My Father's Fortune (11 page)

Actually, my father could never have been called up for the second war, even if he had been younger or they had started taking men in their forties. He's growing increasingly deaf, which isn't such good fortune. I don't know when it first became noticeable, but by the middle of the war he's just about as deaf as his brother and sisters. He has to get a hearing aid. It comes in a black granulated leather case, with the name of the manufacturer, Ardente, imprinted in gold, and I long to possess it. The case opens with a pop, and there on the midnight-blue velvet lining sits the polished black amplifier and earpiece on its silky cord. You put the box in your waistcoast pocket and your hands in your trouser pockets, so that your jacket's pulled back to leave the microphone facing your interlocutor. It's a discreet and magical instrument, as beautiful in its way as my mother's violin; and it's not the slightest use.

He has to start again with something much clumsier and more complex, a serious instrument prescribed by a specialist. This is a Bonochord, made by Allen & Hanbury. If I remember it rightly the microphone and the amplifier are separate, and they're attached to half a pair of headphones, which covers one ear completely. There are certainly two batteries, a low-tension one about the size of a pocket Bible, and a high-tension one more like a Bible that you might carry to church each Sunday. A web of wires runs between jacket and pockets and waistcoat, between waistcoat and back trouser pocket.

I watch him winding himself into this harness before he leaves the house in the morning, like a medieval knight arming himself for battle. The wires become tangled. He taps the microphone, or gets Vi or me to say something into it. He listens anxiously; nothing's coming through. A hidden connection somewhere is loose.
One of the batteries is flat. A switch here or a knob there is in the wrong position … And, then, when he gets home in the evening, I watch him unwind himself from it all again and lay the various components and leads out in good order on his dressing table. I have no desire to own this grim array, unlike the last one, even though it seems actually to work.

I never asked him what it was like, being deaf, and getting deafer. I never asked him what he felt about this very visible muddling of his dapper appearance, this invisible undermining of his quick understanding of the world around him on which all his sharpness depended. How on earth did he manage to carry on with his job? I realise now that nerving himself to go bouncing in with his big smile had always cost him more than he ever revealed; my cousin John says that at some point in the thirties my father came to stay with them to recuperate from overwork, which I suppose means stress. Now, before he goes into battle, he has to sit in the car plugging in the batteries and switching on all the switches, tapping on the microphone, checking all the connections … Then he has to establish friendly relations with a stranger whose personality he can't quite assess, or re-establish them with an old acquaintance whose familiar joshing and banter he can't quite catch. How does he field all the objections and prevarications, all the technical inquiries about the product, all the haggling over discounts and delivery dates, when they come to him from beyond this widening invisible ocean, this confusion of unwanted ambient noise that the hearing aid so impartially magnifies as well? Where does he find the courage to struggle on with it, day after day, week after week?

One technique he develops to help him through is to make himself more of a character. He puts on a performance, and in so far as he can he keeps the conversational initiative. He doesn't leave the person he's talking to much chance to say anything that needs to be heard. He joshes and banters, and smiles, of course, so that all the customer has to do is to be an audience, and smile back. And if the customer does say something inaudible which seems to need a response, my father uses his natural bent for exaggeration
to invent a humorous distortion of it that will make his interlocutor laugh and then repeat himself. ‘But, Tom, how many square feet per hour of this stuff can an unskilled fitter actually run out on site?' – ‘How many
what
at night?' – ‘On
site
. Square
feet
.' – ‘I suppose so, but safer if they wear boots.'

There are some inaudible announcements, though, that he can't joke his way around. ‘I'm driving through Herne Hill this morning,' he tells us, ‘and I'm just thinking, “That's funny. Why are there all these people lying in shop doorways?” – when
woomph!
About two streets away, I should think.'

For many years I waited to inherit the family deafness in my turn. My hearing is now, in old age, getting decidedly shaky, and so is my cousin John's, but neither of us, nor any of our siblings or cousins, has suffered anything like the curse that dogged the two previous generations. The performance that my father put on to cope with it, though, set an example that came to hand later when I had other difficulties of my own – then stayed with me, and became a professional resource, rather as it did for him.

There's another reason, too, why he would never be called up. He's in what's known as a reserved occupation. As a rep? Yes, as a Technical Representative, which is what he now is, and it's reserved because of the importance of what he's selling and who he's selling it to.

