Losing Nicola (2 page)

There was a great deal of large and shabby furniture, but the house was so big that even with our own pieces added, the place still looked spacious. Aunt's things were different from ours; huge chesterfields, a mirror that was at least twelve feet by twelve in an ornate wooden frame which she had carved herself from fruitwood, and enormous mahogany chests-of-drawers which smelled of mothballs and lavender. There was an elephant's-foot stand in the front hall which held assorted walking sticks, umbrellas, golf clubs, lacrosse and hockey sticks, alpenstocks, even a spear which Aunt and the Canon had brought back after a stint on the Ivory Coast. Hot water in the bathrooms was provided by ancient geysers, both of them corroded with green-stained lime and given to spitting tiny drops of scalding water over anyone within reach. When we moved in, there was still a line painted round the inside of the baths.

‘That's all we were allowed, in the Dark Days of The War,' Ada told us dramatically. ‘Five inches of hot water and not a drop more.'

‘Sounds like the
Merchant of Venice
,' said Orlando.

‘Oh no, dear, nothing to do with Italy. It was because of Mr Churchill. Saving water for Our Brave Boys sort of thing.'

‘What did Our Brave Boys do with our bathwater?' Orlando quirked his eyebrow, sucked in his dimple.

‘Um . . .'

‘What happened if you made a mistake and ran a drop too much?' I asked.

‘The police would come.' Ava sounded quite positive, always a sign of uncertainty.

‘What, while you were sitting naked in the bath?'

‘I expect so, dear.'

Because the town was a naval base, there had been many local war casualties. Looking back, I imagine that the widowed mothers had nowhere else to go and so they stayed on, tucked inside their private griefs, bringing up their orphaned children, contriving to send them to the kind of schools their officer husbands would have wanted, making do, drawing only a modicum of comfort from each other.

Our accents were middle class, our poverty genteel. We attended boarding schools, and on returning home for the holidays would join up with an amorphous troop of children like ourselves. We knew each other, but not the local children. Orlando and I spent most of our time with Julian and Charlie Tavistock, Jeremy Pearce and David Gardner. Certain things were taken for granted. We all belonged to the snooty lawn tennis club, though our whites were often considerably less than white. Money for dancing lessons was found because our mothers believed that all gentlemen should be able to steer a lady competently round the dance floor and all ladies should know how to follow. Quicksteps, waltzes, rumbas, foxtrot, we learned them all at the Strand Palais, clasped to the bosom of either Mr Sheridan Fox or his colleague Miss Esmée. Both had false teeth and halitosis. We also learned Scottish reels under the guidance of an ancient Brigadier of some Highland regiment, whose moustache bristled and whose blue eyes constantly watered.

The town was full of men like him. Major This, Lieutenant-Colonel That, Captain Somebody-Else. Every morning, winter and summer alike, they emerged from gates set in the high garden walls along The Beach. In dressing-gowns of striped towelling and beach shoes of faded canvas, they crossed the road onto the green, crunched over the shingle, and slid down the steep shelves of the beach. Off with the robes and into the sea they plunged, wearing baggy black woollen bathing suits which had probably belonged to their fathers, or even their grandfathers. With the war over, perhaps it was the only challenge left to them. Or were they reliving their days at spartan boarding schools, where a cold shower first thing, with Matron barking at their heels, was
de rigueur
? They had red faces and shiny false teeth. They wore flannel trousers and brass-buttoned blazers with elaborate crests on the breast pocket made of gold wire and green or red felt, with flags and crowns woven into them. If they weren't wearing regimental ties, they had cravats thrust into the necks of their shirts.

In all the years we lived there, I never saw any of them with a wife. Once, Major de Grey spoke to me, clattering his teeth and mumbling through his military moustache. He put a hand on my arm. I used to see him sitting above us on the shelving beach, watching as we changed into our bathing costumes. He had a magnolia tree in his front garden, which was the most beautiful thing I'd ever seen.

Occasionally, excursions were arranged for us, and a bus hired. We would sometimes be taken to places of historic interest but much more often to the races. Sometimes the mothers clubbed together and hired the Village Hall for a Hop, paying an older son to act as what we were learning to call a disc jockey.

