Heads and Straights Read online

  ‘Captain Bolton,’ he said, bowing slightly and removing his hat. ‘Royal Horse Artillery, stationed at Newport.’

  The three of them had lunch together in the dining car and when they parted on Newport Station platform, Bolton, who on the journey had offered to teach Eileen to ride, gave Elspeth his card.

  Elspeth had set up home in Newport with a postman called Nick and earned her living writing the women’s page of the Western Mail. Eileen quickly warmed to Nick, who was kind and gentle to her. She was impressed by their library and by the beautiful, scented garden her mother had made behind their little terraced house. Every evening the two of them would walk their dogs along the banks of the river Usk, slowly overlaying the lost years with endless talk. They found that they both cared about the same things: books, paintings, flowers, birds and dogs. ‘I had never known such a feeling of being wanted and loved,’ my grandmother later wrote to me. ‘And I responded with all my heart.’

  It was there in Newport that her affection for ‘the simple life’ must have been born, and also, perhaps, her perplexing prejudices relating to gardens. When I eventually had a garden of my own she insisted I cut down an ornamental cherry tree that was growing happily in the middle of the lawn. ‘It’s a common little thing,’ she said. ‘Get rid of it.’ And to my embarrassment, I obeyed.

  What a relief it was to Eileen that her mother cared about the ‘finer things in life’. Here was a woman Virginia Woolf would have approved of; a working woman, with a room of her own, who painted and read and believed in Beauty and Truth. For the seeds of my grandmother’s intellectual snobbery had been planted there, on those silent walks with Virginia. She told me that even as a child she had sensed the whirring of that great mind. She would have to run to keep up with the writer as she strode across the fields, hashing out the negative space of her first experimental novel, Jacob’s Room, about loss and the baffling and devastating trauma that they had all been through with the Great War. Eileen would always remember her own terror, aged five, at seeing a fully grown man fall to the pavement on Kensington High Street, clutching his head, and her father ushering her into a cab, muttering, ‘Shell shock, baby. It’s shell shock, poor fellow.’ As a seven-year-old, walking with Virginia, she would have been able to hear the sound of cannon coming across the Sussex Downs, like the dull thud of ‘nocturnal women beating great carpets’.*

  Years later, my grandmother’s home in the Brecon Beacons would be filled with copies of Woolf’s novels, letters and diaries. I inherited these, along with her passion for the writer, a passion that helped me, an academic outsider with a poor school record, to pass the entrance exam to Oxford. I wrote about the uses of memory in Woolf’s fiction, whole tracts of which I had learnt by heart. I was staying with Gran when the acceptance letter arrived. She was ironing and didn’t even look up when I cried out in disbelief.

  ‘Of course you got in, my dear,’ she said. ‘They’d be mad not to take you.’

  I remember her standing there smiling at me. By then she had a deeply lined face, a long, hawk-like nose and a snaggle of tobacco-stained teeth. She wore her magnificent, long, dark auburn hair, which even to her death was barely touched with grey, in two long plaits folded on top of her head. As an old lady, she favoured trainers and stiff cotton artist’s smocks, which came in two colours, navy and tomato red. The three, large pockets at the front were for her baccy (Golden Virginia), her dog treats and her pruning shears; perfect, my father would say, for the easy castration of overweening males. Gran never had any time for her son-in-law, or any of the men her granddaughters would marry. Like many of the proto-feminists of her day, she did not have a high regard for men, most of whom she saw as spineless and domineering, like her father.

  Eileen’s love of Virginia Woolf was all-encompassing. It embraced not only the woman’s work but also her prejudices: the championing of Art above Commerce and the belief in Beauty as a portal to Truth. She passed on Woolf’s love of nature to us, teaching us the names of trees and flowers, an old-world knowledge that would make us ridiculous to future boyfriends. Her cure for birds that fell from their nests was a short spell in her bra. I’ll never forget the sight of a revived baby blackbird flying out of her bosom.