The ‘TAC' on all his stationery and brochures stands for Turners Asbestos Cement, and the customers to whom he's now representing the firm are the government and the armed services. The firm's logo shows a female figure in Greek robes doing rather what my father's doing as Fire Captain. She's confronting a sea of flames, armed not with a stirrup-pump or a long-handled shovel but a shield made of asbestos. This is the great selling point of the product, particularly now that the Luftwaffe's attempting with some success to repeat the effects of the Great Fire of London: unlike wood and various forms of wood substitute it's non-inflammable (and it doesn't rot). Unlike corrugated-iron roofing
and cast-iron drainpipes it's also rustproof. Asbestos has no vices. Everywhere we go my father can point to great grey corrugated cliffs and hillsides of asbestos cement, most of it manufactured by Turners, the industry leader, some of it sold by himself, and a lot of it housing aircraft and munitions, locomotives and troops. There's something profoundly dreary about its lifeless greyness, even to my uncritical eye, but at least it will remain grey and not go charcoal-black or mouldy-green or rust-red. My father probably hasn't had to struggle to hear many objections or rejections from the civil servants and senior officers he deals with, now I come to think about it. The nation can't get enough of the stuff. He's part of the War Effort.

He even has a petrol ration. Archie Dennis-Smith's Triumph Dolomite retires to the garage for the rest of the war, like almost all the other cars in the district. Barlow is spared any further expenditure on petrol for his heap of rust. Our car is the only one left in the street. What do the neighbours make of this? Particularly when we somehow manage to go by car to the West Country for at least three summer holidays in the war.

The samples of asbestos that my father brings home are another of our resources against wartime shortages – a version of the carver's perks that he appropriates from the ever-smaller weekly meat ration. The samples, though, unlike the Sunday joints, grow bigger and more numerous – no longer pocket-handkerchief-sized miniatures but complete sheets of roofing and lengths of piping. They're one of the chief raw materials that we improvise things out of. The anti-duck fence is not the only asbestos in the garden. There are also many heavy rectangular boxes, about the size of orange crates and the same grim industrial grey as the hangars and warehouses. What purpose they're intend to serve in the building trade I don't know, but we use them as planters. We turn them over and punch drainage holes in the bottom by hammering a rusty screwdriver through them with the back of the rusty chopper, then grow tomatoes and lavender in them. I build an aircraft out of them. I saw the samples up with a rusty hacksaw from the
coal shed, filling the air with asbestos dust. The result doesn't fly, of course. It doesn't even look much like an aircraft – it doesn't look
anything
like an aircraft – but it's large enough for me to sit in and imagine that it's an aircraft.

Our other great resource is Uncle Sid. He keeps bringing the cigarettes, on which life in wartime apparently depends even more heavily than in peacetime – Senior Service now, in packs of five hundred or a thousand from the NAAFI. He's an RAF officer – not a fighter pilot, like Fielding's son-in-law, but a controller in Bomber Command. He sits in the tower at base and solidly, reliably, reasonably talks down shattered crews limping home after a long night of fear over Germany and occupied Europe. They're sometimes off-course, lost, low on fuel. They're flying on three engines, have half the undercarriage gone or a live bomb jammed in the bomb bay, crew dead or dying. He sits through the small hours waiting like a patient parent for them to be back in radio contact. He smokes and drinks cocoa and joshes them and is the voice of normality and home in the darkness. They all call him Uncle, just as I do. His avuncularity, like my father's smartness, has been channelled into the War Effort.

In the daytime, though, he gets on his blue-and-chrome sports bicycle and cycles round the Lincolnshire farms buying eggs and an occasional rabbit, which he brings to us at the weekends with the cigarettes. He also brings his own carver's perks – small scraps that have fallen from the overflowing tables of the armed services. The RAF has more parachute silk than it can ever make parachutes out of – and there are many things apart from parachutes that waiting wives and sisters-in-law and their mothers can use it for. Late in the war the RAF also finds itself oversupplied with thick yellow felt. It has acquired it for aero engines to sit on when they're taken out of aircraft to be repaired and serviced. Uncle Sid has done a deal, involving perhaps farm-smoked Lincolnshire bacon, with a contact in the workshops, and out of his laden kitbag, together with the cigarettes and the silk, emerge fat yellow rolls of felt. He comes to us, on a 36 or a 48, for a short break from
the war – to relax in the health-giving cigarette smoke and asbestos dust of the Surrey Hills; but he spends his leave just as busily as he did when he was cutting up and gluing cardboard models of the Tower Bridge and the Coronation Scot. Only now he's cutting up the yellow felt and sewing it together with huge stitches of red thread to make slippers. Soon everyone in the family is shuffling about the house in thick yellow slippers with red stitching.