Every Easter Day, we found a chocolate egg beside our breakfast plates, hollow and patterned like a crazy paving garden path, wrapped in silver foil which could be smoothed out flat and then sculpted into tiny silver fans or goblets. At Christmas, we were taken either to the circus or a pantomime. Orlando and I hated both, especially the clowns with giant lipsticked mouths, eyes surrounded by huge white circles, and baggy checked trousers. We couldn't see why people laughed at them, any more than we understood Widow Twankey or Mother Goose. Pantomimes bewildered us, with their baffling references to vulgarities and catchphrases of which we had no knowledge. I've never understood why they were considered suitable entertainment, since we were not allowed to listen to anything on the radio (we still called it a wireless) except the news, nor read comics, and especially not use what my parents termed ‘Americanisms', like
kid
and
okay
.

‘They're trying to make us more normal,' explained Orlando once, as we sat unwillingly at the circus. ‘They don't want us to grow up as misfits.'

‘Too late, don't you think?'

‘Far, far too late.' Musical Orlando groaned as a clown with tufts of ginger hair sticking out on either side of his chalk-white big-lipped mask did something unfunny with a string of sausages. ‘Why can't they take us to the
Messiah
, or the
Christmas Oratorio
or something?'

‘Trouble is, we're all too well brought up to tell them how much we hate it,' I said. ‘Especially Widow Twankey.'

‘Especially the bloody
clowns
.' His hand shook slightly; there was sweat on his forehead. ‘There must be a word for hating clowns, some phobia or other. Whatever it is, I've got it.' He grinned his bone-white grin. ‘My idea of heaven is never again having to watch Lulubelle and her Flying Ponies shedding sequins like dandruff all over the circus ring.'

Pantomimes and circuses apart, nobody offered us entertainment; we made our own from such pinchbeck as was available. We were always busy. Those long hours of childhood didn't exist for us. We made lists of musicians beginning with B, we read the encyclopaedia, we collected things such as stamps, pressed flowers, sea-glass, stones, quotations, favourite poems. We made constantly revised lists of the books we would take with us to a desert island. Orlando and I were occasionally invited into Aunt's room to have tea with her and listen to her tales of life in Africa, or narrow escapes she had had from naked spear-throwers or rampaging elephants.

In that bleakish seaside town, the one thing there was in abundance was stones. We collected flat stones for skimming, stones with a hole through the middle, stones that looked like amber when they were wet, almost translucent. Green stones, stones with multicoloured seams and striations running through them. There were very few shells on that shingle beach, a few broken winkles, half a mussel, shining like a curve of blue pearl in the shingle, the occasional cuttlefish cast up by the tide and embedded in fierce black clumps of sea-wrack.

Orlando and I were luckier than most. We had a wind-up gramophone, a pre-war instrument that had belonged to my mother. We loved folding back the jointed chrome arm and fitting in the sharp metal needle, which we bought in tiny rattling boxes of painted tin. We owned half a dozen records:
In the Mood
, and
Jealousy
, the drinking song from
The Student Prince
, Max Bygraves singing
Ghost Riders in the Sky
. Henry Hall warbled
The Teddy Bear's Picnic,
with
Goodnight Sweetheart
on the reverse side. We played these songs endlessly, over and over again, until one dramatic afternoon, my mother rushed in like a whirlwind and hurled whatever was on the turntable to the ground, where it smashed into several shiny black shards. To our surprise, we saw that she was crying. ‘For God's
sake
!' she shouted.

Our homes were full of hidden tensions.

O
ur perpetually anxious mothers were not much involved with us. Although they fed us, saw that we got up in the morning, brushed our teeth regularly, took baths from time to time, they did not talk to us. We were always conscious of things unspoken, of the ordinary textures of our lives constantly on the verge of being brutally and incomprehensibly ripped apart. We knew, without knowing, that our existences were barely held together by the fragile stitches of the not-in-front-of-the-children caution that our mothers exercised. Life was frail, and we were aware of it.

