Miracles of Life (20 page)

Family life has always been very important to me, far more
important, I suspect, than to people of my parents’ generation.
I often wonder why many of them bothered to have
children at all, and assume that it must have been for social
reasons, some ancient need to enlarge the tribe and defend
the homestead, just as some people keep a dog without ever
showing it affection, but feel secure when it barks at the
postman.

Perhaps I belong to the first generation for whom the
health and happiness of their families is a significant indicator
of their own mental well-being. The family and all the
emotions within it are a way of testing one’s better qualities,
a trampoline on which one can leap ever higher, holding
one’s wife and children by their hands.

I enjoyed being married, the first real security I had ever
known, and easily coped with the strains and early struggles
of a writer’s life. I enjoyed being a father who was closely involved with his children, pushing them in their pram
through the streets of Richmond and Shepperton, and later
driving with them across Europe to Greece and Spain.
Children change so rapidly, learning to grasp the world and
learning to be happy, learning to understand themselves and
shape their own minds. I was fascinated by my children and
still am, and feel much the same way about my four grandchildren.
I have always been very proud of my children, and
every moment I spend with them makes the whole of
existence seem warm and meaningful.

In 1963 Mary was in good health, but needed her appendix
removed. She recovered slowly from the operation at
Ashford Hospital, and perhaps her resistance was affected, or
some infection lingered. She was keen to go on holiday, and
the following summer we drove to a rented flat at San Juan,
near Alicante. For a month all went well, and we enjoyed
ourselves in the bars and beach restaurants. It was the kind
of holiday where the high point is the day Daddy fell off the
pedalo. But Mary suddenly became ill with an infection, and
this rapidly turned into severe pneumonia. Despite the local
doctor, a male nurse (the practicante) who was with her constantly,
and a consultant from Alicante, she died three days
later. Towards the end, when she could barely breathe, she
held my hand and asked: ‘Am I dying?’ I’m not sure if she
could hear me, but I shouted that I loved her until the end.
In the final seconds, when her eyes were fixed, the doctor
massaged her chest, forcing the blood into her brain. Her eyes swivelled and stared at me, as if seeing me for the first
time.

We buried her in the small Protestant cemetery in
Alicante, a walled stone yard with a few graves of British
holidaymakers killed in yachting accidents. A Protestant
priest came to see me the previous day, a decent and kindly
Spaniard who did not seem upset when I declined to pray
with him. I can still hear the sound of the iron-wheeled cart
carrying the coffin across the stony ground. The priest conducted
a short service, watched by myself and the children,
and a few English residents from our apartment building.
Then the priest rolled up his sleeves, took a spade and began
to shovel the soil onto the coffin.

In late September, when San Juan beach was deserted and
the cold air was beginning to come down from the mountains,
we left the now-empty apartment building and set off
on the long drive back to England.

From the start I was determined to keep my family together.
Mary’s sisters and mother, who were an enormous help over
the coming years, offered to share bringing them up. But I
felt that I owed it to Mary to look after her children, and I
probably needed them more than they needed me.

I did my best to be both mother and father to them,
though it was extremely rare in the 1960s to find single
fathers caring for their children. Many people (who should

Fay, Jim and Beatrice at home with me in 1965
.

have known better) openly told me that a mother’s loss was
irreplaceable and the children would be affected for ever, as
maintained by the child psychiatrist John Bowlby. But I
seriously doubt this claim, which seems unlikely given the
hazards of childbirth – the evolutionary disadvantages if the
claim were true would have been selected against and a less
dangerous parental bond would have taken its place. I
believe that the chief threat posed by a mother’s death is,
rather, an uncaring or absentee father. As long as the
surviving parent is loving and remains close to the children,
they will thrive.

I loved my children deeply, as they knew, and we were
lucky that I had a job as a writer that allowed me to be with
them all the time. I made them breakfast and drove them to
school, then wrote until it was time to collect them. Since
day-time babysitters were difficult to come by, we did everything
together – shopping, seeing friends, visiting museums,
going on holiday, doing homework, watching television. In
1965 we drove to Greece for nearly two months, a wonderful
holiday when we were always together. I remember a
hold-up on a mountain road in the Peloponnese when an
American woman looked into our car and said: ‘You mean
you’re alone with these three?’ and I replied: ‘With these
three you’re never alone.’ Thankfully, I had long forgotten
what it was like to be alone.

I hope the children realised early on that they could
always rely on me. My son Jim, who was the oldest, grieved
deeply for his mother, but we helped each other through,
and eventually he regained his confidence and became
a cheerful teenager with a charming and witty sense of
humour. My daughters Fay and Bea soon took command of
the situation, and became strong-willed young women
before they were in their teens, deciding on our diet, which
holiday hotels we should stay at, what clothes they should
buy. In many ways my three children brought me up.

Alcohol was a close friend and confidant in the early days;
I usually had a strong Scotch and soda when I had driven the
children to school and sat down to write soon after nine. In those days I finished drinking at about the time today that I
start. A friendly microclimate unfurled itself from the bottle
of Johnnie Walker and encouraged my imagination to
emerge from its burrow and test the air. Kingsley Amis made
a point of inviting me out to lunch, and in the evening I
would often visit Keats Grove, where he and Elizabeth Jane
Howard had rented a flat. Jane was unfailingly kind, though
my presence was probably a nuisance. She cooked supper,
which we ate on our knees, while Kingsley kept a beady eye
on a television quiz show, answering all the questions before
they were out of the compère’s mouth. I am grateful to
Kingsley, and glad that I saw his generous and kindly side
before he became a professional curmudgeon.

