My Animal Life(21)

But on the drawing-board this house, for us all, was to be perfect, the final stage in our ascension from Bucks, via Poole (and a small retreat, reculer pour mieux sauter, to the midlands) to Sussex. My own part of the excitement was choosing paint for my bedroom. Remember the rarity of luxury and colour in that austere post-war world of the fifties, the scarcity of ornament and print. So the paint manufacturer’s cards with their tiny neat pools of gloss or matte colour, dozens of shades all subtly different, the smell of the cardboard and the feel to my fingertips of the cool slippery gloss, were artefacts of rare beauty. Each small bright rectangle of paint had a number which led you to a correspondingly wonderful name: Jasmine Yellow, Duck-egg Blue, Apricot Pink. I changed my mind over and over again.

Yet the room, when finally unveiled, was a bad disappointment. I was sure that my parents had muddled up my choices. One wall was a murky blue-green, one a fleshy, overbearing pinky-orange, two were yellow, and clashed with the pink. And there were acid yellow curtains with a pattern of rickshaw-pulling coolies with pigtails; I definitely hadn’t chosen those. I raged and complained.

My poor parents. They had wanted me to be pleased, and let me choose. Instead I made everyone unhappy. I insisted, and cried, and screamed, that I had never chosen these horrors. I wanted to be myself. My family was totally unsatisfactory.

Looking back, what threw me was the difference between real paint and the ideal poetry of names.

We lived in the Croft for two decades, until the mid-seventies, for my father had got his headship (‘I was one of the youngest heads in the country’), and stayed until retirement, his youth worn away, jaw jutting forward with the strain of the job to which he walked off every morning, a three-minute walk in his long grey-beige gaberdine mack to the big modern school at the bottom of our garden which he steered from a secondary modern to one of the first comprehensives. My brother John and I grew up and became adolescents, though we weren’t modern teenagers at all. John, tall and skinny with very long arms, a vulnerable Adam’s apple, full sensual lips and a brilliant mathematical brain, came effortlessly top of all subjects at his excellent grammar school, Colyers, and was a demon fast bowler in the Billingshurst cricket team, ‘over-bowled’ by the captain, as Dad said, despairingly, thinking of future arthritis as John pounded away summer Saturdays notching up wickets. John was a Manchester United fan like my father, and went out with the girl next door. What better son could be imagined? My father loved him to a painful degree, yet he fought with him; too much testosterone under one roof. I too was a good teenager in many ways, a bad one in others. Like John, I was both a swot and a sports fiend; I was sexually innocent, neither drank nor took drugs (I was saving things up for later, getting up a head of pressure so the eventual explosion would be worthwhile). Yes, I tormented my kind mother with cruel remarks, refused to eat with my family, read half the night, hated my father, started to be weird about food. But in public terms, both John and I were successes. In private we raged and stormed and, in the end, partially curbed ourselves; one by one, as raw seventeen-year-olds, before things could get too bad, we went away. Another brother was born, the baby of the family, Jamey or James, nearly ten years younger than me, a blond-curled, blue-eyed boy of great beauty and perfect eyesight, whereas John and I were both wiry bespectacled children with knobbly joints and big ears, then awkward adolescents who couldn’t wait to be twenty. In time James became a teenager, actually a teenager, unlike his two elder siblings, dancing to T-Rex, being a proto-communist, bringing girlfriends home. And as all these things happened Vic and Aileen aged from their thirties into their fifties, and certain things became set, and others, in the hothouse of our adolescence, burst and broke, and some of the hopes of the big sunny bay were disappointed, and others, for the next generation’s success, were exceeded.

From the springboard of the local grammar schools, those engines of class mobility which the current Labour government considers undemocratic, both my elder brother John and I won Major Oxford Scholarships, John’s in Physics and mine in English, while my political younger brother James (now Jim, but still unnaturally handsome) went to the best place for politics, LSE. Our parents were so proud, too proud for good sense.

Easy to understand why, since Vic and Aileen were easily as clever as their children, but were doomed by their class, and in my mother’s case, gender, not to have the education they deserved. (My mother, like her sister Eve, couldn’t continue her education after her ‘Highers’, because what little money the parents had was earmarked for the boys’ apprenticeships, even though the girls were brighter than the boys; only Eve and Aileen ‘passed the scholarship’ at eleven to the grammar school. ‘We thought nothing of it,’ said my mother, of the way the money went to her brothers. ‘It was just the way things were.’) My father had done an external, thus affordable, degree in geography, art, religious knowledge and PE at St Luke’s College, Exeter, which he did not rate highly. On the wall of our dining-room now is a black-and-white watercolour he did of the room where he stayed. ‘CORNER OF ROOM: 4-WASH TONAL EXERCISE, 1935’, the title written in his meticulously pencilled capital letters, underlined with obvious use of a ruler. It is a beautiful thing, because Vic had a real gift for drawing, as did his brother Lloyd who, apprenticed in the Railway Works, eventually rose to become the designer of the Queen’s Train. But the room in my father’s vision is claustrophobic, the bed ultra-narrow, the corner cluttered with bleak furniture, the window barred though the sunlight comes in a flood through one side of the curtain, the shadow in the corner very dark.