Memoirs of a Private Man (3 page)

So Evelyn left us and married, and since they could not afford a house of their own she moved in with Arthur's widowed father and four brothers, for whom she then became a permanent scrubber and cook and housekeeper. Eventually a child came – a boy – and they were able to afford rooms of their own, then a tiny house. They could do this because Evelyn got work at Lewis's, the big Manchester store, first as an assistant in the dress department, then in the accounts department, where she established a reputation for efficiency and integrity. So began what must have been the best part of her life. Eventually they were even able to afford a small car; but her husband Arthur was always ailing – he worked in the cotton industry, and the flying dust affected his chest and made him a martyr to bronchitis. They always said that some day they would retire – like us – to the sea.

Their son John was just too young for World War II but was conscripted at the end of it and drafted out to Egypt. When he was free he returned to England and to his work as a draughtsman. But a year after his return he developed a rare kidney disease and began to lose his abounding good health. The doctors could do nothing for him, and the War Office would accept no responsibility, as there had been a sufficient lapse between his discharge and the onset of the complaint for them to deny liability. Aware that he was dying, Evelyn put the situation to her boss at Lewis's, saying that she had worked there for twenty-four years and could not afford to miss her pension, due when she had been there twenty-five. Her boss told her to take six months off to nurse her son. Which she did. And when he died she went back to Lewis's to work out the final year. When it came to settling her pension she was summoned before the board of the company and told that, alas, although she had worked the full length of time, because there had been a break in the time, company rules made her ineligible for a pension. So she got no pension at all.

I do not know if Lord Woolton, who by then was owner of Lewis's, ever heard of this case, but I hope that whoever was responsible for that decision rots in Hell.

A few years later Arthur died, but when I came to meet her again, Evelyn was in her mid-seventies, a cheerful, God-fearing, churchgoing, hard-working widow – her life in ruins behind her but not a trace of bitterness in her disposition. She lived from hand to mouth, helping other people, respectable, a lady of some small dignity. She had never owed a penny that she hadn't repaid, never, I'm sure, committed a mean act or a petty one. Her main concern was that when she died she would leave enough money behind for a proper funeral. This in fact occurred recently.

Then he that patiently wants burden bears
No burden bears,
But is a King, a King.

My brother went to the Hulme Grammar School and I was destined for the Manchester Grammar, but at seven I got meningitis, and when I began to recover the doctor said, ‘Don't worry about schooling, just concentrate on keeping him alive.' So I was sent to Longsight Grammar School, which had moved into a vast house in Victoria Park and therefore was only five minutes' walk away. I hated it.

Whether such schools could exist today, with the Department for Education maintaining a supervisory interest, I don't know. It was presided over by an extremely brilliant, extremely religious, extremely eccentric clergyman called Arthur Frederick Fryer who ran the school almost on his own, with the aid of his wife, a couple of women teachers, another man whose name I can't remember – only his nickname, Snowball – and a couple of masters who came in occasionally.

Running the school was almost literally true of A. F. Fryer. My memories of him seem chiefly to consist of seeing him in flight from one place to another, mortar board perilously perched, gown fluttering like the Witch of Endor. He was also immensely kind when his poisonous little charges gave him the opportunity to be. At the annual school concert the school song ended on a very high note, and each year someone screamed his way well above the others. It was darkly whispered among small boys that Old Fryer was responsible.

Teaching at the school was chaotic but moderately sound – the bright sparks came to the surface, the dullards sank without trace. I was a bright spark and floated upwards easily enough without having to exert myself. I won prizes every year – not because of any supreme cleverness on my part, but because the competition was so mediocre. The only reason I can imagine people sent their children to Longsight Grammar was because it was fee-paying and because it carried some small cachet by being both a grammar school and ‘ within the Park'. Or because of proximity – as in my case.

