I fear no foe except the glamour
Of the eyes I long to see;
I am here, love, without armour –
Strike, and captive make of me!
Used to sing that at concerts, looking straight at me. All I could do not to blush. He used to talk stuff like that to me even after we were married. Welsh blarney, of course. I never let myself set too much store by it. But it brought warmth into a cold life. My life. Why cold? If I knew. Ma and Pa, I suppose, but it’s disloyal to think so. Talked that way right up to that awful row we had. Was I to blame? He never understood. There has to be some reality, say what you like. Not all romance. That old music-hall song he used to sing –
It ain’t all lavender
Don’t you think it is
There’s fish and there’s corduroy trousis!
Well, it’s all done now, but things have never been the same since that awful row. A marriage is for keeps, and I was always loyal. Never mind about the other. Is he loyal? Sometimes I wonder. That woman who comes to him at the office, and whines about the hard luck she’s had in her marriage. Well, if she married a jackass, whose fault is that? She picked him. Complaining to another man isn’t loyal. She got a bad house over her head. Let her live in it, I say. Of course he makes fun of her when he tells me about it, but that could be to cover up something. I know he lends her money. And those others. Think they’re high-flyers because their husbands are professors or in the Army or some such nonsense. Haven’t enough to do to keep them warm. I’ve heard them boast about their “affairs” as they call them, though I wonder just how far the affair went. All that hugging and kissing at Christmas parties. Enough to make you throw up. “How we apples swim, quoth the …” That’s an old one. Ma beat me when I was four because I used language I heard around the blacksmith shop…. Does he get up to any of that when I don’t see? He’s always had a way with women, though underneath I know how shy he is. A lot of women don’t think a man can be shy unless he’s a fool, but I know better. Sometimes the shy ones get into the biggest messes….. God, sometimes I burn with hate, and the worst of it is I don’t know who I’m hating. But I hate till it gives me a headache, and now I can’t even get out into the garden and take it out on the weeds. Is it imagination? That’s been my curse – imagination. Sometimes it nearly kills me. I sit here and I imagine things that disgust me, sometimes. Where does all that awful stuff come from? Is it being a woman? A woman with imagination and nothing to use it on but hate and suspicion? Hate is a poison, and once it gets thoroughly into your system there’s nothing to be done but to hate till you’re sick and exhausted. Hate is an addiction. Brocky’s doing a course in psychology. Do you suppose they ever tell them that? Brocky gets his imagination from me, though he thinks he gets it from his dad. As a girl, I tried to write. Poetry, but it was never the real thing. Forced. But I felt something real. His dad was never a writer – except for newspapers, and he was good at that. Political. Editorials that he used to say were dripping with blood. Did he get that from his uncle? Old John Jethro Jenkins? He could write and he wrote letters to the papers that blistered the government, for whatever good it did. Which was nix. An old blowhard. How Auntie Polly respected that man! “Malvina you mustn’t contradict the Master,” she’d say, whenever I couldn’t put up with his rubbish. The Master! Master of that house, which was mortgaged to the hilt, and falling to pieces from neglect! The fire black out and there he’d sit in bed with his overcoat and hat on reading the encyclopaedia! I know Rhodri helped him, on the q.t. Thought I didn’t know. Well, blood’s thicker than water. With the Welsh it’s thicker than tar. I wish it was thicker between me and Brocky. My son! Gets his imagination from me, I know. Could I have been a writer? A woman Victor Hugo? What went wrong? What’s gone wrong, all down the line? I liked being a working-girl. My own money. Not to do what I pleased with, of course. Had to go to Pa and Ma as long as Pa was around, after he went smash. Ma needed it even more when he was out of the way. Never mind. It was my money, and I made it myself. What money have I got now? Stacks of it, but it’s really Rhodri’s. I have nothing to do with it. Of course I’m a director of a couple of his companies, but what’s that? Sometimes he puts a paper in front of me and says, “Sign there – … You don’t know it but you were at a directors’ meeting this morning.” He means it kindly. Doesn’t want to give me trouble. But that’s the kind of trouble I’d really like. Always hated keeping house, and when we were poor sometimes I’d find I was crying while I swept the floor. Not now. Haven’t swept anything in years. Have to make those foreigners do it. They’re all right, I suppose. You can trust them, and they keep a pretty good house. Not the old style, of course. Not the Dutch style. Not Ma’s style. Clean out the keyholes once a week with an oiled feather. That was Ma’s style, and she saw we did it. Of course she couldn’t do much, except make the odd pot of tea. After Pa went to the Poor Farm she lost all heart for any kind of household work. Said her powers had completely gone … Who looks after that house in Wales, I wonder, now that I can’t get over and see to it? Never could get any decent help there. Not just for the summer months. Farm girls and old cooks like gypsies. And dirty! They hated it when I