Owning Up: The Trilogy (6 page)

Whenever things go wrong with me I never cry or pout.

At this point she would stick out her lip and rub the corners of ‘her eyes, and then, after a pause, she would conclude with great emphasis:

For I
always
am, and I
mean
to be

The jolliest girl that’s out.

During the last two lines she would raise an arm above her head and jig round on one leg.

And jolly she was most of the time, but the Griff was occasionally prey to bouts of deep depression lasting for several weeks or even months. She was then convinced that she had neither friends nor money. Her conversation excluded all other themes. No friends. No money. Round and round like a pet mouse on a wheel. This was not a recent development. She had apparently always suffered from these dark visitations known to her family as ‘doing herself. During the thirties it was suggested that she might benefit from psychological help and she was persuaded, much against her will, to visit several specialists. All they accomplished was to arouse her resentful contempt. She called them ‘talking fools’.

One of her obsessions when she was ‘doing herself was that all she was fit for was to work as an attendant in a station lavatory. Her eldest brother, Frederick Harvey-Samuel, a distinguished-London barrister, was apprised of this by my mother who was sent to stay with him several times before the Great War, presumably in the hope of making ‘a catch’. Sweeping up the ends of his luxuriant moustache, a court-room mannerism he had carried into his private life, he passed judgement.

‘It would have to be Lime Street,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘I couldn’t afford to have a sister of mine working at Edge Hill. It might have a damaging effect on my practice if it became known that Edith was employed in this capacity at a goods station.’ Frederick Harvey-Samuel died before I was born, but the Griff continued to maintain that working in a station lavatory was the only resort open to her in her friendless and penniless state.

After her depressions had run their course, she would wake up one morning in the best of spirits. Life was agreeable once more. There was golf, bridge, ‘runs’ in the car, my mother to tease and badger, a gin and orange before lunch and a Gold Flake cigarette after it. The only lavatory she felt the need to resort to was her own. Her bathroom window was of particular dimpled glass and the same glass was let into the upper panels of the flat’s front door. I have come upon this glass since, but it is only comparatively recently that I have recognised it as the source of an instant evocation of my grandmother. Despite her maid, she chose to answer the door herself, and would cry: ‘Wait a minute!’ (her entire conversation was punctuated by this phrase) as her blurred and faceted image materialised behind the panes. This same glass still produces a certain anxiety: Are my nails clean? My knee-length socks with their concealed elastic garters pulled up? My rebellious ‘cow’s lick’ of hair combed back? She was very critical of such details. ‘George is quite frightened of the Griff,’ said my mother. And so I was, but I was very fond of her too.

I was not, however, at all frightened by the hysterical barking of her current dog as she came to open the door, although I am in general as wary of dogs as of lighting gas appliances or opening champagne. I have no idea why this should be so. My father had a spaniel when I was a baby. He had bought it for when he was invited to shoot by his uncles but it turned out to be gun-shy and given to biting people so it had to be put down. It never bit me, however, and indeed I was told later that I was extremely fond of it and pulled its ears and tail with impunity. Nor, as far as I know, was I ever bitten or menaced by any other dog. Nevertheless for as long as I can remember I have felt apprehensive of them, and my brother Bill’s only, but extremely effective, riposte to my teasing during our childhood walks was to threaten to pat strange dogs, a ploy which reduced me instantly to placatory behaviour.

The Griff’s dogs aroused no such atavistic anxieties because although nervous barkers – ‘good house dogs’ is how she described them – they were without any aggression or indeed character. What they were was indistinguishably wet with brown sentimental eyes and perpetually wagging tails. As one died, it was replaced by another which, although temporarily appealing as a puppy (‘Isn’t it an Uncle Wuff,’ said the Griff, an expression she used for anything sweet or cuddly), soon grew up to become indistinguishable from its predecessor. They were all rather basic animals of no known breed and yet lacking the grotesque collage effect of dogs conceived on vacant lots. They might have posed for the ‘D is for Dog’ entry in a rather unimaginative alphabet book, yet if anyone tried to please my grandmother by offering the cliche that ‘mongrels are more intelligent’ she would respond firmly by insisting they were cross breeds. They were given names as banal as themselves: Jock was followed by Zip who was replaced by Peter. Jock was the first I can remember. Peter was ‘put to sleep’ during the war because the bombing made him hysterical. None of them resembled or grew to resemble the Griff in either appearance or character.

