Walcot

2
An Adult Breath

Your mother liked being in Omega. She decorated it according to her own tastes. The living room was fairly dark; it had only one small window which looked towards the cornfields. It had hip-high wooden panelling painted a deep brown, thus adding to the darkness of the room. To offset this, your mother had scattered orange cushions about on the chairs and settee. She also had, stationed at strategic points, a number of gleaming copper jugs which she polished regularly. And there was a fine brass lamp with a frosted white shade and a clear glass chimney which she lit at dusk. The lamp shed its cosy light over part of the room. There was no electricity available within several miles of Omega.

The walls above the wooden panelling were painted white, and here your mother had hung a number of reproductions of paintings of flowers in bowls and vases. The paintings were glazed and bound in passe-partout. They most typically showed pink and white roses in a deep blue bowl, standing on a well-polished table. A petal had fallen and reflected its colour on table and bowl. Always a fallen petal, its hint of imperfection emphasizing the perfection of the picture.

Your mother was more than usually torpid and framed no flower pictures that night. She was a tall woman, heavy of body, heavy of face. She did her pale hair in a bun, bound tightly to the back of her head, like a supplementary brain. She was given to long skirts of woven material. She had within her the seed of a future child who was destined to take your place; but of this impending event you were not told. It was, as yet, your mother’s secret.

She kept news of her early pregnancy, too, from her visitor. She was a secretive woman and did not entirely trust her visitor, whom she considered superficial. This visitor was younger and more vivacious than your mother. You knew her as your Auntie Violet. ‘No shrinking violet, she!’ your mother was apt to exclaim. ‘Comes from Grantham, of all places,’ she said, appalled.

Auntie Violet was sharp and pale of face, with beautiful arched eyebrows and a permanent wave in her hair which, despite its permanence, was frequently renewed. She had a neat upturned little nose, which you mentally labelled pert. She generally wore strings of beads which rattled across a generous bosom. Her flesh was pale and clear. She smelled delicious. Her clothes were bright, worn with belts which drooped over the upper reaches of her behind. Her shoes, at least at this moment, were bright red. You were fascinated by this flitting figure who drove to Omega in her own open-top tourer. Auntie Violet was married to your mother’s younger brother, Bertie Wilberforce.

Auntie Violet smoked cigarettes in a long amber holder. Her lips were red. She had another endearing trait: she liked small boys and, in particular, she liked giving you treats. She had brought you a wooden glider. You ran outside to fly it; it flew well and meant many excursions between the crisp stalks of the cornfield to retrieve it.

While you were flying your glider, your mother and your aunt had a quarrel. Somehow you perceived this as you returned to Omega. Auntie Violet stood smoking on the verandah, looking statuesque. She made a decision and said to you, ‘I do not neglect my children. I love my children. And I love you, Stevie dear.’ She bent and kissed you on the forehead. You were puzzled by this sudden display. You entered the bungalow to see your mother standing with her arms akimbo – always a bad sign.

While you were accustomed to your mother’s moods, there was another worry on your mind. Auntie Violet was staying overnight. Omega contained only two bedrooms and the spare bed was in your room. You would have Auntie Violet sleeping in the bedroom with you. You were unsure how you should behave in this situation. You knelt and said your prayers by your bedside every night, as your mother had taught you; somehow, instinct told you now that Auntie Violet did not kneel by her bedside to say her prayers. It might be advisable to skip prayers this evening. And you hoped that God would be understanding, although he did not seem to have been particularly understanding in the past. He seemed, like your mother, to be a bit moody.

Several years later, when your auntie was thinking of committing suicide, she told you a remarkable story, which was to haunt much of your life. She said that for an hour or two she and your mother were not talking to each other. She looked hard at you and said that she was in your bedroom until the storm blew over, when the phone rang in the main room. Your mother had picked up the phone. Auntie Violet had listened to the conversation, and concluded that it was your father, your cold and distant father, who was on the other end of the line.

According to Violet, your mother said, ‘Yes, high tide was at about a quarter-to-four today … no, no, he came back as usual … we hope for better things tomorrow … it is likely to be windier, so the sea should be choppier … I can’t do anything more, sorry … No, he doesn’t mind being alone there … no, no one … if he was you know, it would of course be a regrettable accident … Don’t worry. As you say, hope for the best. I don’t want to discuss it … Good-bye.’

That is what your Auntie Violet told you she overheard your mother saying.

Your Auntie Violet was alarmed by the deductions she drew from this one-sided conversation. She believed it meant you were in grave danger. She did not know what to do and so she did nothing.