used to go into the kitchen when they didn’t expect me, and caught them all sitting around drinking strong tea and stuffing themselves with bread and jam and gossiping. But it was my house, wasn’t it? … No, it never was. It was Rhodri’s house. It was Wales to him. Cold, wet country even in June. Never took to the people. Gasbags. And insincere. You never knew what they were saying about you behind your back. County gentry! Down on their luck, most of ’em. And the people in the town were worse. He’d sit in some dirty tinsmith’s shop, because he’d known the tinsmith when they were boys, and chew the rag and thresh old straw, while I sat outside in the car, getting one of my headaches. And then next minute it’d be the county. La-di-da till you couldn’t bear it! How we apples swim! A headache, then my asthma. Might as well admit it, I hate Wales and the hold it has on him. Those women he meets. Gigglers. And he likes to giggle with them. Like that Julia. A giggler. I’d like to get her by that long hair of hers and give it a good yank! I’ve got to stop this, and go to bed, or I’ll make myself sick. Oh hate – hate! The poison of my life, and the worst is that I’m not stupid enough not to recognize it! There’s no medicine for hate, and that’s what my imagination has turned to…. I’ve read six pages of St. Elmo and haven’t taken in a word. Am I getting simple? No, by gum, I’m not, though sometimes Rhodri treats me as if I were. I can see what’s in front of me. I can see Brocky looking at me, when I try to talk some reality to him. I suppose I’m an ignorant old woman, in his eyes. But I still know more Latin than he does, even if I never finished High School and had to do that secretarial course. Pitman’s Shorthand. I can write it still, and sometimes I leave little notes to myself around the place, to show Brocky I can write something he can’t read. Mr. Yeigh said I was the best shorthand writer he’d ever employed. And that was where my imagination went, I guess. Reality took over. Now it’s all gone to seed and dreams. I think things happened that I’ve read in books. Like this book. St. Elmo.
And like an angel bending down above you
To breathe into your ear
“I love you.
I love you.”
I’m getting silly. More of this and I’ll be crying and nobody would ever understand why. Bed, now.
“Min, bring my hot milk upstairs in about five minutes, will you? No thanks, I can manage the stairs alone.”
(4)
I SHRINK FROM watching this film; it is deeply embarrassing. Getting painfully near the knuckle. The Loyalists fleeing to Canada and the gradual rot after that great expenditure of spirit. Yes. The hegira from Dinas Mawddwy to Trallwm and the rise and fall of a Methodist family. Yes. But this – that young man who seems to be reading The Faerie Queen but is really stewing in his own juice, like the other three, is my father and I don’t want to know about his involvement with anyone called Julia. My mother’s name was
Nuala – Nuala Connor from Dublin, a female academic and a cool but kindly and sufficient mother. There was no extreme heat between my parents. Sixty-eight degrees Fahrenheit, I would reckon it. The heat in the library at St. Helen’s – the palpable, real heat – must be well over eighty F. and the psychological heat is just below boiling – a slow simmer. But I cannot escape the film.
Can it be called a film, this extraordinary evocation of things that go far beyond the photographable, physical presence of these people? This film that gives the truth of temperature, of smell, of the sense of physical sickness that hangs about my grandmother and spreads through the room, of the subhuman life of the dog Janie who can know nothing of the complexities around her but, as dogs do, absorbs them all and makes them manifest in her somnolence, feebleness and gluttony; Janie is sick with the life of that house.
The technique of the film is advanced beyond anything I ever saw in my days of life as a film critic. The screen divides and shows many images, or a number of contrasted images that comment upon one another, or swells to one monstrous and frightening close-up; the colour ranges from the dim sepia in which the sad life of Min is seen to the rich Caravaggio palette of my frustrated, imaginative grandmother. This is a film that reaches all the senses including smell. Smell – which our age has made the least acceptable of the five, but which rouses emotion with a painful immediacy. We are not supposed to smell people, and millions of dollars are spent on various devices to kill human smell, either at its source, or in the nose of the proximate companion. But to the aroused, the truly curious, the enchanted or the enchained, is there any better revealer of truth than a smell? As now, when a smell of health, soap, bay rum, and expensive clothes assails me, and I know it is my grandfather.
(5)
RHODRI: (The music which supports his thoughts is from a musical comedy of the twenties, called Lady Mary; the voice of Herbert Mundin, a comedian of the day, is heard:
What do the Yanks know of England
Who know not Austin Reed?
They may have the dollars
But they buy their shirts and collars
From the Boys of the Bulldog Breed.
He is rereading, for the sixth time, a story by Wodehouse in which Bertie Wooster reflects on his one-time love for Cynthia, “a dashed pretty and attractive girl, mind you, but full of ideals and all that. I may be wronging her, but I have an idea that she’s the sort of girl who would want a fellow to carve out a career and what not.”)
