Mr Sudell

One could write a memoir based on where one spent each night of one’s life. It would be like a tune on the black keys only, or a painting of the spaces between things, not the things themselves. But there would be blanks in my memoir if I tried that. I can remember when I first slept in that bathroom, and the morning of waking there with sheets soaked in blood; and when I first came out of hospital, and slept in my sister’s room for a while. But after that, my nights at that house are a total blank. I was mostly at boarding school, so my parents didn’t see the need of a bedroom of my own, and anyway they didn’t have the space. At some point my mother walked out and went back to my grandmother’s house, so perhaps I spent very little time in that Victorian house overlooking the sea.

After being discharged from hospital, I spent only a few days at home, in that cosy room of my baby sister’s, before being packed off to school where the summer term had already begun. It felt strange returning after so many different experiences, though I had missed little more than a term.

They didn’t know what to expect when I came back. Would I be able to play cricket, that was the main thing. I recall a senior boy bowling to me in the nets (that’s a practice area for bowling and batting). He said I had a lot of catching up to do and it was a kind of accusation. Though I did study books of technique by famous cricketers in the school library, my co-ordination was very poor and I was not temperamentally inclined towards team games in any case. I used my recent “accident” as an excuse to drift into a dream world, while the other boys plunged into soccer and cricket with gusto: formally every afternoon and informally in breaks between lessons and on summer evenings.

I invented a game I could play on my own. I made a little hole in the grass and tapped a tennis ball with a long stick till it fell in the hole. One or two boys wanted to join in and I let them. But then came Mr Sudell, our latest-arrived schoolmaster, and he said it was golf and we should learn to do it properly. He found a putter and golf-ball and showed us how it was done. Soon there was a large group playing this new game and I lost interest totally, a little resentful that my daydream game had been made social and official. I went on to invent other solitary games which I’ll tell you about another time.

I confess that my narrative has skipped three years, for Mr Sudell came to the school when I was ten. He was a retired senior master from Manchester Grammar School. He had trouble with his legs. One got gangrene and had to be amputated. Then the other one seemed to be going the same way. But he got around, sometimes with crutch and folded-up empty trouser, sometimes limping with his new prosthetic leg. He was a genial pipe-smoking man and he took a liking to me, despite my resentment at the hijacking of my game.

I was in the top class alongside boys older than me. There were only seven of us. Mr Sudell kept saying I was a “scholarship boy”. He championed my cause when no one else did. The headmaster had a down on me, for reasons I’ll explain another time, while my parents seemed hardly aware I existed. Mr Sudell was not only a teacher but a psychologist too. I was a delinquent rebel at that age, unwilling to be a “geek” and top of the class, so I would make mistakes deliberately and neglect my work absent-mindedly. He took me in hand with a mild spanking in front of the class at everything I got wrong, with his slipper. It wasn’t painful, merely embarrassing as no other boy had this treatment. So I started to try hard to avoid the public attention and then I discovered the joy of striving for perfection. I was also discovering a father-figure for the first time: a man in my life who cared about me.

One term---I had the benefit of his teaching for a year minus his absences for surgery---he brought a newly-published book, called something like Apollo’s Garden: a primer of ancient Greek completely unlike the old-fashioned schoolbooks. It was designed to be read for pleasure, with poems by Sappho and sensual line drawings copied from old urns. He used it to teach me the beginnings of Greek. I loved the feel of the language, so aesthetic and sensual compared with Latin, in which I had reached the stage of reading Virgil and a little Livy, having advanced through some of Julius Caesar’s Gallic Wars. Those were the days when it was customary to learn Latin at 8 before starting French at 9.

I really wanted that book! I loved to form the Greek letters, and pronounce them and read them. I loved the smell of the pages, the excitement of the sounds I was learning to make. So Mr Sudell proposed that I should write to my grandfather and request it for a Christmas present. I must have told Mr Sudell that my grandfather like him was a retired schoolmaster. This was the point where, comparing the two men, I realised my grandfather was too self-centred to understand me or even try to. Did he think of me as his daughter’s unfortunate bastard child, not worthy to inherit his coat of arms and his books?

I tried to explain to Mr Sudell but he stood over me knowing I was embarrassed by this desire so unusual in a boy of ten. It was on a Sunday afternoon when every boy had to write to his parents and the master on duty would check the letter before the boy could go and play: ostensibly to see if the letter was “long enough”. (“Dear Mother and Father. I hope you are well. Last Wednesday afternoon we played a cricket match against Vinehall. I was the scorer for our team. It was an away match. After the match they gave us a tea which included strawberries and cream, the strawberries were grown in their own fields . . . .”

So there was a kind of jokey feeling whilst I was writing the letter to my grandfather. I wrote “Mr Sudell says he will beat me if I don’t ask you for this book.”

The joke misfired. When Christmas came, I eagerly awaited the present. It was The Beano Annual, a childish comic book. I’m still hoping to track down that magical gateway to the Greek language.

Police thriller

rain outside the house

Normally the skirling of police sirens, whilst deafening, passes us by swiftly enough. This time I subconsciously detected something different. Like a pipe band silenced suddenly by punctures to their windbags, the sirens stopped in mid-skirl, which meant they had stopped at our doorstep. I looked out our first-floor window just in time to see the doors of two squad cars and a police van open simultaneously and hear the scuffling sound, as in a street brawl, of four police running up our drive with the fearful determination of a posse closing in on an international terrorist. Then a fifth police car stopped outside, further from the kerb and at an even more rakish angle than the others. A blonde female officer in a ponytail and a bearded Sikh officer in a black turban joined the party.