You were called for supper. Your mother instructed you to behave as Valerie would have behaved. You sat quietly at the table and ate your mackerel, mashed potato and mange touts. Your mother and Auntie Violet drank white wine from South Africa. They made polite conversation. The brass lamp with the frosted white shade shed a comfortable glow over the woven tablecloth.

You had been taught not to hum with pleasure as you ate.

The dessert was pineapple slices and cream. You luxuriated in the taste of pineapple, although it sometimes made your lips rough. You lingered over it. The meal being finished, your mother made Violet and herself some tea. She unfortunately brought up the case of the golden thing she said you pretended to have seen on the beach.

‘I didn’t pretend. I did see it,’ you said.

‘There’s no such creature as this golden thing,’ your mother responded.

‘Perhaps he really did see something if he says so,’ remarked Auntie Violet, casting a smile in your direction.

‘You’ll just have to go back tomorrow and perhaps you’ll see it again,’ your mother said, rather snappishly. After a short while she suggested you go to bed.

As you lay in bed, you could hear the murmur of their voices in the next room. At last, the bedroom door quietly opened. You closed your eyes and pretended to sleep. Your Auntie Violet entered, carrying a candle in a blue metal holder with a broad rim, with which you were familiar. The candle flame flickered in the draught of her entry.

Your auntie set the candle down on the bedside table you shared between you. She looked over at you. You feigned sleep.

She undressed. Her fragrance came to you. There was a moment when she removed her panties, letting them slide to the ground, and you saw the smooth arc of her back shining in the candlelight, and the innocence of her buttocks. Something within you was obscurely touched. Then her nightdress slipped over her head.

As she climbed into bed, the springs of the bed squeaked. Her head was on the pillow. You imagined she was staring towards you, and squeezed your eyes more tightly shut.

‘Stephen,’ she called in a whisper.

In a minute, she called your name again. ‘Stevie.’

You sighed and turned over. It was very realistic. Then you sat up, to ask if she’d called you.

She said she knew you weren’t asleep. She invited you to go over to her bed and have a cuddle.

Although you wished to go, you protested that you wanted to get to sleep.

She laughed softly and told you not to be shy. Again she invited you across that narrow space between your beds.

You felt yourself blushing as you obeyed. She opened up the bed and you climbed in. She put her arms around you and hugged you. She blew out the candle. You were in darkness together, the two of you, with her fragrance and her body heat.

She kissed your neck. You felt her tender warmth and found it more beautiful than you could possibly imagine. Without knowing how you could dare to do it, you wriggled about and put your arms round her neck.

‘That’s more like it,’ she said. Her breath was adult, with flavours of nicotine and toothpaste.

You had no idea what to do next, although you felt something was required. She kissed you on your cheek, then lay there with her head on the pillow, her dark hair overflowing, and her lips against your cheek. You filled with happiness, only to find how like terror happiness is.

You blurted out that you loved her.

‘Good, my little darling,’ she said in a whisper. ‘And I love you.’

Slowly and gently, she fell asleep. You struggled to sleep for her warmth and beauty. But eventually you did sleep.

The next day, your bright and loving young auntie drove away from Omega. You stood with your mother and waved her goodbye. Because you were so young and dominated by your mother, you were unable to put your feelings into words; they swam in you like fish that never reached the surface. For that reason perhaps, you could never name them.

In the same way, this grave and joyful event became confused with the idea of the gold thing which came down from the sky, both events being seen as in someway ‘golden’. As time went by and you did not see anything more descending from heaven, you began questioning the truth of the experience, prompted perhaps by your mother’s disbelief. But you never doubted the truth of climbing into your auntie’s bed and being encompassed by her warmth and goodness. Indeed, in your adult life, whether consciously or not, you frequently sought to relive that transcendental experience in the beds of other women. It was only in those years of your childhood, when you were soon replaced by the baby girl to whom your mother shortly gave birth, that you sometimes wondered if your auntie had behaved out of a spirit of mischief, rather than a spirit of what you generally regarded as compassion.

Of course, as a four-year-old you were not clear about this matter. You never considered, as your aunt had done, that your parents had hoped to be rid of you by ‘accidental’ drowning. Only during Violet’s disquisition did you discover – and great was your dismay upon hearing it – that those long summer days of contentment, playing in solitude on the beaches of Walcot, were intended to be your last: for what caring parent would permit a small child to remain all alone for so long, in circumstances which by their very nature held danger for the unwary?

In your innocence, such thoughts did not occur to you. However, on one occasion they came close. You were playing in one of the warm pools that dotted the great beaches. Shrimps and little fish were floating by you. You tried to trap one fish with an idle hand. It stung your finger with unexpected intensity. The pain shot up your arm. You could not bear it. You needed your mother’s comfort.

