My Father's Fortune Read online

  He’d taught himself the violin. He whistles – a complex, endless flow of melody, like a songbird in summer. He’s a watchmaker, and when he comes to stay with us later he gets out the old St Ogden’s St Bruno Flake tobacco tin in which he keeps his jeweller’s tools, mostly home-made, then spreads a newspaper over the dining-room table and, whistling, whistling, repairs all the family’s clocks and watches. He’s a tailor, and makes suits for his two daughters. He plays chess, and plays it the way that other men drink, sometimes failing to turn up for work because he’s off on a chess bender, and my grandmother has to scour the chess clubs and cafés of North London for him.

  Pa, I call him, when I get to know him later, and I worship him. A lot of other people, too, are evidently charmed by him, as they are by my father, and he has a wonderful ability to find business partners and persuade them to share his enthusiasm for the opportunities he’s dreamed up and the openings in the market he’s identified. What he doesn’t have is my father’s steadiness of purpose. He’s forever going off in different directions. And the associates he chooses (according to my grandmother) have a remarkable propensity to depart sooner or later with all the money. But now, at last, with the palliasses, he has broken his jinx.

  His most surprising venture in life, though, and his most improbable conquest, is right there in 1 Gatcombe Road alongside him – his wife, my grandmother. Eleanor; Nell to everyone in the family; Nanny to my sister and me. I used to have a painting of her as a girl, showing her with long red-gold hair and a frail, ethereal version of my mother’s appealing vulnerability. By the time I knew her the gold had turned to grey but the frailty remained, and the ethereality had become an all-consuming nervousness. She was like one of those birds which seem to spend so much time looking round for any possible danger that you can’t think how they ever eat enough to stay alive. Later she lived with us for many years. I can’t recall her ever going to the shops, or even to the letter box on the corner. The back garden, yes, occasionally, when she was absolutely certain that there was no chance of getting wet, or chilled, or struck by lightning. But the front garden? Next to the road? I don’t think so.

  She was fearful of gas and electricity. Also of air, fire and water, and probably of earth, too, on the rare occasions that she got within sight of any. She was nervous about the state of the world, and about any change to the arrangements of the nation or the house. She was fearful of committing some social impropriety, and would often keep a hand over her mouth as she spoke to trap any embarrassing revelations that might be emerging. She confessed to me once, with hand over mouth and many little nervous laughs, a terrible truth about her origins. She had been brought up not as an Anglican, but as – and she made this seem such an embarrassing admission that I can scarcely bring myself to repeat it here – as a Unitarian.

  From behind that nervously hovering hand on another occasion she confided to me an even worse family scandal. Her great-grandmother had been Jewish. I was too young and ignorant when she let this slip to realise quite how interesting it was. I didn’t know then that Jews see Jewishness as being transmitted matrilineally, so it didn’t occur to me to ask the obvious question: was she talking about her mother’s mother’s mother? If she was, then, in Jewish eyes, she was a Jew herself, and so am I.

  I was her first grandchild, and she loved me blindly through thick and thin, in spite of my shamefully haphazard expression of the love I felt for her, and my playing cruelly, as a growing boy with trees to climb and bicycles to ride, upon her endless fears for my life and limb. As frail as a sparrow herself, in a world full of rain and draughts and electricity, she took an equally pessimistic view of her own life expectancy. ‘Oh, Michael,’ she would say mournfully, each time I went to visit her in later years, ‘I don’t think I shall see another winter through. I shan’t be here this time next year.’ I once reported these predictions to my father. ‘She’s been saying that ever since I first met her,’ he replied.

  So this is the life’s companion that buccaneering Bert has picked out for himself. Even odder, though, is that he seems to have made the arrangement function. He has prevailed upon her to accompany him on his adventures. To embark on a ship, which might at any moment strike an iceberg or be quarantined for typhus. To enter into a foreign register office and lifelong wedlock. To trail from city to city and state to state across America. Into a sailing boat. Back from America to Tufnell Park. From Tufnell Park to Holloway. Into a villa and a motor car, strange cafés and chess clubs. He has even charmed two beautiful daughters out of her.

  No wonder he’s been able to talk the government into buying his palliasses.

  *

  Another possibility has just occurred to me – that my grandmother’s nervousness was the result of living with Bert. That, until he had dragged her through the heat of an American summer and the cold of an American winter, almost drowned her, impoverished her, enriched her, and forced two pregnancies and two child-births on her, she had been a flame-haired adventuress as bold as himself. It doesn’t seem very likely. But then nor does the first version of the story.

  I wonder what Bert and Nell make of Tom Frayn, when he comes courting their daughter. A cocky upstart from the wrong side of the Holloway Road. An office boy, or perhaps by this time a wages clerk, with no prospects in life and a poverty-stricken mother to support, from a family with an unreliable father and a hereditary disability. One look at his slicked-down hair and his sharp suit and even the most tolerant of parents would lock their daughter in her room. She’s only just turning fifteen, after all – she’s got her exams at the Royal Academy to think about. She’s going to be a violinist. Have you ever heard of a violinist stepping out with a wages clerk? She doesn’t know what she’s doing – you can see she’s completely besotted.

