EMPIRE OF REGRET - EIGHT

The process that wrested me from my parents’ tutelage, such as it was, and drew me over into that of the educational and child guidance authorities of the suburban London borough to which my father had brought us when I was five was a gradual and, at the beginning, almost an imperceptible one. The protracted verbal and emotional abuse that was dealt out, with clockwork regularity from noon to midnight every Sunday for example, in our tiny maisonette would surely have greatly interested the adepts in the new sciences of social and familial psychology who were coming, in those pioneering years of the mid-nineteen-sixties, to make up larger and larger proportions of the personnel employed at our local town hall. But I can’t see how any wind of what went on on these torturous Sundays could ever have gotten beyond our maisonette’s four walls, since the idea, say, of consulting a marriage counselor would no more have crossed the mind of either of my parents than would have that of going to join an ashram in Katmandu. It was certainly, then, I conclude with regret, I myself that opened the crack through which the poisonous snake of social work and social engineering slipped into the garden of our household – which, if it was never even close to edenic, had at least, up to that point, been securely walled.

There’s a lot that’s obscure and unknown to me in the story I’m about to tell of my boyhood’s middle years. I’m uncertain, for example, whether it was some potential grandeur, or rather some already actual misery, that the child guidance experts and educationalists believed they saw in me that first prompted them to involve themselves in my family’s affairs. Were the former the case, there would be therein a poetic irony more engaging for my readers, since the especially intense and prolonged involvement of these authorities in my upbringing ended up doing me great harm and bringing to ruin whatever potential I might have had. But I can easily see how the latter might be a plausible explanation for the town hall’s taking an early interest in me as well. Great claims were made on my mother’s time by the need to make up the significant shortfall between the wage that my father earned in his job on the industrial estate behind the Hoover Factory and the rent we were paying in our Art Deco maisonette. By the time I was six or seven, as I’ve already mentioned, she was regularly sustaining, besides her duties as a mother and as keeper of her own household, three or four part-time jobs on five or six days of every week. She would rise, for example, for a first job – the cleaning of a suite of offices in one of the six- or eight-storey “skyscrapers” that were just then being constructed along the interminable London-to-Oxford thoroughfare that bisected the borough just south of Jacob’s Ladder – at five in the morning hours before either my father or myself and would be back again before half past seven in time to make my breakfast and take me across the park to school. By the end of my school-day around three o’clock she’d have put behind her another two part-time jobs – cleaning the several spacious bars of an Irish social club whose northern wall almost abutted on the southern wall of our parish church and caring for the intimate needs of an almost bedridden eighty-year-old Englishwoman who lived alone in one of the large Victorian houses located townward of Ealing Broadway in the richest part of the borough – before picking me up and seeing to the preparation of my and my father’s supper. For long periods – though my mother’s employment situation was, as I’ve already noted, in constant evolution – she went out after dinner, at half past six or seven in the evening, to do yet another job: perhaps in a second suite of offices on the London-Oxford road, where she would dust and polish and hoover in the same uncanny atmosphere as in the early-morning office-cleaning job of spaces designed for purposeful activity abandoned by all activity except her own small and solitary movements, only this time due not to the first batch of busy clerks’ being hours yet from arriving but rather due to the last clerk’s having departed hours before.

