My History: A Memoir of Growing Up Page 6

  I was distinctly excited, as I remember to this day: this memory of innocent anticipation haunts me almost as much as what was to follow. A keen reader of school stories—those of Angela Brazil, favourite of my father’s generation, in particular—I rejoiced that I was about to take part in some kind of clandestine activity, which would undoubtedly turn out to be jolly good fun. The circle was large for there were quite a few of us staying at Kittiwake, and then an older girl whom I will call Elspeth stepped into the middle of the ring.

  She made a brief, rather thrilling speech. The message was clear. There was a traitor in our midst, a truly bad person, someone who was at one and the same time both deeply unpopular and insufferably pleased with him or herself. What could be done about this person, this uppish yet odious person who was making our lives a misery? We all agreed that nothing was too bad for such a person. We hissed, we spluttered. No one was more eloquent in her enthusiastic denunciations than I was. When I first read Orwell, the Two Minutes Hate in 1984, this daily routine of loyal party members expressing their contempt for the current enemy superstate aroused painful memories. For of course this pariah, this hate object, was in fact myself.

  The sheer horror of the occasion lay not so much in my expulsion from the gang as my total ignorance of my impending fate. And so I had betrayed…Exactly what had I betrayed by hissing with the rest of them? Everything, I suppose. As well as ending up a pariah, I had turned viciously on an innocent person, a victim, who just happened to be me.

  On her return from Czechoslovakia, my mother lovingly painted a picture of a kittiwake for my precious autograph book. To her amazement, I burst into tears and ran from the room. Naturally I never told her why the sight of the glinting eye and cruel curving beak of the bird aroused such an extreme reaction: that was not the mode in parental relations in the Thirties—or anyway not our mode.

  Besides which, she would inevitably ask: “What did you do to deserve this?” And I had no idea. As a matter of fact, I still don’t, although it could be argued that the whole experience did me a power of good, teaching me early in life that unpopularity—and thus logically popularity as well—is a mysterious quality which sometimes appears from nowhere, with nothing done to deserve it. For all that, I have never felt quite the same about gulls: untrustworthy predatory creatures that they are. And I tore the picture of the hateful kittiwake out of my autograph book the moment my mother’s back was turned.

  It is curious that in all these memories, mainly good, one mysteriously bad, no images of my brother Thomas’s serious illness occur. It is as though all that existed in some separate sphere. And yet photographs provide clear documentary evidence: here is Thomas, my companion, my Irish twin, my other self, in a large leather collar propping up his head and chin, and with his arm similarly held up by a stiff steel and leather “aeroplane” sling.

  Thomas somehow contracted polio at the end of 1936. Reading my mother’s autobiography, published in the 1980s, I understood for the first time the frightful parental agonies she had endured: and at a time incidentally when she was pregnant with her third child. Thomas developed a temperature over Christmas and, a few days later, could not move his left arm or turn his head. Eventually he was moved to the Wingfield Hospital, not far from where we lived at Singletree, and diagnosed with polio, in those days called infantile paralysis.

  This menacing disease was not unknown to us by repute. According to nursery lore, it might be lurking in certain brands of ice cream with exotic names: you went there adventurously at your own risk, whereas Wall’s was dull but safe. The prospect of dangerous ice cream was in fact rather exciting, like the sort of potion a witch might devise to trap unwary children. We also knew about tuberculosis since there were several children who had had it and recovered: in this case, according to our nanny, it was evil cows who were responsible, as opposed to good cows who gave pasteurized milk—what magic pasture was that?

  Where polio was concerned, I was to meet quite a few people at Oxford, and later, who had suffered from this in the Thirties. It is a phase now history in the most thankful sense of the word, ever since the discovery by Jonas Salk of the vaccine (first tested in 1952) which has led to the virtual eradication of polio, at least in the West. At that time the odd child at a party might have a leg in a splint, a sling like Thomas, or sit in a wheelchair. These were of course middle-class children, yet by repute polio was considered to be a working-class disease. My mother told me much later that Frank’s political enemies, and even some of his Tory relations who deplored his Labour affiliation, had suggested that he risked contamination by living in South Oxford at Singletree, near the Cowley works, instead of safe donnish North Oxford. In short, our middle-class upbringing should have protected Thomas had it not been for his parents’ persistence in living in defiance of the social order.