  Maybe Bert recognises a few similarities between Tom and himself as a young man. Difficult to know, though, whether this would make him even more aware of the wretchedness that the lad is threatening to inflict on his daughter, or give him some hope that one day Tom, too, might find his own palliasses at the end of the rainbow.

  Whatever Bert thinks, Nell must be in the most terrible twitter. She must see every possible disaster either coming or already upon them. Pregnancy … elopement … destitution … All that money on violin lessons wasted! All that tea and seed-cake that will have to be consumed with in-laws on the bad side of the Holloway Road! All the profits from the palliasses somehow spirited away by this cocky young chancer! Vi getting pneumonia from hovering about outside the front door to say good night to him! Yes, and now where is she? She should have been home from the Academy by six and it’s nearly ten past! She’s in Gretna Green! She’s on a boat for South America! Oh – is that you, Vi …?

  Do they perceive Tom as being in at all the same social class as themselves, now that they live in a detached house in Gatcombe Road? Impossible for them not to be aware of the question. It’s all-pervasive, particularly in relationships that threaten to become institutionalised, even if no one mentions it. Its pervasiveness, though, is matched by its elusiveness. It seems simple enough until you try to apply it to particular families. What class are Tom and his parents exactly? What class are Vi and hers? Whenever I have to explain my origins I say ‘lower middle’. Look at those eleven people in four rooms in Devonshire Road, though, and this seems a bit optimistic; a bit of an underestimate, on the other hand, for a palliasse-merchant in a villa in Pooterland. If it’s a matter of occupation then my father’s sister and brother, the bookfolder and printer, surely put the family into the skilled working class – even if the office boy, the pianola roll librarian and their shop-assistant father are struggling to lift it a few inches above.

  In practice, in any case, it’s surely more a matter of style and outlook than income. My father (a lifelong Labour supporter, incidentally, wherever his changing fortunes took him economically) salted his speech with Cockney rhyming slang, and called his business contacts Guv’nor (though never Guv). Perhaps this was pu
tting on a bit of a performance, though, as he did with his deafness. He didn’t drop his aitches or double his negatives. For the most part he spoke more or less received English, and so did all his brothers and sisters.

  And yet he had very little middle-class sense of material possession, or of making provision for the future. For most of his life he drew a monthly salary, and paid it into a bank account. He never owned a house, though, probably never any of the cars he drove, or much of anything, really, except a few suits and hats, and later a hearing aid. I don’t think he ever took out either insurance or assurance, and he certainly never made a will. When he died, and my sister and I concocted a tactful fiction that he had informally intended £300 of the modest balance in his account to go to his one surviving sister, I got a letter from her husband saying that it was the biggest surprise of her life to be so generously remembered – and I think the real surprise was that anyone in the family was in the business of leaving anyone anything at all.

  Insofar as he thought about the future, which I’m pretty sure was not much, he assumed like Mr Micawber – and, I should think, Albert Lawson, the successful palliasse merchant – that something would turn up. But then, if you look beyond Devonshire Road and Gatcombe Road, to the further reaches of the family, the picture changes again. One of my mother’s cousins was married to a stockbroker, while in my generation and my children’s you find not bookfolders and shop assistants, but solicitors and academics, TV presenters and producers, not to mention three writers, all of us firmly related to the structure of society by deeds and degrees, and tethered to the future with mortages and savings.

  So maybe Tom didn’t seem quite so alien to Vi’s family, in spite of his trans-Holloway-Road origins. They must have taken to him, as everyone else did, because soon her mother was confiding to him about her tragically limited life expectancy. And in the front room behind the privet hedge at Gatcombe Road he was mutating from sharp, streetwise Tom into what he would be within the family for the rest of his life – the more domestic Tommy.

  *

  Things were finding their own level, in any case, because within six months of my father’s getting a foothold in the family the Lawsons were on their way down in the world. The heyday of the house of Lawson was over. It had lasted only four years.

  What had happened? ‘It’s a very long story,’ said Phyllis in the note that she wrote me seventy years later, ‘but things didn’t “work out”.’ This was in 1919, and one of the problems must surely have been that the war was over. The civilian population was perhaps less eager to sleep on sacks of straw than the military had been. It would have been characteristic of Bert’s hopeful approach to business not to have seen this coming. I imagine that there must also have been the usual problems with his associates, who had probably decamped with the last of the straw.

  The anxiety of all this no doubt brought Nell even closer to her deathbed. Bert, however, seems not to have been greatly concerned. He remained, says Phyllis, the eternal optimist, and never ceased to believe that his fortunes were going to change. I imagine him continuing to whistle as he opened the final demands and distraint orders; and from now on the supply of them was going to be constant.

  He sold the car. He moved the family out of Gatcombe Road into another substantial house, even closer to the Pooters’ territory, but shared this time with two other families. They were back to the kind of accommodation they had left behind four years earlier.

