My Father's Fortune Read online

  *

  We’re coming to the end of this chapter of the story. Of school, of our great friendship. Of living with parents and step-parents, of agonising over girls under the suburban sodium lights. Just our last exams to sit, and then we shall be going our separate ways. Me into the army, Lane into the RAF, to do our National Service. Then for me, if I get in, university. Life.

  We make one last trip together. We hitch-hike down to South Wales and walk over the Brecon Beacons and the Black Mountains, talking, of course, singing, drinking beer in pubs and smoking – I seem to recall a pipe by this time. I have a picture that Lane took of me on our last day. I’m in my walking boots, sitting on the upland grass and reclining against my rucksack, the wind in my hair. I look relaxed and happy. There’s not the trace of a sneer on my face.

  6

  Closer

  My father winked and clicked his tongue respectfully about Cambridge as we walked round it five or six years earlier. Now the prospect begins to take shape of my actually stepping through one of those college gateways myself into the sunlit world beyond – and he baulks.

  How has the idea come up at all? I think because the school simply assumes that if you have a chance of Oxford or Cambridge you take it. This is what good grammar schools do at the time. You stay in the sixth form for a third year and prepare for college entrance; you try for a scholarship or an exhibition. So this is the timetable my father sees: a third year wasted in the sixth form, another two doing National Service, then three more frittered away at Cambridge. By the time I emerge to face what’s now called the real world I shall be twenty-five – eleven years older than he was when he first got a job and started earning his living.

  I share the assumptions of the school – but I also share my father’s doubts and impatience. In a spirit of compromise, I suppose, if only with myself, I decide to miss out the third year in the sixth form and take Cambridge entrance in the second year, which means that I shall have to be interviewed in my first. Before my initial shine is tarnished by the alexandrines, therefore, while I’m still a pleasure to teach, the Doctor arranges for me to go up to Cambridge and be seen by someone he knows personally. I don’t think I’m fully aware at this point that Cambridge is made up of separate colleges, and that behind each of those dark gateways lies a largely autonomous institution with its own character and peculiarities. The name that the Doctor has written down for me, Emmanuel, or more probably Emmql, has no significance for me except as the address where I’m to meet Dr weLbn, aka Welbourne. I certainly have no idea that Emmanuel at this time is a sporting college which particularly specialises in boxing, where existential anguish is unknown, or that Welbourne is a much-loved local character who’s celebrated for his amusing anti-Catholicism and anti-Semitism. All I know is that at an interview of this sort you must be carrying the Manchester Guardian under your arm. I’ve never seen the paper before, but I buy a copy at Liverpool Street, and discover under the heading ‘University News’, as I read it on the train, that Dr Welbourne, Senior Tutor of Emmanuel, has just been elected Master, so with improbable urbanity I begin the interview by congratulating him. The only other thing I can remember about the occasion is one of his questions (though not my answer): ‘Supposing in years to come you are married and have children. Your children go on a school exchange to France. When they come back you discover that they have been converted to Roman Catholicism. What would your attitude be?’

  Impressed either by my knowledge of college politics or my readiness to subject my hypothetical children to rack and thumbscrew until they recant their hypothetical apostasy, he invites me to take the college entrance exam that Christmas, and I manage (just) to scrape a place. My father remains implacable. He declines to find the maintenance allowance I should need of some £300 a year. I suppose he sees a university as simply a way of getting into a job, and as dispensable as a ladder is for getting into a loft. I can’t really blame him – not, at any rate, with the benevolence of hindsight. I’ve already had four years more education than he had himself, and the benefits both to my employability and to my general character are far from obvious. Any further doses of education are likely to make both even worse. My winning (just) a State Scholarship on the results of my A-levels that summer softens him briefly – until the Ministry of Education discovers how well-off my parents are between them. My grant will be only the nominal minimum of £30; my father will have to find the balance himself. Again he refuses. Once I’ve finished my National Service, when I shall already be twenty-one, I shall have to look for a job. What as? I suppose I might have some faint hope of becoming a reporter on the Epsom and Ewell Gazette. Or perhaps my father still nurses some even fainter hope of my becoming an asbestos rep. One way or another, though, I’m going to have to start earning my living.