I was about to make the obvious joke to K, “They’ve come for us at last!” but there wasn’t time. We heard an urgent knock at the door. I was again about to make a remark, but the normal tapping turned into a collective heavy-weight pounding designed to break down the door if I did not open it of my own free will. I hurried down to see three anxious policemen in bullet-proof vests, ready to leap in and overpower me. “Thames Valley Police”, one of them announced unnecessarily. “Did you call us?” He could see from my startled confusion that I had not. So they commenced pounding the adjacent door to the downstairs flat (labelled D: we are B) with equal vigour. So I left them to it.

I heard a voice from inside the downstairs flat, to the effect that he or she could not open the door. It was locked. It sounded like a voice speaking through a window aperture. The other day they had called me through this window when I was coming home and passed me a letter delivered to them by mistake, apologising that it was not possible to open the door. Perhaps they only use their back door, though the previous tenant (who was certainly wanted by the police on several counts) mostly used his front door. He was a very pleasant chap, helped me start my car a few times and I helped him with his. He came from a country world-famous for the ingenuity of its criminals, but I will say no more.

So the police went round to the back, with me trying to see and listen through our bedroom, then kitchen, then bathroom windows. The only intelligence I gathered was one policewoman telling her radio: “The situation seems to be this: that the . . .” She walked round the corner to a blindspot where I could not see or hear anything.

Things went quiet, no struggle, no shouting, no drama. Downstairs they are a pleasant Pakistani family, known to our landlord (which is no guarantee of their respectability, I should add); a couple with a baby, though I have always felt a certain mystery about them. When the police raided (or responded to an emergency call, whichever way you see it) the couple’s nice new car was not in the car park. Yes, we have a big car park at the back, big enough for a dozen police cars---but that is not their style, police throughout the world prefer to park randomly and untidily. Later, while the police were still in attendance, the tenants’ car was there. Still later it was gone again. Was no one under arrest? Could members of the family (or gang) come and go freely? Most of the police contingent departed with their vehicles, leaving just one car. I went to empty the garbage and saw the downstairs flat back door open. The remaining policemen must be inside: doing what? Windows were open too, the curtains flapping. If it was the smell of death they were trying to get rid of, where was the forensic team? I got a glimpse of the front room, through the disarranged curtains. A large printer/photocopier, a fan: looked more like an office than a lounge. A desolate atmosphere like an empty nest.

Tell me, Mr Sherlock Holmes, what was going on? As I have reported on my now private Wayfarer’s Notes blog (why private? you may ask) this town is officially a centre for the plotting of terrorism. For months at huge expense the woods were searched for explosives and clues. I never learned the outcome, but the teams of police were glad of the overtime payments for such easy work. For a centre of terrorism, it is a very peaceful place and in particular the teenage Muslims are polite and well-behaved compared with their counterparts---what shall I call them?---Christian, white, indigenous? My theory is that it’s the peacefulness of the town that’s the source of the danger. If the Muslim youth spent their spare hours in binge drinking, nightclubs and general rowdyism, they might be less inclined to heroic suicide missions.

Back Home & some pastimes

The pianola

When I reached home from hospital I was pleased to find I had a proper bedroom. Well, it was my baby sister’s room. Her cot had been moved to my parents’ room and I was assigned a mattress on the floor but I luxuriated in its sparse furnishings and relative comfort. I soon found two interesting books on a shelf. One was Nature’s Playground, by M. Cordelia E. Leigh. I recently found a copy in what’s known here as a “car boot sale”, and discovered I almost knew it by heart. The other was The Young Naturalist, a Victorian volume illustrated with engravings. It showed how to heat minerals using a Bunsen burner making its flame hotter and more focused with a blowpipe. It showed the larva of the caddis fly which encases itself in twigs, sand, little stones and snail-shells. I was fascinated by the terms used for the stages of an insect’s life: larva, pupa and imago, especially the latter. My grandmother had only taught me caterpillar, chrysalis and butterfly.

Yes, I can remember the books in my life with almost photographic precision, especially around that time when I was seven. I used books to blot out other things. When I recall a book, an image springs up of the place I read it, or vice versa. The rickety camp-bed in the bathroom is associated with Enid Blyton’s “Mr Twiddle” books, and a magazine she published called Green Hedges, named after her house in Beaconsfield, not far from here. There were two other books which I used to peruse for hour after hour in that draughty bathroom: The Wonder Book of Railways and especially The Wonder Book of Ships. It wasn’t a conscious thing but I see now that I was recapturing the feel of that journey to England on the mv Rangitata, and discovering that others, at least the author Harry Golding, found something fascinating about ocean liners. I was in a dream, reliving that fateful journey, escaping the present.

