Книга - Bad Blood: A Memoir

Bad Blood: A Memoir
Lorna Sage


From a childhood of gothic proportions in a vicarage on the Welsh borders, through adolescence, leaving herself teetering on the brink of the 1960's, Lorna Sage vividly and wittily brings to life a vanished time and place and illuminates the lives of three generations of women.Lorna Sage’s memoir of childhood and adolescence is a brilliantly written bravura piece of work, which vividly and wickedly brings to life her eccentric family and somewhat bizarre upbringing in the small town of Hanmer, on the border between Wales and Shropshire.The period as well as the place is evoked with crystal clarity: from the 1940s, dominated for Lorna by her dissolute but charismatic vicar grandfather, through the 1950s, where the invention of fish fingers revolutionised the lives of housewives like Lorna’s mother, to the brink of the 1960s, where the community was shocked by Lorna’s pregnancy at 16, an event which her grandmother blamed on ‘the fiendish invention of sex’.Bad Blood is often extremely funny, and is at the same time a deeply intelligent insight by a unique literary stylist into the effect on three generations of women of their environment and their relationships.









LORNA SAGE

Bad Blood










Dedication (#u51687a25-db6c-5e5d-859d-5f2d0579fe5a)


For Sharon and Olivia




Contents


Cover (#u17c2010b-b0ed-5e87-86e0-bd5561c762b2)

Title Page (#u6b494df7-9368-5de6-87b8-fb371ef2edfb)

Dedication (#uf327339d-f111-5a4b-ab41-90fe447ee0e7)

Introduction (#uf2e11143-181f-5c34-8add-52a50adeb2fb)

PART ONE (#u6b62806e-1f8f-57e5-beb4-04e4a071785f)

I The Old Devil and His Wife (#u47a0078e-897a-53a5-9720-c30acae759f0)

II School (#u99b42900-9456-575f-8add-4dacec50eca3)

III Grandma at Home (#u0fd1687f-069e-5895-bfda-a5306c1c267d)

IV The Original Sin (#ud3d4e50d-9434-5df7-abcf-33a72d69e45b)

V Original Sin, Again (#ue80bdc4a-243b-5544-bbe4-9754ac355057)

VI Death (#litres_trial_promo)

PART TWO (#litres_trial_promo)

VII Council House (#litres_trial_promo)

VIII A Proper Marriage (#litres_trial_promo)

IX Sticks (#litres_trial_promo)

X Nisi Dominus Frustra (#litres_trial_promo)

XI Family Life (#litres_trial_promo)

XII Family Life Continued (#litres_trial_promo)

PART THREE (#litres_trial_promo)

XIII All Shook Up (#litres_trial_promo)

XIV Love – Fifteen (#litres_trial_promo)

XV Sunnyside (#litres_trial_promo)

XVI To the Devil a Daughter (#litres_trial_promo)

XVII Crosshouses (#litres_trial_promo)

XVIII Eighteen (#litres_trial_promo)

Afterword (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)

Praise (#litres_trial_promo)

Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)




Introduction (#u51687a25-db6c-5e5d-859d-5f2d0579fe5a)


When Bad Blood was published a decade ago it made an unlikely star of its author, the 57-year-old academic Lorna Sage. Sage was already well known to the small but important pool of readers who followed her literary criticism in both newspapers and academic publications, but this was something else entirely. Her account of growing up in a grubby Welsh vicarage after the Second World War, getting pregnant at 16, and claiming the education, career and life which no one – family, school or culture – thought should be hers became the surprise hit of late 2000. The book sold hundreds of thousands of copies around the world, won the Whitbread Award for Biography together with the PEN/Ackerley Prize for autobiography and made Sage famous to people who would otherwise never have heard of her. In fact it was all a bit of a fairy tale – ironic when you consider that one of Bad Blood’s chief concerns is to cast a sceptical eye over the stories handed to us in childhood to steer by, regardless of whether they fit or hobble us horribly.

And then, just as the excitement reached a crescendo in the midwinter of 2000–2001, this late-to-the-party princess was gone. She had been felled by a complicated collision of asthma, emphysema and a fierce smoking habit, which made her cruelly short of breath. It had, though, also granted her the privileges of the chronic insomniac to read through the night, a habit begun in her childhood when she had been made restless by the face-ache of severe sinusitis.

Sage had been named after the heroine of one of her clergyman grandfather’s favourite books, R. D. Blackmore’s Lorna Doone, and if her life proves anything, it is that reading can make things happen. Not just in the old clichéd way – scholarship girl grafts her way to a life her parents could never have provided – but in the sense of giving Sage a keen sense of how stories work to shape our knowledge of self and the world. And how, most crucially of all, if a particular story doesn’t make sense, then you must simply make up a better.

The irony of the timing of her death would not have been lost on Lorna Sage. Unusually for a literary academic steeped in the critical theories of the Seventies and Eighties that declared the author dead, she was fascinated by the connections between writers’ lives and their works. And as an expert reader of memoir she would have known that you seldom get the neat double ending of text and life that had so spectacularly occurred with Bad Blood. As a result the book remains eerily intact, because there is no author on hand to expand, provoke or riff on it. We are left, as readers, an extraordinary freedom to make of it whatever we will.

Sage had been working on a memoir about her early life for some time, but it was the discovery of her grandfather’s diaries in the 1990s that suddenly gave shape to the book: it came out quickly, and in such a finished form that virtually no editing was required. These were the diaries, of course, which her grandmother had used to blackmail Revd Meredith-Morris into handing over most of his stipend. Full of details of his joyless philandering, the diaries would have been highly damaging if they’d got into the Bishop’s hands, which was exactly where Sage’s grandmother was threatening to put them unless ‘the old devil’, as she called him, paid up and paid regularly.

Described like this, Bad Blood sounds like a parochial book, in all senses. Yet when it appeared in the early autumn of 2000 it was a national and international hit, as if people had been waiting for it without quite knowing why. Perhaps it was to do with the fact that the world was now embarking on a new millennium. The mid-twentieth century with its watershed war and the unprecedented social changes that followed was about to be left behind for good. Very soon all the detail from that time – ration books, the eleven-plus, council houses, the nascent NHS, rural buses – would slip from living memory. Here was a last chance to see that world at first hand from someone whose intellect was briskly contemporary – mostly, indeed, ahead of the pack – yet whose life and mind had been forged in another age entirely.

Bad Blood, though, is much more than a social history of the war baby generation (Sage was born in January 1943 while her father was still away fighting). It is instead a story of absolute singularity involving one of the great tragi-comic characters of contemporary English literature, the Revd Meredith-Morris of St Chad’s, Hanmer, a rural parish situated in that thick finger of Wales which crooks oddly into Shropshire. The Old Devil is there for less than a hundred pages but he manages to dominate the whole book, with his great gusts of unhappiness, his boozy self-pity and of course his random lusts, which include trysts with the district nurse and his teenage daughter’s best friend. It is the Revd Meredith-Morris’s Bad Blood that circulates through the narrative long after he himself is gone, tainting everything it touches including little Lorna whose growing appetite for boys and books is darkly attributed to her grandfather’s sticky, vicious bequest.

Nor is it just the people in Bad Blood who are particular. Sage locates Hanmer precisely in time and place, giving us a muddy, midgy rebuttal to any expectation that the tale we are about to hear will be a pastoral one. This is Britain in the last gasp of the tenant farming system, before agribusiness rationalised production into huge regional food factories. The mud is Flintshire mud, rich and sucky and good for beef, though bad for stuck wellingtons. There are big dirty labouring families complete with the obligatory daft son and rusty machinery that takes an age to get going. Few of Sage’s readers will have experienced any of this at first hand, yet her extraordinary achievement is to make us feel that this story is somehow ours too. So while you may not have spent your early years living on rations, you know what a sly punch in the playground feels like. You may not have worn the complicated underwear that was de rigueur for older schoolgirls in the 1950s but you know what it is to feel uncomfortable in your own skin. Hanmer may have class gradations that seem as quaint as anything from Jane Austen, but which of us does not recognise that feeling of falling foul of some social tripwire we were too slow to see coming?

Still, the last thing Bad Blood wants is soppy identification on the part of its readers. Indeed, one of the most bracing things about the book is Lorna Sage’s indifference to making us like her. This blonde princess locked up in the gothic vicarage has bugs in her hair not because of some extraordinary drama of neglect or cruelty but because no one can be bothered to do anything about it. Her gaze, she tells us, is shifty and her default state sly. Had you known her as a child she almost certainly would not have wanted to be your friend, nor you hers. There is nothing remotely cosy here. And any idea that Sage is writing a misery memoir or asking for our pity is simply obscene.

The great joy of the book – and it is a joy – remains the way that this comic nightmare is delivered in the cleanest and clearest of language. As Professor of Literature at the University of East Anglia, Sage was sometimes required to be dense in her academic prose but you can really feel her exultation when she writes, as she did in her much-admired reviews in the Observer newspaper, for the Common Reader. She had a huge admiration for those authors such as Anthony Burgess who hacked to pay the bills, and a corresponding determination to reach the widest readership possible. And her talent is gloriously on show here, with that miraculous ability to conjure the Hanmer landscape, tricky turns in Britain’s post-war social development, and the inside of a priapic vicar’s brain, all without boring or baffling the reader for a moment.

Despite her scepticism about the coerciveness of certain kinds of stories, Sage does give us a happy ending of sorts in Bad Blood. She tells us how her life played out in ways that are clearly a matter of quiet pride. The Bad Blood, it seems, had finally been faced down. There was, though, one bit of the story which her sudden death in January 2001 left unfinished. She had been thinking about her memoir for so long. Now here it was, an enormous hit, making her famous around the world. What would she have done next? Another volume of autobiography? A novel even? Or more of that brilliant literary criticism which seemed to crack open the world of contemporary fiction with such deceptive ease? We will never know now and that, perhaps, provides the most tantalising ending of all.



PART ONE (#ulink_bcbf6019-cdc7-5260-a1a0-5a3cb91ab5d9)




I The Old Devil and His Wife (#ulink_0cd157e3-5a4d-5804-9b22-e105698d3bf1)


Grandfather’s skirts would flap in the wind along the churchyard path and I would hang on. He often found things to do in the vestry, excuses for getting out of the vicarage (kicking the swollen door, cursing) and so long as he took me he couldn’t get up to much. I was a sort of hobble; he was my minder and I was his. He’d have liked to get further away, but petrol was rationed. The church was at least safe. My grandmother never went near it – except feet first in her coffin, but that was years later, when she was buried in the same grave with him. Rotting together for eternity, one flesh at the last after a lifetime’s mutual loathing. In life, though, she never invaded his patch; once inside the churchyard gate he was on his own ground, in his element. He was good at funerals, being gaunt and lined, marked with mortality. He had a scar down his hollow cheek too, which Grandma had done with the carving knife one of the many times when he came home pissed and incapable.

That, though, was when they were still ‘speaking’, before my time. Now they mostly monologued and swore at each other’s backs, and he (and I) would slam out of the house and go off between the graves, past the yew tree with a hollow where the cat had her litters and the various vaults that were supposed to account for the smell in the vicarage cellars in wet weather. On our right was the church; off to our left the graves stretched away, bisected by a grander gravel path leading down from the church porch to a bit of green with a war memorial, then – across the road – the mere. The church was popular for weddings because of this impressive approach, but he wasn’t at all keen on the marriage ceremony, naturally enough. Burials he relished, perhaps because he saw himself as buried alive.

One day we stopped to watch the gravedigger, who unearthed a skull – it was an old churchyard, on its second or third time around – and grandfather dusted off the soil and declaimed: ‘Alas poor Yorick, I knew him well …’ I thought he was making it up as he went along. When I grew up a bit and saw Hamlet and found him out, I wondered what had been going through his mind. I suppose the scene struck him as an image of his condition – exiled to a remote, illiterate rural parish, his talents wasted and so on. On the other hand his position afforded him a lot of opportunities for indulging secret, bitter jokes, hamming up the act and cherishing his ironies, so in a way he was enjoying himself. Back then, I thought that was what a vicar was, simply: someone bony and eloquent and smelly (tobacco, candle grease, sour claret), who talked into space. His disappointments were just part of the act for me, along with his dog-collar and cassock. I was like a baby goose imprinted by the first mother-figure it sees – he was my black marker.

