Bad Blood: A Memoir

So I imagine them celebrating in advance their private Harvest Festival, the event in the church calendar that strikes the richest chord in this pagan place, as he’ll discover. ‘We plough the fields and sca-a-a-tter / The good seed on the land.’ Was that how they managed contraception – coitus interruptus, aggravating the sin of adultery? Deliberate infertility, the luxurious, forbidden pleasure of taking pleasure by itself, must have spiced their lovemaking. Theirs was a feast of blissful barrenness. MB may well have used a sponge and a spermicidal douche. A nurse, being a professional spinster, was assumed to know about these things; and in any case all nurses had lost their conventional aura of feminine innocence – their collective moral virginity – because of their intimacy with other people’s bodies. They administered enemas and sponged the sick, and washed the dead and laid them out and plugged their orifices. They helped other women’s babies into the world. At the same time, since a nurse couldn’t keep her job and marry, she was a bit like a nun – a nun in a salacious story.

Nurses were suggestive. And so, for slightly different reasons, were priests of the Church of England, who could and did marry. Grandpa had the shamanistic glamour associated with the magical ability to transform the bread and wine, of course, and he combined it with licensed access to other people’s private spiritual parts. He officiated at a distance in church, but also close to, at home. He talked with women, and with the aged and the sick, during the day when other (real) men were out at work. An Anglican vicar was, in terms of cultural fiction, a eunuch of sorts. Yet everyone knew that actually he wasn’t vowed to celibacy, hence the comic naughtiness associated with his situation, too. Perhaps that is why it’s inviting to picture this love affair – the Vicar and the Nurse – in the style of a Hogarth etching of carnival appetite on the rampage. Flesh triumphs over Spirit. An allegory of hypocrisy. The holier (or in MB’s case, certainly cleaner) than thou rutting away in the ripe season, no purer than the peasants to whom they preached hygiene and holiness.

Peering down the years, a voyeur through that dense bramble hedge, it’s hard to see them except in outline, etched in archetypal postures. But why not remake them out of Arcimboldo fruit and veg, since it’s a less moralising transformation? O father, at last I see the fruition of my desires, in apple cheeks, cabbage curls and a damson mouth.

On 31 August he pauses for a second to count his blessings: ‘The end of a wonderful month for me. Thanks be to God.’ A couple of days later he foresees possible ‘complications’ with MB, but for now he’s so happy he steps right out of character and simply refuses to brood. He has to admit to having a good time: ‘Well I must take life as I find it and make the best of every circumstance,’ he writes, for all the world like a saintly stoic accepting the delights the Lord has seen fit to pelt him with.

He makes a brief return trip to South Wales, where Hilda and the children are staying at Hereford Stores, packed up to leave. While he’s there he sneaks some vertiginous glimpses of his hated old parish – ‘went for a walk over the Coronation Hill within sight of the parish of Ynyscynon’ – before travelling back north on his own, to be met in Wrexham by MB. Then, on 13 September, the family ARRIVE IN HANMER in capital letters. Hilda has brought her beloved sister Katie along to help and to soften the blow of leaving the Rhondda, but this doesn’t prevent her from being ‘very down in the mouth’ at her first sniff of country air. ‘She is utterly miserable this evening,’ he tells the diary. The next day she is no better (‘terribly miserable’) and the day after that he sends them off to go shopping in Whitchurch, the nearest town, six miles away, with the same result – ‘Hilda again miserable.’ On Saturday, taking stock, he finds his own secret sense of well-being wearing a bit thin: ‘Am not feeling very well again. This is due to the pressure of moving and Hilda’s lack of spirit.’ He seems to feel, rather unreasonably, that she should be sharing in his elation, sympathising with the revolution in his feelings. ‘I have to bear everyone’s burdens and my own,’ the entry ends, with a surge of self-pity.