The ‘cross-breed’ syndrome was typical of her. It tied in with her insistence that people coming to see her took the 33 tram instead of the 1 or 45. She also told everybody that the few mediocre Victorian prints she possessed were ‘artist’s proofs’, although I doubt she had any idea what an artist’s proof was. Her family came from Birmingham, but she would never admit it. She always maintained that she was born in Warwickshire.

The Griff’s flat was in a three-storeyed Edwardian block called York Mansions in a street of the same period called Sandringham Drive. The building was of red brick with ‘Tudor’ eaves. There were six flats in all; hers was on the first floor to the right of the slightly pompous entrance. A caretaker and his family, the Polands, lived in the basement below the level of the square back garden with its large tree in the centre of the sparse lawn. The stairs of York Mansions were of uncarpeted granite which Mrs Poland mopped down every morning, polishing the tenants’ brass bells and knockers en route. She was a pale thin woman who sighed resignedly when you had to pass her at her task. Mr Poland, equally lugubrious, did the garden under my grandmother’s directions. She would point at the weeds in an imperious manner. She was an accomplished pointer at things for other people to do; my mother gave an excellent imitation of this trait. If a workman came to the flat she would stand over him and point at what needed doing until he’d finished. ‘Then,’ she would tell my mother, ‘I gave him a cigarette.’ She’d say this with the magnanimous and gracious air of one who had awarded a major and much sought-after honour.

The Polands had a rather large, plump, moon-faced, almost silent son called Billy. We would play with him sometimes in the garden, but he was as conscientious and melancholy as his parents. We felt he had been told he had to play with us whether he wanted to or not. It went with his parents’ job, like the stairs and the weeding.

The rooms in my grandmother’s flat led off a very dark dog’s leg passage. The rooms at the front (the dining-room, the lounge and ‘the little room’ for guests), and at the back (my grandmother’s bedroom, the bathroom and the maid’s bedroom) were well-lit, while those at the sides (the kitchen, and the ‘boys’ room’) faced the walls of the adjoining houses and were almost as dark as the passage.

The Griff’s furniture was solidly Edwardian and rather out of scale: great wardrobes, massive dining-room table and chairs of an unpleasing orange wood, ‘nests’ of occasional tables, but the lounge – and it was typical of her wish to be ‘up to date’ that she called it that – had a bright magenta carpet, white textured wallpaper and sea-green curtains. Her bedroom was more conventional – faded pink chintz – while on her dressing-table were silver-backed hairbrushes and pretty little tortoiseshell boxes for hair pins and other necessities. She always took, even during her depressions, what my mother called ‘a pride in herself.

In the front hall by the coat stand was something rather odd: a cigarette machine into which she and her sons put money for their packets of Gold Flake. It was filled once a fortnight by one of those men to whom my grandmother, appropriately enough in this case, ‘gave a cigarette’. On the chest which faced the hat stand were some comparatively large wooden carvings of two dappled horses with detachable huntsmen and a small pack of hounds. She had bought these on a holiday in the New Forest. On the wall behind them hung two rather busy etchings. One celebrated the great events of Queen Victoria’s reign. In the centre of it sat the old Queen on the occasion of her Golden Jubilee while around her soldiers slaughtered natives, great ships were launched, and the Crystal Palace glittered in Hyde Park. The other was devoted to the events of the same year, and contained an image which both fascinated and appalled me. In a menagerie or zoo a roaring lion reared up, the bars of its cage snapping like matchsticks, the bustled and top-hatted crowd recoiling in confused panic. Perhaps my fondness for zoos stems from this corner of a small etching. I have always enjoyed being alarmed. The only other picture I can recall was a misty drawing of the young, long-haired Paderewski over the upright piano in the lounge, presumably a sign of my piano-teaching grandfather’s admiration for that virtuoso. My grandmother was uninterested in the arts although she very much disliked modernism. She referred to all modern works of art of whatever tendency as ‘futurist’.

