What to Look for in Winter (3 page)

T
he City of Edinburgh, heated, when it was, by coal and coke and paraffin, had not yet been cleaned. Its grave beauties were still black. Snow fell in the May before I was born. Black-and-white pictures display it all pretty much exactly as the city looked in colour. Scotland, East Coast Scotland, after the war, was cold, dirty, architecturally grand and architecturally ravaged, sumptuarily poor. Ladies over a certain age wore hats indoors. The smells in the street were of wool of stone of coal and, at home in Puddocky (which means: ‘The home of frogs', fit for frogs only), of the pong of hops and yeast from the brewery at Canonmills, down by the Water of Leith, where the flour for the church's canons had once been ground. We lived just a stone wall from the river, which was prone to flood. Our house smelt of wet washing, polish, joss sticks, my mother's
Je Reviens
, and cats and their requirements. Our whole street had been condemned.

My mother boiled ox-lights for the cats. These enormous organs arrived full of air and redness from the butcher, Mr Wilson, and then clopped down, frothing in her jam-making pan, to chewy brown boxing gloves, under the meaty scum. She deflated them further–they hissed–into manageable chunks with kitchen scissors that I have now, sent down south to me thirty years later by my stepmother in a consignment including my toy box and a Fru-Grains tin, all transported by the Aberdeen Shore Porters, the world's oldest removals firm, established more than five hundred years ago to move fish at the harbourside in that silver city.

The kitchen scissors were for kitchen jobs only, the sewing scissors for thread and cloth, and the paper scissors for paper alone. The pinking shears were so heavy and specific that they lived in a holster in the sewing chest with the button box, the cotton reels and the Kwik-unpik,
a natty hook for the slashing open of stitches in order mainly to ‘let things down', or to ‘let things out', terms perhaps now unknown outwith the psychotherapeutic context. There were few rules in my childhood under the dispensation of my mother, but the scissor rule was set. Paper blunted the sewing scissors and kitchen work dirtied the paper scissors. And as for the grapes–they were a luxury to eat (or was it drink, so wet was their taste and so otherwise seductive?) and to look at, so at all times blunt silver grape scissors must be used, like a little flat bird skeleton with a toothed beak, so as to keep the bunch groomed and uncorrupt. I would take grapes with my fingers and leave behind the damp pippy stublet; mould then might spread through the bunch. It seemed I was always found out. If I was caught mid-theft, I would rush to blind whichever parent it was had found me with kisses so that they would not see that I had been greedy and failed to use the scissors. So kisses were connected with distraction and misdeeds–and, it's true, stealing fruit. This book will be a struggle to find that Eden when they were both about, my oddly paired parents, both, incidentally, lovers of pears, and each devoted to a separate means of paring pears. She made slivers, he made hoops.

Another firm rule was that you must never–ever–write on nor fold down the pages of books. I have not obeyed this rule at all thoroughly and as a child was even worse, for I ate the corners of the pages, gouging out soft thumbsful of paper at the corner, chewing it, and collecting a ball. I was making paper, I suppose. An owlish child's pellets.

It is hard to convey to a young reader the frustrations of my mother's life. She was of a generation of women so much less free than my own, as mine is, I hope, less free, or more unrealistic, than my daughter's. I am a poor example of any kind of liberation. ‘Are you a feminist?' I was asked in my middle thirties with I knew not what kind of weight. The questioner was a colonial tycoon. I was nibbling at the sort of lunch thought suitable for reasonably attractive married women at that time in history, when the man was paying.

I replied, unforgivably, I think now, with a sort of, ‘Let's assume that it's been more widely achieved than that' gesture. This man later went on to murder his wife. There's no conclusion.

It is hard for my daughter to imagine the life of her grandmother, a woman of intelligence, allure and independent mind, who disappointed her father, her mother, and husband by being too much of all of it, too tall, too original, too keen to be the little woman, too anxious to conform. Me she did not disappoint, save by disappearing too soon.

