My Father's Fortune (2 page)

The only thing he told me about his education is that at the local central school he was given personal tuition in French by a master who perched on the desk in front of him and brought the register down on his head each time he made a mistake. As a teaching technique this was remarkably effective – it knocked every single word of French out of him. I never heard him essay even a humorous ‘
je ne sais quoi
'. He was also a boy soprano in the local church, and by the time his voice broke he had risen to become head choirboy. As an introduction to religion this served almost as well as the French lessons did to French. He retained a strong lifelong distaste for every aspect of it.

Something stuck, though, something that gave him a lot of pleasure over the years: the music. Often as we drove somewhere together he would lift up his voice, by this time tenor but still sweet and strong, and sing the soprano line from one of the old oratorios. He knew most of the great Baroque standards, but the aria that he sang over and over again was I think from Stainer's
Crucifixion
: ‘Fling wide the … fling wide the … fling wide the gates,/ For the Saviour awaits …' Whether he ever got any further than this, to a bit where the gates were at last open and the Saviour admitted, I can't now remember.

‘Smart Lad Wanted.' This was the formula with which a lot of job advertisements used to begin. The smartest lad that any employer could ever wish for is now on the labour market: Tom Frayn, leaving school at the age of fourteen, and just starting out in the world to help support his family. I have a number of photographs of him taken over the next few years, and you can see – he's as smart as a whip. So handsome, so poised. Three-piece suit, hair slicked straight back, flat against his skull. In one of the pictures
he has a nonchalant cigarette between his fingers. In another his adolescent face is crowned by an enormous grey homburg. Already.

His first job is as an office boy in the Hearts of Oak life assurance company in the Euston Road. Somehow each morning he emerges from the chaos of that tiny kitchen at the top of Devonshire Road with a clean collar, his suit pressed and his shoes shined, and walks down to the Seven Sisters Road to get the tram. The First World War is in its second year, and Tom Frayn is enjoying the fourth piece of good fortune in his life, though he probably doesn't appreciate it at the time. The first was the quick wits he was born with, the second was the brother and sisters who have made him such a favourite, the third was the mother who has somehow kept the family going – and the fourth is being only fourteen years old, and too young to be called up before the war ends.

At some point in the next few years he advances from office boy at the Hearts of Oak to wages clerk at McAlpines, the big building contractors. He goes to New
cast
le, as he always call it later, with a stressed short ‘a', the way the people who live there do, and travels round the city every Saturday in his teenage homburg with a bag of cash, paying out the labourers who are installing sewers and culverts. He must still be in London, though, or back there again, when he has the fifth great stroke of fortune in his life. This is after the war's over, on a winter's day early in 1919, when he runs into a friend of his called Bert Crouchman. I imagine it must be a Saturday, because that evening there's a party, to which Bert is going because a girl he's seen called Vi will be there, and he's hoping to get himself introduced to her. Would my father like to come with him?

Tom is said to have only two interests in life at this point. One is dancing. He's a good dancer, deft and easy in the Fred Astaire manner. The other, no doubt exercised in tandem with the first, is girls – and I suspect, from what follows later, that he also has a certain talent in this department. I don't suppose he takes much
persuading. All the same, I can't help feeling an instant of vertigo when I think about the sheer fortuitousness of this meeting with Bert Crouchman, and the arbitrariness of Tom's response. A lot is riding on this one brief moment while Tom makes up his mind. My existence, for a start, and my sister's. The lives of my three children and my sister's two. Of our eleven grandchildren …

He shrugs. He'll go to the party.

A close call there. Or so it seems to me now, as I write this, ninety years on, and the implications of that passing exchange finally strike me.

So there she was, the girl Bert Crouchman was after. Vi. Violet Alice Lawson. My mother.

I gaze at the old photographs of her in my album and see something of what my father saw when he walked into that party with Bert. A heart-shaped face and wide, wide eyes. Piled brown hair and plaits down to her waist. In one of the photographs she looks straight out at me as perhaps she did at him that evening. There's something touchingly wistful about her expression.

Tom looked at her, and she looked at him – and that was it. He was eighteen, and for him those few short years of girls, plural, were suddenly over. She was still only fourteen, and boys, plural, can hardly have begun. Their lives were settled for the next thirty years.

It was her younger sister, my Auntie Phyllis, who told me about how they met. In fact she wrote it down for me, seventy years later, when I asked her what she could remember of my mother. ‘Tommy went straight up to Vi,' she wrote, ‘and said “I'm Tom – I suppose you're Vi!” And from then on, nobody else got a look-in.' Poor Bert, said Phyllis, must have wished he'd never mentioned the party to Tom. What happened to Bert thereafter she didn't record. He had dropped away from the story like the launch stage of a space rocket.

Fourteen-year-old Vi and eighteen-year-old Tom – or Tommy, as he now became to Vi and all her side of the family. From Phyllis's account of the way he introduced himself he sounds as if he was at his most self-assured that evening, as much the cocky young man of the world as he looks in his photographs. I expect he gave her one of his irresistible smiles. Soon, I imagine, he was demonstrating his double-jointedness to her – bending his fingers
backwards against the table in a sickeningly unnatural reverse curve, and pushing back the thumb on his right hand until it seemed ready to snap off. Then showing her his other special attraction, the thumb on his left hand, that couldn't be bent at all, because there was no joint in it to be even single; his brother George, the compositor, had showed him round the printing works when he was a boy, and allowed him to put his hand in a press.

