The Blue Touch Paper (3 page)

Like many places in Britain after the Second World War, once the sandbags and rusting wire had been removed, St Leonards revealed itself as spectacularly run-down, a vista of crumbling brick and weeping wet windows, lashed by rain from the Channel. A sort of roiling mist seemed year-round to hold the town in its grip. The model village, the chief tourist attraction above the pier, reeked of rot and damp timber. The pier itself was a rusting wreck, occasionally painted but offering no particular attraction at its end to draw the visitor out onto its soaking splintered floorboards. The sea was, on most days, slate grey flecked with turbulent white. The immediate tide of prosperity which was in the next few decades to spread out from favoured London on the wings of colour supplements, restoring and gentrifying nearly every town and village in sight, was not destined to reach the Cinque Ports and their coastal confederation
for at least sixty years, and even then intermittently. The word ‘conservation' never travelled to the south coast. The Aga never took its relentless advance this far. Buildings were left standing not because they were valuable evidence of the past, but because everyone was too poor to repair them. If you visit Hastings, St Leonards and Bexhill today, you will find only a thin smear of trendiness – pockets of painters, architects and designers, loving the air and loving the sea, going into raptures over the choice little eruptions of modernist architecture – laid over a respectable poverty which has persisted alarmingly. The period costume designer Shirley Russell told me she weekended in Bexhill because the posthumous throw-outs at jumble sales were the cheapest and most dated in the country. There was nothing more artistically opportune for Shirley than a Bexhill death. The average age of the inhabitants of these three towns is still stubbornly high.

I cannot now imagine what it was like for my mother, with one daughter born and a son on the way, to be transplanted from a sheltered upbringing to a town where she knew almost no one, where most people were far older than her, and to be expected henceforth to bear all the burden of family alone. My father had been behaving as sailors do, and conducting an on-board affair with a woman none of us ever met. My sister had even been warned by Mum to ready herself for divorce. One of the nuns at Margaret's Anglican convent school took care to instruct all the girls to do everything they could to keep their parents together. This was advice which, even at the time, Margaret thought particularly pointless to an eight-year-old child. What on earth was she meant to do? Scream?

I don't even know if my father was around when I was born at the Briars Nursing Home, a Gothic Victorian pile, in 1947.
On the very same day, 5 June, the Americans announced the Marshall plan, making me, as so many others, a child of enlightened post-war European reconstruction. I have a clear memory of being pushed around in an enormous blue pram, and I am able to date everything that happened to me in St Leonards by knowing that we moved five miles along the coast to Bexhill in 1952. We did once possess lurid colour film taken on my father's 8 mm camera of Margaret and me playing outside our flat. I can see the images now – Margaret in a candy-striped school dress, the colour of seaside rock, and me in baggy grey worsted shorts, playing with a couple of Polish twins whose oddly spoken refugee father every day wore the same heavy blue striped suit and pebble glasses over his scarecrow figure. I couldn't understand a word he said. Here was a man – there were many such in my youth – who would carry evidence of the war with him for the rest of his life. But some time in the 1970s, just at the point when it might have been possible to transfer such indelible primary images to video tape, my father, retired and finally living at home, with no warning, destroyed them. ‘I thought I'd clear out the attic,' he said, telling us proudly that he had also gone on to destroy every Dinky toy, puppet, board game, rail-track and piece of writing from our childhoods. ‘I didn't think you'd want them.'

I saw my paternal grandfather, Alan Hare, who lived a mile away, only when we went there for tea on Sundays. In his thick chalk-striped suit, watch-chain in place, hearing aid up to full, he seemed kindly enough, and keen to teach me the game of cribbage, which involved moving the matchsticks he had used to light his pipe up and down a board of holes, while his wife, Rose, in cloche hat and beige stockings, served us tea. I felt I had a reasonable grasp of the procedures. It was only when I
was in my teens that my mother asked me if I had never been suspicious about the fact that my grandfather won every week. I told her that I had always assumed he was better at the game than a four-year-old. ‘No,' my mother said. ‘He cheated.'

