Alfred and Emily Read online

  William, Emily McVeagh’s husband, came from the little picture of my mother’s great love that lived on her dressing-table. But, strange, it was a cutting from a newspaper in that leather frame, not a portrait from a studio or a friendly snap. Yet she talked as if she and he were to be married. It was a sensitive, cautious face, the sort of face you’d cast in a film as the lover too shy to speak his love, or whose first love died young, leaving him grieving and for ever unable to love another. Even as a child I would look at that face and think, Well, you wouldn’t have had much fun with that one. Meaning fun, the kind of good times my father talked about in London before the war.

  Daisy was my mother’s great friend all her life until, after many decades of writing England to Africa, Southern Rhodesia to London, they met again and I think did not find much in common. Daisy in life did not marry, but she was of the generation that did not find husbands: they were killed in the war, the war to end all wars.

  Both Emily and Alfred, when young, knew how to make the most of London. They went to the theatre – my father loved the music hall; my mother enjoyed concerts; they had supper at the Trocadero, and the Café Royal. What energy they had, both of them. Cricket, tennis, hockey, picnics, parties, dances.

  Cedric and Fiona, the young couple who liked Emily, were suggested by the couples, younger than she was, who befriended my mother. She always had admirers, younger, sometimes much richer, who liked her energy, her humour, her flair, her impetuous way with life. She also had male admirers. The one place in my mother’s imagined life where I have taken serious liberties is her friendship with Alistair. He loved her but she did not know it, or didn’t want to know it. This was suggested by the time after my father’s death when my brother and I tried to persuade her to marry again. It was partly selfish: we made no excuses about wanting that formidable energy directed away from us. But there was also concern for her. She had had that long bad time, nursing – years of it – with nothing in her life but a very sick man, her husband, who needed her every minute. Now there were men who wanted to marry her, sensible, quite impressive men, one a bank manager – surely up her street – another a well-off farmer. She could at last stop worrying about money, have decent holidays, companionship. But our attempts were met not only without enthusiasm but as if what we were suggesting was out of the question. But why? demanded my brother. Why not? I pressed and persuaded. It was her incomprehension that silenced us. That we should suggest such an impossible, inconceivable thing! How could we? ‘How could I marry anyone but your father? And besides, I must devote myself to my children.’ Who were grown-up, with lives well away from her.

  We actually discussed it, my brother and I, though chat about the emotions was not really our habit. ‘But why not one of them?’ demanded my brother. ‘So-and-so – he’s a perfectly decent chap, isn’t he? What is the matter with Derek, then, or Charles? I think he loves her, you know,’ said Harry, blushing at this inordinate use of language. ‘Why shouldn’t she have something nice happen to her at last?’ But no. Anyone would think we were suggesting she should mate with King Kong.

  ‘You know,’ my brother tried again, in a fever of embarrassment, ‘you know, Mother, I think Charles is really keen on you.’

  ‘You really are so funny, you two,’ said my mother, briskly.

  From The London Encyclopaedia, edited by Ben Weinreb and Christopher Hibbert, 1983

  Royal Free Hospital, Pond Street, Hampstead, NW3

  Founded by William Marsden, a young surgeon who was inspired with the idea of free admissions to hospitals when he found a young woman dying on the steps of ST ANDREW’S CHURCH IN HOLBORN and was unable to get admission for her at any of the London hospitals which all then demanded letters of recommendation from a subscriber. On 14 February 1828, Marsden met members of the CORDWAINERS’ COMPANY at the Gray’s Inn Coffee House where they resolved to found the first hospital to admit patients without payment or a subscriber’s letter. The hospital opened on 17 April 1828 under the patronage of King George IV and with the Duke of Gloucester as its first President. It has continued to receive royal patronage ever since. The original site was a small rented house at No.16 Greville Street, HATTON GARDEN, with only a few beds. The hospital, though familiarly called ‘The Free Hospital’, was officially known as the London General Institution for the Gratuitous Care of Malignant Diseases. In 1837, when Queen Victoria became Patron, she asked that it should henceforth be known as the Royal Free Hospital. In the first year 926 patients were treated. In the second year the hospital dealt with 1,551 cases. In 1832 over 700 cholera patients were treated. A matron and nurse were employed while the epidemic lasted. In 1839 another house was acquired and the number of beds rose from 30 to 72.

  With rapidly growing public support, a larger building was necessary, and in 1843 the hospital moved to a site in GRAY’S INN ROAD which had formerly been the barracks of the Light Horse Volunteers. The lease was purchased on 31 August 1843. The hospital extended its facilities on the new site, the Sussex Wing being opened in 1856 in memory of the Duke of Sussex. In 1877 the teaching of students began, and thus the hospital became one of the first of the London undergraduate teaching hospitals. The Victoria Wing with an out-patient department was added in 1878; and the Alexandra Building was opened by the Prince of Wales in 1895. The numerous benefactors included Lord Riddell, Sir Albert Levy, Free-masons, and several of the CITY LIVERY COMPANIES. Apart from the pioneer principle of its inception, the Royal Free took a leading part in two other important aspects of hospital work, the introduction of women medical students in 1877 and of a Lady Almoner in 1895. The admission of women to study medicine was the most momentous step in the history of the hospital and the provision of clinical facilities for women students marked the triumphant climax of a struggle for recognition that had been going on for some years by a small group of brave and deter mined women led by Elizabeth Garrett Anderson and Sophia Jex-Blake. Until 1894 all the medical members of the consultant and resident staff were men, but in that year Miss L.B. Aldrich-Blake was appointed as honorary anaesthetist. In the following year she obtained the MS London, the first woman to secure this qualification, and she subsequently became a distinguished surgeon on the hospital staff. In 1901 women were accepted as resident medical officers.

