My Father and Myself (6 page)

But all this is of less interest to me than the question: Why did my father bring the matter to court? By the time it was heard, four years had elapsed and he was a widower with a handsome allowance of £2000 a year. When were the wheels of justice set in motion? Some time after the marriage in September, 1889, it seems. They are reputed to turn slowly; they can also be stayed and matters settled out of court. After all, whatever unpleasantness had arisen at his parting from the de Gallatins (and the scene may well have been pretty nasty) they had been devoted friends to him and he was deeply in their debt for much love, care, and kindness. There had been plenty of time to calm down and reflect on this. On the face of it it seems a mean thing to have done, and my father as I knew him was not mean, though he could be stubborn and relentless, as we shall see. Who were these relatives who began annoying the Count a year after the event? Except for Aunt Maggie and, perhaps, John Graham, they were all down at heel: my father entirely supported his three spinster sisters, Susan, Sally, and Emily, in their declining years until they died. Had he perhaps promised the indigent part of his family the legacy if they could extract it? Did they keep the dispute going while he was abroad? Could they have filed the suit in his absence? Even so, why did he allow it to come to court? Stockley says that the judge ticked him off, remarking that he had not “behaved well.” Nothing of this appears in
The Times
report and no official transcript of the trial survives. Or did the Count drive him to law by forcing on his counter-claim? There is a fragment of evidence to which we shall come which shows de Gallatin to have been of a vindictive nature: Stockley himself, who liked and continued friendly with him in spite of everything, uses the word. It may therefore be that the Count pushed the matter to an issue. Is that why he got saddled with the costs?

At any rate, considering the whole sad affair in its obscurity as objectively as one can, it looks like one of those bitter lessons so many of us learn who try to buy the human heart with cash. That it taught the poor Count a lesson I have reason to doubt; I am convinced that it taught one to my father. Never while I knew him thirty years later would he accept hospitality if he could help it. He dispensed it, and as lavishly as the Count; he would take none in return. I used to think it selfish of him never to allow others, however much they begged and however comfortable their means, the pleasure of treating him in return for all his treats. Constant visitors to our house and table, people who stayed with us, often for weeks, and enjoyed the delights of his cellar and my mother's five-course meals, frequent guests of his at his favorite restaurant, Romano's in the Strand, all tried to secure him to themselves as a guest, but he would have none of it. Occasionally, I remember, he seemed cornered and we dined out at the compelling invitation of some prosperous friend; but always, at the end of the meal, my father managed, by some ruse, to get hold of the bill and settle it himself, even though this involved unseeming scuffles over the wretched piece of paper, merely chuckling at the embarrassed or disappointed expostulations that followed. It seemed as though it made him positively uncomfortable to be paid for, or even to receive gifts of any value: when I was a schoolboy and a wealthy friend of his, Captain Bacon, Chairman of the Manchester Ship Canal, sent me a check for £100 for some now forgotten literary project I had in hand—my school magazine perhaps—and wrote, “Put it in your own pocket if you don't need it all for that,” my father made me return the check. Yet if he disliked being under obligations to others, he was not above bribing his own way in life and, like any de Gallatin, expecting gratitude and loyalty in return for generosity. When we dined out or stayed in a hotel, head waiters would be liberally tipped beforehand to ensure that we received special attention, every privilege; my father would actually say, “There, see that I am well looked after and I shan't forget you later.”

