A Postillion Struck by Lightning (24 page)

My father was the only one of us who seemed not to join in our general delight with the Italian Family. He was uncomfortable with Gianni, whom he considered to be a Blackshirt, and found the noise and hurly-burly, which so enchanted us, tiresome and unrelaxing. However, he smothered, as best he was able, these feelings, and we all managed a more or less comfortable relationship. It is unlikely that Gianni, who was a member of the Staff at the Italian Embassy,
was
a Blackshirt, if so an unwilling one. He was an Italian, and deeply proud of his country. However, none of this even remotely concerned me at the time. I had quite enough to worry me.

The resentment of my new brother was compounded by the fact that because of him and his untimely arrival, in the very middle of the summer holidays, we were unable to go, as usual, down to the Cottage. And so the long hot summer was spent sweating away in London, with occasional treks to the Heath or Kenwood for walks and “a breath of air”. Although I hated it all, I wished for it not to end, for I knew that with the end of summer came the trip to the North, to a foreign school, to new people and to a new life which, in spite of my Aunt and Uncle's warmth and affection, I dreaded. Wisely, and with great tact, Lally said that it was time we all grew up, things had to change, and we couldn't have it all our own way. Reckoning that MY way was the best way for me I was loth to put it aside. I disliked change of any kind, and I was secretly deeply afraid of having to grow up and go off on my own, a thing I knew was bound to happen one day or another. I preferred another.

I said goodbye to Miss Polyphemus, to Miss Garlick, to Dr Chanter and to weary Dr Lake, gave Jones G. C. all my “Just William” books and left the school on the hill for the last time.

No one seemed very sorry to see me go; they were all pretty busy getting ready for their own holidays to bother about me anyway.

Dr Lake wrote a very pleasant letter to my father saying that I was an “amusing companion and a nice fellow”, and that he wished me well. And that was that.

The summer, stuck away in London and far from my beloved gully and Great Meadow, was going to be a long, dull, time. But I realised that I'd better make the most of it.

One morning, very early, before the sun was up, the telephone rang and startled me out of sleep. The telephone was no strange device in our house. We were more than used to it attached as it was to Printing House Square. At all hours of the day or the night it rang with the news that a King had fallen off a rock, a Golden Eagle had hatched near Inverness, a Queen had been killed in a car crash, or a President had jumped out of a window.

We were never surprised by the odd items which filtered into the Nursery, and none of them appeared, at the time, to touch our golden lives. Until this one.

I heard my father answering the machine in his bedroom across the wide landing from mine. I heard him speaking for a long time … not hearing the words but being unmistakably aware that whatever he was being told was urgent, worrying and concerned him personally.

I lay looking at my tit-and-wisteria paper and wondered vaguely if it was anything to do with me or school. But nothing was said at breakfast, even though I could see, with a stab of surprise and alarm, that my mother had been crying.

Later, up at the top of the garden where I had built a rather rickety hut in which I painted and wrote my countless plays and stories, she came to see me.

I was making some puppets, I remember, and she vaguely admired a scrap of old brocade which I was using for a costume. “It came from those old curtains you gave me,” I said. But she was looking sadly out of the dirty window into the garden and not listening to me.

Presently she turned round and said in a weary voice: “I want
you to listen to me very carefully. Daddy and I have to go down to Brighton immediately. It's very sudden and very urgent and we might not be home until tomorrow. You've got a new grandfather.”

Aimé Emile van den Bogaerde was a tall, dashing, handsome man with great amused eyes and a faded fortune when he met my grandmother Grace some time in the late 1880's.

I don't know very much about him, because my father hardly ever mentioned his name to us as children, and all that we vaguely knew, and it was very vague indeed, pieced together from scraps sought or heard here and there, was that he had gone to South America as an explorer and died there of yellow fever.

