Backcloth: A Memoir

Part One

Chapter 1

Memory: I scratch about like a hen in chaff.

The first thing that I can recall is light.

Pale, opaque green, white spots drifting. Near my right eye long black shapes curling down and tickling gently.

Years later when I reported this memory to my parents they confirmed it. There had, apparently, been an extraordinary pea-soup fog; it had snowed at the same time. My mother had lifted me up to observe the phenomenon; the black feathers which wreathed her hat irritated my eyes and I tried to pull them away. I was nine months old.

When I was two, I remember lying on my back on the lawn behind the house in St Georges Road. It was a brilliant day of high wind and scudding cloud. The tall house reeled away from me as the clouds whipped across the blue sky and I was afraid that it would fall down and crush me.

And later I saw our giant ginger cat – well, giant to me then – nailed alive to the tall wooden fence which separated us from an unfriendly neighbour. I remember my mother weeping: which frightened me far more than the sight of the dying cat for I had not yet learned to recognize cruelty or death, but I was recognizing pain and distress on a human face for the first time.

It would not be the last.

The house in St Georges Road was tall, ugly, built of grey-yellow bricks with a slate roof. It had the great advantage for my father, who was an artist, of a number of high-ceilinged rooms with a perfect north light. It also had a long narrow garden with ancient trees.

An Irish woman lived in the basement with two children and cleaned the house from time to time. She had once been a maid to the Chesterfields, who lived in a very grand house not far away called The Lodge.

Sometimes I would see her crouching on a landing with a mop or a brush. There was an almost constant smell of cooking from the basement, and my father said it was Irish stew because that’s what the Irish ate.

I suppose that made sense to me – at least, I have remembered it.

My father was a prudent man, with little fortune, and he let off most of the rooms in the house to artist friends, so that (apart from the prevailing smell of Irish stew) the place reeked of turpentine and linseed oil, and the mixed scent of those two is the one that I remember best and with which, anywhere I go, if I smell it, I am instantly at ease, familiar and secure.

One of his lodgers was, in fact, an artists’ model who had been left behind, in a rather careless manner, by an artist who had wandered off to Italy to paint. I knew her as Aunt Kitty.

Tiny, vivid, a shock of bright red hair brushed high up from her forehead, brilliant green eyes heavily lined with kohl, she was loving, warm and exceptionally noisy. For some reason, which I can no longer recall, I always seemed to see her carrying a tall glass of Russian tea in a silver holder. I never knew why – or even what it was, then; and I never asked. She just did.

She had a powder puff in a red leather bag which I found interesting, for it looked exactly like a fat little bun with an ivory ring in its middle. If you pulled the ring, out came the powder puff, of softest swansdown, and the powder never spilled. It smelled sweet and sickly. I liked it.

Her room was dark nearly all the time for she hated daylight, which, she said, gave her terrible headaches. So the room was lighted here and there with small lamps draped with coloured handkerchiefs; each had a stick of incense burning beside it. The handkerchiefs cast strange and beautiful patterns on the ceiling.

There was a gold and black striped divan. Cushions in profusion tumbled all about the floor for one to sit on or lie upon. She had no chairs. I found that exceptionally curious. As I did the polar bear rug with roaring head, fearful teeth, glassy eyes and a pink plaster tongue, and the tall jars stuffed with the feathers from peacocks’ tails.

It was the most exciting room in the house. She also had a portable gramophone which stood on a table with a broken leg that she had supported with a pile of books. She would wind it up after each record, a cigarette hanging from her lips, hoop earrings swinging from her ears, dressed as I only ever remember her dressed: in long, rustling dressing-gowns, covered with flowers and blue-birds, bound around her waist with a wide tasselled sash. The tassels swung and danced as she moved.

On occasion she was distressed and wept hopelessly: then my mother had to go down to the scented room and comfort her. Sometimes, too, she was rather strange. Leaning across to caress my cheek, for example, she would quite often miss me and crash to the floor in a heap. I found this worrying at first. However, she usually laughed and dragged herself upright by holding on to the nearest piece of furniture.

She once told me, leaning close to my face, that she had had ‘one over the eight’, but I didn’t know what she meant, and when I asked my father he bit his lower lip, a sign I knew to indicate anger, and said he didn’t know.

But I was pretty certain that he did.

Her dazzling eyes, the henna’d hair frizzed out about the pale, oval face, the coarse laughter, the tassels and the peacocks’ feathers are still, after so many years, before me – and remain indelibly a part of my life.

