Vanished Years (5 page)

A strange noise fills the air and suddenly from behind the setting sun thousands of migrating geese appear. They swarm against the horizon, banking and diving, finding their bearings, before hurtling over the marsh in formations like giant ripples on a clear sea. Their honking chorus precedes them on the wind, ghostly and prehistoric. Wave after wave, these strange creatures come, long necks stretched towards the unknown goal, wings black against the sky, ploughing through the sound and light in a picture of such intense beauty that my brain empties, like a full bath, or a flushing loo. It’s the most extraordinary feeling and for a moment I’m in a new dimension. A new address. Gone is the B-list, first-world fraud of north Norfolk, Cool Britannia, EU. G8. For a moment I am just a little clam with squeaky hinges, winking from the ocean floor.

I am not on drugs.

This feeling of tiny vastness lasts only a moment because a muffled shot thuds from somewhere far out in the marsh and an unlucky dot crumples from the flock and spirals majestically to the ground, as the rest, thousands upon thousands of them, bank high and head out to sea. God is in the world. He’s a man with a gun.

The sea wall is a long triangular bank that divides the low Norfolk farmland from the marsh, and holds the high spring tides at bay like a bath. It curves away towards the horizon and the dunes of Brancaster beach two miles away. Little figures with dogs are dotted across it. Sometimes you can hear their voices close, chucked in
your face by the wind. Sometimes, if you listen very carefully, you can hear voices from the distant past.

‘Roo! Don’t run like that with your shrimping net. You’ll fall over.’

And there I suddenly am, half a century ago, that treasured shrimping net in my hand and nothing in my head but a glorious tingling expanse, as wide as the marsh, as deep as the ocean before it, and as high as the sky above, crossed only by the occasional thought, flapping like a bird out to sea and leaving no trace. I am trotting ahead of three matriarchal generations of my family: my mother first, her sister close behind; my grandmother; and further back, deep in conversation, Great-Granny M and Second Cousin Sylvia. The men are sailing round to meet us at Bird Island, which you can get to on foot when the tide is low.

How they love me, these women. If I close my eyes now, I can still feel it. But love comes with peculiar gifts and these three queens infused all the jagged facets of Empire in their lavender embrace: an empire viewed through chinks in the purdah wall. Great-Granny M brought its best part, a kind of faded romance. She travelled by boat to India in 1907 to marry a man she hardly knew, with whom she had tremendous altercations ‘but marvellous reconciliations’. Possibly she was too bohemian, coming from a large jolly family in Northumberland, for the officers’ mess in Peshawar. However, one of those marvellous reconciliations produced my grandfather, who was born there in 1908, but the altercator was struck down by a mystery illness. By 1910, Great-Granny M was back in England and already a widow. Both she and Cousin Sylvia were consigned by penury to a life touring the north of Italy, or staying for extended periods in the draughty houses of their wealthier connections.

This kind of existence was seen to be bordering on vagrancy in Edwardian England where a forwarding address at American Express in Genoa was seen as a failing rather than a falling on hard times. But hundreds of small sepia photographs left me by Cousin Sylvia reveal an enchanted life in Bordighera and Portofino, while the First World War raged across northern France. Young girls in white, arms
around each other’s waists, Great-Granny M and her sister laughing in their floppy hats, crumbling villas swamped in ivy, outdoor productions of Shakespeare, and tables under trees laid for lunch. The pictures turn to colour after the Second World War, but in fact their world turned black and white, and Great-Granny M ended her days in a bedsitting room in Exeter – but all this ‘failure’ gave her a human quality, which, quite frankly, the rest of my family lacked. While they were busy fitting in, she pottered about with bird’s nest hair and enormous, low-hanging jugs tucked under her arms like an Ealing Comedy medium. She was inquisitive and perceptive. One day she heard me banging on a piano and insisted that I ‘was playing a tune’. The rest is history!

Granny, on the other hand, was Empire under siege, small, neat and viceregal. Duty came before everything with Granny and she was ready to go down with the sinking ship if necessary, sensibly attired with a hairstyle that never once changed in seventy years. It was her job to make sure that Grandpa’s world was organised according to his plan and their home, the Old Rec, was operated with naval precision. Even if the British Empire was crumbling, the sun never set on it at the Old Rec.

