Growing Up In a War (43 page)

I had always taken it for granted that when my grandfather died, the family shop would come to my father. And so had my father. But it did not. After the usual brief delay, during which everyone waited and wondered, the contents of my grandfather’s will were disclosed, and it turned out that his whole estate had been left to my grandmother. I was not present when my father was told this, but the description I heard was so lurid that it has remained with me all my life, as if I had been there. He went green. And then, for just a moment before recovering control, he looked as if despair overwhelmed him. At the age of forty-five he found himself embarking on a new life as an employee of his mother.

I do not know exactly what went on within the family after that, partly because I was away at school, though most of it would have been hidden from me anyway. Certainly there was a lot of electricity in the air, and I knew that high-tension diplomacy was going on. My father made it clear that he was not prepared to carry on in this situation, except for a transitional period. My grandmother
was
now an old lady who had had nothing to do with the management of the shop for many years, and could not conceivably run it herself. If my father was not prepared to run it for her, her (exceedingly powerful) instinct was to sell it for as much money as she could get for it. Her other children would benefit more from this – eventually, at her death – than from any of the alternatives. On the other hand, they themselves felt that it would be unjust to my father, who had given his life to the shop in a way that none of them had, and had been in effect its manager for a long time – he would now be left with nothing, not even a job. It was one of those family situations where everyone’s honest and genuine interests are at odds. What natural justice would have decreed was fairly clear. My grandfather should have left some money to each of his daughters and the shop to my father, with the proviso that a proportion of the income from it should go to my grandmother for the rest of her lifetime – a share smaller than the one he had been drawing for the two of them, but enough for her needs. He had in any case left her the house they lived in, and the value of that could eventually have been divided between the two daughters. I believe that what my father tried to do was to broker a deal along these lines – but of course he was in the invidious, mortifying position of asking for sacrifices from everyone else while seeking advantages for himself. It was painful all round. These were, I know, bruising times for everybody: I heard some damaging exchanges and some bristling silences. We were back to family drama at its worst, as in the old days.

At what stage my father was diagnosed as having cancer is something my memory has blotted out, but while all these things were going on he was becoming more and more seriously ill. All his adult life he had been practically a chain-smoker, and now he was found to have lung cancer. In those days the two things were not known to be connected. As in the case of my grandfather, the full reality of the situation was kept from me. It so happened that the
three
months before my father took to what turned out to be his deathbed coincided almost exactly with one of my school terms, so I was away from home for that period and did not know what was going on. When nightmare forebodings invaded my mind, I tried to shake them off, and told myself that I was being irrational – that if things were as bad as that I would have been told something by now. When only four days of the term were left, Pongo called me into his study in the late afternoon. Our conversation went roughly as follows.

‘I’ve got some bad news for you, I’m afraid. Your father is seriously ill.’

‘I know, sir.’

‘Your mother telephoned. They want you at home. I think you’d better go tomorrow.’

I thought: why? There isn’t anything I can do about it. I said: ‘But I shall be going home on Tuesday anyway. He’s been ill all term.’

‘Your family think it would be best for you to go straight away. The doctors have just seen him, and they think he’s very unwell.’

I tried to avoid engaging with the implication of this, but it got to me just the same, and my vision swam.

Tears seemed to fill my whole head. In a voice that I heard cracking about all over the place I said: ‘Can you tell me any more, sir – what the situation actually is?’

He started fiddling with a packet of cigarettes, taking a long time to get one out. He always did this when he was embarrassed. But he was always shy when talking to a boy.

‘There’s nothing more I can tell you,’ he said. ‘The doctors are concerned, and your family want you at home. I think you ought to go tomorrow morning by the …’ and he told me what train to catch.

Whether it was that evening or after breakfast next morning I do not know, but I went to an ordinary daily chapel service before
catching
the train home. Being surrounded by people singing hymns and psalms was too much for me, and I stood there with tears pouring down my face. Still, no one had actually said anything – no one had said my father was dying, or even that his life was in danger. So I still struggled to tell myself that my fears were exaggerated, that they were reactions based on ignorance, that if things were really as bad as all that someone would have said something to me by this time. Yet part of me – a still-only-just-submerged part – knew what I was steeling myself against. I have been told that people who face death often go through such feelings. I was like a condemned man half aware that he was in denial.

When I got off the train at Victoria my sister Joan was on the platform. Walking up to her I made a for-God’s-sake-tell-me-what’s-happening gesture, eyebrows raised and eyes wide open, hands moving outwards and upwards.

‘Don’t worry, Bryan,’ she said feelingly. ‘He’s going to die quite quietly.’

Victoria station spun round me, then my vision blacked out (or rather greyed out) and I thought I was fainting. I groped blindly at Joan for support, and she led me to a bench in the station concourse, where we sat for some time while I cranked myself up into coming to terms with the shock. My father was not just dying, he was dying
now
, and I was immediately about to see him dying, and he would be dead in a couple of days.

Joan was deeply upset. ‘Didn’t you know?’ she asked, distraught. ‘I thought you knew.’

Haltingly, and with long silences, she told me what had been going on in my absence. The story ended with our father taking to his bed the day before, and the doctor saying to my mother that he would live for only another two or three days, whereupon my mother telephoned my housemaster.

‘I was the one saying all along that you mustn’t be given a shock, that you must be told,’ Joan said. ‘And now this.’

During all that time my mother had put off telling me because there was nothing I could do, and she saw no point in upsetting me to no purpose. Joan had protested to her: ‘Yes, but Dad’s going to die quite soon, and when it does happen it mustn’t come to Bryan as a total shock, a bolt from the blue.’

