Memoirs of a Private Man (2 page)

Mr Churchill and Mr Mawdsley remained friends until James died, but by the time I was born Mr Churchill had himself become a Liberal and my mother, having imbibed Liberalism at her father's knee, decided it would be a good idea if I bore his name.

My grandfather had a substantial house in Dickenson Road, and a carriage and pair for when he took his wife out. But a tramway was laid down the road, and, still in the days of horse trams, he would run after a tram, in spite of his great bulk, and jump on it to take him to his business in the mornings. When he was transferring his business from Gorton to the more central and larger premises at Shudehill his sons were still at school, and his eldest daughter had run away from home to marry a sailor, so he came to rely on my mother, his second daughter, who managed the Gorton premises for him while he was establishing the other. Perhaps this was how my mother came to have such a good business head, though, after she was married, she did not employ it gainfully.

My mother was looked on as ‘delicate'. As a girl she was pretty but very slight – ‘like a yard of pump water', as her elder sister tartly observed – and although she had a number of suitors, it was not until she met my father at a church outing, when she was twenty-seven, that the magic worked. As very much the younger son (my brother Cecil was ten years older), I was not able to observe my parents through all their married life; but they did seem to be completely devoted to each other for the whole of the thirty years they had together. If it is true in marriage that one is always the lover and one the loved, he was certainly the lover.

My father always gave me the impression of having more cultural and intellectual interests than the Mawdsleys (who by this generation had lost all the public-spirited zeal of their forebears), but he was of a slightly lower social status. His father had kept a shop of some sort, and his mother was a sturdy, benign, broad-spoken, vigorous Blackburn woman who had somehow surprisingly produced three children of unmistakable gentility and ambition, all of them with educated voices, though their schooling had been slight. My father when he married was with a firm of tea importers in Sheffield. He played the cello. His younger brother, who worked on a Liverpool newspaper, played the violin. Their sister was intensely musical, and for a time ran her own orchestra. Though no performer herself – I remember some excruciating evenings – she was a good teacher both of the piano and the violin. (For a short time she taught the young Kathleen Ferrier.)

My mother played the piano extremely well but with a restricted repertoire of things she knew and had long practised. As a girl she would practise four hours a day. She was no sight-reader. Some of the pleasantest memories of my youth were the Sunday evenings when I would sit in the drawing room reading a book and humming or whistling the familiar Mozart or Schubert. She didn't seem to mind my accompaniment.

Before my parents married, my mother's mother told my father that they could never have children: ‘Anne is too delicate.' Yet in fact Anne lived to be eighty and produced two sons, both of whom have handsomely exceeded their mother's age.

At the reception after their wedding my mother remembers that her old sweetheart, Will Bowker, who had a good tenor voice, was singing ‘Son of my Soul' as she came down the stairs in her going-away costume. Later, catching the train to take them on their honeymoon, my father leaned out to wave goodbye to those who had come to see them off, and sat back on his silk hat.

They went to Llandudno, and no doubt made gentle love in the long September evenings. When she was old I took her back there. She had not been to Llandudno in the interval, but with characteristic reserve forbore to make any comment other than the casual remarks she had made in other places we had visited.

Eventually I volunteered the question that coming to this town again after so long must bring back many memories. She said: ‘ Everything I look at is like a stone in my heart.'

I don't know where my parents lived when they were first married, but after a while they moved to Huby, near Sheffield, so that my father should be near his business. But the hard water did not suit my mother, who was living up to her reputation of being delicate, and they moved back to Manchester. About this time the tea firm went into liquidation, and my grandfather invited my father to join him in running the firm of D. Mawdsley & Co. This aroused intense jealousy on the part of his eldest son, Tom, who by now had left school and was expecting to inherit control of the firm. Tom had all the makings of an excellent engineer but had no talent for commerce, and when eventually he did come into the firm, followed by his ineffectual but well-meaning brother Daniel, the jealousy continued. My father, who did not suffer fools gladly (or even silently), could certainly have been a more tactful man; but it meant that for about twenty years this incompatible partnership, constantly engendering petty backbiting and rancour, continued, until it was broken by my father's premature illness – at fifty-four – and death – at sixty.

