Important to Me Read online

  3. R.K.

  Reginald Kenneth Johnson was my father, born in 1874. He was seven years older than my mother.

  R.K., as his friends on the Gold Coast came to call him, was born in the tiny Dorset village of Nettlecombe, near Powerstock – no metropolis in itself – into a notably pious family, of which he was, in a sense, the black sheep: his brother Dudley had been preparing for ordination when the First World War came, and he was killed in the trenches. As a young man, R.K. would outrage his mother by such ditties as this:

  David wrote to the Captain of the Host

  My friend, if you’d be savèd,

  Put Uriah in the front of the fire,

  I am, yours truly, David.

  But, black sheep as he might be, he was never cast out – he was very fond of his mother, who always had ready for him supplies of cold tea, which he loved.

  When I was born in 1912, the Johnson side of the family had left the country and had created a curiously countrified atmosphere about them in a small villa off Broomwood Road, where I was later to go to school. The house was rather fusty, smelling of lavender, biscuits, and something quite indefinable. Grandmother Johnson and Aunt Minnie provided enormous high teas for me and my two cousins: ham, salad, pears and custard, and cream cakes. Outside was a small garden with a laburnum tree. My cousin Kenneth and I used to go and pop the pods. It never occurred to us to eat their contents, which I now know was lucky for us.

  R.K. had taken up his job on the Gold Coast, as Chief Storekeeper on the Baro-Kano railway, many years before my birth, and before his marriage to my mother. (The Johnsons were shocked: ‘An actress!’ but they came to accept her.) He was in love with Africa. His tours of duty were long – I can’t remember whether I exaggerate when I say three years – with three months leave in between. But he would only have been home a month before he began to hear what he insisted on describing as ‘the call of the Coast’, and fret to be getting back, among – so he said – the spicy smells, the parrots, the witch-doctors, and the long evenings on the verandahs with whisky and poker-games. (The last were to be his downfall. Poker was his passion, but he was apparently no dab hand at it.) I think he would have been amused had he known that Philip, his grandson, who made a trip along the length of East Africa at the age of sixteen and returned to Tanzania three years later, had also, in a very different way, heard that call. Why, Philip asks me, had I never gone to Africa? Well, children like myself never did, and women very seldom – certainly not mother. The Gold Coast was known as ‘The White Man’s Grave’, and there were few wives to interrupt the poker schools.

  R.K. was one of the old-fashioned type of Colonial administrator: the concept of a wind of change was not one that would have entered his head, though I found out that his junior colleagues, who gave me and my mother much help and comfort after his death, were of a very different mind. They knew that a change was coming – not when – but when it came they would be prepared for it.

  He used to cane his ‘boys’ (his African servants) for flagrant wrongdoing, but claimed, with what seems to me quite unjustifiable optimism, that they never resented this. At all events, he insisted, the ‘boys’ hardly ever ran away from him, and no one ever put ground-glass in his soup. His younger friends did assure me later that, so far as Colonial administrators went, he was popular. But sometimes I do not like to look Philip’s many African friends – and mine – in the face. I hope they will not visit the sins of the fathers upon the children, even unto the third and fourth generations.

  What was R.K. like? I hardly remember. I had no time to. But I do recall that when expecting him home on leave, we would stand waiting in the drawing-room window for his appearance on the Rise. And sure enough, he would appear in the sunset – bronzed as a sea captain, bearing some extraordinary gift, such as a Benin mask, and once a canary in a cage, which he had already christened ‘Battling Siki’, after a prizefighter of the period.

  I think he was a good-looking, though not a handsome, man. My mother always claimed that he resembled the long-gone matinée idol, Lewis Waller, and I suppose, judging from photographs, that this was not altogether without its point. His features were rugged but clear, his upper-lip on the long side, like mine, his thick hair parted in the middle. A little above average height, no more.

  What I do recall was his passion for children. Sometimes he would meet me from school; and a Pied Piper’s ragtail and bobtail of my friends would go with us all the way, with R.K. filling us up with sweets at every sweetshop we passed. I do not think he ever spoke a cross word to me – though doubtless he did not know me well enough to do so.

