Basil Street Blues (2 page)

But my father would not take anything. He wanted to give money and receive praise: he found it almost impossible to receive money or give praise. He felt deeply humiliated by his poverty. ‘I certainly wouldn’t dream of allowing you to pay 1 cent for anything I write about the family,’ he notified me. I remember reading his letter with exasperation. He was so difficult to help. The truth was he felt embarrassed by my offer which, he wrote, ‘made me feel very ashamed of myself. I am not yet as down and out as you may imagine.’ Now, re-reading his letter after his death, an unexpected sadness spreads through me. It was true that he had been ‘down’ many times, ‘down’ but not quite ‘out’. Cursing the foul blows delivered on him by politicians, he would somehow pick himself up each time – just in time. But in his late sixties and early seventies, with only a State pension and a couple of hundred pounds from a mysterious ‘Holroyd Settlement’, though he would still speak with animation of things ‘turning up’, my father had in fact settled into involuntary retirement. The game was up. ‘I find that time is heavy on my hands,’ he had written to me. That was one of the reasons I had inflicted this homework on him. Nevertheless I emphasised that it was for my sake rather than his own that I was asking him to write an account. And perhaps there was more truth in this than I realised. For after my father and mother died in the nineteen-eighties I began to feel a need to fill the space they left with a story. Neither of them were in the front line of great historical events: their dramas are the dramas of ordinary lives, each one nevertheless extraordinary. From their accounts, from various photograph albums and a few clues in two or three boxes of miscellaneous odds and ends, I want to recreate the events that would give my own fragmented upbringing a context. Can I stir these few remnants and start a flame, an illumination? This book is not simply a search for facts, but for echoes and associations, signs and images, the recovery of a lost narrative and a sense of continuity: things I seem to miss and believe I never had.

I had to distance myself from my parents while they were alive, not out of hostility to them, but from a natural urge to find my individual identity, my own route. ‘When a writer is born into a family,’ wrote Philip Roth, ‘the family is finished.’ Inhabiting their worlds as a child and then an adolescent, I felt invisible; after which I traded somewhat in invisibility as a biographer. But following my parents’ deaths, when they became invisible and I was seen to have attained my independence, my feelings began to change. I was drawn into the vacancy their deaths created, needing to trace my origins. It is an experience, I believe, that possesses many people in these circumstances: to ask questions when it is apparently too late for answers, and then be forced to discover answers of our own.

The unexamined life, Saul Bellow reminds us, is meaningless. But the examined life, he adds, is full of dangers. I have found wonderful freedom in that maverick condition which can be described as meaningless: a freedom in not being tied to social contexts or engulfed in family chauvinism. My identity was shaped by what I wrote, though this identity was concealed behind the people I wrote about – concealed I think from others, and also from myself. But now I must go back and explore. My parents, my family scattered over time and place, have become my biographical subjects as I search for something of me in them, and them in me. For this is a vicarious autobiography I am writing, a chronicle with a personal subtext, charting my evolution into someone who would never have been recognised by myself when young.

My father wrote with a ballpoint pen on blue Basildon Bond paper. I remember thinking that, his name being Basil, this was almost a pun – especially since he was largely playing the history don in this investigation, the don he occasionally felt he would like to have been. The handwriting, as always, is wonderfully clear: thirty lines to the page, three hundred words, as regular as a marching soldier – quite unlike my own unformed and erratic writing.

He had probably prepared this fair copy from an earlier version. It stops suddenly in mid-sentence, at the foot of the thirty-eighth page, leaving him in his truncated schooldays during the early nineteen-twenties suffering from double pneumonia. But there are a couple of stray white pages, numbered 19 and 20, and a fragment of 21, that contain a variant text. They allude rather tantalisingly to ‘the only indiscretion’ of his own father, the ‘real start of our financial disasters’, and a ‘Holroyd Settlement’.

There are signs that in his fair copy my father somewhat held back. Perhaps he remembered an attempt I had made to write about the family ten years earlier and the drama it caused. It had been an attempt at using my family to find a career of my own rather than following one of the uninviting professions they were urging on me.