She offered me, in that crammed room, a sense of colour and beauty, and even, although I was almost unaware of it at the time, excitement. I was uncomprehending of nearly all that she said but I did realize that she was offering riches beyond price.

First had come light; after light, scent, originally of turpentine and linseed oil (hardly romantic one might think), and now I was shown colour and, above all, made aware of texture.

‘Touch it!’ she would say. ‘Touch the silk, it’s so beautiful. Do you know that a million little worms worked to make this single piece?’

I didn’t, of course, but the idea fascinated me. That something so fine, so sheer, so glorious should come from ‘a million little worms’ filled me with amazement, and I liked worms from then on.

Sometimes she would go away, and when I asked Mrs O’Connell where she had gone to she would only reply, ‘A-voyagin’.’ Which was no help. My parents when questioned said that she had gone on her holidays. I had an instant vision of buckets and spades, shrimping nets and long stretches of sand with the tide far out. And in consequence, knowing that she would be having a lovely time, put her from my mind.

When she returned she came bearing amazing gifts. Silver rings for my mother, a basket of brilliant shells of all kinds and shapes for me, French cigarettes for my father who, I knew instinctively, liked them better than he liked Aunt Kitty.

She brought for herself rolls of coloured cloth. Silks, voiles, cottons of every hue and design. These she would throw about her room in armfuls, so that they fell and covered the ugly furniture, then with the cigarette hanging from her lip she would wind up the gramophone, drape a length of cloth about her body, and dance. Barefoot, her nails painted gold.

Mesmerized I would sit and watch the small feet with golden-tipped toes twist and spin among tumbles of brilliant silks and the spilled shells from my palm-leaf basket.

‘And when I tell them

How wonderful you are,

They’ll never believe me-e …’

She told me, winding up the gramophone for the second side of the record, that the silks had come across the sands of Araby on the backs of camels, that she had seen monkeys swing among the branches of jacaranda trees, and flights of scarlet birds sweep across opal skies.

I hadn’t the least idea what she meant. But somewhere in my struggling mind the awareness was growing, from her words, that far beyond the confines of St Georges Road, West End Lane, Hampstead, lay a world of magic and beauty.

Aunt Kitty’s room

Once I heard my father say that one day Aunt Kitty wouldn’t return from one of her ‘voyages’.

And one day that’s exactly what happened. She never came back again: the Ground Floor Front was locked. I asked where she had gone. My father said possibly into the belly of a crocodile. It distressed me for a whole morning.

Years later I was to discover that no crocodile had taken Aunt Kitty: she had gone off, perfectly willingly, with a rich sultan from the East Indies.

When her room was opened it was exactly as she had left it, she had taken nothing with her, not even the silks. There were the gramophone, the draped lamps, the gold-striped divan, the bear-skin and the little red leather powder puff wrapped in letter paper on which she had printed a message to my mother, begging her to keep it always as a remembrance of her.

And she did. For many years it lay at the bottom of her jewel case and sometimes I would take it out, with permission, pull the little ivory ring, release the swansdown puff and the strange, musky scent. Naturally, over years, the scent grew fainter and fainter until, finally, there was only a ghostly odour, and the swansdown puff grew thin, grey, and moulted. But Aunt Kitty remains in my mind today, as clear and as vibrant as she was in the days when she wound up her gramophone for me.

‘We’ll have a little dancy, ducky, shall we? Would that be lovely?’

‘And when I tell them

How wonderful you are,

They’ll never believe me-e …’

* * *

Sometime after Aunt Kitty had left us, my sister Elizabeth was born. I was taken off to Scotland by my maternal grandmother Nelson, a friendly, firm, warm, straight-backed woman in black, to keep me ‘out of the way’. I can only remember a new tweed coat with a velvet collar, of which I was inordinately proud, a railway compartment and on my lap a round, black lacquered wicker basket, painted with pink roses, which contained my sandwiches for the journey. It is a fragment of memory; that’s all there is, but I see it sharply.

When I returned to the ugly house in St Georges Road, an enormous pram, with wheels like dustbin lids, stood in the front drive and Mrs O’Connell said that I had a baby sister and that, if they weren’t careful (they apparently being my parents), a cat would sit on the baby’s face and smother it. Faithfully, I reported this piece of information and my squalling sister was draped in netting.

