Daniel Martin (10 page)

I am trying to exculpate myself, not explain cultures. My attitude to nature, my past, Thorncombe, must be partly a product of my own history and genetic makeup; it is also because I am English.

But to make the flight from California and Jenny, that bout of self-pity the previous night, seem some kind of positive (or American) response to all this would be very false. I had no serious desire to examine my past or recreate it in any shape or form; and of course I cheat here. One does not think coherently without a much stronger pretext than mere time to spare. Anything that makes the dozing man in the 707 that day, stuck in what is after all only a continuity shot, high over the monotonous rectangled wheatlands of the Midwest, appear in the least certain of what he was doing would be absurd.

Perhaps the only symptom of imminent life-change was a negative one. I had no project in mind after the wretched Kitchener script. I couldn’t get out of that, I was contractually committed; but both man and period, in the month I had been messing with them, bored me to death. With my daughter Caro now working and Nell long remarried, I couldn’t even pretend that I had needed the money, so I had had to look for some other motive; and I had decided that it was essentially a need to validate self-contempt, to create one last straw that broke the conditioned camel’s back.

I remember, when Anthony and Jane and Nell and I spent our summer in Rome, standing before some comically awful painting of a saint flagellating himself. Even Jane, a convert by then, found it ridiculous, Catholicism gone dotty which allowed Anthony to put us right on the principle, if not this present manifestation of it: how self-mortification was universal because it was absurd and necessary. He based a great deal on the absurd-and-necessary at that time and in that side of his life and I didn’t take it very seriously, having already made something of an art of not causing myself anything but pleasure. But here I was, over twenty years later, flogging myself over the back with Kitchener, a man I liked less the more I knew about him, and a project of formidable technical difficulties; and not even allowed to write, given the production cost of sinking old cruisers, the one scene I would have enjoyed… the old buffer disappearing forever beneath the waves off the Orkneys.

And what should follow that, I did not know. I was not really flying to New York, and home; but into an empty space.

What can a flame remember? If it remembers a little less than is necessary, it goes out; f it remembers a little more than is necessary, it goes out. If only it could teach us, while it burns, to remember correctly.

GEORGE SEFERIS: ‘Man’

My mother died just before my fourth birthday, and I really cannot remember her at all; only the dimmest ghost of a bed surmounted by a tired brown face the brownness being due to the illness that killed her, Addison’s disease. My father was a hopeless incompetent on the domestic side and the unmarried of his two sisters had moved in long before the death. Being a parson’s child helped. There was no doubt, when I was little, that the brown face had ‘gone to Heaven’. In that at least I was lucky to be born where I was; four generations into the Church of England, with a substitute mother who would have done very well as the nicest kind of practical Anglican nun. Aunt Millie was ineffably devoted to making good, and one of the few things I regret bitterly (as opposed to merely regretting) was that I never gave her enough credit for it. She had to bear the brunt of so much that I dared not reproach my father with. When I was young, I took her for granted; when I grew up, I despised her for her dowdiness and her simplicity; at her funeral ten years ago I had tears in my eyes, and perhaps that will gain me a slight remission on judgment Day. But I shan’t have deserved it.

He always seemed old to me, more like a grandfather than a father. Having married very late, he was only a year short of fifty when I was born, and his hair was almost white by the time I begin to see him clearly. If I have to use one phrase to describe his attitude to me, it must be something like a detached and quizzical puzzlement. From the photographs it seems clear my mother was no beauty; she was thirty herself when they married, and some kind of secret I have never quite pierced lay over her. It certainly wasn’t anything sinful, but more to do with a suggestion of folly on my father’s part. He never reminisced about her; Aunt Millie did, but in the sort of kind terms (her gentleness, her respect for my father, her gift for music) that suggested some defect had to be excused. One defect was certainly of birth. She had been one of his parishioners in Shropshire, where he had a living before I came into the world, and her parents had been grocers, quietly successful ones, ‘provision merchants’ was Aunt Millie’s description. Like her son, she was an only child. She seems to have become a village spinster when they died; educated and provided for, but I suppose with the classification of ‘trade’. She played the organ in his church. I can’t imagine what happened, whether in some innocent village way she trapped my father, or whether it was a case of two profound sexual timidities, a scholarly and a genteel, taking refuge in each other’s arms.

Much later, in the Fifties, a letter came out of the blue from a woman who had read a newspaper interview with me, and who claimed she was some kind of second cousin. It was more about herself, she had a dress-shop in Birmingham, but she remembered my mother from before the marriage, that she sewed beautifully and had a medlar-tree in her garden. She didn’t know why she remembered the medlars, which she spelt meddlers. I answered her letter politely, in the kind of way that discourages further communication. When I bought Thorncombe, I got a medlar and planted it; but it died two years later.

