The Girl from Station X (44 page)

November 6th 1962.

Dear Mother Shanley,

I am disturbed at my daughter’s bad conduct. I have no doubt that you are justified in stopping her going out, but it does not seem to have much effect. You write that
she is to be fined five pounds for climbing on a roof. I really don’t see the point of this punishment; it means that I will have to pay, and in my view it is the responsibility of the school
to devise a suitable punishment to deter the child from breaking the rules . . . My wife is on a cruise in Cretan waters at the moment. She writes that she is much impressed with Rhodes and the old
auberges of the Knights of Malta.

Yours sincerely,

Willy Segrave.

My father’s letter resulted in the fine being waived. Instead, I was not allowed to go home for the weekend.

Susan S – my mother’s friend in Sussex – remembered that on my sports days and school concerts, my mother did not always attend (being often abroad), but my father always did,
sometimes with my grandmother.

Nicky also broke the rules – in a different way. He had not won a scholarship to Eton as predicted, but had still gone there almost a year early, as he was clever. In his
last year of prep school he had started a satirical magazine (modelled on
Private Eye
, which first came out in 1961), but subsequently seemed to find his adolescent and teenage years very
difficult. He ran away from Eton, then was expelled from his next boarding school, the Catholic Worth Abbey, as he was friends there with a group of boys who smoked cannabis – they also had
to leave. Nicky then went to a progressive day school in Hampstead which he liked, but I seem to remember that in the end that placement foundered as well.

My father proved inadequate in dealing with all this and on one occasion, when I was seventeen or eighteen, and smoking hash regularly, he rang me and asked agitatedly, several times, about
Nicky: ‘Did you give him pot?’

It seems to me that in the late 1960s, or even before, my father abdicated his responsibilities as a father to Nicky. Like our parents, Nicky drank, from his mid-teens or even earlier. After I
left my convent at sixteen, Nicky and I wore velvet trousers, paisley shirts and smoked hash together – he went on to take many more drugs, unfortunately. I then went to Edinburgh University,
but dropped out after a year. I had missed my brother during my first term and had had severe psychosomatic stomach pains, then bronchitis. Back in London in autumn 1969, I found a job in a
hospital linen room and in the afternoons did a Sight and Sound typing course, hoping to go to America. My mother found the job for me in New York in the family company in public relations and
communications – and after that I travelled round America on Greyhound buses with a writer from London who was collecting underground newspapers.

I can’t help now contrasting my own situation, the $5-a-night hotels, sleeping often all night on the Greyhounds as we crossed the American desert, and my worries about Nicky back in
England, with my mother’s position at the same age – being cosseted in Long Island and Palm Beach by Aunt Dita and Leith and Fife’s parents, and receiving Fife’s adoring
love letters.

My life as a young woman seemed so different from my mother’s, so unprotected. I thought of a letter I had found from Peggie to my grandmother:
Anne seems to think it is all right for
Elisa to travel alone all over America on the Greyhound Bus.

My mother did not know that I was going to travel with a male companion. I suppose she was wrapped up in her own future travel plans and she too must have been worried about Nicky. Or maybe she
was thinking of her own travels through Eastern Europe with Jean in
her
early twenties and knew that she would not be able to stop me.

In 1973, I decided to live in Paris. My grandmother, who would miss me, did not want me to go but my father wrote me a letter:
Your grandmother is very lazy and very
spoilt. It was her fault Raymond died. Of course you should go to Paris.
My grandmother had told me that she admired my father for never having accused her of causing Raymond’s death. Her
daughter, however, had. One evening while I was at Knowle, my mother had driven over from her own house while Katherine and Violet were out looking for my grandmother’s and Katherine’s
West Highlands, both hunting in the Knowle woods. My mother declared: ‘You’re more interested in finding those damned dogs than you were in finding my son!’ After she had left, my
grandmother said nothing about Raymond but only that she was worried about her daughter driving while drunk.

