My Father's Fortune Read online

  My father knows nothing about Kingston Grammar School, or any other grammar school. Nor do I – only that they’re all some kind of Council School, where Council School children go. Sutton High School for Boys was bad enough. In spite of all my father’s winking and clicking of the tongue, I await my descent into the abyss of the state educational system with fear in my heart.

  *

  It’s a town of smells, most of them bad. The urban stink of old-fashioned bus exhausts; the greasy breath from the chip shops selling the chips that boys from the grammar school are not allowed to eat in the streets; the fragrance coming from the cornets of newspaper carried by passing boys who are eating the chips all the same. The fresh scent of the timber being transferred from the barges on the Thames into the great open-sided warehouses on the bank, and the dank green smell of the river. The farmyard odours of the cattle market. In the reading room of the public library, where I go sometimes to look at the Amateur Photographer, the stale fug of breath from the occupationless old men who also take refuge there, which seems to have been sealed away from the outside air as carefully as the leather-bound newspapers themselves. The eastern side of the town is made depressing by the sour fumes from the Courage brewery, but in the centre the streets are ruled by the emperor of all Kingston’s smells, the intimately disgusting stench of the tannery.

  A lot of my time in the lunch hours of that first term is taken up with visits to jewellers. There are more jewellers in Kingston than you might think the trade could support, and I visit all of them, several times over. I’m not buying jewellery, merely trying to get my watch repaired. It’s the first watch I’ve ever owned, and it has a luminous dial and seventeen jewels. I’ve been given it by Nanny for my birthday at the start of the term, perhaps partly to console me for my ejection from the Garden of Eden in Sutton. I’m so proud of it that I have to consult it, in daylight and darkness, every few minutes. Within a week, however, those luminous hands have ceased to move. The watch has died.

  It turns out that Nanny has acquired it in the kind of way that most things in our family are acquired, not by handing over money in a shop, but through personal acquaintanceships, in this case involving Phyllis’s landlady’s sister, who lives in Switzerland. It’s a smuggled watch, and somewhere along the way any kind of guarantee it might once have had has disappeared. So has the name of a supplier or manufacturer to send it back to. It doesn’t even have a brand name. One after another all the jewellers in Kingston hold my watch in their hands and look down upon it, and upon me in my new grammar school cap, with varying expressions of disdain. They explain that cheap watches of this sort can’t be repaired. Cheapness in watches is not a characteristic that the jewellers of Kingston are prepared to have any truck with.

  I report a tactfully edited version of these humiliating rejections to Nanny, who flutters helplessly and apologetically. My father, however, won’t let it go. He’s as inflexible as he was with my desire to leave the Crusaders. All the drive and determination that have made him such an effective salesman are vicariously deployed. It becomes a test of my character. I am not to take no for an answer. I am to go back and try each shop again. And again.

  I fail the test. The jewellers of Kingston, far from relenting, become even more crushing at each of my reappearances. The hidden rubies have no chance to prove their durability; the phosphorescent hands never move again; the watch has become another lesson in the irreversibility of death. The humiliation is stamped upon my soul, and the watch that I was so proud of becomes an object of shame, an emblem of defeat, the focus of all my misery.

  The school itself, though, doesn’t make much impression on me in those first few months. It’s as grindingly ugly as Sutton High School for Boys, but in a much more state-authorised kind of way. It’s built of brick and is two storeys high, with a proper hall for praying in, and eating school dinners in, and putting on plays in. No one, so far as I can see or hear, is getting caned. My classmates don’t have smokers’ coughs. They’re all about the same age as each other, which is a year younger than me. There are ninety of us starting at the same time, and in view of my age I’ve been put in with the thirty thought to be the most able, the A stream. We’re all industrious and well-behaved, but I’ve done all the work before, whereas most of the others are coming to things, particuarly Latin and French, for the first time. Hic, haec, hoc … Marcel et Denise visitent la basse-cour … Le professeur corrige le cahier de l’élève … Caesar adsum iam forte (or, even more provocative of my classmates’ respectful laughter, aderat forte) … I did all this years before! At Sutton High School for Boys I was on to ablative absolutes and gerunds: The camp having been struck, it was meet for Caesar to give battle to the enemy. I was at home with French irregular verbs and nouns with irregular plurals – les hiboux sont couverts de poux. At the end of the term I’m moved up a year – but (a note of caution) into the B stream. My classmates here, a year and a stream less inhibited, greet the swotty bespectacled upstart thrust so irregularly into their midst by turning my desk over and throwing my belongings around the room.