My father: it wasn’t until I went to boarding-school that I realized how outstandingly dull he was as a preacher, a handicap which was partly imposed by his general humourlessness and partly by his lifelong habit of sailing high over village heads. He was not at all a religious or a saintly man, even by the modest standards of the Church of England. He was something of a theologian, but rather in the way an army officer might have an interest in regimental history. He had a considerable collection of sermons and doctrinal pamphlets from the seventeenth century; but the eloquence and fluent imagery of that period never once went with him into the Pulpit. I used to cringe with embarrassment, sitting in the Vicarage pew and seeing how restless he would make the congregation as he droned, he had a special pulpit voice some of the cheekier village boys had the knack of imitating, especially when they met me out of range of adult ears interminably on towards Sunday lunch; or luncheon, as it was always called. I have admired the pruned and clipped ever since. He conditioned me there, as in so many things, by antithesis.

I sent him, during my first term at Oxford, just before he died, an Arbe reprint of Hugh Latimer’s 1549 Sermon on the Ploughers, one of the greatest pieces of hammering prose-poetry in the history of the English language, let alone the English church. He thanked me for it, but made no comment. It was meant to be a gentle revenge, but I think he took it as a sign that what he saw as certain doubts in me might after all survive the ‘reefs of higher education’ a phrase I once heard him use in a sermon on a characteristically irrelevant favourite bee in his pulpit bonnet: recruitment to the ministry.

He never, beyond some very cursory reference, introduced current world events into his sermons, which were always remorselessly dry and rarefied. One of his more educated wartime churchwardens had the temerity to suggest that a few more topical allusions would not come amiss; but father remained convinced that the village had quite enough of all that in the newspapers and on the wireless, and continued adamantly in his old course. On another wartime occasion a Negro chaplain from the American camp near by came and preached to a packed church drawn not by piety but by curiosity to see how this mysterious chimpanzee would perform. He had a fine voice and presence, and a touch of the revivalist in manner; and he stunned us, he was so warm and good. But not my father, who in a rare descent to cattiness condemned him in private afterwards as ‘overenthusiastic’. He was using the word in its technical church sense, of course; the following week he went fifteen minutes over time on the Arian heresy, just to put us all in our place.

I can see now that his real fear was of any nakedness of feeling. He had a bizarre use of the word ‘demonstrate’, which he twisted, or spread, to include any exhibition of anger, conviction, tearfulness any strong emotion, however innocent or justified. Other visiting preachers who showed a touch too much fervour, protesting parties in some village argument, even myself unfairly blamed for some misdemeanour… if only the good man would rely less on the demonstrative; all this demonstration doesn’t help the lady’s cause; do not demonstrate so, Daniel. It was not that he would have expected me to sit silent, if I had a reasonable excuse; simply that I had dared to advance natural temperament as self-justification. The word covered countless other things, in my case: sullenness, excitement, even mere boredom. He had some extraordinary Platonic notion of the perfect human soul, in which all the manifestations he counted as ‘demonstration’ were missing, or totally controlled. I dread to think what he would have made of the more recent political sense of the verb and noun.

Yet or perhaps, the English being what they are, because of this he was counted a good parish man. He was endlessly patient with the most garrulous old spinsters, sympathetic to the (slightly) more enlightened. Like many Devon villages, we had no real squire; there were various larger country houses in neighbouring combes where we were on visiting terms, but in the village itself he was the de-facto social and symbolic tribal chief; on every committee, consulted over everything. I think he filled that role well enough. He certainly believed in it, which was one good reason he was not truly religious. His real faith was in order; and his mildly privileged place in it. There were peasants; there were farmers and shopkeepers and, during the war, a heterogeneous collection of elderly evacuees in rented cottages; and there were people like us. I was never allowed a shadow of a doubt (perhaps because the truth about my mother’s background might have created one) as to where we belonged. Proof hung forever on the dining-room wall; an oil-painting of my great-grandfather, a bishop no less. To be fair, and even if his marriage had not proved it, father was not a snob. We might be out of a better drawer than the rest of the village, but we must never show it. No distinction was ever to be made between those it was our duty to be with pastorally and those it was pleasant to be with socially.