In Paris, after an attempt to work as an au pair, and to learn how to teach English as a foreign language, I wrote a novel. I returned to London with this in autumn 1974 and was in England for
my father’s last weeks. He died of cirrhosis just after Christmas.

Nicky was away in India with his girlfriend and could not be reached. So it was I, my mother and my youngest brother who went in the funeral car to Mass at the Uckfield Catholic church my father
had taken us to so often as children.

The young priest, like her, was obsessed with Russia and knew all about the Russian imperial family. He even knew the names of their dogs and had been to a fancy dress ball dressed as the Tsar.
He sometimes came to tea with my mother and they talked about their common interest.

During the funeral Mass he read out a prayer for ships at sea, a tribute to my father’s naval career. At the wake at Knowle – my father was buried in Frant churchyard almost on top
of Aunt K, whom he’d found irritating – Frank, now suffering from a bad heart, said to me: ‘Your father was a brave man. I couldn’t have gone in those convoys!’

A few months after my father’s death, my mother and I were walking near the little church beside the river where, over a hundred years ago, the boy and the two oxen had
drowned on St Margaret’s Day. We found Nicky lying on the ground outside the church door. He was sobbing. ‘Even the church is locked!’ he cried.

That autumn Nicky, twenty-one, accompanied me to Peru. I had embarked on my next book – about my great-grandfather’s work in South America. Soon after Nicky and I arrived in Peru, I
was shocked to see that he could not walk up a mountain path without panting heavily and that he drank a whole bottle of Pisco, cheap Peruvian liquor, every day. When I returned to England, I
confronted my mother.

‘Don’t you realise, Nicky is an alcoholic?
He is an alcoholic!
’

My mother looked uncomfortable. Unfortunately, I didn’t tell her that she was one as well. Maybe I didn’t fully realise it then. But
she
must have known. Was that what she
meant when she’d said to me, about Nicky: ‘I’m afraid he’s inherited my weakness’?

I have a photograph of Nicky, sitting on the sea wall in Callao, the port of Lima. Over a century earlier, our great-grandfather Michael, younger than my brother was then, worked there in a ship
chandler’s. He had sailed from Ireland to join his older brother William, both starting on the path that would make their fortune. The brothers would get their employer to better the other
ship chandlers by anchoring a supply boat at the Chincha Islands, where guano – seabirds’ droppings – was scraped off the cliffs by unfortunate Chinese coolies, brought from their
own country on overcrowded ships. The guano was then transported round the Horn by clipper ships, to be sold as fertiliser. How tragic that my brother, just as talented, in his own way, as our
great-grandfather Michael, never fulfilled
his
promise. When I look at my photograph of my tall, handsome brother with his dark eyes and dark hair in a widow’s peak (so different from
his great-grandfather Michael, a determined, short man with light blue eyes and a blond-grey moustache), and I see how despondent he looks at twenty-one, when he should have been carving out a
future for himself, I feel very sad.

In April 1977, I visited Nicky on a smallholding in Cornwall. He was living there with his girlfriend and another boy I shall call Mac. They had two cows with calves, a
tractor, a Land Rover and three mongrel dogs. The floor of their little pink farmhouse, near a railway line, was covered with mud and the building was in disrepair. Mac took me aside and said that
my brother must get hold of some more money, to run the farm. I didn’t like Mac, but I had to admit that, of the three of them, he appeared to be the person with his head screwed on.
Nicky’s girlfriend, a pretty girl who went to art school in London and whose parents were divorced, seemed to be in Mac’s thrall. Because my brother was drinking, it seemed that Mac had
taken charge. Since the house was not properly furnished and there was nowhere for me to sleep, I went to the local B&B for the night, very close by. The couple running it were worried about
the situation up at the farm – they were concerned for my brother. The next morning I said to Mac that I knew nothing about getting more money and that he must speak to my mother about it. As
I drove back to London I fell into a terrible depression and that night I dreamed I watched a little bird die.