It was certainly easy to spot him at a distance too. But this was a village where it seemed everybody was their vocation. They didn’t just ‘know their place’, it was as though the place occupied them, so that they all knew what they were going to be from the beginning. People’s names conspired to colour in this picture. The gravedigger was actually called Mr Downward. The blacksmith who lived by the mere was called Bywater. Even more decisively, the family who owned the village were called Hanmer, and so was the village. The Hanmers had come over with the Conqueror, got as far as the Welsh border and stayed ever since in this little rounded isthmus of North Wales sticking out into England, the detached portion of Flintshire (Flintshire Maelor) as it was called then, surrounded by Shropshire, Cheshire and – on the Welsh side – Denbighshire. There was no town in the Maelor district, only villages and hamlets; Flintshire proper was some way off; and (then) industrial, which made it in practice a world away from these pastoral parishes, which had become resigned to being handed a Labour MP at every election. People in Hanmer well understood, in almost a prideful way, that we weren’t part of all that. The kind of choice represented by voting didn’t figure large on the local map and you only really counted places you could get to on foot or by bike.

The war had changed this to some extent, but not as much as it might have because farming was a reserved occupation and sons hadn’t been called up unless there were a lot of them, or their families were smallholders with little land. So Hanmer in the 1940s in many ways resembled Hanmer in the 1920s, or even the late 1800s except that it was more depressed, less populous and more out of step – more and more islanded in time as the years had gone by. We didn’t speak Welsh either, so that there was little national feeling, rather a sense of stubbornly being where you were and that was that. Also very un-Welsh was the fact that Hanmer had no chapel to rival Grandfather’s church: the Hanmers would never lease land to Nonconformists and there was no tradition of Dissent, except in the form of not going to church at all. Many people did attend, though, partly because he was locally famous for his sermons, and because he was High Church and went in for dressing up and altar boys and frequent communions. Not frequent enough to explain the amount of wine he got through, however. Eventually the Church stopped his supply and after that communicants got watered-down Sanatogen from Boots the chemist in Whitchurch, over the Shropshire border.

The delinquencies that had denied him preferment seemed to do him little harm with his parishioners. Perhaps the vicar was expected to be an expert in sin. At all events he was ‘a character’. To my childish eyes people in Hanmer were divided between characters and the rest, the ones and the many. Higher up the social scale there was only one of you: one vicar, one solicitor, each farmer identified by the name of his farm and so sui generis. True, there were two doctors, but they were brothers and shared the practice. Then there was one policeman, one publican, one district nurse, one butcher, one baker … Smallholders and farm labourers were the many and often had large families too. They were irretrievably plural and supposed to be interchangeable (feckless all), nameable only as tribes. The virtues and vices of the singular people turned into characteristics. They were picturesque. They had no common denominator and you never judged them in relation to a norm. Coming to consciousness in Hanmer was oddly blissful at the beginning: the grown-ups all played their parts to the manner born. You knew where you were.

Which was a hole, according to Grandma. A dead-alive dump. A muck heap. She’d shake a trembling fist at the people going past the vicarage to church each Sunday, although they probably couldn’t see her from behind the bars and dirty glass. She didn’t upset my version of pastoral. She lived in a different dimension, she said as much herself. In her world there were streets with pavements, shop windows, trams, trains, teashops and cinemas. She never went out except to visit this paradise lost, by taxi to the station in Whitchurch, then by train to Shrewsbury or Chester. This was life. Scented soap and chocolates would stand in for it the rest of the time – most of the time, in fact, since there was never any money. She’d evolved a way of living that resolutely defied her lot. He might play the vicar, she wouldn’t be the vicar’s wife. Their rooms were at opposite ends of the house and she spent much of the day in bed. She had asthma, and even the smell of him and his tobacco made her sick. She’d stay up late in the evening, alone, reading about scandals and murders in the News of the World by lamplight among the mice and silverfish in the kitchen (she’d hoard coal for the fire up in her room and sticks to relight it if necessary). She never answered the door, never saw anyone, did no housework. She cared only for her sister and her girlhood friends back in South Wales and – perhaps – for me, since I had blue eyes and blonde hair and was a girl, so just possibly belonged to her family line. She thought men and women belonged to different races and any getting together was worse than folly. The ‘old devil’, my grandfather, had talked her into marriage and the agony of bearing two children, and he should never be forgiven for it. She would quiver with rage whenever she remembered her fall. She was short (about four foot ten) and as fat and soft-fleshed as he was thin and leathery, so her theory of separate races looked quite plausible. The rhyme about Jack Sprat (‘Jack Sprat would eat no fat, / His wife would eat no lean, / And so between the two of them / They licked the platter clean’) struck me, when I learned it, as somehow about them. Looking back, I can see that she must have been a factor – along with the booze (and the womanising) – in keeping him back in the Church. She got her revenge, but at the cost of living in the muck heap herself.

Between the two of them my grandparents created an atmosphere in the vicarage so pungent and all-pervading that they accounted for everything. In fact, it wasn’t so. My mother, their daughter, was there; I only remember her, though, at the beginning, as a shy, slender wraith kneeling on the stairs with a brush and dustpan, or washing things in the scullery. They’d made her into a domestic drudge after her marriage – my father was away in the army and she had no separate life. It was she who answered the door and tried to keep up appearances, a battle long lost. She wore her fair hair in a victory roll and she was pretty but didn’t like to smile. Her front teeth were false – crowned, a bit clumsily – because in her teens, running to intervene in one of their murderous rows, she’d fallen down the stairs and snapped off her own. During these years she probably didn’t feel much like smiling anyway. She doesn’t come into the picture properly yet, nor does my father. My only early memory of him is being picked up by a man in uniform and being sick down his back. He wasn’t popular in the vicarage, although it must have been his army pay that eked out Grandfather’s exiguous stipend.

The grandparents weren’t grateful. They both felt so cheated by life, they had their histories of grievance so well worked out, that they were owed service, handouts, anything that was going. My mother and her brother they’d used as hostages in their wars and otherwise neglected, being too absorbed in each other, in their way, to spare much feeling. With me it was different: since they no longer really fought they had time on their hands and I got the best of them. Did they love me? The question is beside the point, somehow. Certainly they each spoiled me, mainly by giving me the false impression that I was entitled to attention nearly all the time. They played. They were like children, if you consider that one of the things about being a child is that you are a parasite of sorts and have to brazen it out self-righteously. I want. They were good at wanting and I shared much more common ground with them than with my mother when I was three or four years old. Also, they measured up to the magical monsters in the story books. Grandma’s idea of expressing affection to small children was to smack her lips and say, ‘You’re so sweet, I’m going to eat you all up!’ It was not difficult to believe her, either, given her passion for sugar. Or at least I believed her enough to experience a pleasant thrill of fear. She liked to pinch, too, and she sometimes spat with hatred when she ran out of words.

Domestic life in the vicarage had a Gothic flavour at odds with the house, which was a modest eighteenth-century building of mellowed brick, with low ceilings, and attics and back stairs for help we didn’t have. At the front it looked on to a small square traversed only by visitors and churchgoers. The barred kitchen window faced this way, but in no friendly fashion, and the parlour on the other side of the front door was empty and unused, so that the house was turned in on itself, against its nature. A knock at the door produced a flurry of hiding-and-tidying (my grandmother must be given time to retreat, if she was up, and I’d have my face scrubbed with a washcloth) in case the visitor was someone who’d have to be invited in and shown to the sitting-room at the back which – although a bit damp and neglected – was always ‘kept nice in case’.

If the caller was on strictly Church business, he’d be shown upstairs to Grandfather’s study, lined with bookcases in which the books all had the authors’ names and titles on their spines blacked out as a precaution against would-be borrowers who’d suddenly take a fancy to Dickens or Marie Corelli. His bedroom led off his study and was dark, under the yew tree’s shadow, and smelled like him. Across the landing was my mother’s room, where I slept too when I was small, and round a turn to the right my grandmother’s, with coal and sticks piled under the bed, redolent of Pond’s face cream, powder, scent, smelling salts and her town clothes in mothballs, along with a litter of underwear and stockings.

On this floor, too, was a stately lavatory, wallpapered in a perching peacock design, all intertwined feathers and branches you could contemplate for hours – which I did, legs dangling from the high wooden seat. When the chain was pulled the water tanks on the attic floor gurgled and sang. In the other attics there were apples laid out on newspaper on the floors, gently mummifying. It just wasn’t a spooky house, despite the suggestive cellars, and the fact that we relied on lamps and candles. All of Hanmer did that, in any case, except for farmers who had their own generators. In the kitchen the teapot sat on the hob all day and everyone ate at different times.

There was a word that belonged to the house: ‘dilapidations’. It was one of the first long words I knew, for it was repeated like a mantra. The Church charged incumbents a kind of levy for propping up its crumbling real estate and those five syllables were the key. If only Grandfather could cut down on the dilapidations there’d be a new dawn of amenity and comfort, and possibly some change left over. Leaks, dry rot, broken panes and crazy hinges (of which we had plenty) were, looked at rightly, a potential source of income. Whether he ever succeeded I don’t know. Since the word went on and on, he can’t have got more than a small rebate and no one ever plugged the leaks. What’s certain is that we were frequently penniless and there were always embarrassments about credit. Food rationing and clothes coupons must have been a godsend since they provided a cover for our indigence. As long as austerity lasted, the vicarage could maintain its shaky claims to gentility. There was virtue in shabbiness. Grandfather had his rusty cassock, Grandmother her mothballed wardrobe and my mother had one or two pre-war outfits that just about served. Underwear was yellowed and full of holes, minus elastic. Indoors, our top layers were ragged too: matted jumpers, socks and stockings laddered and in wrinkles round the ankles, safety pins galore. Outside we could pass muster, even if my overcoat was at first too big (I would grow into it), then all at once too small, without ever for a moment being the right size.

In those years almost the whole country wore this ill-fitting uniform designed for non-combatants – serviceable colours, grating textures, tell-tale unfaded hems that had been let down, bulky tucks. Our true household craziness and indifference didn’t express itself in clothes, but in more intimate kinds of squalor: for instance, nearly never washing the bits no one could see. This was almost a point of vicarage principle, a measure of our hostility to the world outside and separateness from it. Inside our clothes civilisation had lapsed. And this wasn’t to do with money.

Grandma had the scented soap, but she didn’t use it – she bought it for its smell, and kept it wrapped in tissue paper in drawers and trunks. Her line was that her skin was too sensitive for soap and water. We even had a bathroom, but somehow the only way to wash was to boil the kettle and fill a bowl, and do bits – very little bits and usually the same bits – at a time. The resulting tidemarks, in my case round my neck, wrists and legs, would be desperately scrubbed at from time to time. Hair was another problem, a tangle of troubles: brushing was usually felt to be enough of a trauma, without the business of tangling it up all over again with washing, so that my pigtails stayed plaited for days on end. Our secret grubbiness was yet another thing that set us apart. If other children were dirty, that meant they were common, their parents were foully neglectful and slummy, you could catch things from them. One of Grandma’s favourite terms of abuse, in fact, was ‘dirty’ – villagers were dirty, callers were dirty, I mustn’t play with dirty children. So there were two different kinds of dirt, theirs and ours. It was a most metaphysical distinction, as befitted the vicarage.

As if to demonstrate the point, next door to us, also fronting on to the square, was a sixteenth-century tumbledown timber and brick cottage crammed with children I wasn’t supposed to mix with – the Duckets, one of Hanmer’s most shameless tribes. The wall that divided us from them provided me with a perch from which I could look down into their back garden. Our side had a lawn with borders and apple trees, and was neglected and overgrown and peaceful. Theirs was like a bomb-site, a muddy, cratered expanse with twisted pieces of old prams and bike frames, and shards of crockery embedded among straggly weeds and currant bushes. The Duckets epitomised what my grandmother meant by ‘dirty’: they were openly poor (the father was a farm labourer), they bred like rabbits and they spilled out of their house wearing their ragged hand-me-downs for all to see.

The vicarage was a secret slum, but the Duckets’ doors were always open, so you could see Mrs Ducket with her hair in curlers running about bare-legged in slippers, or – even more scandalously – sitting down with a cup of tea and a fag. They had no secrets. Their kitchen drain (on the opposite side to us) disgorged a slow stream of soapy slime and tea-leaves into the open gutter that ran along the main village street. The Duckets kept yappy dogs and skinny cats, and had kittens and ferrets in their pockets; they didn’t go to church, although sometimes one or two of the children would be spruced up and sent to Sunday School. While I was forbidden the square, they were positively driven out of their house, back and front, in all weathers, clutching wedges of bread and damson jam. They reached over our wall and picked the apples, according to Grandma. And (the crowning horror) they had bugs in their hair.