As an adolescent it amazed me that a grown man could derive any emotional satisfaction from beating a child at cribbage, and what's more, by doing so dishonestly. Childhood is like going into the jungle without knowing what animals you will meet there. Evolution may have given you some elementary sense to recognise a leopard as a leopard, and a snake as a snake. But recognising dangerous animals is very different from knowing how they're going to behave. Only experience teaches you that. As a child you're at everyone's mercy.

The routine of the early years was established. My father's voyages, though irregular, took up eleven months of the year. So for that time, he would be away, sailing through the Suez canal, to Aden, to Bombay, to Fremantle and thence to Sydney, on a liner called the SS
Mooltan
. While he was at sea, we lived austerely, my mother scrimping on a budget and reminding us every day of what we could not afford. She was what's called a good plain cook, salad being at all times undressed, and meat unsauced. There were a lot of stovie potatoes. When my father's ship returned to Tilbury, Mum would disappear for a couple of days' decompression without us, and then reappear with my freshly suntanned father, who would unroll a rubber band of copious five-pound notes – he preferred to carry cash – and take us for unimagined treats. He would rub his hands together as he ordered rump steak for us all in the Greek-Cypriot Star Café on the seafront in Hastings. He would divert us with stories of the cabaret singers he had seen on his travels. He took particular pleasure in tall dusky women like Kay Starr and
Lena Horne, all of whom sang hip music in a low range. Margaret and I were expected to bask in his largesse. We were all too aware that his abundance contrasted with the life he left us all to lead in his absence. Eleven months of austerity yielded to one month of razzmatazz.

The most exhilarating moments came when the boat was in dry dock, and Dad would summon the whole family up for a few days' visit on board, while he carried out some practical duties as purser. For years, ships like this had serviced the empire, conveying generations of administrators and cricketers to far-flung places. Way into the 1960s they served as the last remaining islands of nineteenth-century British snobbery: deck quoits and dressing for dinner. My sister and I were suitably awed when we were told that on every voyage there were eight chefs from Goa with no other job but to cook curry. My father had a dedicated servant from the same Portuguese part of India. Fernandez was an elegant sweet-natured man, in white jacket and dark trousers. He spent an astonishing amount of his time on his knees on the thick carpet either unlacing my father's shoes or polishing them. Conversation with him was conducted entirely in pidgin. ‘You go getty my shoes, me wanty quick,' Dad would say, and off Fernandez would run. One exchange, when my father was dissatisfied with the meal put before us, seemed especially memorable. ‘Me wanty curry hot. Me no wanty spicy hot, me wanty heated hot.' ‘Yessir, me getty hot hot, not spicy hot.' The two of them could carry on in this vein for hours.

The ship, huge and mysterious, allowed me to indulge my favourite pastime of getting lost. SS
Mooltan
had been built by Harland and Wolff in 1923. It weighed twenty thousand tons and carried over a thousand passengers. All the furniture was ridiculously weighty, in order to cope with the swell. The floral-patterned
plump armchairs were attached to the floor with metal hooks and eyes. It took all a child's strength to open a connecting door before it slammed back to secure the long corridors. Even the sight of the vast, empty dining room, in which, my father assured me, passengers were free, if they so wished, to order roast beef, eggs and lobster for breakfast, fired up my idea of what it might one day be like to be adult. I was unhealthily driven by fantasy. Alone at night, I would imitate my father, standing with a glass in my hand and demanding another pink gin and a fresh packet of Senior Service. Miming furiously I would say out loud, ‘I'll have one more cigarette, I think, before I go to bed.' The chance to run around empty decks and break into cabins to test out luxurious sheets and eiderdowns gave my imagination a free playground more lavish than anything I knew at home. I came to know the ship inside out and to love it for its unbridled sense of adulthood. Nothing yet intimated to me that I would never take a sea voyage in my life.

