to ‘his wife’, by whom – poor Frieda! – he must mean Lois) he complains that ‘in these degenerate and sinister days few are at pains to learn how they stand with the stars’ but notes that he himself is pleased to be born under the sign of Libra – ‘for they have fine hair, and a beard less bristly to have than the beards of any of the other children of the universe, and write a more lucid prose’.
I was born at 5.30 in the afternoon, when the sun was just moving out of Virgo into Libra, and it was hoped I too would have the gift for lucid prose, though according to Edgar the position of the stars made this marginal. I certainly have fine hair, which has proved very difficult and costly over the years.
It was Arthur Machen who introduced my grandfather to the practice of astrology. Edgar taught my mother, my mother taught Jane, and Jane declined to teach me. But my mother had Teach Yourself Astrology on her shelves, in a bright yellow jacket, next to The Cloud of Unknowing and The Writings of St Teresa of Avila, and I have a clear vision of myself, at the age of twelve, sitting on the lawn of the Christchurch Girls’ High School on a sunny day, with an ephemeris of the planets’ places and some blank horoscope forms, successfully drawing up the chart of a school-friend. I did a handful of these for my classmates and then no more. They seemed to offer a fair enough representation of the temperament of my subjects but what was the point, since they themselves were sitting next to me? And casting horoscopes – or even reading palms, another party trick – left me with a strangely unpleasant feeling of remoteness and passivity: as if (a contemporary simile) one had taken too many painkillers in order to get rid of toothache, and one’s liver was affected. In other words I got to feel ‘spooked’ – a teenage word but the only one available – which is the normal punishment for dabbling in the occult, and a sure sign one should stop. I do not watch horror films on my own in the house. To acknowledge the devil is to bring him nearer; best to ignore him.
I read Machen’s novel The Hill of Dreams around that time, and still carry in my mind its feeling-tone; and the description of the aura of evil which sweeps one evening over an English landscape which has a terrifying past of cruelty and massacre, centred on a Roman fort. That novel was published in 1907, a year later than Kipling’s collection of stories and poems, Puck of Pook’s Hill, very much on the same theme, but seeing evil and horror where Kipling saw good and the human capacity for renewal. I wish it had been the other way round: it is not right for evil to have the last word.
My sister Jane had a ‘blessing’ by Arthur Machen in a frame upon the wall until my mother took it down. She never liked it. The blessing, given to baby Jane on the occasion of her christening, consisted of a sheet of parchment, in the middle of which was a paragraph in tiny writing in a language and script no one recognized. I was probably fortunate I did not receive one too.
In my father’s absence my mother named me Franklin. The registrar wrote ‘boy’ in the ‘sex’ column, and then had to cross it out and write ‘girl’. I was to feel vaguely apologetic about this later; my parents had a girl already and would obviously want a boy and I had failed them. My mother – Mrs Bored of Barnt Green, no doubt – had been studying numerology, a way of divining the future through the relationship of names to numbers, while she waited for the birth. Franklin Birkinshaw, she discovered, ‘came out the same’ as William Shakespeare. My being born a girl had left her unprepared. But Franklin was a most auspicious name. And was not ‘lin’ the female diminutive, and was not Frank my father? Franklin still made perfect sense to her, and she hoped to others.
Alas, it did not, no doubt least of all to my father when she first showed him the new baby. It was going to be, he reckoned, citing the registrar as evidence, too confusing for others. They took in time to calling me Fay, I hope not after Fay Wray, the screaming heroine of so many horror films, but you never know. If it was, I grew up to be a sunny enough child, if only in defiance, though there were to be King Kongs enough in my life. I was left with the name Franklin on official documents, while being Fay at school. But it was Franklin only at the Christchurch Public Library. They would not recognize Fay, though I pleaded. I had to sign my full name, Franklin Birkinshaw, every time I took out a book, while the Beryls and the Dulcies, the Meryls and the Aprils, looked on askance, and the librarians shook their heads and took pleasure in wondering aloud what kind of parents I must have. Thus I started out in a state of ambivalence. I took out library books as Franklin and read them as Fay.
Names are important. I was only to become a writer when I added Weldon to the Fay. Other names had intervened, leaving me stranded, if often entertained, and occasionally scared. But Weldon was the one which best suited. It lengthens with the years, of course. This morning I signed a document under the name Fay Franklin Weldon Fox. With every change of name comes a change in fortune. I never took to numerology, all the same. No change in fortune should be seen as magic, only as a function of altering views of the self. As babies, of course, we are helpless, dependent upon our mothers’ expectations, and in my case these were perhaps too high.
Edgar and Selwyn, father and brother, did not want Margaret to go back to New Zealand. It was too far away: the ends of the earth: things had not gone well for her there. If she went back to Frank, who was to say how she would ever afford to get home again? It was not as if her husband was particularly good at keeping even a roof over her head. They were quite right, of course. In March, 1938, shortly before he died, Edgar wrote a brief note to Frieda in California. He has moved house to spare himself the stairs. He gives his new address. ‘There is nothing else in the way of news,’ he writes. ‘Margaret seems stuck in New Zealand, and I wish she wasn’t…’ He hopes that Frieda’s giddiness has stopped. ‘Perhaps the spring will be helpful.’ And then – ‘I have sold some sword guards to a North American and I send you the cheque. You must buy a spring frock with it.’ He finishes, ‘With best love, E.’ It is a poignant letter. He would do better for her if only he could, one reads between the lines, and perhaps even still loves her, only Lois and her pregnancy came between. His obituary in the Telegraph, found yellowed between the pages of his second volume of autobiography, Memories of an Edwardian, reads ‘He was a distinctive craftsman of remarkable personality, whose many friends included practically all the literary men of any note during the past half-century.’ My mother cried when a letter came to us in Christchurch to say he had died, and Jane and I cried to keep her company, though we did not know what we had lost.
But my mother, back in 1931, was not to be dissuaded by family advice. It was her duty to go back to her husband; she had promised to go back and besides, she loved him. ‘You have no idea,’ she said to me once, ‘what fun your father was in the early days. What light he brought with him into a room.’
She had not given the new land a fair chance, she told Edgar and Selwyn. New Zealand was a better place to bring up children than foggy, smoky London. And besides, things had changed. Her father, old enough to be great-grandfather not father to a new baby, was with a woman not her mother. The good days were over. And as Margaret embarked on the liner which was to carry her back to her unchancy husband, with little Jane clutching her hand and myself at five weeks held against her, and appreciative porters buzzing around with her trunks and cases, she must have felt a certain relief. At least she would not have to stay around to witness the sorry state to which two generations of Free Love and the Life Force had brought her family. To see the shadow of itself which 120 Adelaide Road, once so full of wit, energy and creativity, music and laughter, had become.
Terrible things had happened at Adelaide
