London in the Fifties

© Seán Manchester, 2003

“A signpost has but one good arm: the one that points to

London. Other arms seem trumpery and unnecessary; for

who, given a choice, would take any road but the highway

to London? The country may have its dubious charms —

its quaint churches with crooked spires, its sleepy woods and

fields and village streets as dozy as its churchyards; but no

matter what the occasion, when a man travels outwards from

London and sees a sign pointing back to the Town, he feels,

in his heart of hearts, that he’s going the wrong way.”

~ Leon Garfield

W

Frédéric Chopin ― mine and my mother’s favourite composer ― became the source of my own inspiration to learn to play the piano. I only recollect my mother playing his works, a composer who never performed his music the same way twice. Each recital reflected Chopin’s mood in that precise moment. His compositions lend themselves to a degree of freedom and self-expression rarely found in classical music prior to the century in which my mother was born.

The author’s mother playing Chopin on her parents’ piano at Newstead.

When we arrived in London from Ireland, having settled in a first floor flat in Islington, my father ordered a rosewood piano to be delivered. It remained with my parents to the end. On this instrument my mother would play her belowed music in those early days. When we removed to the Mansions, where Fred the porter and Alice the cleaner were part of the fixtures and fittings, the piano naturally followed. Its final destination was the house my parents purchased within a short walking distance.

The children at Hungerford School loved my mother. They called her “flower face” because of the curls around her constantly smiling face. She was at her most beautiful during this period and attracted many admiring glances — yet she remained ever childlike and innocent, charming everyone along the way, to the end of her life.

Despite the transparent naîvety that never left her, my mother led the way and made things happen. She wanted a child. My father was less convinced. When we returned to England from overseas, my mother would be the one to discover and organise each of our homes. It became apparent to me in later life that Dorothy earnestly wanted me to find the romantic fulfillment that she had been denied all along.

Mrs Brown, a somewhat severe-looking “governess” figure prior to my starting school at the age of five, was in truth a warm and kind person who taught me that “don’t cares are made to care!” Something I would remember for the rest of my life. Though austere, these were lovely, enchanting times — and London was a wonderful city to enjoy them in those days. I was blessed to be alive in a time of common courtesy, considerate behaviour, and gentle folk. Such qualities are sadly now a rarity.

Mrs Brown, the author and his mother in 1949.

I recall my father taking me on trips to where much of London remained a wasteland of bomb craters and semi-ruins, particularly the city and docklands areas. The three of us would enjoy summer picnics on Hampstead Heath, watching the model boats on Highgate Pond. In the winters there would be coal fires and snow, which the horse-drawn milk cart would have to negotiate most carefully. Lamp-lighters would arrive every evening to kindle the gas lamps that still abounded. Christmas was very special. It meant visits to the huge Gamages store, near Holborn Circus, and Santa Claus arriving on Christmas Eve in the snow via a Gamages van stuffed full of toys and games. First on my list was always a Rupert annual. Few of these childhood gifts have survived, save the much treasured Rupert annuals. Moreover, there existed then a quite palpable and almost Dickensian Christmas spirit amongst folk. These were the last days of England comprising of that recognisable stock who held fast to their faith.

“Flower face” and her son upon return to England.

Nicholas Mosley, whose father I would eventually meet, reflected the age soon to eclipse the one into which I was born: “This is the age of untruthfulness, or double-think, or loss of integrity and a profound lack of courage. It is not nowadays that we are deliberately wicked: we are simply mad. … What the world has now denied is the importance of truthfulness and integrity and honour. We are in a moral vacuum with no values, and idols of publicity in the place of God. … I think that because the present abuses are those of dissolution and moral chaos then our remedies must be in this sphere also — in a concentration not on political and social lobbying, but on demonstrating personally and in groups what the godly life of integrity should be.” [Efforts at Truth by Nicholas Mosley, Minerva, 1996, page 116.]

In the autumn of 1949 I had begun primary school and in 1952 joined the junior boys where Miss Hornsby would record in one of my earliest reports: “Seán is rather lazy over his arithmetic — in everything else he worked hard.” This was the year I made the acquaintance of a slightly older boy, Frank Tinsley, whose eccentricity and oratory skills even then drew crowds around him. His totally blind father was the local Communist candidate. Frank himself joined the Socialist Youth Movement in his teenage years, but by the time the 1960s had drawn to a close he was an evangelising Christian, eschewing Communism and putting his not inconsiderable talents to effective use. Tragically, he contracted multiple sclerosis later on, but never did he lose his humour. I valued his friendship immensely, and we were drawn into each others orbit, often through accidental contact, until I quit London in the 1990s.

