Bad Blood: A Memoir

His plan had been to confiscate people’s most vital possessions – their mobility and their music – as pledges against bad debts. They were never redeemed. Yet Stan didn’t mind, didn’t mind at all. In fact, he was as excited and pleased as if he’d invented his own currency and was a secret millionaire in it. He cherished the ivories and the bike wheels, and looked on the storerooms as a sort of safety deposit. This was his treasure, his equivalent to the collections of scented sachets and beads his sisters kept in the bedrooms. They for their part tut-tutted over his inexplicable affection for this junk, but even at the time when I was small I think I somehow understood – since I liked the prams and bikes, and was mystified and impressed by what I imagined to be the stolen teeth of all those pianos – that here was yet another annexe to the fantasy edifice of Hereford Stores. They had (save butcher Tom) all but forgotten that keeping a shop was about swapping goods for money; its real function was as a shrine to the past. Mother’s emotional generosity, her gift for giving, had turned all three into obsessive hoarders.

Their bankrupt idyll lasted for nearly ten years after the war. And even when Katie finally married, and died of a stroke horribly soon, confirming all the myths about men, Hereford Stores went on providing the ghost of a living for my mother’s disreputable brother, Uncle Bill, who joined Stan in the shadows until – some time around 1960 – he was done for receiving some hot Daz, and the CLOSED sign went up for the last time and finally meant what it said.

Grandma eked out her visits with other fantasy gratifications. She could hoard wherever she was and, although Shrewsbury and Chester were in her view not a patch on Cardiff, they would help recapture the security of streets, and their cafés and cinemas would cocoon her against the hostile whispers of the trees and the whiffs of manure. These outings were all-female, too, and involved hours of getting ready, then a lift to the train from a blaspheming Grandpa, or sometimes a taxi, all so that she’d be able to repose in the life-giving fug of a matinée at the Gaumont or the Majestic. The plush seats, the dimming of the lights and the sheen they caught on the swagged curtain as it rose, the box of chocolates, were as important as the film itself, almost. Although she loved the whole thing and entered into the spirit of the illusion so enthusiastically that she swept aside the dimension of fiction altogether. The latest Ava Gardner movie was just the most recent report on what promiscuous Ava had been up to since you saw her last: the changes of costume and setting and name were feeble disguises, and didn’t fool Grandma for a minute. She was there to witness when Joan Fontaine, for all her icy blondeness, fell for Harry Belafonte and would (she said) never trust Joan again. Grace Kelly she watched like a hawk for signs of similar leanings and was semi-confirmed when Grace married an Eye-tie. (She herself wouldn’t touch dark chocolate, even, and anyone who acquired a suntan was suspected of a touch of the tar brush.) Once television arrived in our lives she became an addict of soap operas and in particular Emergency Ward 10, which saved her life day after dreary rural day. The box eventually became her babysitter, the last, many times removed substitute for her mother. By then I was treating her with contempt, as a senile infant, although she scared me a lot, in truth, because she represented the prospect of never growing up.

Once upon a time in South Wales, when a friend of Katie’s came to stay, I had had to spend the night in a feather bed, sandwiched between Katie and Grandma, and that ambiguous sensation of sinking back and back, down and down in a deep nest of feathers and furbelows and flesh, came to stand for the Rhondda. Infinite regress threatened down there: promised, and threatened. It was pleasurable – how could it be otherwise? – to return to the smothering, spongy womb of the Stores. And yet I was always glad to get away. As I grew, Grandma got shorter, so that she sometimes looked almost spherical. She and Katie were such an exclusive club, really, that even my mother wasn’t a full member and I was even further removed from the inner sanctum because I couldn’t recall my great-grandmother, so had to take her praises on trust.

There were other Welsh voices I could have listened to. Occasionally – and to my great surprise – people who dropped in to the shop would congratulate my mother on my bookishness and talk with pride about how their grandchildren were ‘getting on’ and going to the grammar school. People in Tonypandy, as in other mining districts, were enthusiastic about education, in sharp contrast to Hanmer’s conservative scorn and inertia. The future was real and a good thing, and even if you went down the pit like your da you weren’t expected to give up reading, thinking, arguing or politicking; autodidacts flourished still in those days. Nonetheless the atmosphere of Hereford Stores dominated my sense of the place, so that for me the journey south was like slipping into a pocket of the past. I didn’t know who I was, there – didn’t need to know. It was as though I hadn’t been born yet.

