Portrait of a Turkish Family (33 page)

He no longer had the courage to go to his bank for fear of refusal. ‘
Dik yürü
’, he used to say to me. ‘Walk straight’. He didn’t. We had become part of London’s faceless tenement poverty. Life was about fights and arguments, stale left-overs and gnawing mice, about being kept awake by the people next door and trains rumbling through the night deep in the ground, about cabbage and a balloon for Christmas. It was never to be so bad again.

* * *

After a few years in a tiny room, No 8, at the back of 21 Inverness Terrace (where we’d gone in 1952), we moved to 7 Pembridge Square, where in time we acquired several furnished rooms. Historically, Inverness Terrace (Lilly Langtry country) had always been red-light, Pembridge Square (old campaigners come home to pasture) retiring. Pembridge Square was
upmarket
,

its grand early Victorian houses dating from the period of the 1851 Great Exhibition. Ramsey MacDonald (who married into the Square in 1896) wrote somewhere of their ‘calm dignity of pillared porticoes, bow-windows, broad steps and massive front doors’, of ‘that air of detached independence which surrounds the English middle-class home of substantial possessions’. When first built these were ‘upstairs-downstairs’ places of wealthy ownership. No 7, where only spinsters, divorcees and widows lived in our time, was elegant, and comfortable. To the back, there was the leafy invitation of a many-branched tree, full of dappled bowers and watchful owls (I mourned its felling, helpless to stop the psychotic jar of the chain-saws that one morning took its life away). To the front, flowering cherries, their glory as brief as a wedding day, veiling the ground each spring in perfumed petal-storms of rose-white and brown.

We liked Pembridge Square. During the week, I’d join father on walks around Holland Park and Notting Hill, a nice backwater then. We’d set out across Kensington Gardens, braving gaggles of starched British nannies parading their prams like so many ships-of-the-line. By the Serpentine, I’d gather wild flowers for mother. We’d walk along
Kensington
Palace Gardens, wondering at the hammer-and-sickle fortress of the Soviet Embassy. We’d stroll down Kensington Church Street, past No 128 – 1 High Row, Kensington Gravel Pits – home once to the composer Clementi. Here young Mendelssohn from Berlin would visit the Horsley girls, taking time to sketch the place. Here, following father’s death, I would enjoy civilised evenings with the writer and publisher Tom Stacey, a friend of mother’s, playing Mozart duets and Field nocturnes to tremble the ghosts. On Sunday afternoons we’d go to Paddington Station to savour the wiff and steam of trains from Fishguard and Cheltenham, to catch the
Cornish Riviera Express
, brown, cream and titan-green, shuddering into Platform 8. In June, Trooping-the-Colour time, we’d trek as far as the Mall to watch the Queen ride side-saddle at the head of her soldiers on the way to Buckingham Palace. One year, hungry and anaemic, I fainted in the crowd.

Father possessed a strong sense of historical moment. For VE Day, which in 1945 he and mother shared with the throngs in Trafalgar Square. For the passing of men, the insurrections of Europe, the rituals of ceremonial. He admired Douglas Bader, he followed Suez closely, he was appalled by Prague in 1968, he analysed Cuba, he grieved for Kennedy. Concerned, he watched developments in Russia, the old enemy. In February ’52, an ice wind blowing off the Thames, we went to the lying-in-state of George VI. In 1965 we watched Churchill’s funeral on a small black-and-white television, naval ratings drawing the coffin, sixty-two paces to the minute. The 1956 Hungarian Uprising took us to the Hungarian Embassy to see the communist star torn from the flag. The royal salutes of the King’s Troop in Hyde Park, Henry VIII’s hunting ground, became a pilgrimage. The sight, sound and sweat of black horses galloping and wheeling out of distant woodland, harnesses jingling, pulling their six battle-green 13-pounders from Gallipoli and the Somme, nearside riders in No 1 Dress, gold-frogged, and hussar-cut, the earth-pounding thunder of each ‘Fire!’ ricocheting off the walls of Park Lane, drowning out the voices of Speaker’s Corner –
this
, we imagined, was what it must have been like to witness a charge at
Waterloo
or Inkerman. Battle of Britain fly-pasts, Spitfires and Hurricanes leading heavy Wellingtons and Lancasters, were another highlight every September – the banshee wail of the All Clear, the high drone of Merlin engines, reminding father of first days with mother and flying with the RAF.

