Walcot

Yet never did it occur to you that there were parallels here with your own unresolved dilemma; the Walcot problem.

5

‘Bloody Cripples!’

When Martin joined Short’s, another aviation company, the family followed him to Southampton, where Short Brothers was based. You saw little of your father. Politics kept him busy.

You remember an occasion when he had been addressing a small group of men on a street corner. He came home and told you that a policeman had appeared and said to him, gently but firmly, ‘Move along there, there’s a good lad.’

Your father had asked why he should move along. The bobby had replied, ‘Because I say so, sir, if you don’t mind.’

Your father was furious at this demonstration of power.

Looking back, you regret the disappearance of this kind of policing.

Your early existence was trapped between the two world wars, your later one by the Cold War. Your father provided constant reminders of the first war. The injury to his leg pained him continually; the broken bone had been badly set in the first place, and had to be re-broken and re-set. Throughout your boyhood, he was in and out of hospital. The aggravation increased his bitterness and his silence.

‘Does your poor leg hurt very much, Daddy?’ you asked him on one occasion, perhaps trying to curry favour.

‘We all have to make sacrifices,’ he said. It had become a favourite expression.

‘Do you have to sacrifice us?’ Sonia asked. As the spoilt one, she dared to criticize.

In fact, Martin had been lucky. He had survived the prolonged Battle of the Somme, a battle in which a million men had died – Germans, French and British – owing to a well-timed attack of pneumonia.

Your home was not generously provided with books. You remember one book in particular from those early days; it was bound in half-leather and consisted of twelve volumes: The Daily Telegraph History of the Great War. Through an absorbed study of those volumes, you gained an insight into the various hells through which your father had suffered and through which humankind put one another.

One painting reproduced in that book almost destroyed you with pity. The scene was in France; the ruins of a French town could be discerned mistily in the distance. In the foreground lay a wounded horse. It had to be left behind by the troops. The troops could be seen in the background, beckoning to a figure in the middle ground to hurry up and join them. But the figure in the middle ground lingered. His hand was raised in sad farewell to his horse. He it was who provided the caption to the picture: ‘Farewell, old friend!’

You were inconsolable. You cried and cried until your mother became angry and left you to weep. The argument that this was ‘only a painting’ carried no weight with you, for you felt certain it was a representation of something that could have happened, where the innocent suffered along with the wicked.

Surely at that time, one of your admirable qualities was born and fortified: compassion.

For the first thirteen months of the family’s removal to Southampton, you all stayed in a rented flat. Your father and mother could not find a house on which they could get a mortgage that they liked enough to buy. You were allotted a small room in the attic, where you were probably better situated than were the other members of the family. Sonia had a small room overlooking a banana importer’s yard. The wallpaper was violently colourful and featured the endlessly reduplicated image of an animal with big ears driving a little red car. To this Sonia took strident objection.

‘I hate it! I hate it! Take it away. It’s horrid.’

‘You’ll soon get used to it, darling,’ Mary had said, wearily. ‘This was a child’s room and, after all, you are a child, you know.’

Sonia screamed in response to this apparent injustice. ‘I am not that kind of a child. I am a child hunchback! A famous child hunchback! I’m special. I can’t sleep with this horrid thing hanging on the wall.’

‘Valerie would love that wallpaper! Please don’t be troublesome, dear.’

‘It’s not me. It’s the wallpaper.’

But Sonia had to put up with it. And there in that flat you spent a confined Christmas. Before you had your presents, Mary insisted on crimping Sonia’s hair. Protest as Sonia might, the tongs, the crimping paper, were brought to bear, and soon her chestnut locks were covered with waves like a sea of frozen gravy. The scorching smell still lingered round her head even when you sat down to dinner later that day.

Wished upon you was a girl of twelve, bigger than you and even more sulky, a girl of twelve with pigtails, by name Joan Pie. Martin had joined the local trade union. One of his docker friends had been struck by a falling girder. He was lying in hospital after a shoulder operation and his wife was ill, so Martin had generously volunteered to have Joan Pie come to stay with you all over Christmas and Boxing Day.

‘I don’t want to sit next to her,’ Sonia said, after one second’s inspection of the visitor. ‘She’s a pig.’

