My Father's Fortune Read online

  Some people, brought up as my father was in straitened circumstances, run wild when they get a little money and spend, spend, spend. This is a pitfall that my father shows no signs of falling into. He gets razor blades off a barrow in the New Cut, at Waterloo. He gets a gross of them – only five and a tanner, a bargain – and they last for ever, because they’re too blunt and nicked to shave with. We improvise out of old packaging – almost all of which, it occurs to me now, is a by-product of smoking: the large square tin of St Ogden’s Flake pipe tobacco in which my grandfather keeps his watchmaking tools; small round silver tins of Dobie’s Four Square, the sealing rings of which are an important source of the rubber used in the manufacture of catapults; the flat blue battery-shaped American packs of Prince Albert, particularly prized because they’re so elegant, and because the lingering scent of their contents is so alluring – also because thinking of any possible practical use for them is such a challenge to the imagination; and, best of all, the even sweeter-smelling cedar-wood cigar boxes left over from Christmas, which can be used for almost anything, from the housing of home-made crystal sets to the display cases for the birds’ eggs that my friends and I steal from the hedges and trees of the neighbourhood, and the butterflies that we net from the buddleia in the front garden and poison in old jam-jars with a little lighter fuel. Old jam-jars – another essential resource. The lighter fuel, of course, is yet another spin-off from the central economic activity of smoking.

  All this old packaging we work with rusty tools that have turned up behind the water butt or at the back of the coal shed. Why buy a spanner to raise the saddle on the fairy cycle when you can do the job with a certain amount of barked knuckles and shouting and a pair of rusty pliers? Why use nasty shiny straight new nails from the ironmonger’s when there’s a jam-jar of nicely bent and well-rusted old ones on the scullery windowsill? Why spend money on a hammer to drive them into the wood recovered from the section of rotten fencing at the end of the garden when you can do it with the back of the chopper for chopping the firewood – particularly since it’s too blunt for chopping firewood? Why waste space on a ladder to get into the loft, when my father can perfectly well stand on the bathroom stool, wedge his hands against the architraves above the bedroom doors on either side of the landing, flex his knees twice, then push himself up until he can get one foot on to a bedroom door handle while simultaneously lifting the lid of the trap an inch or two with his head, grab the handhold this exposes around the edge of the hatch, wedge his other foot against the architrave opposite the doorhandle, and with an almighty heave haul himself up through the hatch with the trap balanced on his head?

  Even my underpants have plainly not been bought in a shop in the normal way, because they evidently once had an owner whose waist was a foot or two greater in circumference than mine, which means that they can be kept up only by folding over the spare and fixing it with a safety pin. This is what embarrasses me when Daphne Knowles, the little girl at No. 10, suggests that we retire behind some trees at the top of her garden and inspect each other’s private parts. It’s not my parts that I’m bashful about – it’s the safety pin. I’m pretty sure that Daphne’s knickers will turn out to be the right size and held up by elastic. She’s that kind of girl. She has a small (extremely cold) swimming pool in her garden, in which we spend a lot of time in water wings, and she’s looked after by a nanny. Her nanny’s not her Nanny; she’s a nursemaid in a starched apron. Daphne’s a sensitive little girl; at the sound of Hitler’s voice on the radio she has famously gone into screaming hysterics. She might go into hysterics again at the sight of the safety pin. I can’t remember now what she revealed inside her snugly fitting knickers, nor how she reacted either to the safety pin or to what appeared when I finally managed to undo it. Neither the pin nor the penis, evidently, are as upsetting as Hitler, because when her nanny suddenly appears through the trees Daphne’s already fully dressed and completely composed. All I can remember is that I’m still struggling unsuccessfully to get the safety pin done up again – and have to be helped (the final humiliation) by her nanny.

