Owning Up: The Trilogy (16 page)

Old Nell had been the second wife of Hugh Melly, one of Uncle Willy’s brothers who had died in 1924, two years before I was born. He was said to have been extremely handsome. His first wife, who was killed in a carriage accident in 1890, had two daughters. She had been a Holt, a member of the shipping family. The older daughter married a Canadian and I never knew her, but the younger, Cousin Joan, married a rather noisy, ferociously right-wing but personally kindly coal-mine owner called Major Arthur Bromilow, and the Bromilows too were very much a presence at the Chatty parties.

Old Nell had three children by Hugh: Pete, who was killed in the 1914–18 war; John, who was a surgeon and took the only British Red Cross unit out to Abyssinia when it was attacked by Mussolini and who was shot on the last day of the conflict by an African rioter who, logically enough I suppose, mistook him for an Italian; and Young Nell herself.

I can remember John who seemed quite extraordinarily charming and sophisticated. He had been a friend of Vivien Leigh’s and had written a drawing-room comedy which was almost put on in the West End. He had, like many of his generation during the twenties, a passion for elaborate practical jokes. At the same time, like his mother, he was profoundly religious, and it was the application of his practical evangelical spirit which led to his death in the streets of Addis Ababa in 1936.

Old Nell was, I suppose, plain but with so glowing and saint-like a personality that she seemed to be beautiful. Like Aunt Eva she made no concessions to current fashion but her dresses, while black and floor length, were Edwardian rather than Victorian, and she always wore a tight, boned neck choker in the manner of Queen Alexandra. Unlike Eva and Florence, whose philanthropy was severely practical and objective, Nell’s faith insisted on a St Francis-like involvement with those she tried to help. She was preyed on by many petty con-men who came to her with optimistic schemes for self-improvement, and when in London she would visit the embankment night after night with food and money for the down-and-outs. Aunt Eva found this approach intensely irritating, referring rather contemptuously to ‘Nell’s lame ducks’.

Nell was a great admirer of the Salvation Army. When the film of Shaw’s
Major Barbara
came out, she and a like-minded friend staged a planned protest in the Plaza Cinema, Lime Street, and were ejected. She was also an animal rights sympathiser long before such a movement existed. She was wracked with guilt at having enjoyed hunting as a girl. It was the ride, she explained, which had been the source of her pleasure, but the ride after all was at the expense of the poor fox and even of his life. To be surrounded by relations who shot and fished with such enthusiasm, staying frequently in a house which contained the fiendish ecclesiastical mousetrap, must have caused her much pain. During the Blitz she took it upon herself to read Uncle Bill the whole of
Gone With the Wind.
Increasingly senile, I imagine he made little of it, especially as he was very frightened and confused by the bombing.

Young Nell was a cheerful person, full of fun, obsessed with the Mellys, and given to that vice of all large middle-class English families between the wars of constantly asserting that ‘we are just like the Forsytes’. Young Nell never married. She lives in the same eau-de-Nil flat off Fulham Road and is still, at the age of eighty-three, known as Young Nell.

It was at the Chatty party that the remaining Riverslea Mellys surfaced: Cousins Leonard and Fanny, both old and as poor as church mice. Leonard’s dinner jacket was green with age. Rotund, bustling Fanny gave us children only half-a-crown each but they were always mint half-crowns which she had drawn especially from the bank.

It was this huge and noisy party then, three generations of them, that assembled yearly for the great family feast. What happened at it was as fixed and immutable as a religious ceremony.

Before dinner the rarely used drawing-room was opened up although the chandelier remained in its shroud. Sherry was on offer. The meal was huge, even by Chatham Street standards. The youngest member of the family had to propose a toast, an obligation which made my sister Andrée almost ill with nerves when it came to her turn. Toasts completed, a long and very boring event followed. The senior member of the family recited this catch to the person on his or her right:

Do you know the muffin man, the muffin man, the muffin man?

Oh, do you know the muffin man who lives in Drury Lane?

To which the person so questioned replied:

Oh, yes, I know the muffin man, the muffin man, the muffin man,

Oh, yes, I know the muffin man who lives in Drury Lane.