I was taken to meet the high master of the Manchester Grammar School – a man called Paton – and was accepted for the school, but then pneumonia arrived, the doctor told my parents I would not live the night, and, when I did, they decided to play safe and not commit me to a three-mile trip in all weathers, half of it walking, twice a day. So I stayed where I was.

The fact that I hated school need not be taken in itself as a criticism of the school I went to. I would have hated any school. Many years later it dawned on me, looking back over the evidence, that my mother badly wanted a girl when I was born, and although she mostly disguised her feelings she would dearly have loved to dress me up in buttons and bows. When it turned out that I was ‘ delicate' – unlike my brother, who ailed nothing – she was able to sublimate her mixed feelings on my mistaken gender by lavishing every care and attention on me, guarding me against every chill or ill, ministering to my every want. So I was a spoiled brat. She even somehow delayed sending me to school until I was seven; but when I did go I did not at all care for the new and abrasive life it offered me.

My mother was a very strong character. Even when I criticize her I never forget her many sterling qualities. She was a faithful and loyal wife, a devoted mother, generous and guardedly warmhearted, struggling always with debility rather than real ill-health, a singularly
pure
woman – as indeed my father was pure. (I have written a little about them in a short story called ‘ The Island'.) It was not so much that they didn't see the evils of life as that they chose to ignore them. Both born and brought up in Victorian times, they seem to exemplify so much that was best in that age. They believed in English liberal democracy, and in the perfectibility of man. My home was always warm and sheltering.

Loving too, but in a very undemonstrative way. Kissing was almost unknown – as indeed was praise. Praise might make you get above yourself, and that would
never
do. Self-esteem was the cardinal sin. ‘
Side
', as we called it. It's ingrained in me even today.

I remember when I was about nine finding my mother in tears because of the racking uncertainty of having her eldest son in the trenches and liable to be killed or maimed at any time. My father said: ‘Go and comfort your mother.' I went across and perched on the arm of her chair, and kissed her and stroked her face. I did this willingly and sympathetically, but I was horribly embarrassed in the act. It wasn't quite the sort of thing that happened in our family. We loved, but we didn't demonstrate our love.

Despite her virtues, my mother, as the custodian of a highly strung, oversensitive and over-imaginative child, had a number of signal disadvantages. She loved to make your flesh creep – and God, did she not make mine! It was not of ghosts of which she spoke but of
ill-health
. Her brilliant china-blue eyes would focus on you when she told you for the tenth time about her cousin Ernest, who went to a danceand, coming home in the train, when still very hot from his exertions, gave up his seat to a lady and stood with his back to the open window. He was dead within a week, of pneumonia. And of his brother Henry who died the following year from the same thing: they were twenty-one and twenty-two. And of Cousin Essie, who when playing in the garden used to say to my mother, ‘ Feel my heart, cousin, feel how it beats so fast.' And she too died, at nineteen. Speaking of our doctor, that eminent man who when much younger had saved my grandmother by taking her off the bottle, she would say to some visiting friend, ‘Of course our doctor, Dr Scotson, is a very good man, but' – in lowered voice but never too low for me to hear – ‘far too fond of the
knife
.' Her attitude to me was embodied in the words: ‘Wrap up, Winston', ‘ Take a scarf, Winston', ‘Put your other coat on, it's a nasty east wind', etc., etc.,
da capo
.

Of course there was some reason for the concern. For a year after my bout of meningitis I would start screaming in the middle of the night, and my father would pick me up and carry me about the room, eyes open, still screaming, but not awake. I had the most ghastly dreams, some of which I could recall even into middle life. There is one I still remember about breaking knuckles. For most of my early youth if I ran fifty yards I would begin to cough like a broken cab horse. After the lightest, most casual rough and tumble with a friend I would feel sick for an hour. Although naturally highspirited, all this was a constant brake on high spirits, so that I often appeared even more reserved and more shy than I actually wanted to be.

