Time to Be in Earnest (2 page)

I am writing this sitting in an almost empty first-class compartment of the 3:32 train from Newton Abbot to Paddington, and staring out at the red Devon countryside, now blurred and seeming to dissolve in rain; even the eagerly awaited stretch of coast at Dawlish and Teignmouth failed in its usual magic.

But it has been a happy weekend despite the continual rain today. I have been at Paignton to help celebrate the Golden Wedding of Dick and Mary Francis. Their son Felix arranged it, at the hotel where they have stayed annually with their family for over forty years, and about sixty relations and friends gathered to rejoice with Dick and Mary on their wonderfully happy and productive partnership of half a century. Fortunately the rain stopped yesterday for the main event, the evening dinner-and-dance, and we were able to wander out from the dining-room to the terrace and drink our champagne looking out over Tor Bay.

The hotel is typical of the kind I relish, a mock castle designed by a Victorian colonel in an excess of either alcoholic or imperial zeal, but with comfortable rooms and a staff, most of whom have been at the hotel for years, who give the impression of enjoying their work and actually liking the guests. The portrait in oils of the founder-architect hangs on the stairs, painted, I suspect, by himself. I was given a room with a balcony overlooking the sea and was able to sleep with the windows open, listening to the surf and the call of the gulls.

On Saturday morning, sitting in the lounge, Mary passed round her photograph album with the wedding pictures, and how they brought back memories of wartime weddings! The cleverly contrived dresses—butter muslin was a popular expedient—since coupons could not be spared, nor was material available for a more traditional dress; the huge bouquets, the small hats of the women guests with the eye-veils, the suits
we wore with their over-tailored shoulders, the groom and best man in uniform. It was interesting trying to identify the guests from their photographs of fifty years earlier, the smooth, eager young faces untouched by the depredations of war or the vicissitudes of peace. Only Dick and Mary, smiling into the camera, seem hardly altered.

On Saturday afternoon I took advantage of a break in the weather and walked alone into the little town, its main street jostling with residents doing their weekly shopping, holiday-makers crowding the shops selling the usual holiday and beach ephemera. But I did find one antique shop and bought a small Doulton jug and bowl as mementos of the weekend.

As a writer I like small seaside towns best in autumn or winter. There is something nostalgic and slightly melancholy as well as depressing about the slow death of the season that makes the seaside at the end of summer a suitable setting for a crime novel; the windswept esplanade, the last tight shrivelled buds on the rosebushes in carefully planted municipal gardens, the amusement arcades locked and deserted, the peeling paintwork and deserted shelters. I used such a town in one scene in
Devices and Desires
when the serial killer, the Whistler, kills himself in a seedy hotel, the decline of the year symbolizing his pathetic unlamented end. For me, setting, character, narrative are always interdependent.

I seldom have a birthday without thinking back to that date which none of us can remember, at least not consciously; the moment of birth. Mine took place at home, as most births did in those days, at 164 Walton Street, Oxford. I was a much wanted first child, arriving three years after my parents married when my mother had had medical treatment to make conception possible. My father would have much preferred a boy but was, I think, grateful to have a child, and to hope for a son in the future. It was a long and difficult labour and the doctor was present—unusual in those days when the family wasn’t rich. I must at some time have been told the time of my birth, but I have forgotten it and, as those present are now dead, it is one of those facts which I shall never know. I can, however, recall my mother saying that a friend had baked and iced a cake for my christening but that the doctor and my father had between them eaten it all during the long night hours of waiting. This suggests that I was probably born in the early morning. I occasionally find myself
wishing that I knew the actual hour, an irrelevance which can only be a form of egotism.