Then both parties would intone together:

Then we
two
know the muffin man, the muffin man, the muffin man,

We
two
know the muffin man who lives in Drury Lane.

Then the person to have answered the question first turned towards whoever was on his or her right and repeated it; was answered in the affirmative and the three acquaintances of the muffin man agreed in unison that they knew him too. Unbelievably, this rigmarole continued until everybody at the table – there must have been well over thirty most years – could shout out the final chorus:

Then we
all
know the muffin man, the muffin man, the muffin man,

We
all
know the muffin man who lives in Drury Lane,

Some tried to enliven this incredibly tiresome chore by putting on funny accents but most, with surprising good spirits, simply played it straight. It was never suggested that it might be curtailed or dropped altogether. That would have been considered almost blasphemous.

After everybody agreed that they knew the unnaturally gregarious muffin man, the ladies went into the library and the gentlemen drank port or brandy and told mildly indecent jokes. Boys were allowed to remain in the dining-room from about the age of twelve for this initiation into masculine mores. Even Uncle Bill became quite animated and told a story about the sexual habits of the Kaiser. He also usually described a ‘feller’ he had seen on the stage in Paris in the early 1900s who could fart several tunes and blow out a candle at a considerable distance by the same means. Nobody really believed this, but quite recently it was revealed as fact and a book on the gentleman, ‘Le Pétomane’, was published proving that Uncle Bill was telling the truth.

The men, whether laughing at the Kaiser’s inadequacy or pretending to believe in the exploits of ‘Le Petomane’, all wore dinner jackets and the same year that I was allowed to remain behind with them in the dining-room, I wore one too. This was not new – the idea of spending money on a dinner jacket for a growing child would have appalled my father – but had been handed down for several generations. Even so I was extremely pleased with myself, despite Tom’s joke at my expense earlier in the evening. I’d gone into his dressing-room, ostensibly so that he could tie my bow, in fact to solicit admiration, but all he’d said was: ‘Don’t annoy the little man. They’re very touchy, these dwarfs!’

I must have looked rather hurt because he immediately explained the source of this mysterious but unflattering reaction. As a small child in Sefton Park he had seen a dwarf out walking with his ‘owner’, a showman attached to a travelling fair then
in situ.
He had scampered curiously towards it, to be met by this informative reproach. Once I’d understood it was joke I was completely mollified. I even repeated it on arrival.

When we left the dining-room to ‘join the ladies’, it was discovered that my brother Bill, jealous that my three years seniority allowed me to stay on, had concealed himself under the table. He told me later that he had understood nothing that had been said and grown extremely bored. In fact my own reaction had been more or less the same, but of course I wasn’t letting on. ‘You will when you’re older,’ I assured him dismissively.

The final stage of the Chatty party took place in the library. It was in two parts: ‘The Great Divide’ and the entertainment. ‘The Great Divide’ was the name given to the doling out of money in lieu of presents, a rational if somewhat impersonal solution to the problem of how to reward so large a gathering. Uncle Bill would slump in his accustomed chair. Davis would carry in a silver tray piled high with brown envelopes like wage packets. She would stand by her employer and he would pick up the envelopes at random, reading out the name written on each of them: ‘Young Nell’, ‘Gillian Leather’, ‘Samuel Heywood Melly’. Each of us in turn would go forward, collect our envelope, and kiss him on his cold indifferent cheek. Each knew exactly what to expect: £50 for his generation, £2.5 for my father’s, £10 for those in their twenties, £1 for my contemporaries. It was rather a soulless exercise, the only excitement arising from the order in which we were called and the possibility, never fulfilled, that someone might have been accident-ally left out.

The entertainment followed immediately. Gangie and Gampa would offer one of ‘Mrs Caudle’s Curtain Lectures’; we would perform a carefully rehearsed sketch; others played the piano or recited comic monologues. One year, during Aunt Eva’s lifetime, a Rawdon Smith girl – I believe it was Hope, one of Willie Bert’s daughters – tap-danced to a gramophone record having first changed into shorts. Aunt Eva was visibly put out at this immodesty which must have upset Willie Bert. He was always extremely solicitous towards the old ladies of the family.