Given such circumstances, it would not have been surprising if the life that I was living at the age of six and seven had come to display traits of the kind that were just then being codified, by the consensus of the child psychologists and social workers who in those years of 1965 and 1966 were making up month by month an ever larger proportion of the total personnel of Ealing borough council, as indices of parental neglect. The fact indeed is that, at least as I remember it, I was, all this notwithstanding, not a neglected child at all. Aside from during those terrible Sunday afternoons and evenings – which were a sort of état second that she needed to expel, at regular intervals, the accumulated spleen of her life in Hanwell, and her life before that in Westbourne Park, with the odd, and after all difficult and complicated, man who was my father – my mother left nothing to be desired in the way of care and attention. The jobs she was forced to work she worked mostly in the hours when I was in the care of the teachers at my school and in the school holidays, instead of having me “minded” by someone else – something she wasn’t able to afford and wouldn’t have consented to even if she had been – she took me with her to those jobs of hers, at least, that she didn’t perform at hours when I was still asleep in bed. My mother’s having me accompany her to her morning and evening cleaning jobs was, between school terms at least, a counsel of necessity if she was not indeed to be a neglectful parent and leave me, all through the ten weeks of the long summer holidays for example, to roam the terrains vagues around the railway in the dubious company of the Grahams. She may have intuited, though – and soon, on the first or second trial, have actually established – that the gift of an hour or two’s immersion in that atmosphere of uncanniness which informed, as I’ve said, the places of her work at the odd, inverted hours in which these places were rendered up to her was one of the most precious and engrossing gifts she might have given me. Most days at least, I was more than glad to exchange whatever thrill the building of a camp, or the committing of some act of delinquency, with the Grahams might have afforded me for the sense of being transported into some arcane alternative reality that overcame me as soon as I crossed the threshold of one of these localities in which my mother worked as if on the dark side of their normal hours of operation’s moon. I was able to savour especially deeply this precious sense of the uncanny when my mother took me with her to the Irish social club whose premises she used to clean daily between nine and ten in the morning for a five-pound note that the proprietor would crumple wordlessly into her hand. It was a club to which we’d gone, some evenings, as a family – not often, indeed, but on one of the rare occasions, before my mother had quarreled definitively and irreconcilably with all those dozens of her extended family members who lived scattered around the western parts of Greater London, when some cousin pressed us so hard with an invitation to a wedding or a baptism party that we could not refuse – and I found that I could spend hours sitting on one of the deep plush sofas in the club’s saloon bar, without need of book or comic to amuse or to distract me, meditating on the mystery of how strangely different a shine, one seemingly alien to their nature, the brass beerpulls, recently polished by a swipe of my mother’s hand, shone with under the morning light that fell on them from the one unshuttered window high up on the wall behind me as compared to the shine that I remembered them shining with under the effulgence of the strip lights during the loud and boisterous evening hours when the saloon bar was, so to speak, what it was.

But though she had the solicitude, and perhaps the deliberate ingenuity, to turn them into sources of delight and intellectual nourishment for me, these hours of work cleaning saloon bars and office suites put enormous strain on the physical resources of my mother, who, by the time I was seven, was a menopausal woman of forty-five. I clearly remember the first time these energies revealed how really overstrained they were. It was in deepest midwinter, a week or two before Christmas (the Christmas, I suppose, of 1966). One afternoon, when the junior school’s last class ended about half an hour before the winter sun went down, I hurried out to wait to be picked up by my mother with the other children at the school gates which, now that the little estate of prefabs which had stood there for twenty years had been torn down, looked out on a broad patch of newly-grown lawn less and less distinguishable, as the months went by, from the longer-established lawns of the park to the north. Minute by minute, as darkness slowly fell, the cluster of children by the gates dissolved and diminished as each boy or girl was led off, on his or her mother’s hand, across either the old stretches of grass or the new one. When four o’clock was past and both the old lawns and the new one were completely dark, my own mother had still not appeared and I was left standing quite alone in front of the gates. I was seven years old by then and making my way, by myself, across the park to our little maisonette would, though I’d never done it before, not have been an unthinkable or unfeasible enterprise. But while I weighed whether or not to undertake it I was fetched back into the classroom I’d left half an hour before by my form mistress – a pretty young woman who couldn’t, at the time, have been more than a few months out of teachers’ college – who’d been keeping an eye, the whole time, on proceedings at the gate through one of the few panes of the classroom’s several tall sash windows not rendered blind by sellotaped pupils’ drawings. Erring, perhaps, on the side of caution, this young woman dissuaded me from making my own way home and kept me with her in the now empty classroom as she performed the tasks that she normally performed after the dismissal of the day’s final class, in the expectation that my mother would turn up before these tasks were completed.