Her two sons, Fred and Alan, lived with her; Fred until he married in the forties, Alan until she died a decade later. They were not at all alike, as different in their temperaments as Bill and I. When a child, Fred had employed similar tactics to my own to get his way. On cold nights he would force his younger brother to warm up his bed before allowing him to climb into his own. If Alan showed reluctance Fred would begin to recite ‘Wolsey’s farewell’, a speech which always reduced Alan to hysterical tears, and rather than hear it through, he would submit to his role as a human warming-pan.

They had both been sent to Clifton, the only public school with a Jewish house. The housemaster, a Mr Pollack, was a cousin of my grandfather’s and both his son and grandson were to become housemasters in their turn. When my grandfather died there was not enough money for his sons to stay on there and they had to leave and go into business. Alan accepted this without rancour, but it made Fred both bitter and resentful and, witty and charming as he could be, there remained a mistrustful streak in Fred’s nature which emerged strongly when he had taken drink. Alan was a much sweeter character and showed no rancour at Fred’s teasing, which continued into their middle age. Alan for instance read very little while Fred was, like his father, a devoted Dickensian. During the thirties, in my hearing, someone asked Alan if he had read a particular book, I believe it was
Rebecca.
Fred put his head abruptly on one side, always a sign he was about to make a joke. ‘I shouldn’t think so,’ he said, ‘he hasn’t finished
The Wouldbegoods
yet.’

Physically too there was little resemblance between them. Fred was quite short and plump with the face of a clownish baby; Alan rather tall with more defined and sensitive features, more conventional on the surface, and given to describing every detail of his daily life as if the late departure or early arrival of a train at Lime Street Station, or the menu provided at an annual dinner, concealed some essential clue to the meaning of the universe. It was almost as if he were bent on establishing an alibi to satisfy a particularly suspicious detective-inspector.

I believe that Fred, like my mother, would have chosen to go on the stage. He could play the ukelele, dance nimbly, sing adequately, and time jokes brilliantly. When very young I was taken to see him in an amateur production of a musical comedy called
Victoria and her Hussar
and remember the audience becoming hysterical with laughter at his performance. During the Great War, throughout which he remained, mysteriously for a public schoolboy, a private soldier, he had spent most of his time in a concert party, and I believe he had the talent to succeed if he had decided to turn professional. The need to help support his mother probably made him decide against it and perhaps reinforced his sense of grievance. The ‘failure’ of having to leave Clifton early gave him an obsessive determination to succeed.

He went into oil, a firm called Samuel Banner, starting as a commercial traveller; it was a period of his life about which he could be extremely funny, but which I suspect he resented strongly. He rose to become a director alongside his boyhood friend Cyril Banner who, as heir to the company, had no need to struggle as Fred did to achieve this position. He also, in middle age, became Captain of Formby Golf Club. Formby, one of the several clubs strung out along the sandy coast between Liverpool and Southport, was considered the smartest. To become Captain at all was an honour but for Fred, as a Jew, it was a formidable achievement. Golf clubs tended to be anti-Semitic. During the late .fifties, dining with my father and Uncle Fred, I had raised the question. Was Formby anti-Semitic? My father, who was also a member, denied it. He hadn’t an atom of racial prejudice in him; a quality he had proved in marrying my mother in the face of familial opposition. Not so Fred. ‘They’ve got their own club,’ he said. ‘They don’t know how to behave. They drink lemonade and bring out wads of money to pay for it. They discuss business.’

My father was rather shocked, and yet the anti-Semitic Jew is not uncommon, and usually Fred concealed his prejudice behind a defensive humour. He told me once that he had been involved in a slight car accident with a Jewish man who, in a state of high excitement, had demanded his name. ‘Isaac,’ said Uncle Fred. ‘This is no time for joking,’ screamed his adversary. ‘Vat’s your real name?’

Fred had never kept up with Clifton but Alan, who had been removed even younger, had always done so and regularly attended the Pollack House old boys’ dinner in London. One year he persuaded Fred to join him, putting him on his honour to behave. The dinner was held in an hotel in Park Lane. While the old boys were drinking their cocktails asking each other what had happened to Cohen minor who had been such a promising full-back, or whether J.R.Goldberg was still in Bangkok, a page boy opened the door in search of a guest for whom he had a message.