I suppose she looked up at him with those wide eyes, and that hopelessly appealing plangency in her heart-shaped face. Fourteen, going on fifteen, confronting eighteen, going on twenty-five. She saw the way he was looking at her – he saw the way she was looking at him – and by the time they had finished looking the story of their lives was half-written. Together with the lives of all eighteen of their descendants so far.

They had quite a lot in common, if you went back a few years, I discovered as I worked through the records. Her father, Albert Lawson, had come from a rather similar background to Tommy's father – he was the son of a general labourer in Chatham Dockyard. Like Tommy's father he had been a shop assistant, in a draper's, and the family, like Tommy's, had been through some rocky times.

Bert had launched out from his modest beginnings with high hopes and great enterprise. He had become a travelling salesman, and left his fiancée, Eleanor Dormon, behind in England while he went out to the United States to make his fortune. He travelled all over, I think for the Irish Linen Company, and did well enough to send for Nell to come and join him. They married in New York, in June 1903. Bert, twenty-six, just beginning to make his fortune in this unforgiving land, and Nell, already thirty, who had overcome her lifelong fear of anything and everything to cross the Atlantic third-class or worse and join her fate to his in the summer heat of New York. Then off to the train station together, to the howling sirens and crossing-bells in the night as they chased the hard-won dollar, to Buffalo, to Cincinnati, to St Louis and Cleveland. That elusive dollar always just ahead of them, just out of reach. Now Nell's pregnant, and throwing up,
and more nervous than ever, and still they're moving on, always moving on. Until they reach Chicago, where, on 6 August 1904, my mother is born.

I went to look at the street the first time I was in Chicago, and went again to show my daughter Susanna when she was working in the States. Anthony Avenue, way down on the South Side, a street now split in half by the elevated ramparts of the Skyway. These days the district is black, and the first time I went the friend who took me would let me out of the car only on condition that he drove alongside of me as I walked, ready for me to jump back in at the first sign of trouble. It looked peaceful enough to me. But it didn't look as if it had ever been the kind of street, even when it had had two sides to it, that suggested Bert had got very far towards making his fortune.

Within a couple of years, in 1906, with Nell pregnant again, they'd given up on the American venture, and Vi's sister Phyllis was almost born on the boat back. In the 1911 census Bert was exactly where he had started out – an assistant in a draper's shop. The house they were living in was a solid and convincing one in Dartmouth Park, half a mile west of the Holloway Road, but according to the census it belonged to Nell's father – described in her birth certificate as a house painter by trade – and they were there as his lodgers, in a single room. Spacious, of course, by the standards of my father's accommodation. In any case things began to look up. Bert got a series of well-paid jobs, said Phyllis in her note to me, as a buyer with Selfridges, John Lewis, and other West End stores. By 1912, the electoral register records, they were renting no fewer than three rooms off his father-in-law.

Then came the real turning point in Bert's fortunes, as it did for so many, one way or another – the First World War. He gave up working for other people and went into business on his own account, selling palliasses to the government. He had made it at last, not with fine linen for the comfortably-off, but with straw mattresses for the troops. He had become one of those reviled entrepreneurs who were doing well out of the war.

So well, in fact, that he was able to move his family out of the lodgings and into a detached house, which they had entirely to themselves. No father-in-law, no lodgers. He bought a car, a Ford Model T. He took Vi out of school – at fourteen, just like my father. But not, like him, to find work and help support the family. To go to the London Royal Academy of Music, to study violin and piano. She had a gift. She was to be a violinist. However similar her world and Tommy's had once been, they were now very different.

This is how things stood that Saturday evening in 1919, when Bert Crouchman and Tom Frayn came calling on Vi at her cousin's party.

After I'd looked at the setting of my father's childhood in Devonshire Road I walked, as he must have walked so many times in the next few months, to the house where my mother was now living. It's in Gatcombe Road, Tufnell Park, less than half a mile from my father's house. But it's on the other side of the Holloway Road, and sociologically it's rather more than half a mile. To the north-east of the Holloway Road are the early Victorian terraces of the ‘rough old neighbourhood' that had never quite made it into middle-class respectability; to the south-west, where Bert and his family had now established themselves, is a land of late Victorian villas that seem as well cared for and genteel still as they ever were.

This is getting close to the part of Holloway where the Grossmith brothers probably located The Laurels, the home of the Pooters in
Diary of a Nobody
. The Laurels has three storeys, with a flight of steps up to a front door on the
piano nobile
. Gatcombe Road is rather different – a street not of terraces but of detached two-storey villas, their front doors not proudly elevated but waiting welcomingly at ground level. No. 1, where the Lawsons are living in 1919, has fluted columns and stained glass beyond the privet hedges. What does Tom make of this quiet and tree-lined backwater, and this comfortably desirable residence, as he calls to pay court to Vi over the coming weeks and months? What does
he make of his future in-laws? I was going to get to know both of them later, unlike my paternal grandparents, and they're not much like the Pooters, in spite of their new respectability – or for that matter the usual picture of war profiteers.