In essence he was a subtle rather than classic example of why the military and the ecclesiastical, cross and sword, so often seem just two faces of the same coin. He wasn’t a stern man at all, in spite of his lack of humour, which sprang much more from a diffuse absentmindedness, almost an unworldliness, than any intrinsic disapproval of laughter. There was nothing in his personal nature that overtly tyrannized the household, indeed he was always at his most patient where some fathers might have ranted and thumped the table; and I am sure it was not simply because I was an only child, and technically motherless. I was hardly an angel before I went to boarding school at fourteen, yet he never once used physical punishment on me. He disapproved of it, even in the village school, though he finally sent me to where the juniors were caned once a fortnight with monotonous regularity. The real tyranny came from the totally accepted belief in the system, the existing social frame. Just as a soldier cannot question orders, the hierarchy of command and all the assumptions that underlie it, nor could we. One might at a pinch discreetly object to the outward manner of some other vicar from a neighbouring village, or of some high-up from clerical headquarters at Exeter, even of the bishop himself; but not to their right to be exactly who they were. During the war, of course, that was in the nature of things; all social evolution was petrified, which was the main reason Labour won that first election afterwards. Though quite unconsciously, and despite his being an arch-demonstrator, father must have approved of Hitler for keeping progress so firmly at bay.

I tried to put it all in the play I based on him; one other parallel I made there still holds, I think, and that is the way the English turn all outward freedom (as contrasted with that of the imagination) into a game with set rules: one where every freedom is allowed except the freedom to break those rules. I suspect the Anglo-Saxons were a much more taboo-dominated crowd than the Celts they drove out of England. If the Romans brought civilization, the German tribes brought ritual codes, which have survived in our hideous national inventiveness over games proper, the art of wasting time according to someone else’s book. I particularly loathed team games at school as I have ever since though I thought at the time it was merely because they were an obvious emblem of the whole sadistically stereotyping system. But I see now it was one more negative way in which father and his world-outlook conditioned me.

We lived very simply, though much more out of parsonical good taste than necessity. The living (or both livings, since we also had a neighbouring parish-hamlet in our cure) was well endowed, and my father had several hundred a year private income on top of that; and there was the money my mother had left in trust to me; even Millie had a small income of her own. That came to seem like another hypocrisy, when I realized in later boyhood that our supposed poverty was really mere thrift. No doubt a good deal went on charity and the upkeep of the two churches, but the former certainly didn’t begin at home in terms of birthday presents, pocket-money and the like. I have been careless with money ever since, one more item on the bill.

My father had one real passion, which endeared him to the village and belatedly endeared him to me as well. That was a mania for gardening. Though he would potter about on our occasional picnics and botanize with me, he did not really approve of wild plants and nature. He drew some analogy between horticulture and God watching over a world; in nature things happened behind your back, could not be supervised and controlled. At any rate, his own garden and his greenhouse he adored. That and the seventeenth-century texts he liked to browse over were his only real indulgences very nearly his sin, in the case of gardening. If he couldn’t get cuttings of rare shrubs honestly, he was not above stealing them, with a mixture of blatant casualness and ill-concealed guilt that was delicious. He always carried an umbrella, on even the most unlikely days, to hide his ill-gotten Irishman’s heels and seedlings in. It was one of the few things Aunt Millie and I were allowed to tease him over; and assumed monstrous proportions when one day one of his victims happened to be in our garden and spotted a successful scion of some precious rarity from his own. Father was shamed into an outright lie about its real provenance, and he wasn’t allowed to forget it.

All my most affectionate memories are of him standing in his greenhouse, wearing the ancient and faintly episcopal purple baize butler’s apron he used for gardening. Sometimes, in hot weather, he would take off his dog-collar and be taken by some unsuspecting stranger for the fulltime gardener we did not actually permit ourselves. As an adolescent I got bored with all this side of his life, I wanted to read books and roam the countryside during my holidays, but when I was younger I used to help him pot and all the rest. He bred carnations and primulas especially; used to exhibit, before the war, and judged shows to the end. If we were short of humour and several other kinds of light in that house, there were always flowers, a feeling that the large garden was a part of the family.

It seems absurd now. A small boy rushing in to breakfast: The Osmanthus is out! The Clernatis armaudii! The Trichodendron! They weren’t Latin and Greek to me. They were like our dogs and cats, loved and very familiar. There was a walled kitchen-garden as well, but father had no interest in vegetables. Thrift was abandoned enough to allow a man to come in twice a week to look after them. His prides there were the fruit-trees, the apples and pears some previous incumbent had gone in for and my father added to; old gridded espaliers and gnarled cordons, their fruiting-spurs as brittle as charcoal. I suppose people still grow them, Jargonelle and Glou Morceau, Musk Bergamot and Good Christian; the russets and pippins and wardens and codlings and nameless ones Aunt Millie’s Tree, the Yellow Devil (because it used to rot in the apple-loft), the Green Spice. I knew them as other little boys knew county cricketers and football teams.