Owning Up: The Trilogy (30 page)

There was a terrible plague of wasps in the Clwyd Valley that year. At dinner at Hafod everybody was complaining and Maud said she’d found a way to deal with them. She’d put jam jars everywhere, half-full of water with some jam smeared round the inside rim, and the wasps went into the jars for the jam, fell into the water and slowly drowned. Later that night Old Nell drew Maud aside. Had we got a maid with us at Lount? Yes. Were we on the phone? Yes. Well, would Maud mind ringing up the maid before she went to bed to ask her to make
quite
sure that all the wasps were properly drowned? Maud actually refused. She said she’d have felt too much of a fool.

Towards the end of our stay that last year Aunt Eva was taken ill. Before we left for Trearddur the three of us went in to see her in bed. There was some purple clematis that grew round her window at Hafod. I remember thinking how pretty it looked framing the ‘ambitious’ hills beyond. She looked very flushed and was wearing one of those buttoned-up Victorian night dresses which were to become so fashionable thirty years later. Then Tom honked the horn outside and we went downstairs. She died at Chatham Street that November aged eighty-three. Within a fortnight Gampa, seventeen years her junior, was also dead. Aunt Eva left Andrée, then five, a hundred pounds, ‘because she looks like me’. She didn’t look like her at all, but it was kind of her. Having lost a brother and a sister in under a month, Uncle Willy sank even deeper into lethargy. With no one left to run it, he never again took a house for the summer. In 1938 we went to Coniston for a few weeks and spent the rest of the holidays in Trearddur Bay.

Anglesey is an island off the north-west coast of Wales. A sensational bridge, flung across the beetling Menai Straits, links it to the mainland. It has few trees and what there are have been bent almost double by the strong prevailing winds. There are fine beaches, mile after mile of golden sand fringed by dunes, and steep cliffs honeycombed by caves. The farms are white-washed and crouch low against the ground as though afraid of being blown away in the winter storms. There was little attempt to encourage the trippers and there were then no caravan sites. The only port of any size is Holyhead where the ferries set off for Ireland full of drunk men with red faces and bright blue suits and potentially seasick nuns. There are many golf courses.

For all these reasons, except for the presence of the Irish who anyway got straight off the train and into the boats, it was fashionable among the
haute bourgeoisie
of the North of England. ‘It’s like Brittany,’ they told each other, ‘or Normandy.’ Certainly there was fine sea-food: lobsters, crabs, even local whitebait. We went to Anglesey year after year after leaving Uncle Willy’s, and Tom, who tended in part to commute from Hafod or Bodrhyddan, took his main holiday there. The Griff too would spend a fortnight with us, and Uncle Fred and Alan would come down for a weekend or two. We usually rented a house, one of those basic white seaside villas with the hall full of sand and metal windows corroded by salt. When I said I preferred the country to the seaside I was thinking particularly of Anglesey. It was healthy, ‘unspoilt’ and bracing and it bored me stiff.

Trearddur Bay itself is only a few miles from Holyhead. Many friends of my parents were nearby and there was a great deal of golf and bridge, neither of which interested Maud, and a lot of drinking which she feared and detested. I think she disliked holidays in Anglesey as much as I did.

Every day, unless it was raining hard, we went swimming. We were meant to like that, but the sea was always freezing. We came out with our teeth chattering and Maud was waiting with one of those rough towels with yachts printed on it and a ginger biscuit which was meant to warm you up. We had a raft one year and Bill, who was about four, climbed on it just before the tide turned and began to drift out to sea. He sat there perfectly calmly, seemingly unaware of being in danger. I drew Maud’s attention to his diminishing figure. She was fully dressed and wearing a heavy mackintosh but she plunged in, swam after him and pushed the raft back to shore. A man congratulated her, as she stumbled, wet and exhausted, up the beach: ‘Very brave of you, Madam, to rescue that little boy.’ Maud, although out of breath and on the point of collapse, could never resist a good curtain line: ‘Little boy?’ she said. ‘It’s my son!’

It would be unfair to say I experienced no moments of pleasure at Trearddur. In fine weather it could be dazzlingly beautiful. Once, walking inland, I passed a windmill and found myself in a long gentle treeless valley, its slopes bright with clover and stained with poppies, fading into a blue haze in the distance. Whenever I think of the line ‘Over the hills and far away’, I think of that valley.

