My Father's Fortune (13 page)

By this time, I think, at the age of ten and three-quarters, I'm no longer so much in love with Janet, whom I've glimpsed each afternoon coming home from Sutton High School for Girls on the same train as me, in an aura charged with romance by the scent of train oil and railway upholstery. I've never managed to speak to her, but for a whole term I've been dreaming about her shock of frizzy hair and her mauve gingham dress, to a secret background music of (for some reason)
I Love a Lassie
. Every time I've come to the line ‘She's as sweet as the heather, the bonny blooming heather' I've almost fainted from sheer erotic overload. (Later, even without any one particular girl in mind, I'm overcome by the intensity of the emotional field around a waltz called
The Waves
of the Danube
, and the intermezzo from Wolf-Ferrari's
The Jewels
of the Madonna
.) Now the term has ended, and I've transferred my affections to Mike and Stella and Roosevelt, but I'm still also in love with girls in general. How could I not be, when they have such romantic names? Janet … Wendy … Rosemary… And wear dresses. And run in such a funny way. And laugh among themselves. And are called girls. And are accompanied everywhere they go by a private soundtrack of waltzes and intermezzos …

I'm also, as it happens, in love with one girl in particular: Jennifer, the Dennis-Smiths' elder daughter. I certainly talk to Jennifer, unlike Janet, because we've grown up together, and I've always talked to her, and she's one of the gang who sit at Mike's feet. She's a strapping, suntanned girl with white teeth and a loud laugh. I've just unearthed a snap of her, and I see why I've fallen in love with her. It's not just her irresistibly romantic name – she's amazingly beautiful.

We spend a lot of time together that summer, even after Mike and the rest of the tilers have gone. The great meeting place for all of us is the garden of No. 6. The Locatellis (and the light fittings) have long since departed, and the Laverses are not yet back. The garden has reverted to jungle. We swing on the rusty swing (which
somehow later, in the way of the world's rusty rejects, ends up in our garden). We lie about in the sunlit meadow that was once the lawn, and bicker and sneeze, and sometimes take a scythe to the grass and let it lie to make hay for the Dennis-Smith rabbits.

On other days Jennifer and I move across the road to her own garden. We sit in her summerhouse for whole afternoons at a time. It smells of coolness and dry straw, and there's a hamper full of back numbers of a comic called
Girls' Crystal
. We guzzle them one after another without stopping, a forbidden pleasure as intoxicating as Craven A. In the long summer evenings, made longer still by another of the innovations introduced for the Duration, Double Summer Time, we dart about in the gloaming, evading our parents' efforts to fetch us home. Jennifer laughs and spins around in her wide dirndl skirt. In the half-light she's all white teeth and sparkling eyes and darkness, and I'm even more in love with her than I am with Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

The seat of the swing vanishes. We believe that Miss Johnson next door, jealous of our idle summer amusement, has confiscated it, and we work ourselves up into a fury of indignation, to which I, as spectacles-wearer and therefore intellectual, feel obliged to give expression. I copy out Cowper's
Boadicea
in lurid red ink with various adaptations such as ‘Miss Johnson' and ‘she' for ‘Rome', then, watched by my admiring friends, post it through Miss Johnson's letter-box.

As soon as she reads it she identifies me as the author (my specs again, I suppose) and comes round to complain to my father.

Angry as he is about the poem, whatever he can see of Jennifer and me in the gathering darkness evidently makes him a great deal uneasier, because he finds a quiet moment to give me one of his rare pieces of moral advice: I should try to play less with girls. Just
as well that he doesn't know I'm also reading all those old
Girls'
Crystals
, because I can tell from the tone of his voice that he's seriously worried, and with hindsight I realise what it's about: the same as all the other fathers up and down the land who are uneasy because their sons are too interested in
boys
. He thinks that I'm in danger of contracting girlishness.

Would he have been relieved, I wonder, if he'd known about the feelings I also have for Mike the tiler and the President of the United States?

My mother, so far as I can recall, says nothing about all this. Is she, too, worrying about my incipient girlishness? About the fact that she has corrupted me even before Jennifer has – all those sixpences for coming top! – and that I'm already a bit of a mother's boy?