The strange atmosphere of The Young Naturalist was reflected in the rest of this tall narrow house: our part that is---the ground floor was let to tenants. Our mantlepiece was cluttered with statuettes of maidens and swains leaning against treetrunks, objects under glass domes, spotted mirrors in gilt frames, a large round table-top leaning against the wall made of dark marble with a mosaic of Pompeii’s ruins; dusty books lining the stairs. I remember Shakepeare, in a row of separate volumes, and The Waverley Novels, Vol I, Vol II etc. Had they been titled properly, like Ivanhoe by Sir Walter Scott, I would have blown off the dust and taken them down, because I had heard of Ivanhoe. I recall the day, left alone as usual, when I took down Hamlet and started to read. It started with the gate of a castle and Horatio knocking at a door. I was convinced he had said “Who keeps the gate here, ho!” but when I check the Net I discover this was Bardolph in Henry IV Part 2. I must resist this temptation to check memory, which exposes eddies in my space-time continuum, and elements of fiction which creep in against my will.

My favourite thing in that house was a pianola. It was a dark box with domed top, wheeled in front of the upright piano. When it was in place I would get up early in the morning and play Polonaises by Chopin or Songs without Words by Mendelssohn. All you had to do was insert the roll of paper with holes for the notes, and operate the pedals which powered bellows. Little felt-covered “fingers” would hit the keys and you had music. You could vary the speed and loudness with little brass sliders. It had felt-covered “feet” for the piano’s loud and soft pedals: a kind of Victorian computer in a mahogany cabinet. My parents got fed up with my playing early in the morning and wheeled the pianola back into the kitchen behind a great table on which sat a museum-display of tarnished cutlery and contraptions of a bygone age. According to my mother it was that kitchen which first pushed her in the direction of divorce, on the basis of “Keep it or me, you choose”. My stepfather, naïve at 53, had not imagined that a wife would insist on changing the furniture around, and was profoundly shocked.

Privacy

Thanks to flickr / kellamudra

The essence of a blog, or so I’ve thought till now, is to speak openly to the entire world. Just as in a book, except that using book technology someone pays to enter the world within the covers. So why have I suddenly become “scared of my own shadow”, as they say, and restricted A Wayfarer’s Notes to invited readers only?

Sorry to have put up this barrier which deserves an explanation. A quite friendly series of emails from a reader / acquaintance left me feeling a little sensitive. As shadows go, he is not really a threat, but the human animal’s primary impulse is safety. Even spirituality is subservient to it. In fact spirituality is an expression of that impulse. My post Fearlessness written just before the recent series of memoirs---which I impatiently wait to continue, with many more episodes prepared mentally---explored that theme.

This is a funny time of day to be writing. I sit with a quilt wrapped round my legs and glance through the lace curtains at the lightening sky. It’s 4:30 am and I sip tea to persuade my doubting body that it is all right to waken for a journey that won’t end till sleep tonight. “Journey” comes from the French “journée” meaning “day-time” or “the day’s length”.

Our life is divided into separate journeys and the magic of night, or of sleep which is almost synonymous with night, is to take us through a cleansing cycle (the circadian rhythm) so that we awake not quite where we left off.

It’s a similar rhythm in blogging. A post, like a journée, is bounded by its beginning and end, but leads on to the next. I have become fond of its form, and delighted with a small band of readers whose input or silent presence is so valuable. So even if I don't want to speak to the whole world yet, blogging has become an addiction.

I dictated a post a few days ago to be published in my other blog “Reading Without Tears”. It seemed to emerge fully-formed into the pocket voice-recorder and the outline of what I said comes back when I mentally retrace the route of the lunchtime stroll which witnessed its birth. “This will need no editing”, I thought. Except I accidentally deleted it prior to transcription.

Its gist was that writing is a pact between writer and reader. Both must have something to gain. But what they get from it is not quite the same. So it is some kind of miracle when a writer can please a reader.

I write to keep sane, to get a psychic equilibrium without which I feel restless and unfulfilled. It is one of several ways to overcome the solitary confinement of human life. The majority are gregarious, sociable, keen members of the club called Humanity. I’m an Outsider and the memoir sequence traces to the source of how that came about unless it was innate; in a way intended to encourage the reader to make that same journey, to retrace the same steps.

But I realised yesterday, via that friendly email correspondence, that the journey could involve dangers.

Released

Jorge Luis Borges, 1899-1986

It takes effort to wrestle the facts from memory. I thought that it was summer when I came out of hospital, and that it had been a six-month stay. But I was discharged in time to see a long queue outside a tobacconist / candy store in Harold Place, Hastings. The public record confirms that war-time sweet rationing ended on 24th April 1949. So I could not have been incarcerated more than four months, a span which must have included my seventh birthday. Alice in Wonderland and Wind in the Willows, which I recalled in my last post, may have been my presents. Memory is selective. To remember everything is to be fatally afflicted, like Funes the Memorious in Borges’ short story. It’s the peaks of triumph, the pits of woe which remain specially etched on memory. Ordinary days are eroded flat by the ensuing decades. Here in these memoirs, my effort is to peel off layers of forgetful vanity, reaching flesh still raw and smarting from ancient wounds.

My greatest triumph in those months was the first time I hobbled on crutches and plastered leg to the ward toilet. I give heartfelt thanks for not needing to call “I need the Bottle” or “Bedpan please Nurse” in the last 58 years. Hardly an achievement to boast of in the wider world, but such details are big in the reduced horizons of the disabled and dying.

The greatest triumph of a long stay in hospital should be the day of discharge, especially when you walk out on your own two feet, intact after two operations, hundreds of injections in the fleshy parts, successive hospital epidemics and the double-restraint of quarantine. Yet what befell on that day was a great humiliation which I would pass over in silence had I not rashly brought up the topic myself.

