Growing Up In a War (44 page)

While he was on his deathbed my grandmother sold him the
shop.
This was the outcome of months of family negotiation, and was the cause of resentments that never afterwards faded. My grandmother, having agreed to the deal before she realised how ill he was, thought she had to keep her word to him before he died. The documents were signed and witnessed on his bed, with only the participants in the room, while my mother was in the kitchen. Since he was obviously never going to get out of that bed, my grandmother was in effect selling the shop to my mother, and yet not allowing her any say in the matter. I think my grandmother’s point of view was that it had taken her and my father months to reach an agreement, and however favourable to him its terms were – and they were – my mother, not having been party to it, would be under no obligation to accept it, and would almost certainly not accept it, because she could be relied on to think, of any proposal, that it was doing her down. So if my father died before the deal was done, my grandmother would face the impossible task of reaching a reasonable agreement with my mother, as the only alternative to disinheriting her son’s family by selling the business elsewhere. My father, I expect, took the same view. So I believe they both saw themselves as forcing a bargain on my mother. Their intentions were good, on both sides, and the financial consequences of their action were fair, even though it meant that death duties had to be paid twice in six months on the same small family business. My mother and sister bitterly resented the whole proceeding. They saw my grandmother and Aunt Hilda as acting in an underhand way, taking advantage of a man drugged with morphine, and on his deathbed. It is certainly true that my mother was shut out of a deal to which she was, in all but a technicality, one of the main parties. But she could not contest the legitimacy of the deal without, if successful, losing her own inheritance. It ensured the utmost acrimony within the family after my father’s death, when my mother found herself landed with a shop that she was even more incapable of running than my grandmother had been.

The period during which my father was unable to run the shop was quite short, only the last couple of months of his life. During that time my grandmother was there nearly every day, and had the full-time assistance of Mr Davis, who had worked part-time for us ever since I could remember. My aunts Peggy and Hilda had long ago been used to helping out at Christmas, and now contributed to the best of their ability. So the shop remained open full-time. But the whole arrangement had a desperate air about it, an air of emergency. Mr Davis, though well meaning and honest, was unintelligent, and passive to a degree, with not the slightest initiative – and it is not possible for women to run a men’s clothes shop. They cannot take a customer’s measurements, least of all his inside leg. Fittings and alterations offer endless opportunities for embarrassment, and did this a great deal more in the social atmosphere of the 1940s than they would today. The situation was fraught with difficulty. And this was the state the shop was in when it passed to my mother, who knew next to nothing about the business. Not surprisingly, she was to sell it after a couple of years. And that is why I, born and brought up as an only son in the third generation of a family business, never inherited it.

During that desperate period before his death, my father continued to supply management consultancy from his bed. But his energies were fading fast, and his judgement must have been affected by the morphine. After several weeks of sitting up in bed he developed a bedsore, and this became a torture to him, the plague of his life. That tiny sore caused him a degree of physical pain and mental distress that was almost unmanageable, more so than the cancer that was killing him.

My problems were nothing compared to his. But I too, in my way, was living at a level of stress that I could almost not bear. My capacity to love unconditionally was being impaired, since the suffering it now involved me in was more than I could take. It was, after all, not the first time. My infant relationship with my
mother
had been a disaster for me – and now there was this. Drawing back from emotional involvement was not a conscious decision; in fact it was some years before I realised it had happened. I had – altogether unconsciously – become unable to give myself totally, because I had not once but twice, and before I was fully grown up, been devastated by the consequences of doing so.

There came a morning when I was woken by the sound of my mother thundering past my bedroom door to my sister’s room, shouting: ‘He’s gone! He’s gone!’ Then both voices were raised, and they went back past my door to my parents’ room. I got out of bed and went into the passage, and was about to go in to them when I found myself rooted to the spot outside the door. I could not bring myself to do it. I was paralysed with terror at the prospect of seeing my father’s dead body. It was the same immobilising terror as had engulfed me in Victoria station.