Memory casts a capricious and undiscriminating light. The high peaks may stand brightly illuminated—love, marriage, childbirth, bereavement—but the beam ranges with a fitful radiance over the dark and lost plateaux between. My first memory is of an incident when I was just learning to walk. Perhaps it is this which caused the beam to rest, otherwise there is nothing remarkable about it. I must have been under eighteen months old and my mother had taken me to Winchester to stay with her parents. My grandfather, Edward Hone, was Headmaster of the Choir School, later to become the Pilgrims’ School, and the boys were taught in a special classroom block in the garden. Having broken free of my mother, I toddled into the classroom to be met by a burst of laughter from the boys. I remember that my grandfather was sitting at a high desk in front of them and came over at once to take me by the hand and pass me over to my mother, who came fluttering through the door full of apologies. Mother always spoke of her childhood as a happy time, but I’m not sure how far this expressed reality. She was a woman who believed in appropriate emotions and I don’t think it would have occurred to her to criticize either of her parents or the lives that they led.

The only information I have about the Choir School comes from
A History of the Pilgrims’ School
written by John Crook, published in 1981, which was sent to me a few years ago by one of my uncles. I find it interesting, not only because of the light it sheds on my mother’s early life, but because the school must have been typical of not very distinguished boarding schools of its time. My grandfather took over the position of Schoolmaster of the Choristers in 1887. His predecessor was a William Southcott, who was required to resign following a dispute about the voice trials during which he and the organist came to blows. Colebrook House was certainly a beautiful place in which to be brought up. It was, and is, a large sixteenth-century building facing the east end of the Cathedral with a mill stream flowing through its gardens. My grandfather taught the Choristers, virtually unaided except for one assistant, and on occasion also sang solos in the Choir—he had a beautiful tenor voice. My grandmother ran the boarding school. Edward Hone received £15 for each Chorister and £50 as a housemaster’s allowance, to be reduced by £5 for every non-Chorister boarder he received over the number of ten. It seems to have been a complex and far from satisfactory arrangement and
money was certainly in short supply. However, things became a little easier in 1905 when Colebrook House was made an all-boarding school and my grandfather’s allowance was considerably increased.

Even so, life at Colebrook House seems to have been tough. The boys were woken at 7 o’clock in the morning throughout the year and were required to wash in cold water. Breakfast at 8 o’clock consisted of thick slices of bread and dripping, known as “toke,” though occasionally there was fish paste or marmalade. The only morning on which a cooked breakfast was provided was on the last day of term when the boys would be given a boiled egg before their journey home. My grandfather was obviously anxious that the school should emulate more famous preparatory schools and the boys wore Eton suits, mortarboards and carefully blacked boots. They would make their way in a crocodile to the Cathedral, first of all for practice and then for Mattins, which lasted for three-quarters of an hour and was followed by morning school until 1 o’clock.

Lunch was apparently more satisfying than breakfast. It was taken in the elegant dining-room at the back of the house. My grandfather would carve, my grandmother and their two daughters would hand round the vegetables. Perhaps because it was a meal shared with the family, Mr. Crook describes it as “tolerable.” Lunch was followed by afternoon school until 3:45, unless the weather was fine when games would be played instead. Evensong was at 4 o’clock and there was then a further choir practice for the boys until teatime. This, like breakfast, was a miserable affair, consisting of tea and “toke” with black treacle, which had spread all over the plate on which it was served before the boys arrived. (This was the practice my mother continued during our childhood. Breakfast was always bread, butter, treacle and tea, and the treacle would be spooned on to our plates the night before so that by the morning it had completely covered the plate up to the rim. In childhood we only had an egg occasionally, sometimes on a Sunday morning.)

Bedtime was early for the boys at Colebrook House. My mother or her sister, my Aunt Marjorie, would take a dish of “toke” and a jug of cocoa to the schoolroom, after which insubstantial supper the boys would go up to the dormitories. As one might expect, Sunday was a particularly busy day for the Choristers. The first service would be 11 o’clock Mattins occasionally followed by a Choral Communion. The most important of the Sunday services, however, was Evensong at 3:30, and this included a lengthy anthem. It was to be many years before Holy Communion became the main service at the Cathedral.

