Semi-Detached (2 page)

‘No,
no. He was a doctor.’ I was disconcerted by this. I nearly said consultant, but
that was still some years ahead.

‘He was
the only one with membership in the place,’ my mother had explained only a week
before. She meant membership of the Royal College of Physicians, an extra
qualification he had worked hard to get. ‘If they had any problems they would
all come running to him.’ He had asked her to show the head chef how to feed
.diabetics. She had invented a lot of recipes to his instruction.

I came
upon a photograph of the ‘World Conference on Tuberculosis’ in the history book
the PR manager had handed me. ‘That’s him!’ I nearly shouted. But I was relieved
to find him there, looking perhaps a little tense in the back row compared with
the exaggerated bonhomie of the senior consultants who were slouching at the
front, but he had been young then, a junior medical assistant.

Now a
general hospital, with a cardiac unit which treats morbid obesity amongst other
things, the sanatorium where my father worked was built at the turn of the
twentieth century to house TB patients. They had no idea then how to cure the ‘Bluidy
Jack’, but they sought means of mitigating its effects. There were expensive
clinics in the Alps, like Davos (the inspiration for Thomas Mann’s
The Magic
Mountain)
and whole townships in the balmy air of the South of France.
While the Kaiser ordered up dreadnoughts to compete with what he had seen in
Britain, Edward VII struck back with a consumption hospital. The Germans had
hundreds of showpiece treatment centres. Britain was falling behind in the
medical race. With money made available by Casells, his financial advisors, the
King personally supervised the project and stayed in the grounds, in ‘our’
house, which had been painted red and gold to make him feel at home.

Apparently
he entertained his mistresses there. If he did it would have been in
unaccustomed pokiness. The place was a miniature Arts and Crafts cottage with
tall chimneys, high gables and tiny rooms. Not much room for King Edward’s
renowned copulation harness in the Lodge. Nonetheless, if you drove a pedal
cart at speed into a skirting board, the white paint would flake off and reveal
red and gilt trimmings underneath.

My
mother explained across the kitchen table how we got there: things I had never
known, never really sought to find out. After the war there had been too many
doctors leaving the army Originally my father had done extensive research in
diabetes and its effect on eyesight for his PhD. But his consultant had asked
to borrow his results to use in a lecture and then published them in the
British
Medical Journal
as his own. He thanked my father in his acknowledgements, ‘for
his help’, but the research programme had become useless. ‘He was very upset,’
my mother told me. The simplicity of the words and her direct look showed me
how she must have helped him through it. I knew his capacity for worrying. ‘We
carried his notes around for years. They filled a tea chest and in the end I
made him burn them.’ After that he was advised by another senior doctor, angry
on his behalf, to specialize in chest medicine. He had gone to Banchory, a
hospital near Aberdeen, which coincidentally featured on a television programme
I presented in 2003.

‘Shall
we show you round?’ the PR manager at Midhurst asked.

The
sanatorium had recently gone into liquidation. ‘The best thing for it’, because
it had enabled a rescue package to be put together. The rescue was of the
building itself. All the space and light that the architect Percy Adams had
deliberately designed into the wide corridors, the Arts and Crafts staircases
and the shuttered balconies (recently declared unsafe for patients) would soon
go into up-market apartments. They would certainly take me to the Lodge, but
would I like to see the San first?

It is
difficult to walk down the corridors of your past in the company of a tour
guide. I had to apologize and leave them waiting as I stopped and stared into
the hospital stores. The hospital stores! We used to be taken there for sweets,
but I tried to remember. There was always something strangely forbidden about
it, wasn’t there? Was it some memory of the anxiety? We had to be extra good
because it was inside the hospital.

We
walked out. There was the cricket pitch. My father hated having to play
cricket. But that would have been the only time we were ever allowed in these
Gertrude Jekyll gardens. I could remember him in the whites and being given his
gloves to hold. I could remember playing on the dry-stone walls with those
purple flowers which hung out of them in great swags. ‘And over there,’ I said,
pointing across to the trees. ‘Isn’t that where Sir Geoffrey Todd would have
lived?’