Bribery did not always work; the displeasure, as in de Gallatin's case, was then severe. It was one of my father's boasts that his employees in Elders and Fyffes never struck, their needs were always anticipated and provided for, their wages raised before the point of demand was reached. The firm was therefore regarded as a happy family, and my father was godfather to innumerable staff children, none of whose birthdays and the silver christening mugs he bestowed, he ever forgot. But in the General Strike a shocking thing happened; some of these happy employees, the transport side, the van-drivers, were either obliged or felt obliged out of another loyalty, to their unions, to join the strike. They lost their jobs, and out of this situation trouble brewed also for two other persons, a taxi-driver and myself. My father had a pet taxi-driver named Mickey. I never saw this man, but there was something about him that took my father's fancy. His rank was at Waterloo Station which my father used for his Bow Street office, coming up from Richmond where we lived, and in course of time a sort of friendship grew up between them so that Mickey became his special driver. Refusing other fares he would meet my father's regular train and drive him to his office. Soon he was calling at the office in the evening to drive him back to Waterloo, sometimes right down to Richmond; whenever a taxi was wanted by my father for anything it had to be Mickey's if possible. This man was a character, my father delighted in him, gave him handsome tips and presents, such as hands of bananas, sent presents to his family and talked about him so much that we used to ask after him, as though he were a pet dog. But in the strike his union called him out, and he met my father's train no more until the dispute was settled. My father never spoke to him again. Walking past him at Waterloo without a look, he would enter another taxi. Poor Mickey was genuinely upset; he had, I think, formed a personal attachment to my father. He called a number of times at the Bow Street office but was refused admittance. He even drove all the way down to Richmond one day to ask my mother to intercede for him. She did, but my father remained unmoved. The man had let him down and was never seen or heard of again. Some months later, suddenly at table, following some light remark I happened to make, my father unleashed upon my startled head a perfect torrent of reproach for not having put myself and my car at his service in his time of need as the sons of his colleagues, he said, had done for their fathers. It was the most shocking and unique experience for me, this violent discharge of pent-up grievances which he had been nursing for so long. The notion of helping him had never crossed my mind. Had I realized what was going on in his head, that he was silently waiting and hoping for my offer and suffering in his pride because it did not come, I would gladly have helped him, though I was a socialist at the time and my sympathies lay with the strikers. I said I was very sorry but I hadn't thought, to which he retorted, No, of course I hadn't thought, he realized that, I never did think of anyone but myself, I was just as selfish and ungrateful as my sister Nancy, and he did not know what he had done to deserve two such selfish and ungrateful children. What he had done we ourselves did not then know, but we found out later.

Returning now to the legal dispute, how interesting is Stockley's reversal of the facts forty-six years later. He was, I believe, an honest man, as this world and the business world go, of a rigid moral code, severe and self-righteous (his standards of human perfection were King George the Fifth and Rudyard Kipling): perhaps the final order of his loyalties affected his beliefs. Or did my father contrive, out of uneasiness, to throw dust in his eyes, as he seems to have done in another matter to which we shall soon come? It is possible that Stockley was not back in England when the action was judged in July, and heard of it only afterwards from my father, whom he ran into by chance at the Tivoli. But the margin must have been slight, for both these events took place in that same month. At any rate he had no part in the legal proceedings and tried to keep out of the squabble. He was friendly with both de Gallatin and my father; the former had been best man at his wedding three years previously and godfather to his son and heir. But he was not to be allowed to sit on the fence. He was busy inaugurating in Covent Garden the banana business which, starting in an almost costermongerish way, was to become Elders and Fyffes, and my father, bored with idleness, asked if he could come in as “office boy.” He was accepted. But when de Gallatin heard that he was to be employed by Stockley, he wrote angrily to the latter to say he “must choose between them” who was his friend. “It was a ridiculous request,” says Stockley, “and I did not hesitate.” When Mme. de Gallatin was dying some years later she summoned him and he went (“I never blamed her as she was devoted to G., and one can understand a mother's unreasonableness”), but the Count was never again seen by him or by my father and disappears out of their story to arise later as a ghost in my own.

The year 1892, therefore, was a momentous one in my father's life; in it he lost a wife, gained a job which was to make his name and fortune, and picked up my mother on a Channel boat. She was not, as we have seen, his first conquest, nor was she to be his last, and it may therefore be permissible to wonder how long the affair would have continued had not an accident occurred.