He came from an ancient, Catholic family which traced its origins, I am told, to Anne of Cleves, but which finally settled, at the end of the sixteenth century, near Iseghem, a small town in the centre of the orchard country of what was then the Low Countries and is now Belgium. The name, van den Bogaerde, means “of the Orchards” and the coat of arms incorporates three fruit-laden apple trees. That the family was gently noble at its start is not in dispute; however, it apparently slipped towards the Sea (some were to become Admirals) and the Land. From the Land they moved into Law, and my grandfather was born to a famous judge and appears to have lived the life of any other rich gentleman of his time. Part of his education was the traditional Grand Tour which he made with two tutors and an enormous Great Dane. He travelled from Brussels to Paris, Berlin, Munich, Venice, Rome and eventually, London. Liking the English, speaking their language fluently, and being rich and handsome and young, he was attracted to the County Life and spent a great deal of his time in various parts of the shires riding, hunting, shooting and generally enjoying the hospitalities of the larger country houses to which he was invited, or had “letters of reference”.

It was while he was in Worcestershire that he met, and fell in love with, Grace Clark of that county and married her. I have always been told that the Clarks were so horrified at the idea of their golden, slender, child marrying a Foreigner that they sent her to a convent. And from there my grandfather kidnapped her and they ran away and got married. But that is legend. And I very much doubt that it happened. However, it well might have
for my grandfather was an impetuous, determined man, and Grace a rather timid, gentle, creature who could just about blow her own nose for herself. But she had some will. She firmly refused to live Abroad, embraced the Catholic faith and forced him to buy a large villa in Perry Barr, then a small, pleasant village, just outside Birmingham. To be near her family one supposes. They lived very well. There are photographs of the house, many gabled, with trim lawns and great cedars, coachmen and horses, dogs and maids and my grandmother in vast hats and long silk dresses. My father was born there in 1892 and spent the first few years of his life, a solitary child, happily enough with his little pony cart, his dogs Sherry, Whiskey and Soda, and my grandfather's Great Danes. The favourite of which was called Rosé.

My grandmother, like so many converts, became more Catholic than the Catholics, if that is possible, and made my grandfather's life complicated and tiresome. There was never to be another child apart from my father, because she believed, strictly, that sex should only be accompanied by the birth of a child, and this my grandfather resented. Some time—and here I get vague because I am lost for the facts—some time in the early 1900's he went on a journey to London. He never returned to the sprawling ivy-covered villa in Perry Barr with its cedars and lawns and Converted Catholic mistress, but took ship for South America from whence he was occasionally to write, and send my father photographs of his trips up the Orinoco (he was one of the first white men ever to get as far up it as he apparently did) and from the Amazon and various seedy little villages in Brazil.

He must also have sent presents sometimes, because for many years we had a rather smelly leopard's skin, which crackled and moulted, and the upper and lower jaws of a puma which he apparently shot during one of his expeditions. It is also supposed that he tried to import orchids in abundance to England but that this venture was doomed because of a lack of knowledge of packing and that all the tubers, or bulbs or whatever they are called, were rotted and dead on arrival at Liverpool. If this is true or not I do not know: but that was how we were always told that grandfather lost his fortune. It may well be so, for in 1910 my grandmother was forced to sell up Perry Barr and move, humbly, and in her grief, to a dingy, red-brick house in Bexhill, where she lived a genteel, careful, frugal life bringing up my
fatherless parent. She died there alone and bitter, while my father was in Passchendael in 1917. He said that she had died of a broken heart. A lonely, incapable, fragile woman. So, in the middle of a holocaust and at the age of twenty-three, my father to all intents and purposes became an orphan and considered that to be his lot.

It is hardly surprising, therefore, that one hot summer morning, after nearly thirty years of silence, a telephone call from a worried doctor in Brighton informing him that his father was gravely ill and wished to see him before he died, which could be at any moment, should explode like a land-mine within our household.

I have no idea what took place between my father and his own on that fateful day. It was never spoken of and we were certainly not encouraged to ask any questions. It was quite enough for us to know that we had “found” a hitherto dead grandparent whose life, to say the very least, had been a vague shadow lost in the distance of a time unknown to us.

