Passing Stranger
By Mihangel
4. They fuck you up
They fuck you up, your mum and dad,
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.
Philip Larkin, This be the Verse
For most of my Yarborough days, when at home for the holidays in our handsome Georgian house, I had largely to amuse myself. Jessie my sister, who went to a local girls' day school, led a busy social life in which, to my relief, I was not included. My few friends were scattered across the country, and I knew no-one nearby to hang out with. Already a lone wolf, I was not totally unhappy. Home was not wholly joyless, though the fun was muted. I had my thoughts for company, and my books, and my father's books, for he was a scholar too. And I had my hobbies, notably archaeology and windmills and narrow-gauge railways.
These interests of mine had rubbed off on a couple of friends. Bill was the only boy from prep school I kept up with, and when we were fourteen we were allowed out together for a week's cycling holiday in Sussex, youth hostelling and hunting windmills. Next year, at fifteen, the same in Holland, my first trip abroad. But now, with puberty, gone was the unabashed sexual curiosity of our prep school days. Now, when I jacked off in the hostel bed next to Bill's, I took great care he should not hear.
At Yarborough my closest friend -- as far as that went -- was Rob, and once we went camping in Wales together in pursuit of railways. Once, too, he came to stay with me at home, the only occasion that any school friend did. The boiler being on the blink, Mum, in her innocence, insisted we share a bath. We fitted ourselves in, legs interlocked, and inevitably both went stiff. Pretending not to be embarrassed, we laughed. But I was desperate for more than laughter, and draped my face flannel over his erection. Rob responded by laughing again. Nothing else. Therefore nothing else happened. Of course not. Nothing ever happened with me. That pallid episode remained the closest I ever achieved to a gay encounter.
Ultimately, too, I had music to beguile me at home. It is my great sorrow, in hindsight, that I failed to take advantage of the boundless musical opportunities which Yarborough offered. The fault was wholly mine, or my upbringing's. I had heard no music whatever at home and parlous little at my prep school, and joined the school without an ounce of knowledge or appreciation or any desire to take up an instrument. But every new boy had to attend the director of music, who would hit a note on the piano and tell the boy to sing it. If he got it right to within a semitone, he was automatically assigned to the Concert Choir; if, that is, his voice was unbroken, for they were more discriminating with broken voices which were in more plentiful supply. Into the choir, then, I went as an alto, and I recall my fright on being introduced to a musical score. But after two terms I had had enough and wormed my way out by pretending, quite untruthfully, that my voice was breaking. Nor did I take advantage of the admirable programme of concerts by eminent visiting soloists and orchestras. All I had to whet my slumbering appetite was the compulsory school concerts, and sadly it was not until my final year that music and I really began to click. Only then, by acquiring a record player and discovering the Third Programme, could I listen to my sort of music at home.
Home life was dominated, needless to say, by my parents. I am a mongrel, born of a wholly Scots mother and a partly Welsh father, although in both cases their families had settled in England two generations before. On my father's side I also have a chunk of English ancestry, and for good measure a dash of German and Dutch. And it was Dad who, for better or worse, wielded by far the greatest influence on me. An academic, a scholar and an author, he was a curious mixture of the stern and the gentle; as shy, I think, as me, and emphatically not at ease with children. As already remarked, I rarely saw him during the war, and for ten years after it we were not close and I went in considerable awe of him.
Come hell or high water, the one fixed point in the week was still the Sunday morning service. Our local church was literally a stone's throw from the house, but the vicar was not inspiring and Dad saw my sister and me sinking into ever deeper boredom. To ring the changes he took us to other churches in nearby suburbs. At one, as high as it could be without belonging to Rome, we found ourselves in a fog of incense, and when the acolytes started swinging censers in each others' faces Jessie and I got the giggles. Dad was also red in the face. Laughing in church was Bad Form, Anglo-Catholicism was a Step Too Far, and thenceforth it was back to our local mediocrity. None the less, even when I was older and might have cried off, I still accompanied him there whenever I was at home. He would have been so disappointed if I had not.
When he turned sixty-five and retired, our relationship changed. I was sixteen, reaching maturity in independent thinking and independent research. At last he had time for me -- when I was home for the holidays -- and was delighted to find me a chip off the old block. At last we clicked, and became friends. He was into genealogy, and together we pored over parish registers and wills, especially for the Welsh side of the family: it was this, hand in hand with the narrow-gauge railways, which first awoke my love of the land of my fathers. I helped him too with his academic research and criticised his drafts. He helped me by example and by encouragement. He drove me around the country on my projects, or lent me the car when I could drive by myself. By the time I left school my first publication had appeared and the research for my first full-blown book had been done. In this respect I owe him everything; him, and my teachers.
