The Girl from Station X (43 page)

My mother must have found my father’s prejudices trying. He was anti-intellectual, anti-American and anti-Scot, calling the celebrated Scottish poet ‘Rebbie Bairns!’ and
jeering at my mother’s favourite children’s book,
Little Lord Fauntleroy
, the first part of which was set in America.

My mother’s love for America and her times spent there – the only real family life she knew, with Aunt Dita and her four cousins – affected my own early life. I remember the
book of exotic American birds – ‘Golden Oriole’, ‘Hoopoe’ – that I was given to colour in and also our Little Golden Books. One,
The Saggy-Baggy
Elephant
, was about a little elephant who tried to fit in with the other animals in the jungle and ended up being happier with his own kind; another described a little girl being taken to a
supermarket by her mother and asked to choose between three toys. I was intrigued by the illustration of the supermarket trolley.

Then there was my mother’s American songbook. Neither my mother nor I was musical (unlike my father), but, aged nine or ten, I learned to sight-read music and on our upright piano banged
out the old songs – ‘Poor Old Joe’, ‘Swanee River’ and other more cheerful American tunes such as ‘Camptown Races’, ‘John Brown’s Body’
and ‘Marching through Georgia’, though my mother explained that this was a Yankee battle-song and advised me not to sing it loudly all over the house when Leith, a Southerner, came to
stay.

One day I was playing ‘Swanee River’ on the piano and my father strode in, telling me to ‘Stop that bloody row!’ My mother defended me, saying that I must be allowed to
express myself. She had understood that, like her, my imagination had been caught by those sad, often sentimental songs of the American South. This is one of the few occasions that I remember my
mother being really on my side; perhaps she would have spoken out more often if she had been surer of herself. Despite my father’s loud voice, he wasn’t that sure of himself either.
Colin, a writer older than me who knew both my parents, says that he remembers as a young man my father charging into a room with his head down; the overwhelming impression he gave to Colin was of
shyness. Surely, with his own disappointment about his truncated career, my father therefore wasn’t the best person to help my mother with her inferiority complex or with her literary
aspirations? I remember him saying to me: ‘Your mother thinks she’s a writer manqué.’ He gave the impression that there was nothing to be done about it; this was just
another of her whims.

I
did not always dislike my mother, as I came to do in later life. I often longed to please her. I remember a shell box I made for her of cowries,
and her approval when, each year, I was second or third out of my whole school in running and high jump. Like her, I was athletic.

I remember afternoon trips to the seaside with my mother in Sussex, usually with my brothers and one or two dogs. We would cross a small railway line on foot and end up on the shingle, the port
of Newhaven on our right. Sometimes we would drive straight to Newhaven beach and swim from there – the only sandy beach in the area. I also recall my mother taking me to tennis lessons
– I was in my school tennis team – and riding lessons for me and Nicky in Ashdown Forest. But I wanted more from her. Too often she would seem distracted, or preoccupied with her next
trip abroad.

When I had bronchitis, aged eleven, for the second time and was confined indoors, I wove two scarves for my parents from a weaving kit I had been given. For my father I chose dark red and for my
mother I chose kingfisher blue, which, because of her vivid, almost turquoise eyes, seemed to be then the colour that was as magical and rare as she was.

I had an autograph book and asked both my parents to write in it. My father, who, during my incarceration with bronchitis, would read aloud from Enid Blyton’s
The Castle of
Adventure
, putting on a girlie voice to imitate a ‘wet’ character, Lucy-Ann, and screaming ‘Kee-Kee!’ whenever the parrot, Kiki, appeared in the story, jotted down the
following:

My mother also read aloud to me, but would unnervingly stop every few seconds and glance at me unconfidently, to see if I was listening. Beside her autograph, she wrote down
part of Juliet’s speech from Shakespeare’s
Romeo and Juliet
:

I do not think that, despite her romantic, and perhaps inappropriate, choice of quote here – after all, I was still a child – she ever loved a man in the way that Juliet had loved
Romeo. My father, however, did love my mother, I am certain, although my parents, both being so highly strung, would probably each have fared better with a more placid partner.

