Hitch (2 page)

He rarely writes personal letters, and has never encumbered himself with much in the way of personal memorabilia. There is a lot of documentation on his recent films, but little or nothing on the earlier ones which he did not personally produce; he has no photographs of himself much before 1930 (indeed, no childhood pictures of him seem to exist anywhere), or of his earlier homes. In many areas of detail a biographer has to rely largely on Hitch's memory. Fortunately, this is phenomenal. Like any famous raconteur, he has stories that he likes to tell and is asked to tell over and over again. But even these, though consistent in their essentials, are never told in the same way twice: there is always a different perspective which brings out new details. And in other contexts one can point him in almost any direction, asking him about things which obviously he has not had occasion to think about for fifty years or more, and he will come up with precise names and dates in a way few of us could match with the events of the last few months.

In addition, I had the unique opportunity of following one complete film,
Family Plot
, through all the stages from its first idea to the première showing. Since no one has done this before, and a step-by-step account of Hitch at work has, as well as its inherent interest, a lot of light to throw on his personality and the way his mind works, I have, in Chapter Fifteen, gone into what might otherwise seem a disproportionate amount of detail on this film. But this book is an exploration, in which I have tried to take none of the answers for granted.

In 1899 the London borough of Leytonstone was not a borough, and was not even in London. Somewhere out there in the indeterminate east, near the Wanstead marshes, it was just shaking itself out of its traditional condition as a sleepy Essex village and receiving the dubious benefits of strip development along the main road from London to the North Sea packet-boats which docked at Harwich. Fifteen years earlier, at about the time when William Hitchcock, master greengrocer, was setting up his wholesale and retail fruiterers business in a modest London stock-brick shop with living quarters above at 517 the High Road, the area seems to have been noted mainly as the most convenient point to alight from the train for East Londoners on pleasure bent in the woody wilderness of Epping Forest. The maps show open spaces all round—Epping Forest, Wanstead Park, Leyton Flats, the Great Shrubbage—and, slightly less alluring, Bethnal Green Workhouse Schools, a large infant orphan asylum, and the new City of London Cemetery, placed there no doubt because land was still readily available before the tide of lower-income housing covered it all in brick and mortar, and the area still offered fresh country air to the orphans and workhouse children from London's teeming East End.

In any case, it was a good place for an enterprising young tradesman to be in the 1880s. The population was soaring, and covered a whole social spectrum, from the old Essex gentry and the prosperous middle-class inhabitants of Walthamstow and Epping to the newly arrived workers spreading out from neighbouring East Ham and Leyton. The wholesale side of William Hitchcock's business covered a considerable area, supplying small local shops and general stores with fruit and vegetables; the retail side also flourished, to such an extent that he rapidly took over another shop on the other side of Leytonstone High Road. His three brothers were
all fishmongers, and as he continued to expand, persuaded him to join them in the fish shops as well, building up finally a chain which extended all over South London, to become one of the major elements of the giant 1930s combine Mac Fisheries. In the 1890s, though, most of this was still in the future. In 1890 William started a family with a son, William, followed in 1892 by a daughter, Nellie, and then, seven years later, his third and last child, Alfred Joseph, born on 13 August 1899.

It was, as things turned out, rather a good year for English show business. Two other notables in particular sprang from the same sort of solid, respectable lower-middle-class background: Charles Laughton, born six weeks earlier in Scarborough, Yorkshire, and Nöel Coward, born four months later about as far west of London, in Teddington, as Alfred Hitchcock was born east of it, in Leytonstone. Both offer, in their careers and personalities, a number of curious parallels and contrasts. Coward seems at first glance remote from Hitchcock, but their unpredictable mixtures of sentimentality and cynicism, their fierce English patriotism combined with easy cosmopolitanism, their extreme social mobility and command in many areas of society other than that in which they originated, their ability to create their own fantasy worlds and impose them without question on the public, all indicate an improbable similarity. Laughton, great if unpredictable actor, rotund like an overgrown baby, cynic and sensualist, actually crossed paths with Hitchcock professionally on a couple of occasions, and had one even more important attribute in common with him than had Coward: he was born and brought up a Roman Catholic.

