Swan River (16 page)

* * * * *

I woke on Pete Connolly's floor with a headache and another pain which Pat condescendingly explained in detail, and called ‘ball-ache'. But the pains didn't matter; nothing mattered because my skin was glowing and warm and my brain was idling with a sensation that one day I would call euphoria. I had danced for several hours, but the catalyst had been snogging in the dark, unaware of time or place, with a girl who, Pat, Pete and others confirmed, was ‘a complete bombshell'.

14

A Hot Proposal

On a night in January I sat close to the two-bar fire back in my room at my father's home, and wrote a long letter to Deborah. I told her that I missed her, gave her both my new addresses and described all that had happened in the six months since I had last written. Before going to bed, I smoked a cigarette and scanned the bookshelves. An old green cardboard folder was sticking out from the bottom shelf against the upright next to my grandmother's diaries; it hadn't been there on my previous visit. I opened it, although I knew what was there – the chapters my father had written for me two years before, about his childhood in the 1890s. I had read them then and given them back to him.

That week my father seemed calm and content – he had bought another bottle of cherry brandy – and I wondered whether he enjoyed living alone, without my mother who had always seemed to irritate him. Most nights I sat up late reading my father's chapters again and my grandmother's diaries. Sometimes I flipped from his text to hers to see if she wrote at the time about an event that he had remembered sixty years later. The many mentions of my grandfather Tom reminded me of Swan River, Manitoba. I hadn't thought about the place or the old man who had told me to go there for a long time. Would I go, one day? I decided I would, and hoped that it would be with Deborah.

* * * * *

Tom brought Sis a bowl of fuchsias and seemed to enjoy his second visit.

Ernest and Rose were there, music predominated and he showed that he could sing – in a mellow baritone that Sis admired. Twice, while the others were grouped around the piano, Sis and Tom spoke to each other for several minutes almost in private, much as they had over dinner at the Johnsons'. She noticed his eyes again and the lines that came from them when he smiled, and she saw that he had bad teeth under his huge moustache – but she was reminded of the warmth beneath his shyness and of how easily she could talk to him.

When he visited a third time, her brothers and Rose went out for the evening, and Old George gave Tom permission to be alone with Sis – then and in the future if they wished – a clear sign that he approved of him. Tom gave Sis a brooch, a small gold fox with tiny rubies for eyes, and told her that as soon as he saw it he knew it would suit her. He was right; she thought it beautiful – and she realised how expensive it was.

They sat on the red velvet sofa where she had sat many times with Stanley and, with some prompting, he talked about his childhood and youth and how his father had died twelve years before. As the eldest of seven children, he had felt responsible for his mother and his younger brothers and sisters, the youngest of whom had been a baby. He had worked hard to keep the family together and to gain qualifications at night school and had joined the Welsbach Incandescent Light Company as a junior accountant. There he had been promoted several times; he said this modestly, but Sis could sense his pride. By working hard, he and his brother Bill and his sister Emily, who worked as a housemaid, had enabled his mother to raise the younger children; otherwise he feared they would have ended in the workhouse.

Sis was surprised to learn that his family home had been nearby at the further end of Greenwood Street near London Fields; he told her diffidently that a few years earlier he had played in the same rugby team as her brother George – George hadn't recognised him so he hadn't mentioned it. Now, they had left Greenwood Street, and he and Bill had found his mother a larger house in Bournemouth where she could take lodgers and live with her younger children.

Sis told him about her mother's death and how she, too, had felt responsible for a parent and younger siblings. They talked about duty and the satisfactions and frustrations that came from it – and about their fathers. Tom's had been artistic and had worked as an engraver; Sis thought he sounded not unlike her father – creative and kind, but forceful. That night she recorded that she liked Tom ‘a great deal' and she thought it significant that his father had died in the same year as her mother. She noted again that he was handsome, and she thought that his pipe might account for his bad teeth.

For a few weeks Sis and Tom met frequently at Norfolk Road, and he took her to theatres and the smarter music halls, for strolls on Hackney Downs and long walks across Hackney Marshes; they visited Kate in Braintree and Tom's mother – whom Sis found ‘warm and quiet, like her son' – in Bournemouth. From small things Tom said and from questions he asked, Sis began to realise that he would soon propose marriage. She was unsure how she would answer. He had become ‘a great friend and companion', but she didn't think that she loved him.

She remembered the passion she had felt for Stanley and told Kate that she didn't feel at all the same about Tom. Kate said that a marriage without love couldn't work. She shouldn't accept a proposal from Tom – not yet anyway. If she didn't want to turn him away, she should tell him the truth about what she felt and then a long, unofficial engagement might be appropriate. She might grow to love him; Kate told her how she had come to love Uncle Gibson more and more as time had passed and that their child had made them even closer than before.

