Owning Up: The Trilogy (15 page)

Eva’s jigsaws came from a club and were properly made of quite thick wood. She was a complete purist. No picture or title was provided by the club, but even this was not enough for her. She would most often turn the pieces face down so that there was no help from areas of colour, and only when it was completed would she place a large board over the surface on which she had worked and turn it over to reveal ‘The Changing of the Guard’ or ‘Deerstalking in the Highlands’. This abstract activity took up a fair amount of her time. Her jigsaw was laid out on a huge baize-covered tray on a rather rickety little table in the morning room, and one dreadful afternoon Bill and I, in our excitement over a direct hit on the dreadnought, knocked it over when the puzzle was three-quarters done.

Eva had a pocket in her throat and as, like most of the family, she ate far too fast, food would frequently lodge in it and have to be coughed up again and reswallowed. This was a noisy and prolonged operation and the convention was that nobody paid any attention, simply shouting even louder than usual to be heard. Shortly after my parents’ marriage they were invited to dinner at Chatham Street and my mother, unused to Eva’s retching and gasping, felt and showed her dismay. Eva drew breath for a moment to say that if Maud were upset she had permission to leave the table.Maud, who was trying hard to ingratiate herself, went crimson with embarrassment and shame.

Eva died in 1937, but her brother Bill lived on alone at Chatham Street until 1944. Willie Bert’s description of Uncle Bill seems to me so succinct and plaintive that I’m going to reprint it in full, and then relate those facts which impinge on my own memory or which I learnt from my father, about the almost silent figure sitting in front of the steel grate in the dining-room on Sunday mornings.

Willie Bert wrote:

William Rathbone, George and Sarah Melly’s 7th child and third son, was born at 90 Chatham Street on March 30th 1867. Known to every one as Willy, he was always rather delicate, and was educated at the Royal Institution, Liverpool. In 1883 his health broke down and he was sent for 15 months to live with Lord Dalhousie’s head keeper at Panmure, which laid the foundation of his great interest and knowledge of natural history and shooting.

In 1891 he spent three months in Naples studying sponges, but had to come home as he was ill. He then spent a year in South America as Supercargo in Lamport and Holt’s ships; after which he was in their London office for a year or so before joining his father’s firm of George Melly and Co. in Liverpool, in January 1894, and becoming a partner in October after his father’s death.

His interest in life was never business but always birds and shooting. In 1894 his uncle, George Holt, took a shooting at Llwyn Ynn near Ruthin, always referred to as The Farm, for the entertainment of his nephews (and nieces) and put William in charge. This went on till the estate was sold in 1913, William assuming more and more of the financial responsibility. It was a good general shoot producing over 1,000 head most years. All the members of the family went there year after year, his sister Florence acting as hostess.

In 1914 he took a grouse moor at Farndale in Yorkshire, but gave it up on the outbreak of war. From then until the death of his brother George, he had no shooting of his own but spent many weeks each year at Rosedale Abbey. After George’s death in I927, he became tenant of the Rosedale shoot and carried it on in the same lavish way as it had been in the past, but spending some weeks there in the spring and summer bird-watching and photographing. He was a very keen photographer and left hundreds of prints all in books duly annotated. For some years he used to prepare magic lantern slides from some of his photographs which he showed at the family Christmas party.

In March, 1932, it was decided to close the firm of George Melly and Co., and he retired from business, but at Rosedale on October 4th that year he had some sort of stroke which left him a completely different man, very silent and taking very little interest in what went on around him. Up till then he had been a very talkative man and although so handicapped by ill health, was tremendously energetic and lived life to the full. He would walk all day after grouse or partridges and then stay up half the night talking or playing cards. He was always more than generous to his nephews and nieces.

Shooting and photography were by no means his only interests. He fished, played golf and croquet whenever the opportunity offered. He said he had taken part at some time in his life in every sport except hunting.

He never married. From the time he came home from South America he suffered terribly from psoriasis. He died on 9th March, aged 76. A greater age than any of his brothers.