  *

  The fact is that my father’s not greatly given to buying things. A salesman and son of a shop assistant, married to a shop assistant and daughter of a salesman; but the other central role in the commercial dialogue he shows little interest in exploring. I don’t get the impression that we’re poor exactly, and he isn’t mean. He punctiliously lists his expenses and pays his bills. He makes the books balance. But he’s just not used to possessing and spending money, or to the idea of ownership. It’s not the culture he was brought up in.

  The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, for instance. I don’t think we were given this, but equally I can’t picture the scene where my father walks into a bookshop, selects The Complete Works of William Shakespeare from the shelf, takes it to the counter and hands over money for it … The image is as outlandish as one of him him breaking into the Bodleian or the British Museum to steal it. I suspect The Complete Works came the same way as the playing cards in the sideboard drawer – as some kind of free or cheap promotional offer from a newspaper or cigarette company.

  A lot of the things in the dining room have an air that suggests similar provenance. The glass biscuit barrel on the sideboard with no biscuits in, for instance. The sherry decanter with no sherry, the portless port decanter. The twisted brass candle-free candlesticks on the mantelpiece. The picture of feasting cardinals over the mantelpiece … Cardinals? A popular subject of domestic artwork at the time, apparently, in their full scarlet fig and various stages of over-indulgence at the dinner table. But in our house? Princes of the Church – of the Roman Church – carousing in a house where not even a C of E curate is ever invited in for a glass of sherry from the bottle in the sideboard underneath the empty decanter? They must have slipped in free, unexamined, in exchange for fifty coupons from Wills’s Gold Flake packets.

  Perhaps, it occurs to me now, my father didn’t pay money for the Bentalls three-piece suite in the lounge. Perhaps George Davis was throwing it out. Came wheeling the settee across the road one Saturday morning. ‘Tom! Any use to you?’ Impossible – George Davis would never have had such a thing in his house in the first place. George Davis would never have paid money for it. No one would have. They wouldn’t have taken it in for nothing. Not even the canny Barlow. Not even if someone had thrown in the two ink-and-wash pictures that were the only other objects in the lounge, one of them entitled A Bit of Old London, the other, of an equally ancient street, St Gall, Switzerland. (Switzerland again! We’re obsessed with the place! Half the library and a quarter of the art collection are devoted to it!) Where did these come from? Not, surely, a question of money changing hands. I try to imagine my father going into the art shop … Or my mother, on one of our expeditions to Shinners in Sutton. ‘Those two ink-and-wash townscapes in the window …’

  I don’t know the original source of the line that has been adapted to so many humorous contexts over the years: ‘One day, son, this will all be yours.’ It’s not something my father would ever have thought of saying to me, even as a joke. The ideas of inheriting and bequeathing were as alien to him as purchasing and possessing. My father moved lightly over the earth, scarcely leaving a footprint, scarcely a shadow.

  He couldn’t pass the house on to his children of course, because he didn’t own it. As for the contents, they’d vanished into thin air long before my father died. The brown suite, the dining table around which so many people had squeezed, the feasting cardinals, the Bentalls suite – I never saw any of it again after we finally moved out, into another house that my father didn’t own. To my knowledge only two objects survived. Over sixty years later, after the death of someone who won’t enter this story for another twenty years, one of the executors said to me, ‘We thought you might like these.’ And he handed me the two pictures, A Bit of Old London and St Gall, Switzerland, that had once hung on the lounge wall, over the Bentalls suite. I have them in my attic
still, lovingly preserved inside a black rubbish bag.

  5

  Quick / Slow

  My parents came as immigrants to Hillside Road, and immigrants they remained. My sister and I, the second generation, probably just about passed, but my father always had something about him of the cocky young man from the wrong side of the Holloway Road, while my mother (and her mother), in spite of their brief stay on the right side of it, had never fully recovered their social nerve after the crash in the palliasse market.

  There’s something else, too, that sets us apart: my father has a second home.