With another member in the family, my personal discipline was relaxed, and I was left free to wander from studio to studio, squashing tubes of paint, watching the ‘uncles’ (they were all called ‘Uncle’, the resident artists who rented my father’s rooms) painting their canvases, and being as tiresome as any child of four could be in a cluttered room full of sights and smells and bottles.

Bottles had a great attraction for me. I wonder why? I can remember, very clearly, taking down a full bottle of Owbridges Lung Tonic and swallowing its contents. I liked the taste of, I suppose, laudanum or whatever the soothing drug was which it contained. Though I well remember performing this wicked act, the time following it is obliterated. I went into a coma for four days, and nothing, not even salt and water, mustard and water, or being given my father’s pipe to smoke apparently made any impression on me. No one was able to accomplish the essential task of forcing me to vomit up my stolen delight. I lay as for dead, heavily drugged.

I recovered – and later drank a bottle of rose-water and glycerine to the dregs. I was thrashed for this by my father, who always did it rather badly and apologetically with one of his paintbrushes.

But it didn’t stop me. I stole from every bottle set high on shelves or left, carelessly, standing about. The studios were forbidden territory. Not only did I squash the artists’ paint tubes empty, I was obviously quite capable of scoffing their linseed oil and turpentine.

A ‘handful’ is what I was considered, and handfuls such as I had to be dealt with firmly.

But no one had much time to deal with me, so, apart from being locked out of all the uncles’ rooms, I was pretty well left on my own to play about in the garden and feed my sister with pebbles or anything else which came to hand. And, of course, got another walloping. People simply didn’t understand that I was being kind.

Some of these fragments I remember with intense clarity. Others less well. Memory, as far back as this, is rather like archaeology. Little scraps and shards are collected from the dust of time and put together to form a whole by dedicated people, in this case my parents, who filled in the sprawling design of my life at that early age, and made real the pattern.

Aunt Kitty’s room, for example, I can only see as a vague, shadowy place, filled with sweet scents and the trembling shapes of feathers and handkerchiefs flickering high on the ceiling. And I remember the gold and black striped divan, for it was to become my own, many years later, when we moved to the cottage. Equally I remember the polar bear rug. It was the first time that I had dared to place a timid hand within the roaring mouth; for the simple reason that Aunt Kitty had assured me that it would not bite.

It didn’t. I trusted her from then on implicitly.

I trusted everyone in sight. Unwisely.

I can remember the great spills of cloth, but not the stories of camels and Araby or the scarlet birds swooping across opal skies. These items were added by my parents much later, who had, doubtless, heard her recount them and she told stories all day long to enthral me. But I do remember the worms; and the million it took to make a tiny scrap of glowing material. However, most of those very early years are simply the shards and scraps. Vivid none the less.

But from five years old onwards I have almost total recall – although I rather think that Elizabeth, with a feminine mind, has a far greater memory for detail than I.

* * *

My father grew restless in the grey-yellow brick house and decided that he wanted to move out to a quieter area: he suffered from catarrh, and also from hideous nightmares which his experiences, a few years before, in the Somme and at Passchendaele had engendered.

These of course I knew nothing about. Sudden shouts in the night perhaps, I can remember those, and my mother’s anxious, caring face the following morning as he set off to his work at The Times, where he had become Northcliffe’s golden-boy, and the first Art Editor at an absurdly young age.

So we moved away from the grey street off West End Lane into a small, but pleasant, house among abandoned fields just outside Twickenham. It was the talk of the family, and of its friends, that the sale was a ‘snip’. He had bought it extremely cheaply for some reason, and everyone was amazed. The reason was soon to become apparent.

But for the moment we had a muddy road running through fields before us which trickled off into a path between high summer grasses, elderberry bushes and past a great rubbish tip buried deep in a quarry.

Behind our house ran an immense rose-pink brick wall, and behind that lay a park of great beauty and a square, complacent Georgian house burrowing away among chestnuts and elms. The people who lived there were exceedingly pleasant, and had children of about our age, and there was a green paint-peeling wooden door in the wall through which we were allowed to enter and join them at play on their smooth lawns among the croquet hoops.

We also had a garden, but, naturally, far more modest, in which my mother started to grow herbs and exotic vegetables which were, at that time, not easy to find in England. We had a huge cherry tree, some apple trees at the far end and a mass of climbing roses. Nothing could have been a greater change from the long narrow garden near West End Lane and the continuous smell of Irish stew.

We, Elizabeth and I, were in a paradise: but as in Paradise itself there was a serpent.