‘Oh
yes. Of course, they’re all private houses now’

I hoped
our house would provide clues or starting points. But I toured behind Tricia,
and David Hayward, in a semi-anaesthetized trance. If I pushed, just a little,
I could remember the texture and colour of two grey blankets, with a red check
in them, and the glow of the tiny Christmas tree in a wooden tub, and even the
holly-berry-red curtains, but only in my mind. Nothing in the shape of the
place started anything. I stood there hopelessly I couldn’t even say which
bedroom had been which. The shape of the fire-surround was familiar, but it had
been painted over. The place had anyway been used as an office. ‘It can be very
cold in here,’ said David. ‘There are three outside walls with the windows
facing north.’ At the base of the staircase the gloss white had been knocked
away to reveal red paint underneath; the only evidence that this was in fact
the same house.

In due
course we had to have our own train set. My brother and I slept in a tiny room
with a sloping roof, though I could not identify which one in 2005. Our beds
were shoved up against the wall, because one corner gradually became occupied
by my father’s version of Sir Geoffrey Todd’s railway empire.

The
railway was constructed on a made-to-measure platform, which lifted on one side
so that you could clamber in and sit in the middle. It was much less detailed
than Sir Geoffrey’s. It ran on grey rails instead of individually sleepered
tracks, but there were Airfix stations and a brown WH Smith newspaper stand
with the books and newspapers on sale in incredibly tiny writing on the side,
which added a splash of authenticity to the grey plastic platform.

But
wait, wait, wait! Here we go. This is doing it. This is opening the file in my
memory. The speciality act was the mail coach. Some sort of hook arrangement
hung by the side of the track. There were several tiny red plastic lozenges
with a loop at one end, supposed to represent mail-bags. You hung one on the
hook, set the train in motion and it would pick it up, carry it on to the body
of the red mail coach with a satisfying click and, because it was so small and
the terrain proportionately was travelling past so quickly, it all happened at
super speed; a quick whizz-click and it was in. No matter how hard you
concentrated it was almost impossible to spot the mechanism in action. It just
happened. Whizz-click. And better than that, it disgorged the same mailbag
lozenge into a special black plastic collector chute further down the track, as
the train rattled on, around my fathers frankly rather lurid landscape.

His
hills and tunnels were rudimentary affairs, but my father liked to paint them
in blazing oils. It was the same ‘pointilliste’ manner he had once used to do
the view from his house in Cardiff Perhaps he was going through a Churchillian
phase at the time. There were splodgy impastos of trees and walks, as if the
major inspiration of Monet had been ‘Yes, I could probably manage something
like that, too.’

But
Elwyn was mainly transfixed by woodwork; sawing and glueing at the kitchen
table, to the despair of my mother, never changing out of his ‘good’ clothes
and carrying sawdust through the house. The boys got the railway platform. My
sister got the doll’s house (not quite as good as the one he made earlier for
my cousins in Gloucester, which had an opening front, stair rods on the stairs
and an array of clunking great electric switches hidden in the lean—to round
the back); Helen’s was a flat-fronted, four-storey cupboard with a dormer roof,
but it was painted a sticky white with a poisonous green creeper up the front,
spotted with cabbage roses; a Kees Van Dongen, Post-Impressionist influence for
a change.

Later came
a full-sized puppet theatre and puppets, animal hutches, shelves, cupboards,
record boxes, garden fittings, walls, garages and an entire boat. Meanwhile in
Midhurst he moved on to a tree-house in an oak tree up at the back of the clearing.
It had Tyrolean peep-holes, and a real pitched roof. Having got that far, he
set to work on a section of the woods themselves. He got into brick-laying
(more Churchill?) and built himself a giant barbecue which could have doubled
as a field kitchen for a battalion (mind you, I suppose there were an awful lot
of Australians around the sanatorium). Others might have settled for an old
oil-drum, but we got a pit. He laid foundations and constructed a sort of
Vulcan furnace. An old wash-pot was inserted into a brick surround which
climbed up to a towering, oblong chimney. It vied with the kitchens of Hampton
Court.