  I see, now I think about it, that his expectations of my future are shadowed by his experiences of the past. He looks at me and sees his father and his wife’s father, neither of them – even without the debilitating effects of higher education – able to keep a job, neither of them able to support himself or his family. He has spent the first thirty-odd years of his working life maintaining them and their dependants. He can see himself spending the rest of it doing the same for me.

  So what happens next is mystifying. He challenges the Ministry’s decision. Is this at my urging, or the school’s, or has he had second thoughts himself? Still stranger are the grounds for his challenge. He informs the Ministry that my stepmother’s resources are not available for my education. This is an entirely specious argument. Whether or not Elsie is prepared to open her handbag and dole out the money to me direct, she’s paying most of my father’s other expenses in life. I suppose he still has to find my sister’s school fees, and the cost of his new suits, and the entrance fees for the paddock at Goodwood and Ascot, but I’m obviously an indirect beneficiary of Elsie’s wealth.

  All this is curious enough; even less comprehensible is the Ministry’s response. They accept my father’s argument, though even on the basis of his income alone they will not pay me more than £168 a year. At this point he graciously concedes and agrees to give me the other £115. So in a way he has got me into Cambridge, just as six years earlier he got me into the grammar school. I’m saved from the real world for another three years. Or the real world is saved from me, as my father probably sees it. First, though, my National Service – and this, as it turns out, is not the waste of time that I’ve been expecting just as much as he has. My rising tide of good fortune continues. I don’t spend the next two years peeling potatoes or whitewashing coal. Nor am I sent, like so many other national servicemen at the time, to risk being killed in Korea, Malaya or Kenya. Within a few weeks of being marched with my apprehensive fellow conscripts into the grim khaki universe of the Royal Artillery’s huge basic training camp at Oswestry I’m out of it again, and have been sent off to learn Russian. Another couple of months and I’m being trained as an interpreter – at Cambridge, in fact, two years before I’m due to arrive as an undergraduate.

  No literary essays, much translation. Away from home, with money in my pocket and congenial comrades. In my diary for the next few months there’s no trace of existential anguish. ‘Life has never been so enjoyable … A calm river of contentment which flows on and on …’

  That calm river doesn’t flow on for ever, of course. A few months later I’m managing to be disgusted at myself for enjoying everything so much. The rest of my life, though, at Cambridge and beyond, now that my father has helped launch me upon it, is another story, and not one that I’m going to tell here.

  *

  My relations with my father, now I have a little more distance from him, get paradoxically closer. My journal has shrunk from substantial essays in a substantial ledger to brief paragraphs in a pocket engagement diary, but I still find space to record a number of joint expeditions. We go for walks together (one of them over the Seven Sisters, perhaps as an allusion to the road around which so much of our family
’s life has centred: ‘a delightful day’.) A concert at the Festival Hall (‘I enjoyed it very much, but Pa heard almost nothing’). The races, where I try to enter into the spirit of things by putting the occasional five bob on a horse being led round the paddock by a pretty stable girl. Billiards in a hall in Epsom where no daylight has been admitted since the blackout – nor air, by the smell of it – and where we’re probably the only customers without criminal records. On Coronation Day, when Elsie has invited all the neighbours in to watch proceedings on the television in the living room, my father and I, having no interest in the Queen or her crown, spend a very congenial day in the breakfast room, cutting sandwiches for Elsie’s guests and drinking beer together. On Midsummer’s Day 1953, when I’m home on leave again, ‘Pa and I talked about the stupidity of the army, the brutality of the Russians etc until half-past twelve.’ There are also some of the same old squalls. My diary records a row with him about ‘intellectual snobbery’ (mine, I imagine, not his), and another about ‘State of my Room’. (‘What right has he got? Oh blast, fed up. Went and climbed trees …’) When I’m commissioned, though, and have to open a bank account to get my pay as an officer, he takes me down to Barclay’s Bank in Ewell Village and introduces me to the manager, then shows me how to keep a monthly tally of incomings and outgoings. It’s not quite double entry, but it’s good enough to save me from having my cheques dishonoured and getting myself stripped of my new commission. When I set out too late (as usual) to catch the Newhaven boat train from Victoria he drives me, weaving at speed through and around all the slow-witted weekend motorists, to pick it up at East Croydon.