She has enough to worry about even without my shortcomings. Not that I ever notice at the time. A mother's boy, a potential girl and housewife myself, yet I never give a moment's thought to what her life must be like, trailing from shop to shop in the Village – the grocer's, the greengrocer's, the butcher's, the baker's, the fishmonger's, and queues at all of them – racking her brains to conjure food for five, and often for more at the weekend, out of a few crumpled ration books. Not to mention food for the ducks. It's often my sister and I who wait on them; the sour smell from that battered bowl of long-boiled food waste is in my nostrils still. But it's she who has to make them the meals: mince up the peelings, simmer them by the hour, and stir in the balancer meal she has dragged back by the fifty-pound sack, uphill all the way from the Village, on the crossbar of her gents' Raleigh.

And now the doodlebug, which for her means not a premature Christmas but plaster dust and fine shards of broken glass in every corner of the house, in every carpet and fabric. There's no time for the violin now, no more stories about that ship of gold waiting in Chancery. In the snaps I have of her she's still beautiful. But in 1942 the snaps cease, I suppose because it's no longer possible to buy film for the camera. I remember her as putting on a bit of weight
in those later years, as looking a little more harrassed and workaday. It's part of the solid thereness of her that I take so much for granted, and that I'm sometimes fleeing to still for comfort. When I score my one goal, for instance. Or when I'm taken with a school party to the local cinema, and I'm traumatised by a passing line of dialogue in a cowboy film – a reference to an unseen rancher who has had to put down his equally unseen herd because of foot-and-mouth. ‘They killed all the cows!' I sob to her, over and over again.

Sometimes I have bad dreams, or can't sleep at all, and have to take refuge in my parents' bed. Often they don't even wake as I squeeze down between their two snoring enormousnesses. It's boring, lying there awake between the walls of their backs, in the stale smell of their night breath. But even the boringness of it is a comfort.

Am I still fleeing to my parents' bed even when I'm so busy falling in love with everyone and everything? Is my mother still coming in to give us a goodnight kiss on a Saturday night, with her breath smelling deliciously of the pint of bitter she has been drinking with my father, perhaps with Phyllis and Sid as well, at the Spring Hotel in the Village? I don't think my parents are still taking my sister and me for a Sunday morning drink at the Tattenham Corner Hotel on Epsom Downs. We have another family treat now – Saturday lunch at the British Restaurant in Leatherhead. The British Restaurants are government canteens, housed in asbestos shedding which has perhaps been supplied by my father, and their function is to keep the population cheaply and adequately nourished with vast helpings of simple food, such as bright orange mashed swedes. We don't go by car – we cycle. My mother, on her Raleigh, protectively shepherding my sister, now seven, on the fairy cycle that came from our rich relations in Enfield – six miles there and six miles back, her little legs pumping away at four times the speed of ours. The most surprising aspect of these trips is that my father, too, has been persuaded on to a bicycle. He rides it in a special non-committal way indicating that it's not his – that it's his late father-in-law's (and still with us in
the garage, like the violin under the stairs) – that he's not really a cyclist at all but a motorist condescending.

An even greater treat for me, though, is the special privilege that I'm accorded on Saturday evenings as a reward for being nearly eleven. I have to wait for this until my sister's asleep, which often takes an agonisingly long time, because she suspects from the way I'm remaining absolutely silent and motionless, not suggesting any dares down to the dining-room door, or into our parents' bedroom and out of the window on to the roof of the bay window below, that for some ulterior purpose I want her unconscious. At last her restless struggles to stay awake grow still. She begins to breathe regularly … I ease myself inch by inch out of bed…

At once she's sitting up, wide awake. ‘Where are you going? What are you doing?' – ‘Nowhere. Nothing …' I get back into bed and start waiting all over again.

Where I'm going, when near dawn I can, is downstairs. What I'm doing is joining my parents for bread and cheese – the whole week's ration at one go, probably. Even more delicious than the bread and cheese is the grown-upness of it, the nonchalant threeness of it. We're as close as the three we're listening to on the wireless as we eat, in
Happidrome
– 

At one of these Saturday night feasts I take an effortlessly adult swig of my lemonade – and spit it out again over the tablecloth, because it's the most disgusting fluid any human being has ever had in his mouth.
Not
my lemonade – my father's beer. ‘Daydreaming again, Willy?' inquires my father resignedly.