After physiotherapy to relearn walking without crutches, and to build up my strength, I’d been pronounced free to leave. Farewells had been exchanged with my former jailers revealing a sort of mutual respect. Yet I could not go till my parents showed up to collect me. Scrubbed, dressed and combed with a little bag of belongings, I waited, my bed already given up to a new arrival on the ward. No parent showed up. Nurses who had once been cross with me could barely conceal how cross they were with my mother and stepfather. Finally arriving several hours late, they were flustered and quarrelsome as on the occasion of my accident.

My childish deal with the angels, to be a “burnt offering” to reunite my parents, had failed. I had a little sister by now, six months old when I came out of hospital. I remember one image only: a baby in a pram. If anyone would have brought my parents back together it would have been her, their shared child, but destiny had other plans.

Incarcerated

Sketch by Francis Dodd, 1920

They put me in a bed with high-sided rails around it. I was offended at being put in what looked like a baby’s cot: me at seven years old. I protested loudly and tearfully. Boarding-school had taught me self-defence against ridicule from my peers. Through steel bars, I surveyed the ward, long and high like a church, with beds for pews, the night-nurse for a priest, her desk for an altar. A lamp with a green glass shade provided a pool of light for this angel-apparition whilst in the shadows thirty children snored and coughed till the morning bustle woke us and I was still caged.

But that day they lifted me into a proper bed! It had an arched frame to raise the bedclothes free of my leg. Nurse told me they’d listened and yielded to my wish. Hope leapt up in my breast: hospital could be fun if they went on doing that. The events of each day proved otherwise, dashing all such hopes. If you called “Nurse!” for the bedpan---I had to copy others to find out what to do---a Sister would not even look up, unless you called “Sister!”, and then she would find a nurse to perform the menial task. Sisters were nurses in a different colour of uniform. I had several painful injections each day. The kinder nurses, who were outnumbered by the fierce ones, would take care to choose a spot on my buttock which had not been stabbed before.

I was sent for an Operation. As the trolley was wheeled to Theatre, we passed glass cases on the walls, full of gleaming instruments. Perhaps they were museum pieces as a form of decoration, but I saw them as instruments of torture. The Theatre team had masked faces but played jolly clowns, like a magician at a children’s party. They drugged me with chloroform and the bright lights revolved sickeningly. Their voices squealed and splintered like breaking bottles and . . .

I woke up in the ward, with my leg in plaster of Paris, a red rubber tube snaking into a hole they’d drilled into my knee. On a pole stood a jar of yellow liquid at the other end of the tube. It was penicillin, at last available in sufficient quantities for use in peacetime hospitals. This was 1949: a couple of years earlier, my infected knee would have been amputated. Still, the doctors were careful not to raise my mother’s hopes too high. Every Sunday evening Canon Griffiths asked his congregation to pray for me.

Not long after, we all caught chicken-pox and the ward was closed in quarantine, a prison within a prison. No parental visits and no presents, unless they were to be donated to the hospital afterwards. This was to keep in the contagion. Then it was May and our quarantine space extended to a shady balcony, where there was a bookshelf on wheels, full of tattered books left from a previous outbreak of chicken-pox.

Slowly I was learning to create my own freedom, with bravado as the main weapon. The food was disgusting but some of us boys (we were segregated) made a point of pretending to relish it and asking for more. In many little ways I learned to be cheeky with the nurses, to amuse but not infuriate them. I was less successful in this than my peers but you had to find your own technique and it helped pass the days.

The quarantine was over and I suppose I had a visit but I don’t remember it, only the present of two books: Alice in Wonderland and The Wind in the Willows. I was enchanted by the first and bored by the second. My opinion hasn’t changed in nearly sixty years.

Then we were plunged into quarantine again. This time it was measles and I was moved to a smaller hospital, St Helen’s. It was nearer home but what use was that? I was in an isolation ward, with only five beds, like a boarding-school dormitory. The blinds were kept drawn and the lighting dim to prevent damage to our eyes. We had calamine lotion for our skin but my leg itched madly under its plaster. There was a heap of old comics to read and nothing else to do but argue amongst ourselves and, to the extent that our illnesses allowed, jump from bed to bed like fleas.

to be continued . . .

Self-immolation

Drawing by Sally Faye

Boarding school for all its rigours was a respite from the neglect and loneliness of home. I find it difficult to speak of either, but our goal---yours and mine---is to be entertained and edified in the catharsis called human life.

Merrion House School was a red-brick house once owned by Sir Philip Sidney, he who dying on the battlefield had refused water, pointing to a common soldier less gravely wounded lying nearby: “His need is greater than mine.” It had extensive grounds needing constant upkeep: two ponds, an overgrown formal garden, a decaying orchard with twenty varieties of apples, a courtyard and ruined stables; playing-fields and ploughed-fields too. Monty Brummell-Hicks, our headmaster, spent more time mowing and ploughing than he did teaching and frightening us with his presence. Like so many others he had been “shell-shocked” in the Great War and there was a mad gleam in his eye. The other one was glass and he would take it out and dry it on a handkerchief when the socket watered too much. His hand shook so that his writing---he used a steel pen with extraordinary pressure---was jerky, as was often his speech.