  Woolf’s withering scorn for middle-class aspiration, her voice and her manner and her bizarre pronunciation, influenced Eileen to such an extent that whenever I want to hear my grandmother’s voice again, I only have to go on to YouTube and listen to the one surviving recording of Virginia Woolf talking about the English language and its uses. Our grandmother’s Edwardian English made us squeal with laughter. When we were with her, pronunciation seemed to be a constant trap lying in wait for us. However you thought something should be pronounced, for Gran it was the opposite. The mountain range should be pronounced ‘Himarlias’, with the accent on the second syllable. You were supposed to pronounce necessarily and customarily and all the ‘arily’ words with the stress on the first syllable and when she read to us she would roll her ‘r’s, say nardays for nowadays and whenevar for whenever.

  Gran’s Welsh cottage was freezing and you had to put fifty p in the meter for hot water, so she often read to us in bed beneath an eiderdown so thick and heavy it was like lying under another body. Her bed was large and we would often all squeeze in with her – ‘Plenty of room, come along, shove up’ – and fall asleep to her radio, which she would tune to the shipping forecast, one of the few voices that still mirrored her own.

  So there was Gran, busy shaking the tree, while Mum and Dad were trying to keep us under control. She clearly took pleasure in the chaos brought by my sisters’ rebellion against what she saw as her daughter’s narrow, middle-class lifestyle. When it was my turn to begin my sex life she invited me and my seventeen year-old boyfriend to stay. We couldn’t believe our luck. She let us lie in bed all day covering each other in baby oil and brought us cups of tea and breakfast in bed. When we had gone she called my mother to say: ‘You do know she’s no longer a virgin, don’t you, darling?’

  Poor Mum didn’t want to give her own renegade mother the pleasure of knowing something about her child that she didn’t, so she replied ‘Of course I knew’.

  It was always hard to discern fact from fiction with my grandmother, a trait that drove my mother mad, but that we, as children, could appreciate. She was free with the truth and the story of her rich life changed with each telling. She was also somewhat free with private property. In Wales she encouraged us to steal fruit from other people’s orchards and, unlike Mum, would never put us through the shame of taking back something we had nicked. She also had a pathological dislike for traffic cones (long before disliking traffic cones would become a national trait) and we would sit in the back of the car and watch her confiscate them. When she thought they were too plentiful she would stop, pick them up and put them in the back of her Austin Minivan.

  Her dislike of authority figures was born, in part, from a feeling of class superiority, for she didn’t consider that the rules governing most people applied to her. She was someone I knew instinctively must be kept away from my teachers and while she was looking after us I made sure that she never came too close to the school gates. She was also a born atheist and said that Church was the place we were least likely to find God. Before my elder sisters were brought back to London, she told them that the nuns running their boarding school were almost certainly sex-starved lesbians.

  It was Gran who first taught us to question authority. In the late sixties, Paul, one of her two sons, came back from San Francisco, where he had been celebrating the Summer of Love with a six-week binge on LSD. His body came back, that is, but not all of his mind. He began to experience agonizing headaches. By the early seventies he had changed his name to Jesus and could be seen walking up and down Baker Street in a long robe, carrying a heavy Bible. He was, and is, a very smart and funny individual, and the diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia that was made back then did not sit well, either with him or with Gran, who eschewed all a
dvice to have him committed and invited him to move in with her to the little house she was renting on the New King’s Road. She was infinitely tolerant of him and his increasingly impenetrable ways, remarking only that he’d never get a job if he insisted on signing his application letters ‘Jesus Ah So’.