  As that winter term in 1947 gets under way the country is brought to its knees by the most famous cold spell of the century, when temperatures in some parts of South-East England fall to minus twenty. The walk up the London Road to the school each morning is like the retreat from Moscow, the playground at break a taste of a Siberian labour camp. At home all the children in the neighbourhood are cannonading on trays and mats down the hill that had stopped the doodlebug in its tracks. I smash an old orange-box into the rough simalacrum of a toboggan, and shape the rusty springs of the vanished Morrison shelter, like swords beaten into ploughshares, to make runners; hurtle grimly down the frozen hillside with everyone else, and stumble slowly up again towing the toboggan behind me, over and over again, like Sisyphus and his stone, until it’s too dark to see and too cold to endure my sodden clothes, chilblains and freezing feet any longer; then drag my tangle of split wood and buckled metal back to the cold and comfortless house. The world will never know warmth again.

  In school I slowly, slowly settle into my new class and find friends. At the end of the year, though, a catastrophe occurs. Buoyed irresistibly by the great stock of datives and pluperfects that I’ve piled up during my years in the private sector, I come top. If you come top the rule is that you move up a stream. I protest – I want to stay with my new-found friends! My protests are brushed aside, and I have to start all over again, in a third new class.

  I have to establish myself this time not as a pathetic brainbox fallen out of the A stream, but as a pathetic dumbo risen from the B stream. How am I to do it? Not by my prowess at cricket, obviously, nor at hockey, the school’s winter game. Not even in the class listings, because by this time my new classmates have pretty much caught up on the vocatives and disjunctives, and because most of them are plainly cleverer than I am. In my necessity I make a surprising discovery – an unfortunate one as regards my academic success, but perhaps a first step along the road to the career that I will begin to develop twenty years later: I find I can make the class laugh and win some kind of popularity by mocking the teachers.

  I take the lead, with Mumby, one of my new friends who has a similar skill, in harassing one particularly vulnerable beginner on the staff. My new vocation intersects with my old interest in photography. I bring my camera into class and surreptitiously photograph our victim as he struggles to cope with our bullying. ‘The news spreads like wildfire,’ I record in a wonderfully self-important diary that I’m keeping for a couple of months at this point, ‘and by the end of the lesson all the form knew. In break, many boys asked me if I was Frayn, and if I had really taken a picture of [Mr H]. This, then, must be one way of acheiving [sic] fame.’ The picture, I read in next day’s entry, hasn’t come out, but at the end of the term Mr H flees the school, and Mumby and I come joint bottom of the class. The rule is that if you come bottom you move down a stream. Since I’ve only just arrived in the A stream, though
, I’m to be given another chance. The unfairness of this outrages me. I protest – I want to stay shoulder-to-shoulder with Mumby! My protests are brushed aside. I am to mock on where I am.

  *

  As my father reads my report the corner of his mouth twitches, but not in the way that it does when he’s talking about the quality of the hand-made hide upholstery in a Rolls-Royce. He’s angry with me. I’m adding to the pain of whatever ailment he’s suffering from at the time. He has tacitly agreed to overlook my sporting failures, and to accept that I have other abilities that go at any rate some way to make up for them. He has sold me to the local education officer, and got me installed in the best grammar school in the county. I have abused his indulgence; I have belied his claims on my behalf. I’m a piece of asbestos that has melted in the heat, or rotted in the rising damp.

