First Confession Read online

  Discovering this fairly typical nineteenth-century story of immigrant diasporas bravely leaving behind hardship, disease and starvation and making a new and successful life in a foreign country is one of the high points of so many family histories of the time, histories which remind us how time collapses. There is much else you discover or imagine as you work your way through census reports and parish records. There is the huge gulf between public and private life, a salutary reminder for those who spend most of their lives in politics of how little it seems to make an impact on the daily life of most people, except when it implodes in bloodshed or privation. What some critics deride as public apathy is simply normal people getting on with making the most of their opportunities and trying to cope with the small disasters that bombard most lives; this is the heroism of muddling through. Digging deeper into my family history, on both of my parents’ sides, I have also come to a deeper sense of how much in any family we hide from one another – not just from the future, which in any event many feel can best look after itself. How judgemental can we be about the small hypocrisies, the harmless vanities, the casual domestic cruelties, the heartless selfishness that are part of every family history? How can we pronounce from our vantage point and from a contemporary moral stance about behaviour in the past? The best we can do is try to be better and kinder ourselves; to remember how much it is sheer courage that usually gets people through disappointment and heartbreak; and to recognize how the greatest disruption to our well-ordered plans is often love, occasionally regretted but usually embraced and invariably transformative.

  Joseph and Annie sound and look from contemporary photographs and records like a very loveable couple: all that headteachers should be, he with juniors, Annie with infants. They were well-fed and comfortably built. They had two daughters, and then, after a gap of fifteen years, a son, Francis, my father, in 1909. The two girls, Evelyn and Maud, taught the violin and the piano and had a millinery shop in the Stockport Road, where the family also lived. My father, who went to the Xaverian College, was inevitably an altar boy, with the best cotta and cassock from the ecclesiastical outfitters Cassertelli’s. He also had a state-of-the-art, three-spring cricket bat, which seems to have taken pride of place, scarcely surprisingly, over the violin which his sisters taught him.

  My grandfather was remembered, not just for his work with the children of Ancoats, Ardwick and Gorton for whom he helped to organize summer camps in the Peak District, but also for his stylish dress sense, not always a characteristic of teachers. He sounds a bit of a dandy – well-cut dark suits, silk cravats secured by a diamond pin, figured waistcoats, a splendid gold watch chain and an ebony walking stick. That Edwardian flair – attained even by someone as stout as Joseph – is not something that passed down to his grandson.

  I wonder what the reaction of my grandparents was during the Anglo-Irish turmoil of the 1910s and 1920s. Were they proud of the Republicans who stormed Dublin’s Post Office in 1916? What did they believe was the motive – a simple Republican gesture of defiance or an attempt as well to halt the payment of pay cheques to Irishmen serving in the British Army in the war? Deep down did they question (or even hate) the British colonial power that made martyrs of the rebels? They probably kept their heads down and went to mass to pray for the souls of the faithful departed. I asked my father once about their attitude. He could see the point I was making and seemed a bit concerned that he did not know the answer. He was only a small child in 1916, but had never subsequently asked his parents about their attitude to the Irish fight for independence. Dad was a kind, charming and affable man, and like my mother did not much care for an argument. That makes it all the more surprising to me that he defied his parents – as must surely have been what happened – when, having forsaken the violin and taken up the drums at school, he turned down a place at Manchester University and went off to join a band that played gigs on the Isle of Man in the summer, and travelled around the country during the rest of the year. Would his successfully aspirant parents have been so broad-minded in the 1930s to wish him well on his way? Did they buy him a set of drums for the house in Stockport Road? Were they loving liberal parents ahead of their time? Perhaps they were; maybe they had more than their ration of genial Irish kindness. I never met them. I wish I had. They both died in the 1930s, Joseph in the year that my father married, 1938. That leads to the next part of a story that tested parental attitudes.