The Duckets made me feel lonely. Even the bugs were more fascinating than frightening. Once or twice I managed to ‘play’ with Edna, the girl nearest to my own age, through the crack in our side gate. She squatted in the square, I squatted in the vicarage kitchen yard; I squeezed my dolls through the gap one by one for her to look at and she squeezed them back. But otherwise I’d climb the wall and sit astride, watching Duckets in the plural, whenever I was left to my own devices. Which wasn’t often. Grandpa and I must have pottered about in church almost every day, and the echoing spaces, the stained glass and the smell of Brasso, chrysanthemums, damp pew-oak and iron mould from the choir’s surplices were heady compensations for isolation. He’d tell me stories and read me to sleep at night, when he’d often drop off first, stretched out on the couch, mouth open, snoring, his beaky profile lit up by the candle. In fact, he got so impatient with my favourite books (which both he and I knew by heart) that one momentous day, before I was four, he taught me to read in self-defence. This confirmed me as his creature.

I knew my name came out of one of the blacked-out books – Lorna from Lorna Doone – and that he’d chosen it. Now he’d given me a special key to his world. We were even closer allies afterwards, so that when he took me with him in the rattling Singer to Whitchurch, and into the bar of the Fox and Goose down Green End, it never occurred to me to tell on him. There were several expeditions like that. He was well known in drinking circles and was looked on as something of a speciality act, a cynical and colourful talker, always with his dog-collar to set him apart. I was the perfect alibi, since neither my mother nor my grandmother had any idea that there were pubs so low and lawless that they would turn a blind eye to children. Few were willing to, however; and there were other times when I found myself sitting outside on the steps of one of his favourite haunts, an unfriendly place with a revolving door called the Lord Hill, in the company of streetwise kids a lot more scary than the Duckets. Perhaps I did tell about that, or perhaps someone spotted me: at any rate, the pub outings came to an end.

Not the collusion, though. I’d kneel on the threadbare rug in his study while he worked on his sermon, or talked to the odd visitor, pulling out the books and puzzling over big words. Sometimes he’d show off my reading to strangers, but for the most part I was meant (this was the point of it, after all) to be quiet. When he was in very good moods he would draw pictures for me, starting mysteriously from the vanishing point and drawing out the rest into perspective. I learned that trick too, never very well, but well enough to disconcert people. Our mutual ‘minding’ turned by untidy stages into a sort of education. Since he was a man of many wasted talents, not only with words and images but also music, I might have had a full set of pre-school ‘accomplishments’, except that I was tone-deaf. Despite that, I was made a member of the choir as soon as I could sit still long enough – under strict instructions to open and shut my mouth in silence, along with the words. I was quite useful, in fact: I could be shifted across from the girls’ bench to the boys’ (my pigtails bundled up into my cap) depending on where there were the most gaps. Watching Grandpa dress up in the vestry, processing behind him, listening to him intone the liturgy and preach, I basked in his reflected glory.

I took to lining up my toys in a corner of the garden I called ‘the secondary school’, where I lectured them and told them stories. More than once they got left out overnight and were brought in sodden in the morning, to be dried out in the oven of the kitchen range. My teddy, a utility bear with a flabby square stomach made out of flowered cotton, was scorched ever after. An omen there.

I was going to have to go to school soon and that meant the village school, which would make nonsense of the dirt distinction, and – as it turned out – leave scorch-marks on my spoiled soul too. There was some reluctance to send me there sooner than need be, but the temptation must have become irresistible. When Grandpa was out, or hung-over, or not in the mood, I would wander the house in an ecstasy of self-pity, wailing ‘What can I do-o-o?’ over and over again, tears dripping down. This was my own precocious contribution to the economy of frustration and want, and nobody could stand it. If the day was fine, Grandma might take me out into the garden, where we’d exorcise my misery by attacking the brambles and nettles with sharp scissors, pretending they were Grandpa, or Duckets, or other people on her hit list (‘Ugh! Nasty old thing! Wicked old devil!’). She got even more fun out of this than I did, but she often didn’t feel energetic enough for such games. So at four and a bit I went to school, and the whole village gave a shake and rearranged itself. I got bugs in my hair and started to lead a double life: one of the many – Hanmer school had a hundred-odd pupils, aged four to fourteen, in 1947 – and yet the sole vicarage child. I put about the story that you could play in the churchyard if you played with me.




II School (#ulink_7cc541b7-7069-5123-b4ad-b37bbe7a1eb4)


Perhaps I really did grow up, as I sometimes suspect, in a time warp, an enclave of the nineteenth century? Because here are the memories jostling their way in, scenes from an overpopulated rural slum.

First there was dinner money, then the register. Then Miss Myra would hang up a cracked oilcloth scroll with the Lord’s Prayer printed on it in large curly letters. She prompted, we mumbled our way through, getting out of sync during the trespasses and catching up with each other to arrive in unison at ‘For ever and ever. Amen.’ Next we’d be set to copy it out with chalk on jagged slices of slate. If you got to the end you simply started from the beginning again and went on until it was time to stop. You spat on your slate and rubbed it with your finger when you made mistakes, so sooner or later the letters all got lost in a grey blur. Not many in the babies’ class learned to read or write by this method. That didn’t matter too much, though. Hanmer Church of England School was less concerned with teaching its pupils reading, writing or arithmetic than with obedience and knowing things by heart. Soon you’d be able to recite ‘Our Father’ and the multiplication tables with sing-song confidence, hitting the ritual emphasis right: ‘And twelve twelves are a hundred and forty-four. Amen.’

After a couple of years in Miss Myra’s room you moved to her sister Miss Daisy’s, and after that to the biggest class, belonging to the headmaster, Mr Palmer. He was a figure of fear, an absentee deity. Offenders from the lower classes were sent to him for the stick and were known to wet themselves on the way. His own class, too, regarded him with dread. He liked to preside over them invisibly from his house next door, emerging when the noise reached a level deafening enough to disturb him, to hand out summary punishment.

The further up the school you went, the less you were formally taught or expected to learn. There was knitting, sewing and weaving for older girls, who would sit out winter playtimes gossiping round the stove, their legs marbled with parboiled red veins from the heat. The big boys did woodwork and were also kept busy taking out the ashes, filling coke buckets and digging the garden. None of the more substantial farmers sent their children to Hanmer school. It had been designed to produce domestic servants and farm labourers, and functional illiteracy was still part of the expectation, almost part of the curriculum.

Not long after I started there, this time-honoured parochial system was shaken up when some of the older children were removed to a secondary modern school over the nearest border, in Shropshire. This thinned out the population and damped down the racket in Mr Palmer’s room, although quite a few restive overgrown kids still stayed on until they were fourteen and the law allowed them to leave. Passing the eleven-plus (‘the scholarship’) was unheard of; and anyway harder than it might have been, since grammar schools in neighbouring counties had quotas for children from the real sticks, i.e. the Maelor district. When my time came, Mr Palmer graciously cheated me through. Strolling past my desk on his invigilation rounds, he trailed a plump finger down my page of sums, pointed significantly at several, then crossed two fingers behind his back as he walked away. So I did those again.

Perhaps the record of failure was starting to look fishy. The world was changing, education was changing, and the notion that school should reflect your ready-made place in the scheme of things and put you firmly back where you came from was going out of fashion even in Hanmer. It was against the grain to acknowledge this, though. The cause of hierarchy and immobility was served by singling out the few children whose families didn’t fit and setting them homework. Mr Palmer drew the line at marking it, however. The three of us were given sums to do, then told to compare the results in a corner next morning. If all three, or two of us, arrived at the same answer then that was the correct one. If – as often happened – all three of us produced different answers then that particular long division or fraction retreated into the realm of undecidability. Most of our answers were at best odds-on favourites. I developed a dauntingly Platonic conception of arithmetical truths. The real answer must exist, but in some far-removed misty empyrean. Praying (‘… and forty-four. Amen’) seemed often as good a route as any to getting it right.

Sums were my cross. Numeracy was not one of Grandfather’s gifts; we never played with numbers, which were a subdivision of dilapidations and no fun at all. I went to school armed against the spit-and-chalk routine – words went on working – but with sums I struggled like the rest, since it was never part of Mr Palmer’s plan (the school’s plan) to reveal that the necessary skills were learnable. If you passed the scholarship, that was because you were somebody who should never have been at Hanmer school in the first place, was his theory.

One day he lined up his class and went down the line saying with gloomy satisfaction ‘You’ll be a muck-shoveller, you’ll be a muck-shoveller …’ and so on and on, only missing out the homework trio. As things turned out he was mistaken – by the time my Hanmer generation grew up there were very few jobs on the land, the old mixed labour-intensive farming had finally collapsed, farmers had gone over to machinery, and the children he’d consigned to near-illiteracy and innumeracy had to re-educate themselves and move on. Which they did, despite all the school had done to inculcate ignorance. Back there and then in our childhoods, though, in the late Forties, Mr Palmer seemed omniscient. He ruled over a little world where conformity, bafflement, fear and furtive defiance were the orders of the day. Every child’s ambition at Hanmer school was to avoid attracting his attention, or that of Miss Myra or Miss Daisy. We all played dumb, the one lesson everyone learned.

We’d have seemed a lumpen lot: sullen, unresponsive, cowed, shy or giggly in the presence of grown-ups. A bunch of nose-pickers and nail-biters, with scabbed knees, warts, chapped skin and unbrushed teeth. We shared a certain family resemblance, in other words. Some of it was absolutely, organically, real: seven or eight huge families accounted between them for nearly half the population of the school. There were brothers, sisters and cousins who slapped, shoved and bossed each other unmercifully, but always stood up for their own flesh and blood (thickened, it was rumoured, by incest) in the end. ‘You leave our Doreen alone.’ Or else.

Having big brothers or (much better) big sisters – since the big boys had their own separate playground and didn’t usually deign to intervene – seemed the first condition for survival in the infants’ class. In fact, though, these rough, protective clans were already on the way out. There were quite a few parents who’d worked out that one way of escaping poverty was having fewer children, and a subtle eye could have detected among the mass of rowdy, runny-nosed urchins a small sub-class of better-dressed, prissier and slightly more respectable children. The girls wore hairslides and newly knitted cardigans, the boys were ‘nesh’ (the Hanmer word for anything from clean to feeling-the-cold to cowardly) and were endlessly tormented. Being an only child – as I was, for the time being – was a mixed blessing at best when it came down to the gritty realities of the playground. The ‘nesh’ ones I despised and it was entirely mutual, since I was dirty, precocious and had never been treated like a child. And the tribes despised me for being sole, pseudo-clean and ‘stuck up’.

So the playground was hell: Chinese burns, pinches, slaps and kicks, and horrible games. I can still hear the noise of a thick wet skipping rope slapping the ground. There’d be a big girl each end and you had to leap through without tripping. Joining in was only marginally less awful than being left out. It’s said (truly) that most women forget the pain of childbirth; I think that we all forget the pain of being a child at school for the first time, the sheer ineptitude, as though you’ll never learn to mark out your own space. It’s doubly shaming – shaming to remember as well, to feel so sorry for your scabby little self back there in small people’s purgatory.

My first days at school were punctuated by fierce contests in the yard, duels almost, complete with spectators, with the one girl who might have been expected to be my friend. In fact, she did become my very best friend, years later, when we went round holding hands painfully fast and giggling together hysterically, but for now she was my sworn enemy. Gail (she even had a funny name, like me) had hair in ringlets, green-hazel eyes and pale, clear, slightly olive skin stretched tight and shiny over her muscles, and she was nearly a year older than I was. She’d have won our war in any case, though, since she was so physically confident, in charge of her body even when she was five. Was she already going to dancing lessons? I don’t remember. In adult life she became a teacher of physical education and modern dance herself, and even in the days of our adolescent intimacy she would sometimes win an argument by twisting my wrist. I was convinced at the start, anyway, that she was simply better at inhabiting her body than I was – not only better at face-pulling, hair-pulling, pinching, scratching and every sort of violence, but wiry and graceful, so that she made me feel like an unstrung puppet.