  When I was seven, my mother gave birth to another child, a girl, my sister. Of course, I had had no warning of the event. It still gives me shame to think how I resented this. I clung to the stairs leading down into the garden, and prayed that I should be glad. Under the hollyhocks, I prayed with fervour. Beryl was an extremely pretty baby (a turn of the screw) and I tried to love her. When she died of marasmus, a wasting disease, at the age of five or six months, I tried, under those same sacramental hollyhocks, to feel sorry. I couldn’t. It was the beginning of guilt.

  One morning, during R.K.’s final leave – or what was to be his final leave – my mother woke me abruptly. She was wearing a very gaudy jacket (in order not to frighten me, she said later) and told me that my father was not too well, and that I must spend the day with friends.

  Of course, he was dead. He had gone to the lavatory (two floors down) in the middle of the night, and had not come back. He was found by my Aunt Kalie, who had been in love with him, though unexpectedly he had proposed to my mother. She recalled to me afterwards, that, on the very night, I had been singing in my bed (at the top of my voice, in the hope of recalling my parents) a Negro spiritual that was all the rage then: ‘Sometimes I feel like a motherless child.’ This I had adapted to my own purpose. ‘Sometimes I feel like a fatherless child, a long way from home, from home, a long way from home.’

  After his death, we knew the worst. He had left us nothing but debts. We had had to borrow to bury my sister: now we had to borrow to bury him. The prosperous part of my early life had come to a close.

  What did it mean to me, having scarcely known a father? Not what might reasonably be expected. I never went in search of a ‘father-figure’. I was seldom especially attracted to men much older than myself, and indeed, my first husband was younger than I.

  But a longing is there, or rather, a longing to know what R.K. would have thought, and from what he might have saved me. I do know that he would have borrowed my cigarettes: he was a heavy smoker (sixty a day), my mother also, and so am I, inescapably. Yet I hope still to meet him again, if there is a comprehensible after-life, a meeting-place.

  For – and this I do not forget – he was gentle, irreverent, and fun.

  4. A Vision of the Marvellous

  It is not of that vision that I am at once going to write. First comes a silly thing, something of a horror story, an experience in which I do not believe. I am repelled by the occult: by mediums, séances, ghosts and fortune-tellers. I have been warned what happens on the road to Endor. But this does not mean that I don’t enjoy a good ghost story, by M. R. James or Algernon Blackwood.

  When I was working at the Central Hanover Bank, I was sent by the manager to take a message to a client staying, for some incomprehensible reason, in Sutherland Avenue. It was a day in early autumn, heavy and humid, With a low ceiling of cloud. With my customary incompetence in matters of travel, I arrived at the wrong end of the Avenue, and had an interminable walk before I found the house. It was large, grey and shabby, and did not look the place that would be chosen by a travelling and presumably well-heeled American. I went up the steps and knocked at the door: no one came. I rang every bell. Finally, I decided that I had better descend to the basement, and try the door there. The area was dank, the door in need of a coat of paint. The sky now was darker still, the colour of a sodden and dirty towel. I rang the bell. Stil
l no one. Rang again. At last – I had heard no footsteps – the door opened a very little way: and round it came a male hand. I called out, but there was no response, ‘I am from the Central Hanover Bank and Trust Company.’ (A ridiculous announcement.) Again no response, but the hand slowly withdrew. Terrified, yet with the courage of desperation, I pushed that door open. It gave on to an empty stone room, furnished with a few pot plants and a bicycle. There was a door leading into the house at the far end: but surely the owner of the hand could not have reached it before I blundered my way in? No hiding-place, or so I thought.

  I ran away in superstitious fear, ran almost all the way to the safety of bus and tube, my message undelivered. By that time, the rain was coming down vigorously, dancing along on the gutter, and the sky was lightening. That was a relief.

  Did I then, or do I now, believe this was a supernatural manifestation? Certainly I do not. Someone had considered opening the door, had decided not to do so, and had either dashed for the inner entrance, or gone into some place of hiding that I could not see. It was a very real hand that had made its tentative way into my sight. All the same, I was shaken. I think many ‘authentic’ ghost stories have their origins in little events.