  His second home is his car. Barlow and Archie Dennis-Smith also have cars. But theirs are not lived in the way my father’s is. Barlow uses his simply to get him rustily and reluctantly to Putney and back each day. I don’t think Archie Dennis-Smith’s shiny Triumph Dolomite ever goes much further than the Bell in Cheam on Sunday morning. My father, though, spends half his life in his – more time, at least on weekdays, than he does with the feasting cardinals in the dining room.

  It’s nothing grand – an Austin saloon, I think, like Barlow’s, when I’m first conscious of it, one or two models up from the perambulator-sized Austin Seven that’s making motoring accessible to the mass market at the time. Later I recall a car with scalloped flutings along the bonnet, which suggests a Vauxhall, and, rather briefly, an archaic-looking Rover Twelve, which has a handcrafted respectability that’s painfully at odds with my grandfather’s bicycle and the rest of the stuff it shares the garage with. My father doesn’t actually own any of these daytime accommodations, any more than he owns the house he sleeps in at night. They aren’t even rented, as the house is – they’re provided free to the reps by TAC.

  It’s already evening when he gets home from his day in the grimy commercial back streets of his South London territory, but in summer the front garden is still alive with butterflies - tortoiseshells, peacocks and red admirals - gorging on the heavy sweetness of the buddleia. Suddenly there he is in his hot three-piece suit, unlatching the double green gates at the end of the driveway. I must have been watching for him, because already I’m out there, like the pilot meeting an incoming liner, and jumping into the waiting car to help him steer it into the driveway. If this is the Austin still it’s as importantly dark blue as his suit, and inside it the scent of the baking leather upholstery and the sombre veneers of the dashboard and window trims are even more intoxicating than the fumes of the buddleia. From the back seat comes a different kind of smell, a dusty grey sourness from the samples of roofing materials and rainwater goods he’s carrying. The smell is serious, like everything on the back seat. There are serious dark albums with spring clips and the TAC logo, full of serious grey photographs of TAC products installed in serious grey factories and warehouses. There are the piles of buff folders full of my father’s reports. There is his black homburg hat, removed for once as a concession to the low headroom and greenhouse heat. The contents of the car have a kind of natural authority, an order and purposiveness, that the contents of the house never quite achieve.

  I sit in my father’s lap and press the deliciously shallow disc in the middle of the steering wheel. ‘Ge-gurgle!’ cries the car, with a suddenness that always makes me jump. I twist the elegantly geometrical lever above the disc, first left then right, and the trafficators spring out of the coachwork, left and right in their turn, shining yellow. I seize hold of the wheel, and the car glides forward. It swings wide towards George Davis’s driveway, then spins my hands clockwise as it makes its precisely judged right-hand turn into ours. There are only inches to spare between the car and the gateposts, but not once do I scrape them, or fail to stop the car before it hits the garage doors.

  Then next morning the exciting blue smell of exhaust from a newly started engine drowns the scent of the buddleia, and back up the driveway goes the car again, taking my father to his other life in the inner boroughs of South London – a world where he knows every inch of the greasy setts and treacherous tramlines on the main roads, every possible hold-up from policemen on point duty or the horse-drawn drays of railway companies and breweries – and every possible permutation of ways through the back streets to avoid them, even in the yellow fogs that so often in winter reduce the rest of the traffic to walking pace. At the centre of this web are the dour London offices of TAC in the Borough, where the Southwark Street tramlines cross the Southwark Bridge Road ones, and the trams lurch round at a sudden breakneck right angle from one line to another over the complexity of points, steel screaming on steel. Uncle George, with the eyebrows, who began as a printer, now like his brother works for TAC, I think in some kind of financial department, though whether it was George who got Tom into the firm or Tom George I don’t know. The most familiar character in the office from my father’s stories, though, is Kerry, who is I suppose his closest friend, a whimsical Irishman, as tall as Nelson’s Column, with a thoughtful pipe in his mouth and a not entirely serious porkpie hat on his head, like Jacques Tati. He has a difficult home life, and he writes verse and stories, which he pays to have published. He takes a kindly, amused interest in me when I start to write as well, and occasionally sends me humorous birthday messages, often in verse.