  The car remains a bond between us. And when the time finally comes for me to start taking up his disputed £115 a year (which in practice he has generously increased to £150), and I’m scrambling to get from my last day in the army to my first day of term as an undergraduate, he drives me to Cambridge. Or rather – two birds with one stone – allows Jill, who is now learning in her turn, to drive us both.

  He comes up to Cambridge a number of times over the next three years, sometimes on his own, sometimes with Jill, sometimes with his friend Kerry, once, I think, even with Elsie. I’ve always remembered myself as being shamefully unwelcoming, but my diary suggests that I behave somewhat better than I thought. In summer I take him punting, in winter walk him round in the misty lamplight of the Fenland dusk. Give him lunch in my favourite Indian restaurant (where the girl who has just most painfully dumped me is sitting with her new boyfriend at the next table). I even go to watch cricket with him.

  My feelings about all this are not entirely unambiguous. Tea at the Blue Boar is ‘surprisingly successful’, but tea in my rooms is not: ‘Could scarcely bear my family, particularly father.’ I have the impression, though, that he gets a bit of a kick out of these visits. He may even assure me, with the usual knowing wink, that it’s not a bad old university I’ve got myself into. A son at the Varsity (as he probably thinks of it) may seem to him to go rather well with the Harrods suits and shirts. Then when I come down, at the end of my three years, all his old suspicions and forebodings return with a rush. ‘Pass your exams?’ he asks me with careful casualness, as if they had been the Elephant and Castle. I tell him I got a two-one. The esoteric university jargon puts his back up at once.

  ‘A do-what?’

  ‘A two-one.’

  ‘What’s that supposed to be?’

  ‘Well, you can get a first, or a two-one, or a two-two, or …’

  ‘Hold on.’ Quick as ever to take the point. ‘So you were supposed to get a first? And you didn’t? You’ve failed? I knew it wouldn’t come to anything, going to Cambridge.’

  All right, I’ve failed. Gratifyingly. I’ve wasted the last three years – wasted the first twenty-four years of my life. Now I’m going to waste the rest of it. He’s arming himself against disappointment once again.

  ‘Well, you’ve had your fun,’ he says heavily. ‘Now you’ve got to start looking for a job.’

  ‘I’ve got one,’ I tell him. I hope I manage to sound offhand about it in my turn.

  ‘Got one?’ He looks at me carefully. He’s probably remembering that I have actually sometimes found paid employment in the past, in spite of his scepticism. I’ve been a Christmas postman, a van driver, a warehouseman, a sawyer’s mate. Perhaps, he’s thinking, I did rather better at one of these occupations than he’d supposed. It’s not Christmas, and I dented the van, but maybe the sawmill thought highly enough of me to take me back. ‘What sort of job?’ he asks warily.

  ‘Reporter,’ I tell him. ‘On the Manchester Guardian.’

  Quick as he is, it takes him a moment or two to think of a comeback to this. He may not realise that to have got this particular job is for me more or less the equivalent for him of a five-horse accumulator coming up at Sandown, but he has certainly heard of the Manchester Guardian. Has never read it, but has told me, with his usual vicarious connoisseurship, what a reputation it’s got.

  ‘Are they paying you?’ he says finally. ‘Or are you paying them?’ This is a retreat under cover of humour. I think. For the second time the Guardian has come to my rescue. And a few days later he comes back from the office and says in a rather different tone of voice that he has been talking to his colleague Greenwood, whose son has also just come down from Cambridge – and also with a two-one. ‘Greenwood,’ concedes my father reluctantly, ‘says a two-one’s some kind of pass.’