As it turned out, the young schoolmistress and I were still alone in the classroom even when all these end-of-day tasks had been completed and the midwinter evening had advanced to a point where the only name for it was night. Already half an hour into our shared sojourn there she’d asked me to tell her the telephone number under which my parents could be contacted and I think that, even at so early a point as this in the post-war technological revolution, she was a little shocked to be told that our family had no phone installed. Short of the extreme measures of sending a runner across the park, then, or immediately alerting the police, the young woman was left with little choice but to sit on with me in the otherwise empty classroom as five o’ clock turned to six and six began to make its way toward seven. For me, certainly, these hours were not hours of discomfort or of anxiety (though I’ve often wondered since what hard-earned pleasures this young woman, in the first blush of adult beauty at that vibrant apex of the nineteen-sixties, may have forgone that night by prolonging her daily tutelage over me). I’d always felt, most likely mistakenly, that she showed me special favour and I was able to draw, for months afterward, on the events of that evening at least for reinforcement of my self-flattering delusion. She sat me down, for example, in front of the large advent calendar mounted on the classroom’s back wall, the windows of which had been opened by the class together, with the greatest ceremony and solemnity, one by one throughout the course of the preceding ten days, and opened with me, in a gesture that departed so radically from the order that I’d gotten used to that any distracting and calming effect it had was counterbalanced by a dismaying one, the window that bore the date of the following day. As the clock hand moved on from six to seven she opened another window and yet another, enthralling me with the knowledge, that I alone would be the sole custodian of among my classmates for several days to come, that the presiding and informing spirit of the coming Wednesday would be the Three Wise Men receiving the commission of King Herod and that of the following day a robin redbreast perched on a snow-covered country gate. Finally, when we’d reached a point where almost none of the mysteries of this order that lay between that second week of December and that year’s Christmas Day were any longer held back from me, we both glimpsed my mother hurtling, at breakneck speed, past those windows on the left side of the classroom that looked out onto the school’s main interior hallway, so intent, apparently, on reaching some goal at the school’s geometrical centre that she’d set herself that she was looking neither to right nor to left. She was another twenty yards down the hallway before the young schoolmistress was able to reach the classroom door, lean out into the corridor, and gesture and call her back.

My mother was greatly relieved, I’m sure, to find me in the care of the young schoolmistress and not, for example, standing waiting still, in the cold and long since descended darkness, before the school gates, or wandering alone around the now-deserted internal spaces of the school. But once she’d assured herself I was safe something like regret and even resentment became discernible in my mother’s manner with my teacher, as if she believed that some malign God, by making my protector that evening a sweet young woman in whose near future, one sensed, there lay years of impeccable motherhood, had aimed to bring harshly home to her the truth of her having fallen short, and of her falling shorter with every passing year, of this maternal ideal. With the black night beyond them and the bright lights of the classroom before the tall sash windows had become mirrors and my mother, catching sight of her reflection in them, took off the scarf that she’d rapidly tied around her head as she rushed from the maisonette and tried to reintroduce some order into her uncombed hair while she stammered out an account of how, having sat down in an armchair to close her eyes for five minutes between returning home from her second afternoon job and going out again to pick me up from school, she’d been horrified to find herself gently shaken awake, many multiples of these five minutes later, by my father, whom mischance had arrive home even later that night than his usual hour of half past six from his own job in the industrial estate behind the Hoover factory.

