Black Beech and Honeydew (22 page)

During all these avuncular proceedings there were extraordinary involutions of snobbery and anti-snobbery at work. Willie, the boldest and gayest of the uncles, was offered a job by the husband of a cousin. This husband, my father said, was never mentioned without a certain change of voice since he manufactured biscuits. His wife was always called ‘Poor Maude’. The fact that he was enormously rich and subsequently founded a peerage, made him, I gathered, less and not more congenial. However, Uncle Willie laughingly went into the biscuit offices and was in due course invited for the weekend to a large house in the country which he referred to as Cracknel Hall. He did not remain for long on such friendly terms as he discovered that his cousin-by-marriage grossly underpaid his employees. Uncle Willie went without appointment into the holy-of-holies, spoke his mind and was instantly sacked. The Boer War having conveniently broken out, Uncles Willie and Freddie volunteered, were commissioned and appointed to a good cavalry regiment. Dashing photographs were sent home to their family. They both went through the war, heavily engaged throughout and loving it. They did not suffer a day’s sickness or the most superficial wound. When it was all over they decided to remain in South Africa. Uncle Willie, like his brother Reggie, became tubercular, was sent to a sanatorium and there married an English girl who was also a patient: both of them knowing that they had only a short time to live.

Uncle Freddie, nicknamed Criggy, also married and became permanent secretary to the Governor-General’s fund, a job which he still held when I met him in Cape Town.

He was my father’s favourite brother which was odd since he was deeply religious. (’Very sincere about it, though, old Crig. Funny thing.’) When the
Balranald
berthed at Cape Town and I looked down at the people on the wharf, it was a shock suddenly to see my father. They were as like as two peas. Indeed, judging by old photographs of Granny Marsh as a still young and very pretty widow, sitting among her children on a croquet lawn, her sons all looked
much alike. They are handsome, rather arrogant-seeming men with heavy moustaches that obliterate their obstinate mouths and an ‘I’ll see you damned first’ expression in their eyes. Some stand in teapot attitudes: one hand on the back of a sister’s chair, the other in a jacket pocket and the legs modishly crossed at the ankle. Others lounge back in their own chairs wearing knickerbockers and bow ties: elegant, huffy and grand. ‘Conceited-looking lot,’ my father used to say. ‘Wonder if we were, what?’

With Uncle Freddie and his wife and two of their four boys, I visited an eighteenth-century house that had belonged to Koopmans de Wet: a very beautiful house that is kept exactly as it was when the de Wets lived in it. Each room feels as if one of the family must have only just walked out of it and is somewhere else in the house: sewing, casting-up accounts, counting linen or conning lessons. To visit there is like walking straight off the street into a Vermeer of Delft.

That was the only time I was to meet Uncle Freddie but from then until he died many years later, he wrote quite regularly and always remarked that he had greatly enjoyed getting in ‘a nice lot of hugs and kisses’, which was no more than the truth.

After Cape Town we steamed slowly up the west coast of Africa in enervating, overcast weather. A land breeze brought a sluggish, dank smell from the Gold Coast and a notice went up warning passengers to keep under the awnings as ‘the sun was deceptive’. We stood close inshore and saw Accra and, later, Dakar and a fort that looked as if a film producer had decided to revive
Beau Geste.

We had only one other port of call – a few hours, anchored in the roads off Las Palmas where we were supposed to take in fresh water. It proved to be bad and the doctor, who conformed only too accurately to every uncomplimentary and unfair legend one had ever heard about ship’s doctors, roused himself sufficiently to issue an edict that it was unsafe to drink, either boiled or fresh. This resulted in a stampede on the bar which very soon ran out of everything except dreadful port and raspberryade.

Two nights before the end of the voyage a fancy-dress party was held. The weather was stifling. We had taken in a load of bananas which were stowed on deck in open wired bales between layers of their own tinder-dry leaves. I couldn’t but think this a dangerous
arrangement when I saw groups of passengers leaning against the bales, smoking. The smell, too, was very strong.

I had put on a scarlet paper carnival suit and feeling rather pleased with myself, had gone up on deck when I ran into a group of three South Africans. They were in a great taking-on. One of their party, a doctor, had become very ill and drifted between delirium and unconsciousness. The ship’s doctor, run to earth in a cabin under circumstances where embarrassment was at a premium, had merely given orders that his brother medico was to be removed to the hospital and had then slammed the door and gone underground.