Granny was quite frosty and formidable in her dealings with the outside world, but secretly I think she was a romantic. Her bedroom was pink, with two little pink beds for her and Grandpa, and her drawing room was a marvellous emerald green, in a house that was otherwise more or less a gentleman’s residence, where rationing and war hung in the air and the family VCs nestled by Granny’s heavily varnished Ruysdaels on the verdigris walls. She had a pretty face with sparkling eyes and I worshipped her. With us she let down her defences and effortlessly entered the simple world of childhood. When our parents were away we would be sent to stay with her, and at night she would read us stories until my grandfather’s voice could be heard booming from the hall, calling for her to join him.

‘You’d better go, Granny,’ my brother would say with sympathy.

At the head of the line came my mother and the collapse of
Empire. Her generation buried its head in the sand, grasped desperately at the values of the past and nursed the hangover of rationing; debbing and standing up when grown-ups came in and calling everybody sir, as the two-hundred-year party wound down and a cold crisp dawn came up on the welfare state.

My mother met my father in Malta, where he was stationed after the war and where Grandpa was a captain in the navy. It was a fairy-tale backdrop to a military
Romeo and Juliet
. The fleet was in Valletta harbour. A band played a song called ‘Sugarbush’ in a nightclub every evening where the fishing fleet – sisters and daughters of soldiers and sailors – trawled for a husband, presumably entranced by the rather uncomfortable life of an army wife. (The Queen was a naval officer’s wife at the time, living in Malta, and has since claimed it to be the happiest time of her life.)

My father lived in a honey-coloured house in the walled city of Medina, with a balcony full of geraniums. He was rigidly conventional, ambitious, suave and without any semblance of a ‘connection’ that might inspire Granny and Grandpa to part with their eldest child. However, my mother was headstrong, extremely pretty, and had already thrown down the gauntlet to poor Granny by becoming a Catholic as a teenager. She and Aunt Katherine had been sent to a boarding school run by nuns in Sussex called Les Oiseaux. The Birds. It was wartime. Granny left the two girls on the first day of term in their new converted stately home and walked off down the long tree-lined drive, seven miles to the nearest station, to catch a series of trains back to Northumberland.

My poor mother got a brief and blinding crush on a nun called Mother Emanuel (the Sapphic gene was to lie dormant for another generation), but it was soon artfully transferred to Baby Jesus and conversion to the incomprehensible religion was only a matter of time. Mummy was no intellectual, but she enjoyed singing along to the Latin Mass, and like many British Catholics was absolutely horrified much later when the liturgy was translated into English, and she could see for herself what a lot of old twaddle the whole thing was. She
ingeniously consoled herself by substituting the pill for the communion host, and everlasting life for birth control. But I get ahead of myself.

Sailing round Skolt Head as I am skipping down the sea wall with these women are the three men who completed the construction of my interior world. Grandpa, Uncle David and Daddy. These people are going to try to teach me to sail.

At the helm of his treasured sailing boat, the
Wayfarer
, sat Grandpa. He had been aboard the
Ark Royal
when the Germans torpedoed it. Probably he had supervised the abandoning of the ship in the same way he presided over the dining room table at the Old Rec. Practical, humorous and rather withering, he loved Granny and golf, Polly his parrot and sailing, but not much else. He had been brought up and worshipped by large women: Great-Granny M and her enormous sister Aunt Lottie. If he had found Great-Granny M’s love smothering, he had pruned Granny’s passion into a pretty box hedge behind which he stood in his dealings with the outside world.

He found his children quite irritating, and his grandchildren were definitely to be seen and not heard. Occasionally one of us said something he found amusing and, immensely gratified, we vainly tried to repeat the joke, at which point his interest snapped off like an electric light.

Neither did my father particularly convince him in those early days. Daddy left the army at the beginning of the sixties and pursued his dreams in the City, in a stiff collar and a top hat, making a fortune along the way, indulging in the gin-and-Jag existence of the permissive world that my grandfather found frankly appalling. But time is the great healer, and by the time he died, in the same room in which I was born, Grandpa and Daddy had long ago forgotten their ancient reservations.