Separating the formal gardens from the first of the playing fields was a magnificent laurel hedge. It had grown high and one term we were given the pleasant task of pruning it to the proper height of five feet, just right we were told for a sportsman to take cover and shoot from over the top. The headmaster strode around in gumboots with a shotgun and we’d hear distant bangs: mostly rabbits.

Our pruning mission was simple enough to be managed by the senior boys and it was some time before I was allowed to climb on a step-ladder and actually do the sawing. My first task was to drag branches twenty yards to a clearing in the orchard where we put them on a bonfire. The wood had an almond-like aroma when newly cut. The leaves were large and shiny: you could stand on top of a heap of fresh branches while the fire blazed fiercely below. I saw another boy do this once and then I found excuses for doing it too. I’d stand on top of the pyre like an effigy of Guy Fawkes, or an Indian widow committing suttee. We learned in history how the kindly British Raj stamped out such cruel native customs.

Scene: the next school holidays. I’m walking along the esplanade on a frosty evening at dusk with both parents on our way to church. I take refuge in a secret fantasy. I’ll astound my school companions with my bravery. I will die like Joan of Arc in a blazing fire, pitied by all who observe. My parents will be shocked and full of remorse. Unknown to everyone, I have the secret of being consumed by fire without pain, as witness my exploits on top of the laurel-branch bonfire last term. I will die in comfortable glory and my parents will revere my memory and their incessant quarrelling will cease. In a martyr’s fervour I seal a pact with God and his angels for such an outcome.

We came out of the church and passed behind a large hotel where the kitchens were. It was beyond the range of streetlamps and profoundly dark. I fell and cut my knee: a big gash, it must have been a broken bottle. A passing couple from the church offer us a lift home: their kindness adding a warmth that was otherwise absent. My parents offer blame for my clumsiness instead of pity. A piece of flesh hangs off my knee almost severed, exposing a hole down to the bone. My bravery at least is confirmed.

I was shocked but strangely thrilled the next morning to find the sheets soaked in blood. At that time---I still feel shame to tell this---I had no room of my own for the school holidays. I’d been assigned a folding camp bed in the bathroom, a scary place where the wind whistled through the flue, and I would be awakened mornings by my stepfather coming for his bath. The camp bed was creaky and uneven, wedged next to a little Victorian fireplace which dropped soot sometimes.

The doctor who’d dressed my wound was a bumbling old fool who drank: his stitches had come out overnight. Strange things started happening to my leg. Another doctor came, used tweezers to remove glass fragments. Still I didn’t get better, or was I just exploiting the situation and making too much fuss? When the infection had reached the bone I was rushed to hospital.

Ship of Dreams

Arrived at Tilbury
Thanks to the New Zealand Maritime Record

I’m not finished with the mv Rangitata, which brought me as a four-year-old from Fremantle to Tilbury. The Rangitata hasn’t finished with me either. Our acquaintance was a six-week voyage sixty years ago but memories can still be triggered; the shuddering vibration from its engines, the smells of hot paint, engine oil, bleach, disinfectant, sewage. It still haunts my dreams, not as a ship but a labyrinth, a grand staircase at each end and tiers of galleries. I still wander them trying to find my way. Sometimes, I arrive at its second class dining-room, my eyes scanning the crowd for a familiar face, waiting for one person who promised to join me. Through the long corridor of years, the Rangitata is still a theatre of dreams. Not just the ship itself but Fremantle Docks, the scene of an Exodus I didn’t understand. We got up in the night and it was not yet dawn when our taxi arrived at a great looming Customs Shed, in the cold drizzle of an Australian June.

Dream: I’m in a vast shed with a busy concourse and offices leading off. I enter a long bare room, like something out of Kafka, with a counter at the other end and a clerk in attendance. Behind him are pigeon-holes with mail and parcels from many decades ago: faded, dusty, unclaimed. I have been summoned to attend, but my hopes are vague and tattered. The clerk hands me a sheaf of almost illegible papers. Are they for me? No, it is more complicated: something to do with my grandmother; a family secret that no living person understands. My heart quickens. Perhaps I am to inherit something? I wake up and the mystery remains unsolved. I need to know!

Memory: the day of embarkation from Australia, Fremantle Docks. My mother is anxious. I tag along, wanting to know what’s happening. She tells me in fragments and I try to make sense of it all. Within that Customs Shed, we go to the luggage office to deposit our trunks for loading into the ship’s hold, but at the time I don’t understand it: only through later overlays of memory. We can stow only small bags in our tiny cabin, which we are to share with two women: the ship is crowded beyond its designated capacity.

The luggage office was hardly memorable in itself, though many incidents of that unique day remain vivid. Its importance came later, when it stuck as the scene of a double betrayal, part of which lurked monstrous and hidden.

As a four-year-old I took comfort in a well-loved soft toy. I would hug it to my chest while my tears soaked into its fabric skin. My favourite one was an elephant. So in our cramped cabin I asked for it and my mother said it was in the trunk stowed in the hold. I could have it when we reached England. I didn’t understand and then she reminded me of that luggage office where we had handed over the trunk.

Our arrival was too exciting to remember the Elephant but I did later, in a moment of tearful need. She confessed to having left it in Australia, along with all my other possessions, bar one: the tattered Monkey with arms hanging off, which was hers when she was a child. My response was a torrent of vituperation surprising from one so small, and long-lasting resentment.

The bigger betrayal was not the Elephant left behind. It was that man left waving at the quayside, of whom I have no memory, for we were never introduced. My father.

