Tea At Gunter's Read online

  Should prentice himself to the trade,

  And study all day

  In a methodical way …’

  (With apologies to W. S. Gilbert)

  Underneath, my mother had scribbled, ‘last days of happiness’.

  ‘Everything about that spring and summer was perfect, Lucy. Perfect. Even rain, I don’t remember any – the strawberries, the plums, the roses, they all came on early. We had picnics, Lucy, and expeditions, and days by the sea. And in May there was London, and Rumpelmeyers and Gunter’s (those ices, Lucy!) – then we went to “the Passing Show” at the Palace. Tom, who was quite a clown, used to do a wonderful Basil Hallam, Lucy. “Oh Hades, the ladies, all leave their wooden huts…” I can see Basil Hallam now, Lucy. “I’m Gilbert the Filbert…” And with Elsie Janis – “You’re here and I’m here and the whole wide world is a little cosy corner, for you and me …” We had the gramophone record – we loved our gramophone. We had Gervase Elwes too (that other Gervase, Lucy). He sang – I think they were songs by Shakespeare, Lucy …’

  Within a month of that picture, Gervase had enlisted; and the twins, who were to have gone up to Oxford that autumn, followed soon after. By the early summer of 1915 all three were in France. Tom and Bertie, known to me only from the photographs as two gawky, dark-haired boys, were both killed the following September, within a few hours of each other, at the Battle of Loos. Tom’s body was never found, but when they sent Bertie’s kit back – the people in charge, they can’t have been thinking – everything was there, Lucy. Even his blood-stained breeches. We should have burnt them, of course, but old Simon, the head gardener, buried them for us, in the field behind the orchard. Where St Mary’s have their hockey pitch.’

  She was reticent otherwise about these brothers: they featured often, it was true, in reminiscences about the nigh perfect past, but less as real people than as bit players in the drama of Winifred and Gervase. That she had felt deeply at the time, I’m certain; but now they were no longer central to the action.

  By the time of their death, Patmore had already become a convalescent home for officers. Then in the summer of 1916, Gervase, who so far had led a charmed life, was wounded in the shoulder on the first day of the Somme; later in the year he came home on extended sick leave. ‘I should have married him then, Lucy. Hurried marriages like that, in wartime, they weren’t frowned on, and I was eighteen after all.’ But she hadn’t done so. ‘He would wait, Lucy. He wanted desperately to be able to settle down – for everything to be peaceful again. And Mother agreed with him – at the time.’

  He went back to France. But his run of luck was over. Wounded badly in the chest, he contracted pneumonia from exposure; one lung was permanently damaged; and when eventually he reappeared at Patmore, there were other, even greater worries.

  ‘He was impossible, Lucy – quite impossible. So unlike himself! He would fly into these incredible rages; then after, he’d be full of remorse – but just as difficult. Some days, he wouldn’t speak to me at all.’

  His removal to a special recovery hospital puzzled her: ‘They called it shell shock. A sort of neurasthenia. It was something quite new to us at that time. I thought, Lucy, that he didn’t love me any more…’

  Spring 1918. In the Box, there wasn’t a single photograph or souvenir to commemorate this next part of her story. Yet the facts were simple enough. My father was wounded at Cambrai; his leg turned septic, and after a lengthy stay in hospital he was sent to convalesce at Patmore. About the next three months however, my mother would say nothing – I’d had to piece the story together bit by bit from odd remarks – but by midsummer, she had broken her engagement to Gervase.

  Novelty, I think, was the real culprit; novelty, and also being admired at a time when she felt unappreciated. That my father had been good-looking then – as indeed he still was – I knew from the photographs in my grandparents’ front room; but to my mother, his dark vivid colouring must have seemed in unusual contrast with the delicate almost fragile beauty of Gervase; and governess-educated as she was, she must have found his background exciting and different too.

  He’d been brought up in Leeds where his father kept a small grocery shop – although the family came originally from the Dales – and after leaving Leeds Modern had been clerk in a firm of insurance brokers for two years before joining up, going into the army under age. His Yorkshire accent had entranced her. ‘She’d have me lay it on thick, then, just for the fun of it,’ he’d told me once, in an unguarded moment. However little either of them had told me, those spring month in a flower-scented Patmore had an aura about them of barely suppressed physical excitement – at once explaining and excusing what I realized (from various fragments of quarrels, bitter asides, innuendoes) they both thought of now as a misplaced idyll.