On Sunday evening he pushes aside the felt trims and tangles of thread that now cover the dining-room table and three-piece suite, and gets out his RAF officer's tunic and overcoat. Still wearing his own pair of yellow slippers, he fetches his brass button-stick and a tin of Duraglit. Also wearing yellow slippers I sit watching him, as four at a time he traps and buffs the gleaming buttons, each with the embossed RAF eagle and crown that I love to run my reverent index finger over. Still as good-humoured and phlegmatic as ever, he's preparing to return to the long nights in the tower alone with the unseen crews, and the days scavenging for food and scraps to keep us going. Back to the War Effort, back to his modest part in levelling the bricks and mortar of Germany.

My father, meanwhile, wearing
his
yellow slippers, writes his reports and checks the batteries of his hearing aid, ready for Monday morning. Back to the War Effort on the home front, back to his modest part in raising the asbestos roofs and pipes of Britain.

And on the war goes. By this time I have forgotten, even if my parents haven't, that there was once a time before the Duration. The Duration is the duration of the war, but it has become a freestanding abstraction in its own right, and is the condition of our life. It's the reason why the beaches on the South Coast are blocked with forests of slimy green scaffolding, why there are pig-bins on the corner and mosquito-infested static water tanks in back streets, why cakes taste of baking soda, and ice cream of … I don't know what: something grey and neutral … asbestos dust, possibly. It has become not so much a period of time as a purpose in itself. What are we fighting for? – For the Duration.

Not all the effects of the Duration are bad. The shortages that everyone now faces make the scruffy compromises of our lifestyle a little less egregious. Then again, in the thirties London was advancing relentlessly upon Ewell. The fields over the hill just above our house had already ceased to grow any crops except half-a-dozen species of new house, and bald concrete roadways through the overgrown wasteland where more new houses would one day be. Sooner or later the developers would be in Hillside Road itself, driving a concrete roadway between Miss Hay at No. 4 and Miss Johnson at No. 5, where a narrow entrance, choked with nettles and elder, old paint tins and piles of abandoned asphalt, leads to the little landlocked triangle of countryside behind the houses. Then the farmlands just beyond us would go the same way. On over Epsom Downs the houses would march …

Only now the whole unstoppable advance has been stopped. For the Duration.

For the Duration the enormous wastelands of the estate being
developed by Gleesons over the top of the hill, and the tangled triangle behind Hillside Road, have become patched with allotments where the adults of the district Dig for Victory, and overgrown with rank grasses where the children build camps and huts, where they smoke and bake potatoes and bully each other. In the reprieved farmyard we maintain foul-smelling sloshy contact with agricultural life, and in the vast prairies of the meadows we wander at random – this way, that way – walk, run, lie in the long fallow and look at the sky. We cycle up to Epsom Downs and gaze out over the panorama of London and the Thames Valley under their attendance of silver barrage balloons. No one worries that we will be run over; there's no one on the roads to run us over – only my father when he gets back from work, only Dr Wilde on his rounds, only a few army dispatch riders and horse-drawn milk-floats. No one thinks we will get abused or murdered; all the abusers and murderers are in the services, abusing and murdering someone else.

Yes, for some of the other people out there the Duration is not so enjoyable. I'm chastened now when I read the histories of the war or see the film archive, and am reminded once again of the horrors that are occurring while we are so blithe and uncaring. Even at the time I'm occasionally aware of events in the wider world, and not just the of Battle of Britain and the Blitz. I sense the sudden lightening of mood among the adults in the summer of 1941, when Germany invades Russia, and people begin to feel that we really might have a chance after all. On one of our mother's half-term treats for us in London we see an exhibition about Bomber Command, with a huge model of Essen burning, a thousand red and orange fires pulsing in the darkness, though with no sign of the burning bodies among them. Another treat: a family visit to a show at the Kingston Empire on 8 September 1943 – my tenth birthday – when the manager comes on stage and stops proceedings to announce Italy's surrender. Then at Christmas 1944 a shadow falls over the festivities as the Germans counter-attack in the Ardennes, and for a few weeks seem to be on the way to driving the Allied armies back to the Channel and re-occupying Europe.