As Uncle Bill had already suffered his stroke before I was old enough to attend the Chatty parties, he had relinquished his bird-watching and photography and in consequence no longer ‘prepared and showed his magic-lantern slides as part of the entertainment’. I gather that this was no great loss. Young Nell once told me that the performance lasted a long time and that the slides themselves were so blurred and indistinct that the whole enterprise had become known to the more irreverent members of the family as ‘Owls in a Fog’.

During the war the Chatty parties became smaller and one year, during the height of the Blitz, there was none at all. Uncle Bill died in 1944 after several days in a coma. Davis, who had looked after him with extreme devotion, told my mother, with initial reluctance, of his end. He had regained consciousness on a cold but bright winter’s evening and hauled himself up in his narrow bed to face the setting sun. ‘Oh hell!’ he’d muttered resignedly and fallen back dead.

I’d been to visit him shortly before this took place. On the chest of drawers was a small glass-dome and inside it a stuffed thrush and a golf ball. A brass plaque on the base explained the curious confrontation: ‘In 1903 W. R. Melly drove off the 3rd tee at Formby Golf Club. His ball struck a thrush in the air, killing it instantly, and holed in one.’

With Willy’s death, Chatham Street was given up and its contents, with the exception of the drawing-room furniture which was left to the museum, sold or divided among the family. Uncle Bill left his body for dissection in the hope that ‘whatever was wrong with me’ might further medical research, but the offer was refused and he was buried in the tiny graveyard of the ancient Unitarian chapel at the Dingle, opposite the Gaumont Cinema. The house itself now belongs to the University. Passing it recently I saw, through a window, the morning-room full of filing cabinets and illuminated by strip-lighting. A girl brought in a plastic cup of tea or coffee and placed it in front of a man sorting out folders on a formica-topped table.

7

Surrounded by large late nineteenth-century houses, ringed by a sandy ride where middle-class little girls cantered self-consciously past on horses hired from a local riding school, Sefton Park forms a valley bisected by a string of lakes, the largest of which, ‘The Big Lake’, had boats for hire in summer and, when frozen in the winter, became black with skaters. On the other side of the lakes, dominating the landscape, is the Palm House, a large, circular, domed building of steel and glass in imitation of the Crystal Palace. When it was cold it offered a steamy refuge to expressionless men in bright blue suits and red ties, many of them missing an arm or leg. They were the institutionalised wounded of the 1914–18 war, and would sit all day smoking Woodbines on the fern-patterned Victorian benches. Behind them grew a contained circular jungle, its tropical trees and plants neatly labelled, and here and there a small marble statue of a coy nymph or simpering maiden with a quotation from a poet carved on her plinth. In summer the men sat outside on similar benches.

Statues ringed the exterior also, life-size and representing historic figures in the arts and sciences. Before I could read, my father invented false identities for those frozen worthies. A Swiss botanist, he assured me, represented the Prince of Wales, while Galileo, holding a globe of the world, he maintained to be Dixie Dean, the celebrated footballer. Beyond the Palm House the park levelled out to form a great plain big enough to accommodate the annual fair; below it a steep hill swept down to one of the little lakes.

At the bottom of this hill were two stone posts designed to discourage cyclists as there was then only a few yards across a road before the iron railings which ringed the water. I had at one time a small yellow motor car with push pedals and on one of our visits to look at Dixie Dean and the Prince of Wales my father made the following proposition. He would squat behind me on the yellow pedal car, in itself a rather precarious operation, and we would then free-wheel down the hill between the posts, whereupon I would have to turn the wheel abruptly to the right in order to avoid the railings. At five or six, for I can’t have been any older, this seemed a perfectly reasonable if exciting thing to do, for I trusted Tom entirely and the danger didn’t occur to me. We did it, gathering considerable speed, and shot between the posts missing the railings by a few inches. The mystery is that I cannot imagine what got into my father. It was most unlike him, and either or both of us could have been killed or badly injured. He told me not to tell my mother who wouldn’t understand and I never did. Perhaps though, like Maud’s driving, it is a false memory.