  Gervase, not surprisingly, took the news very hard. Whether it was this shock that accounted for his failure ever to recover fully or whether he would never have done so anyway, is an unknown. But whatever the real cause, the Gervase of the Memory Box had gone for ever: leaving behind him guilt, and a question mark, which my mother would answer according to her mood.

  ‘I know I could have cured him’ she would say. ‘They mostly did get better, Lucy.’ But then another time: ‘It would have been a tragic marriage. He would never have recovered, you know.’

  It was my grandmother however, who reacted most strongly to the news. Robert Tinsdale had had a stroke a little time previously and understandably she was worried about this, as well as upset for Gervase, but the real sense of outrage seems to have been caused by something quite other: the threat to her whole way of life. My father, whom she’d thought charming enough when he was a patient and she was Lady Bountiful, as a prospective son-in-law was intolerable. No background, no breeding, with a distinct northern accent and no proper education: a clerk with no prospects. It was only the War which had made him an officer, a ‘temporary gentleman’. Worst of all, she’d complained, he wasn’t a Catholic (although even had he been a duly Mariolatrous, sound Fish on Friday man, he still wouldn’t have done, since it was only the once persecuted recusant families who were the thing). ‘If she could just have kept calm,’ my mother said once. ‘If we could even have discussed it a little – I was still under age after all – then, perhaps … who knows?’ But semi-hysterical, all her hopes and plans dashed, my grandmother proceeded to threaten her in the most hackneyed terms. ‘You’ll be cut off,’ she said. ‘None of us will have anything to do with you!’ Robert Tinsdale was too ill to be told. But had he been able to have an opinion, my grandmother said, it would have echoed hers (an unlikely thought, but since he never spoke again one that couldn’t be disproved).

  She wasn’t the only one to behave dramatically however. My mother, who had been good, happy, acquiescent all her life, now, with a grand gesture of defiance left Patmore for Leeds, to live with my father’s family. If she was expecting a summons back within the week, she must have been surprised. No word came at all.

  She stayed in Leeds six months altogether, and inevitably, there were difficulties. She conceded to me once, grudgingly, that they’d been kind to her, but that was as far as she would go. Yet my grandparents must have been at the least slightly puzzled by this sudden courtship. My father was barely twenty, and as he hadn’t made her pregnant, what was the hurry about? I don’t think either, that she found them sufficiently shocked at her disinheritance – I doubt for instance that they behaved as if they were harbouring a runaway princess.

  They had troubles of their own, anyway. Arnold, their eldest son, was a sergeant in France, and another son, Norman, had been killed earlier that year. Then, only a few weeks after my mother’s arrival, their only daughter, Ethel, died in the first epidemic of Spanish ‘flu. A jolly girl, with buck teeth and a friendly smile, she’d got on extraordinarily well with my mother. How the relationship would have turned out eventually – I don’t know, but it evidently meant a great deal to her then; and she would still sigh occasionally: ‘If Eth
el had only lived, Lucy’ – although it was perhaps not so much to miss her as to mourn the loss of an ally: ‘I know she would have taken my side, Lucy.’

  They were married in October, on my father’s last leave before the Armistice; then in the New Year when my father was demobbed and, luckily, got his old job back, they went to live in furnished rooms in Leeds. Here, I think, reality finally succeeded romance. My grandmother, her bluff called, had shown it to be genuine: my mother’s letters were sent back unopened and other than a few lines of formal permission, the wedding not acknowledged. And from Gervase – not a word. She had been truly cut off.

  It was this time too, I think, saw the beginnings of that restless boredom I now knew so well. She had nothing to do all day except housework (although what little there was she probably found highly complicated). Possibly she’d have handled very competently a large and loyal household staff, for that after all was what she’d been brought up to. (And later she was to inspire great devotion in Mrs Pickering who, slipping into the role almost of ladies’ maid, coped happily year in and year out with the trail of disorder, and the kitchen confusion inseparable from my mother’s attempts at cooking. ‘She’s not been brought up to it, like, you know.’)

