My Father's Fortune Read online

  We’re all dead! We must be! Nanny’s certain of it. She keeps shouting that she knew we were going to be killed and now we have been. It’s not just Nanny – we’re all screaming and shouting. We’re all crawling around trying to find each other, unable to see anything because the air has gone thick and white. It takes some time for our parents to establish that they still have two children, and for us to understand that we still have two parents. All five of us, it slowly emerges, even our late grandmother, are not only alive but unhurt.

  The air’s thick and white because this is where the plaster ceilings of the house now are, hanging in suspension, and spread fine over the floor and the Bentalls three-piece suite. Also scattered about, in a very deteriorated condition, are all the windows on the north side of the house in their Arts and Crafts lead mullions. The front door has deserted its post in terror, and is leaning shell-shocked against the wall on the opposite side of the lounge. Upstairs in the front bedroom, where my sister and I would have been sleeping if my parents had ignored the warnings, as they sometimes have in the past, a tangled mass of window-lead set with broken glass is curled up as peacefully as Goldilocks on my pillow.

  It’s only when day breaks and we hear the BBC news that we can begin to establish what’s happened. The Germans, it seems, have started using a new form of weapon, a small pilotless jet aircraft packed with explosive, that flies until it runs out of fuel and crashes. One of the first of these, engine still running, has passed over the roof of our house. It must have missed us by a matter of feet, because it failed to clear a house in the next street, on slightly higher ground about two hundred yards away. The family who lived there are now all dead.

  Nobody in Hillside Road knew them, though, so there’s no damper on the excitement of all the local children at the sudden change in our circumstances. A team of men from the council comes down the street, nailing shiny linen over the empty window frames, and the lounge is filled with the soft white light you wake up to after an overnight snowfall. A white Christmas! Except that it’s June, and the powdery white icing has transformed not the outdoors but the indoors.

  My father puts on his official Fire Captain’s steel helmet to protect himself from any bits of the house that may still be falling off, and gets up into the loft to investigate the state of the roof. Bathroom stool – knees flexed twice – foot on bedroom door handle – foot on architrave – push lid – grab edge; even the climb up there is already an excitement to watch. And then, as he lifts the trap out of the way with his helmeted head, there’s not the darkness of the loft but the brightness of the open sky above it. My sister and I run out into the front garden – and sure enough, there’s the Fire Captain’s helmet, where no Fire Captain’s helmet ought to be, emerging cautiously from the wonderful hole in the middle of the Dutch tiles. The helmet, like the homburg around my study door twenty or so years later, is followed by my father’s head. He’s smiling down at us, as amused as we are. This, one of my sister’s sons told me recently, is the only thing that his mother could remember about our doodlebug: our father’s head emerging from the hole in the roof.

  *

  It’s a memorable summer. The leftovers of the white linen from the windows are a good new raw material for the camps that we build on our patch of wasteland behind the houses. The tangled lead from the mullions is even more interesting. You can melt it in an old tin lid on top of the New World gas stove and make little pools and balls of quicksilver. You can tip the molten lead into water to form fantastic shapes, or use it for a hundred other things, if only we could think what they might be.

  Our house is changed even further by the acquisition of a Morrison shelter, which is not something for waterfowl to live in at the bottom of the garden, but a perfectly practicable steel table, named after the current Home Secretary, like the Anderson before it, and set up indoors. My parents must have been more alarmed than I realised by that first doodlebug. They have abandoned the trusted habits of improvisation and acquired a proper official airraid shelter, without waiting for passing navvies or for someone to give us a discarded one when the war’s over. It makes our kitchen as excitingly overcrowded as the dining room sometimes used to be on Sundays, and perhaps for my father more reminiscent of the kitchen in Devonshire Road. It has wire cage walls on three sides, and is floored with mattress, so that it makes a snug nest like a children’s camp. We sleep in it at night, and during the day fling ourselves into it, if we have enough warning, whenever a doodlebug threatens.