 

My parents' marriage was a practical disaster, as I felt it. It commenced in passion and was rooted at any rate emotionally and artistically, though only for brief times geographically, in Italy, a place which was in those days even more of a state of mind than it is now. I felt these undertow loves under my parents' more ragged love. My parents often spoke Italian to one another. She was Scots-Irish and he was Irish-Scots. Both were anglicised, that is they spoke with what we would now call old-fashioned upper-middle-class English accents. He corrected her pronunciation of the word ‘orchestra'. She, like the mother in
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
, did not call people ‘dear' like Scots mothers, but ‘darling', and sometimes even ‘dulling'. Of course it was embarrassing. I do it too.

They didn't want more of me, and I have been told they didn't even want me. It's an odd little thing for someone to pass on to me, and I'm not at all sure that they felt like that. They were worried all the time about money and they fought about it. They both hit one another. It almost certainly hurt each more than it hurt the other. I pretended to want brothers and sisters; I don't expect I did. I knew things were desperate between them and it is one of my fervent and impure occasions for relief that I haven't any whole siblings. Impure, because that way I have my mother to myself, I suppose, and I'm not proud of that.

I did have many dolls whose names, characteristics and academic records I kept in my ledger; any dolls not at the front of that day's routine or drama lived on my nursery chaise longue, which was called ‘the chaise longue', just as the tall bookcase, where the
Petit Larousse
I had for my fifth birthday was kept, was called the ‘secretaire'; my father used the correct words for things, my mother not always, though she could taste words exactly despite not being almost painfully good at pitch as my father was in music as well as in language. My dolls were ranked by strict precedence related to length of tenure. After my father's remarriage they went to live in a box at the top of the stone stairs known as ‘the coffin'.

My mother took the contraceptive pill in an early form, I think. We visited a family whose father was a sculptor one weekend in Kinross-shire and there was a dash to hospital after the youngest child ate the medical contents of my mother's handbag. I don't know whether the tranquillisers were in there yet with the Pan Drops and the hanky that she used to scrub at my face with lick like Tom Kitten's mother in the picture, and the lipstick that smelt of wax roses and the Consulate cigarettes and her dark glasses with the pussycat slant and her copy of
The Turn of the Screw
, or whatever it was she was reading at the time, but that's one I remember.

She left over fifty lipsticks at her death and I used them up in a furious winter of drawing nothing but sunsets. What else was there to do with those lipsticks than make sunsets? My mouth was big enough for all those lipsticks to go on in candy stripes but I was nine; and anyhow she had left a lot of blank paper that needed covering by some means. I still have rolls of it that came south with the Shore Porters in the nineteen-nineties.

The cats were too plural in that crammed house in the Crescent. Before I was born the tortoiseshell Nancy Mitford, who enjoyed Dundee cake, had died. My mother's passion for
The Pursuit of Love
, which she read aloud to me, lasted all her life. I think that she was, although so differently extracted, like sad adored Linda Radlett, and
knew it; the same affection for Labradors and the same instinct for rotters. My father was not a rotter. Among the cats there remained grey Godfrey Winn with his small lopsided moustache, Peter Quint who was my mother's fat-footed grey plush familiar, and Lady Teazle, a sealpoint Siamese of the pansy-faced, silk-stockinged sort, whom my mother took shopping on a lead.

This in the days when tradesmen in Edinburgh wore different-coloured cotton overalls, like indoor coats in cotton drill, the shade according to the trade, the tobacconist Mr MacDonald the only one who wore an uncovered suit. Mr Cockburn, the ironmonger, wore a cotton coat in grey, Mr King the grocer in royal blue, Mr Dundas the greengrocer, who kissed my mother one year under the mistletoe, in green of course, Mr (Charles) Wilson in pure butcher's white.