Pembridge Square saw a change in our fortunes. Up to 1957 mother had had a good job working for Frank F. Pershke, a German printing machine company in Westminster Bridge Road, tarnished only by her being loved and courted there by a handsome Pole – making for a stressful atmosphere at home, whatever her protestations of innocence. Then at the end of June that year, Midsummer Day, she joined Secker & Warburg in Bloomsbury (the publishers of Mann, Orwell, Kafka, Gide, Moravia, Barzun, Colette, Angus Wilson, Malraux and Günter Grass), initially as a secretary, latterly as an editor. She was paid a salary of £14 10s a week. We felt ourselves rich, the more so since at the same time I was earning some money by keeping the post-book for a travel agency in The Courtyard off Queensway.

For the only time during father’s life in England, we took a holiday, on one of those big trains of promise down to Totnes in Devon, to a farm called Blue Post. 7th–21st September. It was a good fortnight, us three striding out under open skies, taking in the sea at Paignton, waiting at Avonwick for tank-engines and a coach or two that never seemed to come for all the curling smoke in the valley, for once at one with each other and rurality.

Parties at Fred and Pamela Warburg’s book-lined Regent’s Park flat in St Edmund’s Terrace that autumn led to father, charismatic as an exotic Turk of Ottoman childhood and Republican making, finding himself suddenly taken up, admired by a literary set who may have wondered at his less-than-fluent English, but said nothing, thinking it quaint and attractive instead. We returned the hospitality in our own style, bottles of Turkish wine and delicacies from Soho complementing father’s latest culinary triumphs, the main room hung with rugs. The charmed, brilliant Peterkiewiczs, Jerzy and Christine (Brooke-Rose), came to Pembridge Square. Lord Kinross too – later, in 1959, approaching father to provide the translations and Turkish source material used in his
Atatürk: The Rebirth of a Nation
. And, of course, the Warburgs – gravel-voiced, equine Fred, Jewish intellectual, sometime Royal Artillery officer, living proof that publishing was indeed ‘an occupation for gentlemen’.

* * *

All but two of father’s books were published in the 1950s. Many more, short stories as well, were sketched or completed, but they either remained in manuscript or typescript, or were destroyed. When
Portrait
appeared, a number of critics voiced astonishment at its command of English. Harold Nicolson in particular, in the
Observer
(13 August 1950), closed his generous appreciation with a note of surprise that someone who’d apparently not known a word of English ten years before (well, very little) ‘should now be able to handle the intricacies of our language as easily as if it were his native tongue’. A fortnight later Barbara Worsley-Gough, writing in the
Spectator
, likened father to ‘something of a masculine, Muslim George Eliot’.

In their different ways these reviewers questioned and exposed the truth more acutely than they might have imagined. In the late ’40s father’s spoken command of English was fractured; by the late ’60s it was fluent but still quite limited in vocabulary and strong in accent (‘gowermund’ for ‘government’ being a particular mannerism). His understanding of the written word, on the other hand, was rich: he read widely and avidly, from Dostoevsky and Pasternak to Galsworthy, from Churchill to Eric Newby. When
Atatürk
was published by Michael Joseph in 1962 he insisted (against her will) that mother be credited as co-author. Justly so. He, after all, better than anyone, knew it was she who was the stylistic and linguistic force, the mentality sometimes, the persona often, behind all his work. Leaving a legacy of stories and novels, sometimes under assumed names, she’d always wanted to be an author in her own right.
4
Only father, she said, had ‘crushed’ her talent.

In writing his books father’s method, so far as I can remember, was to prepare a sketch in Ottoman Arabic, which he would then translate and expand into new Turkish Latin, followed by a basic draft in English. This he would hand over to mother who would absorb, interpret and discuss before fashioning a literary, poeticised metamorphosis suitable for publication. His story, her English. Later I would join in, too, reading each chapter, preparing indexes … and even, imagining myself
cartographically
inclined, drawing endpaper maps for
The Caravan Moves On
.

Following
Portrait
his most significant efforts of the 50s were
Phoenix Ascendant: the Rise of Modern Turkey
(Robert Hale), dedicated to the memory of his parents; and
The Caravan Moves On
(Secker & Warburg), a Book Society Recommendation. Both appeared in 1958. The latter, about the Yürük nomads of Karadağ in the High Taurus, aroused interest. The
Geographical Magazine
thought it to have ‘ethnological importance’. Freya Stark, seasoned Anatolian trekker, enjoyed it. Kinross in the
Daily Telegraph
spoke of its illumination. The
Times Literary Supplement
, not always sympathetic in reviewing father’s work, found space to praise. To his surprise/discomfort (but pleasure) he found himself hailed variously as a poet, a traveller of the best sort, a master storyteller, a companionable fellow, a writer of brilliance.