In 1988
the hurricane had come at the south-facing slopes of Easebourne Hill like Thor
with a strimmer. The entire pine forest behind the house was mown flat. It had
quickly been replanted, but nearer to the Lodge than before. The new wood had
grown up in thick, serried lines. It was already about twenty feet high when I
plunged into it in 2005. I was back in a metaphor. My widely spaced, wooded,
open playground had been smothered with an overplanting of reality. I stepped
over a chicken-wire fence and found myself in a beige, dead world. There was no
path at all. It had been obliterated. Within minutes I lost every sense of
direction. Instead of finding the things I wanted in memory-bank wood — the pet
cemetery, the tree-house, the barbecue — all I got was a thick, claustrophobic
maze. I quickly got lost. I began absurdly to panic. I literally couldn’t see
the wood for the trees.

When I
suddenly burst through back to the edge of the garden right in front of the
house, almost by accident, I kicked into a brick. It might have been a brick
from the barbecue, covered in a thick green moss. I noticed there were others
around. I felt like a detective in a Polish film, searching for evidence of
some past atrocity. It was damp and cold. What did it signify anyway? What had
I expected to find? Bones?

Did we
ever use the barbecue much anyway? Elwyn certainly built himself a picnic area
to surround it, using massive half logs, dipped in a preservative that never
quite dried. The accompanying benches were anchored to the ground, just a
stretch too far away from the splintery tables. He was very proud of it. We
were too. He must have ordered a patent glass cutter from a magazine, because I
remember the trees were hung with half-bottles in wire cradles, holding candles.
Everybody was called around to drink gin and tonics, eat the burned sausages
(how could they be anything but incinerated in the improvised blast furnace)
and swat the midges, until my father announced, as he habitually did, ‘Well, I
don’t know about you, but I’m off to bed now.

What a
dad! Except of course he was always a little remote, busy at something,
perpetually screwing or sanding, glueing or painting, and when he wasn’t, he
was down the hill at the hospital, where we seldom went.

We went
everywhere else. Perhaps because my father was so diligently occupied, and my
mother so understanding, we were released into the wild as no parent would dare
do today There were strict times we had to be back: for lunch, supper and bed.
We must have gone to school, but I only remember my time in Midhurst as a
pre-lapsarian paradise of feral gangs.

The
Lodge sat on a little promontory above a drive that led a few hundred yards
down the hill to the main hospital, hidden from view by the woods. The trees
crept up on the other side of the white road too, fronted by a few mountain
ashes and the occasional giant chestnut.

Behind
the house was a little fenced garden; beyond that a stretch of grass, traversed
by a path; and beyond that more of the enclosing trees. They were tall Douglas
pines with red, scaly trunks. We thought they were useless, because, although
they had branches, the branches started twelve feet above our heads and they
were impossible to climb. Miles up there somewhere, they formed a canopy of
dark green fir, which groaned in high winds.

The
floor of the wood was thick with pine needles, soft underfoot, even and clean
and slightly bouncy. ‘The buxom, rosy-faced and high spirited patients’ were
discouraged from drinking and given the gardens to till. They also went for
walks, which were ‘measured’ so that just the right amount of exertion could be
prescribed. The walk past the back of the house was one of these. This was
where we buried the family pets: in the middle of it. The hamster went into a
shoe-box coffin with a wooden cross made of twigs. There was Winston, an angora
rabbit. (My father claimed my mother shaved it for its fur and it died of the
cold.) We liked our graveyard so much that we took to searching for other
corpses and carried dead birds and squirrels to be buried in state, and once,
triumphantly, an adder squashed down the road next to the fuchsia bushes. Thus
the passing-away of a loved one became bearable to the infant psyche. Or rather
we became all too keen for our pets to hurry up and die, and took to examining
the tortoise with the blue cross on its back, the guinea pigs and Bella the dog
for signs of imminent mortality. (Wasn’t there a donkey too? Now that would
have been a funeral.) We liked our ceremonies and the jewels and cotton wool in
the caskets, but best of all we liked revisiting the plots for a touch of
disinterment. We dug up a woodpecker over and over again to scare ourselves
with the shiny white maggots, until my mother caught us at it and chased us
off.