For the Hitchcock family were that relative rarity in their class and with their background, long-standing English Catholics. In the East End of London, a melting-pot of nationalities, there was at that time and since a considerable Catholic population of, mostly, recent Irish extraction. And there were still pockets of the old Catholic gentry surviving not too far away, in East Anglia. Also there were in more intellectual circles a number of converts swept in by the great Catholic revival of the mid-nineteenth century, the period of Newman and Manning. But the Hitchcocks did not belong to any of these groups. No record seems to have survived of how and why they were Catholic—all members of the family now know is that they always seem to have been, and so stood slightly apart from their neighbours and peers, who tended to be Church of England or, if
they began as Nonconformists, shifted allegiance to the Established Church as they moved up in the world. And religion was important in the family; the parents were devout, regular churchgoers and very strict with the children, who had to go every week some miles down the road to Sunday school at St. Francis, Stratford, had to make regular confession and received an almost entirely Catholic schooling. Latterly, the parents seem to have drifted from such strict devotion, but this was the rather severe, restrictive and self-consciously special atmosphere, of a family apart, keeping itself very much to itself, into which Alfred Hitchcock was born.

He seems to have been a rather solitary child. The baby of the family, seven years younger than his sister, he did not have much to do with his brother and sister at that time, since in childhood seven years seems like an unbridgeable abyss. Occasionally a childlike resentment at being left out made itself felt. On one occasion they were going off for a bicycle ride to the near-by Green Man public house and explained to him firmly that he could not come because he was too young to ride a bicycle and would fall off. He countered with the notion that this merely demonstrated the silliness of bicycles—if they had three wheels nobody would fall off. It was only later he discovered that such a thing as a tricycle did exist, and congratulated himself on having worked out the idea entirely on his own through the functioning of natural logic.

If he was left out of some of the pleasures, he was also fortunately excused some of the less comfortable duties. On Sundays after mass William and Nellie had to lend a hand minding the second shop over the road, but Alfred was never allowed to work in the shop. Despite which his very earliest memories are connected with the business. Right behind the house were the ripening sheds, and a vivid early impression is the scene inside them: with the great bunches of bananas ripening by the warmth of gas flares, the sight and the smell and the distinctive hiss. When he was a little older he was allowed to go out with the deliveries of fruit and vegetables to grocers all over the Epping area, often a whole day round by horse-drawn van. Another process which fascinated him was the husking of walnuts, which used to come into the shop still in their fleshy green outer coats and be husked ready for sale by the shop workers.

But not all memories are so happy. One that sounds like a perfect ‘Rosebud' story—could this be the key to so much wariness, so much silent watchfulness in later life?—is that when he was about five he
woke up late one Christmas Eve to see his mother taking a couple of toys out of his stocking to put in his brother's or his sister's, and replacing them with two oranges. Another, which made an unaccountably profound impression on him, was waking up around eight o'clock one Sunday evening to find that his parents were out and there was only the maid watching over him in his room. This produced such a feeling of desolation and abandonment that he still remembered it when he got married, and insisted that there should always be a hot meal at home on Sunday evening and that he and his wife should be as far as possible always within call of their daughter at this vulnerable period of her childhood. Then there is the famous story of his brief sojourn in a police cell. According to the classic version, when Hitchcock was five or six, in punishment for some minor transgression (and it must have been very minor, since by all accounts the young Alfred, called by his father a ‘little lamb without a spot', was almost unnaturally quiet and well-behaved), he was sent down to the police station with a note. The officer in charge read it and then locked him in a cell for five minutes, saying, ‘This is what we do to naughty boys.' The story is so convenient, accounting as it does for Hitchcock's renowned fear of the police, the angst connected with arrest and confinement in his films, that one might suspect it of being in the
ben trovato
category. And probably Hitchcock has told the story so often he is not sure himself any more if it is true. But his sister insists that it actually did happen.