What do my parents think and feel about these great events, and all the other aspects of the war that they must know so much more about than we do? For them, presumably, the war's more than the Duration. Is their confidence that we shall win in the end absolute, even before the Germans take on Russia? Do they believe unquestioningly in the things that we're fighting for?

I don't know. I can't recall ever hearing them talk about it. The questions never arise. But then I've very little idea of what they think about any of the issues of the day. From the way my father behaves and the jokes he makes I have some sense of how he sees the world, which is still to a considerable extent how it must have looked to him from the standpoint of those two rooms in Devonshire Road. He remains, for instance, a lifelong supporter of the Labour Party, undeterred by being probably the only one (apart, I think, from my mother) in East Ewell; though he's so uninterested in the actual details of politics that at a local election in later life, before party affiliations are shown on the ballot paper, he manages to vote not for the six Labour candidates he supports but for three Conservatives and three Communists.

He respects any activity that requires human skill and human effort, from performing music and observing stars to spinning a cricket ball and double-entry book-keeping; and any notable products of that activity, from cathedrals and synchromesh gears to hand-made shoes and well-written newspapers. He's inclined to be disrespectful, on the other hand, about all claims to social or moral ascendancy, and his scepticism remains unaffected by his own rise in life, or his elevation to the Fire Captaincy. Being a general, or a king, or a managing director, or a clergyman are all fundamentally comic conditions, rather like Barlow's Scottishness or Kerry's Irishness. So is being what he calls, talking about a customer or a colleague at work, a ten-to-two, or indicates by sketching the gesture of a hooked nose. I assume that he's as unware as I am at the time of the possibility that his wife, mother-in-law and son are all ten-to-twos, and all have invisibly hooked noses.

He certainly has no kind of religious beliefs, and nor, I think,
does my mother. One of the things I remain most grateful to them both for is their failure to transmit to me that burden of indefinable constraint and unlocated guilt, that overarching cosmic awkwardness, which often seems to be so difficult to shake off. He has no formal ethics, either – no set code of right and wrong. He does what he does; though what he does often has a moral dimension. He shines his shoes and he expects me to shine mine; I understand, without being told, that shining your shoes and everything that goes with it are the keys to success in life. He supports his mother and his disabled sister, then maintains his parents-in-law, without any sign of impatience that I can recall. He endures his deafness, and the worse things that are to come, with courage and humour.

He isn't a great disciplinarian. I can remember only one attempt, early in our relationship, to punish me for something. Whatever it was I'd done, it irritated him so much that he suddenly lashed out at me in fury, and booted me up the backside, as if we'd both been eleven or twelve, instead of something more like thirty-six and four. The well-shone shoe didn't connect with me. Cross as he was, it was probably more a demonstration of a boot up the backside than a seriously intended one.

If there's an abstract quality that he values it's persistence. He's reluctant to allow me to go to Crusaders, some kind of Low Church Sunday school that I long to join because my best friend David has; but when he finally gives in to my pleading, and I immediately hate it, he won't let me leave until I've endured a salutary year or more of sanctimonious Sunday afternoons. He reminds me of this when later I plead to be allowed to join the school Cadet Corps. I persist in my nagging; he gives in; I'm once again immediately repulsed by it; he won't let me leave until I have endured another salutary year or more of marching round the school playground every Friday in undersized ammunition boots and oversized battledress.

But none of this, so far as I can see, springs from any general faith or particular beliefs – any set of assertions that unverifiable states of affairs are the case, or ought to be.

I suppose, with hindsight, that he loved my mother. And loved me and my sister, though he never said. Perhaps, it occurs to me now with a shock of surprise, he loved us as blindly and helplessly as years later I love my own children – was filled with the same joy at the sight of us as I am at the sight of them. Is this possible? The extraordinary discoveries one makes in life! And once again, as so often, only long after the event, only when one has stepped into the shoes one saw before on someone else's feet.

The lack of religion in the house is a further cause for Nanny's nervousness. She sometimes furtively invites my sister and me into her room and gets us down on our knees among all the dim lights and lavender smells, with our eyes closed and hands pressed together, to say our prayers. We pray for our mother and father, and address other prayers, rather confusingly, to another father which art in heaven. His name, unlike the father which art writing his reports in the dining room, is Harold, and there's no mention of any mother which art in heaven with him, or of any Nanny which art in his little back bedroom. Our own Nanny's too flustered and whispery about these surreptitious occasions to offer explanations. She seems to fear that at any moment our father (the one which art not in heaven) might burst in and drag all three of us off to be burnt at the stake. He's rather more likely, of course, given his taste for persistence, to have my sister and me down on our knees to Harold every single day of the year.