* * * * *

Tom perspired in the heat of a hot August evening in the drawing room at Norfolk Road, and waited until Sis had sat down. ‘I have never done this before. I hope I do it properly.' He knelt on one knee, took her hand and frowned with formality. ‘Will you marry me?'

She hugged him around the neck. ‘Yes.'

She hadn't known what she would say; she had decided in an instant. They stood up and kissed for the first time – a brief kiss. He drew away and handed her a small leather box. He had chosen it – a gold ring with a single ruby – because it matched the brooch that she liked; she could change it if she would prefer silver or a diamond. She told him sincerely not to be silly – it was beautiful. She put it on her finger. It was a little big, but she didn't say so. She kissed him again – for longer this time – and held him for a moment when he tried to move away.

A few minutes later Tom asked Old George's permission to marry his daughter. Old George was in his shirt sleeves and told him to take his jacket off – he looked hot – and, of course, he could marry his daughter.

That night Sis wrote that in that moment, as he knelt down, she knew that she wanted to be married to him. She liked him, almost loved him; in time she would love him – especially when they had children. Kate was too cautious and, before long, would see that she, Sis, had done the right thing.

Sis wanted to be married as soon as sensibly possible. Tom's only concern was that they needed to find a home – his lodgings were too small for them both – but it was quickly agreed that he could live at Norfolk Road while they took their time to find the right place. Old George would give them a bed as a wedding present and it would be put in Sis's room.

* * * * *

They were married at noon on 11 October, 1890, at St Mark's Church around the corner from Norfolk Road. Sis enjoyed herself. Her cream satin dress from Gamages in Holborn was much admired; the three bridesmaids, among them her little cousin Kathleen, looked exquisite; at the reception, at a smart hotel near Highbury Corner, her father made an affectionate and amusing speech; and everyone behaved properly – except Aunt Sue, but that was to be expected. All that is known about the honeymoon is that they stayed in a hotel in Hastings and that Sis discovered that Tom ground his teeth while he slept.

When they returned to Norfolk Road, Tom was anxious to find them a home. Before they were married Sis had shared his vision of life together in a house with a garden in Islington, Highbury, Hackney or Dalston. But she had been preoccupied by her wedding, and now she found that she wasn't quite ready to move away from her home and her family.

She hid her feelings from Tom, but discussed them with her father. He reminded her that Tom was eight years older than her, had worked his way up to a well-paid position in an internationally famous firm and earned more than he did. Though it was commonplace for married couples to live with their parents – some of the houses in Norfolk Road and all over East London were crammed with people of all ages – it was natural for a man of Tom's age and income to want his own house.

But Sis felt, privately, that 59 Norfolk Road had room for everyone and that, before long, when her brothers had their own homes – as she was sure they would – it would be the perfect place for her and Tom and the children she hoped to have, and she could continue to live with and care for her father. What would happen to him if she and her brothers all moved away?

On a Saturday in November Tom took her to see a terrace of ten new houses in a street south of Dalston Lane, and timed how long it took them to walk there – six minutes. The houses were two-storey, built of yellow brick, with angled bays, slate roofs and white-painted mouldings and windows. There were two rooms downstairs with a kitchen and scullery at the back, and three rooms upstairs. The small garden was dug and ready for planting, and there was a flush lavatory in a lean-to just outside the kitchen door. The asking price was £275 which could be paid in instalments; Tom had the first instalment waiting in the bank and money to buy furniture, carpets, curtains, everything that was necessary.

Sis wandered around with her arm through Tom's. She liked the house but found it a little small; she'd like to think about it. The builder suggested that they should make up their minds soon; six of the ten had been sold already.

On the walk back to Norfolk Road Tom explained that the house might be small but it was big enough for the time being and that it was as large as he could sensibly afford – given that she wanted to be close to her father and brothers. Apologetically, Sis confessed, for the first time, that she was finding it hard to think about leaving her father, but that she would try. Tom let go of her arm and walked faster. It was a minute or two before he replied. He told her that when her father got old, which would be a long time yet, of course he could live with them; he, Tom, would be rich and they would have moved to a larger house by then.

What began as a discussion, while they walked, became an argument on the corner outside the church where they had been married, and then a row in the breakfast room when they reached home. Sis argued that they would be better off staying at Norfolk Road; it was large and spacious and filled with beautiful furniture – while the new house was small and depressing – and one day they might have number 59 all to themselves. Tom asked if she expected him to wait for ever to get his own home – her father was blooming with health and in his early fifties – and said he hadn't realised he had married him as well as her. Sis told him he was lucky to have married anyone. He retorted that he wouldn't have bothered if he had known she was such a nag and a Daddy's girl.

