The people in the next bungalow entertained him to lunch while we hovered enviously outside, then pointed him towards the nearest airfield, and off he went. The railway line between London and the southwest ran along the seawall on the mainland facing us across the estuary. At night we could see the lighted trains and dream of where they were bound, north and east to a London we had never visited, or south and west to Penzance near the very tip of England, Land’s End.
Nowadays when my wife and I visit Britain we take the train to the south west. Just outside Exeter the line joins the estuary and it’s a wonderfully scenic trip for miles, tunnelling through the red sandstone headlands, and following the coast so closely that it runs along the seafront of villages and towns. It used to be, perhaps still is, that if you took a window seat in the dining room of the Courtenay Arms Hotel in the estuary village of Starcross — Courtenay being the family name of the Earls of Devon whose castle is nearby — you could look up at the underside of the trains as they raced by a few feet away. I suppose people were so anxious to get railway service that they would accept almost any condition the Great Western Railway company demanded. The line was built by a visionary engineer with a towering reputation, Isambard Kingdom Brunei, but he overreached himself and lost a huge amount of money when he chose the stretch of line at Starcross to experiment with the madcap idea that engines could be powered by atmospheric pressure. Rather more reliable is the ferry from Starcross across the estuary to Exmouth; it has been running since the twelfth century.
We children were at the Warren in the summer of 1932 — I was six years old — when my father, who had commuted to Exeter, returned to tell us our mother was dead. She had gone into a nursing home for an operation to remove gallstones obstructing her bile duct, and died from pulmonary embolism, or blood clot in the lungs. I know no more about it than that; it was never discussed and I never thought to ask my father for information. Why a nursing home rather than a hospital? I don’t know, although I believe that the middle and upper classes tended to favour private nursing homes over public hospitals. The death of my mother must of course have been a defining event in my life, but I have few memories of her. I do remember, or think I do, picking raspberries for breakfast with her in the back garden of our first home in Exeter. My father told me that when she dressed as Father Christmas and appeared in the living room, I asked why Santa was wearing Mummy’s shoes — perhaps the first signs of the observant and skeptical reporter. I have a faint sense, more a feeling than a memory, of how it felt to hold her hand, sort of warm and cool at the same time. Less pleasantly, I had for some reason a horror of brown apple cores and I seem to remember her teasing me with a core, pushing it toward me. Perhaps that is why I still find them distasteful. And that’s about it for memories.
There was a housemaid/nursemaid who looked after me, as was common in the middle class, so perhaps I did not see that much of my mother. But I do remember, and wish I didn’t, what I thought when, having heard of her death, I went along the beach to find a friend to with whom to share the news. I thought, “I should feel sad, but I don’t.” My brother, aged eleven, was devastated by mother’s death, but he was more aware of her than I was. She had, for example, been teaching him to play golf with a set of clubs cut down to his size. My sister was only two and unaware of what had happened. But there was I, apparently unmoved and wondering why. Was I already a detached, introspective, unemotional child, or was I instinctively raising psychological defences against a loss I could not acknowledge? Certainly, as an adult, I have never been much moved by death — except of animals. I shed no tears when my father died of a stroke at seventy; I was having breakfast in Toronto when my brother called with the news, and I went back to eating toast and marmalade. Nor were there tears when my brother died of cancer at seventy. I can rationalize my lack of feeling; death is part of life and comes to us all, so why make a fuss when a relative or friend departs? But that did not work when I took our much-loved family dog to be put down. I was with him when the vet gave him an overdose of anaesthetic and, watching him go to sleep and die, I was torn between grief — the tears came later — and the feeling that we should all be so lucky in the manner of our going. But, then, I have always been fond of dogs; they seem to me on the whole to be of better disposition than most humans: faithful friends, cheerful, good tempered through thick and thin.
In my own defence I can say that if the death of others leaves me unmoved, so does the prospect of my own death, which at my age cannot be long delayed. My brother accepted early death as preferable to the prospect of a painful old age as his incurable cancer spread, and I feel the same. I have completed a living will requesting that there be no heroic — strange word — measures to keep me from dying. But for me the troubling question remains: Was I already an unfeeling and introspective child when my mother died, or did her death make me so?
My mother was buried in Weston, perhaps because she grew up there and her sister Babs still lived there. I remember nothing of the funeral, but I do remember that when my father was driving my brother and I home to Exeter, the canvas top of the car was folded down and I was allowed to sit up on it with my head in the wind. And then we stopped halfway and I had a ginger beer. Aunty Babs came to Exeter to look after us, but that lasted only a few weeks, no doubt because of the mutual dislike she shared with my father. The burden then fell on my father’s mother, Alice, a formidable widow. I have a photo of me, aged about four, with my two grandmothers. My mother’s mother, Catherine, is a plump, cheerful old lady, and she has her arm around my waist. Grandma Alice is standing erect, stern-faced and in black from her enormous hat to her shoes, perhaps still in mourning for her husband who had died a couple of years earlier. I realize now what a sacrifice she made in selling her comfortable home in Weston, leaving her friends, and moving to Exeter at the age of seventy-two to run her son’s household of three children and two servants. But I have no warm memories — and there I go again, coldly detached. Her main concern, naturally, was my two-year-old sister. My brother was soon sent off to board at a minor public school, as my mother had wished, and I was pretty much left to my own devices. I remember that granny scraped her fork on her false teeth when she ate, which at least has made me conscious in later life of how easy it is for adults to offend children. And she did take me to tea in a grand restaurant on my birthdays and allow me to dive into a parfait, an ice cream and fruit concoction which came in a tall glass requiring the use of a very long spoon.
She also took me to visit relatives; he was a tenant farmer and his wife was probably the worst cook ever, producing every day meals that could be eaten only with fortitude. On hot afternoons granny and I lay sweating on a featherbed while she read sad stories that reduced us both to tears. I remember being hoisted onto the back of a terrifyingly tall horse, and have never been there since. In my view, horses are too large and nervous to be trusted. And I can still see the sad, accusing eye of a rabbit shot by the farmer at harvest time. Granny died in 1940, aged seventy-nine, and my father said later it was probably a blessing because she would not have been able to cope with the difficulties of running a household in time of war — a questionable idea because she was a tough old lady who had lived through one war in which casualties were much more numerous than in World War II. On learning of her death, I did not cry.
I was a shy child who retreated to my bedroom rather than meet visitors, and while I thought I had overcome that defect when I grew up, it was pointed out that as an adult I pose for pictures, which I hate having taken, with my head on one side, apparently because I am still trying to escape notice. I never went to children’s parties because I was afraid I might be embarrassed by girls, of whom I knew none except my sister, until I went to work at sixteen and, despite my best efforts, found them unavoidable. Music, particularly swing, was pleasant in my ear but meant nothing to my feet so I have never been able to dance. The last attempt was when, emboldened by drink, I persuaded my wife to try again. I fell over, and she said, “Never again.” I did not stay at school for lunch, or dinner as we called it, because I was afraid I would have to eat food I did not like and would then be sick — throw up, we would say — in public. I cycled a mile-and-a-half home to eat, and then returned, all in about ninety minutes. That fear of eating in public stayed with me until, as an apprentice reporter, I had to travel to country towns and would have died of starvation had I not overcome my problem. In those early years I developed a way of coping with fears, if not conquering them, by asking myself what was the