If, in the early months of the following year of 1967, letters from the Child Guidance department of the borough’s town hall began to turn up at intervals of several weeks or so on the little mat below the postman’s slit in our front door this may well, as I’ve said, have been a consequence of incidents like the one I’ve just described, which may have occurred more often than I remember or may not even all have been understood by me to be indices of my mother’s being overwhelmed by the demands that her life was making of her and of her being unable to provide me with the parenting I needed. They were surely so understood, however, by a decisive portion of the large number of professionals of human formation and administration whose world began necessarily to impinge on mine as soon as my parents entrusted my education to the local municipality. The young schoolmistress who’d been obliged to sit with me long after school hours on that evening of my mother’s brief collapse certainly bore her no ill will. But it was surely more than her job was worth not to make some written record of the incident and pass this record up to the school’s headmaster. The headmaster, in turn, must surely have filed the record in question away in some file eventually copied to people bearing broader responsibilities within those sections of the town hall concerned with the welfare of the borough’s children, so that sooner or later one of the district’s professional practitioners of do-goodery – a variety of human being that was, as I say, proliferating at exponential speed in those middle years of the nineteen-sixties when social engineering was still in its vigorous, unchastened youth – would have hit on the idea that it was incumbent on him or her to make alterations and improvements to my life. It seems to me equally possible, though, that a file in which my name figured prominently enough to be especially noticed landed up on the desk of one or more of these pioneering social engineers by a slightly different route. Quite aside from any alerts that he may or may not have been receiving about the precarities and peculiarities of my family situation, the headmaster of the junior school under Jacobs Ladder had been taking a special interest in me for some time for other reasons. We called him, I believe, Mr. Edwards and I remember him as a man dressed always in a dark grey suit with a toothbrush moustache confined, by his morning shave, to so narrow a central area of his upper lip that it was almost possible to count the alternately black and silver hairs that made it up, though it may well be that he is confounded in my memory with some character from a comic book or TV animation with whom my imagination was occupied at the time. Mr. Edwards, though, whatever his actual appearance, was real and had fallen into the routine, already from early on in my first year at his school I think, of calling me up to his office on the topmost storey of the redbrick Queen-Anne-style building and conducting private tête-à-têtes with me that often went on so long that they replaced my timetabled class. Mr. Edwards’ intentions in these tête-à-têtes were not the amatory ones that the reader learning of them sixty years later might suppose. I was to have my brush with the pederasty that was still endemic to the British educational system in the latter half of the last century but that was still some years away. My time with Mr. Edwards, assuming no grave violence has been done to my faculty of memory, was devoted entirely to tests of my verbal and mathematical abilities, interspersed only very rarely with small-talk about my life at school and at home. The special interest that Mr. Edwards took in me, that is to say, was prompted rather by the positive than by any negative reports that he’d received about me from my class schoolmistress and the other teachers at his school: the testing of my reading age, for example, as several years in advance of my chronological one. If Mr. Edwards can be faulted, then, in his dealings with me, this extends only to his having shown, perhaps, an excess of excitement and enthusiasm over the possibility of a child prodigy’s having been entrusted to his pedagogic care. It may well be, then, that it was the notes and memos that Mr. Edwards himself sent, on his own initiative, to the child psychology specialists at the borough town hall and its various annexes, and not at all the reports recounting glimpses into a possibly problematical home-life which he merely filed away and passed on, that began to turn me into an object of interest, and even of a sort of collective preoccupation, for the psychologists and social workers employed by the London Borough of Ealing as 1966 turned into 1967 and my eighth birthday drew near.