My father started his saga in its first version in the eighteenth century and moved fairly rapidly on to his parents – my grandparents at whose house in Berkshire I had passed much of my childhood and adolescence. But coming across a privately-printed history of the family prepared in 1879 by Thomas Holroyd, High Sheriff of Calcutta, for his son in Australia (later brought up to 1914 by Caroline Holroyd, Thomas Holroyd’s daughter, also for her brother who was by then a retired judge of the Supreme Court of Victoria in Melbourne, Sir Edward Dundas Holroyd), my father had been able eventually to reach back into the sixteenth century. That privately-printed history had been largely taken from Burke’s
Colonial Gentry
and Foss’s
Lives of the Judges
.

My father believed that the ‘royd’ in Holroyd came from a Yorkshire word meaning stream. I do not know where he picked up this piece of learning. In the opinion of a Yorkshire local historian, Hilda Gledhill, ‘royd’ was actually a Norse word meaning clearing or place which had been introduced by the Vikings after landing at Durham in the eighth century and making their way south west into northern Wales. When surnames became more common, people were often called after the land where they lived, Holroyd being someone who occupied a hollow place or valley. My father enjoyed history, and had he come across a rare volume, John Lodge’s
The Peerage of Ireland
, published by James Moore in 1789, he might have liked to read that the Holroyd family is ‘of great antiquity in the West-Riding of the county of York, and derives its name from the hamlet or estate of Holroyd, or Howroyd, as it was pronounced, in Bark-Island six miles from Halifax, which they formerly possessed’. According to John Lodge, who provided a pedigree going back to the thirteenth century, the word Holroyd ‘signifies, when applied to land, such as was barren and uncultivated…The origin well suits the soil and situation of Holroyd… which joins to the mountainous country separating Lancaster from Yorkshire, called Blackstone-edge.’ It is spacious country with vast skies and steep valleys full of clinging mists; also deep green fields marked out by granite and millstone walls, and miles of brown windswept moors, dramatic and desolate, round which, in the teeth of the weather, the people of the South Pennons quarried out their lives.

For several centuries Yorkshire seems to have been crammed with these Holroyds – butchers, clergymen, clothiers, farmers, landowners, soldiers, yeoman of all kinds. It was as well my father did not gain access to all this early material or he might never have reached the twentieth century at all.

He began his story with two brothers, George and Isaac Holroyd, in the seventeenth century. From these brothers, he wrote, ‘our particular branch of the family is descended’. The elder brother was the great-great-grandfather of the first Earl of Sheffield, now remembered as the friend and patron of Edward Gibbon, or ‘Gibbons’ as my father rather endearingly called him. This Earl of Sheffield, John Baker Holroyd, is one of only two members of the family to have appeared in the original edition of Leslie Stephen’s and Sidney Lee’s
Dictionary of National Biography
. There his political career is described, his three marriages noted, and the price paid (£31,000) for the house and grounds at Sheffield Place in Sussex recorded (the purchase of which my father, who was having trouble with his central heating, ascribes to the climate of Sussex being more congenial than Yorkshire ‘for his family seat’). There too are listed Sheffield’s various Irish and English titles (Baron of Dunamore in the County of Meath, Viscount Pevensey etc.) and a bibliography presented of his observations, reports, and editing of Gibbon’s posthumous works. There is scarcely a hint of what Leslie Stephen’s daughter Virginia Woolf was to call, in her biographical pastiche
Orlando
, ‘that riot and confusion of the passions and emotions which every good biographer detests’.

Virginia Woolf wanted to ‘revolutionize biography in a night’. She wanted to free the imagination of the biographer from that tedious parade of dates and battles, that dubious weight of notes, indexes and bibliographies which remove it from the common reader. She wanted to introduce riot and confusion, passion and humour. And then she also wanted to clear those forests of family trees planted from father to son in the colonising territory of male culture. Such dreams lie between the lines of an essay she wrote in 1937 called ‘Reflections at Sheffield Place’. At the end of this essay she follows not the male heirs (through the first Lord Sheffield’s grandson, an idiosyncratic patron of cricket who in 1891 took an English team, including W.G. Grace, over to Australia and founded the Sheffield Shield competition), but a daughter and then on to her granddaughter Kate Amberley who was the mother of Bertrand Russell. If you hop on to the right line it can take you almost anywhere.