Of course, Grandma didn’t yet know about MB. Once on the bicycle, on the byways of the parish, he was off her mental map. And in any case from Hilda’s point of view MB was only one of a set of local ladies who had taken doting possession of their new vicar during his first lone weeks. Chief among them was widowed Lady Kenyon, who was (it turns out) the real head of the Hanmer community, and outshone the eponymous Hanmers in both rank and wealth. The diary records that he was frequently chauffeured around in her car, and that he was regularly invited up to Gredington, the comfortable Kenyon pile, for tea and for dinner tête-à-tête. Then there’s Miss Crewe – the headmistress of the parish school – and her friend Miss Kitchin, who ran the bakery and doubled as the church organist. Miss Crewe, too, owned a car, which Miss Kitchin drove, and they gave him lifts to Chester, Shrewsbury, Oswestry and so on, and more invitations to tea. He was, it seems, God’s gift to all the grander single women of the parish. It must quickly have become apparent to these new female friends that he and Hilda were a most ill-matched and disaffected couple. She hadn’t the health, inclination or the social background to play the role of the vicar’s wife. And this unhappy fact must have added to his air of availability for them all, and particularly for MB.

She called shortly after the family’s arrival and walked Hilda to the church ‘for the first time’ (as the diary records, possibly with irony). Instead of cooling down, their affair intensifies: ‘Went to Tallarn Green … met MB. A lovely day altogether’ (19 September). He is hardly ever in his new vicarage and often eats supper or goes to play cards with the people at the lodgings he stayed in when he first arrived in the village, where MB often drops by, too. And very soon this family – the Watsons, who keep the shop – are in on the secret. As the autumn closes in, and the weather gets wet and foggy, his double life keeps him idyllically busy. Official parish duties even promise fun, too: ‘Went to the meeting at the Parish Hall for entertainments … there will be quite a lot to do at Hanmer as time goes on.’ Although the pace occasionally gets hard to sustain, it seems, for on Saturday, 7 October he reverts to the old ploy of hiding in his study and pretending he’s elsewhere: ‘Decided to be away all day so as to have a quiet day.’

It’s the day the clocks go back. He finds himself pausing for reflection and – for the first time – misgivings. Has he been led down the garden path? ‘Thank thee O God for hearing my prayer to get a removal from Llwynypia. But I wish I could have removed to some other parish in S. Wales instead of coming up to the north.’ Or perhaps he isn’t as smitten as he first thought, for the entry ends enigmatically, ‘My heart is in the south.’ But the very next day he goes to the Watsons after evensong, where he meets MB and ‘stays late’. There’s a gratifyingly ‘huge crowd’ at church for Harvest Festival a week later and he’s able to rest on his laurels, since MB is going away for a short holiday. And then, suddenly, just as he relaxes, there comes a stroke of fate that whisks away the very means of his freedom.

In other words, he had an accident on the bike. He was speeding alone down the dark lanes between services when he came a cropper – ‘tore the cartilage of my leg. Laid up at Pritchards’ farm. Dr McColl set my leg and brought me home,’ he writes, staccato style with clenched teeth: immobilised, grounded, trapped in the vicarage. That dawns on him gradually. By Wednesday the leg ‘is far from getting right’, on Thursday the doctor calls and tells him he won’t be fit for his duties on Sunday and things start to look serious. Lady Kenyon sends a pair of crutches. And MB, who is after all the district nurse, returns from her holiday to find him in the new position of patient – flat on his back.

She knows just what to do. She bustles into the vicarage armed with her professional innocence. Now their assignations take place in his bedroom. On 1 November she calls and stays till midnight. ‘Am feeling very tired,’ he tells the diary before falling asleep. MB is tenderly solicitous. She gives him a ‘dental pipe’ as a present, plus tobacco, and a walking stick ‘for me to get about’. Except that she doesn’t seem to be leaving him much time or energy for hobbling out of the house. The diary is dominated by her home visits. After about ten days, when the level of intensive care must have been starting to look a bit excessive, a new and magical word turns up: massage. The leg is on the mend, but needs daily massage. Bliss, you might think, to be in her capable hands. The accident has turned out to be a blessing in disguise, now that the weather is foul and the nights are drawing in.