If I can reconstruct with any verisimilitude the exchanges between my parents and the municipality at that time, then the tone of the latter’s approaches was not a menacing or peremptory one. It’s unlikely that mention was even made in these communications of any doubts that the local council may already have been harbouring about my mother’s and father’s ability to give me proper parenting. What the council spoke of, I’m sure, to my parents in these letters, as well as in the face-to-face interviews with the borough’s child-guidance experts to which these letters invited them, was just my own remarkable intellectual aptitudes, their merit in raising a child endowed with them, and the council’s wish to help them build on what they had already achieved as parents. It was no more a cause of perturbation or suspicion for them than it was for my own eight-year-old self that, while they were talking to a council functionary in one room, the techniques and practices being used to structure the interaction between me and another council functionary in an adjoining room were those which had been developed some decades earlier by Melanie Klein and others to treat serious neuroses and even psychoses in children. I must assume in the light of what transpired that what was specifically proposed to my parents was that the council should contribute to, or perhaps entirely cover, the costs of sending me to a school where my educational needs would be better met than they were likely to be either at the local junior school I was attending or in the local high school that I was set to pass up to in a few years. I know nothing, as I’ve said, with certainty about how the decision was arrived at that led to my being sent away from Hanwell the following spring to spend, thenceforth, two thirds of every year at a boarding school high on the South Downs overlooking the Sussex coastline. But it seems to me impossible that this was a plan formed by my father or my mother themselves. In the first place, it would have been a pipe-dream, given the tightness of our family budget even as things stood when I was attending the little state school by the park. And in the second place, although the defining force in my life up till then had been my father’s ambition to lift his family up out of the poverty with which he’d had himself to struggle for fifty years, I can’t imagine that this ambition extended beyond the condition of security and modest gentility into which he’d raised us, with great and protracted effort, just four or five years before. The impulse to take things still farther must surely have stemmed from elsewhere, though I’ve no doubt that my father and mother, once the local educational authorities drew this casting of their only son forth from them into a social class they’d only glimpsed from afar into the realm of the just about materially feasible, flung themselves with a will into whatever other sacrifice and effort was needed to bring it about.

Perhaps what it took was my mother’s fitting yet a fourth cleaning or caring job into her already impossibly overcrowded working days but, in any case, by early on in 1968 the plan that I should be educated thenceforth at the boarding school proposed to my parents as suitable by the educationalists at the borough town hall had become a firm one, needing only to be finalized by a few last formalities. One of these was an interview with the school’s headmaster, an appointment which we travelled down from Victoria to keep midway through the January of that year. The midwinter weather offered my parents the opportunity to display all that was finest and most substantial in their respective wardrobes. My mother wore, besides her best brooch and earrings, a fawn overcoat that she’d preserved without stain or wrinkle from her Paddington youth by keeping it in the wardrobe often for years at a stretch while my father, for his part, eschewed an overcoat so as to be able to show off what was, in fact, the single suit he possessed. Despite these efforts on my parents’ part, however, the interview proved not to be an auspicious one. It came off so badly, in fact, that I think that, had firm arrangements not already been made between this Sussex school and my London borough’s town hall – and the town hall’s portion of the first year’s fees, no doubt, already been paid over – and had, moreover, my mother and father had a proper sense of the respect that was owed to them at least as parents of a prospective pupil if not as full payers of said pupil’s way, then the plan for me to join the third form of this institution at the start of the imminent spring term would likely have been abandoned then and there.