Once she’d thoroughly trounced me in public, Gail ignored me and held court in her own corner every playtime. She remained something of a loner, however. Other little girls might admire the ringlets and the dresses with smocking on the yokes, and the white socks that stayed up, but she was not allowed out to play in the square after school and everyone knew that she had to sit for hours every night while her grandmother twisted her hair in rags. What really set her apart, though – even more effectively than the vicarage set me apart – was the fact that her mother was divorced.

Given that quite a few kids in Hanmer didn’t know who their father was – or at least knew that he wasn’t the one he was supposed to be – it may seem odd that divorce stood out as a social sin. But its novelty was against it. It was untraditional, new-fangled and (worst of all) above Gail’s mother’s station. Someone like Lady Kenyon (the Kenyons were the other local grandees, a lot richer and more dashing than the Hanmers) might be divorced and that was fittingly aristocratic; for the local garage owner’s daughter to do it was very different. Who did she think she was? People saw her as some new brand of fallen woman.

She was disapproved of in the vicarage, too, but mostly for reasons of envy. There was a history behind this: Gail’s mother and my mother had been friends before the war. They had starred together in the pantomimes my grandfather had put on in the village hall in the days before he had been overtaken by booze and bitterness. My mother, whose name was Valma – another of Grandfather’s romantic choices, although I’ve never known where he got it – and Gail’s mother, whose name was Ivy, had played Prince Charming and Cinderella respectively. They stood there in a surviving photograph, two slim young women with their arms clasped around each other’s waists in the middle of the assembled cast, their big, hopeful, lipsticked smiles looking black and glamorous. Gail’s mother, being divorced, looked pretty much like this still, except that she was even skinnier. She also had a job driving the local taxi. Whereas my mother, thanks to a combination of marriage, poverty and her parents’ crazy demands, lived in (comparative) purdah. This was what made Grandma furious. She said that Ivy looked like Olive Oyl in the Popeye cartoons, or like a stick of liquorice. And that she was common. But it was all sour grapes. Secretly Grandma must have thought divorce a good idea – her notion of marriage, after all, was that a man signed you up to have his wicked way with you and should spend the rest of his life paying through the nose. But her expressed opinion coincided with village wisdom.

Even playground games, in the intervals of thumps and pushes, were all about the changeless order of things. ‘The farmer wants a wife,’ we’d chant, joining hands in a ring – ‘Heigh ho, heigh ho, the farmer wants a wife.’ And when the snotty little boy in the middle had chosen his bride, ‘The wife wants a child … The child wants a dog. Heigh ho, heigh ho’ – which sounded like ‘ee-oh!’, this farmer was related to Old Macdonald – ‘The child wants a dog.’ This doggy extension of the nuclear family seemed to join human arrangements on to the whole wealth of species, top to bottom, patriarch to pup. And then the climax – ‘The dog wants a bone.’ The bone, by tradition a tiny, would be vigorously bounced, thrown into the air and caught on the way down, by the farmer, wife, child and dog, while we all shouted triumphantly, ‘The bone – won’t – stand! Eee oh! Eee oh! The bone – won’t – STAND!’ Being chosen as the bone was a mixed delight, scary and painful as well as thrilling, so I wasn’t sorry that my turn seldom came round. This game, all the games, were a bit like those horrible group therapy exercises where you’re meant to let yourself fall in order to learn to trust the rest, who catch you. Mutual dependence – farmer, wife, child, dog, bone, representing the great chain of being. And you couldn’t be outside of it. Gail and I and the other milder misfits curried favour with the pack in our separate ways.

My great advantage was the churchyard. Mr Downward, the sexton, would turn a blind eye to all but the most boisterous grave-hopping games if I was involved in them. He seemed to regard the churchyard as an extension of the vicarage garden and indeed the wall between them was so tumbledown in one place that the boundary was only a pile of long-fallen bricks in a nettle patch. As the vicarage child I was a licensed trespasser and I shared out my immunity among the ‘dirty’ children I could persuade to play with me after school, or on Saturdays. I was especially popular when there had been a Saturday morning wedding: we all collected confetti, but its dolly-mixture colours didn’t last long in that rainy region, you had to pick up the little pink bells and white bows and silver horseshoes quickly or they dissolved away. We especially treasured the silvered sort and scorned the cheap variety stamped out of waste paper, often mere dots with cryptic fragments of print on them. Once there were drifts of silky paper rose petals on the path, each shaded from cream to crimson, and these we saved up reverently.

Funeral wreaths were even better, although only for looking at until they were thrown on to the rubbish heap in the corner, when if you were lucky you could salvage a carnation or lily or chrysanthemum still blooming – luxury flowers a cut above the sweet williams, wallflowers and Michaelmas daisies of village borders. We marvelled, too, at the glass and porcelain immortelles under their glass globes, and the graves that had shrubs growing on them and shorn grass looked impressively tidy, but it was the bunches of flowers people brought to lay on the graves that gave us our chance really to join in the grown-ups’ mourning games. There’s nothing small children enjoy more than parcelling things out according to some system of just deserts and it was obvious that many of the dead were being short-changed. This a gang of us – mostly girls – set about putting right, redistributing the flowers in jam jars and empty vases filled at the sexton’s pump so that everybody had some. We weren’t strictly egalitarian, however. Certain graves, particularly one with a soulful baby angel in white marble belonging to a child who’d died in the 1930s, always ended up with the best bunches.

It’s tempting, now, looking back, to see in our pious and partial efforts a dim reflection of post-war social policies. Certainly Hanmer churchyard was a pretty good microcosm of inequality. None of those children who puddled around so busily at the pump, and solemnly divided up the daffs and the pinks, had any graves of their own, as it were. Their families must have been buried there, but the graves were unmarked, they had no more property in the churchyard than anywhere else. My family had none there either, of course, but that was because they had recently moved to Hanmer. Nowadays my mother lies there under her stone, alongside my grandparents’ grave. I wonder if any of my generation of upwardly mobile Duckets or Williamses or Briggses have invested in graveyard real estate? Back in the late 1940s their families inhabited anonymous, untended tussocks after they died. I think we kids took it for granted that life after death was a class matter. I know we spent many fruitless hours searching for the entrances to the Hanmer and Kenyon vaults, in the expectation of meeting real ghosts: it was clear to us that the only reason they needed those underground apartments was because they were somehow undead. Or perhaps this was a theory I suggested. Away from the playground, on church territory, I set up as an expert on such spooky topics and managed – on some blissful days – to feel accepted, a member of the child world of Hanmer.

Well, the bugs thought so, I had the school doctor’s word for that. I was sent home with a note, like most people (but not everyone: that line about lice preferring clean hair is just a propaganda ploy to get the middle classes to own up) and predictably Grandma said: one, that I’d caught them from those dirty children; and two, that there was no point in applying the magic bug-killing mixture recommended because it would mean boiling too many kettles and anyway I’d only get reinfected. And anyway we couldn’t be seen buying that stuff in local towns, we’d have to do it in a strange place where no one knew us. So I spent the rest of my time at junior school blithely passing on head lice. The first year at grammar school, too, to my utter chagrin – but that comes later. For the moment, I sort of belonged.

The high point of my career as a dirty child was also, coincidentally, inspired by the school doctor. Medical examinations were a complete novelty to most Hanmer families, and for us kids the beginnings of the National Health Service licensed elaborate games of doctors and nurses, which took place in the bushes at the bottom of the vicarage garden. Nowhere else was private enough (no one else’s family was so oblivious) and so I became, while the craze lasted, everybody’s friend.

We queued up behind a hazel tree, knickers round our knees, clutching leaves for ‘papers’, and shuffled along to have our bottoms examined by Kenny or Bill or Derek, who, after having a good look and making dubious predictions, always prescribed the same thing: another leaf, which might, excitingly, be a nettle, but never was. This one was stuck on with spit if you were a girl, and threaded over your willie if you were a boy, and you were supposed to keep it on like a poultice as long as you could. For most of one summer this illicit clinic was convened once or twice a week, until we got bored, or the weather turned. Never again was there quite such a good occasion for kidnapping other kids on to my territory.

When I think back to that time, it’s not such heady, forbidden games that really represent its feel, but other much more routine memories – like lining up with the others outside on raw winter days, all wearing damp, knitted pixie hats and rubbing our chilblains while we waited to be marched over to the parish hall for our regulation school dinner of whale-meat stew. Thinking of that produces a mingled brew of fear and longing that seems the very essence of school.

Bit by bit the fear came to predominate. I became a timid, clumsy, speechless child – agonisingly shy. In my last year at school Mr Palmer would promise me sixpence for every time he spoke to me and I didn’t cry. I think I earned a shilling. More and more I lived in books, they were my comfort, refuge, addiction, compensation for the humiliations that attended contact with the world outside. But books were nothing really to do with school, not this school. I was a real dunce at the things I was supposed to learn – how to be neat, tidy, dexterous, obedient, punctual. My sewing turned to a grubby rag, it had been unpicked so many times. My knitting was laddered with dropped stitches. I couldn’t write a line without making a blot. So I was mystified when I passed the ‘scholarship’ at ten, and felt sure it was a mistake and someone was going to find me out.

They didn’t and still haven’t, I suppose. Hanmer school left its mark on my mental life, though. For instance, one day in a grammar school maths lesson I got into a crying jag over the notion of minus numbers. Minus one threw out my universe, it couldn’t exist, I couldn’t understand it. This, I realised tear-fully, under coaxing from an amused (and mildly amazed) teacher, was because I thought numbers were things. In fact, cabbages. We’d been taught in Miss Myra’s class to do additon and subtraction by imagining more cabbages and fewer cabbages. Every time I did mental arithmetic I was juggling ghostly vegetables in my head. And when I tried to think of minus one I was trying to imagine an anti-cabbage, an anti-matter cabbage, which was as hard as conceiving of an alternative universe.




III Grandma at Home (#ulink_5cf3cbb8-24ca-525c-90f3-6c26502b59ac)


Hanmer’s pretty mere, the sloping fields that surrounded us, and the hedges overgrown with hawthorn, honeysuckle and dog roses that fringed the lanes, might as well have been a cunning mirage as far as Grandma was concerned. They did nothing to alleviate the lousy desert that made up her picture of village life. She lived like a prisoner, an urban refugee self-immured behind the vicarage’s bars and shutters. None of my new school friends were allowed in the house. You could get into the vicarage garden via the side yard, or by climbing over the walls, and that was the way we did it. The whole thing was clandestine, the other children weren’t supposed to be really there at all, any more than that picturesque backdrop of lake and trees and cows. Meanwhile, insulated and apart, vicarage life went on. In the church, in bars, in books (Grandpa) or in a scented bedroom fug of dreams of home in South Wales (Grandma). That is of Tonypandy in the Rhondda, which rhymed with yonder, but with its Welsh ‘d’s softened into ‘th’, so that it seemed the essence of elsewhere.

Her Welsh accent was foreign – sing-song, insidious, unctuous, converting easily to menace. Asthma lent a breathy vehemence to her curses and when she laughed she’d fall into wheezing fits that required a sniff of smelling-salts. She had a repertoire of mysterious private catchphrases that always sent her off. If anyone asked what was the time, she’d retort ‘just struck an elephant!’ and cackle triumphantly. Then, ‘Dew, Dew,’ she’d mutter as she got her breath back – or that’s what it sounded like – meaning ‘Deary me’ or ‘Well, well’, shaking her head. That ‘ew’ sound was ubiquitous with her. She pronounced ‘you’ as ‘ew’, puckering up her small mouth as if to savour the nice or nasty taste you represented.

She had lost her teeth and could make a most ghoulish face by arranging the false set, gums and all, outside her lips, in a voracious grin. This clownish act didn’t conceal her real hunger, however. She projected want. During the days of rationing she craved sugar. Its shortage must have postponed some of the worst ravages of the diabetes that martyred her later, for once the stuff was available again she couldn’t resist it at all. She was soft and slightly powdery to the touch, as though she’d been dusted all over with icing sugar like a sponge cake. She shared her Edwardian generation’s genteel contempt for sunburn and freckles, and thanks to her nocturnal habits her skin was eerily pale. And just as she maintained that soap and water were too harsh for this delicate skin of hers, so she insisted that she couldn’t chew or digest gristly, fibrous meals with meat and vegetables, but must live on thin bread and butter with the crusts cut off if she couldn’t have tarts and buns. This, she’d repeat to me, was what little girls were made of, sugar and spice and all things nice – and I knew she was thinking of the sticky blondness of butter icing. Her ill-health had aged her into a child again in a way: a fat doll tottering on tiny swollen feet. But in her head she’d never been anything else, she still lived in the Rhondda in her mother’s house, with her sister Katie. So powerful was the aura of longing surrounding the place that it ought, by rights, to have been entirely fantastical, or at best only a memory. But no. True, her mother was long dead, but home actually still existed.