  In her autobiography my mother actually wrote rather more discreetly if less specifically: “It was suggested that he had picked it up on 19 December from a children’s Christmas party given by the Labour supporters of Cowley [the ward for which my father was Labour Councillor].” And she added firmly that it was just as likely to have been acquired at Margaret Countess of Jersey’s party for her numerous great-grandchildren about the same time.

  It showed an admirable—and characteristic—loyalty to the Cowley Labour Party for Elizabeth to invoke those fabulous parties as a potential source of the disease. How many great-grandchildren did Lady Jersey have? Dozens and dozens it seemed. Most of them spoke in terrifying sophisticated voices about visits to the Park, and future London parties, which alarmed country cousins like myself and Henrietta.

  “Was that your nanny you were with this morning, George?” asked a moppet called Sophy in a white frilly dress with red shoes. “She wasn’t wearing a uniform.” It was true that the nannies at Great-Grandmamma’s parties—crowds of them all together like hens—wore starched uniforms, a phenomenon which did not extend to North Oxford. Somehow it illustrated our status, as in a Jane Austen novel, as being less grand than our relations. I longed to have been seen in the Park that morning, with or without my nanny in her usual dull blouse fastened by a pin brooch at the throat, and a tweedy sort of skirt. It was also symbolic of status that the fairy on the vast Christmas tree was always given to Lady Caroline Child-Villiers, daughter of Grandie (for his previous courtesy title Lord Grandison, not a social judgement on his character), the current Earl of Jersey; although, as Henrietta pointed out, Caroline was younger than us.

  Had the infection really lurked in the famous bran tub from which each great-grandchild was allowed to extract a present? My mother showed great bravado in raising the subject. All the same I can only imagine how the original allusions to Labour and Cowley, with their nasty imputation of parental neglect, must have added to her sorrows.

  All this was of course quite unknown to me then. What I saw (through the mask I had to wear for visits) was an entire set of Little Grey Rabbit toys. And Thomas didn’t even like soft toys. Envy, always in attendance in family life, murmured in my ear. The next thing my unfortunate mother knew I was myself struck immobile. It was the family doctor who lured me into movement again by trailing a new doll in front of me. After a moment I could not resist; like a kitten, I pounced—and the game was up.

  So Thomas eventually emerged, back into nursery life, in his steel-and-leather kit, with his neck and one side in some way withered. The true courage of his endurance, the infinitely touching speechless courage of sick children everywhere in hospital, was not apparent to me. I now see that those Nature does not manage to kill, she magnanimously makes stronger; or rather, even more importantly, she bestows the art of survival upon them. No one since has ever questioned Thomas’s powers of endurance: it is as though the steel and leather entered his soul at that point. To me at the time he simply appeared to be more obstinate than before. Thomas’s two favourite words, as a grown-up once wryly pointed out, were “Wajamean” and “Hujamean” and he was not easily satisfied by the
answers he was given.

  In any case, we were soon ready for the next stage in our adventure of living: evacuation. Shortly before war broke out, a taxi took us across Southern England, from Bernhurst in East Sussex to Water Eaton Manor near Oxford. Others were suffering the ordeal of being uprooted and separated from their parents. The nine-year-old Harold Pinter, for example, with the rest of his primary school in Hackney, was dispatched six hundred miles away to Cornwall, never having left home before. For me, however, the happiest year of my early life was about to begin.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  HIDEY HOLES

  Elizabeth Pakenham was sitting alone in the Great Hall of Water Eaton Manor on 3 September 1939 when she listened to Neville Chamberlain on the wireless announcing that war had been declared on Nazi Germany. Frank was with his army unit at Banbury. A private crisis was developing there, insignificant in comparison to the great international one, but central to my parents’ lives. Frank was on the edge of that nervous collapse which would result in his being invalided out of the army in the spring of 1940.