One morning the dirt track in front of the house began shuddering with trucks and lorries of all descriptions; they droned and rumbled all day long, and when they left, in the late evening, we discovered the fields before us, and around us, stuck with scarlet wooden stakes and draped about with sagging ropes. My anguished father discovered, too late, that he had purchased his house in the exact centre of an enormous building development; which was the reason that it had been, as everyone said, ‘so ridiculously’ cheap. ‘A snip.’

We were buried among bricks, lime, cement and piles of glossy scarlet tiles. The road was churned into a mud-slide and the windows rattled all day with thudding trucks.

Within a year the fields in front had yielded up a row of semi-detached villas, with bay windows and tudor gables, their roofs, as yet untiled, looking like the pale yellow bones of a smoked haddock.

My father was in despair.

I was fascinated by all the work and upheaval and spent as much of my time as I possibly could clambering about in the unfinished foundations of suburbia. Although the workmen were friendly, and seemed not to mind me being among them, there came a time when they shouted at me to ‘bugger orf!’, and once someone threw a half-brick which sent me scurrying.

Another time I got a hod-load of lime full in the face; rather like a custard pie. It was, of course, quite accidental, and all I can remember is that it burned appallingly and I fled, blinded, from the half-built house, screaming at the top of my lungs, across the battered field and the rutted road. My distracted mother could not understand what had happened, naturally, and I was unable to tell her because I was yelling. She washed my face and hair and tried to get me to explain what had occurred, to no avail.

At that moment, an enormous man burst into the kitchen, pulled me on to his lap, and licked, with naked tongue, the lime from my eyes. Had he not done so, I have been assured, I would in all probability have been blinded for good. Counselling my distraught mother to bathe my eyes with milk and not to let me out of her sight ever again, he left. I wondered who he was, and have often thought of him with gratitude.

I only stopped going to the half-built houses because I was warned that I’d be given a thrashing I’d never forget if I did. So I wandered off up the little path towards the deep rubbish tip in the quarry. It was quieter there, no one came near, and I could explore the tumbled rubbish of Twickenham with complete freedom. Boxes and crates, broken chimney pots, old tin cans, a battered pram; pieces of wood, quantities of smashed tiles and earthen drainpipes. Nothing smelly.

I remained always just at the edge, for it was very deep, and I had a fear of falling in – which, one day, I did. Because I heard a kitten crying down at the bottom. Leaning too far over the slippery edge of broken tiles and chimney pots I slid rapidly to the bottom, found the kitten, a skinny creature which had managed to get out of a sack, leaving the dead bodies of its companions, and sat down cradling my find, confident that someone would collect me.

I had tried to clamber up but had found that impossible: each step I took up the jagged slope of rubbish sent me slithering backwards, and there was no possibility of climbing the, to me at that time anyway, sheer sides with a frantic kitten. So I just sat quietly.

Calling had no effect either, I was soon to discover, for my thin voice never reached the lip of the pit, and my wretched mother, who had quickly discovered my absence, passed and repassed my prison without having the very least idea that her first-born was sitting below among the debris. Eventually a search-party was formed from the builders and masons on the swiftly growing estate; I was discovered and dragged to the surface with the kitten. I think that my mother had been so frightened that she forgot to punish or even scold, and I was permitted to keep the kitten, who grew into a fine creature which we called ‘Minnehaha’. Unknowingly getting his sex wrong.

The little path through the grasses was not exactly out of bounds, although now the quarry was. But along the path a jungle of most attractive plants and grasses grew, and tiny green crickets scissored in the sun. I picked handfuls of bright black fruits from a small bush, ate them, and stuffed my unprotesting sister. Full. With deadly nightshade.

Both of us, this time, went into a coma. There had been a nurse and a doctor and enemas and thermometers and the moment I was well enough to do so I up-ended the nursery fire-guard, shoved my sister into it as a patient, and we played ‘hospitals’. It was very exciting, but pretty dull without ‘pills’ or ‘medicines’.

I consumed, because it was my ‘turn’ to be a patient, a full bottle of aspirin. Another coma.

My mother was told that nothing could be done – I had taken such a massive overdose that I’d either die or recover. All that she could do was lie with me, her hand on my heart, and if she felt the least change of rhythm she was to call the doctor instantly.

I slept like a lamb, my heart beating contentedly.

I do not think that I had suicidal tendencies. Certainly I had no murderous ones. Then. However, my parents decided that the time was ready for me to have some kind of supervision and discipline in life: I had been altogether far too spoiled.