  My parents were, by this stage, afraid of Uncle J. He had started writing them letters in feverish script with no punctuation about the end of the world and reincarnation, and while Gran was visiting her other son in America, he had, with the idea of helping her to make a fresh start on her return, put all her possessions in a pile in the back garden of the house and set fire to them. It was shortly after this that she would leave London for the Brecon Beacons, taking Uncle J with her. When I asked her years later how she had felt about the fire, she gave me her son’s version: it had been a useful purge. The only two things she regretted losing were the oil painting of her as a young woman in her riding habit by her artist friend, Edward Baird, and her Remington ‘noiseless typewriter’.

  Mum and Dad, however, decided that this was the last straw and, while she was in America and without telling her, they had Uncle J committed to an asylum where he was rolled up in a mattress and given electric shock treatment. As soon as Gran got back to England she went to see him. He was deathly pale, and thin. He had bruises on his body and tears streaming down his face. She took him home there and then and never let the psychiatric community near him again.

  There was an absurd, unspoken pact between Gran and my parents concerning Uncle J. They did not want us seeing him, but as long as they didn’t actually know he was there, they went on letting us go to Wales. When we came home, they didn’t ask and we didn’t tell. We simply talked around the bits of our holidays that had involved our ‘mad uncle’.

  He could sometimes be a little alarming. His habit, for instance, of squeezing your head between his hands when he had one of his HAs (headaches) to let you know what it felt like. Or his tendency when he was telling you one of his labyrinthine stories, to reel off the addresses and postcodes of all the characters involved. I liked him, though. He had a beautiful smile and he played guitar and sang, mostly the Beatles and Irish folk songs. I can see him singing ‘Lord of the Dance’, with all five of us skipping behind him on the little stone bridge that led to Gran’s cottage:

  ‘Dance then, wherever you may be,

  I am the Lord of the Dance, said he,

  And I’ll lead you all, wherever you may be,

  And I’ll lead you all in the dance, said he.’

  Gran would send us off with him for day-long walks in the Brecon Beacons. Once we passed a little hillside chapel where a wedding was in progress. Uncle J ushered us into the back row to watch. I was lost in the beauty of the ritual and the bride’s dress when the vicar turned to the congregation and said, ‘Therefore, if any man can show any just cause why they may not lawfully be joined together, let him speak now, or forever hold his peace.’ At that moment my uncle stood and, holding up his hand, said, ‘No just cause, Vicar. Carry on,’ and sat down again. Izzy and Bee got the giggles, but my cheeks were on fire with the shame of it.

  Once or twice while we were staying with Gran, the police came for him. One night they found him in Gran’s garden, up a tree, surrounded by lit candles. I remember watching him with Cissy from our bedroom window. He hadn’t, Gran assured us, done anything wrong. They just hauled him in every now and then because they were small-minded. Meanwhile, our mother was still trying to convince us that policemen were ‘firm but kind’. By then we had already chosen our camp.

  While I was doing my final exams, Gran came to stay with me in Oxford to help me look after my baby son, Jack. When I came home from the library one afternoon, she was sitting in the kitchen with Jack in her arms, talking to a man in a very smelly overcoat tied up with binder twine. I was not surprised. She would often walk past homeless people, observe that they needed a good, hot meal and tell them they were coming with her. She never questioned her motives for this rather Victorian behaviour, or, indeed, the effects her actions might have and I’m certain that this lack of self-doubt sprang from her belief that she was part of an enlightened ruling class with a duty to intervene wherever she saw fit.

  ‘Lucy, this is Mike,’ she said when I walked through the door.

  Mike slept on the sofa for a few days, then decided that my grandmother’s brand of charity coupled with hard labour was more trouble than it was worth and left after having built a set of wonky shelves.

  Gran tended to put the men in her life to work. Perhaps she was making them pay for the frivolity of her own father, but as soon as a capable male stepped across her threshold, ducking to avoid the low lintel, she would chivvy him into labour: planting, wood chopping or fixing something in her ramshackle cottage. The man she shared her life with as we were growing up was a small, stocky, good-looking Macedonian called Kole. They met in 1962 on a camping trip to Herefordshire that had been organized by a London-based youth organization that Gran worked for at the time. He was eighteen and she was forty-seven. On the last night she got a bit tipsy, took off all her clothes and dived into the River Wye. Family folklore has it that he decided in that moment, as her pale, thin body sliced into the black water, that he would never leave her.