I was born at 66 Langdale Road, Victoria Park – film producer Monja Danischewsky later suggested there should be a plaque put on the house marked ‘Watch this Space' – but when I was two my parents moved to a somewhat better house in Curzon Avenue – No. 18. One of my first memories is of being allowed into the front door of the empty house, toddling the length of the long hall into the dining room and trying to peer out of the windows at the back garden. But the window sills were too high for me to see out. I soon learned my new address but it came out as ‘Eighteen Cur-daddy Addy'.

Victoria Park was something of an anachronism even in those days, being a partly independent, self-ruling small district only three miles from the centre of Manchester. One paid the city rates, of course, but an additional rate was levied to cover the special facilities offered – manned barricades at all entry points, to keep out beggars and other undesirables, park-keepers to see that a decent order was maintained inside the confines, no public transport nearer than the gates, which was a considerable disadvantage to the frail and the elderly. Motor cars and carriages of course went in and out, when the frontier barriers had to be raised for them. This was no park in the ordinary sense of being a publicly owned place of recreation. For that one went to Birch Park, just outside the confines.

Victoria Park had been initiated by a group of wealthy merchants – building their heavy-stuccoed, porticoed, sash-windowed Victorian mansions set amid heavy Victorian trees – who wanted privacy and privilege and were prepared to pay for it by forming a quiet enclave within the noisy city; and this was precisely what they had achieved. By about the turn of the century part of the original park was developed and a number of avenues of smaller houses built to accommodate a much less well-to-do but still fairly select type of city dweller who shared and helped to pay for the amenities of the park.

18 Curzon Avenue was a tall, narrow semi-detached house with a long hall flanked by a sizeable drawing room and a kitchen and scullery, with a dining room at the back. Stairs led up to five bedrooms, a bathroom, a lavatory, and there was also an outside lavatory, and fairly extensive cellars, one of which, I think, was intended for wine. If so, it was sadly neglected during our occupancy. Not that my family was ever teetotal on principle, but we scarcely ever drank liquor of any sort, and certainly not wine.

We kept one living-in maid – or a succession of them, for my mother was not easy to please. All the same, some of them stayed a long time and became long-suffering members of the family. There was one, Patty, an Irish girl, who used to stand in front of the mirror in her bedroom and say to herself: ‘Aren't I beautiful? Aren't I beautiful!' A precocious eight-year-old, I was sometimes present at these self-adulatory sessions. In the end too many young men were in agreement with her, and my mother decided that she was not best fitted for domestic service in a God-fearing household.

Were we God-fearing? Not really. My mother kept steadily, if quietly, to her beliefs all her life, but
her
father was very much a free-thinker and associated with atheists and agnostics, one of whom, a Mr Jack Slaney, used to greet my mother when she came in from Sunday school with: ‘Well, Annie, have you seen Jesus Christ today?' My father was pretty well a non-believer too – at least until his last and only illness, when he began to dabble in Christian Science and spiritualism. My brother never went to church, and I would go perhaps twice a year with my mother. The long walk was something that my mother – still relentlessly delicate – only essayed on special dates such as Christmas and Easter. One of the maids – I've forgotten which one – taught me to say my prayers, and later a fiercely religious headmaster indoctrinated a lot that had been missing at home.

I always shied away from what might be termed overt religion. When I was twelve a curate from the church took to calling, with the aim of persuading me to attend confirmation classes. With equal persistence I would bolt into the garden at the sound of him so that my mother could truthfully – though ruefully – inform him that I was out.

I often wonder why religious teaching was totally missing at home. I think perhaps my mother was so lacking in energy that she just couldn't be bothered. But at least our household was the very reverse of one in which religion is practised but remains a sham (an enduring theme with novelists). With my parents it was ‘ do as I do, not do as I say'. (Never spoken but implicit.) I never heard a swear word – even from my older brother – nor an obscenity, nor really ever a vulgarism. Even if we didn't go to church, we never played cards on Sundays.