From inside the room the women called out: ‘Come in!’ But I could not.

And I never did see him dead. The fact that he actually was dead, there in the next room, was itself nightmare enough. I did go into the room once before the funeral, but by then he was laid down flat on the bed and covered by a sheet. Even so, I was horrified by the knobbly bumps in the sheet where his knees and shoulders were. This experience was followed by some days when he was lying uncovered in a coffin, and most of our visitors went in to see him. One of these declined the invitation with the words: ‘I prefer to keep a happy memory as the last one I have of him,’ and I seized on that gratefully, docketing it in my mind for my own use.

English’s, the undertakers in Hoxton Street, arranged the burial of my father next to my grandfather in St Pancras Cemetery. Again I wore my Christ’s Hospital clothes. The whole occasion was so like my grandfather’s funeral, which had happened six months
before,
that it felt dream-like. We went through exactly the same motions: the same cars, the same drivers, the same route, the same rituals; only the corpse was different. But whereas I have never forgotten the concrete-like inner misery that filled me at my grandfather’s funeral, I remember nothing at all of what I felt at my father’s. Or perhaps, rather, I felt nothing. It was as if my whole world were dead, and my feelings dead too.

Nor do I remember anything of the journey back home: I think we must have travelled in silence. The first memory I have is of my mother and me entering the flat and flopping down in the living room. She looked at me for a long time, as if reflecting on a new, serious thought, then said: ‘If you think I’m going to keep you at your age, you’re mistaken.’

That these were the very first words she spoke to me was a shock greater than I can express. I looked at her, stunned. This was an aspect of my father’s death that I had not considered, the implication that henceforth I would be financially dependent on my mother. It was as if an ice-cold waterfall poured over me. In an instant, the feeling that everything was finished was superseded by the realisation that a whole new, unlooked-for world was about to begin.

I just sat there taking it in.

She went on: ‘You’re old enough now to look after yourself.’

I still sat there, trying to come to terms with the fact that my life was being transformed even more than I had bargained for. From now on everything was going to be different, in startling and unpleasant ways that I had not begun to consider.

‘As far as I’m concerned,’ she said, ‘you’re on your own from now on.’

In existing circumstances, the only place I could go to from home was school, and I had anyway arranged to go there next day. Years later I discovered that it was already an established policy with Christ’s Hospital to waive all further fees for any boy
if
either of his parents died while he was at the school; so the reality of my situation was that I could live at school free henceforth, until the normal time came for me to leave. But I had no idea of this. No one told me. Communication on this point between the school and my mother was not mentioned to me by either party. Transactions at such a level had always gone on above my head, without anyone talking to me about them. The consequences of this piece of ignorance on my part were to distort my life for several years. All I knew was that my fees had been raised by the school to £24 a year, and I took it for granted, without even thinking about it, that if the payments stopped I would have to leave. In any case, apart from money, my mother was now my legal guardian, the one with the power to make decisions for my life. And if she refused to keep me on at school it would put paid to my hopes of going to university. My heart was now firmly set on going to Oxbridge; and David Roberts thought I was pretty well bound to get in. He was going, he said, to enter me for a scholarship to Balliol when I was ready, which would be in about eighteen months’ time, when I was eighteen and a half. He said he was pretty sure that even if Balliol did not give me a scholarship they would offer me a place; and in these new days of government grants that came to almost the same thing. In the event, my complete failure to understand my situation resulted in my not going to Balliol. But that is a story that will have to wait until we come to it. I went back to school the next day, assuming that my fees had been paid only until the end of term.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

ON THE TRAIN
back to Christ’s Hospital I found myself disturbed not only about my father’s death and my endangered future but about what I was going to say regarding my mother’s attitude. It seemed to me so base, so ignominious. I felt not so much ashamed of her as ashamed
for
her – and I did not want others to see her in this light. I came to the conclusion that although I could see no farther ahead than the end of term, I nevertheless did have until then before being compelled to make the decisions that I was going to have to make; and therefore it would be foolish not to give myself the full time to consider them. I ought to do this before rushing to talk about the situation to other people. It was characteristic of my young self, then and for some time after, to make my most important decisions inside myself, without discussing them with anyone else, or asking for advice. I took it for granted that only I could know what I wanted to do, and I did not see what anyone else could contribute. In my experience, people always tried to get you to do things you knew you were not going to do, and then themselves became part of the problem.