  In 1921 it became the first hospital in England to have an obstetrics and gynaecology unit. In 1926–30 the Eastman Dental Hospital was built to the designs of Burnet, Tait and Lorne. The Royal Free suffered severe damage in the Second World War, with considerable loss of beds. In 1948, with the inception of the National Health Service, the Royal Free Hospital became the centre of a group of hospitals which included the HAMPSTEAD GENERAL HOSPITAL, the ELIZABETH GARRETT ANDERSON HOSPITAL, the London Fever Hospital (Liverpool Road), the North West Fever Hospital (Lawn Road) and subsequently also New End and Coppetts Wood Hospitals. The ELIZABETH GARRETT ANDERSON HOSPITAL later separated from the group while the HAMPSTEAD GENERAL, North West Fever and London Fever Hospitals were incorporated with the parent hospital and its medical school in the new Royal Free Hospital, which was built on its present site to the designs of Watkins, Gray, Woodgate International. The first patient was admitted in October 1974; the hospital was in full use by March 1975; and was officially opened by the Queen on 15 November 1978. There are now 1,070 beds comprising 852 in the new building, 144 at New End Hospital (New End, NW3) and 74 at Coppetts Wood Hospital (Coppetts Road, muswell hill, N10).

  PART TWO

  Alfred and Emily; Two Lives

  And dimly she realised one of the great laws of the human soul: that when the emotional soul receives a wounding shock, which does not kill the body, the soul seems to recover as the body recovers. But this is only appearance. It is, really, only the mechanism of reassumed habit. Slowly, slowly the wound to the soul begins to make itself felt, like a bruise which only slowly deepens its terrible ache, till it fills all the psyche. And when we think we have recovered and forgotten, it is then that the terrible after-effects
have to be encountered at their worst.

  D.H. LAWRENCE, Lady Chatterley’s Lover

  I have written about my father in various ways; in pieces long and short, and in novels. He comes out clearly, unambiguous, all himself. One may write a life in five volumes, or in a sentence. How about this? Alfred Tayler, a vigorous and healthy man, was wounded badly in the First World War, tried to live as if he were not incapacitated, illnesses defeated him, and at the end of a shortened life he was begging, ‘You put a sick old dog out of its misery, why not me?’

  This sentence ignores impressive things. He would ride, in Kermanshah, Persia, to his work at the bank. I’ve seen him go down a rough mine shaft in a bucket, his wooden leg sticking out and banging against the rocky sides. He ran, or hobbled, in fathers’ races at my brother’s school. He climbed a difficult tree to a tree house made by my brother and me. He would go stomping through the bush, more than once taking a fall, or clamber over the great clods in a ploughed field. The contraption that enabled him to do all this was called by him ‘my wooden leg’, and it lived, in duplicate, leaning against a wall in the parental bedroom. Recently Burroughs and Wellcome had an exhibition of their products past and present in the British Museum and there in a glass case, a museum piece, I saw my father’s wooden leg. It consisted of a bucket shape in wood, into which the poor wasted stump was put, on a metal leg and foot, and heavy straps that held the device in place. The stump was fitted with stump socks, in knitted wool, up to ten of them, according to the weather and the condition of the stump. If the weather was hot, the socks were itchy and uncomfortable. When my father got diabetes and lost weight, he filled the well with layers of wool. The War Office supplied the wooden leg, and replacements when it wore out. On to the foot went ordinary socks and a shoe. The knee was flexible, in metal. This contraption in no way resembled the artificial legs of now, which are light and clever and can do everything.

  That sentence resumé does not mention the diabetes, which, when they first found insulin, was managed with none of the subtlety they use now.

  Reading what I wrote about my father, listening in my mind’s ear to things he said, one thing stands out. Medicine generally has evolved so that probably most people now would not recognize its clumsiness at the time my father was wounded. He said that his mind was full of horrors as he lay in hospital: ‘Dr.eadful things, horrible, awful. I would wake up screaming.’ My mother, nursing him, confirmed. ‘I was afraid to sleep.’ This sounds like post-traumatic stress disorder, long before the condition was described, but surely not the idea. ‘Shell shock’ has in its syllables the sense of trauma. The doctor, called by my father ‘that nice doctor chap’, suggested that my father was lucky to have avoided shell shock.