In the summer holidays we went there to visit, Grandma, my mother and me, leaving Grandpa behind. (This was called ‘letting him stew in his own juice’.) South Wales was an entirely female country in our family mythology, despite the mines and miners. A female place, an urban place and a place all indoors. Going there was like sinking into fantasy for all these reasons – and for one special reason above all, which was that home was a shop and we lived over it, and when we were there all the money horrors were magically suspended. Life was unfallen, prelapsarian, as though paying for things hadn’t yet been invented. When you wanted a chop or a teacake you just went and helped yourself without even having to cross the street. It was a self-sufficient kingdom, or almost: a general stores that stocked everything from tin trays to oranges to sausages to sides of beef and cigarettes, with a special line in Lyons cakes, and when I was small I could entirely sympathise with Grandma in her resentment at having been persuaded to swap this blissful set-up for the vicarage and the dilapidations. Life at ‘Hereford Stores’ – named for her mother’s native town – was her ideal of luxury and gentility, the source of her unshakeable conviction of social superiority to everyone in Hanmer.

Her sense of what class amounted to was remarkably pure and precise, in its South Wales way. Owning a business in a community where virtually everyone else went down the pit for wages would have seemed, in her youth, thoroughly posh. And the simple fact of not working when all around you were either slaving away or – worse – out of work would have been sufficient to mark you out as a ‘lady’. What could be grander than lounging around upstairs, nibbling at the stock when the fancy took you, brushing out your curls? She and Katie would still spend hour upon hour getting ready to go out – to Cardiff, or to Pontypridd, to some teashop, or to the pictures – recapturing the world of their girlhood, before men and money had turned real.

Katie was in her forties and had never married. She too was very plump and a bit breathless, but her hair was still red, her teeth were her own and her laugh had a tuneful trill to it, so that she tended on the face of things to bear out Grandma’s belief that you were better off without men. There was a shadowy man on the premises – their elder brother Stan – but he didn’t really count, because (after, so they said, a dashing, brilliant youth) he’d had a colossal breakdown and was never quite right again. Now, in his fifties, he was seedy and skinny, with a faraway gleam in his eye, due to stubbornly wearing his mother’s spectacles instead of getting some of his own. Stan hardly dented the atmosphere of scent and vanishing cream and talc I thought of as Hereford Stores. He slipped through it sideways like a ghost. There were two other brothers, but they’d long ago left home and were thought about as outcasts: elderly Tom, who looked after the butchery part of the business, was a pariah because he lived with a housekeeper, who was not very secretly his mistress, and thus belonged to the same vicious male sect as Grandpa; and Danny was talked about in the past tense as though he was dead, because he had actually had the gall to set up a shop of his own in another valley. So the magic circle of sweet, stale dreams stayed intact, up the crooked stairs over the old double-fronted store, with their family name, ‘Thomas’, fading over the door.

The house was overheated with high-quality, jet-black, sparkling coal, swapped for groceries with the miners who got it for perks. There was a big old range in the kitchen, which was behind the shop on the ground floor in point of truthful topography, although imaginatively speaking it was upstairs. Here a serial tea party like the Mad Hatter’s was in full swing all day and every day except Sunday, when Katie would ceremoniously roast a joint of meat (picked out by Tom) and get very red in the face. Otherwise we lived on Grandma’s favourite diet of bread and butter, toasted teacakes, scones, sponges and so on, eked out with tinned fruit and condensed milk. It was understood that cooking, cleaning and washing-up were properly the duties of a ‘skivvy’, which is glossed by the OED as a maid-of-all-work (usually derogatory) – first example 1902, so very exactly a Grandma word, she’d have been ten in 1902 – but if you didn’t happen to have one then you tried to get through as little crockery as possible, for instance, by hanging on to your cup all day, just giving it a cursory rinse once in a while. South Wales habits accounted for a good proportion of vicarage dirt I suppose: certainly it would have been very difficult to wash clothes, dishes or oneself with any regularity or thoroughness there, since the taps mostly seemed to be rusted up in disused outhouses in the yard and the skivvies who’d once upon a time carried water upstairs for bedroom washbasins were no more. Still, somehow, in the Rhondda we never seemed so shamingly grubby as when we were in Hanmer. And the housework that spelled such unending, ineffectual drudgery for my mother in the vicarage simply wasn’t done, for the most part, and nobody much cared.

Hanmer hemmed us in and threatened to expose our secret squalor, whereas neighbours in Tonypandy’s steep, jerry-built streets seemed to have lost interest in the ways of Hereford Stores. Katie and Stan gossiped with customers and this functioned as a kind of insulation – a protective barrier of chat within which their eccentricities were contained, unquestioned. They no longer had a social life otherwise and, having quarrelled with their relations, they lived as they liked. There was something pleasurable and even thrilling about this, at a time when advertising and women’s magazines were so venomously clean-cut and conformist in their versions of how to be. You were supposed to cringe inwardly when you saw those Persil ads: a little boy’s head swivelling on his neck as another boy, the one with the Persil-bright shirt, strides proudly by. ‘Persil washes whiter – and it shows!’ Competitive cleanliness. Hereford Stores sold soap powder all right, and the miners’ wives scrubbed away on their washboards and competed with each other in the whiteness of their lace curtains and doilies and antimacassars (an endless battle, in that atmosphere) but Grandma and Katie scorned it all. They were heretics, they wouldn’t play by the rules. If society wouldn’t supply them with skivvies they were damned if they were going to slave away.

My mother, however, got the worst of both worlds. She inherited the contempt for housework and she was also imbued with the notion that it was a sacred womanly duty. So she dusted and scrubbed and mopped and ironed, but with self-scorn, and – what made it infinitely worse – no idea at all how to set about it. All housework is futile in the sense that it has always to be done again. Hers was more blatantly so, since the vicarage didn’t even look briefly clean when she’d ‘finished’. When my poor mother mopped a floor she merely redistributed the grime – and it showed! That this wretched syndrome was magically suspended in South Wales added to the feeling of playing hookey from reality. Everyone was a girl again – not just Grandma, who perhaps always was, but my mother too.

In the drawers upstairs were scented hankies, fake pearls, ends of embroidered ribbon, painted buttons, scraps of lace, lavender sachets, dyed feathers. They hoarded. Grandma especially loved anything made of mother-of-pearl. For her its rainbow sheen was the epitome of prettiness and its very name was shadowed with extra glamour in that house. Their father had left nearly no impression, but their mother was invoked daily as the standard of grace, sweetness, refinement. When Grandma and Katie looked in the mirror, and titivated and sighed, it was their mother’s face they were looking for. And when they unhooked their creaking corsets after an outing, eased off their tight shoes and made yet another pot of tea, they were mothering themselves as she would have done. She must have spoiled them hugely, for they reposed in the mere idea of her, although nothing they said about her – nor her rather blank-looking photographs – gave her much character. Except for the hair. Her hair they rhapsodised about: naturally wavy and not yellow, not red, not copper-coloured, but golden. ‘The colour of a sovereign,’ they’d sigh, for all the world as though she’d been a fairy-tale princess, able to spin riches out of her hair. When they remembered her, one or the other of them would sooner or later repeat the phrase ‘like a sovereign’ – it became her motto, the sign of her mysterious charm.

Hereford Stores was silted up with mementoes of her era. There were hundreds of picture postcards filed away in chocolate boxes: glazed, embossed and glowing with unnaturally beautiful colours. One I particularly pored over from the time of the First World War (Katie’s first bloom) showed a handsome officer reclining in the arms of a pretty nurse, with a small, scarlet stain on his bandaged temple and discreet puffs of smoke to indicate a battle in the distance. But all the pictures were sanctified by association. They belonged to the world of mothballed hopes, that eerie wonderland of kitsch innocence where, in some unimaginable corner of time, a juvenile Grandpa and an even younger Grandma had met and married, and inaugurated hell.

How had it come about? How had he managed to fall for a girl with nearly no brains at all, and nearly no conversation except for curses and coos? With absolutely no interest in books or music or painting or anything much except peppermint creams and frilly blouses? And why did she accept a lean and hungry curate with his way to make? A clever, passionate, talented man if you believed in him, but a bookish boaster, lecher, snob, ham actor and so forth if you didn’t. They must have been mutually blinded by their dreams and needs: presumably he fell for her icing-sugar-and-spice flesh, not yet run to flab; and she for the pleasure of being courted, the prestige of being married. It seems safe to assume, from the outrage with which she referred to the whole messy business, that she married in entire ignorance of the mechanics of intercourse and childbirth, and found them hideous.

His discovery that she was barely literate and thoroughly philistine was (one imagines) less traumatic. After all, marrying a pretty, empty-headed girl was considered par for the course and still is, even in a world where couples get to know each other first. Hilda Thomas and Thomas James Meredith-Morris, back then in decorous 1916, wouldn’t have been very well acquainted. In that they were simply figures of their generation. What made their marriage more than a run-of-the-mill case of domestic estrangement was her refusal to accept her lot. She stayed furious all the days of her life – so sure of her ground, so successfully spoiled, that she was impervious to the social pressures and propaganda that made most women settle down to play the part of wife. Sex, genteel poverty, the responsibilities of motherhood, let alone the duties of the vicar’s helpmeet, she refused any part of. They were in her view stinking offences, devilish male plots to degrade her. When he took to booze and other women (which he might well have done anyway, although she provided him with a kind of excuse by making the vicarage hearth so hostile) her loathing for him was perfected. He was the one who had conned her into leaving her real home, her girlhood, the shop where you never had to pay for anything, the endless tea party. It was as though he’d invented sex and pain and want and exposure. She turned patriarchal attitudes inside out: he was God to her. That is, he was making it up as he went along, to spite her and with no higher Authority to back him up. There was no Almighty in charge, to excuse him, in Grandma’s world picture. She was an unreconstructed pagan herself, her sacraments a toasted teacake and a cup of tea, her rosary woven out of her mother’s hair. And she treated this life he offered, his shabby malicious invention, with contempt and cocooned herself in memories. The visits to Hereford Stores were her lifeline back to the world before.

Life at the shop was running down, though. Bit by bit they’d gone off their mother’s gold standard. Tom’s butchery department still seemed fairly solid, meat-rationing had buoyed it up somehow, or at least disguised the falling-off in business. But once you turned your back on his suet-and-sawdust-smelling counter and faced into Katie and Stan’s domain (which smelled acridly of tobacco, cheese, yellow soap) you could see that trade was anything but brisk. Customers came out of habit, the older ones, and because they couldn’t carry shopping bags up the hill. They bought tiny quantities in any case, rationed by poverty as much as by coupons. As I grew and 1950 loomed, the world in general began cautiously to cast off austerity, leaving Hereford Stores behind, stranded and getting gradually dustier and emptier. When I could count money well enough to be allowed to play shop, I sold untipped Woodbines in ones and twos out of an opened packet we kept by the till. My customers were stooped men with permanent bronchitis and big boys of thirteen or fourteen mysteriously off school. Men in work and their wives shopped elsewhere, except sometimes after hours, when Katie and Stan could be relied on to serve latecomers. It was the sort of shop that had almost as many customers when it was closed as when it was open. Feckless, improvident types rattled at the door at all hours wanting a few fags or half a loaf. And, of course, in search of that increasingly rare commodity that was turning out to be Katie and Stan’s special stock-in-trade: tick.

Katie doled out credit with a mixture of scandal, resignation and sympathy, clicking her tongue and sighing as she settled back into the kitchen’s fireside warmth to gossip about the after-hours callers (‘There’s cheek for you, sent that Jimmy round again, poor little tyke’). But Stan had his own infinitely more elaborate and clandestine methods, which he’d evolved during the Depression. This was all meant to be a secret – part of his furtive lunacy – but he was proud of his system, and took me on a tour of the stockrooms and the lofts above to show me how it worked. This whole building was separate from the house, a ramshackle barn-like wooden place with missing floorboards and shaky stairs. There were soap boxes, candles, piles of tin trays and jute mats, cigarettes in cartons on top away from the damp, nothing very exciting at first glance. It was only when you edged your way past this sensible stuff that you entered Stan’s Aladdin’s cave.

