I saw little of my father at these times – he was away in the mornings before I woke – but my mother, though she no doubt suspected part of my ailments were sham, could never be absolutely sure the symptoms were not the onset of some dire genuine illness, and it was very much in her nature to pamper her children anyhow.
Perhaps she comfortably argued that I was ‘educating myself’. It was partly true. My parents didn’t have a big collection of books: a few novels, Dickens, Thackeray, Lytton, some good general books on such things as Evolution, Botany, and Astronomy; but above all there was a ten-volume ‘New Edition’ of Chambers’ Encyclopedia. This was a goldmine. I read the volumes endlessly, hopping from one subject to another like a honey-drunk bee. They opened new worlds for me.
But in addition to these I had a daily diet of ‘ comics’ – six a week – and when a lending library was discovered I was able to borrow sensational novels which I lapped up at a phenomenal rate, thereby debasing my taste. I remember winning a handsomely bound Walter Scott novel – The Talisman – as a prize and making a great effort on it but finding it completely unreadable. Perhaps there really is a trace of the philistine in me, for I have not read it even yet.
When I met Sybille Bedford for the first time a few years ago, in addition to congratulating her on her magnificent books, including her just published and semi-autobiographical novel Jigsaw, I said how bitterly, bitterly I envied her her childhood. ‘Why?’ she said. ‘ It was not particularly happy.’ ‘I know,’ I said, ‘ but it was so rich in every sort of literary and artistic influence. You lived and breathed in a world where great literature came more naturally to you than the daily paper. In spite of all your vicissitudes, shortage of money, treks across Europe and the rest, everything was put before you, in art, in music, in writing. You accepted the best because you knew no other.’
It must be said, though, that in my early writing years I remember being thankful not to have been to a university, where one was taught to have the opinions of one’s mentors. (Surely F. R. Leavis’s unforgivable sin was teaching the young to sneer.)
Instead I came in wading through the trash, picking my own path, making my own discoveries and choices which for better or worse were not imposed from without.
But one of the greatest drawbacks in not going to a university, though I did not realize it then, was not in missing the tuition but in not meeting students of my own age, of like or different opinion (on whom I could sharpen my own mind), and of making friendships which would last all through the years.
In my early twenties I was invited, with two others, under the auspices of the WEA, to go to a summer school being held at Wadham College, Oxford. As an introductory task, I was invited to write an essay on Charles Morgan’s The Fountain, which was a book greatly admired by the critics. I wrote an essay so adverse that I was not at all popular with my tutors when I got there. So maybe some contrariness in my nature might have enabled me to preserve an independent judgement anyhow.
Saturday the 8th of August 1914 was a warm summery day, but towards noon the sky clouded over and it was beginning to rain, as it sometimes does in Manchester.
I had wandered in from outside; my mother was in the kitchen with the maid, so I went into the drawing room. This was unoccupied – only the piano looked tempting; but I went back into the hall and thence to the dining room. My father, sober and grave, was standing on one side of the fireplace and my brother, rosy cheeks and eyes glinting, was on the other. They were discussing an event which had occurred the previous Tuesday; Britain, in defence of Belgium, had declared war on Germany.
I remember exactly what my brother excitedly said as I came in. ‘It’ll be a regular flare up!’ My father gravely shook his head. But neither of them dreamed that my brother would eventually grow to be old enough to be drawn in. When he was, in late 1917, he was drafted into the South Wales Borderers and began his training at Kinmel Park, North Wales. It was known locally as Kill’em Park, because of the dozens of young men who died there from pneumonia and allied diseases before they got anywhere near a German. I remember going to see him once, trailing with my mother across what seemed like miles to a great flat camp where he appeared abruptly at the door of a wooden hut, pale and suddenly thin and with an appalling cough.
Later he was transferred to Newmarket, and in the early spring of 1918 was sent to France. People said to my mother, ‘Oh, they won’t put him in the firing line – they’ll keep him in the rear, he’s far too young.’ In fact he went straight in and was in the thick of the great Ludendorff Offensive that sent the Allies reeling and prompted Haig’s famous ‘Backs to the Wall’ message. One day my mother got a telegram from the War Office. With terrified fingers she fumbled it open to see that her lance corporal son had been ‘wounded but remained on duty’. In fact a shell splinter had cut his face just below the eye. Had it been an inch higher it would probably have killed him and so altered not only his destiny but mine and that of scores of other people, since without his pressure we might not have moved to Cornwall. So all one’s destiny is controlled and decided by the direction of a flying splinter.
In September 1918, to his family’s profound relief, he was sent home to train for a commission. It was to be in the Machine Gun Corps, which was known in the army as the Suicide Club; but before he could go back to France the Armistice came.
It must all have been a shattering experience for a boy just out of school, a genteel boy who had never been away from home. I remember the maid picking the lice off his shirt when he came home. He was so inured to maiming and death that during a ninehour German bombardment at the beginning of the Ludendorff Offensive, he sat all the time on a box of Mills bombs in a mudfilled trench listening to a solitary British gun, an eighteen-pounder, persisting with its lonely reply. His only company was two members of his platoon, and they were dead.