It is often said that only children make bad mixers. I was not an only child, but a worse mixer could hardly have been found. The fact that my brother Cecil was ten years the elder may have resulted in my being an only child in all but name, and the fact that he was more often at home than my busy and preoccupied father resulted in my taking my cue and my beliefs – or lack of them – from him rather than from someone who was older and wiser. Cecil combined a mild, inoffensive good nature – and a strong sense of humour – with curiously aggressive views, downright philistine and arrogant. He had no interest in religion (not even in his last days, when some hitherto unbelievers have second thoughts), little interest in books outside certain narrow spheres, no real interest in music or painting or poetry – though he would quote
Omar Khayyam
with relish. His interests were in the fresh air, the sun, the sea, the sands – and in his beloved Cornwall, where he made his home for nearly sixty years.

His comically misanthropic view of life, his pessimism, his philistinism all had a strong influence on me, and although my passionate preoccupation with books from the age of eight soon helped me to throw off the last of the three blights, the former two – or at least the pessimism – have stayed with me in milder form all my life. Of course it would be very unfair to put all the blame on him for what I suspect may be a family predisposition.

Among the maids we had, the one I remember most was called Evelyn – a bouncy, jolly, generous-minded girl from Northumberland, who came when she was seventeen (she told my mother she was eighteen in order to get the job) and stayed with us about five years, seeing us through all the traumas of those sickly years of the Twenties, when my father had his severe stroke, my mother had double pneumonia, and I followed with lobar pneumonia.

Evelyn had had a bitterly hard life. Her father and mother had had to get married when she was on the way, and her father's parents had taken against their new daughter-in-law. Her father, a miner, had a brother who worked on the roads, and one Sunday was called out to clear a blocked drain. Because this brother was drunk, Evelyn's father went instead, climbed down the manhole and was overcome by poisonous fumes and died. Evelyn and her mother and sister lived in direst poverty, receiving the barest help from their relatives until her mother married another miner, who heard there were better prospects of work in Lancashire and so moved. When war came he volunteered, and his family had to try to live on the 10/6 a week allowed them by the government. Towards the end of the war Evelyn's mother died of peritonitis and malnutrition, and Evelyn and her sister were about to be taken to an institution when the war ended and her stepfather came home. But he quickly married again, another child came along, and the new stepmother said there was simply not room in their cottage for them all. Evelyn's grandparents said they would take the younger sister only, and Evelyn was on her own. She found work at a button factory and boarded out. Her wages were 10/- a week and she paid 9/6 a week for her bed and board.

When a friend told her there was a lady in Victoria Park looking for a living-in maid to whom she would pay 10/- a week including food and a
bedroom to herself
she borrowed money from her landlady to buy a new dress, called to see her new mistress and was engaged. Every Wednesday afternoon off thereafter she would take the long tram ride and walk to her old landlady's and pay her back sixpence of the money she had borrowed. Later she was to take me in the afternoons to the local cinema – a fleapit indeed – where we were thrilled together by films like
Intolerance
and
The Exploits of Elaine
and
Way Down East
. I imagine my mother must have connived at these secretive ventures, for Evelyn could not have afforded the price out of her own pocket.

Inevitably, of course, a young man, Arthur, came along, a sober, frail young man who wanted to marry her. My mother, naturally, was against it – they were far too young – hadn't she been twentyeight herself when she married? – but inevitably the young man got his way. Poor Evelyn. She was dogged by ill-luck and her own warm, overflowingly generous nature. Perhaps she was plunged into marriage prematurely because by then my family was sick to death – almost literally – of the illnesses of Victoria Park – my father crippled and prematurely old at fifty-six, my mother saddled with bronchitis every winter, and I apparently threatened with further attacks of pneumonia – a lethal disease then, before the dawn of antibiotics – and my brother, the only healthy one, desperately wanting to get married himself and move to Cornwall, which he had lost his heart to after one visit.