Piled up high, glinting and dusty, were curly metal antlers and wiry spines and whiskers that on closer inspection resolved themselves into dismembered bicycles – handlebars, wheels, plus the occasional fork or seat. There were smaller sets of wheels, too, that came in fours, from prams, and even some whole prams, parked dangerously on top of one another like an accident. He was proudest, though, of the contents of the sacks he kept, for fear of thieves, on the upper storey where the holes in the floor acted as booby traps. Here he had sacks full of ivories: confiscated piano keys, which for Stan, you could tell, represented (together with his other trophies) a cunningly accumulated fortune, the wealth of the world, pretty nearly, infinite riches in a little room.

His plan had been to confiscate people’s most vital possessions – their mobility and their music – as pledges against bad debts. They were never redeemed. Yet Stan didn’t mind, didn’t mind at all. In fact, he was as excited and pleased as if he’d invented his own currency and was a secret millionaire in it. He cherished the ivories and the bike wheels, and looked on the storerooms as a sort of safety deposit. This was his treasure, his equivalent to the collections of scented sachets and beads his sisters kept in the bedrooms. They for their part tut-tutted over his inexplicable affection for this junk, but even at the time when I was small I think I somehow understood – since I liked the prams and bikes, and was mystified and impressed by what I imagined to be the stolen teeth of all those pianos – that here was yet another annexe to the fantasy edifice of Hereford Stores. They had (save butcher Tom) all but forgotten that keeping a shop was about swapping goods for money; its real function was as a shrine to the past. Mother’s emotional generosity, her gift for giving, had turned all three into obsessive hoarders.

Their bankrupt idyll lasted for nearly ten years after the war. And even when Katie finally married, and died of a stroke horribly soon, confirming all the myths about men, Hereford Stores went on providing the ghost of a living for my mother’s disreputable brother, Uncle Bill, who joined Stan in the shadows until – some time around 1960 – he was done for receiving some hot Daz, and the CLOSED sign went up for the last time and finally meant what it said.

Grandma eked out her visits with other fantasy gratifications. She could hoard wherever she was and, although Shrewsbury and Chester were in her view not a patch on Cardiff, they would help recapture the security of streets, and their cafés and cinemas would cocoon her against the hostile whispers of the trees and the whiffs of manure. These outings were all-female, too, and involved hours of getting ready, then a lift to the train from a blaspheming Grandpa, or sometimes a taxi, all so that she’d be able to repose in the life-giving fug of a matinée at the Gaumont or the Majestic. The plush seats, the dimming of the lights and the sheen they caught on the swagged curtain as it rose, the box of chocolates, were as important as the film itself, almost. Although she loved the whole thing and entered into the spirit of the illusion so enthusiastically that she swept aside the dimension of fiction altogether. The latest Ava Gardner movie was just the most recent report on what promiscuous Ava had been up to since you saw her last: the changes of costume and setting and name were feeble disguises, and didn’t fool Grandma for a minute. She was there to witness when Joan Fontaine, for all her icy blondeness, fell for Harry Belafonte and would (she said) never trust Joan again. Grace Kelly she watched like a hawk for signs of similar leanings and was semi-confirmed when Grace married an Eye-tie. (She herself wouldn’t touch dark chocolate, even, and anyone who acquired a suntan was suspected of a touch of the tar brush.) Once television arrived in our lives she became an addict of soap operas and in particular Emergency Ward 10, which saved her life day after dreary rural day. The box eventually became her babysitter, the last, many times removed substitute for her mother. By then I was treating her with contempt, as a senile infant, although she scared me a lot, in truth, because she represented the prospect of never growing up.

Once upon a time in South Wales, when a friend of Katie’s came to stay, I had had to spend the night in a feather bed, sandwiched between Katie and Grandma, and that ambiguous sensation of sinking back and back, down and down in a deep nest of feathers and furbelows and flesh, came to stand for the Rhondda. Infinite regress threatened down there: promised, and threatened. It was pleasurable – how could it be otherwise? – to return to the smothering, spongy womb of the Stores. And yet I was always glad to get away. As I grew, Grandma got shorter, so that she sometimes looked almost spherical. She and Katie were such an exclusive club, really, that even my mother wasn’t a full member and I was even further removed from the inner sanctum because I couldn’t recall my great-grandmother, so had to take her praises on trust.

There were other Welsh voices I could have listened to. Occasionally – and to my great surprise – people who dropped in to the shop would congratulate my mother on my bookishness and talk with pride about how their grandchildren were ‘getting on’ and going to the grammar school. People in Tonypandy, as in other mining districts, were enthusiastic about education, in sharp contrast to Hanmer’s conservative scorn and inertia. The future was real and a good thing, and even if you went down the pit like your da you weren’t expected to give up reading, thinking, arguing or politicking; autodidacts flourished still in those days. Nonetheless the atmosphere of Hereford Stores dominated my sense of the place, so that for me the journey south was like slipping into a pocket of the past. I didn’t know who I was, there – didn’t need to know. It was as though I hadn’t been born yet.

Grandma saved paper bags inside paper bags inside paper bags … Years later, when she died, and my mother and I were going through the trunks that by then held the compacted residue of her lifetime’s squirrelling, we came on a cache of letters from my grandfather, tied in the inevitable banal shred of pink ribbon. His courtship compositions, they were, full of quotations from the poets, sentimental flourishes, promising plans. We looked at them with awful embarrassment and agreed (how I wish now that we hadn’t) to burn them, because they seemed shaming evidence of the mutual confidence trick of that hateful marriage. There was cash in the same trunk, folded notes cunningly dispersed among the photos of Katie done up to the nines, and the bars of waxy soap and sugar lumps put by against the return of rationing. And that money was the clue to another part of her story. Where did she get it? Where, for that matter, did she acquire the substantial sum – around five hundred pounds – she’d accumulated in my name (so that my father couldn’t inherit it, she told me once) in National Savings? I didn’t think very hard about it at the time and I took the theories that circulated in the family as tall tales. However, Grandma’s way of blurring the boundary between fantasy and reality, and her power to draw me back into the past have long outlived her.

About the money: I was asking my father just the other day whether some of the wilder things I recalled about the grandparents had any basis in truth. For instance, what about the story that Grandma had blackmailed Grandpa for years, by threatening to show his private diary to the Bishop unless he handed over part of his stipend every quarter? Well, yes, said my father, that was certainly true. But how do you know? I asked. Simple, he said, I’ve got the diaries, two of them. (Because she’d kept them as well in one of the trunks, although my mother had never let on.) Anyway, with a bit of persuasion, reluctantly, my father handed them over: two small, cheap, reddish diaries, for 1933 and 1934, both published by John Walker & Co., Farringdon House, Warwick Lane, EC4, filled with very small writing and decorated at weekly intervals with coloured stamps he stuck in to mark the church calendar. These left him even less space to write down the compromising details of his daily life, but he managed enough.




IV The Original Sin (#ulink_f962b764-4740-5be7-ae7b-531b124e1ee0)


There is no doubt that Grandma preserved Grandpa’s diaries for 1933 and 1934 as evidence against him. Indeed, the 1933 diary has a couple of scathing marginal comments in her hand – Here the fun begins (Friday, 25 August) and Love begins (fool) exactly a week later. If he refused to produce the cash that lined her luggage, paid for her outings to the cinema and her teatime meringues at the Kardomah, and fed the National Savings account she eventually put in my name in case some man got hold of it when she died, then she would take the damning documents to the Bishop, threaten scandal and divorce, and lose him even the rotten living he had.

Reading these diaries turned out to be a bit like eavesdropping on the beginnings of my world. 1933 was the year the grandparents arrived in Hanmer from South Wales. This was how the Hanmer I grew up in had been created – how life in the vicarage got its Gothic savour, how we became so isolated from respectability, how the money started not to make sense and (above all) how my grandfather took on the character of theatrical martyrdom that set him apart. 1933, he did not fail to note, was the nineteen-hundredth anniversary of Christ’s Passion: ‘This is the Crucifixion Year AD 0–33, 1900–1933. A Holy Year.’ He wasn’t thiry-three himself, but forty-one and fearful, before he was offered this new, sprawling country parish in the north, that his career in the Church of Wales had ground to a shaming standstill. He’d been twelve years in the same place. ‘Here we are at the end of winter time,’ he writes on 8 April, on Saturday night, doing some spiritual stock-taking and already assuming his Sunday style, ‘and I am still at St Cynon’s. O God give me a little chance now at last. Thy will be done.’ But the South Wales parish he was after at the time, Pencoed, went to someone else the very next Thursday and the day after that, Good Friday, he is making the most of his misery, preaching on the theme, ‘Who will roll away the stone …?’

It isn’t until later in Easter Week that he learns – or at least confides to his diary – the full extent of his humiliation: ‘They have really cast me aside in favour of a young fellow who has only been ordained since 1924. Well this is the limit. What on earth am I to do now? No hope and no chance.’

But he has learned to live with hopelessness, that’s the worst of it. He fritters away his time and turns his back on the drama of rejection. The great shock of opening this compromising little book, for me, was that for the first half – with the exception of the few desperate and frustrated cris de coeur I’ve culled – it was the record of a pottering, Pooterish, almost farcically domesticated life. The sinner I was expecting was guilty of pride, lust and spiritual despair, not merely of sloth and ineptitude. This was the diary of a nobody. So I nearly censored January to June 1933 in the interests of Grandpa’s glamour as a Gothic personage. But in truth this is what we should be exposed to – the awful knowledge that when they’re not breaking the commandments, the anti-heroes are mending their tobacco pipes and listening to the wireless.

He had been ‘jolly miserable’ (that middle-class oxymoron!) during those last stagnant months in South Wales. You could do nearly nothing in the Church of Wales and get away with it, no one took official notice, a vicar was a gentleman after all. Chapel would have been different, much more a matter of openly devout busybody closeness with the congregation, but he managed to nurture his depression in private. He’d surface late from sleep or sulks, affronted by the weather: ‘It is a terrible trial to get up in these very cold mornings’ – and light the fire in the study. Or that was his plan. Often things went wrong, as he expected: ‘Lit a fire in the study but heaps of soot fell down and put it out,’ he reports, as late on as 6 May. ‘Could not get on with my sermon at all today. An aeroplane overhead at teatime …’ It’s uncharacteristic of him to notice what’s going on outside, he is so fed up with his surroundings (his parish, his prison). But perhaps the plane flew past his defences because it belonged to the skyey regions of the weather, which he regularly records as a mirror or a foil to his moods. He’s good at the rhetoric of the barometer: with freezing rain comes the pathetic fallacy, sunshine equals irony, with the snow everything grinds gratifyingly to a halt.

Also, the aeroplane was new and a machine, like his addiction, the wireless. With his ear to the speaker he takes to the airwaves himself and communes with the wide world so intimately it seems inside his head. ‘Toothache,’ says one entry, ‘Earthquake in Japan.’ Hitler comes to power in Germany (31 January), Roosevelt’s oath-taking is relayed (4 March). Grandpa registers the facts, but doesn’t comment, he’s more interested in the quality of reception he’s getting on short wave, the placing of the aerial and whether to buy a Pye or a Murphy. He tries each out on approval, squeezes in little drawings of the rival sets on the page and after some enjoyable dithering – ‘Spent the whole of the day trying to decide between the Pye and the Murphy’ – splashes out £17.17s.0d on the Pye, ‘bought … outright’.