  The next morning he begged her to take him home with her, no doubt silently offering a lifetime of DIY in exchange, and she accepted. He cleaved to her from that moment until her death in April 2000 at the age of eighty-seven. They laughed together a good deal and saw the world together. When she was in her seventies they bought an old St John’s ambulance which Kole converted into a rudimentary caravan, and they drove to Africa in it. They took a year, coming back through Europe and lingering in Italy, living off the pension left to her by her devoted third husband, David, who had worked for the Bank of England. On their trip Gran collected stones from the desert for Fly, whom she had started to worry about, and filled dozens of notebooks with drawings and impressions of the people and places she saw. She and Kole must have been having sex right up to the end of her life because when she was eighty she confided to my appalled mother that she still enjoyed ‘a ruddy good orgasm’. A few years before she died, though, she seemed to tire of him, because she began packing him off to his parents in Skopje for half the year. He would return every spring, fix whatever was broken and chop her wood for the following winter, when she would boot him out again.

  By 1975 my parents were doing their best to disguise their fifties programming and keep in step with the age. Mum, a leggy redhead with, as my dad often boasted, a Rita Hayworth smile, bought a pair of scarlet hotpants and wore them to the King’s Road Sainsbury’s. Dad began sporting a look that was part public school, part hipster. He wore a pungently goaty Afghan coat over his three-piece suits and with the Jensen Interceptor he was now driving, the Bay Rum he was splashing on his face in the mornings, the St Christopher medallion he was wearing round his neck, and the Havana cigar he often held between his teeth, he became part of that hybrid species that had started to flourish all over London: the gentleman spiv. Looking at photos taken of my parents at that time, they seem dazzlingly glamorous, but to my older sisters they were two embarrassing Straights masquerading as Heads.

  As a couple they must have had some magnetism because the house was always full of liggers and they weren’t always there for the Big Three. There was Dave from the Peabody Estate, whom Izzy brought home once and who, I see it now, took one look at my mother and fell in love. He seemed to be there every day when we came home from school, sitting in our basement kitchen, roasting himself beside the Aga, drinking tea with Mum and making her laugh. He taught her Cockney rhyming slang and she would swiftly cite their friendship if anyone dared to call her a snob. My father tolerated him, calling him Porridge (his surname sounded similar) and using him as a kind of class snitch.

  ‘Have you ever slept with a black woman, Porridge?’ he once asked.

  ‘No, Giles. I haven’t actually.’

&n
bsp; ‘Tell me when you do, will you?’

  ‘Certainly.’

  Then there was the Dane. No one ever knew his real name, or anything much about him except that he was Danish and very dull. He was tall and skinny, with whitish-blond hair, bad skin and a barely audible voice. One of Izzy’s friends brought him round once and left him in our kitchen for what seemed like years.

  ‘The fucking Dane’s here.’

  ‘Tell him I’m out.’

  ‘It’s your turn.’

  ‘Fuck off. I got stuck with him for an hour the other day. Leave him with Mum.’

  ‘She’s said no.’

  After a while, the Dane stopped asking for anyone in particular and would just fall into one of the deep, low armchairs in the basement and watch the life of the family going by until someone remembered and turfed him out.

  My parents struggled to keep an open mind about the endless comings and goings. Soon they were keeping to their part of the house, relinquishing the basement and top floor to my sisters. The phone rang constantly and it was always some boy asking – in that stoned drawl, peppered with the word ‘man’, so unique to the seventies – to speak to one of the Big Three. Cissy and I had instructions on who to dispatch and who to favour. I remember someone called ‘The Owl’ ringing for Izzy for months without ever getting through to her.