  My mother, Joan Angel, was born in 1915 in Exeter. Her own mother, Clara, had been born in Taunton in 1876 to parents who were tailors. By the age of five, Clara was living according to the census as ‘a visitor’ in Exeter; presumably this was some kind of fostering arrangement when her parents moved to London with a tailoring and drapery business. By the age of fifteen, my grandmother was working as a draper’s assistant and went on to become a milliner. She married Percy, who was as good-looking as she was herself; he clearly took after his extremely beautiful mother, Ellen, mother of six and self-declared head of the household. As a small child, I met two of Percy’s sisters, Aunt Meg in Exeter and Aunt Gwen, who lived in Teignmouth. Gwen was a companion to another old lady, called Aunt Pan. I once embarrassed my mother and sister when very young by commenting loudly over tea and scones in Teignmouth on the old ladies’ smell.

  Percy went to work as a clerk at Heavitree Breweries, an independent brewer of which by the time of his retirement he had become company secretary. So far, I guess, so normal. But then there is an uncomfortable surprise. Percy and Clara had three children, not, as my sister and I had always thought, two. Our lovely Aunt Ina, who managed to be cheerful despite a life which was shot through with disappointment and illness, was born in 1905, and my mother ten years later in 1915. I have now discovered that two years after Ina, Percy and Clara had a son, Colin Marcus. Why did we never know that we had an uncle? Ina at least must surely have known, though perhaps the age difference explained why his existence was never known by my mother. We can only guess at what happened. Colin died in a hospital for the mentally handicapped in Dawlish on the Devon coast in 1945. What was the nature of what the census calls the ‘incapacity’ from which he suffered? Was it both an excessive burden and an embarrassment for my grandparents? Today I guess that most families would be more likely to confront a tragedy like this more openly: better days, but how can I judge? As a family – my parents, sister Angela and I – used to go regularly to Dawlish, renting a flat on the front for our summer holidays. Had my mother known, even if her brother was long since dead, would she not have felt rather awkward about the coincidence of pleasure and family tragedy?

  It was a long way from Joan’s clearly happy childhood. My mother was a very beautiful woman, throughout her life, who much enjoyed her nickname, ‘Bella’. She was curvaceous, and a little more than curvaceous in late middle age, with head-turning good looks: lovely eyes and mouth, a pretty laugh and a radiant smile. As a young woman she must have been dazzling and certainly took Exeter’s amateur dramatics by storm. She even got favourable mentions in national publications like The Stage. A professional repertory company, Malvern Players, offered her a place in their troupe. Her parents refused to let her go; acting was regarded then as beyond louche. Anyway, they were delighted that she seemed to be heading for a local life of comfort and provincial prestige. The beauty got engaged to the son of a well-off local businessman. Then disaster struck. My mother went to a dance at the Rougemont Hotel in Exeter, where the drummer in the band was my father. Love’s percussionist beat the retreat from an engagement and genteel prosperity in Exeter. She had fallen in love with an Irish Catholic drummer. Oh dear, the turmoil! Colm Tóibín could do justice to the story. On top of everything else, in order to marry the man, she informed her parents that she had to abandon their (fairly lightly held) religious views and become a Roman (the word would have been stressed) Catholic. Her mother did not speak to her for weeks and she received nothing in her father’s will.

  My maternal grandfather died in 1938, six years befo
re my birth, but I did know my maternal grandmother, the only one of all my grandparents with whom I spent any time. She lived until 1967 and died aged ninety-one, fired up into old age by regular glasses of Guinness and pale ale. She had forthright opinions on most issues, especially the monarchy (she used to stand for the National Anthem after the Queen’s Christmas message on television) and politics (she was far and away the strongest Tory in the family; at elections she ran committee rooms and acted as a teller for the Conservatives in Exeter). But I never heard her utter a word on any religious matter; nor can I ever recall her setting foot in a church. I suppose it was the sheer foreignness of being a Roman Catholic, and perhaps a bit of prejudice about Irish immigrants, that must have been the cause of her difficulty with my parents’ marriage.

  Gran was very kind to us when my sister and I went to stay with her at her terraced house in Exeter. The garden smelt of honeysuckle, that lovely evergreen ‘Halliana’ with biscuit-coloured flowers. There were tiny new potatoes from the vegetable patch fried in bacon fat for breakfast and big, fat loganberries for tea. She had a ripe collection of mildly vulgar Devonshire sayings and toasts. There were no echoes there of Luther’s ‘A Mighty Fortress is My God’. Despite his unsuitability, Gran came to love my father. Everyone did. He was too loveable for his own good.