Carving out a career. That’s what I’ve done, I suppose. But what a release to read about somebody who had no need to do it, and not the slightest intention of trying. What a holiday to read about people who have no real problems, who are not chained to day-to-day, year-to-year obligations. What a satisfaction to read about aristocrats whose chief concerns are growing flowers, or prize pigs, or simply having a good time. What do the Yanks know of England? What do the Canadians know of England? Come to that, what does P.G. Wodehouse know of England? Because this isn’t England, it is a fairy-tale land, an England that never was. Brocky tells me that somebody has said that Wodehouse’s stories are musical comedies without music. That’s their charm for me. That, and the magic of the language. Escape from reality. And what’s wrong with that? Haven’t I had plenty of reality? Or what people call reality, which always seems to mean something nasty? I took on reality when the Pater announced that we were emigrating to Canada. (Music changes to “Yn iach i ti, Cymru,” a farewell to Wales.) Lance and me first, to spy out the land, he said, but in reality I suppose to be spared the final misery of selling up the shop, and the furniture, paying debts – he paid every penny, good man – putting up the shutters and leaving the place he loved. But I seized on one reality, and that was that twelve pence made a shilling and twenty shillings made a pound, and an extra shilling made a guinea. Where did I learn that? Is a sense of money inborn? The Pater had none. Uncle David certainly had none, though he had the craftiness to marry Mary Evans the Angel, who had money. Grandfather had a sense of money, but not enough sense of how to hang on to it. Backing that debt for Thomas! Couldn’t he sniff that Llewellyn Thomas was unsound, if not actually a crook? Sanctimonious old twister! Religion was like a drug to those people. It could blind them to anything. A great day for me when I put it aside. Yes, put it aside without giving up the outward forms, because it would have grieved the Mater if she thought I wasn’t a Methodist from my crown to my soles. Was it hypocrisy? Hypocrisy is a necessity if life is to be endured. All hypocrites: some hypocrites for God’s sake. The Mater. The finest woman I’ve ever known. The last time I met Lance, when I went to his sixty-fifth birthday party, he said, “Rhod, our Mater was the dearest and best” – then he wept. So did I. Her prayers were what saved our skins in this awful country. (The music changes to “Do Something for Somebody Quick.”) That was a silly song, but she wasn’t a silly woman. Every night in that awful first year, before a poor supper she made us all kneel, and she would pray – the Pater couldn’t pray, he was too low in his mind to pray aloud – that God would bless us in the new land. Which He did. No getting away from it. That night in December, when Lance was late for supper and for prayers, and he suddenly burst in and interrupted the prayer – which showed how overwhelmingly important it was – saying, “Pater, there’s a sign on the door at the Plough and Harvester saying they want an accountant,” and the Pater jumped up in mid-prayer and ran out, and came back later to say that he’d just caught Mr. Knowles as he was locking the door, and landed the job. Knowles told him to take down the sign and be there at eight in the morning. I suppose he was impressed by the Pater’s good speech and honest look. A great night for us, that was. The Mater didn’t actually say that God had answered our prayers, but we didn’t need to be told. Even I believed it. And from that day we never wanted. The Pater was accountant in that factory till the day he died. It was below his abilities, but it was a job, and he never knew how to capitalize on his abilities. That deathbed promise to his mother. His ruin, in a way. I’ll never forget the moment Lance broke into the Mater’s prayers with that promising news. Has my career been evidence of God’s goodness? Or luck? Or my way of capitalizing on my abilities? Nobody can say, but I know what the Mater would have said…. A little intelligent hypocrisy might have saved the Pater. Too good. Excess in virtue can be ruinous…. Those awful first days on the job. The men at The Courier used to tease the life out of me. “Rhod, is that woman that wears the dog-muzzle really your mother? What’s wrong with her? Does she bite? Is that why you left the Old Country? She bit somebody?” I couldn’t mention it at home. I couldn’t ask her not to wear that damned wire cage over her mouth and nose when she went out-of-doors. Packed with some sort of mentholated wool that she was sure was a protection against the Canadian cold, and a certain remedy against her asthma. She never thought it made her look strange. To make fun of a boy’s mother! They were a rough lot. It hurt me in a special way. An intrusion into my deepest feelings. My home…. The Pater, too. That ad he made me put in the Courier:
Bespoke tailor desires employment. Eighteen years experience as cutter and fitter. London (Eng.) training. Letters to Box 7, this journal.