Later, she added to the household. In the background there were as many make-believe horses as you can fit imaginatively into a crumbling house belonging to an ascetic bibliophile who doesn't care for animals and an insecure hoarder with a menagerie habit, and the solitary child they bred.

My mother was horsey, to look at and by temperament; she would go out to the suburb of Liberton to a stables to ride a horse called Lady Gay. I rode the arms of the burst Regency sofa in the drawing room, perfectly happy with picking at the horsehair stuffing and keeping any actual animal content as remote as that. She loved all horses and waged a campaign to get blinkers removed from the dray horses which brought milk from Murchies dairy, where they still patted the butter and stamped it with a thistle, and from the giant Clydesdales who rumbled along with beer barrels to the pubs or loads of bluish-sheered coal under the tarps. The horse would stand at a massive mincing halt in the road outside the house while the coalmen hove sacks on to rests of greasy hopsack on their shoulders and chuted the noisy coals down into what Edinburgh folk call the ‘area', then shovelled it into the cellar where the Indian lady
lodger saw the black rat and where years later I put kohl on my eyes before the Scout dance at St Cuthbert's church, aged thirteen, for make-up was not allowed. I was six feet tall already then and they were right about the make-up. I looked like a caricature without underlining any of it.

M
y father died quite young. My mother died very young. After my father died, I was asked to give a lecture in his memory. I called it ‘Living with an Eye'. At the time, I considered this both a kind of gentle joke of the sort at which my elegant father shone–the kick against grammar's apparent rule–and a gainsaying of egotism, since my father, whose eye was wonderful, a plain fact to which his writing and his memory attest, was not an egoist. This was what I believed at the time I wrote my lecture.

I believe it differently now, having discovered that the sort of egoist he was not was not easy for either of them when combined with the sort of egoist my mother was not, and their issue is me, who can hardly bear to write the word ‘I'.

But I had best crack on and do it, or my children could be cast adrift as I was by unassertion. Thank God their fathers are fully furnished with a good I in each strong head.

Three meetings jolted the long-laid reason to start digging for my life. I met myself in a published diary and feared the loose half-life of what I found there. I met my father in a memoir and saw him as a boy. And I met my daughter's notion of the Queen as a being without meaning, and I thought that if I did not at least try to re-enthrone the monarch in my female child's head I hadn't a hope of sharing my imaginative life with her, or of consoling her, no matter how much I madden her now, after my death.

The person I met in the diary was referred to as ‘the beautiful bolter'. It was like being sicked up. I couldn't get the smell of it from me, because I was made of the vomit. Of course, part of having any kind of publicity, which is now a wretchedly essential part of selling books, carries an afterwash, but this was in the diary of someone I had loved and respected, to whom I had sent the only frequentative
Valentine cards of my life, apart from those to my children. The adjective disquieted me as much as the noun in Jim Lees-Milne's phrase. And in those pages I met Fram, Minoo's father, damaged, and that by me.

My father as a boy I met in the autobiography of Frederic Raphael. The author had ascribed to Daddy the wrong first initial ‘F', turning him into the sculptor F.E. McWilliam, but he meant my father Colin Edgar. Boys of that time had not much use for one another's first names. I had known that my father was a committed socialist and enraged by injustice, but I hadn't quite known how lifelong this lay. He appeared in these pages as defender of the small Raphael against anti-Semitism at Charterhouse. It also seemed that he had been the dux classical scholar in the school and on account of this (there could have been no other reason; he hated authority and loathed punishment, though he was perforce to mete it out to me) head boy of the school.

I knew nothing of this. It is unusual for public school men of my father's generation not to allow their children to understand to what it is they are expected to rise. My father was not of this type. He terribly disliked male institutions, large groups of men, or men at all of a certain bullish type. He was a sophisticated man reflexively prejudiced against his own class, unless some mutual architectural or artistic enthusiasm would allow him to forget what they had in common in those unutterable ways.