How I came to be born: part 3

Where I roamed on the passage to England
Thanks to Richard Overall

(Continued from previous post)

Suddenly I learned that I was not half Dutch, as I had believed for fifty years, but half Australian. I had spent my life wanting to belong somewhere: to feel a kinship, a sense of family, to be able to say, “These are my people. I am home.” I had resented England from the moment of arrival. The first time I opened my mouth in front of my grandmother, she winced as if stabbed, and told my mother over my head “You must get him to speak properly” as if I were a badly-trained puppy rashly acquired. Which I was.

We had only just walked off the gangway. When the Rangitata arrived at Tilbury, my grandparents were waiting to greet us on the jetty: so near but so far. We waved, they waved---for several hours. There was scarlet fever on board and the English officials wouldn’t let us off. They did not want us to pollute their sacred soil. Australians don’t put up with this kind of thing, especially from Poms, even Australian women don’t. Our ship had carried twice its peace-time load for six weeks and it stank. We clapped and jeered the British officials as they went back and forth with stern faces. Finally the crew went on strike. No food would be served, no toilets unblocked, no patients with scarlet fever nursed in the sick bay. Shuddering at the vociferous rabble---the war brides & me---the officials relented. They melted away and we disembarked in triumph.

But I didn’t finish the tale of my birth. After hearing I was the product of an interesting liaison, I could not bring myself to discuss it with my mother. How to start? “By the way, it seems I am a bastard. Do you want to talk about it?” In the end---to cut a long story short---it came out. When she had calmed down, and realised I wasn’t going to chop her with a machete, my mother started to talk. Her Larry---my progenitor---was a boy living with his parents on a farm. She had been looking for riding lessons and hired him. I imagined their two horses following a lonely trail in the shadows of the setting sun, where they found a sheltered place to dismount . . .

But she wanted to tell me more. Long before, she had spoken vaguely about my “elder brother” who had died prematurely. When I was older I understood she’d had a secret abortion which left her seriously ill with peritonitis. All this to prevent her husband Jan Jacobus losing some job, because his contract stipulated “bachelor status”. When he found out he was furious.

But then---this was her new story---he’d contracted malaria during a jungle posting and a specialist had told him his sperm-count was down, and he could never be a father. She feared her recklessness would be punished by dying childless. To forgive her (or end her nagging), he yielded pride and told her to get pregnant “by some man”. He’d treat the child as his own.

Everyone had been noble after all. Shall I believe that? It doesn’t matter. Here I am. I was born.

How I came to be born – Part 2

How I imagined my father
Image source: Dolores

(Continued from previous post)

My mother’s beloved Singapore roadhouse was called The Gap: a prophetic name. After the war, it was nothing but a gap; one that she mourned forever and never really replaced.

The gap in my life was a father. When I met him fifty years later, he admitted having been in the crowd at Fremantle Docks waving with all the others, while my mother and I leaned over the rail of the mv Rangitata as it receded into the limitless sea. Lucy our landlady was there, I remember her but not him, proof that we were never introduced. Later when I was six, sent to boarding school in England my place of exile and in need of a father to boast about, I was only armed with tales of her husband, missing presumed dead, and photos with his hair slicked back like Rudolph Valentino. I embroidered her tales till my heroic father was drowned saving his best friend Klom, when the boat they were escaping in was shelled by the Japanese. And now I’m wondering if that Klom she spoke of so often was her lover . . .

Throughout my life, I struggled with explaining why and how I was born in Australia, to make it sound logical and not random. “My parents lived in Singapore . . . my mother went to Australia because of the war . . . no, my father was killed fighting the Japanese.” I wonder how many in my generation had to justify our existence like this, never quite clear how we got to be conceived. In the jostling teasing world of boarding school, I tried to tell interesting tales of my life. My favourite invention was a pet kangaroo, which we kept in a high fenced compound, and which I sometimes took for walks on a dog’s lead.

“My father stayed behind doing important war work. No he wasn’t a soldier, he was a radio announcer. He used to read the news. Naturally, that was a cover for his Special Operations on behalf of the Allies, that he couldn’t even tell my mother.”

By the time I learned the facts I was past caring. I went to visit my mother’s best friend who was slowly dying. She’d been kind to me as a child and I’d had an attachment to her daughter, from whom I had learned the facts of life, when she was six and I was four. I said “Let’s do it then!” for I was a smooth operator at that age. We took off our clothes and tried, but it’s not easy standing up. My grandfather caught us and was amused. When I reminded the girl seven years later, she was not.

I digress. My mother’s best friend, croaking with cancer of the throat, managed to whisper that my mother aged thirty had an affair with a boy of eighteen, the result being me. I thought she was fooling, making a joke, though talking hurt her. “I promised your mother never to mention it,” she said, and refused further details.

(To be continued)

How I came to be born: Part 1

Thelma Todd would have been a
role model for my mother
Source: Sheila O’Malley

I’ll tell you about my mother and how she got to spend the War years in a Perth suburb called Bassendean by the Swan River in Western Australia. As for my father, he lived there already.

She was born in 1910 in East Sussex, England, to Vincent and Gwendolyn. Her life spanned two world wars: one starting just before her fourth birthday, and another one ending just before my fourth birthday. War seeps into people’s lives.