‘Ooh, snooty!’ said Joan Pie, and poked her tongue out at Sonia.

‘Behave yourselves,’ Mary ordered. But from then on, you two youngsters had conceived a hatred of this intruder into your uncomfortable quarters. You and Sonia were immediately united against her.

You asked your sister at the dinner table if she had ever heard of such a funny name as Pie. ‘Fly is silly too,’ Sonia said in a judicious manner. She asked the visitor, ‘Do you know anyone called Fly, Pie?’

‘Stop that, or I’ll make you get down,’ said Martin from his side of the table.

Now Mary was slicing and serving the Christmas pudding, doing it with slow care. You watched the operation like a hawk, alert for injustice.

Your plate with a slice of pudding was set down before you. Next, Joan Pie was served. Then Sonia. Suddenly, your mother exclaimed. Leaning forward, she rapidly switched your plate with Sonia’s.

You were angry at once. ‘Why did you do that?’

Mary waved her hands about. ‘I gave you the wrong plates, that’s all. Nothing else. Have some custard, Stevie.’

‘How were they wrong?’

‘Just be grateful for what you’ve got,’ Martin said, sternly.

‘Yes, be grateful for what you’ve got,’ echoed Joan Pie, giving Martin a silly look, seeking his approval.

‘You’ve got a bigger piece of pudding now, Stephen, so be quiet,’ said Mary. ‘Valerie would never complain as you do.’

You subsided. The Bird’s custard circulated in its little boat. You all ate in silence. Christmas pudding, dark, reluctant to crumble, heavy as mud, comprising many unknown things, bizarrely pleasing and quelling to the taste buds, a thing of the Stone Age. Eaten once a year like a human sacrifice.

Sonia gave a shriek and plunged her fingers into the sodden mass on her plate.

‘Look! I’ve got it!’ She waved a little bright object, to which a squashed currant adhered. ‘A sixpence! I’ve found a sixpence.’

You burst into tears. Well, you were only eight.

Only eight, but a bit of a baby.

You perceived that you had been swindled. It was a case of naked favouritism – And a reminder to me that I had been born into an unjust world.

No, the world has its invariable laws. It is human society which has established injustice.

Don’t tell me any more. I don’t want to remember –

It is necessary to remember, and to proceed.

After the meal, you had indoor fireworks. You and your sister loved indoor fireworks. There were paper mazes to which Martin applied his glowing cigarette end at the position marked ‘Start’, at which a spark went racing across the blank spaces to a destination it celebrated with quite a loud crack. There were sparklers you could hold and wave in dazzling patterns. There were folded papers that burnt into pretty ferns. There were flimsy paper cylinders to which you applied a lighted match and, as the paper burned down, magically rose and ascended to the ceiling. And there were snakes.

How you both loved the snakes.

By this time, you were in a better mood to enjoy the snakes. To comfort you, Sonia had whispered that she would share the sixpence, giving you half. Still grieving over the injustice, you had responded grumpily that it was your sixpence.

‘It’s not yours, it’s mine, ’cos I’ve got it,’ said Sonia, with some logic. ‘So for that I’ll only give you twopence.’

‘That’s not fair!’

‘And if you don’t shut up, you’ll only get a penny, so there.’

The snakes came in two kinds. One form of snake emerged from a volcano. The volcano was very small and encased in green ‘silver paper’. It stood on a circular cardboard base. When the peak of the volcano was lit, little green flecks, closely resembling grass, poured from it, covering the base. Finally, the snake emerged, writhing realistically as it came. It was thin but, with what seemed like evil intent, it crossed the grass as if to attack. Then, mercifully, it froze.

Sonia and you were enraptured. But Joan Pie said, contemptuously, ‘It didn’t do much.’

‘It would have bitten you if it could,’ you told her.

‘Stephen!’ Martin said, reprovingly. ‘You be nice to Joan or you’ll go up to your room.’

The other kind of snake was bigger and more terrifying. That was why you liked it better than the grass snake.

This snake, possibly a python, was concealed in a small, black top hat. This Christmas, Martin had discovered a cardboard box full of the little top hats, left over from the previous year by the last tenant of the flat. You clapped your hands with excitement at the sight of so many hats.

