Bad Blood (7 page)

Once upon a time in South Wales, when a friend of Katie's came to stay, I had had to spend the night in a feather bed, sandwiched between Katie and Grandma, and that ambiguous sensation of sinking back and back, down and down in a deep nest of feathers and furbelows and flesh, came to stand for the Rhondda. Infinite regress threatened down there: promised, and threatened. It was pleasurable – how could it be otherwise? – to return to the smothering, spongy womb of the Stores. And yet I was always glad to get away. As I grew, Grandma got shorter, so that she sometimes looked almost spherical. She and Katie were such an exclusive club, really, that even my mother wasn't a full member and I was even further removed from the inner sanctum because I couldn't recall my great-grandmother, so had to take her praises on trust.

There were other Welsh voices I could have listened to. Occasionally – and to my great surprise – people who dropped in to the shop would congratulate my mother on my
bookishness and talk with pride about how their grandchildren were ‘getting on' and going to the grammar school. People in Tonypandy, as in other mining districts, were enthusiastic about education, in sharp contrast to Hanmer's conservative scorn and inertia. The future was real and a good thing, and even if you went down the pit like your da you weren't expected to give up reading, thinking, arguing or politicking; autodidacts flourished still in those days. Nonetheless the atmosphere of Hereford Stores dominated my sense of the place, so that for me the journey south was like slipping into a pocket of the past. I didn't know who I was, there – didn't need to know. It was as though I hadn't been born yet.

Grandma saved paper bags inside paper bags inside paper bags . . . Years later, when she died, and my mother and I were going through the trunks that by then held the compacted residue of her lifetime's squirrelling, we came on a cache of letters from my grandfather, tied in the inevitable banal shred of pink ribbon. His courtship compositions, they were, full of quotations from the poets, sentimental flourishes, promising plans. We looked at them with awful embarrassment and agreed (how I wish now that we hadn't) to burn them, because they seemed shaming evidence of the mutual confidence trick of that hateful marriage. There was cash in the same trunk, folded notes cunningly dispersed among the photos of Katie done up to the nines, and the bars of waxy soap and sugar lumps put by against the return of rationing. And that money was the clue to another part of her story. Where did she get it? Where, for that matter, did she acquire the substantial sum – around five hundred pounds – she'd accumulated in my name (so that my father couldn't inherit it, she told me once) in National Savings? I didn't think very hard about it at the time and I took the theories that circulated in the family as tall tales.
However, Grandma's way of blurring the boundary between fantasy and reality, and her power to draw me back into the past have long outlived her.

About the money: I was asking my father just the other day whether some of the wilder things I recalled about the grandparents had any basis in truth. For instance, what about the story that Grandma had blackmailed Grandpa for years, by threatening to show his private diary to the Bishop unless he handed over part of his stipend every quarter? Well, yes, said my father, that was certainly true. But how do you
know
? I asked. Simple, he said, I've got the diaries, two of them. (Because she'd kept them as well in one of the trunks, although my mother had never let on.) Anyway, with a bit of persuasion, reluctantly, my father handed them over: two small, cheap, reddish diaries, for 1933 and 1934, both published by John Walker & Co., Farringdon House, Warwick Lane, EC4, filled with very small writing and decorated at weekly intervals with coloured stamps he stuck in to mark the church calendar. These left him even less space to write down the compromising details of his daily life, but he managed enough.

There is no doubt that Grandma preserved Grandpa's diaries for 1933 and 1934 as evidence against him. Indeed, the 1933 diary has a couple of scathing marginal comments in her hand –
Here the fun begins
(Friday, 25 August) and
Love begins (fool)
exactly a week later. If he refused to produce the cash that lined her luggage, paid for her outings to the cinema and her teatime meringues at the Kardomah, and fed the National Savings account she eventually put in my name in case some man got hold of it when she died, then she would take the damning documents to the Bishop, threaten scandal and divorce, and lose him even the rotten living he had.

