For a time my mother was able to support us, just about, by her pen. Over the next few years, under the name Pearl Bellairs or Bentley Ridge, she was to write a run of romantic serials – Velvet and Steel, The Cups of Alexander – which were published in London by Herbert Jenkins, then Edgar’s publisher. Her editor wrote in enthusiasm to say she had readers queuing up for them in the bookstores as they came out. She’d write by hand in bed, in tiny script, with a fountain pen; and then get up and type it all out on a clattery typewriter. My contribution was to pick out the ink which clogged up the keys. I used a pin. The o’s and the e’s, the most frequent of the letters in the alphabet closely followed by the t’s, were always most in need of cleaning. I loved doing it. Typescripts, in the days of the typewriter, always had an individuality of their own. Microsoft produces a clean, uniform print, for which we should be grateful, but something’s lost as something’s gained.
My mother borrowed the name Pearl Bellairs from the vapid romantic novelist in Aldous Huxley’s novel Crome Yellow – she was saying, I suppose, to anyone who might happen to make the connection: ‘I can do better than this, I am worth more than this, it’s just I have to make a living.’
She worried greatly about the morality of writing romance: she thought it was wrong to put false ideas into the heads of young women: better that they understood that marriage was not necessarily a happy end, and that poor helpless girl catches strong handsome rich man was simply not the way the world went. And she had a point: Velvet and Steel – with its overtones of Pride and Prejudice – the helpless shop girl wooed by her wealthy employer, bringing him to heel by virtue of charm, wit and personality, would today, alas, read as a sorry case of sexual harassment.
Then the war came, and forget principle, the sea-lanes became impassable. Ships were torpedoed, manuscripts went down with everything else: there was a shortage of paper, and none to be spared for frivolities like fiction: that was the end of that, for four or five years.
My mother took advantage of the impossibility of earning a living from these problematic works, and started what she called her magnum opus: a book of philosophy, which dealt with the relationship between morality and aesthetics. She did not type this out: it remained in handwriting: thousands of overwritten pages, which would get in a hopeless muddle on the kitchen table. I wished she would not; I knew even when small how important it was to keep papers collated and in moderate order. The eighty per cent behind you had to be more or less finished and complete, if it was not to distract you and make you restless as you moved ahead into the unknown. What you were working on currently required chaos, what was behind must be orderly, or you would be overwhelmed by confusion.
After the war, my mother said to me, when she thought once again of aspiring to be a ‘proper’ writer, styles of writing had changed. Novels ceased to be discursive, writers could not hide behind their anonymity; politics and social comment began to enter in. The novel was becoming a confessional, and readers demanded that the writer speak the truth as he or she knew it, and my mother’s truths were difficult enough to live through, she said, let alone writing about them as well.
There were various to-ings and fro-ings between my parents and then it was Frank’s turn to walk off into the mist. This was a literal mist, more than just the usual cloud of childhood unknowing. I was growing up. I was six. We stood upon a beach on a rainy day, my father, my mother, Jane and I, and my father walked off along the shore without us, saying, ‘Don’t ever leave the children with friends. Have them properly adopted.’ And then the mist swallowed him up; the tall, dark, consoling figure faded away, without so much as a glance behind. My mother was crying, which is not surprising. He was divorcing her for infidelity. She had only thirty pounds in the world, we had nowhere to live, and my father had gone to catch a ship to England, ‘home’, which was due to leave within the hour. Once the gangplank was up he changed his mind but it was too late then.
Matters had come to a head between them. To demonstrate to him just how upsetting she found his persistent adultery she had spent a night with a passing stranger, and told him that she had. But instead of showing remorse for his own behaviour he had been outraged by hers, and had started divorce proceedings within the hour. It was different for a man than a woman, as common wisdom had it then. Even now women will do this kind of thing, believing tit for tat will somehow cure matters but of course it never does. I have never known a confession of infidelity work anything but harm. The couple who ‘tell the truth to each other’ after their first visit to the marriage-guidance counsellor seldom enjoy many more nights together.
My mother left us with friends, naturally, while she found us somewhere to live. This was to be two rooms in a boarding-house in Cranmer Square. Jane and I no longer went to St Margaret’s across the way: it was a private school, there was no money to pay the fees. My mother, unlike my father, as she pointed out, would not spend money she didn’t have. The green uniforms were sold. The rest of our clothes were brought round in a small suitcase from the luxury of the private hotel. We were to go to a state school, St Mary’s Convent, to be taught by nuns. They would teach us manners, said my mother: we had been running wild. They would be very religious, but we were to take no notice of that.
The boarding-house was shabby and basic. There were no shiny green quilts upon the beds to hate, or round Chinese rugs to spoil. Now they were gone we missed them. The landlady was a harridan who wore curlers in her hair, did not like children, and had only taken us in out of pity. My mother was in disgrace, her name linked in the newspapers with a named co-respondent: guilty party in the divorce. She had not fought her corner: she did not have the money to do so, or the will. (My father was required to send us a meagre sum for our maintenance every month, but it was often late, if it came at all.)
The worst thing about the boarding-house was the magpie which guarded the backyard. It lived in a kennel like a dog, its wings were clipped, and it had a long rattling chain attached to its scrawny leg. When you opened the back gate it would run at you to peck your ankles, screeching ‘Go on out, go on out!’ in a flurry of black and white raised wings and gaping orange mouth. It was what the landlady would shriek as she swept the atrocious bird from her path with the garden broom, the flesh of her ankles falling in folds over her shoes: the bird had learned the phrase from her and now mimicked it to its own ends. I had no broom with which to defend myself: I would try to sneak in the front door in Cranmer Square, but this was forbidden to children, who must use the back yard and face the bird. My ankles were covered in peck marks and sometimes even bled, but I didn’t complain: my mother had enough to be getting on with, so much was obvious, and would get us out of there as soon as she could.
I was so closely aligned to Jane that I had no vision of her as a separate being. She did not count as a sister, as a companion, rather she was an extension of me, and my mother soon became the same. We went round in a survival unit of three: Margaret, Jane’nFay.
My mother decided to paint wooden powder boxes for a living. Pretty women bought face-powder by the ounce, and transferred it to a decorated round box upon their dressingtable, and placed a powder puff on top of it, and a lid on top of that. It needed to look feminine. She would do the decorating. Alas, the pretty women did not want painted powder boxes in sufficient number for us to make any kind of a living: powder was for special occasions only. It lay on the top of the face in a floury film; Max Factor pancake foundation had not yet been invented. The limit of
