My Father's Fortune (5 page)

The Barlows are Scots, which is a bit of an oddity in itself, and makes it difficult to assess their social standing very exactly.
She's a coloratura soprano. I have no idea where or what she sings, except at home. The characteristic sound of summer mornings, when the windows are wide, is of her practising, hours at a time, in her kitchen (or perhaps her scullery) as she clatters the dishes. He's an architect who works for Putney Council, and my father immediately recognises in him a suitable subject for his stories. Most of these turn on what my father sees as his traditional Scots carefulness with money, which forms a good complement to my father's carelessness with the literal truth.

What entertains my father most is Barlow's car. So far as I can recall, he's the only person in the street to have one, apart from my father and Archie Dennis-Smith. Barlow's old Austin, though, is distinguished from the other two by its livery of rust and filth. He's too mean (according to my father) to waste money on repairs or on leathers to wash it. He's also canny with the petrol and oil, and my father has a fund of stories about how Barlow has once again, to his surprise, had to abandon the car somewhere at the roadside between Ewell and Putney because either the tank was empty or the engine has seized up.

In the end, of course, more petrol, even more oil, has to be bought. The extravagance at which Barlow draws an absolute line (says my father) is replacing the brake linings. They wear down to the rivets, but the car goes as well as it's ever going to go without them. There's the question of stopping, of course, but there are other and less expensive ways of doing this. Slamming the car into low gear, for example. Finding a side street to turn into or an uphill slope. Running out of petrol or oil. Barlow has to go down Putney Hill each day on the way to work, and my father tells us over and over how he prevents the car from running away with him by keeping the nearside wheels rubbing against the curb, with an eventual effect on the tyres that surprises Barlow, once again, as much as it gratifies my father.

My father's other friend in the street, Davis, at No. 17 opposite us, has two distinctions. First of all, like Archie Dennis-Smith, but unlike Kidd, Milward, Staines or even Barlow, he has a first
name – George. The other distinguishing characteristic of George Davis, as my father always calls him (never just George), is that he's an artist, and a famous one. He is G. H. Davis, who draws for the
Illustrated London News
, long since defunct, but at that time (or so it seems to us who are G. H. Davis's neighbours) the most important news periodical in the country.

His speciality is drawing pictures of ships and aircraft with sections of their outer skin cut away to reveal the internal workings. He does the great new ocean liners of the thirties – the
Queen
Mary
and the
Queen Elizabeth
, the
France
and the
Normandie
and the
Bremen
– and you can see the teeming passengers streaming up and down the wide stairways between the decks, through suites of restaurants and saloons and ballrooms. All the gradations of the different classes are made graphic, and beneath them the mighty engines thundering away, the holds crammed with trunks and packing cases, the cold-stores hung with sides of beef and mutton and every kind of game. He does the great biplanes and flying boats of Imperial Airways, and the airships that once seemed destined to replace them. When the war breaks out he achieves even wider celebrity by taking us inside the warplanes and warships of both sides.

He's a tall, benevolent, excitable man with a tiny, benevolent, placid wife, and I'm sometimes invited into his studio at the back of the house to gaze respectfully at the artistic chaos in which he works. His painstaking constructions are imagined from sheafs of technical plans (many of which, it occurs to me now, must be highly secret). To get a realistic impression of the exteriors of the destroyers and submarines, the Hurricanes and Wellingtons, he often also uses three-dimensional models. Some of these, when he has finished with them, he impulsively donates to me. The ones I recall best now are First World War biplanes and triplanes, with meticulously detailed struts and crosswires. My favourite is a German bomber, a Gotha biplane, with a corridor, open to the night winds, leading from the cockpit to the front gunner's position in the nose, where a tiny but perfect machine gun is mounted. These
models are by far the grandest toys that I will ever own, and I venerate them; but their record of survival in my muddling childish hands is considerably worse than that of their life-size counter-parts in battle.