The school’s headmaster, one Mr. Hackett – the youngest and least eminent son, as I came to learn before I’d spent much time there, of a family whose more gifted or enterprising members occupied high positions in the British army of the clergy of the Anglican church – was surely unfavourably impressed, already on first catching sight of my parents and I approaching up the school drive, by the plebeian awkwardness and nervousness that my mother and father couldn’t, in the circumstances, help but palpably exude. But his latent contempt for the plebeian interlopers that we were might perhaps not have become overt in the hour or so set aside for this perfunctory interview and tour of the establishment had it not been for an unfortunate accident. Though I was a voracious reader, at that age of eight, of much literature that would have met with Mr. Hackett’s approval, I wasn’t so as a result of any discipline imposed by my parents on my reading. My mother, indeed, was barely literate and although my father, as I was later to gather, had been a broad and venturesome reader in those years before the war which stayed mostly an abyss of unknowing both to me and to my mother, I had, myself, never seen him read anything but a newspaper. At eight, then, the matter I might be found off in some corner reading had a more or less equal chance of being one of the old, dry encyclopaedic works of reference that my family’s peregrinations had allowed me to salvage from vacated apartments or from the waste-paper bins of the offices my mother was employed to clean or a garishly illustrated American comic book of the kind that were experiencing a boom on the other side of the Atlantic in those years and found their way, irregularly and therefore all the more excitingly, over to the British side of the ocean. Since my family were just then engaged on a lengthy journey, the heavy Victorian or Edwardian editions of Pears Cyclopaedia with which I sometimes liked to occupy my idle hours did not come into question and I’d fallen back, as a world I could retreat into during the train-journey from London to the Sussex coast which took in those days two full hours, on some instance of the second type of reading matter which I’d persuaded my mother to buy me at the W. H. Smith news-stand at Victoria seconds before we climbed aboard the train. I remember very clearly and precisely, in fact, which American comic book it was that was half stuffed into, and half poking visibly out of, my jacket pocket when I and my parents’ were ushered into the parlour of Mr. Hackett’s home, which took up a central portion of the old country house which formed the main body of his school. It was the last or next-to-last issue of the series of comic books inspired by the popular Get Smart TV show produced throughout 1966 and 1967 by the minor comic-book publishers, Dell, who were soon to be driven out of business by the larger Marvel and DC – certainly not the most garish example of the genre, with no barely-clad alien slave-maiden cowering before some nightmarish ogre on its cover but rather just a photographic image of the actor Don Adams with a faintly bemused expression on his face.

This alone though, it seems, was enough to bring the exchange of pleasantries which accompanied our entry into Mr. Hackett’s parlour to a grinding halt almost as soon as they’d begun. None of us even had time to seat ourselves before Mr. Hackett’s probing eye was caught by the wad of glossy paper protruding from my jacket pocket. His next action, I suppose, was one of a kind that had become second nature to him in his life as rector and corrector, more or less from dawn to dusk, of a hundred boys being unruly in a hundred different ways. He reached down, knocked my arm away from the jacket pocket that half-contained the glossy American comic-book, drew it out and began to wave it vigorously in my still-standing parents’ faces, saying as he did so:

“Mr. and Mrs. Reynolds, let me make it absolutely clear from this, the beginning of our dealings with one another, that this, just this…”

and here he made an especially vigorous swipe with the Get Smart comic-book that failed only by an inch or so to connect with the tip of my mother’s nose

“…is something I cannot and will not tolerate at my school. My pupils are enrolled at this establishment with a view to developing and improving their minds, not rotting and corrupting them with…trash!”

An action like this, as I say, had doubtless become second nature to Mr. Hackett in dealings between himself and his boys in the course of the school’s daily operations. It was surely unnatural, though, and unacceptable to perform such an action in such a way in the presence of a boy’s parents. It’s still painful to me, even after the elapse of sixty years, to recall, as I do in uncannily perfect detail, the feeling of having my arm knocked away from my side by Mr. Hackett so that he could pull the comic out of my jacket pocket and brandish it in my mother’s and father’s faces. Painful too to recall my mother’s and father’s stance and manner as they silently let themselves be upbraided and reprimanded by him as if they were domestic servants and not paying clients of the business which kept food on Mr. Hackett’s table.

Not every part of me, I have to confess, wishes that my mother and father had found their dignity on that occasion and informed Mr. Hackett that their son would not be enrolled as a pupil at an establishment where his parents were addressed in such a tone. Their failing – I wish I could call it a refraining – to do so opened a path for me through the world, it’s true, that has likely been richer in knowledge and experience, though certainly not in happiness, than the path I might have followed if I’d continued my primary and secondary education in the competent institutions of the suburb on the western edge of the city to which my father had brought us four years before. But the harsh and ugly scene in Mr. Hackett’s parlour in the January before the April in which I actually began my time as a pupil at his school ought to have given my parents a sense – and perhaps really did give them a sense, despite the hopes of better times for us all that were surely rising in their hearts just then – that the care and tutelage of the town hall into which they’d gradually been relinquishing their only child in the course of the preceding two years was perhaps not entirely the benevolent and beneficent thing it initially seemed.