This is hugely extravagant, the better part of a month’s pay (his stipend was £73.4s.4d per quarter), but he owes it to himself, since listening in and twiddling the knobs is what makes his idleness and boredom feel busy. He sees few people, even on the Almighty’s business. He boycotts the meetings of the Rural Dean and Chapter (‘lost any desire to meet the clergy of the Rhondda – they are all such a lot of place-seekers’) and records punctually and with a kind of glum relish the lousy church attendances in harsh weather: ‘Got up for H[oly] C[ommunion]. No one at HC.’ The wireless, by contrast, is a friendly presence. ‘Spent the whole of the afternoon tinkering with my old wireless set in the study,’ reads an almost happy entry long after he has acquired the superior Pye. The hums and crackles and cosmic whistles of interference probably served nearly as well as the programmes to provide him with a private cocoon of distraction. He does read of course as well, and in the same impatient spirit, science fiction stories about other worlds for preference. On 17 January, for instance, ‘the Radio programme is very monotonous and dull. Took up Conan Doyle’s Lost World and read it right through.’ He is an accomplished mental traveller. In March he actually spends a day or two pretending to have been called away, in order to escape parish business – ‘Am supposed to be away from home today. Stayed in and did some reading … Lit a fire in the study and sat there all day reading Jules Verne’s Journey into the Centre of the Earth …’ Sometimes he sat in the kitchen instead, sometimes he complains of a headache rather than a toothache. On his official evening off he would sit in the study and watch people going to church.

He had his smokescreen too. He smoked a pipe. Or that was the theory. In practice he evolved his own extra rituals to make his habit more complicated and satisfying-because-unsatisfying. Fiddling with pipe-cleaners and bowl scrapers didn’t suffice, partly because he hankered after cigarettes – although they woke up an ‘old pain’ in his chest – and partly because it hurt to grip a pipe-stem with those aching teeth. Anyway, he doesn’t just mess with pipe accessories, he goes further. In a sort of parody of a handyman, he whittles: ‘Shortened my pipe – the Peterson – and spoiled it,’ reads a terse entry in January. Was he chagrined? Probably not, although one can’t tell whether he has yet worked out his pipe plot. Does he know that what he really wants is (by accident of course) to spoil his pipe and thus make ‘work’, plus an opportunity to get back to cigarettes? In February he buys another Peterson (‘no. II’) and on Saturday, 22 April he experiments again and supplies a full rationalisation: ‘After I had dinner I turned my Peterson pipe into a cigarette holder as this is the more satisfactory way of smoking to me. The full weight of the pipe is too much for my teeth.’ In May: ‘am still on with the cigarettes but must go back to the pipe I think’. In fact, he buys a new nameless pipe the very next day, but immediately rejects it in disgust – ‘too rotten to smoke. A cheap pipe is useless.’ Whereas a dear one provides hours of pleasure and distraction for a bad-tempered bricoleur. On 15 May he buys another Peterson, ‘a Tulip-shaped Peterson No. 3’ this time, and manages to destroy it fairly fast: ‘Saturday May 27th. Broke my Peterson pipe. It seems I must keep to the cigarette holder.’ By Monday he records proudly in the diary that he has ‘finished turning the Peterson pipe into a cigarette holder’; and so gratifying is this that the week after he goes out and buys another ‘light’ pipe (3 June) and two days later turns that into a cigarette holder too. On 9 June he buys a Peterson No. 33 …

As his frustrations mount, the pattern of destructive tinkering speeds up to match, turning smoking into another pseudo-occupation to fill his seething sedentary hours and days. His sensibility is in perpetual motion – he’s self-absorbed and self-repelled at once, and the pottering alternates with bleak vistas of pointlessness. ‘Spent an unprofitable day feeling liverish and miserable’ (March). ‘Spent a useless sort of day in the study’ (April). Although he is always at home, wearing out the chairs with his bony behind, his family barely exist for him – except for my mother. And this was the second surprise of the South Wales part of the 1933 diary, that his teenage daughter Valma (she turned fifteen on 14 March) lives on the inside of his loneliness. She is his one human task, he has been tutoring her at home for a year (he records in May) and she figures in the same sorts of sentences as the wireless, the books and the pipes, where her presence suddenly populates the house – ‘Spent the morning and the afternoon taking Valma’s lessons. Came on to Latin at teatime’; ‘sat in house all this afternoon giving Valma her lessons’. He plans out schedules of study and sets her exams. She’s his go-between with the outside world, in more senses than one, for she also runs errands and posts letters.

It’s my mother who posts the letter asking for the Pencoed living, after he’s hesitated for days over committing himself, fearing to be snubbed (as he was). She is his hostage to fortune. She stands for a possible future. And the reason this was such a surprise to me was that she always led me to believe that she had never been close to him, and that he had never shared with her the bookish complicity I had with him when I was little. In my mother’s account of her growing up the Latin lessons and piano lessons (she was musical, like him and unlike me) had been erased without trace. Why? Why had she taken my grandmother’s side and when? The story that was about to unfold in Hanmer does explain, I fear, exactly why. But for the meantime she is his creature, as I became. He is distant and callous-sounding about his son Billy, who only attracts his notice when he plays truant from school and is duly beaten for it. And already there is (to put it mildly) no love lost between him and my grandmother. She must have been very ill that freezing winter of 1932–3, because he notes in his diary for Wednesday, 5 April: ‘Hilda went out for the first time since Christmas.’ But that’s not all. He only names her to record her absences. She goes out a lot as soon as she’s able, often back to her real home at Hereford Stores, leaving him to stew in his own juice. The diary simmers on: ‘Well here is injustice if you like. I believe we have got a lot of madmen in authority in this diocese … I pray that this may be my last Easter at St Cynon’s.’

And out of the blue his prayers were answered, when he least expected it. The resurrection of his ambitions and energies was only weeks away. It’s on 13 June that the long winter of discontent finally melts into spring – ‘At last the day of hope has dawned. The Bishop has written to ask me to come and see him about the living of HANMER with TALLARN GREEN.’ And he breaks out the green ink to celebrate. After this things move very fast. He travels north by train to visit Hanmer on 25 June, inspects the vicarage two days later (‘a nice old place and I can’t imagine myself in it’) and accepts the living on 3 July, so that on Friday, 28 July he’s able to read the announcement of his appointment in the Church Times, which makes it real – ‘O father at last I see the fruition of my desires …’ – and within weeks the fun began, as we know.

Everything is suddenly on the move, unfixed, the old landmarks of his depression left behind in the Rhondda – along with his wife and son and Valma too, for the moment, since the vicarage in Hanmer is to be cleaned and refurbished a bit, and in any case they need time to pack up. All at once he’s alone in this new place (‘a lovely spot’) where people don’t know him from Adam. Mobility. Freedom of a kind. He must take up his duties immediately, now that the old Canon, long ailing, has finally admitted defeat and been persuaded to go. His two churches are three miles apart down shaggy, meandering country roads blistered with cow pats and hemmed in by weedy ditches. He acquires a bicycle, and finds himself walking it up gentle hills (no mountains here) and freewheeling down again on the other side. The diary shows him threading his way along a necklace of new place-names – Bangor-on-Dee, Wrexham, Ellesmere, Horseman’s Green, Eglwys Cross, Bronington, Bettisfield, Whitchurch – marking out a map on which, more and more often, his path crosses that of the district nurse, Nurse Burgess, who of course has a bicycle too …

Just days before, ironically enough, he is all prepared to be lonely and bored. ‘Hanmer is very quiet,’ he notes ominously, ‘very … Time hangs somewhat on my hands in this place.’ Then the new bike arrives. There’s an August heatwave, the kids are swimming in the mere just as we would twenty years on (except that in 1933 it’s only the boys) and on the very day he admits to taking his first ride with the nurse (‘Here the fun begins’) they are both summoned to the mereside in their professional capacities, because one of the young men has drowned. It’s the beginning of a tragic sub-plot that keeps up a kind of background thrumming for months to come: drowned Jack is Molly’s young man, bereaved Molly comes to work in the vicarage as a maid, loses her mind, Nurse Burgess tries to get her put away and so forth. For now, though, Jack’s death is the main, telling event, a focus for feeling. It permeates the humid atmosphere and puts paid to any illusion of serenity. His body doesn’t surface for three days and the whole of Hanmer keeps a vigil, people standing in hot huddles talking under their breath, gazing at the innocent flat water only dimpled with fish taking flies. He was a strong swimmer, too, so there’s a niggling element of mystery about his death: cramp, or weed, or cold currents must have got him and it’s true – was still true twenty years later – that sometimes when the water near the edge was soupy warm you’d suddenly find your legs entwined with chill streams snaking in under the lily pads, just before the bottom shelved right away.

Grandpa was swiftly out of his depth as well, but he was having a marvellous time and only noticed how far he’d gone when his family actually turned up. Out of his depth, and in his element. He and Nurse Burgess, now MB for short in the diary, pedal to paradise every day of the week, including Sunday. Trailing a cloud of midges, they’d hump their bikes off the road, through some muddy gateway and, behind the hedge, hug and knead each other among the mallows and Queen Anne’s lace and nettles dusty with pollen. Perhaps they spread his tobacco-scented black cassock on the ground to protect them from ants and the crawling wasps drunk on crab apples. Or more likely they’d keep their uniforms on and each get to know the other’s body in bits. He is lean and wiry, MB in her starched blue linen is substantial but not yet stout, well muscled because of all the exercise she gets, her arms mottled pink and white from soap and sun. She has a midwife’s hands. His fingers are inky and curve to caress an imaginary pipe bowl, or a preacher’s palmful of air, and – now – the generous breast where her watch ticks away. It’s nearly always afternoon, they are supposed to be out to tea, strawberry jam and fruit cake, and so they are, so they are. Cattle watch incuriously, sidling towards the gate, ready to herd along the lane for milking. And they wrestle each other into submission, and relax a long moment, listening with half an ear to the trickling ditch the other side of the hedge, where duty calls. Although it’s hard to hear the summons for the rooks and wood pigeons.

So I imagine them celebrating in advance their private Harvest Festival, the event in the church calendar that strikes the richest chord in this pagan place, as he’ll discover. ‘We plough the fields and sca-a-a-tter / The good seed on the land.’ Was that how they managed contraception – coitus interruptus, aggravating the sin of adultery? Deliberate infertility, the luxurious, forbidden pleasure of taking pleasure by itself, must have spiced their lovemaking. Theirs was a feast of blissful barrenness. MB may well have used a sponge and a spermicidal douche. A nurse, being a professional spinster, was assumed to know about these things; and in any case all nurses had lost their conventional aura of feminine innocence – their collective moral virginity – because of their intimacy with other people’s bodies. They administered enemas and sponged the sick, and washed the dead and laid them out and plugged their orifices. They helped other women’s babies into the world. At the same time, since a nurse couldn’t keep her job and marry, she was a bit like a nun – a nun in a salacious story.

Nurses were suggestive. And so, for slightly different reasons, were priests of the Church of England, who could and did marry. Grandpa had the shamanistic glamour associated with the magical ability to transform the bread and wine, of course, and he combined it with licensed access to other people’s private spiritual parts. He officiated at a distance in church, but also close to, at home. He talked with women, and with the aged and the sick, during the day when other (real) men were out at work. An Anglican vicar was, in terms of cultural fiction, a eunuch of sorts. Yet everyone knew that actually he wasn’t vowed to celibacy, hence the comic naughtiness associated with his situation, too. Perhaps that is why it’s inviting to picture this love affair – the Vicar and the Nurse – in the style of a Hogarth etching of carnival appetite on the rampage. Flesh triumphs over Spirit. An allegory of hypocrisy. The holier (or in MB’s case, certainly cleaner) than thou rutting away in the ripe season, no purer than the peasants to whom they preached hygiene and holiness.

Peering down the years, a voyeur through that dense bramble hedge, it’s hard to see them except in outline, etched in archetypal postures. But why not remake them out of Arcimboldo fruit and veg, since it’s a less moralising transformation? O father, at last I see the fruition of my desires, in apple cheeks, cabbage curls and a damson mouth.

On 31 August he pauses for a second to count his blessings: ‘The end of a wonderful month for me. Thanks be to God.’ A couple of days later he foresees possible ‘complications’ with MB, but for now he’s so happy he steps right out of character and simply refuses to brood. He has to admit to having a good time: ‘Well I must take life as I find it and make the best of every circumstance,’ he writes, for all the world like a saintly stoic accepting the delights the Lord has seen fit to pelt him with.