  The saddest thing about his failure was the consequences it had for the two girls. They had to become the family’s breadwinners. As soon as she was fourteen Phyllis left school and trained as a shorthand typist. And at the age of sixteen, after just one year as a future violinist, Vi had to leave the Royal Academy. She had already, my father told me later, played with the Queen’s Hall Light Orchestra – in what circumstances I don’t know – but now, it turned out, she was not going to be a violinist after all. She was going to be a shop assistant, like her father and Tommy’s father before her.

  Her father’s downfall, though no one realised it at the time, was not the first disaster in Vi’s life – it was the second; and the effects of the first one were going to be infinitely worse. But this neither she nor anyone else would discover for another twenty-six years.

  *

  I recall my mother taking me as a treat, when I was five or six years old, to go shopping at the big stores in Kensington High Street, and I thought she told me that she had worked in at least two of them, Barkers and Pontings. Maybe this was later, though, because in Phyllis’s little memoir she says that Vi started straight out at Harrods. This was certainly several steps up the ladder from the kind of places her father and future father-in-law had begun in, and I guess it must have been Bert, with his pre-war connections in the West End retail trade, who had got her the job, even if he hadn’t managed to do something similar for himself.

  She was in the gowns and costumes showroom, and Phyllis says she did very well there. ‘They often used to take her out of her department to do special modelling for them, preferring her to their “official” models.’ When, in middle age, I began to think about my origins, and about things that had long seemed more or less unthinkable, I realised that I had not one single physical memento of my mother – not so much, at that time, as a blurred snapshot. I asked Phyllis about her, and she told me where I might possibly find a picture. In the 1920s, she said, Vi had modelled Harrods gowns for their advertisements in the society papers. I went out to Colindale, to the newspaper department of what was then the British Museum Library, and searched blindly through the ancient files.

  And suddenly, in an illustrated magazine called The Bystander, dated 18 March 1925, there she was, unidentified but unmistakable. She’s sitting hand on hip, in a long silk jacket and a lace scarf. Her heart-shaped face is framed by a cloche hat, and the long plaits have been reduced to a bob. She’s half-turned away from the camera, and her wide-set eyes are cast demurely down. The advertisement occupies a whole page of the magazine, and under the picture, in tasteful italics, it says:

  INVITATION

  Harrods Exposition of the Fashions for Spring is simply a tribute to the dress-taste and discrimination of the public Harrods serve. Visitors tell us that nowhere else is there to be found a Display so fascinating, so original, so informative. Why not accept Harrods’ invitation to this enchanting spectacle?

  I did, belatedly, accept it as best I could. I had the page from the Bystander photographed and framed, and I have only to lift my eyes an inch or two from the screen of the word processor to see it hanging on the wall. And if I look at some of the other photographs hanging around it, there she is again, in various snapshots that no one in the family had ever thought to give me copies of until I began to ask around for them.

  And there’s that same heart-shaped face, those same wide-set eyes, in the photographs of my daughter Rebecca. Then yet again, in the next photograph, in her daughter’s face. Not everything is lost.

  *

  So Tommy and Vi were now socially and financially rather well-matched. Whether they had by this time already decided to get married, and if so when, I don’t know. The following year, though, in 1920, any plans they had were disrupted, because Tommy’s father died.

  Exactly how much he had been contributing to the household in Devonshire Road in the last years of his life isn’t clear. According to his death certificate he had moved on from the china shop to an ironmonger’s, but he died of cancer of the stomach, which suggests that he hadn’t been working for some time. He had plainly made no provision for his widow, and she was now effectively destitute. Three of the five children, Nellie, George and Daisy, had long since married and moved out, while Mabel, the simple-minded bookfolder, needed quite a lot of support herself. Daisy chipped in with the occasional ten-shilling note, says her son John, but only one of the children was really capable of doing much to help financially, and that was the baby of the family, now nineteen years old: Tommy.

 
; Standing in for his father in this way was the first serious moral challenge of his life, and it sorts oddly with his haphazard approach to some other questions of financial responsibility that he shouldered the burden so completely. He can’t have been earning much yet, and he had, says Phyllis, ‘a pretty tough time’. When I think of how little was required of me at that age – and how unready I should have been to take on the task if it had been – I feel chastened. He and Vi evidently accepted that they couldn’t afford to get married until his circumstances had changed. They had to wait another eleven years.

  I don’t know much about this decade of their lives. I have snaps of them at other people’s weddings, and on the holidays they took every year, at least from 1926 onwards, with his brother George, George’s wife Nelly, and George and Nelly’s schoolboy son Maurice. Llandudno, Penzance, Bournemouth, Llandudno again, in George’s open bull-nosed Morris Cowley, a vast haywain of a vehicle. Here they are, stuck in a ford somewhere, with the bonnet of the Morris up, and Tommy, who has presumably been trying to push the car out, leaning against the back of it, with the water halfway up his trousers. Here he is on a beach somewhere, carrying Vi across the puddles left by the receding tide. Here’s Vi looking romantic on a rock, here she is smiling straight out at the camera from a crowd in front of a cockle stall, here lurking lonely and mysterious in a long dark overcoat and fur collar in front of the misty lattice of the Forth Bridge. I gaze and gaze at the soft images, unable to get enough of them.