Sis ran to her room in tears. She saw that Little Alice was in the kitchen and must have heard all they had said. That evening Tom went to the Norfolk Arms after dinner and returned at 12.30 banging doors and stumbling up the stairs.

The following Tuesday evening they hugged and kissed and apologised. Sis told Tom that she had been silly and that she did want to move to the new house. Tom said that he had thought it over and, if she really wanted to stay with her father a bit longer, he would ‘adjust his expectations' – there was the advantage that he would be able to save up more money; it was just that she hadn't told him that that was what she wanted before. She confessed, tearfully, that she didn't really know what she wanted and they agreed to leave things as they were for the time being.

In May, the next year, 1891, Sis discovered that she was pregnant. She was excited, if a little fearful; Tom was euphoric and the house filled with flowers that he bought for her every evening as he passed through Liverpool Street Station.

In September – to avoid the crowds – they had a week's holiday in Margate, where Tom had often been as a child when his father was alive. They stayed in a guest house facing the beach and spent the days walking, talking and sitting in tea rooms; in the evenings they played chess and Tom read
Tristram Shandy
aloud while Sis lay on the bed.

She decided that her love for him was growing; she felt more at ease than she had on their honeymoon almost a year before. And she liked being on holiday. In London the running of the house and the men's constant need of meals and clean clothes were tiresome, even though – funded by Tom – they now had Big Alice coming in more often to cook. She thought again about living with Tom and her child in a smaller house, and remembered that he had said that they could afford a live-in servant; perhaps it would be better? But she said nothing.

15

Looking over the Bristol Channel

My father was born at 7 am on 10 December 1891 in Sis's bedroom on

the brass bed that Old George had bought as a wedding present. It was a Wednesday and he had not been expected until the following weekend. Doctor White, the family's doctor for more than twenty years, delivered him with the help of a local nurse.

Sis's labour had begun at six o'clock the previous evening. Tom and Old George spent most of the night awake in Old George's room playing chess by candlelight. Young George slept on the drawing-room sofa, so as to be away from the inevitable noise and disturbance; Ernest and La Frascetti were away performing in St Petersburg. Little Alice stayed up all night, keeping the cooking range and the fires alight and carrying towels and bowls of water up and down stairs; she was even admitted to the labour room – she kept her eyes averted and rushed away as soon as she could.

A few minutes after seven Tom was called to Sis's bedroom where Doctor White handed him his son wrapped in a cream shawl. Sis lay smiling, propped on several pillows; Little Alice had already brushed her hair. The doctor and the nurse left, and Tom held my father, stared at him and saw that he had dark hair and blue eyes just like his. He stroked his cheek and whispered ‘My son' and ‘My hat' several times before sitting on the bed next to Sis where they admired him together. My father ignored them and went to sleep.

The new family had a few minutes alone before the two Georges came in to congratulate them and examine the baby. My father woke up as his grandfather held him on his knee and rubbed his nose gently with his own before passing him to his uncle. Young George held him at arm's length in such a way that Sis feared that either he would drop him or her son's head would fall off. With Sis's permission, Tom handed my father to Little Alice who rocked him in both arms in a manner much approved of by Sis. Throughout this ordeal my father, who was less than an hour old, gazed around wildly but made no sound.

Kate had been summoned by telegram and arrived with Kathleen in the afternoon – it had been planned that she would stay for two weeks and run the household so that Sis could rest and concentrate on her baby. Kate thought her great-nephew was ‘a true Thompson' with ‘his grandfather's piercing blue eyes' but also liked his mouth which was ‘wide and firm like Tom's'. She spent time alone with her niece, discussing the details of the birth and giving advice, particularly that Sis mustn't forget Tom; men often felt ignored when a baby arrived and this could lead to trouble. He was a good dutiful husband and she must make him, as well as the baby, feel loved.

The following Sunday Ernest and Rose returned, after a three-day journey from St Petersburg, and suggested that there should be a party to celebrate the birth, especially as – in accordance with the family's radical views, which originated with Old George – there was to be no christening. Sis and Tom liked the idea, but Kate counselled against; there should be no upheavals until mother and baby were thoroughly settled. Ernest and Rose were disappointed but set up their xylophone on the landing outside Sis's bedroom door. While Ernest struck the keys and sang a music-hall ditty called ‘There's a Baby in Our House', Rose cartwheeled and somersaulted in and out of the room. From his cot next to the bed on Sis's side, my father waved his arms and made a few noises and then went silent during the lullaby ‘Sleep Pretty Baby, Sleep', played as a xylophone duet.