I was only six when Uncle Bill had ‘some sort of stroke’ and have therefore little recollection of the ‘tremendously energetic’, ‘very talkative man’ of earlier days. In fact I can only remember him once outside his own front door and that was when he took me, aged about five, to visit the Liverpool Zoo. This was a rather seedy and ill-stocked institution on Mossley Hill which nevertheless, in lieu of anything better, played an important role in my life, as I was and remain fascinated by zoos and had at that time some aspirations to become a keeper when I grew up.

For this expedition Willy wore pepper-and-salt tweeds and brown boots, while on his head was a large, rather shapeless tweed cap which my mother said ‘looked like a sponge-bag’. We wandered together for an hour or so examining the mangy lions and tigers in their cramped quarters, the solitary elephant in its sweet-smelling shed, the few snakes, the dispirited bears. Willy, peering through his round pince-nez over his bedraggled nicotine-stained moustache, offered few observations until it was time to go. Then he said to me: ‘I like this better than the London Zoo.’ I turned to him in appalled amazement. Although I had not yet visited Regent’s Park, it was high on my list of priorities if I should ever be taken to London. I knew there was no comparison. My uncle had said something so perverse, so unreasonable that I demanded an immediate explanation. Why? How? What did he mean?

‘Not so many damned animals to look at,’ he mumbled.

My father told me something of Uncle Willy before his stroke. He had been a great organiser of family outings. One summer in the early twenties there had been a circus pitched on a field off Aigburth Road. It included a lion tamer one of whose beasts, whose name was Nero, was of such ferocity that it was seldom allowed into the ring. Uncle Bill had attended the opening night and was so impressed by Nero’s dangerous intransigence that he returned most evenings with as many of the family as could be persuaded to accompany him. As the circus was not doing too well and he had booked the front row for the entire run of the show, he was treated like a Roman Emperor and, like a Roman Emperor, it was the lion act which particularly interested him. Whenever he was present and if, as was most often the case, the lion tamer had decided that Nero was in too uncertain a temper to join his companions in the ring, Willy would demand his presence. ‘Let Nero out!’ he’d bellow, and it was done. I couldn’t help wondering how Uncle Willy would have felt if a fatal accident had taken place as a result of his whim.

There was indeed an element of sadism in him. One of the few ways that we, as children, could arouse him out of his torpor was to ask him to show us the mousetrap he had brought back many years earlier from a visit to Berlin at the turn of the century. This was in the form of a Gothic church and quite large. The top could be removed to show its sinister inner workings. The mouse entered by the church door and proceeded up the nave attracted by the smell of cheese. At the foot of the altar it trod on a board which was sprung in such a way as to slam the door behind it. Having recovered from its panic, it renewed its interest in the cheese and, in pursuit of it, climbed a ladder up the inside of the tower most of which was occupied by a large water tank. At the top of the ladder, and over the tank, was a narrow passage with the cheese at the far end. The mouse excitedly scampered towards it, unaware that halfway across was a trap-door which opened, precipitating the unfortunate creature into the water tank where it swam until it drowned. What was so ingenious about the contraption, as Uncle Willy enthusiastically explained to us, was that the action of the trap, in springing back into the closed position, reopened the church door to be ready to welcome any other passing mouse and, as there was no smell of death, there was no limit to the number of rodents it could dispatch in one mission. I had proof as to its effectiveness. One afternoon Bill and I visited the dark and tortuous kitchens in the basement. In the yard, thrown there by Davis for the nourishment of the Chatham Street cats, were the drowned corpses of four or five mice, the harvest of a single night.

When he had finished explaining the mechanism of this infernal and very Teutonic machine, Uncle Bill would reset it with his constantly shaking hands, replace its religious exterior and ask us to put it back under the sideboard before relapsing into his customary silence.