Later I was to find out that all through those many years he had never ever lost track of my father and knew every detail of his existence. He knew of his marriage to my mother, of which he did not approve because she was “foreign”, of our births, of his position at
The Times
and, clearly, of his whereabouts at all times. And even though we spent most of our lives living within a few miles of the town in which he had taken up permanent residence, he only got in touch because he feared that, finally, he was dying of pneumonia and asked the doctor, who had been sent for by his daily woman, to inform his son of that fact.

He did not die as it happened. Perhaps the sight of his son and the idea of a large family to gather around him revived him, for he shortly got better and settled back into his dingy house near the West Pier at Brighton.

When it was clear to my father that death was not to ease our new burden, he decided that we had better meet, and some weeks after the telephone call we were driven down to Brighton to see our “dead” grandfather.

It was a faded, grubby house in a faded, grubby square. “To Let” signs hung at every window, and children played hopscotch in the ruined patch of garden in the centre.

Inside it was dark and smelled of stale tobacco and turpentine. The ground-floor room, with a big window, was crammed with canvases, stacks of old newspapers, a huge easel, paints and brushes and a battered couch on a raised platform. The windows
were thick with grime, and beside the ugly marble fireplace there were a couple of tables draped in worn American cloth, cluttered with saucepans and gas rings. Pots of dying herbs stood on the window-sill. We went up some dark, heavily papered, stairs.

He lay, a waxen shrivelled figure with blazing eyes and a small straggly beard, on a vast red lacquer bed in the shape of a swan, the neck and head forming the foot of the bed, the spread tail the head, and the raised wings the sides. It looked like a boat.

He stretched out a thin arm and took our hands, and smiled as we leaned to kiss him. He spoke with a heavy accent, and was delighted that we resembled him as he said.

He had established a pleasant form of rapport with my mother during the weeks, and told her how handsome we were and how handsome she was too.

“She has good eyes, you know, Ulric,” he said to my father. “Good eyes. Probably Latin blood, I wouldn't wonder, even if she is Scotch. Remember the Spanish; they swarmed over the west coast of Scotland, and half the population were raped.” My mother laughed and he blew her a fragile kiss. “You all probably have Spanish blood as well as Flemish! What a mixture!” He was amused. Turning to me with his fine, gaunt head, he asked me if I was clever. I was forced to admit that I was not.

“How many languages can you speak?” he asked.

“A little French,” I said. He laughed and said a little was better than none and that he spoke five fluently, including some South American Indian dialects as well.

“But you must not worry, boy,” he said gently. “We are all very slow to develop in our family, so you have time. Do you know the family motto? Does he know it, Ulric?
Semper Viridis
… do you know what that means?” And when I shook my head he stroked his little straggly beard and said, “It means Ever Green”.

Once a week, until I went to Scotland, we went down to the dirty house and saw him gradually grow stronger, and in time he was pottering, very slowly, about his dusty studio downstairs. On one occasion, swearing that he was strong enough to cook again, he sent me off with a penny to buy him four farthing eggs from a shop up the road.

“Ask for Polish eggs,” he said, “they do me very well in an omelette.”

The herbs got watered, and my mother replaced chives and
parsley and mint and sought, in vain, for his essential love, tarragon. The gas-rings blazed and he started to smoke endlessly; the smell of cooking now competed with turpentine and tobacco when we went to call.

My father realised that this state of affairs could not go on any longer. It was impossible for us to have him at home, and indeed he flatly refused the idea. So a nursing home where he could furnish his own room was sought and found near Kemp Town, and they told him firmly but gently. His rage knew no bounds. He refused to be moved and demanded to be left alone to his painting and his cooking and his own life. My father, weary of it all, shattered by the additional expense not only of a new son but a new father, gave in and, making him a small allowance which he could ill afford, left him to himself as he demanded.

He was not only impetuous and determined, but a blindingly selfish man. What happened to him in all those long years so near and yet so very far away? When did he return to England? How did he live? Why did he never make the smallest effort to reach my father or his mother, knowing, if one is to believe the facts, that he was well aware all the time of where they were, and what they were doing?