Grandma saved paper bags inside paper bags inside paper bags … Years later, when she died, and my mother and I were going through the trunks that by then held the compacted residue of her lifetime’s squirrelling, we came on a cache of letters from my grandfather, tied in the inevitable banal shred of pink ribbon. His courtship compositions, they were, full of quotations from the poets, sentimental flourishes, promising plans. We looked at them with awful embarrassment and agreed (how I wish now that we hadn’t) to burn them, because they seemed shaming evidence of the mutual confidence trick of that hateful marriage. There was cash in the same trunk, folded notes cunningly dispersed among the photos of Katie done up to the nines, and the bars of waxy soap and sugar lumps put by against the return of rationing. And that money was the clue to another part of her story. Where did she get it? Where, for that matter, did she acquire the substantial sum – around five hundred pounds – she’d accumulated in my name (so that my father couldn’t inherit it, she told me once) in National Savings? I didn’t think very hard about it at the time and I took the theories that circulated in the family as tall tales. However, Grandma’s way of blurring the boundary between fantasy and reality, and her power to draw me back into the past have long outlived her.

About the money: I was asking my father just the other day whether some of the wilder things I recalled about the grandparents had any basis in truth. For instance, what about the story that Grandma had blackmailed Grandpa for years, by threatening to show his private diary to the Bishop unless he handed over part of his stipend every quarter? Well, yes, said my father, that was certainly true. But how do you know? I asked. Simple, he said, I’ve got the diaries, two of them. (Because she’d kept them as well in one of the trunks, although my mother had never let on.) Anyway, with a bit of persuasion, reluctantly, my father handed them over: two small, cheap, reddish diaries, for 1933 and 1934, both published by John Walker & Co., Farringdon House, Warwick Lane, EC4, filled with very small writing and decorated at weekly intervals with coloured stamps he stuck in to mark the church calendar. These left him even less space to write down the compromising details of his daily life, but he managed enough.

IV The Original Sin

There is no doubt that Grandma preserved Grandpa’s diaries for 1933 and 1934 as evidence against him. Indeed, the 1933 diary has a couple of scathing marginal comments in her hand – Here the fun begins (Friday, 25 August) and Love begins (fool) exactly a week later. If he refused to produce the cash that lined her luggage, paid for her outings to the cinema and her teatime meringues at the Kardomah, and fed the National Savings account she eventually put in my name in case some man got hold of it when she died, then she would take the damning documents to the Bishop, threaten scandal and divorce, and lose him even the rotten living he had.

Reading these diaries turned out to be a bit like eavesdropping on the beginnings of my world. 1933 was the year the grandparents arrived in Hanmer from South Wales. This was how the Hanmer I grew up in had been created – how life in the vicarage got its Gothic savour, how we became so isolated from respectability, how the money started not to make sense and (above all) how my grandfather took on the character of theatrical martyrdom that set him apart. 1933, he did not fail to note, was the nineteen-hundredth anniversary of Christ’s Passion: ‘This is the Crucifixion Year AD 0–33, 1900–1933. A Holy Year.’ He wasn’t thiry-three himself, but forty-one and fearful, before he was offered this new, sprawling country parish in the north, that his career in the Church of Wales had ground to a shaming standstill. He’d been twelve years in the same place. ‘Here we are at the end of winter time,’ he writes on 8 April, on Saturday night, doing some spiritual stock-taking and already assuming his Sunday style, ‘and I am still at St Cynon’s. O God give me a little chance now at last. Thy will be done.’ But the South Wales parish he was after at the time, Pencoed, went to someone else the very next Thursday and the day after that, Good Friday, he is making the most of his misery, preaching on the theme, ‘Who will roll away the stone …?’

It isn’t until later in Easter Week that he learns – or at least confides to his diary – the full extent of his humiliation: ‘They have really cast me aside in favour of a young fellow who has only been ordained since 1924. Well this is the limit. What on earth am I to do now? No hope and no chance.’

