There was a housemaid/nursemaid who looked after me, as was common in the middle class, so perhaps I did not see that much of my mother. But I do remember, and wish I didn’t, what I thought when, having heard of her death, I went along the beach to find a friend to with whom to share the news. I thought, “I should feel sad, but I don’t.” My brother, aged eleven, was devastated by mother’s death, but he was more aware of her than I was. She had, for example, been teaching him to play golf with a set of clubs cut down to his size. My sister was only two and unaware of what had happened. But there was I, apparently unmoved and wondering why. Was I already a detached, introspective, unemotional child, or was I instinctively raising psychological defences against a loss I could not acknowledge? Certainly, as an adult, I have never been much moved by death — except of animals. I shed no tears when my father died of a stroke at seventy; I was having breakfast in Toronto when my brother called with the news, and I went back to eating toast and marmalade. Nor were there tears when my brother died of cancer at seventy. I can rationalize my lack of feeling; death is part of life and comes to us all, so why make a fuss when a relative or friend departs? But that did not work when I took our much-loved family dog to be put down. I was with him when the vet gave him an overdose of anaesthetic and, watching him go to sleep and die, I was torn between grief — the tears came later — and the feeling that we should all be so lucky in the manner of our going. But, then, I have always been fond of dogs; they seem to me on the whole to be of better disposition than most humans: faithful friends, cheerful, good tempered through thick and thin.
In my own defence I can say that if the death of others leaves me unmoved, so does the prospect of my own death, which at my age cannot be long delayed. My brother accepted early death as preferable to the prospect of a painful old age as his incurable cancer spread, and I feel the same. I have completed a living will requesting that there be no heroic — strange word — measures to keep me from dying. But for me the troubling question remains: Was I already an unfeeling and introspective child when my mother died, or did her death make me so?
My mother was buried in Weston, perhaps because she grew up there and her sister Babs still lived there. I remember nothing of the funeral, but I do remember that when my father was driving my brother and I home to Exeter, the canvas top of the car was folded down and I was allowed to sit up on it with my head in the wind. And then we stopped halfway and I had a ginger beer. Aunty Babs came to Exeter to look after us, but that lasted only a few weeks, no doubt because of the mutual dislike she shared with my father. The burden then fell on my father’s mother, Alice, a formidable widow. I have a photo of me, aged about four, with my two grandmothers. My mother’s mother, Catherine, is a plump, cheerful old lady, and she has her arm around my waist. Grandma Alice is standing erect, stern-faced and in black from her enormous hat to her shoes, perhaps still in mourning for her husband who had died a couple of years earlier. I realize now what a sacrifice she made in selling her comfortable home in Weston, leaving her friends, and moving to Exeter at the age of seventy-two to run her son’s household of three children and two servants. But I have no warm memories — and there I go again, coldly detached. Her main concern, naturally, was my two-year-old sister. My brother was soon sent off to board at a minor public school, as my mother had wished, and I was pretty much left to my own devices. I remember that granny scraped her fork on her false teeth when she ate, which at least has made me conscious in later life of how easy it is for adults to offend children. And she did take me to tea in a grand restaurant on my birthdays and allow me to dive into a parfait, an ice cream and fruit concoction which came in a tall glass requiring the use of a very long spoon.
She also took me to visit relatives; he was a tenant farmer and his wife was probably the worst cook ever, producing every day meals that could be eaten only with fortitude. On hot afternoons granny and I lay sweating on a featherbed while she read sad stories that reduced us both to tears. I remember being hoisted onto the back of a terrifyingly tall horse, and have never been there since. In my view, horses are too large and nervous to be trusted. And I can still see the sad, accusing eye of a rabbit shot by the farmer at harvest time. Granny died in 1940, aged seventy-nine, and my father said later it was probably a blessing because she would not have been able to cope with the difficulties of running a household in time of war — a questionable idea because she was a tough old lady who had lived through one war in which casualties were much more numerous than in World War II. On learning of her death, I did not cry.
I was a shy child who retreated to my bedroom rather than meet visitors, and while I thought I had overcome that defect when I grew up, it was pointed out that as an adult I pose for pictures, which I hate having taken, with my head on one side, apparently because I am still trying to escape notice. I never went to children’s parties because I was afraid I might be embarrassed by girls, of whom I knew none except my sister, until I went to work at sixteen and, despite my best efforts, found them unavoidable. Music, particularly swing, was pleasant in my ear but meant nothing to my feet so I have never been able to dance. The last attempt was when, emboldened by drink, I persuaded my wife to try again. I fell over, and she said, “Never again.” I did not stay at school for lunch, or dinner as we called it, because I was afraid I would have to eat food I did not like and would then be sick — throw up, we would say — in public. I cycled a mile-and-a-half home to eat, and then returned, all in about ninety minutes. That fear of eating in public stayed with me until, as an apprentice reporter, I had to travel to country towns and would have died of starvation had I not overcome my problem. In those early years I developed a way of coping with fears, if not conquering them, by asking myself what was the worst thing that could happen. I could then accept that the worst thing would not be the end of the world — close perhaps, but not the end.
But if I was an insecure, mixed up and introspective kid, I did have close friends, one a neighbour at home and the other at school, and with both I still have occasional contact. And I did get on quite well with my father. Many of his insurance clients were farmers, and he sometimes took me in the company car to visit them, usually on market day in one of the rural towns around Exeter. He liked to tell a story which both amused and horrified me, and then provided the same delicious thrill for my own children when I retold it: A farmer once took him to lunch in the village pub where they enjoyed a hearty meal, the standard “Soup, meat and veg., apple pie, and cheese,” washed down with a pint of ale — all of which the farmer pronounced so good that they would have the meal again, which they did.
On weekends, father played golf at the Warren links, where in fact he ended his days as club secretary. He often took the Exeter city clerk as his guest, and I’m sure it was entirely coincidental that he insured the city buses. I sometimes went along to carry his clubs, or to take our dog, Chips, for a run in the sand dunes. It would be wrong to say that father and I were close; I never discussed with him my feelings or problems, nor he with me. After he died, my brother and sister discovered when going through his papers that he had been paying maintenance for an illegitimate daughter, born in 1947. As he had obviously not wanted us to know about it, they decided not to try to identify the mother or the child, and in fact did not for years tell me, in Canada. Somewhere, I may have a half-sister. My father had been living on his pension and left almost nothing, but my brother sent me a pair of gold cufflinks. I suppose that I never really knew my mother or my father, but at least my father and I were comfortable with each other, which is better than some father-child relationships of which I have heard.
I quite enjoyed school, which was of course a formative influence. My family was not religious; I was not christened, which could have been because of my health, but I don’t recall ever going to church as a family. However, the school a few hundred yards from our first house, to which I was sent at the age of three or four, happened to be much influenced by religion. It was called Mount Radford, but was better known as Vine’s, after the proprietor and headmaster, Theodore Vine, a member of the Plymouth Brethren, a form of Lutheranism combining, says my dictionary, elements of Calvinism and Pietism. There were perhaps a dozen boarders who lived in the big house with Mr. and Mrs. Vine and were mainly the sons of missionaries serving abroad. The masters tended to be enthusiastic Methodists, and the hundred or so day boys, of which I was one, were mainly the sons of shopkeepers and other small businessmen. Sons of farmers were let out early, to the envy of the rest of us, so that they could catch trains to their homes in the country. We followed the national