I was interested in rock pools too. I would lie full length on the damp seaweed, popping the little bladders in the long fronds and staring down into the water at the transparent shrimps, the tiny dark green crab and the rose-pink sea-anemones which closed up into little balls of jelly if you threatened them with a stick.

We did a lot of fishing, although after my three-pound trout and in comparison to casting a fly, it seemed far too easy with its big hooks, strong traces, and a wooden frame with the line wound round it instead of a delicate split cane rod. Tom and I, when he wasn’t knocking them back at the golf-club, used to go and sit on a ledge just below a cliff top and pull up inedible multi-coloured fish, apparently some species of rock-bass. I didn’t much like putting on the worms we used either. They were segmented with many horrid little legs and they bit. We bought them from a man with a wooden leg in Holyhead.

Sometimes we went out after mackerel in a motor-boat. I liked the getting there: bounding over the water with the cliffs and houses bobbing and lurching away behind us and the people on the beach getting smaller and smaller. But once we’d stopped and hit a shoal it soon became monotonous. The fish were beautiful – striped, streamlined, blue, green and silver – but they were so eager to get caught that they grabbed the feathered lures almost before you could get them back into the water. It was too easy to be satisfactory. I preferred prawning: scraping the straight wooden edge of the net up the underside of rocks and lifting it out of the water to find out how many hopping Crustacea I’d dislodged.

We were also taught riding by a Mr Jones, a handsome black-eyed Welshman with a great deal of patience. He needed it with me. The horse I tried to ride was in no way temperamental, just obstinate. Despite my trying to follow Mr Jones’s advice about using my knees and letting him know who was boss, it did exactly as it wanted, turning right when I wanted to go left, and grazing whenever it chose, no matter how hard I tugged on the reins. In the rough fields around Mr Jones’s riding school one year there was a plague of striped black and yellow caterpillars. I put one in a match-box to take back to Parkfield to show Hurter, but somehow it escaped.

We weren’t alone in Trearddur. There were several of our contemporaries, the children of our parents’ friends, some of whom I liked in Liverpool. Here all they ever wanted to do was play ball games on the beach which was exactly what I hated. Sometimes they chanted ‘Sissy Parkfield’ at us. It seemed hard when I loathed Parkfield so much to have to defend it during the holidays.

One morning in a hen-run on the edge of the garden of the house we rented, I came across a disturbing spectacle. On the grass in the middle of the run squatted a large toad, although how it got there I couldn’t imagine. The hens, about half a dozen in number, were pecking it to death, but not in any concentrated way. They would strut around for a bit, making their stupid noises, preening their feathers, scratching here or there and then one of them, quite casually, would stab at it a few times with its beak. The toad just sat, seeming to grin, gradually coming to bits but still breathing. I could do nothing. If I rescued the toad, I thought, it was too far gone to live. I couldn’t kill it either – that would mean associating myself with its beady-eyed assassins. I remained, watching in rapt horror, until it was obviously dead. Whenever I read of gratuitous cruelty I see that toad.

18

As the thirties drew to a close, Ginger’s arsehole was under increasing threat. Sitting in the Tatler, waiting for the latest Disney, I saw Spain bombed, Hitler and Mussolini, Auden’s ‘fashionable madman’, strutting and ranting. Because of my mother’s blood we were more aware of the increasing persecution of the Jews than most middle-class Liverpudlians. I don’t know how it came about but for a few months we even took in a Jewish refugee. Vicki was a young man from Berlin, neatly dressed and speaking perfect if pedantic English. He told us what made him decide to leave Germany: the burning of synagogues, the looting of shops, university professors forced to clean out lavatories in front of jeering crowds, the casual use of rubber truncheons. Hearing this did Tom no harm. He’d been inclined, like a lot of people, to dismiss much of what he’d heard or read as exaggerated. Nevertheless, on a personal level, Vicki drove my parents mad. Humourless and pompous, he constantly ‘held the floor’, the gravest crime in Maud’s almanac. Much to their relief he didn’t stay very long. Highly qualified in chemistry, he landed an excellent job in Leicester.

