My Father and Myself (23 page)

She asked me if I would live with her—just the question, no pressure. It saddened me to say no; I could not have endured it. Instead a woman companion-help, whom she liked, was found for her and she had her little dog. I went constantly to see her and she was visited also by Aunt Bunny and the “Doc,” Air-Commodore Charlton and other friends of mine who were fond of her. For over a year she seemed perfectly happy, a merry little squirrel in its cage; then my sister announced her return with her child from Panama; she had failed to patch things up with her husband and was now divorced. There was no ready place for them to live in and my mother decided to have them stay with her. I tried to dissuade her from a step which, it seemed certain, was unlikely to suit anybody; the house was too tiny for such an invasion, she and my sister had never got on together, and my mother, who had had nothing to do with children since we were born and not much then, was surely too old and fixed in her habits now to be able to endure for long the addition of a small boy to her household. But she had set her heart on it, she was sorry for my sister in her adversity, had forgotten all the dissensions of the past and doubtless also wished to play the part of grandmother. The results were as unpleasant as I had foreseen; by the time when, some years later, other accommodation had been found for my sister, my mother had taken to living almost entirely in her bedroom, into which she would allow no one else to go, even her servant, and had also taken secretly to the bottle. Then the “Doc” died and Aunt Bunny, left destitute, went to live with her in Sheen Road.

By the side of the house was a pretty cul-de-sac named Peldon Avenue, where the little Sealyham bitch got her exercise. One night, in September, 1941, a land-mine fell into it, cracking the house from top to bottom. My aunt happened to be away at the time; my mother and her servant were sleeping on mattresses in the sitting-room on the ground floor. Windows and doors blew in, the ceiling fell on them as they lay. In a panic the servant rushed out into the street in search of help. Returning, she found my mother standing in the dark, shattered room in her night shift, her hair full of plaster. “I think it very inconsiderate of you,” said my mother reproachfully, “to go out before sweeping up all this glass. I might easily have cut my feet.” The concussion had ruptured a small blood-vessel in one of her eyes; otherwise she was uninjured. She was seventy years old.

My sister, who was then living in a large block of furnished flats near by, found one for her and Aunt Bunny in the same building. It was here that, my mother's faculties rapidly failing, she made friends with the fly. Her furniture had to be removed from the wrecked house; I had it stored in a depository that had been improvised in Richmond Town Hall—upon which, soon afterwards, an incendiary bomb fell, burning everything up. Among the things that confronted my sister and me for disposal in my mother's sacred and filthy bedroom, with the great piles of ancient newspapers she had hoarded and the empty whisky bottles, was her personal luggage, her trunks and suitcases and those large cardboard boxes she had so carefully preserved. It was necessary to find out what they contained before deciding whether to store them or to take them along to her new flat—though, her memory going, if not gone, she asked for nothing and seemed hardly aware of what was happening in the world outside. I was personally curious too; I might find some useful information, letters, etc., about her early life with my father. I opened the cardboard boxes first. They were full of wastepaper. The wastepaper consisted of old receipts and circulars, letters, envelopes, Christmas cards, bits of Christmas crackers, newspapers cuttings about dressmaking or cooking recipes, household lists and memoranda, old theater programmes, visiting cards, blank pieces of paper, and literary compositions of her own—rambling verses and
pensées
in her large quill-pen writing; all these had been torn up into small fragments and put back into the boxes, which had then been secured with string. I opened her three square leather hat-boxes. They were full of wastepaper. There were two large cabin trunks. They were crammed with wastepaper. The drawers of her dressing table also contained wastepaper, excepting for two or three bundles of letters, tied with ribbon, from Harold Armstrong, my brother and myself. In the midst of this sea of torn-up paper various other objects were discovered: a few old and ragged small articles of clothing, some aged feathers and other trimmings for hats, empty jewel-cases, empty boxes, empty tins, old cosmetic and powder containers, buttons, hairpins, desiccated suppositories, decayed De Reszke and Melachrino cigarettes, old and used sanitary towels done up in tissue paper, stumps of pencils, orangewood sticks, Red Lavender lozenges. An occasional gold or silver trinket, of no value, was found, an occasional undestroyed treasury note (£3.10s.0d. in all). Suddenly, for a time excitingly, bundles would appear like presents in a bran pie, done up in tissue paper and tied with ribbon or string, or large plain envelopes, bulging and sealed. They all contained wastepaper, torn into small fragments. To this mass of rubbish clung my mother's odor of “Jicky” and Red Lavender lozenge. The last thing to be opened was an ancient battered black bag such as doctors used to carry. It was locked. No key could be found, but the leather had rotted, the bag was easily torn open. The first thing that met my eye was a page of pencilled writing in my mother's hand: “Private. Burn without reading.” At last! Beneath were sundry packages tied up in ribbon. They were full of wastepaper. There was nothing else in the bag.

This was my mother's comment on life. It might serve also as a comment on this family memoir, which belongs, I am inclined to think, to her luggage. A good many questions have been asked, few receive answers. Some facts have been established, much else may well be fiction, the rest is silence. Of my father, my mother, myself, I know in the end practically nothing. Nevertheless I preserve it, if only because it offers a friendly, unconditional response to my father's plea in his posthumous letter: “I hope people will generally be kind to my memory.”

My father, c. 1890

My father as a guardsman

New Brighton: Stockley, my father, de Gallatin, Dudley Sykes

My father and Miss Burckhardt in New Brighton in 1889

My mother in
The Merry Wives of Windsor

My mother in the 'Twenties

Myself as a preparatory schoolboy: “Girlie”