Auto Da Fay

So my father ran away from his apprenticeship and my not very pleasant grandfather, and was sent to the front line in France, but within the year was invalided out of the mud and slime of the trenches. Next he was posted to Arabia, where the air was all too dry. But he became T. E. Lawrence’s driver: he had a Rolls-Royce to play with, adapted to desert use and armed with a machine gun, which he coaxed up and down impossible sand hills. I think he enjoyed himself very much. He once showed me a battered leather-bound copy of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, inscribed to him by Lawrence himself. He told me he was captured by Bedouin but saved himself by offering them jam labels, which he told them was money and they believed him. It just so happened that he collected jam labels, there being lots to collect in a desert filled with soldiery who had to eat. They blew about the sand hills.

This part of The War he talked about: he would never speak about the trenches. Perhaps the time spent there was too traumatic: too full of exploding bodies for words to encompass. It made him neurotic. Those who have been soldiers often are: from time to time they behave compulsively. Those who are damaged feel the need to pass it on: those who are hardened try to harden others. Soldiers who emerge from wars are often cheery enough: they have learned the art of living in the present: they’re good at that – today’s friend can be tomorrow’s corpse. Just sometimes they shake and shiver and are cruel to others, and want them to suffer too. Ron Weldon, my second husband, was an ex-soldier, like so many of the generation after my father’s. He had spent time clearing bloated bodies from streams in Burma: he didn’t mention this for a good twenty-five years into the marriage, when he started getting nightmares and handing them on.

After the Armistice Frank went to London and with the aid of demob money and contributions from his maiden aunts in Newcastle, studied medicine at University College Hospital. In 1922 he visited a nightclub and there met and charmed Edgar and Susan Jepson, who took him under their wing. Before long he was sleeping on their sofa, and had begun his assiduous courtship of their daughter Margaret, then a girl of sixteen.

Doors opened to my father. It was a life he had not known before. Those who have a natural and spontaneous response to books, paintings, music and the life of the mind are lucky: the gift of their enthusiasm strikes through class barriers: they find mentors. ‘He was rather rough at the time,’ my mother said of him. ‘He’d been a soldier for years: he’d had no education. He swore dreadfully. He had no money: he slept on other people’s floors and ended up on ours. His aunts came down to visit him and threw up their hands in horror at what they found.’

Perhaps the gift for standing in front of the right door runs in families? When Edgar gravitated to Nona, back in the 1890s, a new world opened up for him, and it suited him down to the ground. Here was the gossipy bohemia of the day: forget the waspish writers and intellectuals, here were painters and musicians, and another kind of delinquency. ‘Through Frieda,’ he wrote in his Memories, ‘I came into the Bloomsbury Group of the day.’ He picked up the ball and ran with it.

Thirty years later Frank was to find himself in the same situation. All he had to date was the copy of Romeo and Juliet from T. E. Lawrence; now Edgar and Nona offered him the culture he was starved of, and he realized he had finally come home. When that home collapsed, he carried the daughter off as a trophy. Another generation on and history repeats itself. My mother’s world, by the virtue of war, divorce, poverty and circumstance had shrunk to subsistence level, and my world with it. Forget the arts and the life of the mind, what about the rent? But go to a party one night, just as Frank had been to a nightclub, and all of a sudden, there you are, back in your natural place: in my case Primrose Hill in the Sixties, the abode of the writers and painters. Go down to the launderette and run into the kind of people who hung out in these parts. Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath, Patrick Caulfield, Kingsley Amis and Elizabeth Jane Howard, Adrian Mitchell, R. D. Laing and the George Mellys, Tom Maschler the publisher, Mel Calman and Michael Ffolkes, cartoonists, Alan Sharp and Lukas Heller, screenwriters, ANC activists by the handful, Bernice Rubens and David Mercer, and down in Gloucester Crescent Alan Bennett and Jonathan Miller, and as many names as you care to drop, rising young artists and writers all. And the parties we gave were many and wild, and not so different from those at Adelaide Road, except the beer was made in the bath, and the bath was lidded and in the kitchen, and I don’t think Nona would have stood for that. With a permanent place in the lover’s bed, comes a permanent place in their circle. Actual marriage cements it.

Patterns

I am very conscious of the patterns our lives make: of interconnecting cogs and wheels, of coincidence which is no coincidence but fate, of the quiet sources of our energy. All things connect. The lost wedding ring turns up on the day of the divorce; the person you happen to sit next to on the Tube happens to be your new boss. Destiny intervenes. We assume we are playing the lead, but turn out to be bit-part players in someone else’s drama. Nothing is without result.

Even the maiden aunts, Madge and Augusta, who helped Frank become a doctor, were major players in his story, for all the quiet seclusion of their lives. They lived in Newcastle, in a house in which almost nothing had changed since the beginning of the century. Antimacassars protected the armchairs: oil lamps provided the only lighting.

In my student days, when I would hitchhike down from St Andrews in Scotland to St Ives in Cornwall, their house made a useful stopping-off point. The Aunts, who by then were in their nineties, provided a fine refuge from the hunger and tribulations of the open road, especially in winter time. Their ancient maid May lived with them. Most social inequalities had been evened out by the passage of the years, but not all. They would share the warmth of the fire but if more coal were needed it would be May who went to fetch it, and she was the one who got up to make the tea, though she was even more doddery than they. There would be a candle to light you to the unheated spare room, where the bed was so high you had to climb up into it. A flowered china chamber pot was placed beneath it. Springs would creak if you moved: the mattress sagged. The sheets were linen and cold, and the pillow was stiff, but the weight of the many blankets was reassuring. After you had been a little while in the bed it would begin to steam with damp, which was oddly pleasant. In the morning ice crystals would have formed on the inside of the windows. You would put bare feet out onto cold lino, dress as fast as you could and make for the kitchen, where a purple-knuckled May would be making breakfast. The tea would be hot and sweet.

The aunts would give you some money to help you on your way, and wave goodbye from the door as you set out on the road, and you would worry that this was the last time you would ever see them. It seemed a miracle that they existed at all: this was the stuff of fairy-stories, as if they came into existence only to facilitate your journey. When you ceased to see them, they would cease to be.

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