In My Father's House Read online

  It was the visual impact that most affected the spirits of my father. We had to be sure to warn each new guest to the House not to mention the looming presence of the station. Taken out for a walk or drive in the park, they must look only in the direction indicated by their host. Jokes – a favourite was alluding to the chimney’s always visible crown as ‘George’s Folly’ – would assuredly not be well-received.

  The power station has increased in size by almost a third during the past twenty years; the tall chimney can still blot out the brightness of a summer day and its red lights – a warning to low-flying planes – still wink down on us like dragon’s eyes. Now, however, I see it as a friendly presence. As old laws protecting the landscape grow weaker by the year, and the population of provincial cities and towns continues to increase, it’s apparent that the closure of the station would open the area to the threat of new and less contained forms of development of the kind that swiftly blossom around city fringes: shopping centres; car parks; factories; warehouses; housing estates. These would feel no obligation to beautify a location that had already been ravaged. The station, however, conscious of its massive size and the pollution, both visible and invisible, that it creates, has always worked hard to offer compensation. A golf course lies at the foot of the cooling towers; visitors are encouraged to take tours of the site and listen to the overwhelming roar of the turbines thudding at its heart in the sealed box of the powerhouse; around it, new woods and banked plantations soften the impression of a desecrated landscape.

  It’s sad to think that the remains of a Roman bath-house lie irretrievably buried under the station; still, unlike my father, I admire our modern neighbour. Standing on top of the hill that separates the tall Jacobean chimneys of the House from the concrete towers and cloud-challenging pillar of the station, I find it hard to say which building I prefer. Both are magnificent. Both are of value.

  My father was too engaged by his memories of the past to take this view. Watching black smoke-clouds belch out into a bright blue sky to screen the sun and make winter of yet another summer day, he cursed the burden that had been laid upon us by our hideous neighbour. Living beneath the shadows it threw across his fields and his House, he mirrored these dreary eclipses in the darkness of his moods. The only difference between him and the station, it came sometimes to appear, was that one produced energy while the other sucked it out.

  5

  ON THE ROAD

  Turning sixteen in the summer of 1964, I had reached an age at which to dread the family’s annual pilgrimage to the seaside. Bored by the present and apprehensive of the future, I saw charm in nothing, except the make-up counter at the High Street chemist and the slick-haired boys in black leather jackets who clustered like a nest of vampires about the doorway of the local expresso bar, sucking cigarettes in moody silence.

  This was the birthday for which I received, to my delight, a two-tone Honda blue-and-cream motorbike, brand new and capable of doing (downhill) seventy miles an hour. My father immediately asked to try it out; I didn’t object. He climbed on, revved it up and, with a flourish of his hand as he recovered from an initial skid across the gravel, shot round the corner and out of sight. I smirked without tenderness: whom did he imagine he looked like, riding his teenage daughter’s motorbike, decked out in a borrowed helmet that made his head resemble an upturned eggcup? Alain Delon?

  I show off my new Honda 50, above the Cromer promenade, before my father decides to try out its capacity.

  He came back only at sunset, all aglow at the speed with which he’d covered a hundred miles. The following morning, he left the house before breakfast. Returning late that afternoon, he casually informed us that he’d spent the day with the son of a local shopkeeper. The boy – his name was Nick – knew about bikes. They’d been to a garage and picked one out, a real beast, a black Norton. Fascinated, I stared. I’d never seen my father’s eyes look so alive or heard such relish in his voice, as though each word were being licked clean by the tip of his tongue. Catching my glance, he shot me a little twisted grin.

  ‘You aren’t planning to buy it, are you?’ I enquired.

  ‘Oh dear,’ he said, pulling his mouth down to mimic my disapproving gaze. ‘Isn’t it awful? I already did.’

  This was the moment at which my father and I entered a new stage of a relationship that already reeked of conflict. I had, until this point, led an unusually sheltered life, while my father, despite that series of merry flirtations, had been acquitting himself well in the role of the model squire. I am willing to think that, in presenting me with a motorbike, he was hoping to enlist my support for his own future escapades.