But he has learned to live with hopelessness, that’s the worst of it. He fritters away his time and turns his back on the drama of rejection. The great shock of opening this compromising little book, for me, was that for the first half – with the exception of the few desperate and frustrated cris de coeur I’ve culled – it was the record of a pottering, Pooterish, almost farcically domesticated life. The sinner I was expecting was guilty of pride, lust and spiritual despair, not merely of sloth and ineptitude. This was the diary of a nobody. So I nearly censored January to June 1933 in the interests of Grandpa’s glamour as a Gothic personage. But in truth this is what we should be exposed to – the awful knowledge that when they’re not breaking the commandments, the anti-heroes are mending their tobacco pipes and listening to the wireless.

He had been ‘jolly miserable’ (that middle-class oxymoron!) during those last stagnant months in South Wales. You could do nearly nothing in the Church of Wales and get away with it, no one took official notice, a vicar was a gentleman after all. Chapel would have been different, much more a matter of openly devout busybody closeness with the congregation, but he managed to nurture his depression in private. He’d surface late from sleep or sulks, affronted by the weather: ‘It is a terrible trial to get up in these very cold mornings’ – and light the fire in the study. Or that was his plan. Often things went wrong, as he expected: ‘Lit a fire in the study but heaps of soot fell down and put it out,’ he reports, as late on as 6 May. ‘Could not get on with my sermon at all today. An aeroplane overhead at teatime …’ It’s uncharacteristic of him to notice what’s going on outside, he is so fed up with his surroundings (his parish, his prison). But perhaps the plane flew past his defences because it belonged to the skyey regions of the weather, which he regularly records as a mirror or a foil to his moods. He’s good at the rhetoric of the barometer: with freezing rain comes the pathetic fallacy, sunshine equals irony, with the snow everything grinds gratifyingly to a halt.

Also, the aeroplane was new and a machine, like his addiction, the wireless. With his ear to the speaker he takes to the airwaves himself and communes with the wide world so intimately it seems inside his head. ‘Toothache,’ says one entry, ‘Earthquake in Japan.’ Hitler comes to power in Germany (31 January), Roosevelt’s oath-taking is relayed (4 March). Grandpa registers the facts, but doesn’t comment, he’s more interested in the quality of reception he’s getting on short wave, the placing of the aerial and whether to buy a Pye or a Murphy. He tries each out on approval, squeezes in little drawings of the rival sets on the page and after some enjoyable dithering – ‘Spent the whole of the day trying to decide between the Pye and the Murphy’ – splashes out £17.17s.0d on the Pye, ‘bought … outright’.

This is hugely extravagant, the better part of a month’s pay (his stipend was £73.4s.4d per quarter), but he owes it to himself, since listening in and twiddling the knobs is what makes his idleness and boredom feel busy. He sees few people, even on the Almighty’s business. He boycotts the meetings of the Rural Dean and Chapter (‘lost any desire to meet the clergy of the Rhondda – they are all such a lot of place-seekers’) and records punctually and with a kind of glum relish the lousy church attendances in harsh weather: ‘Got up for H[oly] C[ommunion]. No one at HC.’ The wireless, by contrast, is a friendly presence. ‘Spent the whole of the afternoon tinkering with my old wireless set in the study,’ reads an almost happy entry long after he has acquired the superior Pye. The hums and crackles and cosmic whistles of interference probably served nearly as well as the programmes to provide him with a private cocoon of distraction. He does read of course as well, and in the same impatient spirit, science fiction stories about other worlds for preference. On 17 January, for instance, ‘the Radio programme is very monotonous and dull. Took up Conan Doyle’s Lost World and read it right through.’ He is an accomplished mental traveller. In March he actually spends a day or two pretending to have been called away, in order to escape parish business – ‘Am supposed to be away from home today. Stayed in and did some reading … Lit a fire in the study and sat there all day reading Jules Verne’s Journey into the Centre of the Earth …’ Sometimes he sat in the kitchen instead, sometimes he complains of a headache rather than a toothache. On his official evening off he would sit in the study and watch people going to church.