As a matter of fact Barlow is also an artist; two pale watercolours he has painted of Scottish seaside resorts hang on our dining-room wall. He and George Davis have something else in common, too – the disgraceful state of their gardens. Barlow's front garden has at any rate one feature – his rusting motor car. I don't think I'm doing George Davis an injustice when I recall that from the windows of his studio you look out through a tangle of rambler rose over a small but (to me) entrancing landscape of primeval forest and unmown savannah. Of course – he's an artist.

Was our garden also a disgrace? I'm not sure. I find it hard to know quite
what
it was. I've often told stories since of my father's ineptitude in the garden (and there are more to come). But when I think about it I realise that this isn't fair. I'm scarcely in a position to comment, in any case, since I've never even attempted to make anything grow in a garden. Whereas he planted and nurtured herbaceous borders on either side of the lawn, including banks of goldenrod that my sister and I hid behind, clumps of lupins, irises and Michaelmas daisies, and two formal beds of roses, of delphiniums and snapdragons. There were tomatoes along the sunlit south wall of the house. Beyond the rosebeds a hedge of macracarpa concealed a kitchen garden with apple trees, blackcurrant bushes and raspberry canes, a green cathedral of runner beans, and beds that during the war kept us healthy with an endless supply of potatoes, carrots, cabbage and curly kale.

Now that I catalogue it, it begins to sound like Sissinghurst or Hidcote. All the same, there was something a bit … a bit funny about it all. It wasn't like most of the other gardens where I went to play. What was wrong with it? I can't put my finger on it … The lawn, perhaps. It was full of bumps and hollows, and plants that had some resemblance to grass but were not grass. There were odd unexplained patches of concrete and gravel. The layout of the
beds was … unconvincing. Nothing was quite straight, or quite round, or quite lined up with anything else. The flowers looked as if they had sprung from packets of seed scattered at random, without checking the name on the packet first. There was rather a lot of elder and bindweed. Rather a lot of weeds of every sort.

It looked like … well, like a garden bravely planted by a man brought up in two rooms, who has never seen a garden before. I don't think anyone could ever have accused my father of keeping up with the Joneses. I'm not sure that he cared much what the Joneses were up to. Or even knew.

When I think about the unfairness of all those stories I've told people over the years past about my father as a gardener I begin to doubt the fairness of some of the other stories I'm telling here still, my father's as well as mine.

My father's stories about Barlow, for example. Had he improved them a bit in the telling? Stretched one unfortunate occasion when Barlow had run out of petrol, or the engine had seized up, into a regular pattern of comically predictable behaviour? Extended a single brief accidental graze against the kerb on Putney Hill into a daily mile-long saga? Made something light and tractable out of heavy and intractable anxieties over money?

Of course he'd improved the stories. That was his style. Have I improved them still further in retelling them, in spite of all my conscious concern for the historical truth? I can see my daughter's sardonic smile at my even asking the question.

It's everybody's style, in any case. All accounts of the past are a bit like Davis's drawings of liners and bombers. They're formalisations of what was once before us as an endlessly confusing and unformalised present. They're intended to make visible the hidden causal machinery, to show up the structure of the decks and the different classes of saloon, and to decorate it all with little models of people made small and simple enough for us to understand. The stories we tell about childhood have no more resemblance to what that childhood was like as we actually lived through it than
George Davis's neat cutaways of a Lancaster bomber had to the interior of a real Lancaster in action, stinking of aviation fuel and vomit and fear.

And when I retell my father's stories I'm moving one stage further away from the original experience, like George Davis depicting not an actual Lancaster but someone else's model of a Lancaster.

No doubt Barlow told his wife stories about my father. ‘Pours petrol into that car of his. It's often standing there with half a gallon or more left in the tank, completely unused. And as for oil! He throws it about like a drunken sailor! Now he's buying new brakelinings!' Perhaps George Davis does the same. ‘Saw Tom Frayn mowing his front lawn again. Second time this summer. Funny fellow, Tom – killing a perfectly good crop of daisies.'

Another question occurs to me in relation to my father's stories – a strange absence among the people he told them about. Apart from Barlow and George Davis there were various colleagues and customers who were immortalised. His cousin Courtenay, watching the asylum clock. Me and my own various idiocies. His brother and sisters, occasionally.