Three months later, just after I had published a comic article in the
Guardian
about a feminist writing group, Mac telephoned from Cornwall: Nicky was in hospital, following a drinking
bout. I told him to telephone my mother, who later reported to me that she’d asked Mac why he hadn’t told her immediately about my brother’s collapse. He said: ‘I’m
running this place and I haven’t any funds’, to which she replied: ‘What have funds got to do with it?’

It must have been then that my mother became suspicious. Family funds had been originally advanced to Nicky on her say-so. I am sure she thought that, after a history of expulsions from schools,
drugs, drink, depression and no work, now that my brother had settled on the idea of running a very small farm, he should be encouraged to do so, as it was something positive. However, she now
realised that Mac was taking advantage. A very decent farmer who worked for my parents and grandmother went down to Cornwall at my mother’s request to find out what was going on and reported
to my mother that Mac had asked him: ‘And what do you get out of this family?’

Nicky, like my mother, lacked some sort of protective skin. It was easy for anyone predatory to exploit him. He was kind-hearted and had often given friends or acquaintances cash. I’m sure
he felt guilty that, at his age, he had more of it than they did.

What was my mother’s attitude during all this trouble with her second son? I suppose that, in her own way – by putting a stop to ‘funds’, for example – she thought
that she was doing her best, even as she watched Nicky go downhill. Her husband had died three years earlier of cirrhosis and she was an alcoholic herself. It is only now, over twenty years later,
that I can begin to understand my mother’s situation then. At the time I loathed her drinking and I was terrified that everything would crash down on me, that I too would lose my bearings.
Like many of my age then, I had experimented with cannabis and LSD but I did not crave these – or drink – in the way that some other members of my family seemed to do. Indeed, cannabis
made me feel introverted, even a bit paranoid, so I gave it up. I wonder now, after reading of recent studies suggesting that it can sometimes induce psychosis or schizophrenia, if regular smoking
of it since his early teens – to say nothing of his consumption of alcohol – could have contributed to my brother’s almost permanent depression. I had warned my mother that Nicky
was an alcoholic, but she had not done anything about it, probably because that would have meant her dealing with her own drinking. I had even invited an older man who had just given up drink to
come round and talk to my brother, which he did, to no avail. He explained to me afterwards, ‘You see, drink is his friend.’ Nicky’s drinking continued.

On 4 August 1977, my mother and I were in London when the telephone rang at 9 a.m. It was the police from Cornwall. I thought, as I passed the telephone to her, that Nicky
might have committed suicide, but it was not that. The police had arrested Mac the night before – they would not say why – then let him go. Later Nicky rang. He had left the hospital
that afternoon.

The next day my mother, having returned to Sussex, rang me in London. Nicky had now been arrested by the Cornwall police and they were sending him home. My mother was coming up to meet him.

My diary describes Nicky arriving like the Prodigal Son. We went to a Greek restaurant, where he ordered a bottle of retsina. The next morning, he went to Sussex with our mother, after first
slipping off to a local off-licence, only to find it shut. My mother was plainly incapable of restraining him.

I was sick of the whole thing, I wrote, sounding callous, though actually I was terrified. At that stage in my life I did not know anything about addiction. I had never been to
Alcoholics Anonymous, and had barely heard of it, and I had certainly not fully understood that all the members of my immediate family, including my deceased father, were alcoholics.

As I look back now, I can see that I was desperately trying to stop myself going under. I had tried to help my brother but now I did not know what to do. (‘He’s weak, and you
can’t do anything about that!’ my grandmother said brutally.) That year I suffered from stomach problems and glandular fever, the latter triggered by a failed affair in London. My
escape to the States – I was no doubt taking my cue from my mother, who had once sat me down and told me seriously that her solution for dealing with ‘troubles’ was to go abroad
– was a bid for my own survival. That October, safe in the mountains of Vermont with my friends, I wrote of what I had just escaped:

London was becoming more and more excretal. Nicky and my mother were both in the house, drinking. The situation was impossible. The order that I had tried to impose
on my life had disappeared. I had become prey to all my mother’s fears of calamities and ‘troubles’ as she sometimes calls them. I was drawn tighter into the net with the two of
them – I couldn’t get out.