  It didn’t work out like that. I, too, was ready to let rip and to escape from the claustrophobic closeness of our family unit. My adventures were not destined to be momentous (even the experience of performing as the only white topless dancer in the black ghetto of Watts during the riots of 1966 came about entirely by accident); all I wanted was independence. But having freedom myself did not mean that I felt inclined to grant it to my father. The further I removed myself from the old, orderly life of the House, the more important it became to me that life should continue there just as it had always done. The last thing I wanted was to end by competing with my father for the rebel’s role.

  This might explain how it was that in the summer of 1966, just before I set off to explore America by Greyhound bus, I wrote my father a censorious letter. I didn’t like the fact that an enormous motorbike now blocked the tiny entrance to my parents’ London home. I didn’t like the fact he was spending time away from my mother. I didn’t like his friend, Nick, who seemed to me both sulky and dull; above all, I didn’t like the fact that he was beginning to live a life more suited to his children’s age than his own. I made all these things clear.

  My letter was disagreeable enough to produce a long and defensive answer. Biking, my father explained, was a necessary compensation for an upbringing that he now perceived as ‘most unnatural and oppressive’. A week later, he wrote again, to explain that his ‘trouble’ came from the fact that he retained ‘a zest for doing things more suitable to people much younger than I, coupled with the opportunity for doing them.’

  Put simply, he had begun to realise that there was a life beyond custodianship of the House he loved. Mr Jekyll would continue to do his bit as a pillar of the community and holder of traditional values; Mr Hyde was ready to play. This was the stage at which the family portrait was commissioned, the painting in which my father’s face was turned away from the viewer.

  My mother is looking thoughtful. It wasn’t, she says, as uncomplicated as George’s letter to me suggests. What he needed, as much as the sense of danger and speed which motorbikes offered, was company.

  ‘You know what he was like,’ she reminds me. ‘I always found it so odd. He couldn’t bear to be alone. You and your brother weren’t around as much as you’d been in the past. And I – well, I couldn’t always be with him, could I?’

  She’s right; my father’s horror of solitude had become stronger with age. I remember another letter that he wrote to me, in 1969. Four years earlier, he’d bought a house on a Caribbean island, without thought for the fact that this exotic getaway, for a man who wouldn’t set foot on a plane, wasn’t going to be easily enjoyed. The letter, written on the way home from his last winter holiday there, exuded self-pity. My mother had already returned to England by air; my brother was at boarding school; I, back from my American adventures, was off in London, listlessly employed as a secretary. Travelling home on a Fyffes line banana boat, along with eighty fellow passengers, my father was consumed with despair. The captain was stupid; the passengers were uncongenial; the sea was flat; the bananas smelt. ‘I am,’ he wrote, oblivious of the irony, ‘entirely on my own.’ Four months later, the Caribbean house was sold, having failed to provide the long-sought panacea.

  Loneliness plagued him; acts of duty filled his days. Appointments, no matter how tedious, were never cancelled:
discussions with his land agent revolved interminably around the minutiae of the estate. The old and sick, whatever their role had been in his life, could rely on my father to be a faithful attendant, bringing flowers, books and a surprisingly easy manner to brighten the dreariness of a hospitalised existence. All that virtue and no reward: no wonder he felt low. No wonder, riding pillion with Nick, by now established as his regular motorbiking companion, that he was always ready to turn back the clock, roar out from under the power station’s shadow and plunge into an experience of visceral excitement.

  As a magistrate with a keen interest in juvenile offenders, my father was a regular visitor to Lowdham Grange, a prison for underaged boys.