  The entertainment provided by the flying bombs continues. Never again does the angry buzzing come as close and loud as it did that first night. Even in the distance, though, it provides an agreeable touch of tension. Some fresh excitement may be just about to happen. A bigger bang. More dramatic destruction. We listen as the uneven racket gets louder – watch sometimes from the back garden as the persistent little insect with the tail of flame approaches … Until suddenly the noise stops. ‘It’s cut!’ shouts everyone, and we all fling ourselves into the Morrison, or flat on the ground.

  Silence. Wait … It’s going to be a really big one!

  And always we’re disappointed. Six thousand people are killed by flying bombs before they’re through, and after that first one they’re always somewhere else.

  *

  A team of tilers works its way along the street, replacing the temporary tarpaulins on the roofs. One of them is a handsome young American called Mike, who wears gym shoes instead of boots like all the others. He has bad feet, he explains, which is why he isn’t fighting his way through Normandy. All the children in the street fall in love with him. We gaze at him adoringly as he runs lightly over the tiles on his rubber soles, and stands with casual disregard for either height or doodlebugs on the very crest of a roof against the summer cumulus. We sit on the ground at his feet as he drinks coffee. On the pocket of his shirt is embroidered ‘Stella, Chicago, USA, 1942’. We fall in love not only with Mike but with Stella, the beautiful girl who’s waiting for him so heartbreakingly three thousand miles away. We fall in love with Chicago.

  Actually I’m already in love with Chicago, even before I know that Stella lives there, perhaps because it’s my mother’s legendary birthplace, or because ‘Chicago’ is such a romantic word. Or perhaps simply because it’s in the USA, which I’m also having a love affair with at the time, I think because of a Puffin book about the history of the country, which has pictures in brightly coloured poster paints of covered wagons and the Liberty Bell, and which mentions the Sioux, who have almost as romantic a name as Chicago, though I discover many years later that I’ve been mispronouncing it. I have the Union Jack and the Hammer and Sickle as well as the Stars and Stripes arrayed above my bed, but the Stars and Stripes is the only one of the three that I’m in love with, and at the centre of the array is a photograph of not Winston Churchill or Joseph Stalin but Franklin Delano Roosevelt. I’m in love with Franklin Delano Roosevelt. How could I not be in love with someone called Delano? Even though, as with ‘Sioux’, I discover years later that I’ve been mispronouncing it.

  By this time, I think, at the age of ten and three-quarters, I’m no longer so much in love with Janet, whom I’ve glimpsed each afternoon coming home from Sutton High School for Girls on the same train as me, in an aura charged with romance by the scent of train oil and railway upholstery. I’ve never managed to speak to her, but for a whole term I’ve been dreaming about her shock of frizzy hair and her mauve gingham dress, to a secret background music of (for some reason) I Love a Lassie. Every time I’ve come to the line ‘She’s as sweet as the heather, the bonny blooming heather’ I’ve almost fainted from sheer erotic overload. (Later, even without any one particular girl in mind, I’m overcome by the intensity of the emotional field around a waltz called The Waves of the Danube, and the intermezzo from Wolf-Ferrari’s The Jewels of the Madonna.) Now the term has ended, and I’ve transferred my affections to Mike and Stella and Roosevelt, but I’m still also in love with girls in general. Ho
w could I not be, when they have such romantic names? Janet … Wendy … Rosemary… And wear dresses. And run in such a funny way. And laugh among themselves. And are called girls. And are accompanied everywhere they go by a private soundtrack of waltzes and intermezzos …

  I’m also, as it happens, in love with one girl in particular: Jennifer, the Dennis-Smiths’ elder daughter. I certainly talk to Jennifer, unlike Janet, because we’ve grown up together, and I’ve always talked to her, and she’s one of the gang who sit at Mike’s feet. She’s a strapping, suntanned girl with white teeth and a loud laugh. I’ve just unearthed a snap of her, and I see why I’ve fallen in love with her. It’s not just her irresistibly romantic name – she’s amazingly beautiful.