  Three years later, and her in-laws had begun hinting about children. ‘It was all I was good for,’ my mother would say bitterly. ‘To give them a grandchild.’ Then in 1924, my brother was born; she had an excuse to get in touch with Patmore, and this time her mother replied – it was a cool, dismissive note (still kept in the Memory Box) with muted congratulations, and a little news. Robert Tinsdale was dead; Gervase was still not back to normal (‘Please do not attempt to see him, Winifred.’) and it was doubtful whether he would ever be able to run the estate properly – a convent was very interested, and they were thinking of selling up. That was all.

  The brief interlude of my brother’s life was celebrated in the Memory Box, only by a couple of photographs, showing a large fair-haired toddler in rompers standing on the lawn; it is summertime so that the pictures must have been taken shortly after my parents’ move to Bratherton, in the spring of 1926. One July evening in the following year, Michael climbed out of his cot and, in his night-clothes, rode his small red tricycle down the back path. The gate wasn’t properly fastened, and he went outside – pedalling directly into the path of a lorry.

  It had been my father, not my mother, who’d supplied the details. She’d been tight-lipped on the subject. He’d described it matter of factly, as if shock had detached it from any emotion, and as a result I had never thought it to be real in any personal sense – it might have been the tragedy of some other, unknown family.

  My mother hadn’t wanted another child. What the real pattern of those first seven or eight years of marriage had been I don’t know; but in one of the few remarks I remember her making (usually she would say: ‘you can’t expect me to discuss that time, Lucy,’) she’d said of Michael’s birth: ‘all that pain and suffering – for nothing. And it was no help to the marriage. No help at all.’ It was a difficult, forceps delivery, there were severe complications, and she’d been told that she was most unlikely to conceive again – so what her feelings were when expecting me, I can only guess. But afterwards they were quite clear: she didn’t want me.

  Two months before I was born, her mother had died suddenly of a heart attack, and this loss, cutting off still more links with Patmore and removing finally any possibility of reconciliation, must have had a profound effect on her. After my birth she almost certainly suffered from a post-natal depression which, undiagnosed and untreated as so often happened at that time, dragged on for years; apathy alternating with the now familiar, restless boredom.

  One of my earliest and clearest memories is of being in the same room with her: she was sitting in the armchair while I had some wooden bricks on the carpet. I remember that she didn’t speak to me, or seem to move at all; the room was growing dark, but she’d put no light on. Then I must have bumped into her, or jolted her in some way because she said suddenly and angrily, and absurdly loudly even allowing for childish memory, something like: ‘Who asked you to come in here?’

  Most of the affection, attention, stimulation I received in those first years, came in fact from my father. Frank, who had just moved in next door, told me once: ‘It was some sight your Dad pushing the pram. But I didn’t laugh – no one laughed. He’d bath you round at ours. Nora were alive then and you’d sit on her knee.’ I think too that he did quite a lot of the cleaning in the house – Mrs Pickering didn’t appear till I was seven or eight – and as he was working quite hard for his firm at the time, he must have been very tied: especially as it was the social side of his job he enjoyed most. Later, it was always he who played with me at weekends; and in the evenings I would wait for him to come and put me to bed. Even when in my first year at the Council school, I had a small birthday party, it was my father who managed it entirely, sitting at the piano in a homemade paper hat, cigarette in mouth, playing, singing, ‘Lookie, lookie, here comes cookie’, ‘The music goes round and round’, ‘Who’s afraid of the big bad wolf?’.

  My mother did, however, do two positive things in those early years. She’d already scored a great success with her in-laws by giving them a grand-daughter (Uncle Arnold, married just after the War, had had three boys); now, unwittingly, she scored another. She insisted that I be christened Lucy, after Gervase’s mother who had died in childbirth. The Taylors, delighted, assumed at once that it must be after my grandfather’s sister, Aunt Lucy Thornthwaite – whom my mother might have heard speak of, but whose existence she’d certainly forgotten. Aunt Lucy was very flattered. A formidable widow, she lived over at Holmfirth. Her husband had been decorated in the Afghan War, and on our twice-yearly visits the medals would be brought out of their glass case and the story retold. Although what I remember about her was her vigorous black moustache, which seemed to grow longer and thicker each visit. ‘And how’s my little namesake?’ she’d say invariably, planting a bristly kiss.

