Everything I Have Always Forgotten (12 page)

Someone from Laugharne also remarked quite recently, when reminiscing about my Parents: “Mr Hughes would use the Bentley to take children to the hospital in an emergency. He had other cars all right, but the Bentley – that was the quick one. Ran fast indeed it did!”

One morning Dylan appeared at the front door in pyjamas and an old dressing gown. He told Mother that he had come to consult Father on some learned matter… to cross the estuary, he had been rowed by the deaf and dumb ferry boy, dressed as he was for the bedroom. Dylan disappeared into Father's study in a small lookout room in the walls of the medieval castle. Eventually, it was time, and Mother went in to invite Dylan to stay for lunch – the two men were enjoying glasses of dry Amontillado. After lunch (with wine) they retired to their discussion again and soon it was dinnertime. Mother invited Dylan to stay (the two men had moved on to Scotch by then). After dinner, since it was quite clear that Dylan was not going home to his new wife, Mother invited him to stay the night… with the parting thrust of: “At least you will finally be properly dressed for the invitation!” She never forgave him for leaving his young wife with two babies, for more than twenty-four hours, without the possibility of telling her what he was up to – as I've said before, there was no telephone.

The dumb ferry boy, incidentally, was later accused of killing his grandmother, who had been bedridden for so long that she had never seen a car! So it may well have been a mercy killing, but only the family knew what really happened, for it is doubtful that the ferryman had much of a clue about anything. He was a bit simple, besides being deaf and dumb – which had been reason enough not to go to school for a single day. The world around him must have seemed quite incomprehensible. All he understood was the cheerful salutations he received when he went his daily rounds in the village, smiling and waving to people. That was how he got his human feedback. He was acquitted, thanks to a clever young defence lawyer who insisted that a Welsh-speaking deaf and dumb specialist was needed in order to communicate with the accused. When one was finally found, the ferry boy could not understand him at all, having never learned sign language. Could he indeed have understood anything? A mistrial was declared and the poor fellow went back to his work rowing the ferry to and fro. The inhabitants of Laugharne resented any interruption from the outside world. The ferry boy ‘meant no harm' – after all, he was always checking in on people and waving to acquaintances across the street – even if he was accused of killing his grandma!

That, at least, was the story I was told. Once again, the story is apocryphal and there have been many more up-todate versions than those told to me by Father. Even my brother confirmed this version. But in point of fact, it was far more complicated than that. The victim was not his grandmother, nor was she so ancient and bedridden that “she had never seen a car”. It must have been an amalgam of different, disconnected stories, or perhaps just such a murder did occur in Laugharne earlier. Strange things came about in Laugharne all the time.

So indeed, Mother could have felt that Dylan was an enabler to Father, but I believe it went much further than that. Once, when Father was away, he let the poor young poet write in his little study in the lookout room in the castle ruins. Nearby, down a few steps, was the castle dungeon that Father used as a wine cellar. I heard from an old neighbour of my Parents that Father had come back one day to find Dylan in a drunken stupor, surrounded by empty bottles of his best wines. He was not using the study to escape the sound of squalling infants, but to enjoy the cellar nearby. Knowing Father well, I can just picture him taking his small friend (Father being a tall, strong and big man) by the scruff of the neck and walking him slowly off the property, closing and locking the gate without a single word and not once looking back at his brilliant, derelict friend. They never met again, though their mutual respect seems not to have paled.

Well, that is one version of the story, but my oldest siblings assure me that after the war, when Dylan was invited to go on the second (and fatal) lecture tour in America, he came and talked to my Parents about it. On the one hand, with his growing family, he desperately needed the money. On the other, he knew himself too well and had a premonition that he would not be able to resist the temptation of alcohol and its ready availability when he was away from home. What my Parents told him, history does not relate… but of course that was his last trip to America and he died in Saint Vincent's Hospital in Greenwich Village, New York in November 1953.