  We spend a lot of time together that summer, even after Mike and the rest of the tilers have gone. The great meeting place for all of us is the garden of No. 6. The Locatellis (and the light fittings) have long since departed, and the Laverses are not yet back. The garden has reverted to jungle. We swing on the rusty swing (which somehow later, in the way of the world’s rusty rejects, ends up in our garden). We lie about in the sunlit meadow that was once the lawn, and bicker and sneeze, and sometimes take a scythe to the grass and let it lie to make hay for the Dennis-Smith rabbits.

  On other days Jennifer and I move across the road to her own garden. We sit in her summerhouse for whole afternoons at a time. It smells of coolness and dry straw, and there’s a hamper full of back numbers of a comic called Girls’ Crystal. We guzzle them one after another without stopping, a forbidden pleasure as intoxicating as Craven A. In the long summer evenings, made longer still by another of the innovations introduced for the Duration, Double Summer Time, we dart about in the gloaming, evading our parents’ efforts to fetch us home. Jennifer laughs and spins around in her wide dirndl skirt. In the half-light she’s all white teeth and sparkling eyes and darkness, and I’m even more in love with her than I am with Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

  The seat of the swing vanishes. We believe that Miss Johnson next door, jealous of our idle summer amusement, has confiscated it, and we work ourselves up into a fury of indignation, to which I, as spectacles-wearer and therefore intellectual, feel obliged to give expression. I copy out Cowper’s Boadicea in lurid red ink with various adaptations such as ‘Miss Johnson’ and ‘she’ for ‘Rome’, then, watched by my admiring friends, post it through Miss Johnson’s letter-box.

  She shall perish – write that word

  On the swing-seat she has ta’en;

  Perish, hopeless and abhorred,

  Deep in ruin as in pain.

  As soon as she reads it she identifies me as the author (my specs again, I suppose) and comes round to complain to my father.

  Angry as he is about the poem, whatever he can see of Jennifer and me in the gathering darkness evidently makes him a great deal uneasier, because he finds a quiet moment to give me one of his rare pieces of moral advice: I should try to play less with girls. Just as well that he doesn’t know I’m also reading all those old Girls’ Crystals, because I can tell from the tone of his voice that he’s seriously worried, and with hindsight I realise what it’s about: the same as all the other fathers up and down the land who are uneasy because their sons are too interested in boys. He thinks that I’m in danger of contracting girlishness.

  Would he have been relieved, I wonder, if he’d known about the feelings I also have for Mike the tiler and the President of the United States?

  *

  My mother, so far as I can recall, says nothing about all this. Is she, too, worrying about my incipient girlishness? About the fact that she has corrupted me even before Jennifer has – all those sixpences for coming top! – and that I’m already a bit of a mother’s boy?

  She has enough to worry about even without my shortcomings. Not that I ever notice at the time. A mother’s boy, a potential girl and housewife myself, yet I never give a moment’s thought to what her life must be like, trailing from shop to shop in the Village – the grocer’s, the greengrocer’s, the butcher’s, the baker’s, the fishmonger’s, and queues at all of them – racking her brains to conjure food for five, and often for more at the weekend, out of a few crumpled ration books. Not to mention food for the ducks. It’s often my sister and I who wait on them; the sour smell from that battered bowl of long-boiled food waste is in my nostrils still. But it’s she who has to make them the meals: mince up the peelings, simmer them by the hour, and stir in the balancer meal she has dragged back by the fifty-pound sack, uphill all the way from the Village, on the crossbar of her gents’ Raleigh.

  And now the doodlebug, which for her means not a premature Christmas but plaster dust and fine shards of broken glass in every corner of the house, in every carpet and fabric. There’s no time for the violin now, no more stories about that ship of gold waiting in Chancery. In the snaps I have of her she’s still beautiful. But in 1942 the snaps cease, I suppose because it’s no longer possible to buy film for the camera. I remember her as putting on a bit of weight in those later years, as looking a little more harrassed and workaday. It’s part of the solid thereness of her that I take so much for granted, and that I’m sometimes fleeing to still for comfort. When I score my one goal, for instance. Or when I’m taken with a school party to the local cinema, and I’m traumatised by a passing line of dialogue in a cowboy film – a reference to an unseen rancher who has had to put down his equally unseen herd because of foot-and-mouth. ‘They killed all the cows!’ I sob to her, over and over again.