  I have as a matter of fact had a triumph on the playing field, or at any rate in the Cage, the rectangle of red dust behind the classrooms where most of the school plays obsessive informal hockey all the year round in every break and lunch hour. In the summer term my class, 4a, is swept by a brief craze for rounders instead. How on earth we’ve hit upon this girlish alternative to the manly carnage all about us I’ve no idea, but even I am happy to join in; I don’t mind having a tennis ball tossed underarm at me, though I can no more hit it than I’ve ever been able to hit any other kind of ball. And then, one lunch hour, I can, and do. I swing the bat as wildly and hopelessly as ever, and for some inscrutable reason of its own, even though it’s even narrower and shorter than the toy cricket bat, it connects with the ball, which flies up into the summer sky and describes such a huge parabola that it lands outside the wire netting of the Cage. I stand gazing after it, open-mouthed, unable to understand what’s happened. I slowly become aware that people are shouting at me. ‘Run!’ they’re screaming. ‘Frayn! Run!’ I run. ‘The bat!’ they scream. ‘Drop the bat!’ I run back, drop the bat, run again. First base … second base … third base … Home! I’ve gone right the way round the diamond, and the fielder’s still recovering the ball! I’ve scored a rounder! It’s the first time in my life that I’ve scored anything, at any rate for my own side. Much amused applause from my classmates, who are accustomed to choosing me second to last on games afternoons. A wild surge of joy runs through me.

  Scoring a rounder means that I bat again, so my triumph will be short-lived. The pitcher pitches. I take another blind swing … And once again bat and ball connect. Once again the ball describes that same wonderful parabola and soars over the wire netting. Once again I stand gazing, unable to believe what seems to be happening. Once again everyone’s shouting, once again I’m running … running back, dropping the bat, running on …

  I’ve scored a second rounder. More amused clapping.

  The pitcher pitches. The bat swings. The ball’s high up in the summer sky. Is over the wire netting … This cannot be happening! A third rounder!

  The ironic applause becomes serious. I’m thumped on the back. I have become a different person.

  Ball … bat … thwock … Over the wire. A fourth rounder.

  My friends – they’re all my friends now! – are shouting to the hockey-players in other classes. ‘Hey, come and watch old Frayn!’ The games of hockey drift to a halt. The diamond’s surrounded by an audience.

  A fifth rounder. I can’t do otherwise than hit the ball, and drive it out of the Cage. I have become a rounder-scoring machine.

  A fielder’s posted outside the Cage. It makes no difference. A sixth rounder.

  Two fielders outside the Cage. A seventh rounder. An eighth …

  Cheering. Applause. I’m the most famous person in the school. Everything in my life has at last fallen into place. Nine … Ten … I’m becoming too tired to run, and am generously allowed a runner to deputise for me. All I have to do is hit the ball. And hit it I do. First strike each time. Up into the sky, out of the Cage, as inevitably as the earth going round the sun, as fore-ordained as mathematics: bat + ball = rounder.

  By the time the bell rings for afternoon school I’ve scored twenty-one rounders and am still not out. I’ve also learnt a painful lesson, because by this time people have become bored by the spectacle. The hockey-players have returned to their hockey. My classmates are impatient to have a go themselves. My fame has evaporated even as I continue to supply the performance that created it.

  Never again do I score another rounder. Never do I score a goal at hockey or a run at cricket. At hockey and cricket I’m still the last but one person to be picked. No one in the class ever refers to this weird episode. It’s as if everyone’s embarrassed to have taken part in some piece of improbable collective madness like a riot or a lynching.

  If only my father had seen me in action that summer lunchtime he would have forgiven me everything. If only I’d told him about it, even, as I’ve told it here. Rounders are not cricket, of course, and he would probably have divided my total of twenty-one by three to allow for the genetic weakness I’ve inherited. But even seven rounders would have made up for a great many shortcomings. Even one would have given him a moment of pride and pleasure.

  *

  Am I also saying, or shouting, this kind of thing to my father over the supper table? Even if not, he can scarcely fail to be aware that I’ve taken to going to church. I can’t remember why – probably for the same reason that I went to Crusaders before: because my friend David does. I’m as patronising about the church in my diary as I am about Tchaikovsky and the BBC. The vicar’s sermon, I record on Sunday, 1 February 1948, is ‘a very poor effort – long-winded, dull, and uninteresting’. However, ‘the English church service is peculiarly restful … and I think I would go many miles to hear the final amen.’