This withdrawal had marked the end of a more regular family ritual than the release of Nero; the tribal visits to the D’Oyly Carte Opera Company on their biennial appearance in Liverpool, a custom much dreaded by Maudie in the early years of her marriage. This was not only on musical grounds, although no doubt for her Gilbert and Sullivan came under the general heading of ‘mini-mini’, but also because of Uncle Bill’s noisy and extrovert behaviour on these pre-stroke outings. This was due to the fact that, unlike the majority of Savoyards, he considered the overture as a time when chocolates could be ordered and the merits of the Company discussed with members of the family however distantly seated along the row. His competence to pass judgement was founded on his golfing friendship with Sir Henry Lytton and with ‘ Miss Bertha Belmore, the two principals. Wishing to make this clear to those around him he would boom out Sir Henry’s opinions at second hand. The death of Miss Belmore, far from inhibiting him, added a fresh topic. ‘Harry tells me,’ he’d shout, oblivious to a mounting storm of angry shushing, ‘that this woman’s not as good as Bertha!’ Despite the end of these visits
en masse,
my father retained his affection for the operas and was delighted that in time I was to share his enthusiasm. His favourite was
Ruddigore,
which during the thirties had been dropped from the repertoire, so our first visit was to his second preference,
The Gondoliers.
I enjoyed it so much that he later took me to see
The Mikado, The Yeomen
of the Guard
and the rest of the canon. I learnt many of the songs by heart and would enunciate them in that curiously affected mincing voice favoured by the Company. I tried, at Tom’s suggestion, singing them to Uncle Willy, but he showed no more than a flicker of interest. Sir Harry had followed Bertha Belmore into the dark. Gilbert and Sullivan, like everything else except the mousetrap, had lost their savour.

The cause of Uncle Bill’s stroke was obscure but there were dark rumours. My father told me eventually that it was believed by some that, as a child, he had been injected for smallpox with a needle, insufficiently sterilised, which had previously been used on a baby infected with syphilis. It is true he never married but this is more probably because of his psoriasis, a flaking of the skin caused by the overproduction of cells, which afflicted his whole body with the exception of his face and hands. This led to terrible irritation especially at night and his only relief was to get up and take a tar bath. There was a limit to the time he was allowed to stay in the water and my father told me that once, staying at Rosedale in a room next to the bathroom, he had been awakened by Uncle Bill murmuring something rhythmically to himself and, on enquiring next morning, he discovered it to be Lewis Carroll’s
The Hunting of the Snark.
Apparently the time it took Bill to recite this work coincided exactly with the period he was allowed to submerge himself in the medicated waters.

Apart from his shaking and the psoriasis, Uncle Bill also suffered from a hatred of anything sweet or sugary with the single if inexplicable exception of chocolate peppermint creams, for which indeed he nourished an inordinate passion. In consequence he was given each day his own little dish of Hasty Pudding, a kind of unsweetened soufflé, while everyone else dug into a wide choice of elaborate trifles, tarts and rich rice dishes.

As the head of the household it would normally have been his prerogative to carve the enormous joint which preceded the puddings, but his ague and general disability prevented it. With no apparent irony intended, it fell to him in recompense to ladle out the puddings which were placed in front of him after the removal of the meat course.

‘Anyone want any of this muck?’ he would enquire. Frequently this was one of the only three times he spoke during our entire visit. The other two sentences were ‘How’s yourself?’ on our arrival and ‘Look after yourself’ on our departure. The contrast for older members of the family who remembered him as ‘very talkative’ must have been extraordinary.

The great occasion of the year at Chatham Street was the family party held towards the end of the week after Christmas. Almost every Melly and Smith living were present and, in the case of married women nee Melly, their husbands and children also. The one notable exception was Willie Bert’s mother, Great-Aunt Beatrice, who lived in southern England. After a toast to ‘absent friends’, Willie Bert always leapt to his feet and proposed ‘My Mother’ as a codicil. It was more likely her geographical rather than her ‘invidious position’ as a divorced woman which prevented her presence at the Chatty parties. Not that distance alone kept many members of the family away. My Great-Aunt Nell and her daughter Cousin Nell were assiduous attenders. They lived together in London in an Edwardian mansion block off the Fulham Road with eau-de-Nil walls and fine Dutch furniture, but stayed a great deal at Chatham Street and indeed lived there during the Hitler war; Aunt Nell looking after Uncle Bill, Cousin Nell driving a Civil Defence ambulance throughout the Blitz. Aunt Nell and her daughter were known as ‘Old Nell’ and ‘Young Nell’.