Easiest to compile were two British culinary ground-breakers taken up by André Deutsch:
Cooking with Yoğurt
(1956), pioneering ‘one of nature’s blessings to mankind’; and
Turkish Cooking
(1958). Both enjoyed financial return and stayed in print for many years. The astonishingly primitive way given by father for making
yoğurt
, complete with a ‘nest’ of cotton twill and feathers in the fireplace of our room, was a ritual I witnessed nightly in Pembridge Square. Prompted by a need to build mother’s strength after her tuberculosis, the result had a deliciousness and texture unlike anything then available. Even today nothing can compare. For father food was the focus of family life. Reflecting the spirit of the meals he created – culture-reminding ‘old family favourites’ of lavish sight and smell, each a nostalgic excuse for lamp-lit nights of coffee-and-tobacco aftermath, of reminiscences and stories – his cookery writing, framed by social custom and monarchist/republican history, imbued with the tastes and textures of a distant place and past, endures as a rare species of sensory autobiography.

There were also a couple of educational diversions:
The Young Traveller in Turkey
, dedicated to me (Phoenix House 1957); and
The Land and People of Turkey
(A. & C. Black 1958). This last, sold outright for £75, circulated under a pseudonym, ‘Ali Riza’ – the name of Atatürk’s Albanian father.
A nom de plume
was wanted, the publishers said, to avoid clashing with
The Young Traveller
. They were also worried about saturating the market with too many titles under the Orga name. Father didn’t mind. He needed the money and was glad to have a chance to write something for his young nephews back in İstanbul, Kaya (Mehmet’s son) and Erdal Arığtekin (Ali’s). Mother’s breakdown aside, 1958 was a good year for us.

* * *

In the late fifties/early sixties a new way of life began to take us over. We started to look for houses to rent, buy even. At weekends we would go to St Albans, to Pinner and Chesham, to Northwood Hills and Amersham. Metroland became our hunting ground. Occasionally we’d venture south: a Pullman tea on the old
Brighton Belle
is a happy memory. Then we put an advertisement in
The Times
and got one reply. We pondered, we saw, we fell in love.

The white house on a hill foretold by a gypsy, Spike Island, belonging to the van Thals (Bertie – James Agate’s ‘sleek, well-groomed dormouse’ – was a seasoned anthologist and former publisher, Phyllis edited
Vanity Fair
), was a low-slung, late eighteenth-century, weather-boarded East Sussex cottage. In over an acre of isolated wilderness, of wooded, nightingaled, seclusion, it nestled by a rampant ancient hedge down a rutted, grassy lane just up from Wadhurst station. Kipling country. No more than an hour or so from Charing Cross, it was like nothing we’d ever seen. It was romantic and rustic, a haven within heaven. It wasn’t ideal, we kept telling ourselves (just two front rooms, bathroom and kitchen – which meant I’d have no bedroom of my own) … but was anything better likely to come up? After all, we’d had no other responses to our optimistic advertisement and we wanted to get away from London. We rented it for a song (5 guineas a week), moving in on 18 September 1961. Later, in March 1968, mother bought it for £5,500.

Father loved Spike Island and its stillness. It was a place where humans and noise didn’t exist, where the garden spirits ruled everywhere. We were enveloped by Nature in all the overtures and cadences of its seasons – the damp-green smell of the earth, the scent of flowers, the waves of June yarrow, the rustle of animals, the majesty of oak and beech, the sway of birch, the wind. The blackness of the night unpolluted by city lights, ‘powdered with stars’, the galaxies of the Milky Way, bordered on mystical experience.

In 1962 two contrasting books appeared:
Cooking the Middle East Way
(sold outright to Paul Hamlyn for £200); and
Atatürk
(against which Michael Joseph advanced us £500).
Atatürk
(anticipating Kinross’s study by two years) was a reworking of the second part of
Phoenix Ascendant
. The Turkish Embassy didn’t like it. ‘The portrait of Atatürk […] is a source of astonishment and indignation to Turkish people everywhere,’ wrote the press attaché to the
Evening Standard
(20 January). ‘I take the strongest exception to the words used to describe Atatürk’s character.’ Coincident with this criticism was a letter received from the Consulate requesting father to attend for an interview to answer (unspecified) questions. He didn’t, and never heard further. His Certificate of Nationality went unrenewed.