He had his smokescreen too. He smoked a pipe. Or that was the theory. In practice he evolved his own extra rituals to make his habit more complicated and satisfying-because-unsatisfying. Fiddling with pipe-cleaners and bowl scrapers didn’t suffice, partly because he hankered after cigarettes – although they woke up an ‘old pain’ in his chest – and partly because it hurt to grip a pipe-stem with those aching teeth. Anyway, he doesn’t just mess with pipe accessories, he goes further. In a sort of parody of a handyman, he whittles: ‘Shortened my pipe – the Peterson – and spoiled it,’ reads a terse entry in January. Was he chagrined? Probably not, although one can’t tell whether he has yet worked out his pipe plot. Does he know that what he really wants is (by accident of course) to spoil his pipe and thus make ‘work’, plus an opportunity to get back to cigarettes? In February he buys another Peterson (‘no. II’) and on Saturday, 22 April he experiments again and supplies a full rationalisation: ‘After I had dinner I turned my Peterson pipe into a cigarette holder as this is the more satisfactory way of smoking to me. The full weight of the pipe is too much for my teeth.’ In May: ‘am still on with the cigarettes but must go back to the pipe I think’. In fact, he buys a new nameless pipe the very next day, but immediately rejects it in disgust – ‘too rotten to smoke. A cheap pipe is useless.’ Whereas a dear one provides hours of pleasure and distraction for a bad-tempered bricoleur. On 15 May he buys another Peterson, ‘a Tulip-shaped Peterson No. 3’ this time, and manages to destroy it fairly fast: ‘Saturday May 27th. Broke my Peterson pipe. It seems I must keep to the cigarette holder.’ By Monday he records proudly in the diary that he has ‘finished turning the Peterson pipe into a cigarette holder’; and so gratifying is this that the week after he goes out and buys another ‘light’ pipe (3 June) and two days later turns that into a cigarette holder too. On 9 June he buys a Peterson No. 33 …

As his frustrations mount, the pattern of destructive tinkering speeds up to match, turning smoking into another pseudo-occupation to fill his seething sedentary hours and days. His sensibility is in perpetual motion – he’s self-absorbed and self-repelled at once, and the pottering alternates with bleak vistas of pointlessness. ‘Spent an unprofitable day feeling liverish and miserable’ (March). ‘Spent a useless sort of day in the study’ (April). Although he is always at home, wearing out the chairs with his bony behind, his family barely exist for him – except for my mother. And this was the second surprise of the South Wales part of the 1933 diary, that his teenage daughter Valma (she turned fifteen on 14 March) lives on the inside of his loneliness. She is his one human task, he has been tutoring her at home for a year (he records in May) and she figures in the same sorts of sentences as the wireless, the books and the pipes, where her presence suddenly populates the house – ‘Spent the morning and the afternoon taking Valma’s lessons. Came on to Latin at teatime’; ‘sat in house all this afternoon giving Valma her lessons’. He plans out schedules of study and sets her exams. She’s his go-between with the outside world, in more senses than one, for she also runs errands and posts letters.

It’s my mother who posts the letter asking for the Pencoed living, after he’s hesitated for days over committing himself, fearing to be snubbed (as he was). She is his hostage to fortune. She stands for a possible future. And the reason this was such a surprise to me was that she always led me to believe that she had never been close to him, and that he had never shared with her the bookish complicity I had with him when I was little. In my mother’s account of her growing up the Latin lessons and piano lessons (she was musical, like him and unlike me) had been erased without trace. Why? Why had she taken my grandmother’s side and when? The story that was about to unfold in Hanmer does explain, I fear, exactly why. But for the meantime she is his creature, as I became. He is distant and callous-sounding about his son Billy, who only attracts his notice when he plays truant from school and is duly beaten for it. And already there is (to put it mildly) no love lost between him and my grandmother. She must have been very ill that freezing winter of 1932–3, because he notes in his diary for Wednesday, 5 April: ‘Hilda went out for the first time since Christmas.’ But that’s not all. He only names her to record her absences. She goes out a lot as soon as she’s able, often back to her real home at Hereford Stores, leaving him to stew in his own juice. The diary simmers on: ‘Well here is injustice if you like. I believe we have got a lot of madmen in authority in this diocese … I pray that this may be my last Easter at St Cynon’s.’