Sex had not sneaked into our consciousness, or if it had, was still unrecognized. There was no television to make us aware before our time, and although we were occasionally permitted to go to the cinema, we groaned when the hero kissed the heroine, or looked away, embarrassed. We weren't allowed to read comics or Enid Blyton. Sweets were still rationed, strawberries were only available in season. Appearances mattered.

We wore shorts and faded Aertex shirts. On our feet were Clark's sandals or white tennis shoes, which we Blancoed vigorously when they grew grubby, setting them out on a window sill overnight to dry to a stiff chalky white. We never wore black plimsolls; black ones were common. Fish and chips were also common, and so was eating in the street. The pleasure and delight of buying three penn'orth of chips and devouring them, hot and vinegary, straight from the newspaper wrapping, was made all the more delicious by the guilty fear that one of our mothers might catch us.

It was always our mothers we worried about. Fathers were rare or non-existent. We never asked about them, partly because in those years following the war, fathers were not a species to which we were used, and partly because we were somehow aware that the answer might be too painful to give or receive. I had a father, though I scarcely knew him and only saw him occasionally. David, Jeremy and the Tavistock brothers, did not. Their fathers had been war heroes, had Gone Down In Flames, according to Ava, or been prisoners-of-war in some German camp and never come home. Mine had spent the war working for intelligence in London, and then, in the immediate post-war years, in Germany, helping, so my mother said, to rebuild it, before returning to his position at an Oxford college. Whenever I thought of him back then, which was seldom, I envisaged my scholarly father in his shirtsleeves, setting bricks into mortar.

Many of the middle-class mothers in the town took in Paying Guests, or PGs. Anything to have a man around the house again, whiskers in the bathroom basin, a smell of tobacco, bass tones instead of trebling pipes or the hoarse croaks of breaking voices. They had not been raised to deal with lodgers, but, finding themselves husbandless, they hoped that the extra income would help to pay for heating their large cold houses, and feeding their families. For such women, life after the war was a series of improvisations as they learned to cope in a new world that was essentially alien. Gardeners, cooks, nursery-maids and housemaids had vanished or else were simply unaffordable.

For the most part, the PGs were misfits thrown up by the chaos of war, men who for reasons of health or age or incapacity, had not fought for King and Country, women whose husbands or fiancés had not returned from the front, or simply people, like Ava, who had quietly seized the opportunity to shuck off their former lives and start again in some quiet place where their pasts could not catch up with them.

During our first years at Glenfield House, PGs passed through in a more or less continuous stream. Most were dull, some were more memorable. Among them was Attila the Nun, a pretty woman who, according to Ava, had Leapt Over the Wall, a mad journalist from Sófia, known to all as the Bulgarian Atrocity, and a tall Army officer called Major John Silver, who came complete with an eye patch and a war wound to the right leg.

Sundry others swam briefly into our horizons and swam away again without making much of a ripple. Fiona found these people in the street, on trains, in queues, occasionally by answering ads requesting accommodation. She had a misleadingly open and sympathetic air so that people, particularly lame ducks, fell naturally into conversation with her, only to find themselves, often without understanding how, not only moving into her house, but also paying rent for the privilege of sharing the discomforts of our daily lives.

Three of them stayed long enough to become fixtures.

Prunella Vane met Fiona on the train, when she came down from London to interview for a job as a domestic science teacher at the grammar school. She was a buxom woman, like all the women in my recollection of childhood, except for someone called Mrs Simpson who, according to Ava, had got her claws into our Rightful King and whose real name was Mud.

Despite her size, Miss Vane was of a nervous disposition and shied like a horse at loud noises and sudden shouts. She occupied a vast freezing attic bedroom on the third floor, from which you could look through dormer windows at the sea and the wrecked pier and glimpse the distant coast of France on summer evenings.

‘No need for curtains, as you see,' my mother said briskly, showing her around the first time, while Orlando and I trailed behind, hoping to catch a glimpse of what lay inside Prunella's canvas bag.

‘I'm not sure I'd feel quite comfortable . . .' Miss Vane's hand caressed her throat.