Bad Blood (23 page)

I was privately contemptuous and disapproving of the very idea of performance (my stage fright shamed me, but that didn't mean that acting mattered). I had hundreds and hundreds of lines of verse by heart, which I paraded past my mind's eye as though in a way they were mine. Reading was already a kind of theatre, ‘live' theatre was its literal-minded travesty. In fact, I read plays in private, too, not only set-book Shakespeare and Marlowe, but Shaw, Synge, Eugene O'Neill and even Coward and Terence Rattigan, whose works I borrowed from the library and who struck me – the last two – as the last word in smartness. I thought them quite unperformable. Their worldly characters were
ineffably
chic, they suffered from some kind of doomed yearning for perfection.

Ennui was a word that fascinated me, all the more because I had no idea how to pronounce it. Its foreignness was not French but fantastical, it belonged to the elsewhere I roamed in my avid, aimless reading. For although I read indiscriminately I edited out prosaic or realistic stuff, I didn't want to meet
lifelike
characters, I preferred characters who carried off their unreality with conviction. All my favourite books were poetical even when they weren't in verse and their authors – Rafael Sabatini, Rider Haggard – sounded like invented heroes of romance themselves. Not that I was very interested in who wrote what.

Books didn't belong to a particular time or place of origin, their contents all mingled and transmigrated. They were all one book, really – and indeed, I owned a book that could stand
for all the rest, inherited from the vicarage and exiled from the public bookcase in the open-plan living-room because it had lost its spine and covers. This was
Poetry for the Young
, a fat School Prize anthology published in 1881 and much reprinted, a treasury of heroical and sentimental verses culled mostly from the Romantics and their Victorian followers, particularly Mrs Hemans and Longfellow.
Poetry for the Young
had murky engravings of castles by moonlight, shipwrecks and birds – the only form of wildlife ethereal enough to carry its message, for although it was packed with rhymes about nature's busy doings (storms, torrents, tides) it was absolutely silent on animal appetites and contrived to confuse love with waving goodbye to one's native land. Its real subject was death: death in infancy, death in the far corners of empire, death at sea on the way there – and just plain old death. Death was
Poetry for the Young
's great prize. Dying, anyone was elevated to the condition of poetry: Blake's chimney sweep, Byron's gladiator ‘Butcher'd to make a Roman holiday', the boy on the burning deck, the minstrel boy, Somebody's Darling, Ozymandias, Poe's Lenore, Lord Ullin's daughter who rhymed with water, the Forsaken Merman, the Solitary Reaper, Simon Lee the old huntsman, Gray's mute inglorious Milton, and Lucy like a violet by a mossy stone even while she lived, which wasn't long. This world was ‘the bivouac of life', the mere ‘suburbs of eternity', in Longfellow's memorable phrases. The last words in
Poetry for the Young
went to Shelley: ‘O World, O life, O time, On whose last steps I climb . . .' Bliss. Ennui.

I'm digressing, wandering away from my mother's world – but that was always exactly the point of the books, you could escape into them. No one followed after to investigate my reading habits, for although my mother carefully preserved the vicarage books and even dusted them occasionally, she never
opened one, not ever. She read only play scripts from French's,
Woman's Own
and the reports on local amateur-dramatic events in the
Whitchurch Herald
. She had resolutely turned her back on reading when she was betrayed by Grandpa – it was as if he lurked inside the books, along with his promiscuity, duplicity and self-indulgence. Obviously this wasn't spelled out. In theory my mother thought reading a good thing, but you could tell from the small shudder and sniff with which she said that she didn't have time for it that she was keeping herself pure. And I knew that she was right, the books were haunted. The bookcases not only had a bad case of vicarage woodworm, endangering the new council-house three-piece suite, they were a graveyard, you could bury yourself in a book and slip away into anti-social, delinquent ennui. Grandma may have lived with us in the flesh, mumbling sponge cake and wheezing, but Grandpa was still around too. He emerged like a genie from a bottle whenever I communed with the dandyish and despairing characters in his leftover library. Didn't my mother wring her hands and say that he'd spoiled me?

