My sister Jane had a ‘blessing’ by Arthur Machen in a frame upon the wall until my mother took it down. She never liked it. The blessing, given to baby Jane on the occasion of her christening, consisted of a sheet of parchment, in the middle of which was a paragraph in tiny writing in a language and script no one recognized. I was probably fortunate I did not receive one too.
In my father’s absence my mother named me Franklin. The registrar wrote ‘boy’ in the ‘sex’ column, and then had to cross it out and write ‘girl’. I was to feel vaguely apologetic about this later; my parents had a girl already and would obviously want a boy and I had failed them. My mother – Mrs Bored of Barnt Green, no doubt – had been studying numerology, a way of divining the future through the relationship of names to numbers, while she waited for the birth. Franklin Birkinshaw, she discovered, ‘came out the same’ as William Shakespeare. My being born a girl had left her unprepared. But Franklin was a most auspicious name. And was not ‘lin’ the female diminutive, and was not Frank my father? Franklin still made perfect sense to her, and she hoped to others.
Alas, it did not, no doubt least of all to my father when she first showed him the new baby. It was going to be, he reckoned, citing the registrar as evidence, too confusing for others. They took in time to calling me Fay, I hope not after Fay Wray, the screaming heroine of so many horror films, but you never know. If it was, I grew up to be a sunny enough child, if only in defiance, though there were to be King Kongs enough in my life. I was left with the name Franklin on official documents, while being Fay at school. But it was Franklin only at the Christchurch Public Library. They would not recognize Fay, though I pleaded. I had to sign my full name, Franklin Birkinshaw, every time I took out a book, while the Beryls and the Dulcies, the Meryls and the Aprils, looked on askance, and the librarians shook their heads and took pleasure in wondering aloud what kind of parents I must have. Thus I started out in a state of ambivalence. I took out library books as Franklin and read them as Fay.
Names are important. I was only to become a writer when I added Weldon to the Fay. Other names had intervened, leaving me stranded, if often entertained, and occasionally scared. But Weldon was the one which best suited. It lengthens with the years, of course. This morning I signed a document under the name Fay Franklin Weldon Fox. With every change of name comes a change in fortune. I never took to numerology, all the same. No change in fortune should be seen as magic, only as a function of altering views of the self. As babies, of course, we are helpless, dependent upon our mothers’ expectations, and in my case these were perhaps too high.
Edgar and Selwyn, father and brother, did not want Margaret to go back to New Zealand. It was too far away: the ends of the earth: things had not gone well for her there. If she went back to Frank, who was to say how she would ever afford to get home again? It was not as if her husband was particularly good at keeping even a roof over her head. They were quite right, of course. In March, 1938, shortly before he died, Edgar wrote a brief note to Frieda in California. He has moved house to spare himself the stairs. He gives his new address. ‘There is nothing else in the way of news,’ he writes. ‘Margaret seems stuck in New Zealand, and I wish she wasn’t…’ He hopes that Frieda’s giddiness has stopped. ‘Perhaps the spring will be helpful.’ And then – ‘I have sold some sword guards to a North American and I send you the cheque. You must buy a spring frock with it.’ He finishes, ‘With best love, E.’ It is a poignant letter. He would do better for her if only he could, one reads between the lines, and perhaps even still loves her, only Lois and her pregnancy came between. His obituary in the Telegraph, found yellowed between the pages of his second volume of autobiography, Memories of an Edwardian, reads ‘He was a distinctive craftsman of remarkable personality, whose many friends included practically all the literary men of any note during the past half-century.’ My mother cried when a letter came to us in Christchurch to say he had died, and Jane and I cried to keep her company, though we did not know what we had lost.
But my mother, back in 1931, was not to be dissuaded by family advice. It was her duty to go back to her husband; she had promised to go back and besides, she loved him. ‘You have no idea,’ she said to me once, ‘what fun your father was in the early days. What light he brought with him into a room.’
She had not given the new land a fair chance, she told Edgar and Selwyn. New Zealand was a better place to bring up children than foggy, smoky London. And besides, things had changed. Her father, old enough to be great-grandfather not father to a new baby, was with a woman not her mother. The good days were over. And as Margaret embarked on the liner which was to carry her back to her unchancy husband, with little Jane clutching her hand and myself at five weeks held against her, and appreciative porters buzzing around with her trunks and cases, she must have felt a certain relief. At least she would not have to stay around to witness the sorry state to which two generations of Free Love and the Life Force had brought her family. To see the shadow of itself which 120 Adelaide Road, once so full of wit, energy and creativity, music and laughter, had become.
Terrible things had happened at Adelaide Road in the past, of course they had. It was not in anyone’s nature to play safe – neither in the Jepsons’, nor the Holmeses’. Where there are angels there are devils as well, and sometimes they both take up residence in the one person. At one time Edgar had installed Lois in the house over the way, and Frieda had been summoned in the middle of the night to help her rival through a miscarriage. It would be a rare wife these days who would put up with such a thing, but wives were more helpless then, and besides, the doctrine of Free Love was offered by the bohemians of the time as an excuse for a great deal of hurtful activity.
It was in its name that my seventeen-year-old Aunt Faith was seduced by her mother’s brother, to the destruction of her life but with no apparent difference to his. Men are great theorists and when in full pursuit of ends which to them seem noble but are simply not, it’s an unwise woman who allows herself to be persuaded. Body blows can be dealt to family life, and a family seem to reel and recover, but not for long. The next soft tap can bring it tumbling down.
But while it stood how well it stood. Houses have heydays, just as people do, and that of 120 Adelaide Road ran for twenty years, from 1910 to 1930. In the good days Edgar would write in his study, Frieda play the piano, the nanny look after the three children, and the cook and maid who lived and worked in the basement in times of plenty, looked after everything else. There were literary parties to give and attend, nightclubs to go to, and the talk was of socialism, Free Love, eugenics, and Fabianism. The household income was erratic, and entirely dependent on the skill of Edgar’s pen. The carpets might stop at the first landing, yesterday’s cold rice pudding turn up in today’s soup (a habit of Frieda’s, my mother would complain) but there was comfort and conversation and good cheer. It was true that at one time Edgar tried to forbid talking at meals, following the example of Joseph Conard, but the attempt was doomed to failure. ‘Joseph Conard was a very bad-tempered man,’ said Frieda, ‘and hated his children. He said it was they who had driven him mad. Edgar could be moody and difficult, but at least he liked his children, and when it came to it, liked to hear what they had to say.’
There were twelve bedrooms in the house and the children could take their pick of them. All were unheated, all contained a bed, a rug, a mirror and a wardrobe and that was all, so it made very little difference which one they chose. They moved on every night, trying not to hurt the feelings