  In conversation with my mother, I once referred lightly to the period at Water Eaton as the happiest time of my childhood. After all, our involvement in the progress of the war at this early stage was limited to knitting dark green woollen squares to help Gallant Little Finland win its struggle against Big Bad Russia. This war work, as we were grandly told it was, had two effects. First of all, it enabled us to taste for the first time the pleasantly sanctimonious feeling that a good deed brings (“Another square done! I must have knitted at least half a quarter of a blanket by now” i.e. Russia is trembling). Secondly, we learnt about the fragility of international relations. That is to say, it seemed a remarkably short time before I was casually informed that Gallant Little Finland had been subsumed into Big Bad Russia, no longer bad but led by our great ally Uncle Joe Stalin. Was I therefore now supposed to be knitting with equal zest for the Gallant Little—I mean Bold Big Russians? I retained a sneaking sympathy for my first friends the Finns throughout the war, without ever quite liking to ask exactly what had happened to them.

  None of this impaired our sheer enjoyment of life at Water Eaton. Yet to my horror, when I made that casual remark about my childhood, my mother’s face, normally so composed, crumpled. The beginning of the war, the deaths, imprisonments and woundings of friends, and, I suspect, worst of all the cruel memory of my father’s collapse, meant that my delightful childish experience was a travesty of her adult one. Of course we children knew nothing of this. This was true to the extent that when I read in a newspaper interview with Frank in the Sixties that he could empathize with the lost and broken because he had been forced to leave the army with a breakdown, I rang my mother indignantly, thinking that this was a smear.

  “But Dada had very bad ’flu, you told us. He had ’flu four times.” I even remembered that detail, which must have been added to convince us of the seriousness of the situation.

  “No,” said Elizabeth sadly. “It’s all true.” Only then did I begin to realize the extent of the hurt which Frank suffered, by failing, as he saw it, where his heroic father Brigadier Tom had triumphantly succeeded, losing his life in the process. Already in the Thirties he had been divided from many fellow members of the Labour Party who opposed the idea of war and was personally distressed when the Labour Party voted against Conscription. In April 1939 he wrote a letter to the Daily Telegraph—giving Christ Church, Oxford as his address—protesting against the inclusion of university dons over twenty-five in the Reserved List. He argued passionately that such men, like himself, should be able to join the Territorials, or at any rate “be given some indication of their wartime tasks.”

  He continued: “As a Socialist, I think…it would do University men like myself a great deal of good, and could scarcely do the Army much harm, if we were all started off at the bottom.” The Telegraph headed the letter EDUCATION & SERVICE. Frank went further. He sent a copy of the letter to Winston Churchill, with apologies for troubling him but adding: “You have brought it on yourself, if I may say so, by your emergence as the one man of knowledge and purpose whom the public recognize is equal to the military necessities of the moment.”

  Certainly Frank practised what he preached where starting at the bottom was concerned. He was thirty-three but prided himself on his physical fitness, his running, his playing rugger, his tennis: the semi-final of the Oxford Mail championships. Thus he volunteered as a private in the newly formed 5th (Territorial) Battalion of the Oxford and Bucks Light Infantry. In his autobiography, Frank admitted to the reader that this choice of the ranks was considered strange—he knew no one there at all and had to bribe a sergeant to look after his clothes. (From the 1939 group photograph, a row of men in army trousers, braces and bare chests, I notice now that he looks better fed than his fellows.) His political enemies suspected him of electioneering; even we children found our visit to him in a summer camp distinctly odd. Dada sharing a tent furnished with a suspicious-looking bucket was somehow outside the natural order of things, and the smell from the bucket yet more disquieting. I also secretly thought that he looked ludicrous in his ill-fitting private’s uniform, like a noble lion in a circus.

  Eventually it was put to Frank that he should seek a commission—in whose interests was not clear—and he set off to the Isle of Wight on an officers’ training course. Once again he unintentionally managed to stand out from the conventional crowd. Settling into the railway carriage with his future fellow officers, Frank decided to break the ice in the easiest possible way.