But our friendship was more professional, as it were, than personal. We could now discuss history and geography and language, art and politics and current affairs. We shared a similar sense of humour and had good times together. But there were barriers, on both sides, which we did not cross. The shy father and the shy son could still not talk about such awkward things as emotions, let alone sexuality.
Towards the end of his life Dad handed me, as he always did, the draft of his latest book to comment on. As a young man he had written thrillers -- "clutch and throttle," we called them -- which, for their date, were not bad. Since then his books had all been academic. This new venture, surprisingly, was a novel. But it was a disaster, and pointing out that it was almost unreadable and certainly unpublishable strained my tact to the utmost.
If I was surprised at his return to fiction, I was flabbergasted at one chapter where a man attempted a gay affair with a boy. Novels in the 1960s were admittedly less explicit than they are now, but the Victorian coyness of this scene was excruciating. Only to be expected, perhaps, from an old-fashioned man: what astonished me was that he touched on such a topic at all. It seemed so out of character that I was puzzled. But I could not ask, and my mental question was answered only when he died.
Dad had also gone to Yarborough and Cambridge. His boyhood and youth had been unsettled. From his teens until his death at the age of eighty he kept a diary, twenty-odd volumes in his microscopic and spidery script. When, after his funeral, it came to me and I opened it, I was knocked back on the ropes. Throughout his late schooldays and his time at Cambridge, many pages had been ripped out and replaced by a note in modern ballpoint, "I have destroyed these pages because I was then sick." But enough hints remained in the surviving parts to make it clear what his sickness was. Among his books, moreover, was a large and sumptuous edition of the Rubáiyát bound in soft red leather and illustrated with sensuous Preraphaelite-style paintings. It had been a twenty-first birthday present from a Cambridge friend who was more, I have the strong impression, than a mere friend.
I am not sure what light all this sheds on his personality. I have yet to summon up the courage to read more of the diary, and I still do not know when or how his young nature came to be stifled, Pompeii-like, under the Vesuvian ash of his morality. All I do know is that he did not propose to Mum until he was forty-three, and that it took Mum three weeks to say yes. Nor am I sure whether to be sorry that I heard about his past only when it was too late. Even if I had known of it earlier, we could hardly have discussed what was clearly and profoundly shameful to him. He was not that sort of man. Nor, with my equally deep-hidden if unrepented secret, was I. Like father, like son.
He never said much about his unstable boyhood. He was still a baby in the early 1890s when his father, an Anglican priest, had walked out on the family and left Britain never to return. Dad was brought up by his mother, a domineering woman with itchy feet who was permanently on the move. I never knew her -- she died well before I was born -- but he was open in his praise of her, and very occasionally a hint broke through of disapproval of his father. But almost at the end of his life he was told, by a distant relative who was in a position to know, that his father had actually been an admirable and maligned man. Dad's faith -- and his faith in his mother -- was shaken. He admitted it. How much detail he learned from this relative I cannot say. The information I have is limited, and maybe I have a suspicious mind; but both suggest a reason why my grandfather left his family and these shores.
Mum came, on both sides, from military families. Perhaps their greatest fame was achieved by her father who, when a schoolboy at Harrow, used to jab his pen nib into the podgy rump of the unpopular boy at the desk in front, whose name was Winston Churchill. But Mum was not in the least militaristic, and a totally different character from Dad. Where he could no more fry an egg, sew a button or drill a screw hole than fly to the moon, she was an accomplished craftswoman. Not only at dressmaking, as might be expected of her genteel background, but at carpentry and bricklaying, accomplishments rare indeed in a lady of her generation. Any practical skills I have I owe to her.
She was fifteen years younger than Dad, more fun, much more extrovert, always more approachable. Emphatically no churchgoer, she sometimes went along to keep him happy, but usually pleaded that she had to stay at home to cook Sunday lunch. Otherwise she was loyal and modest to a fault. She viewed herself as a light-weight alongside her authoritative husband. She knew her place, as she interpreted it, and suppressed her natural sociability to match his retiring life-style. As far as I was concerned, she saw to my food and clothes and health and, until I was old enough to fend for myself, my cleanliness. Everything else she left to Dad.
Once, in my early teens, I was running an eye down her shopping list. "What are tampons, Mum?" She hedged, and that evening Dad took me aside and reluctantly explained the messy practicalities of menstruation. At much the same time he had to relay a complaint that I was leaving pubic hairs stuck to the soap in the bath. Mum could never have raised so unmentionable a matter herself.
No doubt we loved each other, but we were much too private to show it. No hugs in our family, no cuddles, no kisses. Not even (I strongly suspect) between Mum and Dad: certainly not in public, and they slept in separate beds. We all had a communication problem. Theirs has now been solved, for they -- and Jessie too -- have long since gone.
The grave's a fine and private place,
But none, I think, do there embrace.
My problem is still with me.
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