Auto Da Fay. Fay Weldon
school of writing which I inhabit. But I am responsible in my own way: I couldn’t be ill or have a holiday for forty-nine weeks, and I wasn’t and didn’t. The episodes, restructured, were eventually published in novel form, and when it was I was quite pleased with it, though I missed the ‘story so far’ sections, which I had loved writing. As you move through a story it is interesting to see how your own view of it changes, and how you see fit to describe those who inhabit it. But the central premise of the story held, that like calls to like and most of us are given second chances, and that virtue is more often rewarded than we think.
New Zealand, for my father, was a second chance, and perhaps that was why he took to the new land with such joyful ease. Its very air suited him. He had contracted rheumatic fever in the trenches of World War I and nearly died from it. The smogs and fogs of London were no good for him. He had run away from home in 1914 to join the army, in response to Lord Kitchener’s pointing finger and ‘Your country needs you!’ He was sixteen but pretended to be eighteen. In those days it was possible to lie about your age: now we are all so closely monitored and registered it is near-impossible. Life is much duller as a consequence. One’s instinct is to hide from the state. I was always taken aback by the way schools asked to see my children’s birth certificates – supposing there was something there that I wanted them not to know? What business of theirs was my offspring’s parentage? Bad enough that school was compulsory – one could overlook that, because the children evidently so badly wanted to go – but what did they hope to find out? And where was I meant to find these bits of paper anyway, four or five years after the birth? As it happened I managed on all four occasions to fail to provide the required documentation, and no one ever followed up the initial request, but just assumed the children had the names and ages they said they had.
My father came from yeoman stock: his mother Isabel was a Garbutt, from a family who had farmed sheep in Northumbria for generations. His father Herbert was a Henderson on his mother’s side: the family had been ‘in wool’ for as long as anyone could remember, but had diversified into carpets, and were ‘in trade’ which was not quite the thing. The Garbutts, who now included bishops among their ranks, saw Isabel as a cut above Herbert. He was spoken of as a bully, and Isabel as a saint for putting up with him. And she was indeed the sweetest, gentlest thing. My half-sister Barbara takes after her, and her daughter Naomi, though sweetness seems to have by-passed the rest of us, become too diluted in the genes. On the one occasion I met Herbert, in 1946, he seemed perfectly pleasant and gave me half-a-crown so I will not add to the slurs.
But he did seem to be anxious that his four children would not succeed, and almost to spite him, they all did. He took Frank away from St Edward’s Grammar School in Birmingham and apprenticed him to an engineer, when that was what he specifically didn’t want to be. Sheona, the oldest, was given away in infancy to be brought up by an aunt, and grew up to marry her cousin, an eye surgeon, and to became a poet. For fifty years, until her death in her late Nineties, a poem by Sheona Lodge, delicate and lyrical, appeared regularly in the American Fly Fisher’s Journal. The second daughter, Mary, was active in politics, married Michael Stewart, later to be Foreign Secretary in Harold Wilson’s government, and both ended up on the Labour benches in the House of Lords. Bill became a much respected dentist in the Midlands: once mysteriously married to someone who ‘ran off’, and whose name he would not have mentioned in the house. That was not so unusual a response at the time; the world was full of things too painful to be mentioned, because there was nothing to be done about them. Infidelity, illegitimate children, insanity, cancer – it seemed impolite to God to mention them, pointing the finger because he had failed to make a perfect universe. As cures became available, of course, one by one, they could be talked about, and now are, almost to exhaustion, as if we are making up for lost time.
So my father ran away from his apprenticeship and my not very pleasant grandfather, and was sent to the front line in France, but within the year was invalided out of the mud and slime of the trenches. Next he was posted to Arabia, where the air was all too dry. But he became T. E. Lawrence’s driver: he had a Rolls-Royce to play with, adapted to desert use and armed with a machine gun, which he coaxed up and down impossible sand hills. I think he enjoyed himself very much. He once showed me a battered leather-bound copy of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, inscribed to him by Lawrence himself. He told me he was captured by Bedouin but saved himself by offering them jam labels, which he told them was money and they believed him. It just so happened that he collected jam labels, there being lots to collect in a desert filled with soldiery who had to eat. They blew about the sand hills.
This part of The War he talked about: he would never speak about the trenches. Perhaps the time spent there was too traumatic: too full of exploding bodies for words to encompass. It made him neurotic. Those who have been soldiers often are: from time to time they behave compulsively. Those who are damaged feel the need to pass it on: those who are hardened try to harden others. Soldiers who emerge from wars are often cheery enough: they have learned the art of living in the present: they’re good at that – today’s friend can be tomorrow’s corpse. Just sometimes they shake and shiver and are cruel to others, and want them to suffer too. Ron Weldon, my second husband, was an ex-soldier, like so many of the generation after my father’s. He had spent time clearing bloated bodies from streams in Burma: he didn’t mention this for a good twenty-five years into the marriage, when he started getting nightmares and handing them on.
After the Armistice Frank went to London and with the aid of demob money and contributions from his maiden aunts in Newcastle, studied medicine at University College Hospital. In 1922 he visited a nightclub and there met and charmed Edgar and Susan Jepson, who took him under their wing. Before long he was sleeping on their sofa, and had begun his assiduous courtship of their daughter Margaret, then a girl of sixteen.
Doors opened to my father. It was a life he had not known before. Those who have a natural and spontaneous response to books, paintings, music and the life of the mind are lucky: the gift of their enthusiasm strikes through class barriers: they find mentors. ‘He was rather rough at the time,’ my mother said of him. ‘He’d been a soldier for years: he’d had no education. He swore dreadfully. He had no money: he slept on other people’s floors and ended up on ours. His aunts came down to visit him and threw up their hands in horror at what they found.’
Perhaps the gift for standing in front of the right door runs in families? When Edgar gravitated to Nona, back in the 1890s, a new world opened up for him, and it suited him down to the ground. Here was the gossipy bohemia of the day: forget the waspish writers and intellectuals, here were painters and musicians, and another kind of delinquency. ‘Through Frieda,’ he wrote in his Memories, ‘I came into the Bloomsbury Group of the day.’ He picked up the ball and ran with it.
Thirty years later Frank was to find himself in the same situation. All he had to date was the copy of Romeo and Juliet from T. E. Lawrence; now Edgar and Nona offered him the culture he was starved of, and he realized he had finally come home. When that home collapsed, he carried the daughter off as a trophy. Another generation on and history repeats itself. My mother’s world, by the virtue of war, divorce, poverty and circumstance had shrunk to subsistence level, and my world with it. Forget the arts and the life of the mind, what about the rent? But go to a party one night, just as Frank had been to a nightclub, and all of a sudden, there you are, back in your natural place: in my case Primrose Hill in the Sixties, the abode of the writers and painters. Go down to the launderette and run into the kind of people who hung out in these parts. Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath, Patrick Caulfield, Kingsley Amis and Elizabeth Jane Howard, Adrian Mitchell, R. D. Laing and the George Mellys, Tom Maschler the publisher, Mel Calman and Michael Ffolkes, cartoonists, Alan Sharp and Lukas Heller, screenwriters, ANC activists by the handful, Bernice Rubens and David Mercer, and down in Gloucester Crescent Alan Bennett and Jonathan Miller, and as many names as you care to drop, rising young artists and writers all. And the parties