Yet when he himself lay dying nearly seventy years later I sat by his bed and somehow the question of the war came up, and he said: ‘I wouldn’t have missed it for anything.’ Such is the oddity of human nature.
By the end of the war he was just twenty and his natural destination in a dishevelled civilian world would have been a position with his father at D. Mawdsley & Co. But the objections of my uncle, who had four sons coming on, blocked this, so he took a position with a firm of cotton shippers called Jones, London & Garrard, who shortly offered him a post as their chief representative in Hong Kong. It was a brilliant opportunity, with high pay and fine prospects, but he turned it down; his nine months in France had convinced him that he wanted no more travel. So he worked for the firm for several years in England in what was, because of the collapse of the Indian and Chinese markets, to become a dead-end job. As it happened, the man who went out to Hong Kong in his place was murdered, so it was not altogether an ill decision.
He soon wanted to marry, could not possibly afford to on his then salary, and my uncle had succeeded in introducing his two eldest sons into D. Mawdsley & Co.
Cecil said he owed a great debt of gratitude to Uncle Tom for his jealousy, for otherwise he would probably never have come to live in Cornwall. Taking a holiday there with his fiancée in September 1924, at a place he chose at random out of the Great Western Railway Holiday Guide, he fell instantly in love with the county and the village of Perranporth. Having got there eighteen months later, he never wanted to move again, even after he had retired, and never did move again, for all the rest of his long life.
When my father was fifty-four he took his bath one November Sunday morning, came down and sat in the drawing room to read the Sunday Chronicle. But after a few minutes he found he could not hold the paper; he was losing the use of his right hand and arm. Then he lost the use of his right leg. Then he lost his speech. Then he lost consciousness. Coming chattering in as a noisy schoolboy, I was stopped by the maid, who said: ‘Hush, your father’s ill!’ I stared at her and said: ‘D’you mean Mother?’
My father in my eyes was never ill. He never had been. Th
e apostle of fitness, he used to jump gates instead of opening them. He was never known to be tired. The year before this, taking one of his regular walks with his men friends, they found on reaching the station to go home that they had walked twenty-four miles. So while waiting for the train he ran up and down the platform so that he could say he had done twenty-five.
It was a strange mixture – of this relentlessly energetic man and this delicate woman who was always tired and had no stamina at all. (Perhaps I am a fair mix of the two.) If he ever felt impatient with her he never for a second showed it. Nothing was too good for her, nothing too much trouble. If there was ever impatience in his heart it showed only with his sons – much more particularly towards me, whom his wife was bringing up as a mollycoddle. For, except with my mother, he was not really a sensitive man. When he took Cecil to an indoor swimming pool for the first time he told him to jump in at the deep end and he’d paddle his way easily back to safety. Instead Cecil was hauled out half-drowned, and as a result never learned to swim in his life.
During my childhood and early youth I saw my father only at weekends and sometimes briefly in the evenings, and his attitude towards me always seemed to be one of abruptness and slight disparagement. When I was thirteen I went down with lobar pneumonia, and the doctor, finding me unable even to cough, warned my parents that I was not likely to live the night. In the bedroom, after he had gone, my father rounded on my mother, blaming her bitterly for allowing me to go back to school when I hadn’t properly recovered from influenza. I remember listening to this and thinking: ‘ Good Lord, he’s fond of me!’
On that sad Sunday morning when he was taken ill they sent a maid hurrying for the doctor. Our own doctor was out, so another man came. He made a brief examination, lifted my father’s eyelid, and shook his head. He left a note at our own doctor’s, saying his patient would be dead before nightfall.
But the patient did not die. Instead a bed was brought down to the drawing room and a day nurse and a night nurse were engaged. These women were stiff and starched and demanding. The night nurse’s first insistence was that our new drawing-room carpet must be washed with carbolic soap. For six months they ruled the house while my father climbed slowly back to life and, to the doctor’s astonishment and delight, began to move his right arm and leg again. Presently he was able to go out in a wheelchair, then to walk with a stick – a few steps, and ever a few steps further. But physically he was a ruined man, and such had been the damage to his brain that he began to have fits – sometimes twice a month, sometimes at longer intervals. In them he would go purple and grey, and as the fit reached its climax he would scream at the top of his voice. No sedative was able to cure or prevent them. Sometimes a handkerchief tied and tightened around the right arm would check them and the attack would pass off with only a brief aguelike shaking.
It was at this early stage of his convalescence that we bought a wheelchair, which he could steer by means of a long iron handle at the front, and during the first summer holidays I used to push him as far as Birch Park where, on a quiet afternoon, he would get out and sit on a park seat, sometimes chatting – so far as he was able – with a friend. During these peaceful interludes I raised his ire more than once by standing on the chair, steering with the bar and pushing with the other leg. This way one could get up a fine turn of speed and go careering round the park paths with the wheelchair going backwards.