The friends were both furious and anxious and a little irked, I thought, at having their party upset. Who, they fretfully pointed out, could say what might not happen? He had warned them at the outset of his illness that he was in a bad way. He might die. They had decided to take watches between them. It was rather awkward, they said, because they had arranged…I said I would take a watch. I wasn’t madly wedded to the fancy-dress party and anyway one of them would come and relieve me in an hour.

It was a strange experience. The unknown doctor, who looked dreadful, lay with his eyes not quite shut, turned his head from side to side and sometimes muttered unintelligibly. The stifling little hospital was dirty and unkempt. Surgical instruments flecked with rust lay haphazard in an enamel tray. Used towels had been thrown into a corner. The window was open and I listened to the giant whisper of the sea and distant sounds of revelry. Whoever had undertaken to relieve me evidently forgot to do so. I wished there was something to be done: fluids to be given or perhaps sponging, or ice packs to be administered. I wished the ship’s doctor, in whatever condition, would look in.

I don’t know how long I sat there in my scarlet paper dress. Presently there was no more music, the deck outside the window went dark and the ship settled down for what was left of the night. The patient had become so quiet that in a panic I felt for his pulse. His parched hand closed on mine. I leant forward and rested my forearm on the bed and so remained until at last the man who first spoke to me returned. He said he supposed I must like nursing. It was evident that however bereft the bar might be there were still
supplies of alcohol in the
Balranald.
I said good night and walked
en fête
and alone down the coconut matting corridors to my cabin. Dawn was already established.

Four hours later I woke to the last day on board the
Balranald.

Now the thing about names began. I wonder why these names should have had that particular effect? Was it just the easy magic of proper nouns, so indefatigably explored by poets? ‘Harry the King, Bedford and Exeter, Warwick and Talbot, Salisbury and Gloucester’ down to Kipling’s list of fishing craft? Was it because one had so often heard these names and read them and was at last to see the places themselves? Or was it that, for someone with a great predominance of English blood in her veins, the sound of ‘Land’s End’, ‘The Lizard’, ‘Portland Bill’, ‘Beachy Head’ and ‘Sheerness’ roused some atavistic emotion and abruptly established a heritage. Two men passed along the deck.

‘We lie off Dungeness tonight.’

‘I heard someone say we’re to anchor off Gravesend until it gets light.’

My heart rose into my throat.

I went below and finished my packing.

Here, now, was England itself, close at hand, sliding composedly into the frame of my porthole. A lighthouse, the very tip and beginning of England, a breakwater, cliffs modulating into hills that looked as if they were mown like a lawn: a heraldic England in green and white. For a moment I remembered the West Coast of New Zealand as I’d seen it one evening nearly three months ago: remote, bereft of humankind, so old and so lately born out of primordial time. It astonished me to see now how the south coast of England bore an almost unbroken chain of habitation. I knew it must be so but it was surprising, nevertheless.

Already shipboard life was falling to pieces about one’s ears. A radiogram from the Lampreys fluttered into the foreground and spread itself over my field of receptivity like the playbill in the film of
Henry V.
I had packed everything but my overnight necessities: for all the world, I might have been back on the inter-island ferry. My cupboard-cabin was blank and I don’t remember, although the voyage had been a source of delight, that I felt at all sorry, as I would nowadays, that the
Balranald
had come to the end of her last ramshackle voyage. To all intents, I was ashore.

We did anchor off Gravesend and were to steam up the Thames at dawn to the docks at Tilbury.

Impossible to sleep. I knelt on my bunk and what I saw must have been much the same kind of thing that would be seen a few years later, during the bombing of London. A fire had broken out among the timber-yards at Gravesend. It made a red wavering hole in the night and I thought I could smell it.

Just before dawn the cabin steward made an isolated gesture. For the first time on the voyage he brought me a cup of tea. He said it would be all right to drink it: the water had been filtered. Since Las Palmas I had half-satisfied my thirst with the last of some Cape Town fruit. I thanked him warmly and had drunk half the tea when I found the rest of the cup was full of a thick, viscid, grey silt. There was no time to worry unduly about this. Light had entered the cabin, the ship was moving. Outside was the Pool of London.