‘How Valerie would have loved them,’ Mary exclaimed wistfully.

Your father set one of them on the table near the grass snake, struck a match and tried to light it. The hat would not burn. Martin burnt his finger instead, and swore.

‘Try another match, daddy,’ shouted Sonia, full of anticipation.

He struck another one, but it also failed to ignite the hat, and again he burnt his finger.

‘Don’t be daft, Martin,’ Mary said. ‘You can see they’re old and damp. You’ll only burn yourself.’

Perhaps he was annoyed to be called daft. He took the box of top hats and flung it onto the coal fire, which heated his end of the room. You and Sonia groaned your disappointment. Joan Pie stuck her tongue out at you both, enjoying your dismay. But the box caught fire. The next minute, a dozen huge black pythons came uncoiling out of the fire and across the hearth to the carpet. What a sight! Sonia gave a yelp of delight. Joan Pie ran from the room, howling with fear.

What a sight! What a triumph!

Your father seemed always to be standing, holding forth in those days, despite his bad leg. He was a big man, generally to be seen in a tight-fitting Aertex shirt. He had a broad face and steely eyes. His lips were generally compressed, as if with anger against the injustices of the world.

You remembered an occasion when your parents had been having what you thought of as ‘a cold row’. Few words were spoken during their cold rows, but there was plenty of body language, of glaring of eyes and turning of backs. Your father had said, ill-advisedly, that his Socialist principles had been formed because he was shocked to find families like his wife’s in penury.

‘The Wilberforces’ lot was much more humble than the Fieldings’,’ he said.

‘I wouldn’t say that,’ Mary protested, stiff of face. She liked to think she came from ‘respectable stock’. ‘We weren’t too badly off. When I was fifteen Dad had an indoor lavvy tacked on.’

A recital of your antecedents made you dizzy. It seemed to you that these dead people all became middle-aged shortly after their thirtieth birthdays, that they died in their fifties or sixties, and that they were poor in ways forgotten in the more prosperous present – your present.

‘Take your mother’s family,’ Martin said, directing his words at you and glaring through you into the past. ‘Zachariah Frost was grandfather to your grandfather. Where he came from, heaven knows, but his parents must have been extremely poor, since the story has come down that they had to remove Zachariah from school because they were unable to provide the halfpenny a week required to keep him there.

‘A ha’penny! Think of that, Stephen!’ He shot a corrective glance at you, huddled in an armchair with a comic.

You thought of it. You knew ha’pennies. They had the last king’s head on one side of them and a sailing ship on the other. Those coins were often worn thin with usage, having passed through innumerable pockets.

‘Zachariah became a cobbler,’ Martin continued. ‘He married one Jane Wilberforce. They lived in a small house in Brick Street, Newbury. Although she was a scraggy little thing, by all accounts, they produced two girls and two boys. The kids were brought up on jam butties. They were all Baptists – Buttie Baptists – and went to chapel every Sunday.’

‘They were always religious,’ Mary said, defensively. She was making a cloth cover in which to keep the week’s Radio Times.

‘One of those girls died aged three. A common fate in those days. Rickets, probably.’

‘We used to have soap flakes called Ricketts,’ your mother exclaimed, unable not to enjoy talk of the old days, despite the offence she had taken. Your father ignored her remark.

‘Then the other girl, Hettie, her name was, she ran off with a foreigner and went to the Continent and was never heard of again.’

‘I ’spec she wanted to escape the family,’ said Sonia.

‘Getting above herself, more like,’ said Mary. ‘The Continent! Of all places! Fancy!’

Father remarked in an aside that Paris must have been better than Portsmouth.

‘One of Zachariah’s boys was known as “Flash Harry”. They say in the family that Flash Harry seduced the vicar’s daughter. In any case, he went to fight the Boers and died in some horrible spot of Africa.

‘The other Frost brother got a job in Utterson’s, the hardware merchant. His name was Ernie, Ernie Frost. You picture him and his like in rough black suits, wearing caps when out on the street, where most of the lads like him spent much of their spare time.’

‘Why was that?’ you asked. You failed to see the attraction of streets.