It seemed to me that everyone in the World was successful, though not necessarily rich, at least in our circles. We were brought up to disdain the rich or at least those who showed their wealth. But it certainly didn't do to be poor either. Then you might have to go out and get a job – that was beneath the ipper class to contemplate! Now, after the war, more and more formerly rich people were indeed having to do just that, but Mother came from a wealthy family. Of course, her great grandfather had made a fortune in the textile industry up North, where the saying goes: ‘
Where there's muck
[industrial grime],
there's brass
[money]'. He was elected a Liberal Member of Parliament from 1858-80, was knighted on the recommendation of Prime Minister William Gladstone for ‘services to the Cotton Industry' – he served on both the Royal Commission for Assimilating Mercantile Law and on both the Great Exhibition of London in 1851 and the Paris International Exhibition of 1855 (receiving the
Légion d'Honneur
). By the time he sold his company in 1861 it was the world's largest manufacturer of fine cotton and lace thread. He bought a vast estate in Gloucestershire with farms and villages on it and moved there – though he never forgot his humble origins and his good fortune. He once wrote in a letter to his son that: “he was not long for this World (actually he lived to 88), that it was his money that had bought his baronetcy and his gentility, but his son should never forget that, for all their huge houses and carriages, they were no better than anyone else”. Naturally, his daughter-in-law, Granny Cadogan, was not bound by this credo – she came from a patrician family – and his grandchildren (such as Mother and her siblings) completely forgot his advice and felt they belonged in higher society. It was beneath Mother to open letters from her stockbroker so that, when she died, she still had the same shares in American railroads that she had received when she got married in 1932… which, upon her death, were worthless. I am sure that her grandfather would have turned in his grave had he heard of such lack of husbandry on the part of an heir to the fruits of his labours. After all, he was a highly successful businessman.

Mother's mother, my Granny (his grand-daughter-inlaw), was furious when Mother's elder sister married a banker

– (as mentioned before, she had referred to him as: ‘that counter jumper') for it was beneath the ‘upper class' to actually have a job and earn their living… but who bailed out Granny in her old age? Who else but the distinguished banker (the counter-jumper), of course. Meanwhile, Mother's method of spending less was to wander round the house singing: “There's no more money in the bank, oh there's no more money in the bank…” I don't know what we were supposed to do about it, there were no shops in which to spend money, save once a week when we used our petrol rations to go and buy a few essentials, such as kerosene (paraffin to us). If you asked for something in particular at the ironmonger's shop, the invariable response was: “Oh no, such a thing doesn't exist”. True, in post-war Britain supplies were very short, but it was quite clear that the Ironmonger's horizon stopped abruptly at their occasional travelling salesmen. Otherwise, we walked a mile each way to the village shop for bread and other such simple essentials, or two miles to the Post Office. We had a new-fangled rucksack with a frame from Norway or a huge basket (said to be from Switzerland) with shoulder straps for carrying baguettes… not that there was anything as fancy as a baguette in Wales.

The only person in the house who always had some cash in his pockets was Father, but Mother paid for our education and the household expenses by cheque. When the local Bank Manager finally saw her coming into the branch for once, he hurried round the counter to corner her:

“Mrs Hughes, Mrs Hughes, it is many the letter I am writing to you, indeed, asking what you plan to do about your overdraft… and it's not a single answer that you vouchsafe me. What are you going to do about it, Mrs Hughes?”

“Why Mr Jones, if I only knew what to do, I would have surely answered you, wouldn't I?” That flummoxed the poor man!

While on the forbidden subject of money, Mother kept telling me that “When I came of age” I would “Come into money”. That sounded nice, if a little confusing, since she didn't seem to have any left. She assured me that it had been put in Trust for me. Unwisely, I once asked her how much it was, to which she retorted: “It's rude to talk about money and anyway, I don't know. Don't talk about it.” Fine, so I shut up, but when I turned twenty one, I was indeed given a check and told to spend it wisely, not fritter it away. It was £135, which was very nice to have, though it paled beside what I had already made from publishing a couple of novels… I had simply no idea what to expect from ‘coming into money'!