The year 1952 also brought with it the terrible London smog and more deaths of English folk than had Hitler’s bombs achieved in the preceding decade. I suspect it weakened my lungs, as I attempted to find my way home in pea-soupers so dense that I could not see my feet or outstretched hands in front of me, because I would suffer thereafter from a slight asthmatic condition. But, at least, I survived. Many did not. The “smog masks” issued by the government of the day, as were found by many who wore them, proved to be completely ineffective against this deadly air pollution of 1952. This much was admitted in government papers released half a century later.

Not as warm and amicable as my first form mistress, Miss Richards, a colder character by far for 1953, commented in my school report: “Conduct a little too frisky and playful, but worked very well and is a useful member of his class.” Mr Cordwell, my last junior school master, reported: “A neat little worker. He is a pleasant, likeable little chap and I wish him success.” In many ways, Mr Cordwell reminded me, in later years, of Mr Chips in Goodbye Mr Chips. He once asked me what I read, and I answered: “Books.” His eyes seemed to shrink back from behind his thick lenses in their round frames, as he snapped: “I didn’t imagine you read caterpillars!”

My borderline eleven plus exam result, much to the astonishment of my teachers who felt I would do much better, was nevertheless enough to earn me a place in an excellent secondary school where discipline and obedience were much to the fore. I did quite well for the first two years, coming near the top of the form in most subjects, bar arithmetic and algebra. The third year, however, witnessed a marked decline where my report declared that I had “shown no inclination to exert any effort in any subject and therefore has achieved nothing.” During the two years prior, my form master, who was also my English teacher, fully grasped my “exciting style,” as he would describe it, which assured top marks in English throughout this period. I was to suffer the embarrassment of having my name read out before one morning school assembly, having won a national poetry competition with To Nature ― On Autumn:

’Twas down a little country lane

Leaf-strewn, in coloured hue,

That to my memory will remain

The joy I found in you.

Sweet whisperings from a brook nearby,

Sad notes of birds’ late song,

Filled my heart with an ecstasy.

Dear Peace, for you I long.

When back amid the noise and pain

Of daily toil and strife,

Locked in my heart that country lane,

Brings reality to life.

* * *

Notwithstanding the influence my mother had on these three verses, Newstead Abbey Park had provided for me the brook and nearby country lane. My mother had much older memories. When she was very young and her parents had moved from Derbyshire to an idyllic setting at Wollaton, a brook ran along the bottom of the country lane where their house was situated. She often spoke about her first home. Newstead, in many ways, would magnify its joys and aspects ― adding acres of woodland and more besides. After the Newstead property and its acreage were sold in the early 1960s, my grandparents lived out their remaining days in a house built for them on land purchased at Wollatan Park. The haunting of their home by a cold presence that apparently manifested as a spectre, allegedly causing my grandmother to fall down the rockery one evening, precipitated this final move. She lay undiscovered for some hours before her husband returned. Presentiments of doom and disaster seemed to intrude her everyday existence thereafter and she never properly recovered.

The author’s maternal grandparents’ Newstead Abbey Park abode.

Newstead was to become for me a symbol of all that belonged to the old world that was already irrevocably, moment by moment, slipping away. More than anything my mother wanted me to find the fulfilment that she had been denied. This is reflected in the lines I would write in a novel published some eight years after her death.

“The world we once inhabited has gone. … This is your time and your world. Find happiness in it, if you can.” So tells Mina Harker to her son, Quincey, in Carmel, my sequel to Bram Stoker’s gothic masterpiece. Yet it could have been my own mother speaking. Her world was fast disappearing as two catastrophic wars heralded the quick demise of a cultural identity and spiritual destiny that had lasted two millennia.

The sad truth is that my parents were incompatible. Yet they could not survive without each other. This sometimes cast a bleak shadow over my otherwise enchanted childhood. Their differences aired in my presence affected me enormously, and instilled some insecurity that would always remain with me. Both became more detached from the emerging new world, reminding each other of an older and more familiar England which they preferred. True happiness always lay beyond their grasp.

On 21 July 1991, they finally came to lunch together for the first time at my home. My journal records: “Lunch with all the trimmings. It is the first time my father has visited and certainly the only time my parents have visited as a couple. It went well ― but they now seem so old and feeble, frequently forgetting things. It is to be expected. I am nevertheless most pleased that they both came to visit ― at last!”

They did not visit as a couple again, and a photographic record of the occasion was to be the last picture of them together. The final photograph of my mother was taken almost three months later as she received the Host at Mass. It is reproduced in the book I dedicate to her memory, The Grail Church. Twelve months after that picture, almost to the day, she died ― something from which I have never fully recovered.

