
' and sensed the exhilaration of a forceful, enthusiastic speaker. I was sitting between two adults in the huge, leather front seat of a Ford Motorcar (no such thing as seat belts then), climbing the driveway of Lyulph's Tower, that Gothic Hunting Lodge. The car smelled of musty wood, leather and hot oil, that nostalgic odour of old motors which still grabs at my senses as evocatively as certain perfumes. The driver was a commanding old lady and she exploded the word ‘
terrific
' with such vehemence that it has stayed in heavy italics with me to this day. It remains associated with the simple replica of an aeroplane that decorated the hoods of those big old Ford Pilots. It gave me visions of planes taking flight – the soaring force, the escape, the flight… all contained in that single word ‘
terrific!
' At that age I did not wonder where the precious petrol to run this big car came from, but it certainly was strictly rationed at the time.

I wonder now if that determined lady was our Great Aunt ‘Tiger', who terrified the whole county with her driving – a style not so dissimilar to that of Mother. They both drove by touch rather than by sight, punctuating monologues by forcefully changing gears – usually at the wrong moment for the car. Tiger had knocked down a ‘pillar box' or mailbox at the end of her driveway. Pillar boxes were of heavy cast iron, set deep into the ground and painted bright red (how could you possibly miss them?) They were decorated with the Royal Coat-of-Arms and ‘G.R.VI' for ‘George Rex Sixth'. The Royal Mail and its collection boxes were the property of the Crown and their abuse a serious offence. Nevertheless, when Great Aunt Tiger was summoned to the magistrate's court, she stormed in with all guns blazing, upbraiding the sixty-year-old magistrate with: “Now listen to me, young man, that pillar box was placed in a most dangerous position. Someone was bound to run into it sooner or later. It must be moved to a safer place!” It was moved and Great Aunt Tiger continued to terrify the neighbourhood by driving around for many years to come.

While the War was in its final, desperate death-throes – successful at last thanks to Roosevelt's skilful manipulation of American opinion, I had already managed to half cripple my left hand by holding onto the heating bar of an electric heater. It was off at the time, but incorrectly wired, so that even when turned off, electricity still flowed when given the ‘ground' of a crawling infant. I was too young to have any memories of this, but I was later told that my youngest sister, three years my senior, was so terrified by my blackened hand that she screamed until Mother came and picked her up – ignoring, for the time being, the source of her horror: the hand! Well, that falling ceiling missed me too. How many lives does one have? At least in North Wales there would be no danger of electrocution – we had a twelve-volt windmill charging four tractor batteries. They were usually so worn out that the light came up and died down again on the whim of the wind as it freshened and failed – much as a sailing boat drifts to a standstill in a calm, then lists to the wind and leaps forward again. No, there was no danger of electrocution here!

Ten years later, my middle finger was still so bent from the burn that it threatened to grow into my palm. I was sent to a hospital for plastic surgery. The hospital had been built during the Second World War to patch up disfigured fighter pilots. It still looked like an army barracks but now it treated hare-lips and obtrusive ears in children, besides casualties of fires and accidents amongst adults. In three weeks the surgeons did miracles and the finger is as good as new.

Nor could I escape electrocution forever: in the sixties I was installing a kinetic art show in a gallery on the Boulevard St Germain, in Paris. Noon came just as I was in the middle of some complex wiring, but when the six artists setting up their own works called me to lunch, I dropped everything in midstream and we all went round the corner to a neighbourhood bistro for a well-lubricated lunch and much enthusiastic discussion. We were just behind Les Deux Magots, hangout and workplace of Hemingway, Sartre and Camus – but it was too busy and expensive for us proletarian workers. Upon our return an hour later, what I had been doing had escaped me and I had forgotten what I should do next. I decided simply to pick up where I had left off and hope it would all come back to me. The metal-handled wire cutters were still there on the floor where I had left them, right next to the wire which I was about to cut. The bang threw me right across the room. I could see the wire was still plugged in – the outlet smoking ominously. My wire cutters were perfectly melted to use as wire strippers with two small rounds melted in the cutting edges. Could that have been why I moved to America, where the voltage is 110 instead of 220?