Bad Blood: A Memoir. Lorna Sage

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СКАЧАТЬ spirit of the illusion so enthusiastically that she swept aside the dimension of fiction altogether. The latest Ava Gardner movie was just the most recent report on what promiscuous Ava had been up to since you saw her last: the changes of costume and setting and name were feeble disguises, and didn’t fool Grandma for a minute. She was there to witness when Joan Fontaine, for all her icy blondeness, fell for Harry Belafonte and would (she said) never trust Joan again. Grace Kelly she watched like a hawk for signs of similar leanings and was semi-confirmed when Grace married an Eye-tie. (She herself wouldn’t touch dark chocolate, even, and anyone who acquired a suntan was suspected of a touch of the tar brush.) Once television arrived in our lives she became an addict of soap operas and in particular Emergency Ward 10, which saved her life day after dreary rural day. The box eventually became her babysitter, the last, many times removed substitute for her mother. By then I was treating her with contempt, as a senile infant, although she scared me a lot, in truth, because she represented the prospect of never growing up.

      Once upon a time in South Wales, when a friend of Katie’s came to stay, I had had to spend the night in a feather bed, sandwiched between Katie and Grandma, and that ambiguous sensation of sinking back and back, down and down in a deep nest of feathers and furbelows and flesh, came to stand for the Rhondda. Infinite regress threatened down there: promised, and threatened. It was pleasurable – how could it be otherwise? – to return to the smothering, spongy womb of the Stores. And yet I was always glad to get away. As I grew, Grandma got shorter, so that she sometimes looked almost spherical. She and Katie were such an exclusive club, really, that even my mother wasn’t a full member and I was even further removed from the inner sanctum because I couldn’t recall my great-grandmother, so had to take her praises on trust.

      There were other Welsh voices I could have listened to. Occasionally – and to my great surprise – people who dropped in to the shop would congratulate my mother on my bookishness and talk with pride about how their grandchildren were ‘getting on’ and going to the grammar school. People in Tonypandy, as in other mining districts, were enthusiastic about education, in sharp contrast to Hanmer’s conservative scorn and inertia. The future was real and a good thing, and even if you went down the pit like your da you weren’t expected to give up reading, thinking, arguing or politicking; autodidacts flourished still in those days. Nonetheless the atmosphere of Hereford Stores dominated my sense of the place, so that for me the journey south was like slipping into a pocket of the past. I didn’t know who I was, there – didn’t need to know. It was as though I hadn’t been born yet.

      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.

       IV The Original Sin

      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. СКАЧАТЬ