Augustus John (7 page)

‘The bubble of a life-time of respectability burst without trace. There seemed no answer to it but ridicule. That was your answer and I approve of it – that or silence.’

Thornton John to Augustus John (25 June 1959)

The year 1884 was for Edwin John a particularly unhappy one. His marriage, ruined latterly by his wife’s ill-health, was at an end; and his father, who had been suffering from what the locals called ‘water on the brain’, had died in the previous month.
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He had four children, two fanatical sisters-in-law, few friends.

That autumn Edwin made a great decision. He gave up his legal practice in Victoria Place, sold his house at Broad Haven and, taking with him two Welsh servants from Haverfordwest, moved to Tenby where, for a short spell, he had enjoyed some happiness with Augusta. Leah and Rosina left too, transferring their proselytizing zeal to the wider horizons of the New World,
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and leaving Edwin to lapse back into the bosom of the orthodox church.
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But there may have been another reason why Edwin wanted to get away from Haverfordwest. He had inherited almost all his father’s fortune of some eight thousand pounds. His two brothers, Alfred and Frederick, were each left only a small annual income provided that, at the time of William John’s death, neither was ‘an uncertified bankrupt or through his own act or default or by operation or process of law or otherwise disentitled personally to receive or enjoy the same during his life or until he shall become bankrupt’.
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It seems that in their father’s opinion Alfred, who had gone to Paris, was a ne’er-do-well; Frederick, who served time in prison (and was to die in 1896 aged thirty-nine), was a criminal; and Edwin was his good son. Two of their sisters, Joanna and Emma, were already dead, but another sister, Clara, was alive. She did not go to her father’s funeral, and neither did Alfred or Frederick, for there was bad feeling between them and Edwin. Clara never enlarged ‘upon the rift
which separated them’, Thornton wrote to Augustus, ‘ – hatred perhaps would be a better word. I suspected money.’
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Clara felt she had a moral claim on her brother, but Edwin knew she had no legal claim. He was now a comparatively wealthy man, having also inherited his wife Augusta’s money (partly held in trust for their children). He was thirty-seven years of age – not too late to start another life in a new place.

Victoria House, 32 Victoria Street, into which he and his young family now moved was an ordinary mid-nineteenth-century terrace house, with three main floors, a basement for servants and an attic for children.

Augustus disliked his new home almost from the beginning. Dark and cube-like, with a peeling façade, it was like a cage and he a bird caught within it. Set in a dreary little street off the Esplanade, from where you could hear but not see the waters of Carmarthen Bay, it was furnished without taste or imagination, its dull mahogany tables and chairs, its heavy shelves of law tomes and devotional works, its conglomeration of inauthentic Italian pottery, pseudo-ivory elephants and fake Old Masters – all tourist souvenirs from William John’s European wanderings – reinforcing the atmosphere of mediocrity and gloom. In the twelve years he lived here, Augustus came to feel that this was not a proper home nor was Edwin John a real father. ‘I felt at last that I was living in a kind of mortuary where everything was dead,’ he records, ‘like the stuffed doves in their glass dome in the drawing-room, and fleshless as the abominable “skeleton-clock” on the mantelpiece: this museum of rubbish, changing only in the imperceptible process of its decay, reflected the frozen immobility of its curator’s mind.’
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Edwin John was afflicted by a form of acute anxiety from which he protected himself with a straitjacket of respectability. For what he had lost with the death of his wife, for all he had seemed prevented from attaining by his terrible reserve, he found solace in the contemplation of a stubbornly unspent bank balance.

The regime at Victoria House was an expression of this financial and emotional stringency. Sometimes, at night, the children were so cold that they would pile up furniture on their beds. Though timid in public, Edwin was something of an authoritarian at home and demanded of his children an unquestioning obedience. He was determined to do the right thing – and the right thing so often combined unpleasantness with parsimony. Gwen, who abhorred rice pudding, was required to swallow it to the last mouthful; Winifred, who was rather fragile when young, was specially fed on a diet of bread-and-butter pudding full of raisins which
she was convinced were dead flies. More awful than anything else were the silences. Whether because of his shyness or of some wall of melancholia, Edwin seemed shut off from his children, unable to mix or communicate with them. Breakfast, lunch and eventually dinner were sometimes eaten without a word spoken. Once, when Winifred hazarded some whispered remark, Edwin turned on her and asked with facile sarcasm: ‘Oh, so you’ve found it at last, have you?’