For several days the family discussed names. Tom wanted to call him Thomas Clifton, his own names and those of his father; Clifton was an old family name of the Reynolds'. Sis liked Thomas and she liked Clifton even more – it was unusual and sounded distinguished – but insisted on George; the eldest males in the Thompson family were always called George. A suggestion that he should have three names was quickly dismissed; only girls and toffs and swells had more than two. Thomas George and George Thomas were considered, but Sis had decided that she liked Clifton, which meant that either Thomas or George had to go. In return for Clifton, Tom agreed to drop Thomas on the understanding that their second son be given his name. With two Georges already in the house, they decided to address their son as Clifton and put it first; it soon got shortened to Cliff or Cliffie.

* * * * *

He was a small child surrounded by adults – the second son did not appear – and he noticed things when he was very young that he remembered decades later, including his grandfather in the mellow light of candles resembling the painting of God that he saw in a Bible, his Uncle George always reading, the servant Alice being kind and very pretty and, of course, his aunt Rose walking around the house on her hands. He learned that his mother sniffed when she was annoyed and that his father sometimes came home drunk and had to be left alone while he slept on the sofa in the breakfast room.

While he was too young to be allowed out in the street on his own, Cliffie often played in the garden. One afternoon he heard a voice singing a song about someone called Sweet Rosy O'Grady. A curly-haired boy was standing on the wall at the end of the garden. When a voice from the back of the boy's house shouted ‘Stop that blasted noise,' he sang even louder, ran along the wall and began to jump up and down on the corrugated iron roof of a neighbour's hen house causing the hens to add to the din. The boy's name was Toppy Wheeler and he and Cliffie became close friends, although Sis disapproved because Toppy was ‘common' and an ‘urchin'.

Occasionally Cliffie went to Toppy's home and he was always shocked at how different it was from his own. A rusty bookbinding machine covered in dust and cobwebs took up a large part of the basement kitchen, which was also the living room; Toppy told him that his grandfather who now worked in a factory used to make his living from it. The rest of the room was filled by a big table which was always covered in gin bottles, unwashed crockery and empty tins, most of which had once contained condensed milk. There was a sour smell, like vomit. Along the passage, where the WC, whose door wouldn't shut, opened off the scullery, the smell was worse; it was caused, Toppy said, by something that was wrong with his own bowels.

Toppy's mother – he had never known his father – always dressed in black and generally sat without moving in front of a fireplace overflowing with cold cinders. Toppy said that she had ‘bad legs' and she told Cliffie that she suffered from dropsy. She usually had a bottle of gin within reach and Toppy often fetched beer for her from the Norfolk Arms. Toppy had an adult brother, who slept in the front basement room and kept the back garden well tended. Unlike his own garden which backed on to it, it was a paradise of flowers and blossom in which Cliffie loved to play.

When he was still quite young, Cliffie decided that his family was unusual; his grown-ups were always reading, or having serious discussions about people and things that sounded important – they hated two men called Salisbury and Joe Chamberlain and they liked a man called Gladstone. Cliffie knew that they were in favour of something called the rights of man and that that was also the name of a book, and that they wanted people to be nicer to a creature called the bottom dog; his uncle Ernest, in particular, talked a lot about this dog.

By the time he was five, he understood who the bottom dogs were and saw that his friend Toppy was one of them – and he became confused by the attitudes of adults. His mother was on the side of the underdog, and especially the bottom dog, but she didn't want him to be friendly with Toppy because he was a common urchin.

The adults were also confusing about God and religion. His mother made him kneel down every night and pray to ‘Gentle Jesus, meek and mild', but he heard the grown-ups saying that they didn't believe in God and his mother telling a man on the doorstep that God was a lot of nonsense because, if he existed, he would help the poor. She told the man to stop bothering her and to go away and look after the underdogs. Afterwards she said, with a sniff, that he was a silly man who had come from the church.

His
mother had an opinion about everything and argued a lot with other people, and with his father more than anyone. With him, Cliffie, she was very loving – always smiling, lifting him up and kissing him – and she was always polite and friendly to his grandfather, but with other people she sniffed a lot and was often cross. His father was different; he was friendly towards everyone and, though he had opinions, was less argumentative and hardly ever got cross. His mother was always there, but she was often busy with food or making clothes or talking to other people or bossing Little Alice; when his father wasn't at work or out at the pub, he was always ready to talk or play games. As Cliffie grew up, he asked lots of questions and found that his father, more than anyone, would answer them properly – and, if he didn't know the answer, he would get out a book called
Whitaker's Almanack
and read bits out loud.