Other friends were a great help, especially Michael
Moorcock and his wife Hilary. But, as every bereaved person
learns, one soon reaches the point where friends can do little
more than keep one’s glass filled. I missed Mary in a thousand
and one domestic ways – the traces she had left of
herself in the kitchen, bedroom and bathroom together
formed the outlines of a huge void. Her absence was a space
in our lives that I could almost embrace. Long months of
celibacy followed, during which I resented the sight of happily
married couples strolling down Shepperton High Street.
I once saw a couple laughing together in the car ahead of
me and sounded my horn in anger. After celibacy came a
kind of desperate promiscuity, a form of shock treatment in
which I was trying to will myself to come alive. I remember embracing my first lover – the estranged wife of a friend –
like a survivor at sea clinging to a rescuer. I’m grateful to
those friends of Mary’s who rallied round and knew that it
was time to bring me back into the light. In their way they
were thinking of Mary rather than me, wise and kindly
women who were concerned that Mary’s children should be
happy.

A year or so after Mary’s death I saw her in a dream. She
was walking past our house, skirt floating on the air, smiling
cheerfully to herself. She saw me watching her from the
doorstep of our house and walked on, smiling at me over her
shoulder. When I woke I tried to keep these moments alive
in my mind, but I knew that in her way she was saying goodbye,
and that at last I was beginning to recover.

I am sure that I changed greatly during these years. On the
one hand I was glad to be so close to my children. As long as
they were happy nothing else mattered, and success or
failure as a writer was a minor concern. At the same time I
felt that nature had committed a dreadful crime against
Mary and her children. Why? There was no answer to the
question, which obsessed me for decades to come.

But perhaps there was an answer, using a kind of extreme
logic. My direction as a writer changed after Mary’s death,
and many readers thought that I became far darker. But I like
to think I was much more radical, in a desperate attempt to
prove that black was white, that two and two made five in the
moral arithmetic of the 1960s. I was trying to construct an
imaginative logic that made sense of Mary’s death and
would prove that the assassination of President Kennedy and
the countless deaths of the Second World War had been
worthwhile or even meaningful in some as yet undiscovered
way. Then, perhaps, the ghosts inside my head, the old
beggar under his quilt of snow, the strangled Chinese at the
railway station, Kennedy and my young wife, could be laid to
rest.

All this can be seen in the pieces I began to write in the
mid 1960s, which later became
The Atrocity Exhibition
.
Kennedy’s assassination presided over everything, an event
that was sensationalised by the new medium of television. The endless photographs of the Dealey Plaza shooting, the
Zapruder film of the president dying in his wife’s arms in his
open-topped limousine, created a kind of gruesome
overload where real sympathy began to leak away and only
sensation was left, as Andy Warhol quickly realised. For me
the Kennedy assassination was the catalyst that ignited the
1960s. Perhaps his death, like the sacrifice of a tribal king,
would re-energise us all and bring life again to the barren
meadows?

The 1960s were a far more revolutionary time than
younger people now realise, and most assume that English
life has always been much as it is today, except for mobile
phones, emails and computers. But a social revolution took
place, as significant in many ways as that of the post-war
Labour government. Pop music and the space age, drugs and
Vietnam, fashion and consumerism merged together into an
exhilarating and volatile mix.

Emotion, and emotional sympathy, drained out of
everything, and the fake had its own special authenticity. I
was in many ways an onlooker, bringing up my children in a
quiet suburb, taking them to children’s parties and chatting
to the mothers outside the school gates. But I also went to
a great many parties, and smoked a little pot, though I
remained a whisky and soda man. In many ways the 1960s
were a fulfilment of all that I hoped would happen in
England. Waves of change were overtaking each other, and at
times it seemed that change would become a new kind of boredom, disguising the truth that everything beneath the
gaudy surface remained the same.

In 1965 I met Dr Martin Bax, a north London paediatrician
who published a quarterly poetry magazine called
Ambit
. We became firm friends, and years later I learned that
his wife, Judy, was the daughter of the Lunghua headmaster,
the Reverend George Osborne. She and her mother had
returned to England in the 1930s and spent the war years
there. I began to write my more experimental stories for
Ambit
, partly in an attempt to gain publicity for the magazine.
Randolph Churchill, son of Winston and a friend of
the Kennedys, objected publicly to my story ‘Plan for the
Assassination of Jacqueline Kennedy’. Churchill made a
song and dance in the newspapers, demanding that
Ambit’s
modest Arts Council grant be withdrawn and describing my
piece as an irresponsible slander, all this at a time when the
ordeal of Mrs Kennedy and her courtship by Aristotle
Onassis were ruthlessly exploited by the tabloid newspapers,
the real target of my satire.

A prime engine of change in the 1960s was the entirely
casual use of drugs, a generational culture in its own right.
Many of the drugs, led by cannabis and amphetamines, were
recreational, but others, heroin chief among them, were
intended for use in the intensive care unit and the terminal
cancer ward, and were highly dangerous. Moral outrage had
a field day, while preposterous claims were made for the
transformation of the imagination that could be brought about by LSD. The parents’ generation fought from behind a
barricade of gin and tonics, while the young proclaimed
alcohol to be the real enemy of promise.