  What my father feels about this development my diary doesn’t record. Perhaps I’m doing it partly for oedipal reasons, since I’m well aware of his views on religion. My parents have never had me baptised. They’ve left me to make up my own mind about membership of the church when I’m old enough, as I remember my mother explaining. Old enough I now am. I make use of my freedom of choice by getting myself first baptised and then confirmed. Another moral test for my father, to which he rises as he has risen to all the others, because so far as I can recall he behaves with the most exemplary restraint, and makes no comment at all.

  *

  I don’t invite him to the ceremony. At which, incidentally, I’m expecting to be struck dead. I’ve cheated God.

  I realise with hindsight that there’s something a little unusual about the vicar of Ewell, who is preparing me and another dozen or so of us for confirmation. He’s an unctuous, ill-shaven man with a vast number of children, very unlike the uningratiating, bullet-smooth Reverend J. B. Lawton, and he never finishes services in the way I’ve grown used to, by caning selected members of the congregation. The Reverend J. B. Lawton, I think from something about the set of his eyes and the closeness of his shave, was Low Church. The vicar is High.

  It never occurs to me at the time that there’s anything surprising about his appearing at some services in a purple dress, at others in a green one, or about his swinging a kind of silver teapot on a chain that fills the church with agreeably holy-smelling smoke. Nor, as a member of his confirmation class, do I see anything inconsistent with normal Anglican practice when, on the last evening of the course, he tells us that each of us in turn is to go off with him to be confessed. In the Church of England the whole congregation makes a notional public confession together; it recites the General Confession of Sin, as laid down in the Book of Common Prayer, and the sin is reassuringly generalised. We, on the other hand, are to go off with this unprepossessing man one by one to some special dark corner of the church and tell him in our own words about actual specific sins that each of us has personally committed.

  Not for a moment does it occur to me to question this – it’s simply one of the many incomprehensible challenges with which the adult world confronts the young. I find it an appalling one, though.
Not even the Reverend J. B. Lawton has inflicted this particular torment on us. It’s a winter’s night. The church is cold, and lit only by a few bulbs over the front pew where we’re all sitting cowed and silent. One by one we’re picked off. I’m at the end of the pew, the last in the line, with most time to develop a full head of panic at the the sheer embarrassment of the prospect. What on earth am I going to confess? I suppose with hindsight that it’s masturbation the vicar’s hoping to hear about; perhaps even, with a bit of luck, something a little more precocious; at any rate a few unchaste thoughts, a few glances at Health and Efficiency, the naturist magazine. I’m remarkably backward in this respect. I’ve only recently discovered that the male sexual organ is not, as I’d always supposed, the navel. My classmates at Sutton High School for Boys sometimes showed me the bashful figures half-concealed behind bushes in Health and Efficiency, but I prudishly tried not to look too closely. One boy, particularly knowing, once challenged me ‘to draw the breasts and buttocks of a woman’, and I did manage two triangles facing left and below them two semi-circles facing right. I don’t have unchaste thoughts, though. My thoughts about girls, overwhelming as they often are, are cloudily romantic. I didn’t try masturbation until years later. I’m not sure that at the time I’ve even heard the word. If anybody else in our class has they’re reluctant to reveal the fact; even though we will stop at nothing to torment a new teacher called Mr Bate, not one of us, difficult as this is to believe now, exploits the obvious possibilities offered by his name.

  Does it occur to me that I could tell the vicar about my persecution of inexperienced teachers, or my unkindness to my grandmother? Or even my manifold moral shortcomings on the games field? I don’t think it does. I’m going to be reduced to pathetic crimes like teasing my sister and failing to clean my shoes. I can’t think straight for the horror of what’s to come. The boy four places away from me is summoned … Minutes, months go by … He returns, cheeks red, eyes cast down, unreadable. The girl next to him, three places away from me, slides out of the pew in her turn …