‘Found what?’

‘Your tongue.’

It was after this that Gwen and Winifred invented a language based on touch and facial expressions, but they were forbidden to use it in the house since it made them look so hideous. So they would go upstairs before each meal and try to decide what each would say.

‘I’m going to say...’

‘No. I want to say that.’

‘I thought of it first.’

‘Well, I’m the eldest.’

Augustus’s silence was more complicated. He had seen a boy of about his own age fall off a roundabout at a fairground and be led away bleeding at the mouth. This scene had so impressed him that he later transferred it to himself. When called upon to answer some question he would struggle gallantly with his partly amputated tongue but utter only a few grunts. This handicap left him at last when he became a self-elected son of the Antelope Comanche Indians, and was required to cry ‘Ugh! Ugh!’

Birthdays were times of unbearable excitement. Though excessively formal, Edwin John was not an unkind man. At night, the children would tell him what to play on the piano, and the sound of his scrupulous rendering would float up to their icy bedrooms. He also read to them in the evenings from
Jane Eyre
,
and Mme Blavatsky’s
Isis Unveiled
,
from bowdlerized versions of
The Arabian Nights
and, more haltingly, from the complete works of a Flemish writer, Hendrik Conscience, translated into French – a language in which Edwin was being tutored by Monsieur de Berensburg, a Belgian exile in Tenby. Gwen and Winifred were for a time taught by a French governess who was delighted by their progress and told their father it must be due to some French ancestry. This intended compliment dismayed Edwin who discontinued the lessons and substituted instruction in German grammar.

As at Haverfordwest, it was the servants who enjoyed themselves most and they were much envied by other servants in Tenby. Shrieks of laughter were often to be heard rising from the basement and invading the stillness
of Edwin John’s rooms. Occasionally relatives called, and the children would be dragged out from behind furniture and under beds to deliver their cold kisses.

But it was not an unhappy life. Their emotions were chiefly directed to their animals, the sea, to wild stretches of the country and the occasional best friend. Gwen had a cat, Mudge, who was a famous fighter. Out walking, Edwin would meet him on the town wall looking so disreputable that he refused to recognize the animal, quickening his pace to shake him off. But when Winifred lost her spaniel Floss, Edwin arranged for the town crier to walk through Tenby ringing his bell and shouting out the news. Once Floss was found, he hurried round to her school, accompanied by a maid, interrupting her lessons to tell her the good news.

Thornton grew into a small quiet boy, more at home in the sea than on land. Rather slow and precise in his speech, he would provoke Augustus into all sorts of exasperating tricks to discover the limits of his endurance. Destined by his father to be an engineer, he cherished a romantic ambition to live the life of a gold prospector, and before the age of twenty left, luggageless, for Canada, sprouted a moustache and spent many years unsuccessfully digging.
*1

The two girls, Winnie with long fair hair down her back, and Gwen who was dark, used to walk about Tenby alone, which was regarded as very peculiar. Both were intensely shy. As they grew older they were allowed to go for bicycle rides together along the green Pembrokeshire lanes, climbing on to the stone walls whenever they met a flock of sheep. Once they encountered a company of soldiers, whose officer gave a word of command as they approached so that the columns of men separated, allowing them to ride down the centre at full speed, blushing furiously.

Winifred, who was to become an accomplished violinist in the United
States,
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and who also loved dancing, shared her sister’s affinity for the sea and passion for flowers. But Gwen’s need for sea and flowers, nurtured in greater solitude, was obsessive. She used to dream of flowers and if she could not pick them, she would spend her pocket-money buying them.

Out of sight of her father and the well-dressed persons of Tenby, Gwen would strip off her clothes and run along the empty beaches. In this wildness, and the quick switchback of her emotions, she resembled Augustus more closely than Winifred or Thornton who were both softer personalities. But as children Gwen and Winifred paired off together while Thornton and Augustus, wearing their dark-blue schoolboy caps at the very backs of their heads, trailed groups of girls across the sandhills. At home Gwen and Gus would stage elaborate arguments as to who was really the elder, neither of them appealing for judgement to Papa because they would then have to find something else to argue over.