I was astonished to learn of my father's rank at school, for his dislike of authority was complete and mischievous all the time I knew him. He was sceptical even of the Brownies, an organisation he couldn't quite agree was not crypto-Nazi at some level. Later, in a long and kind letter, Frederic Raphael tried to recall for me this tall gentle senior boy, ‘a kind of demigod to a new boy' at the school. To my surprise, he remembered my father showing off a scarf that he had purchased for his ‘Popsy' one Christmas. Popsy was the word used; I could hear it.

All his life my father was irresistible to women. He was handsome and fragile, funny and fundamentally, I think, rather cold, or cool. Catnip. I had always assumed that he had had a relationship involving what he called ‘the usual thing' (for which Simon was expelled from Charterhouse) with his friend Simon Raven at school. I used to think that that was why Simon liked me, but now I think that they were simply friends, and anyhow I'm not sure how much Simon did like me; I was simply an experimental frog, though a frog he was once able in my twenties consciously to rescue from a nasty admirer by being fantastically rude to him over tea in the Stafford Hotel.

My father, not wholly a fiction man, loved Simon's
Alms for Oblivion
sequence of novels; I think their classical heartlessness confirmed something for him, and he enjoyed the long tease on his boyhood bugbear William Rees-Mogg. Always, for a clever and subtle man, surprisingly willing to embrace prejudice were it against a Tory, my father was nonetheless open-hearted always about the boy, and the man, James Prior, another contemporary at Charterhouse.

Then: ‘Why do you like the Queen, Mummy?', my undergraduate daughter, who, as it happens has had far more actual contact with the royal family than I have, asked in the car on the way to the eightieth-birthday gathering of the man who is not my father, but whom I address, as do his six blood children and their children, and my children, as ‘Papa'. And then I knew I had to write this book to tell her.

I like the Queen because she isn't dead. I like her because she defers, as far as one can see, most gratification. I like her because she was there and is here, because she puts duty before sensation, because my father carried me to see her on Princes Street when she was a new Queen, because going to the cinema is connected with her dreary but durable anthem, because she is happy in Scotland, because she is the Duke of Lancaster and a woman, because she has found a way of looking and looks it, has found a way of being and is it, because
she is absolutely not stupid but not intellectual, because she is not me, not even the best of me, but she is my times, and shelters my life. In the car I tried to say this.

‘I like the Queen because I loved my parents,' I said, trying again. It stuck like a granny-knot, instead of flying like the standard I had intended.

‘But Grandpa was a republican.'

He was a contrarian, of course, a formalist and an anarchist, a patrician flincher away from all unfairness, a detester of privilege who knew great houses more intimately than some of their owners. He had that eye, yet was not, unlike me (until this closing of my eyes), a voyeur.

Now though, I am more a voyeur of what is coming back to me out of the past than of what offers itself to my closing eyes. They are becoming like lychees, jelly with a stone and a thin rind lid. And over it all still reigns the reigning Queen.

‘Like' is too passionless a word for what I feel for her. The Queen is an emblem and carrier of memory, as rock music for my daughter perhaps.

Then again, as bores say, just as one thinks one can make a bolt–that word!–for it, then again, the Queen is like my own mother in one single way. She is safest, we imagine, among creatures. Where the Queen has her mystery and her awesome power of patronage, pure in itself but corrupting for the corrupt, to defend, my mother had her horribly vulnerable person; my mother was eaten up by other people wanting a bit of her. She was made of sex appeal, sweetness and unconfidence.

Two things I have said, in attempt at self-definition, for years. I've not believed them as I said them, but I was impersonating the solid sort of person who might be heard to say such things.

One is, ‘I don't trust the sort of woman who prefers the company of animals to the company of humans.'

The other (which I haven't said for about twenty-two years,
prevented by some prefiguring shadow maybe) is, ‘I cannot stand a woman drunk.'

The first is Mummy.

The second, who might as well have modified her statement's punctuation to, ‘I cannot stand, a woman drunk', is, of course, me.