Something of my father's attitude to me crystallised on the morning of my fifth birthday. With his sailing dates a lottery, it was rare for him to be around on this, for me, the most important day of the year. Just before breakfast, he got up, put my mother on the back of his Vespa and told me that they would not be staying for the day itself because they were going scootering in northern France. My sister and I could stay home and our grandmother could look after us. He said they had thought of warning me in advance that they were going to be away for the big day, but had decided it would be less hurtful to get up, give me a present and leave. The shock, he said, would be less. My mother was definitely ashamed, my father not. Before they disappeared off into the distance, Dad presented the clinching argument. ‘It was much the most convenient day for me.'

A wiser child would have protected himself by adjusting his needs. But for a long time I allowed my father's absence of interest in me to determine my own emotional life. Another time, after a bath, when I rushed back down to kiss him goodnight, he greeted me with the words, ‘Oh God, don't say that boy's out of bed again.' Unsurprisingly, I have always been resistant to literature which portrays childhood as a paradise from which we fall. My own experience suggested this view was false and sentimental. Even as a child, J. M. Barrie and Lewis Carroll meant nothing to me, and they mean less today.
Swallows and Amazons
was anathema. I have been Hobbit-hating from Day One. I never bothered myself with film or theatre specifically aimed at children. Even in Bexhill I had discerned that, as a child, things not intended for you are much more rewarding than things that are. So what if you don't understand them? That's how you learn. Although I could hardly have articulated it, nor still less known what lay ahead, I had begun to suspect that a child's radar was often sharper than an adult's, principally, it turns out, because the child lacks the equipment to process the information from that radar. For me, childhood is not defined by innocence but by bewilderment. I remember thinking all the time, ‘Someone tell me what's going on.' How could I know what I was meant to do, when I had no clue what anyone else was up to?

In 1952 we made our move out of the flat in St Leonards and into the leafy semi-detached in Bexhill, a town which was later improbably used by Alfonso Cuarón as the last location for those surviving Armageddon in a film called
Children of Men
. My sister has always suspected our parents went there in order to cement their marriage, to make sure there was an investment which together they would have an interest in protecting. They chose
a street which backed onto the Downs, and in which everyone lived in houses all constructed by the same local builder. It was almost a parody of suburbia, and, like new suburbanites seeking to pass a national examination, we bought a television set in time for numbers of neighbours to come round to see the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in black and white on a tiny screen in the corner of what seems also, in retrospect, to have been a tiny living room. Our house was packed with people staring at a snowy blizzard of imperial imagery, cooked up by Victorians and clothed in music and drapery to suggest a seamlessness in history which the real thing lacks. Peanuts were passed round all day, alongside the filter-tipped cigarettes which my mother favoured but never inhaled. These cigarettes were retrieved from individual pipe-shaped containers within a revolving silver globe, representing the shape of the world. When, in the 1980s, well-born intellectuals deployed the word ‘suburban' as a term of abuse against Margaret Thatcher, I always bridled. I thought there were a thousand reasons to oppose our most self-admiring prime minister, but not for her background. That background was not so different from my own.

How do I begin to explain the level of repression obtaining in Newlands Avenue, where to hang your washing out on a Sunday or to fail to polish your car on a Saturday invited – well, what? The opprobrium of your neighbours? Or maybe just the imagined opprobrium, which could well, in the latent hysteria of the silent street, be twice as bad? What exactly was everyone frightened of? As an adult, reading Kenneth Tynan's diaries, I came across his characterisation of the craven drama critic of the
Sunday Telegraph
, John Gross, whom he described as seeming ‘to be in fear of being blackballed from some nameless club of which all aspired to be members'. That phrase ‘nameless club'
shocked me to my roots, because it so described the threat hanging over the life we had known in Bexhill-on-Sea. James Agate had once summed Bexhill up as ‘bleak and purse-proud'. That's how it was. It was not a particularly Masonic town, and it had no dominant institutions. The churches and the golf club did not seem powerful, nor did the Rotarians and Past Rotarians hold the town in an iron grip. You couldn't even say there was a strong social hier­archy or clique, a group of favoured names who held sway. If there were aristocrats, we never met them. But nevertheless somehow everyone in the town of twenty- four thousand white people and one black knew full well by messages which came only through the air that you might be damned if you broke the rules. Worse, you might be doubly damned because you never knew the rules in the first place.