I was so secure of my own monopoly on transgression that I simply didn't see that when she went on the stage
she
was his girl too. But the large ladies certainly saw him in her. The WI seemed so wholesome, matronly and respectable that it never occurred to me to make the connection – even though I had the example of Nurse Burgess before me every day – but in fact more than one of those tweedy spinsters had had an affair with Grandpa. They saw in my mother's acting talent a glimmer of his bitter, needy eloquence, no doubt. Just when I thought I had his ghost safely solipsised, there he was, true to form, still philandering in others' memories. I identified him with the books with the blacked-out titles, there (I thought) I had him to myself.

The only person who knew what was in the books was my mother's brother, Uncle Bill, and he affected to despise them. He said that fiction was a waste of time, the opium of the bourgeoisie, that you had to get a real grip on the facts of life. He had books of his own and even a shelf of his own in the bookcase, since he was always flitting from one bedsit to another and liked to travel light. There he lined up books on evolution and fat teach-yourself tomes with no-nonsense titles like ‘Mathematics for the Million' and ‘Science for the Citizen'. However, he'd also added quite a few volumes to Grandpa's collection of unrealities:
Gone with the Wind
,
Forever Amber
,
King's Row
,
The Werewolf of Paris
among them. These I read too, enchanted by their news of forbidden love, civil wars, corsetry through the ages, incest and necrophilia. Uncle Bill's rejected collection of escapist classics looked and felt different from vicarage books. This was not only because you could read their spines, but also because he'd bought them in Canada, where he was stationed at the end of the war, and they exuded North American profligacy in their very bindings and their extravagant use of paper, at a time when English books were printed close and meanly. This difference was impressed on my sensibility for ever the night I finished
Gone with the Wind
, reading in bed, no one else awake: as I neared the end, speeding on, I could feel with my right thumb the reassuring thickness of the pages left to turn and
knew
there had to be a happy ending. And then – nothing! Just a mocking set of blank pages left over by careless binders. I cried and cried. After that, for years, I used to check automatically when I started a book what the end pages looked like. Uncle Bill introduced me to the material nature of culture without even knowing it.

Bill's born-again fidelity to hard fact wasn't entirely consistent. There were collections of cod-anthropology on his
documentary shelf –
Strange Customs of Courtship and Marriage
was one I pored over. It offered titillating and vague descriptions of traditions like ‘bundling', which seemed to involve nothing more exotic than pre-marital sex between courting couples in the chilly north. They were probably clinging together for warmth. Of course, at the time (when even married people in the movies couldn't be shown sharing a double bed) this was dynamite. I knew these
Strange Customs
were supposed to provide illicit thrills, but I couldn't get on the right wavelength, I read the book again and again out of sheer bafflement and disappointment.

That was more or less my reaction to Uncle Bill, too: he proved a lot less of a kindred spirit than he seemed, despite his rows with my father about Business. He was realistic too, in his own way – at least he loathed idealities and took a suspicious amount of pleasure in stripping truth bare. Hunger was real, sex was real, and money was more real than either since it enabled you to satisfy these other wants. Bill would rock from his heels to his toes with his hands in his pockets, grinning impatiently and rattling his change while he made his demystifying speeches. He was small and wiry, and always looked rather hungry himself, although he preferred smoking to eating. He was certainly sex-starved, he'd boast with a bitter snigger, marriage was a mug's game, buying and selling was all it was about: private property in women. Without money you had to make do with what was going and not be too fussy. He didn't seem to mind that I'd rebuffed his advances (the poor man's Brigitte Bardot), he was doing me a favour by introducing me to the brute facts, as I'd find out for myself in time. Our educational walks didn't cease altogether, or at once, but I kept at a suspicious distance; I felt mocked, he didn't take me seriously as a fellow reader.

Bill was and wasn't a member of the family: he was an outsider, a self-declared black sheep, which I had imagined when I was small as one of those sheep that roamed the slag heaps in the Rhondda, stained with soot and rummaging through dustbins, and in a way I wasn't far wrong. He was resolutely urban and regarded Hanmer with contempt. He'd moved after the war to Wolverhampton and worked with someone he'd met in the air force as a sort of freelance handyman, patching up and painting factory buildings; he was not (as he led me to suppose) a worker on the factory floor. He also went to night school since, like my mother, he'd dropped out of school in his teens when Grandpa and Grandma were too busy tearing each other to shreds to notice. He had an idea of studying to become an architect, although he mainly went to classes, he said, to pick up women and save money on the gas meter. Anyway, he was too restless to stick at anything, and took pride in his rootlessness and indigence. Come the revolution the solid folk would find out what was what.