The boys were inevitably educationally disadvantaged by the demands of the Cathedral services, but my grandfather was a conscientious schoolmaster and did his best. I don’t know whether I actually remember what he looked like, or whether the image firmly fixed in my mind comes from a single photograph. In this he looks very like Edward VII: heavily built, bearded, bespectacled. He was a good teacher of English and was genuinely musical, but he was a severe schoolmaster and it was good for the boys that this severity was tempered by his assistant, Percy Spillett. I remember my mother speaking of him with great affection. He seems to have been one of those gentle and erratic schoolmasters, typical of his period: a bachelor, tall, thin, moustached, scholarly, soft-voiced and with a passion for palaeolithic artefacts. Sunday afternoon walks over St. Catherine’s Hill were a hunt for the prehistoric treasures which never came to light. Between them Edward Hone and Percy Spillett seem to have given the boys as good a general education as was possible under the circumstances.

Both my grandfathers were schoolmasters and both were fond of music. My paternal grandfather, Walter James, was also a good linguist who for some years worked for the British and Foreign Bible Society. I know little about him, but I do remember visiting him and his wife when I was about ten and they lived in a small terraced house in South-sea. He had by then retired, but was an organist at the Garrison Church. Some of the anthems he wrote for the choir were published, but none, as far as I know, has survived. I think he was largely self-educated; certainly I can remember a framed diploma in the hall which I think was awarded by London University after he had taken an external degree. I have always believed that he was Welsh, although I have never been told so. Certainly I see his, and indeed my father’s, face very clearly when I am in the Principality. My father was born in Reading, but I have no idea what my grandfather was doing there at the time. Some of his brothers and one sister were certainly born overseas, and I am told that for some years Walter James acted as tutor to the children of the Rajah of Sarawak.

My father never spoke of his childhood but I don’t think it was easy. Money seems to have always been short. Certainly he left school at the first possible time and entered the Patents Office, I think at the age of sixteen. He is an example of the waste of intelligence which was tolerated during the first half of this century. Just before the First World War he must have had a job at Winchester, either in the Patents Office, which seems unlikely, or in the local office of the Inland Revenue. It was in
Winchester that he met my mother. This isn’t surprising as he was exceptionally fond of music and would naturally have attended the Cathedral services. They became engaged during the war and married, I think in 1917 when he was a young officer in the Machine-gun Corps. Mother was twenty-five, an age at which, in those days, a girl was beginning to feel that she might miss her chance of marriage.

I think the days of the engagement must have been some of their happiest. A few years ago I found a photograph of my father sitting with his troop, a slight, good-looking young man with his hair parted down the middle as was then customary, the three stripes of a sergeant on his sleeve. On the back is written, “To my darling girl, a better one next time.” There must at one time have been love, or what both of them believed to be love; but they were ill-suited. My mother was sentimental, warm-hearted, vivacious, impulsive and not intelligent and, although she had a rich contralto voice and loved the church music which had been part of her childhood, she neither understood nor loved music as deeply as did my father. He was intelligent, reserved, sarcastic, deeply distrustful of sentimentality, fastidious and with little ability to show affection. I don’t think he had known much demonstrative love in his childhood and what a child doesn’t receive he can seldom later give. I think the first years were happy and became more so when I arrived, the first longed-for child. I was followed eighteen months later by my sister Monica and, eighteen months after her birth, the hoped-for son arrived. He was christened Edward, after Edward Hone.

Children live in occupied territory. The brave and the foolhardy openly rebel against authority, whether harsh or benign. But most tread warily, outwardly accommodating themselves to alien mores and edicts while living in secret their iconoclastic and subversive lives.

I think that all three of us realized quite early in life that we were the children of an unhappy marriage. Of course it lasted; marriages, however unhappy, did last in those days. Divorce was still regarded not only as a disgrace, but as a social failure, and for my mother, deeply religious, it would have been a sin. But there were more material considerations. It was just not possible for my father to support two households, and my mother—untrained except for her nursing experience in the First World War which was, of course, voluntary—had absolutely no means of earning a living for herself and three children. These were inhibitions which applied to all except the rich and those powerful enough to defy convention.