And out of the blue his prayers were answered, when he least expected it. The resurrection of his ambitions and energies was only weeks away. It’s on 13 June that the long winter of discontent finally melts into spring – ‘At last the day of hope has dawned. The Bishop has written to ask me to come and see him about the living of HANMER with TALLARN GREEN.’ And he breaks out the green ink to celebrate. After this things move very fast. He travels north by train to visit Hanmer on 25 June, inspects the vicarage two days later (‘a nice old place and I can’t imagine myself in it’) and accepts the living on 3 July, so that on Friday, 28 July he’s able to read the announcement of his appointment in the Church Times, which makes it real – ‘O father at last I see the fruition of my desires …’ – and within weeks the fun began, as we know.

Everything is suddenly on the move, unfixed, the old landmarks of his depression left behind in the Rhondda – along with his wife and son and Valma too, for the moment, since the vicarage in Hanmer is to be cleaned and refurbished a bit, and in any case they need time to pack up. All at once he’s alone in this new place (‘a lovely spot’) where people don’t know him from Adam. Mobility. Freedom of a kind. He must take up his duties immediately, now that the old Canon, long ailing, has finally admitted defeat and been persuaded to go. His two churches are three miles apart down shaggy, meandering country roads blistered with cow pats and hemmed in by weedy ditches. He acquires a bicycle, and finds himself walking it up gentle hills (no mountains here) and freewheeling down again on the other side. The diary shows him threading his way along a necklace of new place-names – Bangor-on-Dee, Wrexham, Ellesmere, Horseman’s Green, Eglwys Cross, Bronington, Bettisfield, Whitchurch – marking out a map on which, more and more often, his path crosses that of the district nurse, Nurse Burgess, who of course has a bicycle too …

Just days before, ironically enough, he is all prepared to be lonely and bored. ‘Hanmer is very quiet,’ he notes ominously, ‘very … Time hangs somewhat on my hands in this place.’ Then the new bike arrives. There’s an August heatwave, the kids are swimming in the mere just as we would twenty years on (except that in 1933 it’s only the boys) and on the very day he admits to taking his first ride with the nurse (‘Here the fun begins’) they are both summoned to the mereside in their professional capacities, because one of the young men has drowned. It’s the beginning of a tragic sub-plot that keeps up a kind of background thrumming for months to come: drowned Jack is Molly’s young man, bereaved Molly comes to work in the vicarage as a maid, loses her mind, Nurse Burgess tries to get her put away and so forth. For now, though, Jack’s death is the main, telling event, a focus for feeling. It permeates the humid atmosphere and puts paid to any illusion of serenity. His body doesn’t surface for three days and the whole of Hanmer keeps a vigil, people standing in hot huddles talking under their breath, gazing at the innocent flat water only dimpled with fish taking flies. He was a strong swimmer, too, so there’s a niggling element of mystery about his death: cramp, or weed, or cold currents must have got him and it’s true – was still true twenty years later – that sometimes when the water near the edge was soupy warm you’d suddenly find your legs entwined with chill streams snaking in under the lily pads, just before the bottom shelved right away.

Grandpa was swiftly out of his depth as well, but he was having a marvellous time and only noticed how far he’d gone when his family actually turned up. Out of his depth, and in his element. He and Nurse Burgess, now MB for short in the diary, pedal to paradise every day of the week, including Sunday. Trailing a cloud of midges, they’d hump their bikes off the road, through some muddy gateway and, behind the hedge, hug and knead each other among the mallows and Queen Anne’s lace and nettles dusty with pollen. Perhaps they spread his tobacco-scented black cassock on the ground to protect them from ants and the crawling wasps drunk on crab apples. Or more likely they’d keep their uniforms on and each get to know the other’s body in bits. He is lean and wiry, MB in her starched blue linen is substantial but not yet stout, well muscled because of all the exercise she gets, her arms mottled pink and white from soap and sun. She has a midwife’s hands. His fingers are inky and curve to caress an imaginary pipe bowl, or a preacher’s palmful of air, and – now – the generous breast where her watch ticks away. It’s nearly always afternoon, they are supposed to be out to tea, strawberry jam and fruit cake, and so they are, so they are. Cattle watch incuriously, sidling towards the gate, ready to herd along the lane for milking. And they wrestle each other into submission, and relax a long moment, listening with half an ear to the trickling ditch the other side of the hedge, where duty calls. Although it’s hard to hear the summons for the rooks and wood pigeons.