But reading between the lines – which are getting pretty repetitious, there’s massage and more massage – he’s not altogether enjoying this domesticated transgression. For instance, there is an interesting double-take in the entry for 16 November: ‘The nurse (MB) came in the morning and gave me another massage.’ On the eighteenth he’s ‘rather depressed … shall be glad when my leg is well enough to get about’. On the twenty-third the massage leads to ‘a long serious talk with MB all the morning’. On the twenty-fifth he strikes a querulous note: ‘Have to be massaged in the afternoon’ (my italics, but his resentment, surely?). It’s not just the nights that are closing in. Perhaps in some perverse way it’s almost a relief when at last on 27 November Grandma, who has been distracted (presumably) by homesick dreams of the Rhondda, wakes up to what’s going on.

There’s a huge row. ‘Hilda in tantrums.’ No more massage sessions with MB. He goes to see the bone-setter at Church Stretton and the leg is soon cured. Not so the ache of passion. There are more long, serious talks (‘It is a very miserable position for MB’) and more rows with Hilda – ‘Heart-breaking in this country silence,’ he says, suddenly, dazedly, missing the background hum of traffic, the life of noise in South Wales. Still, he’s out and about again, and there has been a gratifying flurry of invitations, including one to the Hanmers’ house, Bettisfield Park, for late supper (leading to a ‘thumping’ hangover the next morning). He keeps away from the vicarage as much as possible and sees MB at the Watsons’, as he did before the accident. Things have changed, of course, the complications he dreaded have materialised. On 9 December he swears her a sinner’s oath on the Bible – promising to stay faithfully unfaithful. Thick fog blankets Hanmer and some days he is stuck at home. ‘Had to sit in the kitchen through perpetual bothering and misery,’ he writes on 19 December. ‘Don’t know what is going to come of this.’ Even when he contrives to stay out all hours, Grandma – already an insomniac – is quite capable of raging till dawn: ‘Spent a most awful night with Hilda again. Up the whole of this night and in deep misery about everything.’ He notes grimly that the Watsons have called the vet to put their dog out of its misery. He was no animal lover, obviously he envied the brute.

This misery was of an altogether different order from the old dull depression, however. This was live, vivid, mythic misery that marked the festive season with its own secret significance: ‘So the most notable Christmas of all has commenced.’ He was full of energy, absorbed and fascinated by the spectacle of his life. ‘How will all this end?’ he asked himself, clutching the edge of his seat. His feelings were volatile and contradictory. Certainly there were moments when he wanted to be free of MB. She had become a liability, another burden. And yet she still represented the lure of adventure. On 27 December he sent her a ‘letter of renunciation’ – ‘This is now the end.’ But the very next evening, when he went to church to collect his robes, ‘MB followed with a scene … a pathetic pleading night. I do not know what to make of all this. What a situation is now developing. Hilda begins her tantrums again about MB. So it goes on endlessly. Did not go to bed but remained in study all night long …’ As the year ends, and the diary too, he’s very attracted by the pull of an ending, but also by the opposite desire, for more intrigue, the plot to come. Rounding off 1933 he’s keeping his options open: ‘So ends a most memorable year for me. I have had the move I wished for to a lovely country church. Here I have met many most kind people. But I fear that the work will be too much for me. I have met MB too and therein hangs all the tale of the future. What will that be I wonder?? God knows since it is His doing that all this has come about. So then I commit the future to God.’ So MB was God’s idea.