  A car, at whatever velocity, is still somehow comparable to a home. Four wheels and a chassis marry it to the ground; a bike, by contrast, is an extension of the body and soul of its rider. It expresses his power; it makes him one with the world through which he rides; it allows him to register life, its blur racing past like unspooling film, as he speeds along the horizon’s edge. This is the line between dawn and dark, life and death. The thrill of the ride lies in its intensity, the need to live in the moment, never outside it. Here, everything extraneous falls away. Cocooned in his black leather uniform, masked against the night wind, hugged close as a twinned spirit with his fellow rider, my father found the happiness he’d searched for all his life. Here was the elixir of youth that could be drained over and again, and never lose its power, never fail in the effect of its ambrosia.

  By the 1970s, biking had become as necessary to my father as the drugs with which he blotted out constant worries about the House and plunged into insensate sleep. Nothing, in life, had turned out as he’d hoped. The House, albeit beautiful, was marred by the presence of the power station, an intrusion that had possessed his mind for nearly a decade. Old friends, settling into their maturity, were unable to share his new enthusiasms. His wife seemed always to be preoccupied with the garden; his son was off at university; his daughter had become a married woman. And he, in 1973, turned fifty years old.

  My marriage, the previous year, to a scholarly author rather than to the friendly young viscount on whom my father’s hopes were pinned (he had already planned which grand relations to humiliate by demoting them to seats at the back of the church), had not gone down well. The revelation that I was pregnant, a respectable year after my marriage, caused active dismay. Newly cool behind his shades, clad in jeans and leather jerkin, he wasn’t prepared for grandchildren; asked to come and celebrate, he wanted to know a good reason why. Surely news of this nature should be concealed, he begged: ‘too boring for you to have to endure boring things like people examining your appearance to see if you have got larger!’ (The anguish in that doubly-stated ‘boring’ was hard to ignore.) Kind though it was of me to suggest that he should visit, he didn’t care to see me looking so heavy and, besides, his diary was fully occupied. ‘I do realise,’ he added in a guilty postscript, ‘that all this sounds dreadfully unfriendly and unloving.’

  Although disconcerted, I was not surprised; a man who found it difficult to tolerate the sight of an overweight woman was unlikely to relish the spectacle of a pregnant daughter. It hurt me more, when my son was born, to realise that my father had no plans to come and admire his first grandchild. (His letter of apology mentioned a troubling cold; his diary reveals that he went off with Nick on a two-day bike trip to Cornwall.)

  Seven days later, my father finally managed a visit. Wearing an expression of frozen distaste, he asked what I planned to call ‘It’. When I told him ‘Merlin George’, he expressed unexpected delight. I was slow to grasp the reason: I appeared to be honouring his beloved sports car, a green MG. I never disillusioned him. My son’s lack of affection for cars – and indifference to bikes – later became a source of keen disappointment to a devoted grandfather.

  ‘I don’t feel fifty-two,’ he wrote me the following year, adding a rhetorical question: ‘Should I?’

  The letter brought me up to date on the other life in which my mother played no part. He had just taken Nick to see the musical, Godspell, and then on to hear some late-night music at Ronnie Scott’s. It seemed that Nick was not much of a jazz fan; he’d shown more enthusiasm at Snetterton, where, awed, the two of them watched, over twenty laps of a two-mile track, the Race of the Aces. Nobody could have failed to sense the thrill of a bike that day, proclaimed my father; it was plain that he was still looking for support from me for his late-found passion.

  My own wild days, briefly enjoyed, were over; at the age of twenty-six, I asked nothing of my parents except that they should be conventional. I did not want to hear about my father’s adventures with Nick; in fact, the more I heard about his friendship with Nick, the more uneasy I felt. There was nothing there that could be defined as wrong; nevertheless, it seemed strange that my father should be spending so much time with this young man. Frankly, other than biking, I couldn’t – I didn’t want to – imagine what they might have in common.

  Prim in my new maternity and offended by his absence of interest in my newborn son, I wrote to thank my father for his news, and to convey a pious hope that he was not over-exerting himself with all the biking and late nights. His answer covered four pages, complete with a photo of his newest toy, a magnificent, black and gold 750cc Ducati, on which he had just been out for a night ride with Nick. Keen to remind him of his age, I wrote back that I was sending him a present, a charming antique wheelchair that might soon come in useful.