As a matter of routine, the first thing I had to do when I got back to school was report to my housemaster. He had unexpected news for me. I was to go to France for several weeks, and as soon as could be arranged. Christ’s Hospital had set up an exchange with the Lycée Hôche in Versailles, and a number of seventeen-year-olds were going from one to the other for the remainder of
the
school year. Four boys from Christ’s Hospital had gone already; and in my absence a decision had been made that it would be good for me to go too. Indeed it was. I was plunged immediately into the distractions and practicalities – and excitements – of preparing for it.

Never had I been out of England. I needed to get my first passport; but in this and other respects the school had already made preparations: since I was under age, and legally the school was
in loco parentis
when I was there, it had acted for me. David Roberts was especially supportive. He gave me excellent advice, and not too much of it, about what to see and do in Paris. He also commanded that I send him regular reports in the form of a long letter once a week; and if, he said, I did this to his satisfaction he would give me my buttons when I returned. This was Christ’s Hospital parlance for making me a Grecian, one of the school’s elite. It meant I would hand in the standard blue coat I wore in exchange for a longer one of finer material, with velvet collar and cuffs, and an outpouring of big silver buttons down the front. Grecians were Olympian figures. They trod a different earth from the rest of us.

I could not bring myself to talk even to David about my mother’s refusal to keep me, so although I expected to have to leave the school I accepted his offer with what I hoped would appear a good grace. It also seemed to me that going away would help me to think. In any event I was caught up in the excitement of the coming trip. Between 1939 and 1945 none of the inhabitants of Britain had been allowed out of the country except on war service, unless they had some extra-special reason. The fact that the whole of Europe was under the heel of fascist dictators doubled the feeling we all had of being cut off, as well as different, living in a fortress with the drawbridge up. During those formative years of mine, between the ages of nine and fifteen, I lived in a society in which private foreign travel did not exist, and could be thought
about
only in daydreams. I had had many such daydreams. But we were still scarcely two years from the end of the war, and still living on a semi-war footing: hundreds of thousands of people were still in the armed forces (the post-war Labour government staggered demobilisation over a period of years to prevent civilian unemployment); the whole population still had food rationing; there were almost prohibitive currency restrictions on foreign travel. It had not as yet occurred to me to think of such travel as available to me. In any case, aside from all this, and leaving the war aside too, people had travelled independently a great deal less until then than they do now. Before the war a majority of people in all social classes took their holidays in the British Isles – those who went abroad had a high profile but were a minority even among the well-to-do. The other members of my family, and almost everyone else we knew, had been abroad either once or not at all; and I believe this was typical of the population as a whole – I am talking, of course, of private travel. So I was now on the point of a tremendous experience, a Big Thing, to a degree not easy to convey.

Nearly all international travel was then by train and boat, so I travelled to Paris via Newhaven and Dieppe. It was typical of the wartime nature of conditions still obtaining that to get from Christ’s Hospital, in Sussex, to Newhaven, also in Sussex, I had to travel on five different trains (with a great deal of luggage). The school had decreed, as it always did, that I should wear Christ’s Hospital uniform on the journey, and not change into other clothes until I arrived. This made me an object of interest on the boat. The French passengers assumed I was some kind of cadet priest – I was now six feet tall. I was to find that I was taken for something of that sort whenever I wore those clothes in France, and it caused me to be treated with a tiny but noticeable touch of respect, especially by women. It helped to alleviate what would otherwise have been a gruesomely self-conscious ordeal.