I felt exceptionally close to my mother who I tried to visit at least once a week throughout my life, until she passed from this world on the feast of the Holy Guardian Angels. If she could have possibly contacted me from beyond the veil, she would have certainly done so. I did experience an angelic presence soon after her death, which I discussed on a television programme [Up Front, Granada, 30 October 1992] at the time, but my mother was at peace and did not communicate. Matters such as life after death held a real fascination for her, and her familiarity with the lives of her favourite saints ― St Teresa of Avila and St Thérèse of Liseux ― made for some extremely interesting conversations. Fortuitously, the feast of St Thérèse of Liseux fell on the day before my mother died, and the feast of St Teresa of Avila was the day of her funeral. When I saw her in the little gothic chapel, isolated from the funeral director’s office, in a place where the flowers for wreaths are grown, to place items of devotion in her coffin, I was struck each occasion on how she remained so completely without any trace of corruption. There was something saintly about her as she lay in her coffin, fresh and absent of death’s all too familiar hand. It was difficult to believe she had really gone, as I returned in the evenings to lift the lid and view her. My father could not bring himself to see her in such sombre surroundings. I nonetheless drew comfort from these evening visits to the chapel. There seemed to be a smile of such peace on her face. She looked radiant.

The last photograph of the author’s parents together.

I was nowhere near as close to my father, who would remain seemingly uninterested, playing the piano in an adjoining room, or reading something whilst seated in his armchair, whenever I visited. We were at opposite ends of the spectrum in most things. However, we did share an appreciation of jazz, but little else. My romantic inclination seemed anathema to him. Ironically, close to the end of his life, he revised much of his anti-Romantic feelings, even to the extent of gaining an inner understanding of Wagner’s music.

When my mother died, he absolutely lost the will to live. He would speak of her as if they had been the two closest people on Earth. The house in north London became cluttered and untidy ― the very opposite to how my mother had kept it ― and he forbade anyone interfering. My mother’s bedroom ― they had separate rooms for many years ― remained exactly as it had been on the day she died. Nothing was touched, and years later it still held the fragrance of her perfumed aroma. He would survive his wife by eight years, just managing to catch a glimpse of the new century.

We did not become any closer for most of the intervening period, except for the last year. He came to stay with me for a few days at a time, and his last three visits were far better than anything prior. The round trip was over a couple of hundred miles, and he could not tear himself for long from the home where he and my mother had spent so many years; so his visits were never more than three or four days at a time. When I came to London, and naturally visited him, it was painful to witness the deterioration of his surroundings. He was also deteriorating, having a heart condition for which medication had been prescribed. Yet he was fiercely independent and would not allow any interference. Knowing it would be fatal to stop taking his prescribed tablets, he nevertheless did stop taking them ― no longer able to live in a world without his first, last and only love whom in life he was unable to show the appreciation she deserved.

In the weeks following my father’s death something happened that would provide a unique portal through which I glimpsed things as they had once been. Following the traumatic discovery of my father’s body in the house where my parents had spent so much of their lives ― a house, moreover, now more resembling Mrs Havisham’s in Charles Dickens’ Great Expections ― an altered state of consciousness occurred which, coupled with the inevitable adrenalin surge that accompanies stress in crisis, found me walking the streets and calling on people I had not seen for decades. The intervening years temporarily evaporated and became an illusion. I was back. Most I called upon welcomed me as though no time at all had passed. Some, of course, were now ghosts, as I wandered the streets to old haunts. I was somehow experiencing it all over again, albeit briefly, for the very last time.

Subsequent visits to London in the years that followed, found it had returned to the friendless, faceless city that is now all too familiar to those who suffer its crime, pollution and melancholic atmosphere. Yet those weeks at the end of the year 2000 were to offer me a time warp where the past was somehow witnessed through a weathered window. Thereafter I felt like a phantom myself, who was not even present in the city, passing through sadly unfamiliar places. I felt as though I had now become a stray ghost. My final visit to England’s grey and gloomy capital was for the funeral of a close friend on 16 January 2004. I do not envisage returning to the place where most of my life’s dramas ― indeed most of my life ― was spent.

The author ~ inheriting a love of music from his parents.

To continue to read fragments of Seán Manchester’s unpublished memoir click on book è &

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Seventeen fragments were deleted on 11 February 2004. The above link, therefore, jumps to the close.

The above text and pictures from Stray Ghosts by Seán Manchester (unpublished memoir) are copyright protected and cannot be reproduced without consent.