Abandoning pail and spade, you ran back, nursing your hand, husbanding your tears, over the dunes, down Archibald Lane, to Omega. You ran inside, for the door was never locked.

Your mother had gone. No one was there. The bungalow was empty.

Mary’s mother, Granny Wilberforce, had been staying for two days. They had gone. Father had driven them off for a jaunt somewhere. The familiar car was not in the driveway. They had abandoned you to the sands and the tides.

You lay stunned on the sofa, waiting for their return. After an hour you grew ashamed, ashamed of yourself, ashamed of your parents. You crept away, back onto the beaches, so that their neglect was hidden from them.

Here’s an instance of your concealing your pain, isn’t it?

Why do you draw my attention to it?

Because it becomes a lifelong habit. A habit that makes some people find you difficult to understand. Do you see that now?

I never felt my parents troubled to understand their son. That was certainly a pain I strove to hide.

Tell me why.

I suppose I didn’t … didn’t want them to feel bad … Because … they already felt bad enough.

3
Almost Drowned

Quite late in your life there fell into your hands a leather-bound copy of the Holy Bible, which, you were told, had been owned by your paternal grandmother. This Bible had been a present from your grandfather to Elizabeth Harper when he was courting her. Later he would win Miss Harper’s hand in marriage. A label inserted in the preliminary pages of the Bible read, ‘From S.M.F. to Miss Elizabeth Harper as a token of his love’. And there was a date, May 1891.

The formality of this message enclosed within the pages of a Bible convinced you of the solemnity of a Victorian courtship. Possibly it also spoke of something slightly stiff in the character of your grandfather.

The evidence of your father’s courtship of your mother was hardly more substantial, obscured as it was by the advent of war. Even before the Victorian Age was over, the nations of Europe were arming themselves against one other. In another August, an August graver than the one we have been discussing, war broke out after a shot was fired in Sarajevo. One by one, the nations were drawn towards the flame. Soon, all of Europe was at war. And your father was of an age to volunteer to fight. So the story went that young Martin Fielding became a pilot in the Royal Flying Corps, which at a later date became the Royal Air Force. He flew in Sopwith Camels, first of all on the Western Front and then in Mesopotamia. He shot down three German planes and became an air ace, with his picture in the Daily Graphic.

When Martin’s plane crashed he was injured and spent some months in a hospital in Cairo – ‘Cairo of all places’, as your mother was frequently to say thereafter. In 1918, with the war ending, he was brought home on a troopship. The troopship moored a mile outside Southampton harbour, the troops fretting over the delay about getting ashore. It is here that Martin emerges from being ‘Mentioned in Despatches’ and becomes part of the folklore of your family. Martin dived off the troopship and swam ashore, in his impatience to meet again Miss Mary Wilberforce, to whom he was engaged. Another reason for his rebellious act was that he had become politicized by his wartime experiences. He had experienced the great division between men and officers and became a Socialist.

Mary Wilberforce lived in a sleepy cathedral town outside London. It was her younger brother, Bertie, who was later to marry your Aunt Violet; her older brother, Ernest, was killed in the Battle of the Somme. You can understand that all over Europe, people were scuttling everywhere, trying to pick up the threads of their lives, hoping to restore a normality that had vanished and would never return to the world.

Mary Wilberforce married Martin Fielding in May of 1919. Many marriages must have taken place in that year, as people strove to put the horrors of the war behind them and reconstruct their lives. You may ask why, if Martin was in such a hurry to get ashore and claim his ladylove, the marriage was delayed for almost a year. Certainly Martin, your father, had been injured in the war, but the wound had healed sufficiently to enable him to swim that mile from ship to shore. It seems not unlikely that he was suffering from some other type of malady, possibly picked up during his weeks of recuperation in the city of Cairo.

Although your father had to give up flying, he did not lose his love of aviation. In 1924, the year you were born, Imperial Airways undertook a commercial programme of flights across the world. Martin worked for Imperial before moving to Vickers Aviation, where Bertie Wilberforce was also employed. Bertie was a pilot. Bertie flew a Vickers ‘Victoria’, a troop-carrying plane, to Kabul in Afghanistan in 1929, rescuing six hundred people threatened by revolution there.

Martin was active in trade unionism, determined to obtain better pay and conditions for the workers. He made himself unpopular and moved to another company on the South Coast. The family went with him.

Omega was to be sold.

‘We have to make sacrifices now and again,’ said Martin, consolingly, to his weepy wife.