  So I haven’t entirely wasted my life after all. He may not have to spend his declining years keeping me from destitution.

  When the day arrives for me to move to Manchester, he drives me once again. From Stoke-on-Trent north it rains. The windscreen wipers beat hypnotically back and forth, and he tells me some of the stories about his childhood that I’ve mentioned in this book. We sing the old songs. ‘Fling wide the … fling wide the … fling wide the gates.’ ‘Come, come, come and make eyes at me …’

  Now I really am finally flying the nest; no more 48s or long vacations. So far as I can recall it’s the last time that he has a chance to drive me anywhere.

  *

  Did he really think I was as unemployable as he seemed to – and as I certainly thought he thought?

  I’m not sure. It wasn’t the style then to encourage your children too openly – and in the hard world in which my father grew up disparagement was probably thought to help form their character. Many years later my second wife’s sister, who was selling property to English ex-pats in the Lot-et-Garonne, told me that a couple of her clients had met my father somewhere and he’d told them that he was actually rather proud of me. I couldn’t help being pleased by this circuitous and belated testimony, and wanting to believe it. I’m a little cautious, all the same. I really did lack many of the qualities that my father’s very different experience of life had taught him were necessary, and he really was apprehensive for me. To me, certainly, he continued to hold my career and ambitions at arm’s length. In the letters he wrote to me when I was away from home he protects himself with a rather heavy facetiousness; but then in correspondence he’s off his territory, the face-to-face joshing in which he specialises, and he knows that I have ambitions to make the written form mine. He expects, he says in one letter sent while I was still at Cambridge, that an advertisement he’s seen for the Observer (possibly the one I’d just written myself to win the paper’s student copywriting competition) ‘is the genial sort of flapdoodle you yourself will be inflicting on a gullible public in the not too distant future’. Even when I was actually employed by the Guardian, and they had turned out to be paying me rather than vice versa, it apparently didn’t occur to him to start taking the paper and reading what I wrote. ‘Our only reader of the MG in the office’, he says, ‘has not reported any fireworks from MF.’

  He seems to have softened briefly when I was away with the Royal Navy, reporting the so-called Cod War off Iceland in 1958, perhaps because it was the only way to get news of me. He’s as facetiously deflating
as ever, though: ‘Have followed the breathtaking reports from our Special Correspondent with interest …’ – and he can’t resist adding, in case I’m getting too big for my sea-boots: ‘You won’t always be able to make the front page.’ Later on, when I was writing a column for the Observer, he seems to have read me sometimes. ‘Good piece last Sunday,’ he concedes in one letter, though the corroborating details that a writer likes to hear are missing. And I remember his being hurt at another piece in which I’d mocked family occasions where everyone talks about the clever routes they’ve taken to get there. He thought it was about him; I thought I’d fictionalised it beyond recognition. I look at those letters now and I see not just the mockery but the affection that it conceals. He’s pre-empting my intellectual (and social) snobbery, protecting himself from his own vulnerability. There are the usual complaints of parent to offspring about neglect, most of them facetious. When I’m in America for a few months he’s ‘suffering no eye strain from reading the letters that stream across the Atlantic’. Sometimes, though, he’s more direct: ‘I was a little hurt that you departed for Cambridge without saying farewell.’ There’s recognisable anguish in his letters when I spend Christmases away, once working in a refugee camp, once with some of my grand new friends. And when later I confide in him about my difficulties in a relationship with a divorced woman six or seven years older than myself he replies with quite surprising tact, gentleness and insight. He thanks me for writing so frankly, and says he trusts I realise that ‘if this venture isn’t successful then indeed it is a particularly sad thing for [E] after her earlier tribulations. I know you will both have given this your fullest consideration, and since you both are intelligent, you should be able to make a success of it. I won’t go into all the pros and cons here but it would please me if you could come down in the near future – if this is difficult, I could come up … We should very much like to have [E] for Xmas.’