Walcot

‘Martin!’ exclaimed Mary, reprovingly.

‘I said beggars. Off they bravely went – Bertie, Jeremy and Ernest, Sarah shedding motherly tears as she waved them off on the train.’

‘My poor mother! What she went through!’

‘Two of the lads were captured by the Germans and spent most of the war in an Oflag. The third one, Ernie – a handsome youth of twenty-one – stopped a bullet at Passchendaele and died on the spot.’

‘It was the Somme, of all places,’ said Mary. ‘I ought to know. He got shot in the Somme offensive. August 1916.’

‘The Somme,’ cried Sonia, bored with talk of war. ‘That was where I got my hunchback.’ She was sitting huddled in an armchair with Gyp, our Airedale, sprawling on her lap. Suddenly she threw Gyp off. ‘I’m going to have an operation to get it removed.’

‘Do stop that nonsense,’ your mother scolded her. ‘Valerie would never say anything like that.’

The dog sat and scratched himself, staring at Sonia with a look of amazement. Everyone was amazed by Sonia.

Martin pressed grimly on with his account.

‘They say Ernie fell face down in the mud, was trampled over, got buried in it – never to play his banjo in the Strand again. Sarah, his widow, never remarried, poor lass.’

‘She set up a teashop with a lady companion. It stood on what’s now the Southampton Road,’ said Mary. ‘Valerie and I often used to go there in the old days.’

‘The other two brothers, Bert and Jeremy, returned unharmed at the end of the war. Jeremy rejoined his Flo – her folks were no one much – and Bertie married Violet from Grantham, a member of the smart Parkins family. The Parkinses manufactured the latest thing in lawnmowers for the upwardly mobile generations. Violet is a bit of a goer – I’d say out of Bertie’s class.’

‘Don’t say that,’ Mary exclaimed. ‘I wouldn’t trust Violet further than I could throw her!’

Contemplating the idea of anyone throwing any aunties anywhere, Sonia burst into laughter. Her mother hushed her.

‘Any road, at Violet’s prompting, Bertie ceased to pursue his architectural career. He became instead a stunt pilot. Violet thought that was much more glamorous. He flew with Sir Alan Cobham’s Air Display, touring the country and delighting audiences with his daring. Jeremy remained with the architectural business, sole owner. Bedazzled by his young wife, skittish Flo, he began to neglect his work. Gradually the business went downhill. Bertie finally gave up his flying and joined the sinking business. He and Jeremy built that little Baptist chapel down Greenacres Road.’

You imagined that old Zachariah Frost was a refugee from some starving stretch of the country, where life for the poor was even harder than life in the towns. Sonia drew a picture of him in crayon: a terrible old man with a big, hook nose and a hump on his back. Martin snatched up the paper and was furious at what he saw.

‘You should show some respect, girl!’

Sonia jumped up, stamping her foot. She grabbed the paper back.

‘It’s me! It’s not him! It’s me, dressed up. Mind your own business.’

You would never have dared speak to your father like that. It would have provoked a beating.

‘We’ve never had hunchbacks in our family,’ Martin said. He enjoyed telling you and your sister about the family history. You listened more passively than Sonia. But you, like her, were obsessed with your appearance. Shutting yourself in your north-facing bedroom, you would stare at your face in the looking glass. Eyes of an indeterminate colour. But were you not rather aristocratic, by and large? Possibly lantern-jawed? What was a lantern jaw? Did it shine like a lantern? Lantern-jawed. You spent hours practising being lantern-jawed, walking round the room being lantern-jawed.

And still your father did his best to educate you in family history.

‘We Fieldings became more prosperous earlier than did the Frosts,’ Martin said. ‘In the parish records, William Fielding comes into the picture with dates attached. Born in the eighteen-forties. His wife Isabelle – Isabelle Doughty, she was – was from the superior Norfolk family of Doughtys. Isabelle bore William seven children, no less. William himself was one of nine children, two of whom were daughters. Two of William’s brothers died at sea.’