Now I am sitting in a car with my grandmother in the middle of the marsh, watching another swarm of geese fly above us across the pink and white sky. She is ninety-six. I am forty-eight. She is five feet. I am seven feet. We are in a small car.

She no longer lives at the Old Rec. It was sold after Grandpa died two years ago. Now she lives alone in a small house near by, and I have come to visit. We are more or less strangers. The wind rattles the windows, the sea creeps and gurgles up the track towards the car, and we are bathed in the unearthly glow of another glorious sunset. Granny is ageless in it, translucent, a child’s face impossibly lined. Her eyes glow at the explosion of nature hurtling through the sky above, at the planet rolling slowly over, at the evening star and the moon flying up, dragging the North Sea towards us, in a blanket of fog for the night. A veil of mist already curls around the church at Deepdale, tucking Grandpa into his grave for the night (hospital corners) and creeping over the wall and up the lawn towards the derelict Old Rec.

Sitting still in all this movement, the two of us, side by side, just the handbrake between us and a gulf of time. Somewhere in our eyes the early intimacy flickers, like a ripple at the bottom of a deep well, but we both know that too much has happened for us ever to be able to find our way back to it. However, Granny is philosophical, to say the least; too old, possibly, to care that much about the hiccoughs of youth, or the scars inflicted on ancient battlegrounds. She tells marvellous stories, as the light fades theatrically around us: of Lancasters flying over a marsh covered in tin foil on their way to bomb Dresden, of the anxiety of never knowing where Grandpa was during the war, and then of always knowing where he was after it was over. The noises of horses’ hooves when straw was laid on the streets of London during a winter freeze, and the summer day she met Grandpa on the beach at Cromer. She expresses herself in a forgotten idiom, delightful to my ears, conjuring up the lost world of all my household gods, Mitford, Greene and Waugh.

‘You were such a solitary child,’ Granny says dreamily. ‘Very quiet. You always played alone. You hated birthday parties. Now I read in Hello! that you’re the life and soul of every party. What happened?’

‘Life,’ I reply. ‘Life changes one.’

She looks at me with a faint smile, and shrewd eyes. I know what
she’s thinking. Life, including two wars, never changed anyone else in her family.

We sit in silence for a moment. I suddenly feel vulnerable, small, in the certain world of my forebears.

‘Maybe I’m having a mid-term crisis, Granny,’ I say.

‘Goodness. Aren’t you a bit young?’

‘Fifty, nearly!’

‘So you are! I sometimes wonder if Grandpa had one when he left the Admiralty.’

It is nearly dark and the shooting begins far out on the marsh.

‘Ducks are not very nice to their relations,’ she says. ‘Has the season begun?’

W
hen I left you, dear reader, in 2001 at the end of my last book, I was escaping America, boarding a plane for São Paulo. I was forty-two years old. My brief career as a Hollywood siren had spluttered to a standstill, but a carefree holiday on Ipanema beach was also brought to a shuddering halt by a phone call from my lawyer in LA – Barry Hirsch – to say that the
National Enquirer
(an American scandal magazine) had photos of me having sex in a toilet in Miami and were going to print them in a week.

‘A toilet!’ said I, trying to summon up a bit of gravitas, but my voice cracked and it came out like Lady Bracknell. Electricity shimmered across my body and minuscule beads of sweat oozed from my nerve endings, dripping down the hairs on my arms, which stood waving with electricity in the air-conditioning. It was during moments like this that cancer cells, shot with adrenalin, divided and ruled. The kind of moment that every celebrity dreads, but at the same time taunts. Caught on camera smoking crack. Oops. There goes my skincare line! I looked out of my window twenty floors up and a terrible feeling of despair settled on me.

Sugar Loaf Mountain glimmered through the haze. A cable car laboured towards its peak, a silhouette against the pink sky. It was nearly dusk and lights were already winking to life across the bay, but it was virtual, untouchable from up here. All the noise and bustle of the crowded beach below was a dumb show, a million bronzed insects in coloured shorts crashing into the silent waves. The only noise was the unearthly breath of recycled air, my own heartbeat and the compressed voice of Barry flying into the room on dark vibrations from Century City.