Vincent was a smallish man. He looks pleased with himself in photos. He was proudly descended from Archbishop Sumner whose marble effigy lies in Canterbury Cathedral. I knew him as a retired schoolmaster who spent his days in a booklined study, its ceiling and walls stained yellow with decades of pipe-smoke. He’d coach a pupil in Latin in the morning, then complete the Telegraph crossword, his spectacles pushed up on his forehead. In the afternoons he’d go to his gentlemen’s club. For exercise, he’d potter round the garden pruning fruit trees or maintaining the compost heap. But the real garden-lover was my granny. Crippled with arthritis, and not able to afford a jobbing gardener to keep things tidy, she would hobble about poking things with her stick, or painfully get down on her knees to tend flowerbeds, or persuade her grandchildren to pull up weeds. She was full of creative energy despite her pain. She’d even take us (my cousin Mark and me) on long country walks, waving her stick at cows to scare them away and instructing us in many subjects as we went.

These were my mother’s parents as I knew them: proud strangers sharing an apartment, with separate bedrooms and lives. They would eat together and he would drive her to shops and church, but that was it. There was no evidence that they even liked one another. Emotionally, he was content with his own company, a “cold fish”. Local tradesmen called him “the Professor”, and you could see that pleased him.

My mother was the eldest of their two daughters, and the most adventurous. Peggy’s life was a more level-headed imitation of her elder sister. (Both emigrated to the colonies, had three marriages and were unmaternal. They thought nothing wrong with farming out their children for others to look after.)

When my mother was 21 she received an letter of invitation from her former dancing teacher, Miss Doris Holdsworth, who had gone out to Singapore to start a Dance Academy. Free at last from parental restraint, she took the next boat out. Together they taught Englishmen, Dutchmen, daughters of Chinese millionaires and sometimes the millionaires themselves.

This is how she met her husband, Jan Jacobus M-. I never met this moody and impetuous man, whom I’d been taught to regard as my father, for he died or at least disappeared before I was born. In his native Holland he had been engaged to a young lady from a high-born family. To prove his own worth and substance he had started up a tulip business and planted fields of those bulbs for which Holland is famous; but they were ruined by blight. He went bankrupt and lost the girl. This at any rate is the explanation my mother gave me for his emigration to the East Indies.

Together they lived the high colonial life of the ’Thirties, as celebrated in the plays and songs of Noel Coward. Jan made her give up being a dancing teacher. They ran a branch of Ciro’s, a chain of stores which still sells cultured pearls; and then a fashionable Roadhouse. This was in her glory days, in Singapore. She remained a flirtatious blonde till she died. But as she reminisced to me and her subsequent husbands (my stepfathers): “That terrible war, those Japs---we lost everything. Everything.”

Eager cupped hands

Having started my memoirs at age four, the sensible direction to go is backwards, till I have explained how I got to be born at all: you know, how my parents met and all that, which might involve telling their life stories too. I hope it won’t be too boring. The aim is to write my story in 500 words in each instalment.

The photo (click to enlarge) is written on the back in my grandmother’s hand:

Vincent, aged 3½ Sept ’45, Perth

I can remember it being taken. The clothes were bought specially for the occasion. My mother slicked my hair down with water when we arrived at the studio. Don’t be deceived by the rosy cheeks. In those days the stylish thing was to order hand-painted sepia prints: at least it was still stylish in the colonies.

We had gone by bus to the office district of central Perth, and climbed up narrow staircases to the top, where I was astonished to hear a nearby public clock chime the hour. The photographer wanted me to look eager and smiling, never easy for me in front of a camera. He held a soft ball and said he would throw it for me to catch. That is why I look expectant with my hands in that position. The camera was on a tripod and he stood beside it squeezing a shutter release cable to get the shot. I left the building frustrated that he broke his promise: he never threw the ball.

I can understand why my mother went to the trouble and expense of the clothes and the portrait. On August the 6th, the Enola Gay had dropped the bomb Little Boy on Hiroshima. Within days the war was over, and my mother had no more reason to seek sanctuary in Australia. Her husband was missing presumed dead. She had last been “home” in 1935, on her honeymoon visit to England, proudly showing off her six-foot-seven Dutchman. Now she wanted to prepare her parents for her imminent return to England, with her piece of excess baggage.

It was nine months before she could book her passage. Blame the disruptions of war. Every available ship was “bringing the boys back home”, one of the boys being my own father, but that story will have to wait. I wasn’t told who he was and have no memory of him. The concept of father had never been put in my head.

The eager cupped hands in that photo remind me of an earlier occasion, where the fixative of memory was also disappointment. I was at a farm. Perhaps my mother had left me to be cared for whilst she went on one of her trips, or impromptu “honeymoons”.

In this memory, a “big girl” – perhaps she was seven or eight – took me to a big open-fronted shed, filled with bales of hay, where chickens roamed free. The shed was so dark and the yard so bright, that your eyes had to adjust from one to the other. She took me to find a new-laid egg, still warm, and placed it in my two eager hands. We were to take it up the stony little lane to the house. I was proud and excited as if I had laid the egg myself. After only a few paces, it bounced out of my hands and broke. She refused to get me another. First I was furious and then I cried bitterly.

Early childhood

I suppose I was six months old in the photo (click to enlarge), but it might be good to start when I was four. Some of the biggest dramas of my life occurred then and in the next three years. So I have some vivid memories. In writing a memoir, I think there's a lot to be said for working backwards, and even more to be said for starting with your own experience before piecing together the jigsaw puzzle of hearsay.