  My mother’s other positive action was to insert a notice of my birth in The Times – I was already several months old when she did it (in a sudden burst of energy), but Gervase (and she had been hoping for this surely?) happened to see it, and that same day, from his cottage in the grounds of St Mary’s Convent, he sat down and wrote her a long, rambling letter.

  This too, she kept in the Box. Its writing, thin, feathery, uncertain, is only just recognizable, so altered is it from that on the early photographs; the thought is confused too – reminiscences merge with suggestions so that the sense isn’t always clear. But there is no recrimination, no self pity – he merely wants, very much, to see her again.

  ‘Do you ever by chance come up to London? If so, couldn’t we meet, possibly? What about Gunter’s in Berkeley Square – or has that gone?’ And if she does come, could the meeting be in August? An odd time, but it suits him – he is often up staying at his Club then. Does she remember, he wonders, the time (‘before Armageddon’), one August the twelfth, when they had all been at Gunter’s, his father too – and she had teased them for not being out on the grouse moors? Was that a true memory, or a false one? She must say. ‘I seem unable as it were, to feel a certainty about –’ Then through the word ‘anything’ he’s drawn a line. An accidental jerk, or deliberate?

  That summer my mother roused herself and went up to Gunter’s, for the first of those annual reunions which soon were to become the central event of her year. Back home again however, she was no better. My existence, even though it had been the direct cause of her seeing Gervase again, continued to be a nuisance to her. Her asthma, which she had had only hints of before, dated really from the time of that first tea – but the rest of her ill health, the migraines, the debility, the languor, she blamed on my birth.

  Those first seven or eight years though, I wasn’t at all unhappy. I had an ally, full time. My father had wanted a daughter; and told me so, frequently. Even my first, reluctant visit
to Gunter’s seemed to make no difference to the pattern. Instinctively I didn’t discuss it with him before or after: he rarely mentioned Patmore anyway, and the days of my mother’s obsessive reminiscing had not yet begun.

  But about this time he began telling me of his war experiences – doing so not occasionally, but incessantly, as if he’d reached some stage when he had to talk. On a simple level, my knowledge was soon considerable – almost encyclopaedic: long before I’d heard of 1066, and even before I knew my fairy stories properly, I had a head full of howitzers, mark sevens, French heavies, Jack Robinsons. I was his strange but willing audience – so willing, that I think sometimes he forgot it was a child he was talking to; often I was frightened: rats, shot at for sport, sleek and well fed on army food and corpses, flitted disgustingly through my dreams, while a live one, glimpsed once, streaking, fleshy and plump-tailed over a grave-stone, set me to a high-pitched screaming.

  Other times, he would talk as if I weren’t there at all: usually when he’d been drinking. He confessed once to a feeling of overwhelming wickedness: ‘There were four of us went in together – all clerks in the office. All pals. I was the only one came back.’ But this was beyond me: ‘Weren’t you glad then?’ I kept saying, ‘weren’t you glad they didn’t kill you?’

  It was his religious attitudes, however, that had perhaps the most lasting effect on me. He’d been brought up as a Methodist (yet another nail in his coffin at Patmore) but sometime during the War he’d lost it all, practice and beliefs. He’d raised no objections to being married in a Catholic church; and the fact that I was being reared as a Catholic – one of the few things my mother had insisted on – was to him a matter of indifference, almost irrelevancy. Later, I went through the forms mechanically, even making my first confession and communion. But his attitude prevailed, so that even now, close as I was to my mother, I kept it up only to please her.

  The change of allegiance from a father- to a mother-centred world was gradual but, once it had begun, inevitable. I never saw it happening. I remember only that my mother began to talk -that she seemed suddenly to be always talking, and that Patmore, Patmore, Patmore was what it was all about.