Generally it rained. The rain in the Thames Valley is like the tropical downpour in some fever-ridden jungle, but more intense. And there were swans, made friendly by my mother, who used to give them sardine sandwiches. My father would mistake their intentions.
‘Strong enough to pull you under, those beggars,’ he would observe, lunging at them with the hitcher; dismayed by this unfriendly reception they would raise themselves in the water and hiss ferociously.
In July, 1937, we were on our way downstream, bound for Richmond after Henley Regatta. We arrived very damp at Bray, a village once famous for its vicar, latterly for the Hind Head Hotel, which at that time had one of the finest cellars in England. We had an excellent dinner. My father drank burgundy and my mother drank claret (this was one of the provinces in which he never succeeded in subordinating her tastes to his own).
My father decided that he liked Bray. It was also a very wet night. We never went back to Richmond; the boat was hauled out and put in the boathouse. My father had had enough.
At Bray all went well for a bit; but in the long run affluent members of his own trade, in electric canoes, and the Guards Boat Club at Maidenhead proved too much for him. A knowledge of watermanship is not one of the conditions of membership of the Brigade of Guards. The members of the Boat Club who drifted across my father’s course purveyed a brand of ill-manners that was unequalled in the civilised world and for which he was no match.
‘You don’t find many young fellows interested in skiff work down here,’ he remarked one evening as we were easing the boat in to the landing stage after a particularly disagreeable encounter. ‘I think I’ll move her up next year.’ He meant to Henley, the last stronghold of the rowing man.
It was July 1939. Fifteen years were to elapse before he was able to put his plan into operation.
If I have dealt at what may seem unnecessary length with my father’s addiction to rowing it is because, seeing his life in retrospect, I realise that it meant more to him than any other part of it.
My father was a complex man. With his love of active sport and the pleasure he derived from the good things of life there was coupled a deep, Victorian sense of guilt that he never succeeded in throwing off. It partly sprang from a deep-rooted conviction that no one should enjoy life as much as he did and partly from a feeling that he was not cultivating his garden with the same assiduity as some of his fellows; those now elderly men who before 1914 had fled from the pogroms of Eastern Europe and set themselves up as tailors in the East End of London.
Working sixteen hours a day, knowing only a minimal amount of English, the most forceful of these refugees had succeeded in setting their sons and daughters on the road to a way of life which to them, working in their sweat shops, must have seemed a crazy dream. In the Thirties their children and grandchildren were beginning to reap the harvest which they themselves had sown with toil and tears – the showroom in Margaret Street, the family house in Cricklewood, the weekends at Cliftonville and Hove, the grandchildren down for Westminster and St Paul’s. It was these men who had trodden the muddy streets of Lvov, Kovel and Voronezh often in fear and trembling who laid the foundations on which the British Rag Trade was raised.
My father was on excellent terms with these old men, many of whom he had employed as outside tailors at the time of the Siege of Sidney Street. A lesser man might have permitted himself a slight feeling of jealousy. If he did experience such feelings he never betrayed them. They too, in their own way, were extremely fond of him. Many of them had suffered fearful indignities and for this reason were at times slightly incredulous at his attitude (to someone who has been unsuccessfully sabred by a Cossack a display of tolerance is often equated with feeble-mindedness). Because he was so English and intolerant in many ways it was one of the last things that one might have expected of him. It was a contradiction in his character that he was only half-aware of, but one that gave him considerable pleasure. In a world that was becoming increasingly racially conscious, among the people with whom he did business his name was a by-word, a sort of laisser-passer.
He never, however, lost his inborn ferocity. There was an occasion when he picked up a man who was behaving in an objectionable fashion on his premises and threw him headlong into the street. The victim brought an action against my father for assault and battery. My father was put in the box and cross-examined by his opponent’s lawyer – an extremely didactic individual.
‘Tell the Court what you actually did to my client, Mr Newby.’
‘I ejected him from my premises,’ my father said.
‘Oh, you ejected him did you? Perhaps you would be good enough to give an ocular demonstration of what you actually did to my client?’
‘I did this,’ said my father. He leant forward and gave the lawyer a violent shove in the chest so that he sat down on the floor.
At this there was a great uproar. The lawyer, his client forgotten, rose to his feet himself claiming assault and battery.
‘Well, Mr Smallbones,’ said the Judge looking down from his eminence. ‘You can hardly complain. You asked for an ocular demonstration – and you got it. The whole thing is absurd. The case is dismissed.’
My father was much disturbed by the political state of the country and by the decline in religious observance. He had a deep-rooted regard for the established order of a religion which he never publicly practised. He never entered a church except as a tourist to look at some family vault.
Yet he would spend long periods on Sunday mornings before setting off for the rowing club reading interminable articles to my mother and me on the parlous state of the Church of England. The Observer was not the free-thinking organ that it is today. If it had been, in all probability he would have burned it ritually.
My mother bore these diatribes with fortitude. She had long since cultivated an expression of eager interest which she was able to assume for long periods of time whilst allowing her mind to range on more attractive subjects. He used to try and catch her out by stopping suddenly in the middle of a sentence, but she was equal to this.
‘Why don’t you go on, dear?’ she would say, blandly, sipping her lapsang souchong. My father would look daggers at her and perforce continue.
I was not so clever. As I grew older it became more difficult for me to listen with equanimity to a twenty-minute reading of a leading article by J. L. Garvin on The Decline of Imperial Responsibility with intervals in which my father made plain his own point of view, and as a result our relationship deteriorated.
He had a curious obsession with violence, but it was of an abstract kind. Walking along a beach he would come on a piece of wood made smooth by long immersion in the water. ‘Foo!’ he would say, weighing it in his hand. ‘You could give a wrong ’un a good slosh with that.’
And his house was full of weapons of offence. Life preservers made from cane and lead and pigskin from Swaine and Adeney, shillelaghs from the bogs and odd lengths of lead piping which he had picked up on building sites. ‘This might do,’ he would say and add it to his collection. But there was nothing eerie about this obsession. He was not addicted to canings and flagellation. ‘Silly kite,’ was all he used to say to me when roused, ‘You deserve a thick ear!’ and at the same time delivered it.
So far as his business was concerned my father travelled a good deal – whenever possible in such a manner that he would arrive back in time for his Sunday morning row – after the departure of Mr Lane he usually had my mother in tow. She accompanied him ‘to put the things on’. She also did most of the packing and unpacking. When he went to Paris or Berlin to buy models for copying she helped him to make up his mind. Sometimes they used to set off for a mysterious place called the Hook in order to sell gigantic coats to the Dutch.
They were both assiduous letter writers and to