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The atmosphere was so tense, he said, that you could have chopped it with a battle-axe. But when he repeated his sentence in even blunter English their anger at his accusation gave way to embarrassment, and then to humour when they realized he had seen through their trick. They bought his patterns, and paid him well, and he went to Chemnitz many times until the Great War put a stop to it.

He left for England only hours before war was declared. On the way from Berlin he witnessed the manoeuvres of the Imperial German Army near Magdeburg, and made a dramatic farewell to the country because the police tried to arrest him at Bremerhaven for what he had seen. The ship pulled out from the quay just as they came into view. If they had collared him he would have been interned for four years in Germany, and thus saved himself some bother in trying to avoid the war in his own country. The sea crossing was so appallingly rough that he was unable to leave his cabin.

When call-up came in 1916 he would have nothing to do with it, averring that a person who refused to get killed for his country is more patriotic than a mad keen bravo who rushes into death for it, that a man is of more value to everyone else if he stays alive. He was not alone in his reluctance to go, for in the first six months of conscription 100,000 men failed to appear for call-up, and another 750,000 hurried to claim exemption.

His wife belonged to the Christadelphian Sect and Frederick had converted to it. Assiduously studying the Bible and learning to read Hebrew, he hoped one day to become a preacher. His allegiance therefore led him to stand as a conscientious objector—an educated phrase that was unintelligible to most ordinary people, which would have been better understood as ‘a hater of war'.

Facing the tribunal of old, true-blue British dunderheads who looked upon him with a sort of patriarchal distaste and offended class unction because he was staunchly refusing the honour of being sent to fight for what they held dear, and would no doubt lavishly enjoy after many of those who had gone to do so were dead, he simply stated his religious principles and folded his arms against them with such mute and obstinate belligerence that it caused one mellower gentleman to regret that such unyielding brass could not be turned against the Germans.

Having long ago weighed up his own talent as a lace-designer and painter of pictures, Frederick quoted his profession before these men as that of artist, upon which the mellower gentleman brightly wondered why he had not joined the Artists' Rifles when the war began, whose fine battalions did wonderfully dreadful work against the Hun.

Frederick broke his silence, though he had gritted his teeth for some minutes against doing so. ‘There wasn't one artist in the Artists' Rifles,' he said sharply, and so angrily that he had to fight against his own blood to keep to the point of what he wanted to say. ‘They stopped being artists as soon as they put on a uniform. No true artist picks up a gun to kill his fellow-men. Whoever had the idea to form battalions of artists was a devil. He was anti-Christ. It was Satan's trick, to get rid of those artists who might otherwise stay behind and make trouble—or keep a breath of sanity in this country. If any artists are still fighting they are poor deluded fools who don't deserve their talent. In all likelihood they never had any.'

The two sides were without meeting point, and instead of being sent into the army Frederick spent two years shovelling shit—as he put it—on a farm in Lincolnshire.

‘Man chooses,' he said, ‘though God disputes his right to it. Freedom of choice is given to everyone, and if I lived in the moderate comfort of a hayloft instead of cringing in a mud-trench in Flanders, then I betrayed no one, because everybody else could have done the same. They made the wrong choice, and it led to the biggest disaster in the history of the world, because the Second World War came out of the first, and the Jews were almost destroyed by Hitler and his lunatic pan-Germans, and by all those others who didn't say a big No when they should have done. The only things you can say yes to in this world are love and work, and even then you've got to be intelligent and careful about it. God knows, I'm not made of such stuff that my life's been all that successful, but I've never killed or injured anybody.'

During his agricultural life he and his companions were awakened from the hayloft opposite the house at five each morning to the tune of a bully-farmer cracking a whip below, and cursing so richly that it might have sounded picturesque if it hadn't been aimed at them. To the farmer they were workhorses, and weak ones who did not have the necessary patriotic feeling to go and fight for their country so that he could stay behind and make a profit from it. They were scum, worse even than prisoners of war, who might at least have fair reason for being out of the fighting.

Nocturnally roaming around and into remote sheds of the farm Frederick and a friend discovered a small trunk hidden under a heap of sacks. On shaking it they rightly guessed that it contained several hundred gold sovereigns. As the Great War went on the government needed gold to pay its debts, so a law was passed that such coinage was to be handed in to the banks, who would then issue the equivalent in paper money. It was illegal to hoard such metal, though many did—so as to sell it after the war when its value would be much increased.

Next day the conscientious objectors carried the box to the farmer's door. When he came at the jingle of it, Frederick said in his most pompous and grating tone that they expected his behaviour to improve from now on, as a reward for finding his long-lost gold. But if the farmer was not the real owner of it, then it should be taken to the police station in Louth. If he was, which seemed likely because they had found it on his property, then it should be put into a bank for safe keeping.

The farmer disliked them, but accepted his gold and treated them more reasonably afterwards. He never found out who had broken the lock of the shed where the box had been kept, though he had his suspicions. As Frederick said, delicate fingers can always be put to good use.

48

We lived in a room on Talbot Street whose four walls smelled of leaking gas, stale fat, and layers of mouldering wallpaper. My father's thirty-year-old face was set like concrete, ready to hold back tears of humiliation that he must have been pleased to find were not there when the plain clothes police came to take him away.

From the side I saw two of him as he combed his black hair in the mirror. The face looking into the glass seemed about to smile, but that reflected from it showed the bafflement of his brown eyes, and lips that were thinner when he was unhappy. In both images his flesh was grey.

He had especially gloated over his brother Frederick's haughty manner with creditors. Being dunned as a young man during one of his indigent phases after his release from the servitude of the Great War, Frederick stood at the door of his father's shop on Trafalgar Street with, as my father remembered: ‘Hardly any bleddy shoes to his feet,' shouting at a tradesman waiting hopefully on the pavement: ‘I only pay my bills quarterly! Do you understand? Quarterly!'