MY ELDER BROTHER Peter was the accident. “Your father happened to have run out of french letters that day,” remarked my Aunt Bunny with her Saloon Bar laugh, and I have for some time been aware that if I am to get this history even approximately straight I must somehow steer a course between my aunt's Rabelaisian humor, my mother's romanticism, and the mutual jealousies of both. Nevertheless my brother was neither intended nor wanted and efforts, probably of an amateur kind, were made to prevent his arrival. My mother was thirty-one years old at this time and working on the stage, a more respectable stage than the one Aunt Bunny was to reach, known indeed as the “legitimate” stage (she was a recruit of Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree): this is not however to suggest that she should therefore have known better. Doctors were confidentially consulted, various homely remedies prescribed, and all manner of purges, nostrums, and bodily exercises employed to bring about a miscarriage. But my brother was not to be quenched. Nevertheless he did not survive unscathed. He emerged prematurely, a seven-month child and breach delivery, double-ruptured, jaundiced and black in the face, presenting altogether so wretched and puny an appearance with his head sunk between his shoulders like a tortoise that the doctor in attendance remarked, more prophetically, it may be thought, than he realized, “Seems hardly worth saving.” This event occurred on October 6, 1895, in Melcombe Place, Marylebone, where my mother's family were then living. Mr. Ackerley then concealed Netta Aylward (my mother's maiden name) and the child at 4 Warminster Road, Herne Hill, in care of his grandmother and of a faithful housekeeper of his named Sarah.

If Arthur Stockley's memory is to be trusted my father withheld from him, then and always, the truth of his dealings with my mother, for up to the end of his life Stockley believed that they had been married at the Marylebone Register Office before my brother was born. “The marriage was kept secret,” he wrote me, “as your father did not want old B. [Burckhardt] to know of it.” Secrecy, for some reason, was maintained by both of them, in spite of the death of “old B.,” for nearly ten years; it was not until about 1904 that it came out accidentally that my father had a “wife” and three children living up in Cheshire, news which greatly puzzled and displeased some of his business friends, who wondered why they had been kept in the dark.

This book is not about my brother, but in connection with him my own character and story develop and his subsequent history must be briefly sketched. Fed at first through a quill, for he could not suck, and wrapped in cotton wool soaked in cod-liver oil, this flickering life was gradually brought, mainly by the unremitting care and skill of my grandmother, through a sickly childhood, to become in time a tall, thin, dark, rather sallow youth of a lively and good-tempered disposition. He liked practical jokes and all forms of buffoonery, was good at playing cricket and the bones, had a charming natural tenor voice and a leaning towards the stage: he collected pictures of Henry Irving and Beerbohm Tree and was always acting and dressing up.

This was in my mother's tradition, but the paternal influence was stronger and he was training to enter our father's business when the 1914 war broke out. This brought in the paternal example again: my mother said, “Thank Heaven my boys are too young to join up,” and we offered ourselves to the Army at once. I was accepted; my brother, who had been obliged to wear a truss throughout his life, was rejected. The patriotic fervor of the time, which looks in retrospect so idiotic, was strong; he was not a chap to be left out of drama of any kind and resolved to have his rupture corrected by an operation. To this decision he was encouraged by our family doctor, a handsome, dandified sportsman named Harry Wadd, who took my brother along with him to hospital one day to watch the same operation performed upon someone else before he underwent it himself—an invitation I myself would certainly have refused. But there was, I think, in my brother a streak of bravado, inherited from my father, which I did not possess; though was it not to carry it too far to dress up for the benefit of the specialist who was engaged to perform the operation? That eminent and busy man was somewhat taken aback to find in the nursing home not the youth he was expecting but a grotesque bearded tramp with a red cardboard nose and huge papier-mâché feet. However, the operation was successful and some time later my brother was accepted by the Army. In 1918, just before the Armistice, he was killed by a whizz-bang. My parents were married in the following year.

Possibly this sequence of events, this brief potted biography, which actually spread itself over nearly a quarter of a century, did not present itself to them in the crude light in which I have sketched it in; but I feel that to my father at least it may have done so, and that although Aunt Bunny's intervention on my mother's behalf at Pegwell Bay may have been the determining card which won the belated day, the true cause of the marriage lay in some deep, sad desire to make amends. Be that as it may, however little my father welcomed my brother when he came, he lost his favorite son when he died. Peter approximated far closer than I did to the paternal image, a chip of the old block, and was already set to fulfill my father's cherished ambitions: he would have married and, perhaps, provided grandchildren (he was already courting several girls before he died and my father was fond of children), and he would have entered the banana business. Finally, it may be added, he would not have written this book. He was, in fact, all the things that I was not, though we got along together perfectly well.