But about his parents – never. Not a word, in all the thirty-seven years I knew him. The sons of Noah piously covered their father's nakedness. Perhaps my father was doing the same. For better or worse, that's one way in which I'm failing to follow his example.

And only now, as I write this page, does another rather fundamental question occur to me: I can remember something about my father's social relationships, but which of the neighbours were my mother's friends? Who did
she
tell stories about? Mrs Barlow? Mrs Davis? I don't think so. I can't make my mind form a picture of her talking to or about any of them. She walked to the shops, pushing my sister's pram or pushchair, and I went with her. I can remember the shops we went into. I can remember some of the weather. She must sometimes have said good day to Mrs Kidd or Mrs Knowles as we emerged from the gate, or stopped to chat
with Mrs Shakespeare as we turned the corner into Queensmead Avenue … I can't see it, though. Her friends are her family and my father's family from North London. And of course my father himself, my sister, and me.

All four of us together, often. On a Sunday morning, perhaps, sitting outside the Tattenham Corner Hotel on Epsom Downs. My father has fetched two pints of bitter and two half-pints of ginger beer on a round nickel-plated tray. The ginger beer is in authentic pub beer glasses engraved with the measure, exact models of the glasses our parents are drinking from, and we have a packet of potato crisps with salt in a twist of blue greaseproof paper. If it's still too early in the year to sit outside we stay in the car. Our parents sit in front, chatting peacefully to each other now and then about whatever it is that parents chat to each other about. My sister and I sit behind them, on our best behaviour, not squabbling or pestering, looking out over their shoulders at the complex white rails of the empty racecourse and the soaring spring cloudscapes above the grandstand. An occasional gust of April wind rocks the car slightly. The fizz of the ginger beer in the authentic pub glasses is deliciously intoxicating.

What's our mother like? Not like anything – she's just our mother, as taken for granted and uncharacterised as the air we breathe. She's put on a bit of weight by this time, I see from the old photographs. I suppose she's shy, and feels as displaced in Hillside Road as my father does, but doesn't have his cheek to brazen it out. What the neighbours see, I should imagine, insofar as they see anything, is a placid, smiling woman who keeps herself to herself. With us, though, she can be mercurial. She sits in the dining room in the evening with my father, and my sister and I dare each other to get up and creep downstairs, further and further, before we turn and run terrified back to bed. The darer watches through the bannisters as each sortie brings the daree closer and closer to the dining-room door … until he or she can distinguish the voices of the BBC news announcers and comedians on the other side of it … is actually touching the handle … turning it … Until in
the end, inevitably, the door abruptly disappears in front of our over-confident fingers and a flying mass of fury comes hurtling out, slapping wildly at whichever of us it happens to be as we run screaming back up the stairs – then slap, slap, slap – this bed, that bed – darer and daree without distinction.

But then there are the mornings when she takes us on the green 408 or 470 from the end of Queensmead Avenue to the great metropolis of Sutton, three miles away. The bus is a double-decker, with its own staircase to climb. We're going shopping in Sutton's great department store, Shinners, to buy … What? I never notice – only the immensely grown-up clatter of the lift gate, and the sophisticated swoosh of the little cable cars that are shot along overhead wires to carry the cash from the counter to the cashier's office and bring the change back.

Sometimes she takes us on a longer expedition still, on the 406 from Ewell Village, to Kingston and its even more palatial Bentalls, with a visit to Santa's grotto, or an ice cream amidst the dark and ancient panelling of the Tudor Lounge. Or best of all, on the electric train from Ewell East station, in the serious green livery of the Southern Railway, trailing showers of sparks. We sit in a compartment richly furnished with veneers and sepia photographs of seaside views, and luxuriously scented by dusty upholstery and the leather of the strap which you can let out to lower the window. We're going to Madame Tussauds in Marylebone Road, and our mother points out to us once again the Royal Academy of Music, almost next door, where her career as a violinist began, and was so quickly extinguished.