  My parents had my sister, Angela, the year after they were married, in 1939, and then in 1941 my father went off as a Royal Air Force officer to the Middle East, running the gauntlet of the German submarines and bombers to get there. He spent most of the war in Palestine and Lebanon, a country he loved for its sophisticated and tolerant mix of religions and nationalities. For their safety Mum took Angela to live in Exeter with her own mother. That lasted until the Baedeker raids of 1942 when Luftwaffe bombers devastated the centre of the city, fortunately missing the cathedral, in retaliation for the RAF’s increasingly effective targeting of German cities like Lübeck. My great-grandmother seems to have been one of the casualties of the German attacks, and died shortly after, two years to the day before I was born. The flattening of the heart of Exeter (where the post-war rebuilding did the city few favours) prompted my mother and sister to move up to the Lancashire coast to live in a holiday house owned by my father’s sister Maud and her husband, who was a prosperous potato merchant – an appropriate business for a scion of the great famine. It was in that coastal town, Thornton-Cleveleys, that I was born on 12 May 1944.

  After demobilization, my father used his contacts in the music business to get a job with a publisher of popular sheet music in London, in what was called Tin Pan Alley. It was in the West End, which my mother always referred to as ‘in town’. Dad brought the family down to London and my parents bought a new house built on the borders of Greenford and Southall in Middlesex to the west of the city. By a few yards and licks of paint we were in Greenford, a suburb which had grown up around the new arterial road to Buckinghamshire and Oxford, the Western Avenue, and just south of the Underground Central Line and the older Metropolitan Line, connecting Baker Street with Amersham and the real countryside. Greenford had once boasted market gardens, elm trees and the Brent River wandering, as John Betjeman wrote, ‘Wembley-wards at will’. Its proximity to a new road system and an old canal had attracted factories like Rockware glass, and Lyons and Hovis bakeries, and the construction of several housing estates. These provided a new generation of Londoners, either side of the Second World War, with the spurious notion that they were moving out to the country beyond Ealing, the queen of suburbs as its residents liked it to be called. The sense of countryside was reflected in the use of mock Tudor beams in semi-detached houses and the preserving of green spaces like Horsenden Hill, where in later years I used to go with school friends for a surreptitious smoke during lunch hours or on our way to our games field.

  Our first Greenford house was in Hillside Road in a new terrace of housing, bought in those days for well below a thousand pounds. The houses lacked any touch of rural pastiche, except an inglenook brick fireplace in the front room. They were plain and rather ugly, surrounded by larger ‘semis’ built before the war. Most of the residents when we moved there in 1947 were young families like us. My two friends next door, Robin and Kevin, were the sons of a civil servant, who commuted into central London like my father, starting with two bus rides to get to the Central Line station at Greenford. At the top of the road, there was a turning circle for cars, not that there were many in the street. Robin, Kevin and I used to play cricket there when we got older, using an old stink pipe as a wicket.

  I spent most of my years at primary school living there. Gradually during the 1950s and 1960s the ethnic composition of the road changed as large numbers of Indians and Pakistanis moved into Southall, initially recruited, so it was believed, by a former British Indian Army officer for his own factory. They were also attracted by work elsewhere, for example at Heathrow Airport, opened and developed as London’s main airport in 1946. Though there have been racial tensions over the years, I do not recall any trouble or much evidence of prejudice when the population’s culture and ethnicity began to change so dramatically, with Sikhs, Muslims and Hindus moving into the area. According to the census the largest number of residents in Hillside Road and the surrounding streets now is from India or the Indian diaspora. I cannot remember a single prejudiced comment about colour or religion from either of our parents. It would have been easy to imagine such attitudes emerging as Asian communities transformed Greenford. Going back to the street today, two things stand out. First, many of the front gardens have been dug up and covered with hard standing for cars, hebe and hortensia replaced by Hondas. Second, many of the 1940s houses in our terrace have been done up, with smart porches and Georgian front doors. Houses like ours, with a sliding door between what we called the lounge and the dining room, sell for over £300,000 these days.