But my father tried to protect my mother. Even when he was terminally ill in hospital, he was preoccupied with her welfare. ‘I don’t want her to get anxious about getting nurses for
me. I don’t want to worry her,’ he told me, before being brought home to die. Her women friends – I have to remind myself again that she was popular with other women –
rallied round her at that time and found nurses.

My father protected his wife but also patronised her. He called her Tubby Fat Lump; when I was small she would regularly embark on regimes which I called ‘Going On Diet’, and he
teased her about her girlish enthusiasms. ‘Mum shouted: “There’s a camel!”’ he told me on their return from a holiday in Egypt.

My father used me as an accomplice. When my mother got drunk at the dining-room table and started making her extravagant hand gestures, he would turn to me and raise his eyebrows. He needed a
companion to help him deal with his wife’s instability.

I adored my father, although, being so explosive, he was difficult to live with. I sometimes fought with him and he could be physically aggressive. He did not conceal his lust for other women
and would make inappropriate remarks in front of his wife and daughter: ‘Wouldn’t mind doing spermia with her!’ he said of one of my fifteen-year-old schoolfriends.

My mother may have felt undermined by my father’s lustful remarks about other women. Fifteen years after he died, she suddenly showed me some photographs from their early married life in
Madrid. My attention was caught by a tall woman with dark hair and a sensual face. I asked who she was and, when I heard her name, I remembered overhearing that it was she who had had a long affair
with a married friend of my parents. My mother said: ‘Dad had a walk-out with her.’

Direct communication from my mother was so unusual that I did not question her further. Privately, I was shocked. I worked out that my father could easily have had his affair – if
‘walk-out’ meant that – with this woman in Madrid while my mother was in England having me. My parents had been married then for less than two years. If that was so, for the first
time I was on my mother’s side against my father, and that felt strange to me. My mother admired my father’s ‘guts’, a word she liked. She was proud of his having been
awarded the DSC with two bars for his courage in the North Atlantic, and was sympathetic that his favourite ship,
The Kite
, was torpedoed and most of the sailors whom he had known were
drowned. My mother said that he was devastated, and had written to the sailors’ wives and mothers, who wrote back, some stating that if he had still been in command of the ship she would not
have gone down. ‘How could I expect him to work after he’d had such a hard war?’ she said.

If she had had a living father, even one brother, and a more down-to-earth upbringing, she would surely not have taken this view. My father should have gone on working.

However, despite his daily intake of whisky and wine, he did try to pull his weight, running our small farm – I remember his anxiously practising telephone calls, half under his breath,
rehearsing instructions about something to be done. He became a local magistrate and would tell us colourful stories at the dining-room table. One lurid case concerned two kitchen porters called
Tony at a local hotel. One Tony had murdered the other with a carving knife, then buried him down the road in bits in the grounds of my former school, the one I had left at eleven. Remains of one
of the Tonys were found months later by Boy Scouts camping. My father told us how a finger was held up in court and how Tony the murderer had announced in the dock that the other Tony’s ghost
had come to him and forgiven him.

My father’s behaviour, I now realise, was uninhibited. He would frequently come down to breakfast in pyjamas and dressing gown; his pyjama cord would be undone and my brothers and I would
often see his penis (which he referred to by a nickname), as he helped himself to scrambled eggs. I have already described his freewheeling comments about other women and his frequent use of the
phrase ‘doing spermia’. In contrast, my mother’s attitude to sex seemed to be associated with secrecy, even shame. She always gave me the impression that she had been a virgin
until marriage and had once muttered, in answer to one of my questions when adolescent, that the important thing about sex was that you both had to be ‘in harmony’.

