My Animal Life(9)

Of course my mother minded all this very much. And then, Vic criticised her brothers and sisters, when we were back in our own home and away from the battleground of Wolverton v. Stony Stratford. Eve and Albert were too rich and ‘too selfish to have children’ (which was far from being the case. I only understood how much sadness had been concealed when I was eighteen, and in a moment of revelation, Eve showed me, one day, the life-size blonde figure of a child, a giant doll over four feet tall, which she kept sitting on the sofa, when no one was there. She had called her Annabel. Was that selfish?) Arthur and Frances, also childless and therefore fond of their nieces and nephews, annoyed Dad by generously buying me, in the face of his protests, from Woolworths, the flat gold and silver cardboard crowns I craved, to celebrate the Coronation in 1953; I still remember the row between the grownups afterwards in the hot sunlight on Bromsgrove High Street, the horror of it, my gift poisoned with guilt, wishing I had not asked for it … Uncle Arthur and Aunty Frances never came to stay again.

As I remember these quarrels I find myself growing annoyed with my father, for all the trouble he caused, for the gnawing anxiety under my ribs (it’s there now) that I always had to feel, as a child, when we were going to family, ‘to see people’, or indeed going out at all, because visiting a café for a cup of tea or coffee was a minefield with my father — the staff might ignore or insult him, or other customers might sit too close, for he had an exaggerated sense of personal space, which must not be invaded or even passed through by others. This extended to houses and gardens (Vic needed to be detached, but could not afford it), and even to roads, whether semi-private (on the little modern estate where they died in a thin-walled, thin-skinned modern bungalow, he objected to his neighbours’ children riding their bikes down the shared access road which passed his front window) or public (he drove very fast and increasingly badly, and saw any overtaking as a challenge, so it was normal to be roaring down the flat Norfolk roads with Dad in a desperate race for pre-eminence, two abreast, his passengers fearing death. The armour-plated Landrover they bought in their fifties overturned at least twice and frequently disappeared for repairs after crashes Dad never admitted to.)

Dad was a self-deluder, as all of us are, only more so. Not always, and not at the end, when he faced the impossible thing he had always rejected and fled, his death, with clear eyes, and courage. But the high moral code he had been force-fed sometimes made him absurd: ‘I have never told a lie,’ he would say, quite frequently, when accusing one or other of us of untruth (thus telling a lie, of course). When my brother and I got older, we questioned him: ‘You must have done, Dad.’ ‘No, never.’ Shaking his head at us and himself to make it true. He was never wrong, either; evidence was nothing to him, he would simply refuse to consider it; some of the worst father-son arguments of my elder brother’s teenage years were about facts. For example, about the time of a radio programme: John would leave the room and reappear red-faced and triumphant pointing to the item in the Radio Times, but my father, outraged, would shout, ‘Leave it!’ and refuse to look.

As Gees go, Vic was acknowledged, even by other Gees, to be an extreme example. My brothers, in my memory, though they might say different, admired him more as their distance from home lengthened. Male Gees have testosterone in buckets, or maybe that should be spades: buckets AND spades. It is hard for a lot of male Gees to fit into a tiny house, especially when one or more of them is adolescent.

But it was my father, really, who never grew up, not his sons. Part of Dad remained an inconsolable child, needing to be loved and praised more than anyone I have ever known, horribly easily thrown off kilter emotionally, for all his jut-jawed determination. He imagined the world wanted to fight with him, to put him down. He fought back relentlessly, but it cost him. He had to rehearse whatever had happened with my mother, over and over, until she was exhausted. He could never let anything drop until she had acknowledged him to be entirely in the right. Of course: with such a fragile ego, how could he afford to be wrong? How bored she must have been, how tired, and her ‘Yes Vic’s would become thinner and thinner, her face blank, her voice hoarsened by suppressed irritation and disbelief.

(But then, wives should tell their husbands the truth at least some of the time. If only she could have been braver at the beginning, when all habits are made. Wives have to let their husbands know the reality of how they are behaving in the world, as husbands should wives, since that is part of the compact of marriage: I will help you understand how others see you. My mother got too tired and too frightened to keep that part of the bargain.)