Not that I didn't have friends. I was not unpopular at school – except with a few hearty oafs – and had my own coterie of four or five boys, with whom I had a lot of fun. Also there were another four or five, who lived in Curzon Avenue but did not go to Longsight Grammar School, who formed another circle of which I was the sort-of leading spirit.
Never
the leading spirit when it came to any kind of athletic prowess, but almost always so in other things. I used to read some book of adventure and then they would sit round in a circle while I retold them the story – this often at great length. They would shout with annoyance if I tried to break off too soon. They adopted names I invented and games I devised.

A few girls used to be about too, though they were never part of the group. I remember kissing Hilda Carter fifty-four times in one day, which was considered a world record. But it was all very matter of fact, and she didn't seem to mind.

What was not matter of fact was a meeting with a girl called Amy Warwick in Morecambe when I was thirteen. It took me five years to get over that. I think it was Edith Wharton who wrote somewhere: ‘One good heartbreak will provide the novelist with a succession of different novels, and the poet with any number of sonnets and lyric poems, but he
must
have a heart that can break.'

The last two or three years at school were not so dislikeable. Freed of the necessity of making a new life in a new and better school, I continued to coast along, doing just enough work to come top, growing much taller and a
bit
stronger, senior to the majority of the chaps in the school, and eventually a prefect. The number in my class lessening until there were only seven, avoiding school sports but taking up tennis; it was not such an agony turning out every day. All the same, the tuition was eccentric and sometimes inefficient.

But in the early school years, alongside my many genuine ailments were psychosomatic indispositions fostered by my dislike of school and the fact that on a day-school basis one could have a day off or even a morning off without too much difficulty. Compare the horrors of an early breakfast, a five-minute tramp through the rain, an uncongenial desk and an uncongenial task with a group of fairly uncongenial boys, an irascible master or mistress, scribbling in exercise books, learning verses from the Bible or from poetry, struggling with French, then wild affrays in the passages and all the other undesirable moments in a tedious and tiring day – compare it to a day at home: reading over a more leisurely breakfast, reading in the lavatory, reading in the dining room in a comfortable armchair before a blazing fire, reading over dinner, reading in the afternoon, reading over supper, reading in bed – the only discomfort being that I didn't know what prep I should have been doing for the following day. It's little wonder that a feverish headache or a bout of morning vomiting occurred too often to be true.

I saw little of my father at these times – he was away in the mornings before I woke – but my mother, though she no doubt suspected part of my ailments were sham, could never be absolutely sure the symptoms were not the onset of some dire genuine illness, and it was very much in her nature to pamper her children anyhow.

Perhaps she comfortably argued that I was ‘educating myself'. It was partly true. My parents didn't have a big collection of books: a few novels, Dickens, Thackeray, Lytton, some good general books on such things as Evolution, Botany, and Astronomy; but above all there was a ten-volume ‘New Edition' of
Chambers' Encyclopedia
. This was a goldmine. I read the volumes endlessly, hopping from one subject to another like a honey-drunk bee. They opened new worlds for me.

But in addition to these I had a daily diet of ‘ comics' – six a week – and when a lending library was discovered I was able to borrow sensational novels which I lapped up at a phenomenal rate, thereby debasing my taste. I remember winning a handsomely bound Walter Scott novel –
The Talisman
– as a prize and making a great effort on it but finding it completely unreadable. Perhaps there really is a trace of the philistine in me, for I have not read it even yet.

When I met Sybille Bedford for the first time a few years ago, in addition to congratulating her on her magnificent books, including her just published and semi-autobiographical novel
Jigsaw
, I said how bitterly, bitterly I envied her her childhood. ‘Why?' she said. ‘ It was not particularly happy.' ‘I know,' I said, ‘ but it was so
rich
in every sort of literary and artistic influence. You lived and breathed in a world where great literature came more naturally to you than the daily paper. In spite of all your vicissitudes, shortage of money, treks across Europe and the rest, everything was put before you, in art, in music, in writing. You accepted the best because you knew no other.'