He makes a brief return trip to South Wales, where Hilda and the children are staying at Hereford Stores, packed up to leave. While he’s there he sneaks some vertiginous glimpses of his hated old parish – ‘went for a walk over the Coronation Hill within sight of the parish of Ynyscynon’ – before travelling back north on his own, to be met in Wrexham by MB. Then, on 13 September, the family ARRIVE IN HANMER in capital letters. Hilda has brought her beloved sister Katie along to help and to soften the blow of leaving the Rhondda, but this doesn’t prevent her from being ‘very down in the mouth’ at her first sniff of country air. ‘She is utterly miserable this evening,’ he tells the diary. The next day she is no better (‘terribly miserable’) and the day after that he sends them off to go shopping in Whitchurch, the nearest town, six miles away, with the same result – ‘Hilda again miserable.’ On Saturday, taking stock, he finds his own secret sense of well-being wearing a bit thin: ‘Am not feeling very well again. This is due to the pressure of moving and Hilda’s lack of spirit.’ He seems to feel, rather unreasonably, that she should be sharing in his elation, sympathising with the revolution in his feelings. ‘I have to bear everyone’s burdens and my own,’ the entry ends, with a surge of self-pity.

Of course, Grandma didn’t yet know about MB. Once on the bicycle, on the byways of the parish, he was off her mental map. And in any case from Hilda’s point of view MB was only one of a set of local ladies who had taken doting possession of their new vicar during his first lone weeks. Chief among them was widowed Lady Kenyon, who was (it turns out) the real head of the Hanmer community, and outshone the eponymous Hanmers in both rank and wealth. The diary records that he was frequently chauffeured around in her car, and that he was regularly invited up to Gredington, the comfortable Kenyon pile, for tea and for dinner tête-à-tête. Then there’s Miss Crewe – the headmistress of the parish school – and her friend Miss Kitchin, who ran the bakery and doubled as the church organist. Miss Crewe, too, owned a car, which Miss Kitchin drove, and they gave him lifts to Chester, Shrewsbury, Oswestry and so on, and more invitations to tea. He was, it seems, God’s gift to all the grander single women of the parish. It must quickly have become apparent to these new female friends that he and Hilda were a most ill-matched and disaffected couple. She hadn’t the health, inclination or the social background to play the role of the vicar’s wife. And this unhappy fact must have added to his air of availability for them all, and particularly for MB.

She called shortly after the family’s arrival and walked Hilda to the church ‘for the first time’ (as the diary records, possibly with irony). Instead of cooling down, their affair intensifies: ‘Went to Tallarn Green … met MB. A lovely day altogether’ (19 September). He is hardly ever in his new vicarage and often eats supper or goes to play cards with the people at the lodgings he stayed in when he first arrived in the village, where MB often drops by, too. And very soon this family – the Watsons, who keep the shop – are in on the secret. As the autumn closes in, and the weather gets wet and foggy, his double life keeps him idyllically busy. Official parish duties even promise fun, too: ‘Went to the meeting at the Parish Hall for entertainments … there will be quite a lot to do at Hanmer as time goes on.’ Although the pace occasionally gets hard to sustain, it seems, for on Saturday, 7 October he reverts to the old ploy of hiding in his study and pretending he’s elsewhere: ‘Decided to be away all day so as to have a quiet day.’

It’s the day the clocks go back. He finds himself pausing for reflection and – for the first time – misgivings. Has he been led down the garden path? ‘Thank thee O God for hearing my prayer to get a removal from Llwynypia. But I wish I could have removed to some other parish in S. Wales instead of coming up to the north.’ Or perhaps he isn’t as smitten as he first thought, for the entry ends enigmatically, ‘My heart is in the south.’ But the very next day he goes to the Watsons after evensong, where he meets MB and ‘stays late’. There’s a gratifyingly ‘huge crowd’ at church for Harvest Festival a week later and he’s able to rest on his laurels, since MB is going away for a short holiday. And then, suddenly, just as he relaxes, there comes a stroke of fate that whisks away the very means of his freedom.

In other words, he had an accident on the bike. He was speeding alone down the dark lanes between services when he came a cropper – ‘tore the cartilage of my leg. Laid up at Pritchards’ farm. Dr McColl set my leg and brought me home,’ he writes, staccato style with clenched teeth: immobilised, grounded, trapped in the vicarage. That dawns on him gradually. By Wednesday the leg ‘is far from getting right’, on Thursday the doctor calls and tells him he won’t be fit for his duties on Sunday and things start to look serious. Lady Kenyon sends a pair of crutches. And MB, who is after all the district nurse, returns from her holiday to find him in the new position of patient – flat on his back.

She knows just what to do. She bustles into the vicarage armed with her professional innocence. Now their assignations take place in his bedroom. On 1 November she calls and stays till midnight. ‘Am feeling very tired,’ he tells the diary before falling asleep. MB is tenderly solicitous. She gives him a ‘dental pipe’ as a present, plus tobacco, and a walking stick ‘for me to get about’. Except that she doesn’t seem to be leaving him much time or energy for hobbling out of the house. The diary is dominated by her home visits. After about ten days, when the level of intensive care must have been starting to look a bit excessive, a new and magical word turns up: massage. The leg is on the mend, but needs daily massage. Bliss, you might think, to be in her capable hands. The accident has turned out to be a blessing in disguise, now that the weather is foul and the nights are drawing in.

But reading between the lines – which are getting pretty repetitious, there’s massage and more massage – he’s not altogether enjoying this domesticated transgression. For instance, there is an interesting double-take in the entry for 16 November: ‘The nurse (MB) came in the morning and gave me another massage.’ On the eighteenth he’s ‘rather depressed … shall be glad when my leg is well enough to get about’. On the twenty-third the massage leads to ‘a long serious talk with MB all the morning’. On the twenty-fifth he strikes a querulous note: ‘Have to be massaged in the afternoon’ (my italics, but his resentment, surely?). It’s not just the nights that are closing in. Perhaps in some perverse way it’s almost a relief when at last on 27 November Grandma, who has been distracted (presumably) by homesick dreams of the Rhondda, wakes up to what’s going on.

There’s a huge row. ‘Hilda in tantrums.’ No more massage sessions with MB. He goes to see the bone-setter at Church Stretton and the leg is soon cured. Not so the ache of passion. There are more long, serious talks (‘It is a very miserable position for MB’) and more rows with Hilda – ‘Heart-breaking in this country silence,’ he says, suddenly, dazedly, missing the background hum of traffic, the life of noise in South Wales. Still, he’s out and about again, and there has been a gratifying flurry of invitations, including one to the Hanmers’ house, Bettisfield Park, for late supper (leading to a ‘thumping’ hangover the next morning). He keeps away from the vicarage as much as possible and sees MB at the Watsons’, as he did before the accident. Things have changed, of course, the complications he dreaded have materialised. On 9 December he swears her a sinner’s oath on the Bible – promising to stay faithfully unfaithful. Thick fog blankets Hanmer and some days he is stuck at home. ‘Had to sit in the kitchen through perpetual bothering and misery,’ he writes on 19 December. ‘Don’t know what is going to come of this.’ Even when he contrives to stay out all hours, Grandma – already an insomniac – is quite capable of raging till dawn: ‘Spent a most awful night with Hilda again. Up the whole of this night and in deep misery about everything.’ He notes grimly that the Watsons have called the vet to put their dog out of its misery. He was no animal lover, obviously he envied the brute.

This misery was of an altogether different order from the old dull depression, however. This was live, vivid, mythic misery that marked the festive season with its own secret significance: ‘So the most notable Christmas of all has commenced.’ He was full of energy, absorbed and fascinated by the spectacle of his life. ‘How will all this end?’ he asked himself, clutching the edge of his seat. His feelings were volatile and contradictory. Certainly there were moments when he wanted to be free of MB. She had become a liability, another burden. And yet she still represented the lure of adventure. On 27 December he sent her a ‘letter of renunciation’ – ‘This is now the end.’ But the very next evening, when he went to church to collect his robes, ‘MB followed with a scene … a pathetic pleading night. I do not know what to make of all this. What a situation is now developing. Hilda begins her tantrums again about MB. So it goes on endlessly. Did not go to bed but remained in study all night long …’ As the year ends, and the diary too, he’s very attracted by the pull of an ending, but also by the opposite desire, for more intrigue, the plot to come. Rounding off 1933 he’s keeping his options open: ‘So ends a most memorable year for me. I have had the move I wished for to a lovely country church. Here I have met many most kind people. But I fear that the work will be too much for me. I have met MB too and therein hangs all the tale of the future. What will that be I wonder?? God knows since it is His doing that all this has come about. So then I commit the future to God.’ So MB was God’s idea.

She was not the whole story, for he had other projects. In the new year private drama had to share space in the new diary with the public kind. The parish entertainments committee that started meeting back in the autumn had generated a real show, his first Hanmer pantomime – and suddenly all the world’s a stage. He limbers up on New Year’s Day by doing a ‘turn’ himself in the parish hall, as part of a very amateur concert, a monologue as ‘Fagin in the Condemned Cell’. But for the panto he’s the prime mover – mostly from behind the scenes – recruiting the band, rehearsing the cast, and painting the scenery. The diary entries take on a surreal savour, when you remember the real-life drama he’s escaping from. Armed with bolts of cloth and cans of paint, he is levitating out of the rows and scenes to create in their midst scenes from another world, the innocent, archetypal land of Cinderella: ‘Got up this morning to start painting the scenery. Commenced with the woodland glade and got on well with it until 4.30 … sat in study thinking out a scene for the kitchen … finished scene 1 this morning. Put it out to dry this afternoon.’

He’s wonderfully well insulated from the raw real. Everything takes on an extra dimension of theatre, or to put it another way, bad faith. Thus he resolves to simplify his life and make a moral choice – ‘I must make up my mind what to do’ – but actually he is revelling in all the complications of indecision, the beauty of both/and: ‘So this is the end or is it the beginning of a new era for me.’ The personal plot thickens – Mrs Watson talks to him about MB, MB and Hilda row face to face … The village is a carnival of gossip. He is defiant and grandly outrageous. These days he and MB are meeting in the church, God’s safe house. It’s not the emotional logic of adultery that shapes events, though, but pantomime preparations. The show must go on – ‘a long and serious talk’ with MB gives way to ‘a good rehearsal’. He has finished the final ballroom backdrop (1 February) and is now hanging the whole sequence of scenes and painting the wings in situ in the parish hall. ‘Had a row with Hilda in the house during the day,’ he notes on 3 February. ‘After that went to the Hall and continued painting. MB brought me a cup of tea.’ He’s cutting it fine, for the first matinée is only four days away, but it’s a real labour of love. He is exercising his vocation to the full at last – the hard-working wizard making magic for the crowd.

He has started to turn into the Grandpa I remember – except that he has yet to taste the bitterness of being really found out. The pantomime was a triumph. He put on evening dress to conduct the orchestra, Sir Edward Hanmer publicly praised him from the stage and so – on the final night – did Lady Kenyon. So far, no one held his sin against him, MB was apparently a mere peccadillo compared with the major magic of Cinderella. Indeed, it looks as though people somehow felt it was all part of the show. He was having a love affair with the parish. No wonder he was suddenly forlorn and lonely when the curtain fell. His life was as much of a tangle as ever, but it struck him as banal. He remarked that time hung heavy on his hands – which is exactly the phrase he used just before he met MB. He was restless, impatient to affront the next phase of his fate. This time the cast would involve my mother (she hadn’t starred in the first panto, nor had he been paying her much attention) and this time things would go badly wrong, and he would fix the future.




V Original Sin, Again (#ulink_8b6fc04a-e866-55f3-98fc-1d43c611e887)


The quiet of Hanmer gave Grandpa the willies whenever he slowed down sufficiently for it to invade his consciousness. He heard time passing, then. Depression lay in wait and he would see the prospect of a more vivid life, the life his talents deserved, dissolving away like a mirage. I think this is why scenery-painting for the pantomime absorbed him so blissfully. He could create the illusion of perspective without having anywhere to stand to check he’d got it right (mostly he painted with the canvas spread out on the floor of an attic) and this trick was a version of the moral trick he needed to play on himself constantly. The moral trick – or more truly the morale trick – was harder, however. The show he put on that first Hanmer winter gave him a taste of carnival freedom and yet its very success left him in post-coital gloom: ‘The village is very quiet tonight after all the excitement of this week. What a week!’

The affair with MB had developed along similarly perverse and disappointing lines, since she had not only become the theme of endless Hilda rants, but also a kind of wife number two, part of the furniture of his frustration. So it was horribly convenient that the village – or at least the influential people, like Lady Kenyon – seemed disposed to blame MB for the scandal. If he cast her off he’d be allowed to get away with it. And he was ready (for the wrong reasons) to do the right thing. In short, he behaved like a complete cad towards MB.





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