  Sometimes I have bad dreams, or can’t sleep at all, and have to take refuge in my parents’ bed. Often they don’t even wake as I squeeze down between their two snoring enormousnesses. It’s boring, lying there awake between the walls of their backs, in the stale smell of their night breath. But even the boringness of it is a comfort.

  Am I still fleeing to my parents’ bed even when I’m so busy falling in love with everyone and everything? Is my mother still coming in to give us a goodnight kiss on a Saturday night, with her breath smelling deliciously of the pint of bitter she has been drinking with my father, perhaps with Phyllis and Sid as well, at the Spring Hotel in the Village? I don’t think my parents are still taking my sister and me for a Sunday morning drink at the Tattenham Corner Hotel on Epsom Downs. We have another family treat now – Saturday lunch at the British Restaurant in Leatherhead. The British Restaurants are government canteens, housed in asbestos shedding which has perhaps been supplied by my father, and their function is to keep the population cheaply and adequately nourished with vast helpings of simple food, such as bright orange mashed swedes. We don’t go by car – we cycle. My mother, on her Raleigh, protectively shepherding my sister, now seven, on the fairy cycle that came from our rich relations in Enfield – six miles there and six miles back, her little legs pumping away at four times the speed of ours. The most surprising aspect of these trips is that my father, too, has been persuaded on to a bicycle. He rides it in a special non-committal way indicating that it’s not his – that it’s his late father-in-law’s (and still with us in the garage, like the violin under the stairs) – that he’s not really a cyclist at all but a motorist condescending.

  An even greater treat for me, though, is the special privilege that I’m accorded on Saturday evenings as a reward for being nearly eleven. I have to wait for this until my sister’s asleep, which often takes an agonisingly long time, because she suspects from the way I’m remaining absolutely silent and motionless, not suggesting any dares down to the dining-room door, or into our parents’ bedroom and out of the window on to the roof of the bay window below, that for some ulterior purpose I want her unconscious. At last her restless struggles to stay awake grow still. She begins to breathe regularly … I ease myself inch by inch out of bed…

  At once she’s sitting up, wide awake. ‘Where are you going? What are you doing?’ – ‘Nowhere. Nothing …’ I get back into bed and start waiting all over again.

  Where I’m going, when near dawn I can, i
s downstairs. What I’m doing is joining my parents for bread and cheese – the whole week’s ration at one go, probably. Even more delicious than the bread and cheese is the grown-upness of it, the nonchalant threeness of it. We’re as close as the three we’re listening to on the wireless as we eat, in Happidrome –

  We three

  In harmonee,

  Working for the BBC,

  Ramsbottom …

  … and Enoch …

  … and me.

  At one of these Saturday night feasts I take an effortlessly adult swig of my lemonade – and spit it out again over the tablecloth, because it’s the most disgusting fluid any human being has ever had in his mouth. Not my lemonade – my father’s beer. ‘Daydreaming again, Willy?’ inquires my father resignedly.

  All this – the doodlebug, the falling in love, the bread and cheese – happens, I think, in the summer of 1944. In September, on the 8th, I’m eleven, and the Germans celebrate my birthday by launching the first V2s upon London. The V2 is not a pilotless plane, like the V1; it’s a rocket. It travels faster than sound, so there’s nothing to hear beforehand, and no sporting chance to throw yourself on to the floor or into the Morrison. The first warning of its arrival is the explosion that announces it’s already there. Then you hear it coming.

  In theory, it seems to me now, this ought to be less stressful than the doodlebugs, because you don’t need to do anything about it. If you hear anything at all you’re still alive, and it’s killed someone else. But for some reason – perhaps simply because I’m three months older than I was – it terrifies me. Over and over again, as the autumn and winter draw on, I’m snatched out of sleep by that peremptory notice of execution, and as the retrospective warning comes rumbling along in its wake I realise that I could have been extinguished – could yet at any moment still be extinguished – without ever realising it.