Nanny gives me a Bible. I have it still on my bookshelf, inscribed ‘Xmas 1943', its spine worn away by being pressed against the lever of my bicycle bell as I cycled to Crusaders each Sunday. And maybe it's her piety that wears away my unbelief a little, too. At some point in the war, certainly, I write two poems of a religious nature. One is about the heroism of the people of Dover under bombardment by the German cross-Channel guns, the other about the invention of the electric telegraph by Samuel Morse. Each stanza of the latter ends with a repetition of the first message that Morse sent on his newly installed line from Washington to Balti-
more: ‘What hath God wrought!' I have also developed a feeling, which I suppose is essentially religious, that any fun or pleasure in life is unseemly, and has to be balanced out in some kind of moral double-entry system. On Christmas morning – perhaps in 1943, the same year as the Bible – after my sister and I have been awake since four o'clock, agonisingly counting the minutes until we finally hear faints signs of life from our parents' room, I insist that before we can go downstairs and open our presents we must kneel up on our beds and hold an extempore Christmas morning service of prayers and carols. I pray aloud at great length. I know a lot of carols, and we sing them all. My poor sister.

Eventually the more acute symptoms of religion pass off, and for a year or two I'm in remission. I don't know what brings this about. Sunday school, perhaps.

In spite of my father's political sympathies we pay for the doctor who comes rather frequently every winter to put a thermometer under our tongues and feel the swollen glands in the corner of our jaws. The only alternatives would be to become panel patients, as working men (not women or children) lucky enough to have national insurance are called, and wait to be seen at the doctor's surgery in Epsom on a Thursday morning, or to get some form of charity. Nobody in Hillside Road is a panel patient. By the time you'd waited your way through enough Thursday mornings to get to the head of the queue your glands would have subsided, your broken bones knitted up, your mortal remains been laid to rest.

Nor do my parents ever consider educating my sister and me in state schools. The local Council School, a large purpose-built municipal structure in Ewell Village, where the lavatory tiles covering the walls are decorated with the pupils' daubs in vulgarly bright poster paints, is visited by the middle classes only on Sunday afternoons, when Crusaders is held there. The rest of the time it, and the Council School children who emerge from it at the end of each schoolday to spread vulgar Council School infections such as ringworm and impetigo around the district, and litter the streets
with dropped aitches and double negatives, are simply below our conceptual horizon. The Central School that my father went to in Holloway, with the French teacher who had with such personal attention beaten French out of his head, are aspects of the past that he has turned his back on.

So my sister goes to the kindergarten at Sutton High School for Girls, three miles away, wearing a pale mauve blazer and an anxious look on her face, with a velour hat in winter over her mass of blond sausage curls, and in summer a straw boater. But where am I to go? I've finished the top class in Nonsuch School, the delightful little local academy run by Miss Dunk and her father, and accommodated partly in a decayed Victorian mansion and partly in a raw new house on another of Gleesons' estates. I've had a good time there, and a productive one. I've learnt to read, and have written the essay that moved my father to suggest a career in journalism. I've served as official scientist in Diana Baker's gang, in its camp under the laurels in the old shrubbery. I've mastered the triangle in the school's percussion band, and sung a song that represents the call of the yellowhammer, ‘A Little Bit of Bread and
No
Cheese'. I'm ready for something more demanding.

My parents decide to see whether I might get into Sutton High School for Boys, a few hundred yards along the road from the girls' high school. The blazers here are purple instead of a discreet mauve, and there are other differences, in spite of the similarity of the name. The girls' school is owned by the Girls' Public Day School Trust, a non-profit body that runs well-reputed and academically oriented schools all over the country. The boys' school is owned by the Reverend J. B. Lawton, who is also its headmaster. The girls are housed in a substantial spread of classrooms, laboratory blocks and gymnasia, tree-shaded tennis and netball courts, and a spacious hall where we go later to see my sister play Seventh Rat in
The Pied Piper of Hamelin
. The boys are in one single-storey building. Its front wall, visible to the public, is built of brick, and all its other walls of corrugated iron lined with tongue-and-groove boarding. The whole school shakes whenever a door's slammed.
There's no hall where the boys might be distracted by amateur theatricals. A wobbly partition between two of the classrooms is folded back each morning to make a space where the school assembles for prayers.