All this – the doodlebug, the falling in love, the bread and cheese – happens, I think, in the summer of 1944. In September,
on the 8th, I'm eleven, and the Germans celebrate my birthday by launching the first V2s upon London. The V2 is not a pilotless plane, like the V1; it's a rocket. It travels faster than sound, so there's nothing to hear beforehand, and no sporting chance to throw yourself on to the floor or into the Morrison. The first warning of its arrival is the explosion that announces it's already there. Then you hear it coming.

In theory, it seems to me now, this ought to be less stressful than the doodlebugs, because you don't need to do anything about it. If you hear anything at all you're still alive, and it's killed someone else. But for some reason – perhaps simply because I'm three months older than I was – it terrifies me. Over and over again, as the autumn and winter draw on, I'm snatched out of sleep by that peremptory notice of execution, and as the retrospective warning comes rumbling along in its wake I realise that I could have been extinguished – could yet at any moment still be extinguished – without ever realising it.

My first intimation of mortality. The war has at last come home to me.

And then it's all over. The Duration, that dour explanation for the state of everything, that had stretched ahead to eternity as comprehensively and dully as the Law of the Conservation of Matter, has ceased to be.

An official day of rejoicing is decreed, VE Day, to mark our victory in Europe. My sister and I celebrate by starting another war of our own, against each other. She marches into Poland – deliberately snaps one of the paint brushes from my watercolour set. I honour my obligations towards my paint brush. A blitzkrieg of punching, scratching and weeping ensues, followed by a second blitzkrieg of slapping, raging and screaming from our mother. I sit chastened in the garden on my own after the battle has died down, very aware of the irony, ashamed of my part in events, pierced to the heart by the sadness of things.

In the evening there's a huge communal bonfire on the waste
ground at the back of the houses, where all the neighbours sing patriotic and sentimental songs together. An asbestos sheet – not one of my father's samples but part of someone's abandoned chicken run – explodes and almost kills the man who's stoking the fire. (I don't think TAC's publicity about the fire resistance of asbestos mentions its weakness for exploding.) What we're watching burn, though we don't yet know it, is the last of the wartime communal spirit that got this bonfire built.

In August there's another day of celebration, VJ Day; even the war in the Far East is over. Peace at last, and the good years starting. We certainly have plenty to rejoice about. Fifty-five million people have died since 1939 – and in our immediate family we have all survived, apart from my grandfather and the drake. My cousin Maurice, who came through Dunkirk, and in 1944 volunteered to go back to France as a glider pilot, is OK. So is my cousin Philip, after his time as a rating in destroyers in the North Atlantic, then rising to lieutenant-commander in the Pacific. Even Nanny has managed to hang on so far, just.

On a misty Saturday evening that autumn, my parents, my sister and I are invited to another bonfire, this time for Guy Fawkes Day. My sister and I are even more excited by this one, because it will be the first Guy Fawkes with fireworks since before the war. And it's in the paddock of our wealthy neighbour Mr Warbey, the cardboard-box manufacturer with the tennis court. We're on the up and up in every way.

So there we are, waiting to go out to the fireworks that misty Saturday evening, the 3rd of November 1945. It's about 6 p.m. My father's in the back bedroom, changing, my mother's in the dining room with Nanny. Nanny (as I discover later) is suggesting a glass of sherry, and I suppose my mother's feeling, ‘Well, why not?' Everything's still rationed, it's true, England's still bleak and grey. But it's the end of another week, it's Saturday. Tommy's home, the children are upstairs playing, our wealthy neighbours have invited us out, and there are sky rockets and sparklers to look forward to. And when she thinks of everything that has happened since
that party in Holloway twenty-six years earlier … Her father's ruin, and her farewell to music. The long wait to marry. The move to Ewell. The struggle to support parents and parents-in-law, to feed the family, to keep our battered little ark afloat … It's a life, though, no doubt about it. She and Tommy have made a reasonable go of it. There's something to celebrate.