The last summer spent at Walcot was during the nineteen-thirties, when war clouds were gathering and the voice of the dictator of Germany was growing louder and shriller. You had a small, lively sister, Sonia, by that time. Your mother accompanied Sonia and you down to the beach. Your father was also there, during one of his increasingly rare visits. Politics taking up more of his time, he was a candidate to become Socialist Member of Parliament for the New Forest constituency on the south coast, following the death of Bernie Hale, the previous incumbent.

While Sonia and you played on the newly revealed stretch of beach, your parents sat nearby on deck chairs. Both were fully dressed; your father, you remember, wore highly polished brown shoes. They always kept anxious eyes on Sonia who, in consequence, was nervous, and did not like to splash in the deeper pools. You were absorbed some distance away, chasing a small crab with your shrimping net. The intense murmuring silences of the sea were broken by Sonia’s shrieks and your father’s shouts at you. You caught the crab in your net before turning.

Sonia was lying on her back a few feet away, her hair in a shallow pool. She was crying in terror. Your father was ordering you to go to her aid. You popped the crab in your rubber pail and then ran over to her. While helping her to her feet, you could not understand why she had not got up of her own accord.

Your father was furious with you. ‘Why didn’t you hurry? Sonia could have drowned!’

‘No, she couldn’t. Her face was not in the water.’

He clenched his fist. ‘She almost drowned.’

‘No, she didn’t, dad, really.’

‘Don’t you argue with me, boy!’

‘I’m just saying her face –’

‘She was helpless. You didn’t care one bit, you little wretch.’

‘I rescued her, didn’t I?’

‘Go back to the bungalow at once! Get off the beach! Go away!’

After tipping your crab back into the warm pool, you made your way up the beach.

‘Come back, Stevie!’ called Sonia. ‘I’m all right! Really I am!’

You did not turn your head. You made your way down Archibald Lane without a tear. You went into Omega and settled down to read a book. You never in your childhood saw the beaches of Walcot again.

4
An Absolute Slave

Of course there were other Wilberforces, other Fieldings.

You recall various splurges with some of them, and with other friends of yours – indeed, splurges too with strangers. Splurges when you were half-boy, half-adult, ending up in Indian restaurants, swilling down glasses of Kingfisher lager, showing off, laughing ‘fit to bust’.

You remember going off to pee one time, almost falling down the steep steps to Avernus, into the reeking, hot basement, realizing you were drunk, staggering, running your dirty hand over the dirty walls to steady yourself. Alien territory, sopping towels lying exhausted on the floor, doors marked successively STAFF, PRIVATE, LADIES, KEEP OUT. A fellow rushing by, throwing out a look of contempt as you were already unzipping, ready for the outpouring. GENTS, it said. And you smelt the urine/disinfectant smell like soup spilt on an oilcloth table cover. You tossed away in disgust from between your lips the half-puffed fag. It fell on the red-tiled floor. You directed a first splash at it to put it out, laughing weakly, then directing all your energy to the hard squirt into the china bowl, in which sodden things lay. You used your penis like a hose, amused to direct it to splash right up the wall. It writhed in your fingers, glad as a puppy for its master’s touch.

You did not know then that a time would come when you would climb unsteadily down those same stairs, to that same urinal, this time going slowly, hobbling even, the frayed remnant of what you cherished proudly long ago already leaking into your trousers in anticipation and then, when you make it to the sordid bowl, unable to produce anything but an irregular drip. You would lean your arm against the wall and your head against your arm and you would spit into the yellow trail below. You would not be miserable exactly. You would just know that you had run out of spark and spunk and steam, and would be sort of semi-glad of it. But all this awaits you in the future.

You and all your pals.

Early in life you saw what old age and its captivities meant. You were fortunate, in that respect, to escape.

You mean I will not become a prisoner in my old age?

That is not my meaning exactly.

What do you mean?

Let us continue with your timelife story.

You worry me. What do you mean?

No, you do not worry. That’s just a figure of speech. You will become old but never reach extreme old age.

You had a girlfriend at this period, as young as you but with plenty of female assurance. Her name was Gale Roberts, a rather cinematic name which bestowed glamour on her. Her mother was a big, hearty woman, who liked to praise things in general. She called you ‘sensible’. When she despatched you and Gale to visit her Uncle Norman and his wife, Tamsin, she described their tragedy in enthusiastic terms.

‘She’s totally incapacitated, poor darling thing! She bears her misfortune so nobly. And my brother – well, Norman’s such a sweetie-pie! Of course, an absolute slave to Tammy, an absolute slave, he does everything, but everything for her. As you’ll see, my dear.’