Bert, for a start. Like my father he's a bit of a card. Unlike my father he's also a bit of an adventurer, who seems able to turn his hand to anything. He cycles – all over the south of England, sucking a pebble to keep his mouth moist, on a drop-handled machine which I later inherit, and which is built to much the same specifications as a cast-iron bedstead. He swims. While they were in Chicago, my grandmother told me, he had swum across Lake Geneva. I assumed for years that she was suffering from some fairly characteristic geographical confusion here, and that the story was another ship of gold. But when I very tentatively inquired about it the first time I was in Chicago my friends drove me there – Geneva Lake, to be precise, a noted beauty spot in Wisconsin, a mile or so across, and notoriously dangerous for swimmers. Bert had set out with a friend who gave up halfway, swum on undeterred, had a rest, and swum back. Later he took my grandmother sailing on the lake, and almost drowned them both when a sudden storm blew up.

He'd taught himself the violin. He whistles – a complex, endless flow of melody, like a songbird in summer. He's a watchmaker, and when he comes to stay with us later he gets out the old St Ogden's St Bruno Flake tobacco tin in which he keeps his jeweller's tools, mostly home-made, then spreads a newspaper over the dining-room table and, whistling, whistling, repairs all the family's clocks and watches. He's a tailor, and makes suits for his two daughters. He plays chess, and plays it the way that other men drink, sometimes failing to turn up for work because he's off on a chess bender, and my grandmother has to scour the chess clubs and cafés of North London for him.

Pa, I call him, when I get to know him later, and I worship him. A lot of other people, too, are evidently charmed by him, as they are by my father, and he has a wonderful ability to find busi
ness partners and persuade them to share his enthusiasm for the opportunities he's dreamed up and the openings in the market he's identified. What he doesn't have is my father's steadiness of purpose. He's forever going off in different directions. And the associates he chooses (according to my grandmother) have a remarkable propensity to depart sooner or later with all the money. But now, at last, with the palliasses, he has broken his jinx.

His most surprising venture in life, though, and his most improbable conquest, is right there in 1 Gatcombe Road alongside him – his wife, my grandmother. Eleanor; Nell to everyone in the family; Nanny to my sister and me. I used to have a painting of her as a girl, showing her with long red-gold hair and a frail, ethereal version of my mother's appealing vulnerability. By the time I knew her the gold had turned to grey but the frailty remained, and the ethereality had become an all-consuming nervousness. She was like one of those birds which seem to spend so much time looking round for any possible danger that you can't think how they ever eat enough to stay alive. Later she lived with us for many years. I can't recall her ever going to the shops, or even to the letter box on the corner. The back garden, yes, occasionally, when she was absolutely certain that there was no chance of getting wet, or chilled, or struck by lightning. But the
front
garden? Next to the road? I don't think so.

She was fearful of gas and electricity. Also of air, fire and water, and probably of earth, too, on the rare occasions that she got within sight of any. She was nervous about the state of the world, and about any change to the arrangements of the nation or the house. She was fearful of committing some social impropriety, and would often keep a hand over her mouth as she spoke to trap any embarrassing revelations that might be emerging. She confessed to me once, with hand over mouth and many little nervous laughs, a terrible truth about her origins. She had been brought up not as an Anglican, but as – and she made this seem such an embarrassing admission that I can scarcely bring myself to repeat it here – as a
Unitarian
.

From behind that nervously hovering hand on another occasion she confided to me an even worse family scandal. Her great-grandmother had been
Jewish
. I was too young and ignorant when she let this slip to realise quite how interesting it was. I didn't know then that Jews see Jewishness as being transmitted matrilineally, so it didn't occur to me to ask the obvious question: was she talking about her mother's mother's mother? If she was, then, in Jewish eyes, she was a Jew herself, and so am I.

I was her first grandchild, and she loved me blindly through thick and thin, in spite of my shamefully haphazard expression of the love I felt for her, and my playing cruelly, as a growing boy with trees to climb and bicycles to ride, upon her endless fears for my life and limb. As frail as a sparrow herself, in a world full of rain and draughts and electricity, she took an equally pessimistic view of her own life expectancy. ‘Oh, Michael,' she would say mournfully, each time I went to visit her in later years, ‘I don't think I shall see another winter through. I shan't be here this time next year.' I once reported these predictions to my father. ‘She's been saying that ever since I first met her,' he replied.

So this is the life's companion that buccaneering Bert has picked out for himself. Even odder, though, is that he seems to have made the arrangement function. He has prevailed upon her to accompany him on his adventures. To embark on a ship, which might at any moment strike an iceberg or be quarantined for typhus. To enter into a foreign register office and lifelong wedlock. To trail from city to city and state to state across America. Into a sailing boat. Back from America to Tufnell Park. From Tufnell Park to Holloway. Into a villa and a motor car, strange cafés and chess clubs. He has even charmed two beautiful daughters out of her.

No wonder he's been able to talk the government into buying his palliasses.