It was still very early in the morning when we berthed at Tilbury. I expected that I would have to wait for at least two hours before anybody appeared but when I looked over the rail, there, among a handful of people on the wharf, was a Lamprey.

My childhood dream of London is in some ways clearer in my memory than the events of that first morning: they, indeed, have a dreamlike, wavering quality. Of the long drive through the East End into the City I remember little except, again, names. ‘Limehouse’ and ‘Poplar’, for instance, in those days evoked wonderfully sinister references to opium dens, gas-lamps wreathed in fog and wet stone stairs. The Commercial Road looked drab, broad and bald on that bright summer morning and held no romantic overtones.

I remember being told to look up out of the car window and there was the dome of St Paul’s.

Up the hill to Ludgate

Down the hill of Fleet.

I thought, and the words jingled confusedly in my head. As if in answer there
were
bells, high in the air, clanging away above the roar of London.

‘That’s St Clement’s Dane.’

There it stood like an island. ‘Oranges and lemons’ they were ringing as if there were no bombs in the future and they would sing it out for another three centuries or more.

‘We’ll have breakfast somewhere. There’s a new place in Piccadilly we might try.’

The smell of the West End in the early morning. Hot bread. Coffee. Freshly watered pavements. Hairdressing parlours. Roses. Being a Lamprey place of entertainment it was, of course, an extremely grand restaurant. Why was it open at that hour, I wonder? I smell and see it and am surprised by the waist-to-ankle aprons of junior waiters. Eggs and bacon are ordered and then we are driving up a beautiful wide street.

‘Do you know what that is?’

‘Buckingham Palace?’

But it flashes up and is gone and so is the whole of the journey into Buckinghamshire.

I am not at all surprised to find myself being driven up a fine avenue to a Georgian manor house about three times as big and infinitely more impressive than the place that had seemed so grand in New Zealand and which, it may be remembered, had been given up as an economy measure. This is a lovely house. Behind and around it are gentle emerald-green hills, woods, and coppices, all beautifully groomed and tended and looking as if they came out of a medieval chronicle. Nor am I surprised, on alighting, to find everything shuttered and barred with large notices chalked up. ‘Gone away.’ ‘Visiting Omsk and Tomsk.’ ‘Back in September.’ ‘For sale on Easy Terms.’ This is one of the classic Lamprey jokes. They adore false telephone calls, dressing-up, diddling each other on railway stations and at garden parties, charitable bazaars and committee meetings. The head of the family once dressed up as an eccentric clergyman and with his wife – all scarves and beads – drove twenty miles into the country where he wrecked a charitable fête in his mother’s garden. He made scenes about the prices, pocketed the clues in the treasure hunt and screamed out that the chocolate wheel (which I was running) was daylight robbery. Not until he shook his stick in my face did I recognize him. As most of the Lampreys are possessed of a considerable flair for acting and make-up, their on-goings are
thought funny by people who normally detest and despise practical jokes.

We waited quietly on the portico and presently Bet and all the Lampreys inside took down the shutters and opened the doors. There was a fond reunion.

Again, it was no surprise to find (beside Nanny and the lady’s maid) a butler, a footman and full domestic staff. The bandwagon evidently had had a coat of paint and a rebore.

It’s no good trying to make a prim mouth about the older generation of Lampreys. Anybody who tried to do so, even the angriest young man of the fifties, would, if he knew them long enough, discover a sweetness of disposition, an absence of rancour and a generosity of spirit that, irritatingly enough, would seem to offset behaviour for which no logical excuse could be advanced. I, least of all, can shake a finger at their singular notions about money since I have never learned to take any interest in it apart from the pleasure or comfort it can give. Luckily this easy-come-easy-go attitude is offset by a pathological dread of debt, born, I am sure, of my father’s strict integrity and nourished by a far from admirable and irreducible pride. The worst that I, who loved them, could ever find to think about my own generation of Lampreys was that they were, perhaps, not insensible of their cranky charm, nor as I think they say in the world of finance, of its potential. But that, after all, is an Irish characteristic and the Lampreys were nothing if not Irish. As for the younger generation; they, clever creatures, managed as they grew up to retain the charm and at the same time pluck out of thin air, a jokey sense of responsibility. They have in fact grown up, a process never quite achieved by some of their elders.