  “Well,” he said, “what books has anyone brought?” There was complete silence. Finally one future officer, bolder than the rest, answered: “Book? Won’t there be a book when we get there?”

  The trauma of all this passed us children by. It was indeed still dealt with delicately by my father himself in his first memoir, published in 1953. Here he merely referred to frequent attacks of gastric ’flu (hence the ’flu story?) which “got to work on a nervous system already strained.” There were various Medical Boards and then he was gazetted as having resigned his commission owing to his ill-health. The effective comment followed: “I could not disguise from myself that here was failure—complete and absolute failure,” adding: “The wound will never, I suppose, heal completely.”

  This feeling of humiliation, based naturally enough on his precious memories of his own father, meant that he was much discomfited, roughly ten years later, by Thomas’s failure on medical grounds to be passed fit for National Service. A rational thought might have told him that a boy who had been savaged by polio in the Thirties, with serious physical consequences and medical reports to that effect, would be unlikely to be passed fit for the army. All the same, Thomas’s exultant telegram giving the results of the medical, the telegram of a gleeful schoolboy, did cause him much pain: “Great news! Failed 100%.”

  As it was, Frank fell back on becoming an enthusiastic member of the local Home Guard; here eccentricity was limited to the fact that he actually needed two forage caps to be stitched together for his uniform: a single cap could not cope with his increasingly lofty pate. “You have a big head too,” said my mother cheerfully when I expressed my admiration for what was evidently some kind of achievement. “When you’re grown up, you will probably need two straw hats to be put together to go to garden parties.” After that I regarded the dual forage caps rather more warily.

  We arrived at Water Eaton Manor, near Oxford, in the direction of Kidlington, in August 1939, just before the beginning of the war. We had been brought up to know that Water Eaton was “Elizabethan” since we had earlier done lessons there with a governess. Naturally I already knew about the great Queen Elizabeth: the vision of a courtier’s cloak being laid down sacrificially in a puddle before Her Majesty was to the forefront of my historical mind. A ruff ? A mighty gilded skirt? Pointy shoes resting on a globe? These images of a magnificent woman were also associated with the word Elizabethan.

  The globe
was relevant because we had a picture called The Boyhood of Raleigh in our nursery—it was a surprise to discover that it was not actually an original painting but a reproduction. This was when Millais’ famous picture of 1871 proved to be a favourite among schoolrooms of the time, with its imperialist message. “But that’s our picture!” I naïvely exclaimed, before learning to swallow my words and concentrate on what was depicted: two young boys with angelic Pre-Raphaelite complexions, Raleigh and his brother, listening to an extremely rough-looking sailor who has mislaid his shoes and is directing the boys out to sea. To something called the Spanish Main, it seemed. “For fighting,” said our nanny, “fighting foreigners.” “Serving Queen Elizabeth,” said our governess. “They did the exploring the world for her when she couldn’t.” Due to the ruff, the skirt, and the pointy shoes being no good on a boat, I added mentally.

  Water Eaton Manor had in fact been originally built in 1586, right in the middle of the Elizabethan period, but reduced in size later. It still seemed enormous to us, with its dovecote, its forecourt, its wide wonderful steps with huge stone globes—yes, globes again—on each side of them, and a chapel to the left. To the right lay what we came to think of as the school house. Most important of all were the big gates which faced the house at the other side of the grassy forecourt; beyond them lay fields, and beyond that the river.

  There were three families sharing the house: the Carr-Saunders, who lived there, had invited the children of another Oxford don, Frank Taylor, as well as ourselves to take refuge. The effective gang therefore consisted of six children, Edmund and Flora Carr-Saunders, John and Julian Taylor, and Thomas and myself. The little ones, Nicky Carr-Saunders and our brother Paddy, hardly impinged on our consciousness at this point. Edmund, two years older than me, was an intriguing figure: dark and good-looking, he was also aloof with the tantalizing air of one who has a serious but secret project engaging his attention. Flora on the other hand, although a little younger, became my dearest friend and remained so long after the Water Eaton sojourn was at an end.