He shrugged. ‘Where else could they go in those days? Besides, the houses were so pokey –’

Ernie had the urge to improve himself. He rejected his surname, Frost, on the grounds that it was unappealing. He changed his name by deed poll to his mother’s maiden name of Wilberforce. It was a rejection of all that cobbling and grubbing for the last farthing.

‘Next, Ernie took up the banjo. He hired himself out to sing and play at parties. He had no wish to live forever in the back streets with a shared thunderbox. He had a daguerreotype taken of himself in a straw boater, strumming the banjo. Your mother can show it you. He must have been quite a lad, young Ernie. Leaving Utterson’s at the age of nineteen, he became the delivery man for Ross, the big Newbury grocer. He worked hard and was reliable. Pretty soon, he was driving about in a pony and trap, delivering the groceries to the better houses of the district.

‘That was how he met the young lady who played the organ at the Baptist chapel in Brink, just outside Newbury. Her name was Sarah Ream. She was a shy lass, though not without spirit, and she couldn’t resist Ernie’s charm and jollity. He coaxed Sarah to play piano accompaniment while he strummed the banjo and sang.’

‘Oh, and they say that my mother never went near the chapel again,’ Mary interposed, caught somewhere between shame and pride.

‘Anyhow, Ernie and Sarah became a duo, quite stylish! The duo became quite fashionable. He wrote a song entitled I Stand and Play My Banjo in the Strand. It was printed as sheet music, and was very popular for a time.’

Your father sang, looking genial.

‘The girls all fall for me

They ask me home for tea,

They think I’m grand.

They didn’t ought to risk it

’Cos they know I take the biscuit

When I stand and play me banjo in the Strand,

Hey ho! I stand and play me banjo in the Strand.’

Sonia clapped the performance. Mary looked pleased and said she loved that old song.

‘Ernie and Sarah got married and went to live in 33, Park Road. Although Ernie had no “background”, as people used to say, his ease of manner served him well. With the help of local Baptists, he soon acquired four houses in Park Road. He became a man of substance and was appointed secretary of the local Baptist Church. He was never afraid of work, was Ernie. Sarah became director of the local Waifs and Strays House –’

So there you were, the fatal family four of you, in the cramped room. A light fitting hung centrally overhead, like the God in which you all more or less believed at that period. It was the only light in the room. On a side table stood the wireless, the only wireless in the house. A coal fire burned in the grate. On the mat in front of the grate lay a rug, and on that rug centrally stood your father, holding forth, as fathers did in those days, before they were deposed.

‘Sarah and Ernie produced five children: first of all three boys, and then two girls, of which your dear Mother was the last to be born.’

Martin cast Mary an affectionate, if patronizing, glance as he mentioned her. The cold row was over.

‘You can imagine that Ernie’s increasing prosperity was shared by many of the lower classes at that time. Only four of your generations ago, Steve, listen to this, most people in England lived the sort of life Zachariah Frost lived; ill-educated, hand-to-mouth, having too many kids, dying young. Change since then has been incalculable, mainly thanks to the rise of Socialism.’

Socialism always backed science.

‘These three Frost, or Wilberforce, sons formed an architectural partnership. Things were looking up. The town itself was expanding. The partnership built many of the rows of houses in which a new generation of engineers and artisans and other workers lived. It’s all in the records. The sons all married young. They needed wives for social purposes. You’ll remember your Uncle Jeremy and Auntie Flo’s little house, with its cheerful geranium window boxes?’

You did remember it. Uncle Jeremy’s house was full of heavy furniture. The rooms smelt of mothballs. Sombre engravings of Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow and similar improving subjects hung on the walls in heavy frames. Jeremy and Flo employed a little servant girl called Ann.

When you were taken visiting to the house, you used to run off to see Ann. She lived in the gloomy rear of the house until called. Ann was nice to you. Ann would even do a cute little dance for you. Ann was of obscure origin, probably illegitimate. She was quick and ardent, always smiling. What secret sorrows were hers you never knew. Nor did her employers enquire. Many feelings natural to earlier generations were necessarily repressed in the name of progress. When Ann finally climbed, late at night, to her tiny cabin in the attic, no one knew or thought to know what eternities of hope or disappointment she underwent there.