She was not the whole story, for he had other projects. In the new year private drama had to share space in the new diary with the public kind. The parish entertainments committee that started meeting back in the autumn had generated a real show, his first Hanmer pantomime – and suddenly all the world’s a stage. He limbers up on New Year’s Day by doing a ‘turn’ himself in the parish hall, as part of a very amateur concert, a monologue as ‘Fagin in the Condemned Cell’. But for the panto he’s the prime mover – mostly from behind the scenes – recruiting the band, rehearsing the cast, and painting the scenery. The diary entries take on a surreal savour, when you remember the real-life drama he’s escaping from. Armed with bolts of cloth and cans of paint, he is levitating out of the rows and scenes to create in their midst scenes from another world, the innocent, archetypal land of Cinderella: ‘Got up this morning to start painting the scenery. Commenced with the woodland glade and got on well with it until 4.30 … sat in study thinking out a scene for the kitchen … finished scene 1 this morning. Put it out to dry this afternoon.’

He’s wonderfully well insulated from the raw real. Everything takes on an extra dimension of theatre, or to put it another way, bad faith. Thus he resolves to simplify his life and make a moral choice – ‘I must make up my mind what to do’ – but actually he is revelling in all the complications of indecision, the beauty of both/and: ‘So this is the end or is it the beginning of a new era for me.’ The personal plot thickens – Mrs Watson talks to him about MB, MB and Hilda row face to face … The village is a carnival of gossip. He is defiant and grandly outrageous. These days he and MB are meeting in the church, God’s safe house. It’s not the emotional logic of adultery that shapes events, though, but pantomime preparations. The show must go on – ‘a long and serious talk’ with MB gives way to ‘a good rehearsal’. He has finished the final ballroom backdrop (1 February) and is now hanging the whole sequence of scenes and painting the wings in situ in the parish hall. ‘Had a row with Hilda in the house during the day,’ he notes on 3 February. ‘After that went to the Hall and continued painting. MB brought me a cup of tea.’ He’s cutting it fine, for the first matinée is only four days away, but it’s a real labour of love. He is exercising his vocation to the full at last – the hard-working wizard making magic for the crowd.

He has started to turn into the Grandpa I remember – except that he has yet to taste the bitterness of being really found out. The pantomime was a triumph. He put on evening dress to conduct the orchestra, Sir Edward Hanmer publicly praised him from the stage and so – on the final night – did Lady Kenyon. So far, no one held his sin against him, MB was apparently a mere peccadillo compared with the major magic of Cinderella. Indeed, it looks as though people somehow felt it was all part of the show. He was having a love affair with the parish. No wonder he was suddenly forlorn and lonely when the curtain fell. His life was as much of a tangle as ever, but it struck him as banal. He remarked that time hung heavy on his hands – which is exactly the phrase he used just before he met MB. He was restless, impatient to affront the next phase of his fate. This time the cast would involve my mother (she hadn’t starred in the first panto, nor had he been paying her much attention) and this time things would go badly wrong, and he would fix the future.

V Original Sin, Again

The quiet of Hanmer gave Grandpa the willies whenever he slowed down sufficiently for it to invade his consciousness. He heard time passing, then. Depression lay in wait and he would see the prospect of a more vivid life, the life his talents deserved, dissolving away like a mirage. I think this is why scenery-painting for the pantomime absorbed him so blissfully. He could create the illusion of perspective without having anywhere to stand to check he’d got it right (mostly he painted with the canvas spread out on the floor of an attic) and this trick was a version of the moral trick he needed to play on himself constantly. The moral trick – or more truly the morale trick – was harder, however. The show he put on that first Hanmer winter gave him a taste of carnival freedom and yet its very success left him in post-coital gloom: ‘The village is very quiet tonight after all the excitement of this week. What a week!’

The affair with MB had developed along similarly perverse and disappointing lines, since she had not only become the theme of endless Hilda rants, but also a kind of wife number two, part of the furniture of his frustration. So it was horribly convenient that the village – or at least the influential people, like Lady Kenyon – seemed disposed to blame MB for the scandal. If he cast her off he’d be allowed to get away with it. And he was ready (for the wrong reasons) to do the right thing. In short, he behaved like a complete cad towards MB.

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