  I also have another theory about people who see ghosts. I have met a few, some of whom I considered to be exhibitionists, and others whose good faith I could hardly doubt. Let us take the latter group. Where did they see them? In what architectural circumstances? Because I have been in a ‘haunted house’ or two, notably Monmouth’s house in Chelsea, so contrived that one might expect to see anything: a figure disappearing around the turn of a passage or a stairway. Shadows, in these kind of tricky buildings, can easily seem like psychic appearances. I once had a flat in Beaufort Mansions, Chelsea, which wasn’t haunted, but should have been: it had a twist at the end of a long passage totally obscuring what lay ahead. Our house in Clare was old: the foundations about the fifteenth century, the rest a pleasing conglomeration of the seventeenth and early nineteenth. Almost every big house in that little town had a legend of some sort – indeed, we were told that we had the Admiral’s ghost, but he turned out to reside elsewhere. No legend attached to our ancient house at all. Why? Because it was all so open. There were no corners to peer around, no dark, half-hidden places to spring surprises. It was a sunlit, wide-open house. Would it be useful to have the relevant architecture looked at carefully when ghostly appearances are investigated?

  Incidentally, I do think these ghosts should be prepared to appear to sceptics. It is thought that in the most haunted house England can produce, Lord Blackett, for example, the late J. D. Bernal, and my husband would have had a very blank night, and that this would have been attributed to their scepticism. Is this sporting?

  Now let me be serious. I cannot claim to be a mystic – and would not claim it – but one summer a year or so after Philip’s birth, I came home from London to Clare, in Suffolk, where we were then living, after an appalling attack of migraine (it was with me for over thirty years). That night I found a lump, like a piece of cube sugar, in my left breast. And this led to an extraordinary experience.

  Next day I called my doctor, Alan Stewart, who was also my friend in those rural days. He said he did not himself think it ominous, but that I had better visit a specialist in Cambridge.

  When Charles and I went to see one – he lived somewhere off the Madingley Road – it was a clear, bright flowery day. Not fair folk in fields, but cricketers. Blossoming trees bearing their glorious weight everywhere. The specialist examined me. No, he didn’t think it was serious, but I had better go into Addenbrooke’s Hospital for an exploratory operation.

  Charles and I walked, falsely hearty, back past the white flannels, the swags of flowers, and the scents of summer. How long I had to wait for a hospital bed I don’t know: perhaps not long, but it seemed so. And I was filled with dread. I would walk round our lovely garden, leading down to the river, and gaze at the flowering rockery, the little pools, as if I might never see them again. (Though I was not afraid of death particularly, but of mutilation.) I said nothing of this to my mother, and certainly not to my elder children by my first marriage, Andrew and Lindsay. I think I said little to Charles, but the fear of cancer was strong in me.

  Cancer, that damned crab. Why has it such a dreadful name? Sunshine, fear, the love of husband and children, dominated those days of waiting. Of course I should not die: but what if I did? The answer was somewhat undramatic: an inconvenience to others.

  At that time, Philip had a nanny: Nanny Page, about whom I cannot write with too much love and gratitude. She shared him with me: at our first interview she stated that had I asked her to take total control she would not have wished to come. I had had no money for nannies for my elder children and I think they suffered for the loss of it. I had to bring them up as best I could and earn money by my writing at the same time. It was Nanny Page who took me into hospital.

  A few days before that, however, while I was still waiting to go in, I had to make the journey back, alone, from London to Clare after a job with the B.B. C. Perhaps, because I was very tired, fear was heavier than usual upon me.

  Then, on the little slow train between Marks Tey and Cambridge, it happened. We were just passing through the charming small town of Bures. It was, as it had been when I visited the specialist, a radiant late afternoon in spring. I was looking, lack-lustre, out of the train windows.

  Then the glory opened.

  I can only weakly describe it. The trees sprang to three times their normal height and burst out in blossom. Though it was the wrong time of the year ‘the corn was orient and immortal wheat, which never should be reaped, nor ever sown. I thought it had stood from everlasting to everlasting.’ All was a golden enormity, beyond anything I had ever seen or ever can conceive. Size and gold. A sky golden over all. Familiar and yet unfamiliar: something of almost insufferable beauty.