Somehow, although it was increasingly likely there would be a war, people managed to put it out of their minds most of the time. My parents continued to entertain. I went five times to see
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.
My mother organised’a successful appeals year for the Personal Service, including a sale of work in a house belonging to Toc H in Rodney Street. Gangie and Gaga, still Mrs Melly and Mrs Isaac to each other, each ran a stall. Gangie was in charge of knitware, Gaga sold home-made chutneys and jams. There was something about sales of work which very much irritated Tom. He was obliged to go, of course, but explained to me sarcastically, when I asked him what a sale of work was: ‘It’s your grandmothers playing shop.’

From being unable to read, I had now become an obsessive reader, but my parents’ library was no treasure trove. There were Maud’s prizes from Belvidere High School for Girls:
Hiawatha
in blue leather,
The Works of Tennyson
in limp calf, and a number of theatrical memoirs by people she’d known, many of them dedicated to ‘Darling Maud’ in extrovert calligraphy.

Tom’s contribution to the shelves was mainly Leslie Charteris’s ‘Saint’ books, and a number of ‘dossiers’ of imaginary crimes with little cellophane envelopes in them containing ‘real’ clues: a lipstick-smeared cigarette butt, a torn-off button. There were, however, as always with Tom, a few surprises: the short stories of Damon Runyon for instance, which he bought as they came out, and a first edition of Waugh’s
Vile Bodies,
his favourite book. It was typical of him that he never read, or was curious to read, any other book by Waugh, or at any rate not until
The Loved One
was published in the late forties. Maud even had difficulty in persuading him to read
Rebecca.
‘I knew he’d love it,’ she’d tell people, so I kept leaving it about, even in the lavatory at Trearddur, but he wouldn’t open it. When he did, of course, he read it cover to cover at one sitting.’ She told this story a lot. She seemed to believe it reflected some credit on her.

Although my parents didn’t buy books, they both subscribed to Boots. Maud liked Warwick Deeping, Gilbert Frankau (brother of Ronnie), and J. B. Priestley. Tom read mostly thrillers and detective stories: Edgar Wallace, Dorothy Sayers, and Agatha Christie but only if Poirot wasn’t in them. Maud, too, could sometimes break out of her middle-brow corral; she adored
The Diary of a Nobody
and instantly saw the point of
Cold Comfort Farm.
I read all these; sometimes Maud and Tom had to fight to get their own library books back; I read the William books, E. Nesbit and Arthur Ran-some, any collections of ghost stories I could get my hands on, and
The Story of San Michele
which I thought a masterpiece.

From being relieved that I had learned to read, Maud became worried at what had become an addiction. ‘No books!’ she’d shout through the bathroom door, and she’d come into the ‘boys’ room’ several times each night to make sure I hadn’t turned the light on again.

The other thing that worried her was my stomach. Given that I was eating a cooked breakfast, a substantial if disgusting lunch at school, a huge tea and a grown-up dinner at night, it was hardly surprising that, while remaining rather skinny in general, my stomach had swollen up like a tight balloon. Fearing a tumour, she took me to the doctor. While he was examining me he asked me what I ate on an average day. I told him. He didn’t bother to go on with the examination. I was advised to eat rather less and my stomach disappeared for twenty years.

Maud was also much preoccupied during the later thirties with the difficulty of finding suitable ‘staff’. ‘Going into service’ was becoming less popular and she was forced to employ girls she would have rejected instantly a few years earlier. There were two Irish sisters, for example, who gave her a great deal of trouble. They were called Nelly and Norah and had very thick Dublin brogues. Nelly, the parlour-maid, was handsome in a bold raw-boned way. Norah, the cook, was fat, dumpy and hysterical. They fought all the time. There’d be a crash in the night followed by screaming and shouting. Maud would get up and rush into their bedroom to find out what on earth had happened. Usually Nelly had thrown a water carafe at Norah or vice versa.

Nelly liked mischief. She read the Bible as if it were a dirty book because, back in Ireland, her parish priest had told her it was a sin for lay Catholics to do so. Swearing me to secrecy, she would wait until my parents were out and then use ‘the green bathroom’ instead of ‘the blue’. Eventually Nelly scored a bull’s-eye with the water carafe, cutting Norah so badly that she had to have stitches, and Maudie decided that enough was enough.

Molly, the house parlour-maid who followed was, as Maud admitted, a very hard worker, but she was extremely noisy and had a very strong Liverpool accent. She was also enormous. She sneezed a great deal about the house too, making no effort to control it, despite Maud asking her continuously if she could possibly use a handkerchief. ‘A-a-a-a-CHEW-ER!’ was what it sounded like.