  I walked to school, at first looked after by my sister. The journey was just over a mile and took about half an hour at our snail’s pace. We used to go down an alley opposite our house alongside the playing field of Greenford Grammar School. In the summer the wire fence on one side was covered with belladonna, which we knew as Deadly Nightshade. My sister told me that it was smeared on the tips of arrows to make them certain killers, and that the Roman Emperors picked it in order to murder their opponents. She would pretend to eat a few of its black berries and then do a Sarah Bernhardt death scene in the alley, a regular piece of dramatic acting which never failed to terrify her nervous younger brother.

  Our route took us through Greenford’s older residential areas, eventually bringing us out at the covered market in the Broadway. This is where Mum came to buy fish every Friday morning. There was a Sainsbury on one side of the Broadway with sales staff in white overalls and hats in the days before it became self-service. Mum used to get bacon there, sliced very thin when it was streaky so that it would crisp nicely for weekend breakfasts. There was a baker which I think was called Liszt’s, like the composer. Their paper bags, with perhaps an iced bun inside for tea, carried the slogan, ‘Good Flavour Always Finds Favour’. How true! Further down was Burton’s Tailors, which had kitted out Britain’s servicemen on their demobilization after the war. Above the tailor was a billiard hall, but no one we knew ever set foot in it. At the traffic lights by the pub, we crossed the road where I was once almost knocked over. The car actually touched me. I remember my mother giving me a lecture, the point of which was not to look both ways before crossing, but always to wear clean underpants in case an accident ever hospitalized me. Then we passed a sweetshop, where we bought our first post-rationing allowance in 1953 – Flying Saucers, Gobstoppers, Lemon Sherbets, Fry’s Chocolate Creams. Finally, after a Post Office building, there was the parish church and the primary school, which was named after it: Our Lady of the Visitation.

  Catholics in Greenford had initially been looked after by Benedictine monks, but an order of missionaries – the Pallotine Fathers – took over the growing community including many Irish a
nd Polish families, building a small red-brick church in 1937. The school followed in 1948 and a new and far larger church (like an aircraft hangar, my mother always thought) was constructed in the late 1950s. I do not know why the church and school were named after one of the most charming scenes in the New Testament, described early in St Luke’s Gospel. Shortly after the Annunciation, Mary goes to visit her much older and hitherto barren cousin Elizabeth, perhaps in now sad and divided Hebron in the Palestinian hill country, to give her the extraordinary news about her role as Mother of God. As Mary enters the room to greet Elizabeth, the older woman’s baby – who is to become John the Baptist – leaps in her womb, cleansed of original sin. The scene provides many of the words of the most frequently enunciated Catholic prayer, the Hail Mary, and the most beautiful prayer, the Magnificat. This meeting is used as the subject matter for many great Renaissance paintings, including two by Ghirlandaio, my favourite of which in the Louvre depicts not only three very beautiful young women – Mary, Salome and Mary of Cleopas – but an exquisitely graceful and serene, much older Elizabeth.

  We moved from Hillside Road to Courthope Road not long before I transferred to secondary school. Our new house, quite close to the station, was in what my mother regarded as the best road in Greenford. It was not in Ruislip or Northwood, let alone the centre of Ealing, in any of which she would have preferred to live, but it was definitely a step up. Now I can see that it was in the middle of the world of Lupin Pooters whimsically described by John Betjeman. The regimental symmetry of the houses along the arterial Western Avenue is replicated in the estates either side as far down as Perivale, with its Hoover Art Deco factory building striped with bright Aztec and Mayan colours (which is now the most magnificent Tesco supermarket). Betjeman saw the roofs of Perivale as a line of trawlers in a Cornish gale. I have never quite seen that myself, but he was correct in writing that once you could smell the scent of mayfields in Greenford. In Courthope Road, where small boys would not have dared to play cricket in the street, you also caught the smell of laburnum, nicotiana and privet in the summer. A flower-filled, weed-free front garden was the nearest we now came to the rural charms of Middlesex. Two doors down from us a very serious gardener with a face like a polished apple grew magnificent dahlias, the scarlet Bishop of Llandaff on duty every summer on either side of his garden path. I am not sure what the real bishop would have made of the girlie magazines that our neighbour kept in his potting shed, which my father was shown to his embarrassment every time he borrowed weed-killer or a hoe.