grey stuffiness of the room – and yet cannot call to mind a single feature of Lizzie, or anything she said? Or anything Bill ever said about her?
What has gone wrong? Two of her four children died. Is there some great disappointment in her life? She leaves no record. As far as I know, she makes no complaint. She dies in 1930 or 1931. I fail to remember the event.
Every Christmas, we go up to Whitehall for Christmas dinner. It is a serious commitment. Beforehand, Bill and Dot become anxious. Also present will be the rival brother’s family. Gordon with his sharp-nosed Dorothy and their three children will outnumber us. I, by contrast, skip about, because I shall receive a present from The Guv’ner, and it might be a Hornby train. He always knows what young boys like.
Despite a roaring fire, the dining room at Whitehall is cold. There is no central heating. Dot always complains beforehand, applying Snowfire and cachous to their appropriate stations. I know without being told that she fears Dorothy’s sharp nose, which bores holes in Dot’s fragile self-confidence. I know without being told of the rivalry between Bill and Gordon. H. H. ignores these tensions.
In the room above the dining room lies Lizzie. She is not brought down, perhaps cannot be brought down, to join the fray.
We are seated, nine of us, round the table. The maid brings in the turkey. And I disgrace the family.
This humiliating memory must date from Christmas 1927, when I am twenty-eight months old. If it dates from the next year, then it proves I am a backward child. For a christening present, the Roddicks, family friends, give me a silver pusher. I adore the pusher. It is a miniature hand-held bulldozer. The pusher has a loop for a finger to go through and a tiny shovel blade. With this, food is pushed towards a spoon held in the other hand. It is a device to simplify eating for the infantile or retarded. This I employ on The Guv’ner’s turkey, which in consequence has to be cut up for me.
One of Dot’s great triumphs is to have delivered me into the world ten days before my cousin Tony is born. This, it is felt, is definitely one up on Dorothy.
But – here is Young Hopeful on one side of the table, still having his food cut up, still using this babyish implement. It is a gift to the opposing team. On the other side of the table, his cousin is already using a knife and fork, although not wisely or too well.
The contrast is immediately noted.
Oh, Brian still has his food cut up, does he, Dot?
Sometimes, yes, Dorothy. It’s quicker, really.
You don’t find the turkey at all tough, do you?
It’s very tender. How is yours?
He’s quite good with his little pusher. Tony has been using his knife and fork for some months now, haven’t you, dear?
Yes, Mummy. Smarmy merriment.
It is a bad moment. More than a moment. I am out of favour for several days.
The contrast between H. H.’s two surviving sons is marked. Gordon is large, hearty, almost bald. He looks out at the world through owlish spectacles. The cashier, Miss Dorothy Royou, long after she has taken up another occupation and another name, tells me how Gordon persuades her on a drive into the country in his car and tries to seduce her. She refuses. He kicks her out of the jalopy and she has to walk home. Other young ladies in the shop, she informs me, suffered from the same tactics.
Gordon also keeps in touch with events at Newmarket and frequently absents himself from the shop to go down and watch the horse races. On Saturday, he takes his boys over to Norwich to watch Norwich City play. He is a sporting man, and can be found pretty often in The King’s Arms in the market place.
Bill is of different build and habit. He is neat and spare, humorous, good-looking, less tall than his brother. He never in his life goes into a public house, and is teetotal for most of his years. He works hard in the shop and does not molest the ladies – or so the historic record asserts. He does not bet. Only once do we go to Newmarket with Gordon. Once a year, Bill and Dot will put a pound on the Irish sweepstake. God goes easy on the Irish sweepstake, perhaps because the Irish are so Catholic.
Bill does everything his father asks of him, is submissive, dutiful. Whereas Gordon has been known to cheek The Guv’ner and please himself.
On a wall in our long corridor, next to the photograph of Bill in a pierrot outfit, hangs a photo of Gordon and Bill as boys. They sit companionably on a rug together, with two terriers standing by. They wear caps and have guns tucked under their arms. Once they were friends. The photograph must cause Bill pangs of regret.
The traitorous thing is this, that I quite like Gordon and Dorothy. I occasionally go round to the Corner House where they live, where Dot never sets foot. They appear much richer than we are. Their house is better furnished. It is a puzzle. Also Dorothy has a huge folding tray table with raised edges, made especially for jigsaws; we work together amicably on a huge landscape which includes huntsmen. I labour under the impression that Dorothy is nice to me. I like my cousin Derek. And Gordon is generally genial if overbearing.
Tony and I kick a football about in their garden. He sends it through a window and bursts into tears. So I am one up on him. I would not cry.
Dorothy tells me a joke I am supposed to riddle out: ‘The Queen reigns over China’. I know she does not reign over China, but eventually we tease out the word-play. She rains every night, into her china chamber pot.
We are all convulsed with laughter. Fancy thinking that of haughty Queen Mary! The mere idea of Queen Mary peeing sends us into fits.
I go home and tell the joke to Dot. She is far from laughter. It is disgusting and vulgar, not a joke at all. Like an earlier queen, Dot is not amused.
My picture of Dereham, which we leave finally when I am twelve years old, is coloured by the attitudes of my parents. Only later do I realise Bill’s dependence on his father: he was my hero, and I thought he depended on no one. I perceive his dislike of Gordon, his brother, I soon realise how Dot suffers from paranoia.
She loves to accuse everyone of backbiting, while indulging in it herself. She is sweet to everyone’s face, cruel when they have gone. She is nervous. She consults Dr Duygan, whose advice to drink a whisky-and-soda after lunch every day has not entirely resolved her unhappiness. She suffers from being overweight, so that we visit Yarmouth to buy Dr Scholl’s shoes. Her largely unarticulated view of Dereham is that it is a kind of prison. Narrow-minded, she calls it.
She takes books from both Webster’s, the bookseller, and from Starling’s Lending Library. Starling’s books come in a protective cardboard jacket on which is printed a legend: ‘A Home without Books is like a House without Windows’. Dot often reads the legend aloud to me. ‘How true!’ she exclaims. Or perhaps more mysteriously she will say, ‘Too true, O King!’, quoting I know not what.
Gorleston on Sea figures large in our lives. From Dereham to Gorleston is about thirty-five miles. Gorleston is beautiful, a small, elegant seaside resort, with a bandstand and a pierrot show in summer. While I like everyone in the pierrot show, my favourite is the comedian (‘I’m the one who makes you go ha-ha,’ he sings as he comes on). Later we shall live in Gorleston for a while, as reported, until war breaks out, and the world we know falls into little bits, and the jolly rude picture postcards blow away down yesterday’s beaches.
Before the Five Year Abyss opens at my feet, Dot escorts me every September to the Dereham fair. On one occasion, I escape from Dot and rush to see a sideshow where a man stands bare-chested, swallowing watches offered by his audience. He gets hold of a turnip watch on a gold chain. He tips back his head and gulps it in, lowering it into his insides link by link, as if sinking an anchor into the North Sea.
He beckons me out of the crowd. Horrified, I go forward. I am forced to place my ear against his chest to give a sounding. I hear the watch ticking, entangled somewhere among the sea wrack of his lungs.
The watch is hauled up again, glittering with phlegm.
Another time, Dot plays the Wheel of Fortune, to win a yellow Norwich canary