For Virginia Woolf, the great gardens at Sheffield Place, with their series of descending lakes, came to reflect something too intimate to find its way into works of historical reference. ‘No place was more like home to him [Edward Gibbon] than Sheffield Place,’ she wrote, ‘and he looked upon the Holroyds as his own flesh and blood.’

Virginia Woolf hands over the telling of her story to Sheffield’s daughter, ‘the soft and stately Maria’, as Gibbon described her. Only she could bring understanding to this devoted friendship between the Peer and the Historian, or ‘the Gib’ as she sometimes calls him (my father would have liked that). It was a friendship based on opposites, an attachment that (like biography itself perhaps) enabled them both to live lives each could never have lived simply in his own person. In the headstrong figure of Sheffield, Gibbon found someone caught up in those sorts of political and military affairs that, from the calmness of his study and over great distances of time, he sat composing into the sonorous sentences of his
Decline and Fall
. With his friend Sheffield, he was able to slip off his purple language and become quite racy and colloquial. In matters of the heart, where Gibbon was so ineffectual, Sheffield appeared recklessly extravagant. This emotional extravagance troubled Maria who looked to Gibbon for support. For though he was ridiculously vain and prodigiously fat, over-dressed and top-heavy, a waddling indoor figure of a man, ‘rather testy too, an old bachelor, who lived like clockwork and hated to have his plans upset’ (this must have brought her friend Lytton Strachey to Virginia Woolf’s mind), yet he was also ‘le grand Gibbon’ whom Maria could not help liking. She saw how only in deference to Gibbon would her father check the self-destructive riot and confusion of his passions, and she felt grateful.

In ‘Reflections at Sheffield Place’ Virginia Woolf was indicating the change she wanted to see in historical biography, ‘changing as the furniture changed in the firelight, as the waters of the lake changed when the night wind swept over them’. It is a turning away from the general narratives of history, with their wheeling armies and splendid processions that pass through the gorgeous tapestry of Gibbon’s pages. It is an attempt, in miniature form, to put into practice Samuel Johnson’s advice to biographers not to dwell on ‘those performances and incidents which produce vulgar greatness, but lead the thoughts into domestic privacies’: an eye-level rather than the overall view of our past.

This is what has attracted me to biography: the idea of an ‘intimacy between strangers’, a closeness growing up during the acts of writing and reading between an author, the reader and their subject, all unknown to one another before the book began coming into existence. For I do not think of biography as being an information-retrieval exercise: information, now the fruit of technology, has little fascination for me unless it takes root in my emotions and grows in my imagination into knowledge. What increasingly absorbs me is the unconscious process of learning. While writing I forget myself, and when I return to my world I sense that I am someone slightly different. The effect of these working holidays is of course cumulative, and perhaps there is significance in my having two birthdays. I was born the son of my parents, the grandson of their parents, and so on; and then, as it were, reborn the child of my writings – for it is they that have taken me round the world and shaped my adult existence. Now I must sit at my desk and see if I can bring together these two people who were consecutively, and who are cumulatively, myself.

My mother’s beginning was dramatic. In 1916 her parents were living at Örebro, 200 kilometres west of Stockholm. They had been married three years, had a two-year-old son Karl-Åke, and my grandmother was over five months pregnant with her second child. On 19 November Karl-Åke was playing in the kitchen where his nurse was cooking – simply boiling water it seems at the fireplace. Some say the child knocked over an oil lamp and started a fire; others that he tipped the boiling saucepan over himself. He was rushed to hospital, lingered there almost three weeks, then died on 9 December. The shock caused my grandmother to give birth prematurely to a tiny daughter on the day after the accident and in the hospital where her son was dying. They called their daughter Ulla. This was my mother.