  Surely his darling daughter was still just a little young to be taking such precautions, my father snapped back by the afternoon post. But how touching that I was so concerned about my approaching decrepitude!

  Thwarted, I fell into a sulk.

  The two sides of his nature still maintained, during this period, an equilibrium. The thrill of hearing that a neighbour was to bring along an ancient member of the Royal Family to lunch at the House was matched by the joy my father was experiencing upon his glorious new machine, to which he always referred, with a little snort of laughter, as ‘the Duke’. My mother, while she had once been a fearless horsewoman, never mastered the art of driving a car and was not keen to attempt a bike. It’s a testament to her loyalty that she asked to be taken pillion, and came back declaring that it had all been a most wonderful experience. Any hopes she may have had of displacing Nick were quickly dashed; no further spousal expeditions were suggested. The family had, by 1974, fallen by the roadside.

  It wasn’t, at the time, clear to me how much hurt my mother was feeling, since I myself had already fled. Under-educated (my father felt university would only corrupt his daughter’s fine upbringing) and, consequently, hungry for any scholarly knowledge I could get, I was making the most of my marriage to a man who loved to teach. No love was lost between my husband and my father since they were both competing for the same dominant role. Paying increasingly rare visits to the House, I felt each time as though I was entering a war zone. Away from it, my father was enjoying his new, more youthful life; when he returned, he was more insistent than ever on the maintenance of order, etiquette and routine. When breakfast had ended, the time had almost come for pre-lunch drinks. Lunch rarely ended before three; at five, the ceremony of tea commenced, bringing us close to the hour for a glass of sherry, or two or three, before dinner. Trapped together by this endless series of meals, my husband and my father eyed each other like two boxers squaring up to a fight. A good weekend was one in which we left before a screaming match broke out. The screaming was mostly done by my father and myself. Neither of us knew the meaning of a controlled temper.

  I still loved the House, as did we all, with an intensity of feeling that could make me catch my breath when I stood outside it, relishing the gentleness of its lines, the serenity which never failed to bring me peace. It was only when I walked through its doors that the atmosphere changed. The saddest part of my father’s love for the House was that his longing for it always to be perfect, always at its best,
had created instead a sense of tormented strain. It was as if the House had become the mirror to his own unquiet spirit.

  My father would claim that it was I, not he, who broke up the little family unit when I chose, at the time of my marriage, to invest my savings in a romantic ruin on a hilltop in Corfu. This house, when it was eventually made habitable, became my home of preference, an excuse to escape the relentless insistence by my father that every weekend should be spent under his roof, and structured to his rules. I, after all, being female, was never going to be the heir. My brother bore that unenviable burden of obligation. I didn’t have to dance attendance.

  The news that my husband and I would be spending all of spring 1975 at the Greek villa, where my mother would briefly join us (she enjoyed flying as much as my father feared it), was broken to my father at Christmas. This was one of the few remaining occasions for which the family still convened at the House, where the stone entrance hall was decked for the season with more boughs of holly than a Victorian chapel.

  I had been worrying that there would be a row about our Greek plans. The news, although grudgingly received (‘But Easter at Thrumpton is so beautiful! How can you bear to be away!’) was rapidly overshadowed.

  Nick had also been invited for Christmas. My father’s explanation was that he needed a mechanic to accompany him for long night rides on icy roads; secretly, we all wondered what Nick’s own family must think about this defection. But Nick himself seemed eager to accommodate my father’s needs. He didn’t even object when, on Christmas Eve, he was languidly invited to don fancy-dress – we had a collection of elaborate, and very fetching, military uniforms laid away – and wait on the family. Fitted out in a waisted and splendidly-braided jacket, with a peaked cap perched sideways on his dark curls, he looked shyly pleased by the compliments my father lavished on him.