  My father likes being in the car. Even after he has spent the working week nipping through the side streets of Bermondsey and Battersea he’s always happy to get it out again at the weekend and take us all for a drive to the noted beauty spots of Surrey and Sussex, or on our summer holidays to the West Country. Over the years the car becomes a bond between him and myself. It’s something he can give me – something he’s alway happy to give me: a lift. I think it’s in the car, when I’m seven or eight years old, that he makes the offhand suggestion after reading one of my school essays, ‘The House I Should Like to Live in When I Am Grown Up’, that I should become a journalist. On his way up to Southwark in the morning he drops me at various different bus stops where I can get various different buses to school. Later he takes me all the way with him, so that I can spend the day in London. For years this is my experience of the city – first a bewilderingly complicated zigzag, always different, through grimy districts of Tooting, Balham, Mitcham, Streatham, Herne Hill and Tulse Hill, that have no known function except to be complexly threaded through by my father, and then a walk through the Borough, its thick commercial air laden with the sour smell of warehoused Kentish hops, and across a Thames still full of barges loading and unloading along the busy quays, and tugs lowering their funnels at every bridge.

  My father doesn’t just like being in the car – he likes driving. He’s the Smart Lad on wheels. It gives him great satisfaction to be the first away from the lights, and to dismiss scornfully as a weekend motorist anyone who delays him by a millisecond or two. He enjoys nipping past a motor coach on a narrow winding road, in the interval that may or may not exist before another motor coach comes over the brow of the hill in the opposite direction, and squeezing into the gap that may or may not have been left by a weekend motorist too half-witted or too timid to keep his front bumper touching the rear bumper of the car in front. He smiles into the mirror at the sudden expressions of surprise and alarm on their bumpkin faces. He’s doing his bit for society by keeping his fellow motorists alert.

  And he’s perfectly relaxed about it all. He sings at the wheel. Fling Wide the Gates, of course, but also old favourites that we can all join in. Ten Green Bottles, Down at the Old Bull and Bush, There is a Tavern in the Town, Daisy Daisy, The Man Who Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo – all the songs that families sing together in cars to replace the bonding effect of family prayers. Years later the car provides another link between him and me when he teaches me to drive. It’s often an intense experience. We have another dog by then, a black spaniel, and driving lessons are sometimes combined with taking it for a walk. We drive up to Epsom Downs, with the dog standing on the back seat, its forepaws resting on our shoulders, blocking the rear-view mirror and barking with uncontrollable excitement six inches from my left
ear. My father turns to crane around the dog to see what’s happening behind us. ‘Some fool trying to overtake!’ he shouts over the barking. ‘Keep up, keep up! Don’t let him in!’

  I love the lessons, though, and I somehow absorb his pleasure in driving. It becomes one of his many gifts to me. In the first few years after I have passed the test I even aspire to his smartness and competitiveness, and am lucky not to kill myself or anyone else before this part of the inheritance wears off. Not that my father’s approach to driving ever causes him any trouble. In all the thirty-five or so years that he drove he only ever had one accident.

  It had occurred probably before I was born, but he told me the story of it many times, because he found it so amusing. He had been driven into at a crossroads in the middle of the country by a very expensive sports car. It had sprung out of a side road at forty or fifty miles per hour, he said, hit him, turned over several times, and thrown the driver over a hedge. My father was unhurt, and his car scarcely dented. The sports car, however, was a write-off. No doubt its speed and the number of times it had turned over increased a little over the years, and I can’t help suspecting that the hedge over which the other driver had been thrown was planted only later. What amused my father so much was that the man was a car salesman, who was delivering the expensive sports car to a customer. ‘Brand new!’ he complained wretchedly to my father, when he finally limped into view, ashen-faced and shaking, from a gateway in the neighbouring field. ‘Just out of the showroom! What’s he going to say?’