The incident suggests that William Hitchcock was a stern father. People who knew him say that he seemed to be fundamentally a kindly, rather emotional man who felt some mysterious necessity to keep his emotions under constant restraint, with the result that he suffered from various naggingly painful conditions of apparently nervous origin, like boils and carbuncles. He kept a careful eye on his children's moral well-being, to the extent even of ordering them home at what they felt to be an unreasonably early hour from perfectly respectable evening entertainments, and sitting up to make sure that Nellie kept the hours he prescribed even when she had only been to a staid dance at the Town Hall in the sober company of her brother Alfred. At the same time, he would shield his children very indulgently from the effects of the outside world. Alfred attended briefly a convent school run by the Faithful Companions of Jesus ‘for the daughters of gentlemen and little boys', as the black-and-gold
sign outside proudly stated, and even more briefly the primary school which had been built in 1893 immediately behind the Hitchcocks' house. Here he was protected by the presence of the ‘paper boy' from the shop, who was paid a shilling a week for services which included taking on himself any punishment Alfred became liable for at school. But Father Flanagan came and gave his parents hell for sending him to a secular school at all, and instead he was sent off at the age of nine or so as a boarder at the Salesian College in Battersea.

He did not stay long there either. At the beginning of term his mother packed him a tuck-box containing among other things some long-back bacon and pre-fried fillet of Dover sole. When he had been there a week or so his father came to visit him on Sunday after mass, and enquired what he had had for lunch. Oh, answered the child lugubriously, cold fillet of sole from his tuck-box. His father was so incensed at this that he vanished, white-faced, to see the headmaster and by three that afternoon Alfred was out of the school, collected by his brother and sister, never to return. Probably just as well, since the only other thing he can remember about it is that the good fathers believed so fervently in purging as the cure for all ills, physical and moral, that all the boys in the school were simultaneously given a strong dose of laxative with their evening tea, with the inevitable rather messy results.

The discipline at Alfred's next school, St. Ignatius College, Stamford Hill, where he remained until the age of fourteen, was no less strict, but rather more sensibly applied. The Jesuits were noted at that time for their fierceness in corporal punishment, which was carried out with ritual formality, generally with a cane made of hard rubber. The refinement of the punishment, however, was psychological. Once the errant child was sentenced to corporal punishment, he could choose for himself when it should be administered—first morning break, lunchtime, mid-afternoon or the end of the day. Naturally the child put off the fateful moment as long as possible, sweating all day. And when it did arrive there was again a ritual to be gone through: the strokes on the hand were given three at a time, because the hand became too numb to feel a fourth, and the most that could be given in one day were six, three on each hand, so that if the offence was so grave as to merit twelve strokes the whole process had to be repeated the following day. Hitchcock, who still seems to have been a very quiet boy, can hardly have come in very
often, if at all, for this ultimate deterrent, but recalls that the horror of it, ‘like going to the gallows', marked his life, creating an almost morbid revulsion from any sort of behaviour which was or might be construed as evil: if you were a good boy, you not only kept out of danger of hellfire, but also stood a better chance of not being subjected to high-handed and ferocious physical discipline, as unpredictable as the wrath of God itself ('Unpredictability', says Enid Bagnold; ‘it's the essence of authority'). Hitchcock also, in this connection, learned one lasting lesson in understatement: one day his favourite priest summoned him in for punishment, looked at him sadly and said, ‘This isn't nice, is it?' Alfred said dutifully, ‘No, Father,' and the priest just allowed the strap to fall gently on his hand. A symbol, but a telling symbol, all the more effective for avoiding the obvious, direct gesture—much as Hitchcock has chosen to do in his own mature movies.