As time went on his mother seemed to get more cross with his father and to tell him off more often. Cliffie was worried one night when he heard his mother shouting and his father murmuring apologetically. A few weeks later he heard his mother shouting again and caught the words ‘You drunken sot!' His father walked out of the house slamming the basement door. He knew that his father sometimes got drunk, but then lots of people did, especially men; he often saw them in the streets and he and his friends imitated the way they wobbled as they walked and spoke without leaving gaps between words. It was something men did; he hadn't realised that there was anything wrong about it.

Then Cliffie noticed that his father was drunk more often, on Sundays as well as Saturdays, and that a routine had developed. At lunchtime on Saturday his father would go out to the pub. In the afternoon, when Cliffie heard his key in the door, he knew that he would be drunk and would sleep on the breakfast-room sofa until dinner-time. Then he would go to the fried fish shop on the Balls Pond Road and come back with fish or saveloys, and pease pudding for dinner. After dinner he would go out to the pub again and return when it shut at 12.30, often sleeping the night on the breakfast-room sofa.

On Sunday mornings Cliffie and his father would go for long walks together – on which for a time Cliffie regularly wore his highwayman's outfit with a cape and a triangular hat. They would call at several pubs on the way and at each one his father would order ‘three fingers of Johnny Walker' and buy a cake for Cliffie to eat while he waited outside, which was never for more than a minute or so. When they got home Sunday lunch was usually ready. Though drunk, his father would manage to carve the joint and, after it was eaten, do the washing-up with the help of the Alices.

Soon after he had heard his mother call his father a drunken sot, his father gave him a cake outside a pub on a Sunday morning and told him not to tell his mother, when she asked him, as she always did, how many pubs they had visited. Cliffie realised that there
was
something wrong about getting drunk. But he loved his father and from then on enjoyed the secret side of their outings, and soon became a good liar.

* * * * *

While I was reading his account of this, Cliffie had been snoring in the room next door. Suddenly he was standing in the doorway in front of me wearing a brown and red checked dressing gown and sky blue pyjamas. His hair was sticking up at the back. ‘I saw the light on. Are you all right, old chap?'

‘Fine. Just reading about your childhood.' I looked at my watch. It was a quarter past one.

‘Oh!' He smiled and rubbed his cheeks with his palms. ‘I just put that there because it seemed to belong with my mother's diaries… How is it the second time?'

‘Great. I
love
Toppy Wheeler.'

He grinned. ‘So did I.' He looked at the carpet while nodding his head. ‘Long ago. Long, long ago.' He looked up. ‘I went to Spurs for the first time with Toppy.'

‘I know. I just read about it.' I stood up.

‘Well… don't stay up
too
late.' He went out and shut the door carefully. The door opened again, and he put his head in. ‘And don't smoke too much, or you'll end up coughing like me.' His head disappeared before I could say anything.

By the time I went back to school I had read my grandmother's diaries as far as 1897. After 1892 she wrote progressively less – there were many days and, in the later diaries, weeks – when she wrote nothing. In 1897 she wrote more fully, probably because she had something to write about.

* * * * *

For two years or so after the birth of her son, Sis felt that she had come to

love Tom. He was kind and attentive and proud of her and Cliffie. She liked the way that he put one arm around her waist while pushing Cliffie's pram with the other when they went walking in fine weather on Hackney Downs. And she was charmed when he bought a camera and set up a dark-room under the stairs, because he wasn't satisfied with the posed portraits of her and Cliffie taken at the studio in Kingsland High Street.

Occasionally he mentioned his dream of owning his own house and living in it with just her and Cliffie and a maid – and the rest of their children, who, annoyingly, had not yet begun to arrive. She deflected him by saying that Cliffie was too young for such an upheaval, but the truth was that she didn't want to spend most of her time alone with a child and a maid-servant – Tom had only Saturday afternoons and Sundays away from work; she had grown used to a home where many people, especially her father, came and went.

Eventually, in the heat and humidity of the summer of 1894, Tom's resentment surfaced. He said again that he hadn't expected to be married to her father as well as her – and this time he added in her brothers and her sister-in-law. There was a row, and a week later another, and then another, and he began to attack her character – calling her an opinionated bully and telling her how exasperating he found her unwavering belief that she was always right. And, always an enthusiastic drinker at social occasions, he started to drink at other times and to come home from work late and tipsy; there were words over late, re-heated dinners and afterwards he would retreat from her to the Norfolk Arms, returning after midnight properly drunk, singing, staggering and, sometimes a little abusive.