Reading these diaries turned out to be a bit like eavesdropping on the beginnings of my world. 1933 was the year the grandparents arrived in Hanmer from South Wales. This was how the Hanmer I grew up in had been created – how life in the vicarage got its Gothic savour, how we became so isolated from respectability, how the money started not to make sense and (above all) how my grandfather took on the character of theatrical martyrdom that set him apart. 1933, he did not fail to note, was the nineteen-hundredth anniversary of Christ's Passion: ‘This is the Crucifixion Year AD 0–33, 1900–1933. A Holy Year.' He wasn't thiry-three himself, but forty-one and fearful, before he was offered this new, sprawling country parish
in the north, that his career in the Church of Wales had ground to a shaming standstill. He'd been twelve years in the same place. ‘Here we are at the end of winter time,' he writes on 8 April, on Saturday night, doing some spiritual stock-taking and already assuming his Sunday style, ‘and I am still at St Cynon's. O God give me a little chance now at last. Thy will be done.' But the South Wales parish he was after at the time, Pencoed, went to someone else the very next Thursday and the day after that, Good Friday, he is making the most of his misery, preaching on the theme, ‘Who will roll away the stone . . . ?'

It isn't until later in Easter Week that he learns – or at least confides to his diary – the full extent of his humiliation: ‘They have really cast me aside in favour of a young fellow who has only been ordained since 1924. Well this is the limit. What on earth am I to do now? No hope and no chance.'

But he has learned to live with hopelessness, that's the worst of it. He fritters away his time and turns his back on the drama of rejection. The great shock of opening this compromising little book, for me, was that for the first half – with the exception of the few desperate and frustrated
cris de coeur
I've culled – it was the record of a pottering, Pooterish, almost farcically domesticated life. The sinner I was expecting was guilty of pride, lust and spiritual despair, not merely of sloth and ineptitude. This was the diary of a nobody. So I nearly censored January to June 1933 in the interests of Grandpa's glamour as a Gothic personage. But in truth this is what we should be exposed to – the awful knowledge that when they're not breaking the commandments, the anti-heroes are mending their tobacco pipes and listening to the wireless.

He had been ‘jolly miserable' (that middle-class oxymoron!) during those last stagnant months in South Wales. You could do nearly nothing in the Church of Wales and get away with
it, no one took official notice, a vicar was a gentleman after all. Chapel would have been different, much more a matter of openly devout busybody closeness with the congregation, but he managed to nurture his depression in private. He'd surface late from sleep or sulks, affronted by the weather: ‘It is a terrible trial to get up in these very cold mornings' – and light the fire in the study. Or that was his plan. Often things went wrong, as he expected: ‘Lit a fire in the study but heaps of soot fell down and put it out,' he reports, as late on as 6 May. ‘Could not get on with my sermon at all today. An aeroplane overhead at teatime . . .' It's uncharacteristic of him to notice what's going on outside, he is so fed up with his surroundings (his parish, his prison). But perhaps the plane flew past his defences because it belonged to the skyey regions of the weather, which he regularly records as a mirror or a foil to his moods. He's good at the rhetoric of the barometer: with freezing rain comes the pathetic fallacy, sunshine equals irony, with the snow everything grinds gratifyingly to a halt.

Also, the aeroplane was
new
and a machine, like his addiction, the wireless. With his ear to the speaker he takes to the airwaves himself and communes with the wide world so intimately it seems inside his head. ‘Toothache,' says one entry, ‘Earthquake in Japan.' Hitler comes to power in Germany (31 January), Roosevelt's oath-taking is relayed (4 March). Grandpa registers the facts, but doesn't comment, he's more interested in the quality of reception he's getting on short wave, the placing of the aerial and whether to buy a Pye or a Murphy. He tries each out on approval, squeezes in little drawings of the rival sets on the page and after some enjoyable dithering – ‘Spent the whole of the day trying to decide between the Pye and the Murphy' – splashes out £17.17s.0d on the Pye, ‘bought . . . outright'.