So my childhood was one of extraordinary privilege in which emotions were not encouraged, founded on the false premise that we were ‘upper class' despite having no money – because we had a decrepit old car and never any cash around. In point of fact, my bohemian Parents (who had known many of the Bloomsbury Group) lived very much as they wanted. We had a large house, the grownups drank decent wine, we five children went to private schools (though two won scholarships) and our Parents travelled a great deal. It all made me want to earn a good living and be involved with the ‘unsavoury' world of business, with its reality of profit and loss, gross and net earnings. I wanted to travel the world and to have enough money when I did so, to buy myself a drink instead of relying on polluted water.

Which brings me to ice cream: being without electricity, of course we had no refrigerator, save a pre-war kerosene one that worked only very rarely. Even then, sugar was rationed, so the nearest thing I had to ice cream was occasional plain milk frozen in the ice tray. When I was finally treated to a store-bought ice cream, I was already seven or eight and guessed how foolish it would be to bite off the bottom of the cone… but I did it anyway.

XI

BACK TO W.W.II

L
ike the ubiquitous mosquito, that thrives in the Arctic, the Antarctic and almost everywhere in between from the Amazon to most of Africa and Asia, mankind is almost infinitely adaptable to his environment. When I think what pre-war Wales must have been like for Mother, brought up as she was in a huge house, knowing only the name of the Head Gardener (and of course the same applied for the Head Coachmen, the Housekeeper and the Butler) she never got to know the under-gardeners, kitchen maids, nurses, valets and chambermaids. Now, without servants, she had to face her own arduous destiny single-handedly.

At the outset of war, when Hitler was fully expected to invade Britain at any moment, my Parents were living in a romantic sixteenth-century house high up on the flank of Cnicht in Snowdonia. It was a fine old stone farm manor-house, unchanged in the last couple of centuries: without running water, drains or electricity. The walls were six to twelve feet thick. The thicker walls accommodated a couple of ‘priest holes' or early safes. It was always cold and damp. Indeed, it was so damp that soft, velvety emerald green moss grew on the risers of the stairs – even during the driest of months. There she was, with three young children and no domestic help. One day Father announced that he had to go down to the train station to help with the triage of evacuee children from Birkenhead, Liverpool and Manchester. At the end of day, he returned, driving his two-seater Bentley, with a dozen of the least physically or mentally fit children. They had all been refused by local farmers, who were hoping to use them as free labour on their farms. Mind you, the billeting of these evacuee children was not exactly expedited by the fact that the list of possible billeting addresses dated from the First World War, over twenty years before! Not that that was surprising for, as Father wrote after the War, in his arcane history of the British Admiralty: “Much of the shipbuilding machinery in the Tyneside Shipyards dated from a hundred years before!” A point contested by a gentleman who actually read it and declared that “the oldest steam winch was only ninety-eight years old at the time!”

Mother was then saddled with not three, but fifteen children! The newcomers had never walked on grass before, nor eaten a lettuce salad and here they were, swathed in cloud half the time, not an inhabited house in sight, homesick and very unhappy. She did what she could, but was constantly frustrated. The lack of running water came as no surprise to most of the children – in the city they had to get water from a pump at the end of the street, while here the spring was only a dozen yards in front of the door – but there were many other culture-shocks. When offered salad, they said it was rabbit food (many people in cities raised rabbits for food). Once, when Father saw a teenage girl carefully bringing in a huge amount of food in a great Chinese bowl, very likely Ming, he said, “Oh Emily, you really shouldn't be carrying that bowl” – and at that she stopped, opened both her mouth and her hands, and let it smash to smithereens on the slate floor.

My brother remembers being bathed in a tin hip-bath in front of the roaring kitchen fire (on which all the cooking was done) and finding the side away from the fire was freezing cold, while the side near it was scalding hot. Presumably, all the children went through that hip bath and the water cannot have been changed often, given that it had to be brought in from the spring in buckets and heated in the huge kettle that hung on a chain over the fire. What a contrast to having the children brought down, tidily dressed and coiffed at teatime, to be ‘seen but not heard'! If Mother had had a nervous breakdown at that point, she would have been fully justified, but instead she soldiered on, ‘muddling through' and saved her breakdowns for less inconvenient times, when there were fewer tender souls relying on her.