To this effect, early one morning, my sister and I, peering down into the hall through the white-painted banisters from the upper landing, saw our mother (elegant even at that hour, in a coffee-lace morning-gown and boudoir cap) engaged in earnest conversation with a Girl Guide. The latter smart and upright as a ninepin. Trim in her uniform with a bright white lanyard at her shoulder, a whistle at her neck.

Miss Ellen Jane, of Walnut Cottages, Twickenham, had just entered our lives. She has stayed part of it ever since.

‘Ellen is my given name,’ she said. ‘At home I’m called Nelly, but you’d better call me Nanny, that’s what I’m supposed to be, and that’s that. It’s more fitting.’

Elizabeth couldn’t come to grips with ‘Nanny’, so she compromised and called her ‘Lally’; and that is what she has always been.

It was a curious feeling having someone literally ‘in charge’ of one at all hours of the day, and even night. I began to enjoy it quite. I lost any suicidal tendencies I might have had because all bottles, knives, pills or potions were removed from my reach, and I willingly gave in to this cheerful creature who would stand no nonsense, as she said (and clearly meant it), and who looked a little less daunting in her new uniform of blue cotton and long white apron with celluloid cuffs.

It was rather interesting, I found, to be forced to sit upright at table and not to ‘slouch about’. To replace my napkin in its linen envelope, to stop swinging my legs, to ask permission to leave the table (and often be refused until we were all satisfied), to have to wash my hands every two minutes (so it seemed), and above all to be read to in bed – a great change from ‘Gentle Jesus’, which we had to mumble in a hideous monotone, kneeling, with one eye on The Water Babies. But perhaps most interesting of all was the morning journey to the lavatory, the details of which operation had to be reported in full. If they were unsatisfactory one was sent back again.

But after a while I became less interested. I am easily bored. The novelty wore off, and I began to resent the routine and having my neck examined each morning to make certain that I had, in fact, washed ‘round the back’.

My sister didn’t seem to have to undergo quite so many humiliations, I began to realize, and she was far more cosseted and fussed over because she was younger. And prettier. Jealousy started to sprout like a bean shoot in the darkness of my heart – it also began to show.

And that was the start.

Miss Harris and her sister ran a genteel school for young children in a square Victorian house overlooking the Green. In their back garden, down among the laurels, and where the teachers parked their bikes, there was a long tin shed, painted dark red; this was the kindergarten.

I landed up there.

A blackboard, a big iron stove, tables. I remember nothing else. I imagine that one was instructed in the very basics, but I never bothered to learn them. This has had serious consequences for me throughout my life.

Jealousy seething, anger mounting, I sat and thought only about Minnehaha or how best to build an aquarium, or when we would next go down to Teddington Lock with net and jam jar to fish for sticklebacks.

I simply didn’t bother with Miss Harris and her silly kindergarten; my brain absolutely refused to see the connection between ‘CAT’ and ‘MAT’ and I frankly didn’t give a damn which sat on which. As far as I was concerned it was a wasted morning.

My parents found it to be the same thing after one caustic report from Miss Harris herself: ‘He doesn’t try. Won’t put himself out at all.’

He was not about to.

Stronger medicine was needed, and it was found in the form of a tall red building along the river, almost next door to Radnor Park. A convent-school a-flutter with smiling nuns.

I was captivated by their swirling grey habits, by the glitter and splendour of the modest, but theatrically ravishing, chapel, the flickering lamps beneath the statues of the Virgin Mary and Joseph. It went to my head in a trice and I fell passionately in love with convent life.

I liked, above all, our classroom, a high-ceilinged, white-painted room with great mirrored doors which reflected the river, the trees beyond and the boats; I worshipped Sister Veronica with her gentle hands and the modest mole from which sprouted, fascinatingly, a single hair, and Sister Marie Joseph who was fat, and bustled, and stood no nonsense, but taught me my catechism and let me come into the chapel whenever I felt the need, which was often.

Not to pray, you understand, but to drown in the splendours of lamps, candles, colours, a glowing Christ and the smell of something in the stuffy air which reminded me of Aunt Kitty.

The colours, the singing of the choir, the altarcloths shimmering with gold thread filled my heart and my head with delight. I was lost: and decided, there and then, to be a priest.

Religion, certainly the Catholic religion, was not taught in our house. My father was born into a strongly Catholic