Meanwhile he relied on casual labour and handouts from Grandma. Billy (as she always called him, he was her boy still) was entirely exempt from her otherwise universal hatred of the male race, he could do no wrong. She saved up her pension and stinted on her contributions to the council-house budget in order to bail him out when he ran short, as he so often did. Perhaps this was why he turned up at all – although he was an addicted wanderer and scavenger. He kept a pair of bicycle clips in his pocket in case someone might want to lend him a bike.

His visits could be relied on to create an atmosphere you could cut with a knife. My father's air of conscious virtue would become more pronounced than ever, since although he ‘rowed' with Bill about politics, it was just symbolic sparring; he never
let himself go about the money, in deference to my mother's feelings. So far as I was concerned, Bill steadily dwindled in importance. Far from turning me into a fan of fact, he actually reinforced my conviction that imaginary beings were
more real
. My scenarios of revolution were acted out by quixotic figures in period costume, he was seedy, implausible and one-dimensional by comparison. I was still alone in my head. More so, in a way. It was round about now, just in this pubescent moment between childhood and licensed teenage moodiness, that I found you could sometimes be more satisfyingly separate in the company of your family than on your own.

Saturday afternoon outings to the pictures with my parents took on a new meaning. Acting on the cinema screen was blissfully free from the alienating personal dimensions of drama in the parish hall. The great thing about the stars was that you felt they had been assumed entire into the heaven of immortals. Kirk Douglas and Jean Simmons may have showed through their roles in
Spartacus
, for instance, but they themselves – ‘Kirk Douglas', ‘Jean Simmons' – were safely larger-than-life and quite unreal;
they
, not the feeble fictions they put on, were the heroes and heroines of the Hollywood Big Picture. They were always themselves, her eyes always soulful, her lips tremulous, her smile sweet and impulsive, her ankles thick; his teeth always gritted, the dimple in his chin as improbable as Popeye's. The stars could mingle with the people out of my favourite books with no difficulty. Watching movies with my family, I was transported, my mother and father and bored Clive would vanish into the stuffy dark until they were nothing but a rustle of sweet papers.

When we left the cinema I'd loiter to delay the moment of facing the grey light outside and to commune with the framed portraits of stars in the foyer. I would sneak glances at myself
in the mirrors, seeking a reflection of their dreamy, pancaked finality in my own face, finding for a moment a touch of glamour in the heavy-lidded eyes of my sleeplessness. All the Odeons, Gaumonts and Majestics back then had whole sequences of curving, carpeted foyers and corridors, which acted like airlocks or green-rooms, antechambers to fantasy. When we walked out past the queue for the second house, I kept slightly apart from my family, imagining strangers' eyes on my face. Perhaps they'd realise that I didn't belong to these people at all, that I moved secretly in much grander company.

But on the way home from Wrexham or Shrewsbury I was regularly carsick, headachy and hung-over from the combined effects of the airless excitement of the cinema and the fish and chips afterwards. Sometimes we stopped for me to be sick in a lay-by, more often I'd swallow the rising bile, lapse into a groggy doze and replay the film on the inside of my eyelids with the drone of the car engine for soundtrack. It was hard, though, to sustain the illusion. Our cars were noisy, their exhausts and silencers were semi-detached from bumping over farmyard potholes, their engines coughed and rattled. Cars came after trucks in the Business order of priorities and my father tinkered with them hastily to keep them going. The car often needed repairs en route and he kept an old oily pair of overalls in the boot for routine emergencies. When he couldn't get it to start at all, we climbed into the cab of a truck in our best clothes, Clive and I squeezed between my mother and my father on the gearbox. So our outings threw us together. Even in the car (unless Grandma came, which she sometimes did, although she would never, never have condescended to ride in a truck even if there'd been room) we felt like a family business, a human limited company. The car was one of us, it played a part in making us one at all, the 1950s nuclear-family model:
two parents and two-point-something children travelling along life's highway, socially mobile, their own private enterprise.