This is hugely extravagant, the better part of a month's pay (his stipend was £73.4s.4d per quarter), but he owes it to himself, since listening in and twiddling the knobs is what makes his idleness and boredom feel busy. He sees few people, even on the Almighty's business. He boycotts the meetings of the Rural Dean and Chapter (‘lost any desire to meet the clergy of the Rhondda – they are all such a lot of place-seekers') and records punctually and with a kind of glum relish the lousy church attendances in harsh weather: ‘Got up for H[oly] C[ommunion]. No one at HC.' The wireless, by contrast, is a friendly presence. ‘Spent the whole of the afternoon tinkering with my old wireless set in the study,' reads an almost happy entry long after he has acquired the superior Pye. The hums and crackles and cosmic whistles of interference probably served nearly as well as the programmes to provide him with a private cocoon of distraction. He does read of course as well, and in the same impatient spirit, science fiction stories about other worlds for preference. On 17 January, for instance, ‘the Radio programme is very monotonous and dull. Took up Conan Doyle's
Lost World
and read it right through.' He is an accomplished mental traveller. In March he actually spends a day or two pretending to have been called away, in order to escape parish business – ‘Am supposed to be away from home today. Stayed in and did some reading . . . Lit a fire in the study and sat there all day reading Jules Verne's
Journey into the Centre of the Earth
 . . .' Sometimes he sat in the kitchen instead, sometimes he complains of a headache rather than a toothache. On his official evening off he would sit in the study and watch people going to church.

He had his smokescreen too. He smoked a pipe. Or that was the theory. In practice he evolved his own extra rituals to make his habit more complicated and satisfying-because-unsatisfying. Fiddling with pipe-cleaners and bowl scrapers
didn't suffice, partly because he hankered after cigarettes – although they woke up an ‘old pain' in his chest – and partly because it hurt to grip a pipe-stem with those aching teeth. Anyway, he doesn't just mess with pipe accessories, he goes further. In a sort of parody of a handyman, he
whittles
: ‘Shortened my pipe – the Peterson – and spoiled it,' reads a terse entry in January. Was he chagrined? Probably not, although one can't tell whether he has yet worked out his pipe plot. Does he know that what he really wants is (by accident of course) to spoil his pipe and thus make ‘work', plus an opportunity to get back to cigarettes? In February he buys another Peterson (‘no. II') and on Saturday, 22 April he experiments again and supplies a full rationalisation: ‘After I had dinner I turned my Peterson pipe into a cigarette holder as this is the more satisfactory way of smoking to me. The full weight of the pipe is too much for my teeth.' In May: ‘am still on with the cigarettes but must go back to the pipe I think'. In fact, he buys a new nameless pipe the very next day, but immediately rejects it in disgust – ‘too rotten to smoke. A cheap pipe is useless.' Whereas a dear one provides hours of pleasure and distraction for a bad-tempered bricoleur. On 15 May he buys another Peterson, ‘a Tulip-shaped Peterson No. 3' this time, and manages to destroy it fairly fast: ‘Saturday May 27th. Broke my Peterson pipe. It seems I must keep to the cigarette holder.' By Monday he records proudly in the diary that he has ‘finished turning the Peterson pipe into a cigarette holder'; and so gratifying is this that the week after he goes out and buys another ‘light' pipe (3 June) and two days later turns
that
into a cigarette holder too. On 9 June he buys a Peterson No. 33 . . .

As his frustrations mount, the pattern of destructive tinkering speeds up to match, turning smoking into another pseudo-occupation to fill his seething sedentary hours and days. His
sensibility is in perpetual motion – he's self-absorbed and self-repelled at once, and the pottering alternates with bleak vistas of pointlessness. ‘Spent an unprofitable day feeling liverish and miserable' (March). ‘Spent a useless sort of day in the study' (April). Although he is always at home, wearing out the chairs with his bony behind, his family barely exist for him –
except for my mother
. And this was the second surprise of the South Wales part of the 1933 diary, that his teenage daughter Valma (she turned fifteen on 14 March) lives on the inside of his loneliness. She is his one human task, he has been tutoring her at home for a year (he records in May) and she figures in the same sorts of sentences as the wireless, the books and the pipes, where her presence suddenly populates the house – ‘Spent the morning and the afternoon taking Valma's lessons. Came on to Latin at tea-time'; ‘sat in house all this afternoon giving Valma her lessons'. He plans out schedules of study and sets her exams. She's his go-between with the outside world, in more senses than one, for she also runs errands and posts letters.