I was happily living in Old Perth Road, Bassendean, Western Australia; a wooden bungalow with a tin roof and a veranda. My mother and I were lodgers in a house of women. I don’t mean a whorehouse though my mother in reminiscing mood used to tell me that the other girls had gentleman callers. I was happy there till one cold wet morning three months after my fourth birthday, a taxi took us to Fremantle Docks and we boarded the mv Rangitata bound for Tilbury in England.

I soon established a shipboard routine whereby I saw my mother at mealtimes and bedtime. For the remainder I wandered the decks, exploring every staircase and ladder. I was looked after by eight hundred war brides about to join their husbands. They were eager to practise being maternal on a chubby little boy. I felt very safe, but liked to wriggle off their laps after being fed snacks and sweet-talked.

I liked the easy ways of Australian women. All the more shock when I met my upper-crust English grandparents. They didn’t conceal their horror at my wild ways and “Cockney” accent. I now think the stain of my illegitimacy was part of it too: “bad blood”, but I didn't know this till I was fifty. My mother always told me my (official) father was a hero who had died defending the Dutch East Indies against the Japs.

We spent Xmas ’46 in an Edwardian house in Sussex. In the drawing room we sang carols round the piano. Actually my grandparents were poor and the house was let out to tenants. We had to shuttle between rooms as they became vacant.

In the notorious freeze of February ’47 the house was so cold that some of its residents stayed in bed all day, for we couldn’t afford to keep running the little electric fires. But what I remember best was the thrill of toboggan rides down a nearby hill with my cousin Matt. The novelty of snow outweighed what it did to your fingers and toes.

I am not sure where I first went to school. It may have been in Holland.

My mother, officially widowed, took me to visit her sister-in-law, my official aunt, in Arnhem. I was given a nice box of mosaic pieces and was making shapes with them on the floor whilst the women drank tea and ate slices of dried apple. Bored eventually with my game, I found my mother gone---to Switzerland, where she planned to hang out in hotels till she found a rich husband. Her years in pre-war Singapore had given her a taste for servants and the high life.

After being taken by my aunt on the first day, I was sent to school on my own thereafter, with a little tin of jam sandwiches for my lunch. I would pass the milkman’s pony-cart, fierce dogs and a smithy’s forge, where I would watch horses being shoed. I don’t remember life indoors. If it wasn’t raining, I would be shut out and let in at mealtimes, or perhaps my memory is distorted. Anyhow, I wandered in the neighbouring wood feeding on bilberries and pretending to be a dog. I collected pine-cones. I loafed at the wharf where sacks of chicken-feed were winched from barges into warehouses.

I had nearly forgotten my mother-tongue and even my mother, but one day she returned. Her romantic quest had not been successful. Back in England, I was sent to St Dominic’s School on Filsham Road to be taught about mortal sin by strict nuns. I was bullied there---by other pupils as well as nuns---but stayed only one term.

One day, I was put on a bus to go and meet my mother somewhere. I got off at the wrong stop and wandered forlorn till my grandfather found me hours later. I had missed the tea-party where my mother was to introduce me to my future stepfather.

I was sent to boarding-school in September ’48, aged 6. It was better than being left home alone while my parents went to the theatre in the evenings.

Fearlessness

St Alban, Soldier, saint, martyr
click here for source

There are many reasons for religion, but I think the top one is the conquest of fear. It’s at first sight extraordinary that you and I have never come across this thesis before. But . . . consider. Is it not true?

Mind and body say different things.

The body , that is, the ancient intelligence from earlier stages in evolution, says “Fear with its brother pain is what helps me to stay alive. Without the warnings of fear I would certainly be dead!”

The mind, this recent addition, this reflecting “I” which knows how to yearn for the unseen, says “If it wasn’t for fear, I’d be happy!”

The natural man respects fear. The man ready for religion is open to the suggestion that "Perfect Love casteth out fear." (I John 4:18)

What are we to do with fear? It halts behaviours which put our life and wellbeing at risk. Should we not respect it rather than bypass it? As I have learned from harsh experience, suppressing emotion---fear being one of the most powerful---leads to various kinds of illness which the body has evolved to resist the foolishness of mind.

So how will we protect ourselves against fear? The rich man’s way is to live in a castle of stone, employ a small army and pay for the best doctors to prolong his life.

The poor man’s way is to embrace religion.

There are strong traditions which link fighters with religious faith, for fighters must be fearless. We can overcome fear, at the price of a sacrifice: to pretend there is no difference between the natural conscience and some artificial concept of salvation imposed upon us.

The tradition of the warrior-saint is seen in British Christianity: martyrs; King Arthur and his knights; St George and the dragon; the Red-Cross Knights and their Crusades; “Onward Christian Soldiers”; the Salvation Army. All of them demonstrate how religion fosters courage.

On Saturday I was fearful of an event I had to attend, but it was irrational so I suppressed it. This put me out of sorts. I did not feel well. I got fatigued and slept. All this was a ritual. Like the actor afflicted with stage-fright, I knew I would go on the stage and everything would be all right. In the end, I made myself a reason to be courageous: “I’m doing this for S.” In the event all was well and S. had no need of my gesture.

Look at religion and see how much of it is designed to rid us of fear.