Much of Augustus’s life at this time passed in fantasy. He would ransack his father’s library for books and, poring over them, would seem to hover on the threshold of other worlds. When he read the story of Gerda and Little Kay, he was overcome by ungovernable tears, and had to shut himself away in his room. His favourite author was Gustave Aimard, whose tales of ‘Red Indians’ so absorbed him that he took to studying his father’s features in the hope of discovering in them some trace of Antelope blood.

But it was outside Victoria House that Gus came fully alive. Striding through the streets of Tenby on the tallest stilts, diving off rocks and swimming far out into the cold bay, gathering wild strawberries that overhung the cliff tops, gazing fearfully down disused coal pits or up through the terrifying blow-holes that bellowed out volumes of yellow sea-spume over the fields, wandering across the salt-marshes to the rock-pools
in the hills where the snow outlasted the winter – Augustus was in his element.

At home he appeared to shrink; outdoors he seemed fearless. One day, coming across an untethered horse, without a word he jumped on its back. As it started to gallop, he slowly began sliding off until he was eventually hanging under its neck. So this odd pair hurtled towards the horizon. But in the end, when the horse finally came to a halt, Augustus was still clasped there. He was always climbing. He would descend the dizzy rock-cliffs between Giltar and Lydstep to wet shingle beaches and, like Gwen, fling off his clothes and throw himself in and out of the water while the tide advanced, giving him that special thrill which comes from not being quite sure of getting back.

In particular, he loved the harbour at Tenby with its fleet of luggers and fishing-smacks, and the russet sails of the trawlers; and the long expanse of Tenby beaches, their sand spongy like cake – a golden playground two miles long. Here, while still very young, Gus would play all day with his brother and sisters, catching shrimps in the tidal pools where the sea-urchins delicately flowered, paddling through the waves that seethed and criss-crossed the shore, and elaborately hauling buckets of sand up the blue slate-coloured cliffs. Where the sea had worn these cliffs away, devious caves had been hollowed out, as if gnawed by giant sea-mice – dark, dangerous and exciting. Slabs of slate rock lay bundled at the entrances, covered with barnacles and emerald seaweed.

The beach was a fashionable meeting place for all Tenby. Under the cliffs a band played patriotic airs and ‘nigger minstrels’ sang and danced; donkeys, led by donkey-boys and ridden by well-dressed infants, trotted obediently to and fro; gentlemen in boaters or top hats, and ladies in long skirts with wasp waists, balancing parasols, promenaded the sands. Bathing – a complicated procedure in voluminous blue serge costumes or long combinations – was permitted between special hours. Horse-drawn bathing machines, strewn along the sands, were used – bathing from boats was not lawful within two hundred yards of the shore. These bathing machines were upright carriages on wheels, advertising the benefits of Beecham’s Pills and Pears Soap. They were looked after by a large uncorseted woman and a company of boys, celebrated for their vulgarity, who shocked Augustus by whispering unheard-of obscenities in his ears. A frantic man, summoned by the shouts of these boys, would canter up and down the sands harnessing horses to the vehicles which were then pulled out into the deep water. The occupants could thus enter the water with the least possible hazard to modesty. Once they had completed their swimming, they would re-enter their horse-drawn dressing-room, regain their clothes, then raise a flag as a signal that they were ready to be towed back.

As he grew older, Augustus began to avoid this beach, roaming beyond North Cliff Point where he and his companions could bathe from the rocks and lie naked in the sun. He longed for a wider world than that enclosed by the walls of Tenby and was happiest when he and his brother and sisters were invited to stay at Begelly, in a house overlooking an infertile common populated by geese, cattle and the caravans of romantic-looking gypsies. Here, and with the Mackenzie family at Manorbier, the rules and repressions of Tenby were forgotten, Papa was left behind, and the strangely brooding children of Victoria Street were transformed into a turbulent tribe of Johns.