‘We still have a record somewhere of the death of one of the brothers, James. James Fielding was Chief Petty Officer of the ship Montgomery. He died of a fever off the Grand Banks, aged twenty-five. A fine young man. His body was committed to the deep.’

Your father spoke these last words in a deep voice, as if to convey the depth of the ocean involved.

‘What are the Grand Banks actually, Daddy?’ you asked.

‘Not the same as Barclay’s Bank.’ Perhaps he thought he had made a joke. ‘No, the Grand Banks are off Newfoundland, and covered permanently in fog.’

‘Did they push him over the side when he was dead?’ Sonia asked. It was the first time she had shown any real interest in the account.

‘His coffin was lowered over the side with all due reverence.’ Martin gave his Aertex shirt a tug, as if to demonstrate.

‘It may have been these deaths that persuaded William to settle in Swaffham and open a chemist’s shop instead of going to sea. One of his sons, my dad, your grandfather, Sydney Fielding, established a similar business in Horncastle. He combined a dentistry with his pharmacy. In Horncastle were born all of Sydney and Elizabeth’s children, one of them being none other than me, your father.’

Your mother was quite a bit younger than your father.

You feared him. He would beat you with a slipper even when you were small – say, two years old. After the beating, when your feelings were hurt as well as your behind, he would make you shake hands with him and declare that you were still friends. This you always did, fearing another beating if you didn’t, but you never ever felt he was your friend.

‘Never,’ you swore under your breath, accentuating the word by becoming momentarily lantern-jawed.

When your father was not angry, he was morose. You remember watching him staring moodily out of your front window at the street. A little band of wounded ex-servicemen was playing there, with trumpet, tambourine and penny whistle. A cap lay on the pavement at their feet. The old soldiers could muster only five eyes and four legs between the three of them. You would often stand and look at them with a kind of puzzled sympathy, until they told you to clear off. Your father regarded them icily through the window. He had no patience for those who did not, or could not, work.

‘Bloody cripples,’ he said, catching you staring at him. He had to fight against being a cripple himself, with his painful leg. Such disabled soldiers fell outside his socialist sympathies for the working man.

‘Work’s the saviour, young feller-m’-lad,’ he told you. He often called you ‘young feller-m’-lad’, as if he could not quite remember your name. Perhaps he thought that a new breed of men would have to appear before wars ceased; men without the savagery that begot wars. You know he sometimes spoke to your mother of how the world could be redeemed. How God should send his Son down again, pretty promptly, and alter everything; yet his words were empty of any real sense of belief.

And Mary would sniff and say that these were awful times they were living in.

‘It’s the end of the British Empire,’ Martin would respond. ‘India has let us down. Remember when the present king held his durbar in Delhi? What a show that was. Those times are gone for ever.’

‘Good old King George and Queen Mary,’ your mother exclaimed.

‘I’ve nothing against him, but what’s he ever done for the poor? Look at the miners.’

And Mary would say, rather despairingly, ‘Martin, couldn’t we just talk about happy things?’

‘Like what?’ your father would ask.

She would gesture. ‘Oh, can’t we ever laugh? I long for humour the way you long for a pork chop.’

‘You’re too superficial, that’s the trouble with you, dear.’

Your little sister, detecting something frosty in the air, perhaps another cold row brewing, would bang heartily on a tin tray with a spoon, while shrieking at the top of her voice her favourite swear word, ‘Shuggerybees!’

You often wondered where Sonia got her high spirits from.

You were barely in your teens when you bought a book for twopence off a market stall. It was called The Old Red Sandstone. You were attracted by the title –

I don’t remember it.

Yes, you do. Your father approved, because the book was written by a working man who became a geologist, a rare achievement in early Victorian times. What fascinated you were such dramatic passages as, ‘At this period in our history some terrible catastrophe involved the sudden destruction of the fish of an area at least a hundred miles from boundary to boundary, perhaps far more. It exhibits unequivocally the marks of violent death …’

Yes, I was thrilled by it, and by the idea of geology. Better than any fairy tale!