But I had a physical and an emotional connection with my father that I did not have with my withdrawn mother, always dancing away out of reach.

My mother’s situation was unusual. She could not cook, so did not look after my father in the manner of most wives of that period. I remember her sometimes waiting on him at table, taking
plates from the sideboard, instead of asking me or my brothers to do it, although Nicky, when she complained about him leaving dirty dishes in the sink in London, remarked to me: ‘She’s
never washed up a cup for me in her whole life.’

It was her money that gave my father his post-war lifestyle – a country house with servants that he could not have afforded on his naval pension. But, as my aunt had pointed out, it was my
father who interviewed cooks, nannies and other household staff – duties that normally belonged to a wife. My mother did not have to cook, wash clothes, clean, or even take us to school. If
she had, perhaps she would have been able to distract herself a little from the pain of Raymond’s death. It was clear after she was widowed and the extent of her helplessness was revealed
that my father had taken charge of her financial affairs.

Did he resent, deep down, his reliance on her money? It made him physically comfortable, but certainly did not make him happy. Indeed, after his gallant war and his – and her –
popularity in Madrid, his life also quickly became a sad contrast of wasted potential.

Soon after we moved to Sussex, my mother joined the WVS, perhaps to take her mind off Raymond. By her own admission, she was hopeless at arithmetic, but the local WVS for some reason asked her
to do their accounts. She was intrigued by three women who worked there, Miss Gaites, Miss Whiteleg and Mrs Pinecoffin. One was sacked, then, my mother told us excitedly, she met this lady in our
town. My mother did not know where to look, but quickly realised from the other’s friendliness that she wasn’t in the least embarrassed.

My mother was entertained by these day-to-day encounters, and willingly threw herself into many aspects of local life and derived pleasure from life in the country. She was president of the
village’s Forget-Me-Not club for pensioners and even shortly before getting Alzheimer’s was still making friends. I remember her delight when a newcomer sent out invitations for
‘Open House’:
Please nod in!
My mother pictured herself and the other locals entering the house one by one, nodding. This was her good side.

When I was thirteen, long before I got my first period, she decided to give me a ‘talk’. We were in London, the year before my great-grandparents’ hundred-year lease on the
Belgrave Square house ran out.

My mother sat on my bed, underneath that tinted photograph of the Florida cormorant and semi-tropical trees reflected in water. After a few words on menstruation, she wanted me to know that men
were ‘fundamentally jealous’ of women’s ability to give birth. Although I did not argue, I did not agree with this and I concluded privately that her view was somewhat unbalanced.
Nevertheless, I found what she had said disturbing. Was it she who was jealous of men, rather than the other way round?

Soon after this, I discovered that my mother’s bedside-table drawer was full of forbidden books –
The Perfumed Garden
,
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
,
Fanny
Hill
,
The Kama Sutra
,
The L-Shaped Room
and Simone de Beauvoir’s
The Second Sex.
I removed them one by one, reading the first four quickly in my own room at
night, then returning them when she was out. I filched
The L-Shaped Room
for longer, taking it to my convent, where my three closest friends and I read it under the cover of
The Young
Traveller in Belgium.
In the holidays, I put it back in my mother’s drawer. I never put
The Second Sex
back. I still have it. Maybe that book was a necessary substitute for the
dialogue I should have been having with my mother about being female. She never asked me if I had taken
The Second Sex
, nor did she ever mention that secret drawer. She was indeed so
unlike my outspoken father, who would nowadays be described as having ‘no boundaries’. (Aged thirteen, I had tried to get my hands on
The Third Sex
, a book he was reading on
holiday in Greece, but he threw it overboard, off our ferry to Mykonos. He did, however, let me read
Lolita
on that same holiday. It remains one of my favourite books.)

Despite hating to leave my dog when I went to my convent boarding school at nearly twelve, I ended up liking it. I made many friends and enjoyed breaking the rules. After I had been there just
over a year, my father wrote a letter to our head nun.