It was the following summer that I went with my parents for a prolonged stay at Morecambe. My father by then could walk short distances with a stick; we stayed at a small hotel at the end of Regent Road and walked every morning to the front, on to the pier and along to its end where every day a concert party called ‘Jack Audley’s Varieties’ performed. No doubt a more adventurous boy would have struck out on his own, but, apart from absenting myself when there was a rough sea to watch – and sometimes the sea can be spectacularly rough there – I went along and listened and, of course, read. Because the concert party was not geared to people staying more than two weeks the programmes repeated fairly frequently, so that in the end I could, without conscious effort, remember and sing, with all the words, their entire repertoire. Even today I can remember twenty songs, and when my children were young I would sometimes entertain them with these. Reference was then sometimes made to ‘Daddy’s music-hall days’. Alas, all my music-hall days were spent reclining in a deckchair.
Of course after his illness my father was quite incapable of any form of work, and within four months my Uncle Tom called to say regretfully that the firm could no longer afford to pay his salary. I listened, convinced that destitution stared us in the face, not knowing that my father for years had taken a derisory salary in order to bolster the profits of the firm, of which my mother, being a partner with her two brothers, took a third share.
Tom’s eldest son, the younger Tom, whom I much liked, presently joined the firm. Young Tom was a very strange character (an extreme example of the kind of eccentric the Mawdsley family occasionally throws up): an intellectual, a lover of music and the arts, a dilettante, and a neurotic. Like his three brothers he was brought up under the iron hand of his irritable, ill-tempered, jolly, uncultured, weathercock of a father, and when the boys were at home they did everything they were told, exactly as they were told, and no questions asked. (My mother said they crept around the house like white mice.) May, their mother, was an easygoing, eventempered but astute woman who alone knew how to manage Tom senior. The boys, when they possibly could, kept out of his way.
But young Tom, although he did not marry and continued to live at home, developed a life of his own, joined the Manchester Athenaeum, went to concerts and read widely. In a way he was a sad young man – and there are many such about – a person with a passion for culture and no creative talent at all. At the age of twentyfour, having read deeply in psychiatry, he went to an analyst and for the rest of his short life visited him five times a week. In the mid- Thirties he began to take an active interest in the persecution of the Jews in Hitler’s Germany and Austria, and by various contrivances – such as finding or inventing jobs for them in the firm – was able to get a half-dozen of them to the safety of England. Because of his work in this field he convinced himself that he was a marked man whose name would be in the Nazi Black Book, which would condemn him to a concentration camp if Hitler were to win the war. When France collapsed and the British army straggled back weaponless from Dunkirk, Tom thought the war lost and committed suicide by jumping from a third-floor window of the warehouse. He left a note saying: ‘I have died for democracy.’
The second son, Harry, was much more normal, a typical thrusting unintellectual North Country good-timer, good-looking and a smart dresser. He would probably have done well in the firm and for the firm, but decided one fine June morning to drive with a friend to Wimbledon in his new Riley. At five o’clock in the morning, racing along the empty roads, they met a bus on the wrong side of the road, the driver having gone to sleep. Both young men were killed instantly.
Tom’s youngest son, Denis, was eventually drafted in to the firm, so fortunately it remained a family concern.
Chapter Three
The year I was to be fourteen, after I had been seriously ill with pneumonia, my mother had double pneumonia and also nearly died. I remember being sent to the cinema one night when she was gravely ill. When I got back, having separated from my friend Ernest Emery at the gate, I looked up and saw the front bedroom bay windows in darkness. This was where my mother was. I crept up the path and peered in at the drawing-room window where there was a light, and saw my crippled father sitting in conversation with the nurse and the doctor. Their faces were all grave, and I thought all was lost. If my mother was dead it was the end of the world for me. All mothers at the age I was then are no doubt dearly precious, but my own mother, in her love for me, had kept me so close that I could see no future for myself without her. I have long thought that psychologically her attitude was a terrible blunder; but if one assesses t
he outcome I suppose it cannot be criticized too drastically. (What is it that makes an author?)
Anyway, that night I was afraid to go in to the house, so fell on my knees, the doormat scratching them, to pray to a God I had never properly been introduced to that she was still alive – that somehow she was still alive. When eventually I summoned the courage to go in I discovered that my mother was dozing and the doctor and the nurse had turned the gas down and come downstairs to discuss the situation with my father. I should have learned from that that the imagination – my imagination – can always put two and two together and make six. It has been doing so ever since.
All this made my parents ready for a move. My mother with catarrh all the year and bronchitis every winter because of the ‘dampness’ of Victoria Park; my father a restive, frustrated cripple still only in his mid-fifties but forcibly retired by ill-health; and now my near-death and hers – there was nothing any longer to keep us in Manchester. The idea was to move to Southport, or perhaps to St Anne’s, which is the better, residential end of Blackpool, and which they knew suited my mother’s health. Together they could find a pleasant bungalow and face a long retirement. But behold my brother, frustrated beyond measure in his dead-end job, desperately wanting to marry, and now, suddenly, totally besotted in his desire to live in Cornwall. He didn’t mind what he did, however menial, so long as it was in Cornwall.