‘Then the war came,’ Martin went on, although this was on another occasion, just after your pet rabbit died. ‘1914. I’ll never forget the date. August 1914. It was royalty brought the war about. The blinking Crowned Heads of Europe! The war gradually ground into action, swallowing up young men all over Europe and far beyond. Among those cast into the maw of this monster were the three brothers of the architectural partnership; your uncles, poor buggers.’

‘Martin!’ exclaimed Mary, reprovingly.

‘I said beggars. Off they bravely went – Bertie, Jeremy and Ernest, Sarah shedding motherly tears as she waved them off on the train.’

‘My poor mother! What she went through!’

‘Two of the lads were captured by the Germans and spent most of the war in an Oflag. The third one, Ernie – a handsome youth of twenty-one – stopped a bullet at Passchendaele and died on the spot.’

‘It was the Somme, of all places,’ said Mary. ‘I ought to know. He got shot in the Somme offensive. August 1916.’

‘The Somme,’ cried Sonia, bored with talk of war. ‘That was where I got my hunchback.’ She was sitting huddled in an armchair with Gyp, our Airedale, sprawling on her lap. Suddenly she threw Gyp off. ‘I’m going to have an operation to get it removed.’

‘Do stop that nonsense,’ your mother scolded her. ‘Valerie would never say anything like that.’

The dog sat and scratched himself, staring at Sonia with a look of amazement. Everyone was amazed by Sonia.

Martin pressed grimly on with his account.

‘They say Ernie fell face down in the mud, was trampled over, got buried in it – never to play his banjo in the Strand again. Sarah, his widow, never remarried, poor lass.’

‘She set up a teashop with a lady companion. It stood on what’s now the Southampton Road,’ said Mary. ‘Valerie and I often used to go there in the old days.’

‘The other two brothers, Bert and Jeremy, returned unharmed at the end of the war. Jeremy rejoined his Flo – her folks were no one much – and Bertie married Violet from Grantham, a member of the smart Parkins family. The Parkinses manufactured the latest thing in lawnmowers for the upwardly mobile generations. Violet is a bit of a goer – I’d say out of Bertie’s class.’

‘Don’t say that,’ Mary exclaimed. ‘I wouldn’t trust Violet further than I could throw her!’

Contemplating the idea of anyone throwing any aunties anywhere, Sonia burst into laughter. Her mother hushed her.

‘Any road, at Violet’s prompting, Bertie ceased to pursue his architectural career. He became instead a stunt pilot. Violet thought that was much more glamorous. He flew with Sir Alan Cobham’s Air Display, touring the country and delighting audiences with his daring. Jeremy remained with the architectural business, sole owner. Bedazzled by his young wife, skittish Flo, he began to neglect his work. Gradually the business went downhill. Bertie finally gave up his flying and joined the sinking business. He and Jeremy built that little Baptist chapel down Greenacres Road.’

You imagined that old Zachariah Frost was a refugee from some starving stretch of the country, where life for the poor was even harder than life in the towns. Sonia drew a picture of him in crayon: a terrible old man with a big, hook nose and a hump on his back. Martin snatched up the paper and was furious at what he saw.

‘You should show some respect, girl!’

Sonia jumped up, stamping her foot. She grabbed the paper back.

‘It’s me! It’s not him! It’s me, dressed up. Mind your own business.’

You would never have dared speak to your father like that. It would have provoked a beating.

‘We’ve never had hunchbacks in our family,’ Martin said. He enjoyed telling you and your sister about the family history. You listened more passively than Sonia. But you, like her, were obsessed with your appearance. Shutting yourself in your north-facing bedroom, you would stare at your face in the looking glass. Eyes of an indeterminate colour. But were you not rather aristocratic, by and large? Possibly lantern-jawed? What was a lantern jaw? Did it shine like a lantern? Lantern-jawed. You spent hours practising being lantern-jawed, walking round the room being lantern-jawed.

And still your father did his best to educate you in family history.

‘We Fieldings became more prosperous earlier than did the Frosts,’ Martin said. ‘In the parish records, William Fielding comes into the picture with dates attached. Born in the eighteen-forties. His wife Isabelle – Isabelle Doughty, she was – was from the superior Norfolk family of Doughtys. Isabelle bore William seven children, no less. William himself was one of nine children, two of whom were daughters. Two of William’s brothers died at sea.’