That night a pantechnicon was loaded to the gills by my father and the driver, Frederick looking on because his hands were too fine to lift such heavy goods and furniture on which little more than a deposit had been paid. The pantechnicon went to London where, as far as the creditors were concerned, Frederick was never heard of again, London being a long way from Nottingham in those days.

Years later, when my father was married, unemployed, and already had three kids to feed, he tried the same scheming stunt of running up bills for food that he had no hope of paying, an imitation of his elder brother which turned out to be the highest form of folly, for he lacked Frederick's superior mobility and ways of speech when the shopkeeper asked him to pay up or get taken to court. But even when he came back from prison he was glad his brother had been able to beat the system from time to time, and often gloated over it to me.

Frederick followed his trade of lace and embroidery designer in London, and for a while he was a court embroiderer, though I ommitted to ask at what court because I suspected he was exaggerating his claim to grandeur—which might have been doing him an injustice. But there was a great slump in his trade by the middle thirties, and he was thrown as much out of work as were Burton and his sons when motor-cars finished off blacksmithery.

In 1936 he met a column of unemployed miners that had stopped to rest at some open ground before continuing their march to the middle of London. Various members of it went among the spectators with collecting boxes, gathering funds to buy food and shoes for the men. A great many police stood at various points of the concourse, not expecting purple revolution to break out there and then so much as to intimidate them into knowing their place by the time they reached the middle of London—where hosepipes were waiting for them anyway. Frederick, moved by the men's plight, put the large sum of half a crown into a box, at which a police inspector told him brusquely to get out of the way and move on.

In a tone of congenital intransigence Frederick retorted that it was his right to give to whom he pleased. The policeman left him alone, and went after the man with the collecting box. Telling me about it fifteen years later, the incident still infuriated him more, I think, because a man in uniform had dared to accost him on any pretext whatsoever, than that the hunger-marchers had been harried.

He was widely read, and the most politically radical of the family, though his radicalism was of a somewhat uncertain brand—when he allowed it to show through. Perhaps his intensive reading of the Old Testament made him so, and his experiences as a conscientious objector left him as bitter against government, British or otherwise, of past, present, and future, as any soldier who by a miracle had survived four years in the trenches.

Parting from his wife and two daughters, he came back to Nottingham in 1936. He also broke with the Christadelphian sect (after more than twenty years of it) and turned an atheist. When I first met him in 1949 I had started to think of myself as a writer. ‘A good short story,' he advised me, ‘is what people want. It's what editors are looking for, as well.' To back up his point he sent me to Nottingham Central Library with lists of books to take out and read.

He was sixty-five years old, and worked at his studio desk with a skullcap on the back of his bald head. Having a thin, wax-like face, his features resembled those of Voltaire's death-mask (a plaster copy of which hung from the wall above his desk as a measure of his admiration for that great man) if one caught him asleep or having just woken up.

Though quite prosperous for certain periods of his life, Frederick had dressed well but never really ate properly, as if that side of good comfort didn't interest him. So he kept a frail unhealthy aspect, though he fetched more than eighty years of age.

He talked for hours on painting and art. His drawings were fine and meticulous. Now and again I would sit for him, and much of his work must still be scattered around Nottingham, for the only way he earned money at that time was by selling landscapes and doing portraits. Needing little at this part of his life made him a man of independent means, in the sense that those who have little, but which is all they need, can afford the most freedom.

An obsessional expatiator, he wanted a listener, and there was none better than an incipient writer for whom he could dip into his reminiscences and tap endless pipelines of information. He told me about a spiritual exercise by which he viewed any troublesome problem in its own utter light, and therefore went much of the way to solving. He concentrated his mind until there was nothing left in it, then went on to force this nothingness to an even greater pitch of vaccuity, so that in the blinding light of emptiness the problem suddenly reappeared with such clarity that the answer was obvious. Think of nothing, was how he put it, and think on that.

He loved England, but did not like it, and would lunge at the good name of its indwellers as often as some sharp light flashing from past or present forced him to:

‘The English are a nation of form-fillers,' he would say, putting a few flourishes to the cloud of a half-finished landscape. I remembered this picture as a remote, mellow, dreamlike hilly country without people or even animals, some peaceful therapeutic land he could escape into after spending too much time on the close-up details of his portraits.

‘In some countries,' he went on, pausing a moment to get into his best hectoring rhythm, ‘when the backbone has cracked, they live by taking in each other's washing. In dear old England they exchange forms to fill in. Give somebody a form and he won't tear it up and throw the bits back at you. Not your Englishman he won't. He'll get out his pen and wonder how to fill it in so as to please and satisfy whoever made it up. They'll let authority put chains on them as long as it respects their privacy. They don't want to be touched, ergo—ergot—(or is it argot?)—they'll sign anything.'

‘Well,' I said, not really objecting to his statement, nor his punning, ‘you're English. And so am I. You can't get away from it.'

‘True,' he admitted. ‘At least I expect it is. I was born on the island, and that's a fact.
You
still have time to get off it, if you look sharp in the way of saving yourself. In any case, I'm an artist. I'm independent. But think about it: the war's been over six years, and the English still put up with rationing and conscription. Anybody who tries to get a tiddly bit of food above his fair share is denounced as a traitor and a black-marketeer, whereas it's only a healthy and normal reaction to an unnecessary restriction. And don't think they won't always be like this, even when such vicious things are finished with. Scratch an Englishman and you find a—no, not only a Turk—but a ration book, or an identity card, or a pay-book, or a census form or even a form from the back of the
Radio Times
to order a greenhouse or potting shed. In other words, a form to fill in lets them know their place, and they love that.'