When, the previous day, they had decided to telephone the school, they had agreed that they would ask my housemaster to break the news to me that my father was on the point of death, and to send me straight home. After making the telephone call my mother had told Joan that she had done this. I do not know whether the failure of nerve was on her part with Pongo or on Pongo’s part with me. Both would have been in character, but I think, given the circumstances, the latter is more likely. Anyway, Joan had assumed that Pongo had told me. When she met me on the platform her first concern had been to assure me that our father was not in pain, and that I was not on the point of witnessing nightmarish death throes – she had interpreted my facial expression and hand gestures as a way of signalling shock-horror at what I was about to face. Her first words had been intended to put my mind at rest.

‘There’s nothing to be frightened of,’ she said. ‘He’s quite calm, and he looks normal. He’s being given a lot of morphine. The doctor says he’ll just drift away. If he’s not asleep, he’ll talk to you quite naturally.’

But I was terrified. To see my father and know that he was about to die was more than I believed I could bear. But there was no alternative, at this point, to going home and facing it. Dragging myself away from that bench in Victoria station was one of the hardest things I have ever done.

As it turned out, my father lived not for two or three days but for six weeks. He was dying throughout the whole of that school holiday and well into the following term, and at no point did he or the rest of us know how much longer it – he – was going to
go
on. It was always true that he might die next day. I was at home throughout it all, eventually coming to an arrangement with Pongo that I would return to school the day after the funeral, whenever that might be.

My life contains two episodes which were literally traumatic in the effect they had on me, and this was one of them. The other was to come in my twenties, and had to do with my marriage. After each of them, I was not the same person again. With the death of my father, the human being I supremely loved, loved unconditionally, was dying in front of my eyes. At one point he said: ‘It feels to me as if I’ve been in this bed half my life,’ and that was how it felt to me too. I was in a state of intolerable and yet – of course, it had to be – tolerated anguish, unbearable yet borne, and so always at the end of my tether. I stayed at home most of the time, helping out, sitting for long periods with him, unable to think of anything else, not much wanting to go anywhere else. There were, however, a few times when I was overwhelmed by a need to get away from it, and then I would just go out, it scarcely mattered where. On one of those occasions something happened that I have always remembered with gratitude.

It was a Sunday afternoon. I took a tube train to Green Park, blind with misery, and wandered around the park for a while. Then I crossed Piccadilly and began to drift through the empty streets of Mayfair. In those days London’s West End was notorious for its street prostitution, thick on the ground at every time of day, and since I had grown to adult height I was used to being accosted. For any full-grown male walking alone it was, literally, an everyday occurrence. I was ravenously tempted, but I had never been with a prostitute, not out of anything to do with rectitude but from fear of venereal disease. One of the salient themes of wartime propaganda had been the dangers and horrors of this, and it was also the subject of many schoolboy jokes, so I thought I knew about it. On me, at least, the propaganda had its effect.
Occasionally
I might be lured into conversation by one of the girls, especially one close to my age – sometimes they stopped you by blocking your path, and then it was difficult not to speak – but in any case they were usually (not always) asking for more money than I had. It was only by the narrowest margins that my resistance stayed unbroken. My custom, when accosted, was to veer past the girl saying nothing at all, possibly shaking my head, usually avoiding her eyes, and no doubt looking as scared as a rabbit. But on this occasion, lost in grief, I hardly noticed.

One, however, caught my eye. She was standing looking at me as I approached her: older than the others – old enough to be my mother – and very expensively, yet well, dressed. When I drew level with her, instead of the usual opening she said: ‘You’re unhappy. What is it?’

I stopped beside her.

‘My father’s dying,’ I said. I made no effort to remove the devastated look from my face, but I did, as it were, engage with her.

‘Do you love him very much?’

‘Yes.’

She began to talk to me about this with ordinary sympathy. She had a French accent and was a person of warmth and charm. There was a fellow feeling here that I was not used to. After a few minutes of this we turned and walked along the pavement, very slowly, side by side; and for something like half an hour we wandered the streets, she comforting me. Because I was in the state I was in, I do not remember anything she said; but she provided me with such solace as no one else did in all that terrible six weeks. When I got home I found it bordering on the impossible not to talk about her, and yet I had to stop myself. I knew that my family would be unspeakably shocked at the very idea of my spending time with a prostitute, and would probably not believe that all we did was talk.

Most of the time my father spent dying he was sitting up in
bed,
and always had someone sitting in the chair beside him. He assured us he was not afraid of death, and I think it was true. When he said it he did not seem to me to be protesting too much; and he was concerned for us, reassuring us. I was struck by the fact that each time he said it he added that he had never been afraid of death. I envied that, and could not understand how it was possible. After my grandfather’s funeral he had said to Joan: ‘I’ve never been sure whether there’s anything after death or not, but now I’m sure there is something.’

He was frightened, though, of being left alone. It was essential for him to have someone always there beside him. And he wanted to hold the hand of whoever it was, even my mother. It was always he who held their hand, not they his. Each of us in turn would sit with him for hours with our hand clasped in his, sometimes talking, sometimes not. One’s hand would become cramped, or tired, or begin to feel awkward; but if we tried to change its position he would grasp desperately at it as if it were being taken away. My mother hated this, and spent as little time with him as she could, so it was usually either Joan or me, or one of his many visitors. We always warned them before they went in to see him that he would want to hold their hand.

When it was me sitting beside him he liked to talk about either my interests or my future. Why did I like Sibelius so much – what was so special about his music? How sure were my teachers that I was going to get in to Oxford? What did I want to do after that? My seventeenth birthday fell in the middle of all this, and he gave me the biggest single present I had ever received. It was a complete recording of the third act of
The Valkyrie
, on eight discs, secretly procured by my sister. I unwrapped it at his bedside, and will never forget the expression on his face, and in his voice, as he said simply: ‘What you wanted.’ It was something he himself would have loved to have, and had never felt able to afford.