Grandma saved paper bags inside paper bags inside paper bags … Years later, when she died, and my mother and I were going through the trunks that by then held the compacted residue of her lifetime’s squirrelling, we came on a cache of letters from my grandfather, tied in the inevitable banal shred of pink ribbon. His courtship compositions, they were, full of quotations from the poets, sentimental flourishes, promising plans. We looked at them with awful embarrassment and agreed (how I wish now that we hadn’t) to burn them, because they seemed shaming evidence of the mutual confidence trick of that hateful marriage. There was cash in the same trunk, folded notes cunningly dispersed among the photos of Katie done up to the nines, and the bars of waxy soap and sugar lumps put by against the return of rationing. And that money was the clue to another part of her story. Where did she get it? Where, for that matter, did she acquire the substantial sum – around five hundred pounds – she’d accumulated in my name (so that my father couldn’t inherit it, she told me once) in National Savings? I didn’t think very hard about it at the time and I took the theories that circulated in the family as tall tales. However, Grandma’s way of blurring the boundary between fantasy and reality, and her power to draw me back into the past have long outlived her.
About the money: I was asking my father just the other day whether some of the wilder things I recalled about the grandparents had any basis in truth. For instance, what about the story that Grandma had blackmailed Grandpa for years, by threatening to show his private diary to the Bishop unless he handed over part of his stipend every quarter? Well, yes, said my father, that was certainly true. But how do you know? I asked. Simple, he said, I’ve got the diaries, two of them. (Because she’d kept them as well in one of the trunks, although my mother had never let on.) Anyway, with a bit of persuasion, reluctantly, my father handed them over: two small, cheap, reddish diaries, for 1933 and 1934, both published by John Walker & Co., Farringdon House, Warwick Lane, EC4, filled with very small writing and decorated at weekly intervals with coloured stamps he stuck in to mark the church calendar. These left him even less space to write down the compromising details of his daily life, but he managed enough.
There is no doubt that Grandma preserved Grandpa’s diaries for 1933 and 1934 as evidence against him. Indeed, the 1933 diary has a couple of scathing marginal comments in her hand – Here the fun begins (Friday, 25 August) and Love begins (fool) exactly a week later. If he refused to produce the cash that lined her luggage, paid for her outings to the cinema and her teatime meringues at the Kardomah, and fed the National Savings account she eventually put in my name in case some man got hold of it when she died, then she would take the damning documents to the Bishop, threaten scandal and divorce, and lose him even the rotten living he had.
Reading these diaries turned out to be a bit like eavesdropping on the beginnings of my world. 1933 was the year the grandparents arrived in Hanmer from South Wales. This was how the Hanmer I grew up in had been created – how life in the vicarage got its Gothic savour, how we became so isolated from respectability, how the money started not to make sense and (above all) how my grandfather took on the character of theatrical martyrdom that set him apart. 1933, he did not fail to note, was the nineteen-hundredth anniversary of Christ’s Passion: ‘This is the Crucifixion Year AD 0–33, 1900–1933. A Holy Year.’ He wasn’t thiry-three himself, but forty-one and fearful, before he was offered this new, sprawling country parish in the north, that his career in the Church of Wales had ground to a shaming standstill. He’d been twelve years in the same place. ‘Here we are at the end of winter time,’ he writes on 8 April, on Saturday night, doing some spiritual stock-taking and already assuming his Sunday style, ‘and I am still at St Cynon’s. O God give me a little chance now at last. Thy will be done.’ But the South Wales parish he was after at the time, Pencoed, went to someone else the very next Thursday and the day after that, Good Friday, he is making the most of his misery, preaching on the theme, ‘Who will roll away the stone …?’
It isn’t until later in Easter Week that he learns – or at least confides to his diary – the full extent of his humiliation: ‘They have really cast me aside in favour of a young fellow who has only been ordained since 1924. Well this is the limit. What on earth am I to do now? No hope and no chance.’
But he has learned to live with hopelessness, that’s the worst of it. He fritters away his time and turns his back on the drama of rejection. The great shock of opening this compromising little book, for me, was that for the first half – with the exception of the few desperate and frustrated cris de coeur I’ve culled – it was the record of a pottering, Pooterish, almost farcically domesticated life. The sinner I was expecting was guilty of pride, lust and spiritual despair, not merely of sloth and ineptitude. This was the diary of a nobody. So I nearly censored January to June 1933 in the interests of Grandpa’s glamour as a Gothic personage. But in truth this is what we should be exposed to – the awful knowledge that when they’re not breaking the commandments, the anti-heroes are mending their tobacco pipes and listening to the wireless.
He had been ‘jolly miserable’ (that middle-class oxymoron!) during those last stagnant months in South Wales. You could do nearly nothing in the Church of Wales and get away with it, no one took official notice, a vicar was a gentleman after all. Chapel would have been different, much more a matter of openly devout busybody closeness with the congregation, but he managed to nurture his depression in private. He’d surface late from sleep or sulks, affronted by the weather: ‘It is a terrible trial to get up in these very cold mornings’ – and light the fire in the study. Or that was his plan. Often things went wrong, as he expected: ‘Lit a fire in the study but heaps of soot fell down and put it out,’ he reports, as late on as 6 May. ‘Could not get on with my sermon at all today. An aeroplane overhead at teatime …’ It’s uncharacteristic of him to notice what’s going on outside, he is so fed up with his surroundings (his parish, his prison). But perhaps the plane flew past his defences because it belonged to the skyey regions of the weather, which he regularly records as a mirror or a foil to his moods. He’s good at the rhetoric of the barometer: with freezing rain comes the pathetic fallacy, sunshine equals irony, with the snow everything grinds gratifyingly to a halt.
Also, the aeroplane was new and a machine, like his addiction, the wireless. With his ear to the speaker he takes to the airwaves himself and communes with the wide world so intimately it seems inside his head. ‘Toothache,’ says one entry, ‘Earthquake in Japan.’ Hitler comes to power in Germany (31 January), Roosevelt’s oath-taking is relayed (4 March). Grandpa registers the facts, but doesn’t comment, he’s more interested in the quality of reception he’s getting on short wave, the placing of the aerial and whether to buy a Pye or a Murphy. He tries each out on approval, squeezes in little drawings of the rival sets on the page and after some enjoyable dithering – ‘Spent the whole of the day trying to decide between the Pye and the Murphy’ – splashes out £17.17s.0d on the Pye, ‘bought … outright’.
This is hugely extravagant, the better part of a month’s pay (his stipend was £73.4s.4d per quarter), but he owes it to himself, since listening in and twiddling the knobs is what makes his idleness and boredom feel busy. He sees few people, even on the Almighty’s business. He boycotts the meetings of the Rural Dean and Chapter (‘lost any desire to meet the clergy of the Rhondda – they are all such a lot of place-seekers’) and records punctually and with a kind of glum relish the lousy church attendances in harsh weather: ‘Got up for H[oly] C[ommunion]. No one at HC.’ The wireless, by contrast, is a friendly presence. ‘Spent the whole of the afternoon tinkering with my old wireless set in the study,’ reads an almost happy entry long after he has acquired the superior Pye. The hums and crackles and cosmic whistles of interference probably served nearly as well as the programmes to provide him with a private cocoon of distraction. He does read of course as well, and in the same impatient spirit, science fiction stories about other