“What’s a bespoke tailor, Rhod? Are those pants you’re wearing real London bespoke pants? Do they wear patches on the knees in London now, Rhod?” What I went through with the Courier gang! Not bad men – though Beak Browder and Charlie Delaney were not much above the criminal class – but men from another world. Not the world I grew up in. So far as I’d grown up. Fifteen, and raw off the boat…. That ad was the nearest thing to a lie I suppose the Pater ever allowed himself. He was never a real tailor, and his London training didn’t go beyond a few wrinkles Uncle David showed him, from time to time. But he had to have a job, and as a failed man I suppose he thought he had to go right back to the beginning, and that was the tailor’s bench. Pitiful. But could I say so? To my own father? Unthinkable…. I’ve helped quite a few immigrants in my time. I know what they feel. The desolation o
f leaving home and facing the worst-the bottom – of a new country…. Can I ever forget the first day at the Courier? Lance and I arrived on a Saturday, late in the afternoon, and Uncle John said he had jobs for us and we started Monday morning. I was scared out of my life. There I was, a printer’s devil, and I’d never seen the inside of a printing office in my life. Delaney was first: “Get the lye bucket and scrub out the urinals.” That was the way with a new apprentice. Give him the rottenest job first, to humble him. As if I needed humbling! The lye skinned my hands, and the stink made me vomit. Printers. Great beer-drinkers. Stinking piss. Then it was, “Get over to the market and get us some fruit for dinner.” “What fruit, sir?” “Any fruit, you stupid little bugger.” “May I have some money, sir? For the fruit, sir?” “Do you think we pay for fruit? Grab what you can, and run. And if you’re caught, don’t say you’re from here, or I’ll beat your brains out.” So I stole, and it nearly killed me. A thief! Had I come to this? If Hell is any worse than that first week at the Courier I’ll be surprised. Not just the cursing and filthy language and the perpetual dirty jokes about women, and the tobacco-chewing and the reek of men who never seemed to wash, but what they used to call in the Chapel the Abjection of Soul, the fear that God had deserted me. That’s when I learned that God has two faces. I’d exchanged the Wesleyan chapel for a chapel of the Typographical Union…. That was my Canada. That was the vast wheatfield and the sturdy farmer in elegant breeches. Lance and I lived with Uncle John and Auntie Polly. And every week we gave them most of our wages to put aside to buy furniture for the house when the Mater and the Pater and the two girls followed us out to the new land more than a year later. And when the day was near and we asked Uncle John for the money, what did he say? “Don’t trouble about it, boys, I’ll make it right with your father.” And that was all we ever heard about it. He’d used our money, the damned old scoundrel. – Ah, well; not a bad old stick. Just untrustworthy about money. When we told the Pater, he looked pretty sad, but he never said a word of blame to John Jethro. Uncle John was the Mater’s brother and he couldn’t bear to grieve her. I’ve never mentioned that to a soul. Not even to Vina. To cheat a couple of boys – how could he? And in other ways he was so much above the rest of us. Educated beyond us. But education never seems to have much to do with money matters. Nor with common sense … Look at Brocky. A really intelligent fellow, you would imagine. Certainly Jimmy King says so. But he seems ready to sacrifice it all for that damned Julia. What does he see in her? Stupid question. What does anybody ever see in someone else’s love affairs? But is it love? Looks like rank infatuation. He’s a slave. Thinks I don’t know it, but I do. Perhaps because I’ve been a slave a couple of times myself. Perhaps that kind of slavery runs in the family. Do we overvalue women? Perhaps it would be different if there weren’t madness in Julia’s family, but there is. The mother. The old grandfather. They’re not locked up, but above a certain level of income we don’t lock such people up. They’re not crazy, they’re neurotics. Until they burn the house down, or threaten somebody with a knife, that’s to say. Like William McOmish. There was a nice neurotic for you! And I suppose I have to understand that Brocky is his grandson, as well as the Pater’s. There’s a strain – Do I see it in Vina? No, no; that’s ridiculous. There never was a more level-headed woman when we were young. Now, of course, things have changed. She has so much illness to bear, poor woman, and illness eats into the mind as well as into the body. Not neurotic, but has too much to bear…. Is Brocky leading an immoral life? Has he gone the limit with that girl? That can be a frightful trap, and the man isn’t always to blame. It’s horribly coarsening. Does he take any precautions? Ought I to speak to him? He’d probably laugh at me. If the woman drinks a glass of really cold water right after – that does the trick. That’s what Vina and I have always done. Birth control…. If only she didn’t hate the Old Country so. Every year I want her to come with me to Belem. But after the first few years she has always said it’s too much for her. And I know she doesn’t want me to go. But I do go, and I live there by myself – unless I take Brocky with me – and I swear it saves my life. It’s peace and happiness and a blessed rest from perpetual illness and from old Min…. Min. There’s that in the family, too. Min lacks a round of being square, and that’s all there is to it. She thinks I didn’t see her at dinner last night, in one of her fits, one hand scrabbling in the mustard pickles. Oh, what a heritage Brocky has – asthma, on both sides. Petit mal likely to be grand mal at any time. Failure. Bankruptcy. Disappointment and bitterness of heart. That terrible thing about Vina. – That won’t do! Back to Wodehouse.