  I suppose this vision, for that is what it was, lasted for two or three minutes. But when it had passed, I was free from fear. I went, free from fear (except for a cosmetic fear) into Addenbrookes, and was serene. When I woke up from the operation I remember saying to a nurse, ‘Am I intact?’ Because I did not care to touch myself and find out. She said, ‘Quite intact.’

  The tumour was benign.

  But will such an experience ever come to help me again, if I have need of it? And was it, after all, a mystical experience? I dare not say no, though as I said, I do not pretend to be a mystic. Nevertheless, since it rid me from fear, how can I think from where it came if not from God?

  He may not be so generous to me again.

  Yet I wonder why I have chosen to tell a silly story, and a real one. Perhaps because I have an instinct that the latter had some tremendous importance.

  Anyway, I can’t let the experience of the countryside beyond Bures go by.

  All this brings me, however, to the contemplation of death.

  Death is a part of life: birth the opening, death the completion. I do not follow Dylan Thomas’s rhetoric:

  Do not go gentle into that good night.

  My only hope, and I think it is the hope of most people, is that I may go very gently indeed. But there is always the dread to beset us, of a lingering terminal illness, in great agony. Few people are altogether free of this. There are, of course, the pain-reducing drugs, but there comes a point when even they may lose their power.

  I have recently read a thoughtful and well-reasoned article upon the intractable subject of euthanasia. It presented both sides of the case sensibly but, of course, reached no conclusion. Perhaps there can be none, for to legalise it seems impossible. (Yet I suspect that there are often acts done out of loving-kindness to put an end to unspeakable suffering, without a word being said.) I wonder, if such suffering ever came to me, whether I should ask my doctor to help me quickly out? I think I should have a rather dishonourable hope that he would do so without being asked. Dishonourable, on my part, because I should be laying a dread respo
nsibility upon other shoulders. But I doubt if I am capable of ultimate stoicism. I can only think about these things (blessedly, infrequently) and come up with no answers. I must say that Cardinal Heenan’s recent observation that if euthanasia became legalised it would therefore become compulsory is pretty bizarre. We have legalized homosexuality between consenting adults, and that hasn’t become compulsory – yet. But I do not mean to be flippant, about this question, of all questions.

  Perhaps, at the end, something like that transformation of all things seen from a train window, might come to me again? If only my faith were not so feeble, I might hope for it, or at least cling to the hope. On mourra seul as Pascal says: and which my husband has often quoted. With real faith, one does not. But I don’t know whether I have enough of it.

  I let my mother die alone, literally, because I thought she was ‘crying wolf’. I shall write of that later, as briefly as I can, because it was one of the most terrible things that ever happened in my life, and because out of selfishness, I need the relief of the confessional. But not now.

  5. Instructions on the History of Art

  When I was in my penultimate year at school, a piece of great good fortune befell me. Miss Hedgeland, our art mistress, said that she would give, to a group of volunteers, a course in the history of art. I had always loved pictures – but in a fumbling, undirected way. Now, owing to her, and the work she unconsciously induced me to pursue on my own, I am by no means sure that I do not love painting above all the arts.

  After a preliminary lecture, during which she showed us reproductions of paintings from all over the western world, she would take us to spend an hour weekly in the National Gallery. Here she first taught us not to dislike a painting (such as Duccio’s Transfiguration) simply because we were disappointed by the absence of what, at the relevant time, could not have been there. Paintings such as this were for church decoration, and the backgrounds were of solid gold: nobody had yet thought of adding landscape. We were not to let our appreciation of Piero della Francesca’s Nativity be dampened because the cow in it was such a peculiar shape: in Piero’s time, animal anatomy had not been studied. Perspective? If we wanted to see the first fruits of that we could look at Uccello’s ever-ravishing Rout of San Romano. And so, quite quickly, we began to concentrate upon what there was, and not expend energy and appreciation on searching for what could not have been there.