The visit proved a memorable one.

Tamsin Roberts had ‘broken her back’, as the phrase had it, when crossing a road in France and encountering a slow-moving vehicle. She suffered complex fractures of several vertebrae. Both Robertses were in their early fifties; to you they seemed vastly old. They lived in a small terraced house, the upper floor of which they let out.

When you rang the bell, Norman peeped out before nodding and letting you both in.

‘Just doing a spot of cleaning,’ he said with a laugh that affected at once to laugh at himself and to explain the floral apron he was wearing. Norman was a small, dry man with a sandy moustache and a large red nose. He clutched a yellow duster.

Tamsin was confined to an armchair in what had been their dining room, where she could gaze out at the small garden. Now she got her meals on a tray. Her husband, Gale’s uncle, looked after her, doing everything for her; dressing her, undressing her, shopping and cooking for her.

Somehow they remained cheerful. The radio was always on. They kept two cats, Mike and Snippets, both tabbies. The cats hung about in picturesque positions on items of furniture, the one on the piano, the other on a side table. When they moved, they moved carefully about the little crowded room, full of its small tables, its china figures and its potted plants.

Gale presented the Roberts with a cake her mother had baked. They chatted of small things. Tamsin spoke in a flat voice, but appeared cheerful enough. Norman said he pushed her up the street and back in her wheelchair every day, when all the neighbours came out to speak to them.

‘What a lot they are,’ said Tamsin, looking slightly humorous as she referred to the neighbours.

As you and Gale were about to leave, Norman ushered you out, saying, ‘Careful how you go. Mind the ironing board. I’ve just got to iron one of Tammy’s nighties. I’ll just shut the kitchen door. We love the cats so much; we don’t want them to escape. We never let them go outside.’

So off the two of you went, carefree and skipping up the street, Gale swinging her mother’s wicker shopping basket. You were getting to the stage when you might dare to kiss Gale.

‘So what do you make of that pair of old crocks?’ Gale asked.

‘Your uncle’s very good with Tamsin. Life can’t be much fun for him.’

Gale sat down on a low wall, adjusting her dress so that first you saw a lot of thigh and then none. ‘I reckon uncle enjoys being prison warden.’ She spoke carelessly.

‘Prison warden? How do you make that out?’ You stood in front of her, your trousers all but touching her knees. ‘I thought he was her slave. Isn’t that the general idea?’

She tossed a lock of dark hair from her eyes. It immediately fell back into its original position, its lowest strands to rest on her rosy cheek. ‘You heard what he said – about the cats, I mean. He loves the cats but is afraid they may escape. So they are stuck for ever in the house. Could be he feels the same about her.’

‘You mean he feels Tamsin might escape?’

‘Maybe he used to. You can see how insecure he is. He’s glad she is stuck in that chair, unable to get away from him.’

Such a concept had not occurred to you. The novelty, the secrecy of it, thrilled you in some way. ‘But what does she feel?’

Gale sighed and looked up at you with a contemplative air. ‘Work it out for yourself. Could be she likes being a prisoner. She was always a bit valetudinarian, even when she was young – like her mum.’

‘So you’re saying they get on okay?’

‘I’m saying it may not be the way it looks, with them both being miserable. Just could be it even suits them.’

‘But you can’t ask them –’

She reached out and touched your hand. ‘Of course you can’t ask them, silly!’

‘What a bugger that you can’t ask them straight out.’

But your mind was not really on that mystery of human relationships; it centred more on Gale’s pretty, moist lips. You leant forward, clutched her shoulders and kissed her.

The world turned to gold dust about you.

You often wondered what sort of person Valerie had been in her short life. After the visit to the Roberts’ house, you found reason to wonder about yourself. You had gone on this rather boring – as you initially saw it – visit to an invalid, simply to be near Gale. You were well aware of the life of the senses, even if, at that early age, you stood as yet high and dry on its shores. You were also aware of another life, one that might hinder or distract you from the sensual oceans represented by the tepid lake of Gale Roberts, and that was one to which she herself had directed your attention: the life of human motivation, so cunning, so unfathomable.

For which way had it been in the invalid’s semi-detached home? Was old Norman the slave or the captor? Was she the dominatrix or the prisoner? Only slowly, as you sat upstairs in your bedroom, gazing blankly at the painting of birds quietly despoiling a wheat harvest, did it occur to you that both interpretations, such was the complexity of the human psyche, could be simultaneously viable.

Yet never did it occur to you that there were parallels here with your own unresolved dilemma; the Walcot problem.