  There are pills for it today, surely, and for what sounds to me like a major depression: ‘I was inside a dark cloud. It clung to me. You see, the men who were killed and wounded, the men in my company, oh, they were such fine chaps. I couldn’t stop thinking of them. There was such a weight on my heart. My heart felt like a big cold stone…’

  People who have experienced grief will testify that it is felt in the heart, like a weight of cold pain.

  But no mention was made of medicines. Bromide, was it? If so, it didn’t seem to do much for him.

  If he had post-traumatic stress disorder or very bad depression these days, there would be miraculous pills, dulling it all.

  And now, looking back at that life, it is evident to me that my father, during the dreadful slow end of it, was depressed. Now the grim and ghastly depressions of old people are common knowledge. He would be medicated out of the worst of it. But no one then suggested that my father was ill with bipolar or any other depression and needed serious medicines.

  My father slept badly for all his life, what there was of it; he dreamed of his old comrades, and grieved for them. Yes, the pain of grief does soften and go, but at the breakfast table he might say to my mother, ‘I was dreaming of Tommy again,’ or Johnny or Bob. ‘There he was, telling me a joke about something.’ Quite right! Dead soldiers simply should not be angry ghosts displaying their wretched wounds. He was a great joker, obviously, Tommy or Johnny or Bob, and I think the Bairnsfather cartoons, much relished in our house, were responsible for that. Old Bill, the archetypical British Tommy, didn’t go in for grief or repining, whether up to his waist in dead water in a shell hole, or trying to hide from the shells under a bright moon. ‘The same dear old moon is looking down on him,’ was the caption of one cartoon: a girl in England with her hair floating looks at the moon out of her bedroom window, and meanwhile her lover is cowering from it under shell-fire. ‘The same dear old moon is looking down on…’ became a bit of a catchphrase for us, the children included.

  Thus. It is bright moonlight, we stand on the hill and down there the great mealie field is rippling in the moonrays, just green, just not green. It is possible to see there are people too because parts of the field are gently agitated. ‘Thieves,’ says my father, pleased because of the predictability of it all. ‘What’s the sense,’ he enquires of the night, the universe, ‘to go stripping cobs under a bright moon?’

  ‘While the same dear old moon is looking down on us,’ says my mother.

  Or, my brother off at boarding school, and she is mourning because of his absence: ‘The same dear old moon…’

  ‘Oh, come off it, old girl,’ says my father, bruised by the sentimentality she enjoys. She had never understood why her higher flights embarrassed him. We, the children, were appalled by them. But some kinds of sentimentality have in them an antidote. She was moved, her voice was rich with tears. She felt it, all right. But isn’t sentimentality intolerable because it is false feeling? My mother was capable of weeping because of Oates going out into the snow – ‘I may be some time’ – or the Last Post coming from the noisy radio that was so hard to keep steady on a wavelength. Yet when something terrible had to be done, like shooting an ill dog or drowning kittens, she did it, lips tight, face hard. She complained that my father had a cold heart.

  When she was ill, shortly after reaching the farm, she was intolerably sentimental, and this leads me straight into the hardest part of what I am trying to understand.

  Nothing that she ever told, or was said about her, or one could deduce of her in that amazing girlhood, so busy, so full of achievement, or of her nursing years, about which we had the best of witnesses, my father himself, or the years in Persia, so enjoyable and so social, nothing, anywhere, in all this matches up with what my mother became.

  Nothing fits, as if she were not one woman but several.

  As a child I was desperately sorry for my mother, even when I was planning to run away (how? in the bush? where to?). I was sorry for her because she was hardly silent about her sufferings. And that is where we begin with the question, when was Emily McVeagh ever self-pitying, complaining, sorry for herself? I don’t think it was in her. And yet it must have been, the self-pitying tears welled up when she was sick with ‘a heart-attack’ and took to her bed. Now let’s look at this superbly healthy, energetic woman, who has brought two little children, five and three, all the way from Tehran to London, by ship to Cape Town, to Beira, by train to Salisbury, who helped her invalid husband choose a farm in uncharted, unworked wilderness, got the house built, from materials she had never seen and knew nothing about, got the house furnished, as was the way with ‘the settlers’, making curtains from dyed flour sacks, cupboards and tables from paraffin boxes, making everything herself – and then she and her husband got malaria, twice. Is there a clue there perhaps? Very debilitating, is malaria. And then, in that house, made of mud and grass, matching it with what she thought she was coming to, stuck there, and she knew it, she took to her bed with a heart-attack.

  This was a nurse. She had nursed for years in one of the world’s great hospitals. She had nursed the wounded of a world war, and now it is easy to see she was in a state of dreadful anxiety, she was full of panic, she could look ahead and see she was trapped,
with no way out. A heart-attack. So she said. She lay on her bed while my father coped with clearing bush, buying machinery, employing labour – about which he knew nothing at all – looking after the two little children, with the aid of a drunken widow calling herself a housekeeper. It was not like her, my mother. This was simply not what she was. She called her little children to her, and she said, ‘Poor Mummy, poor, poor Mummy.’

  To this day I can feel the outrage I felt then. I was outraged, in a rage, furious, and of course desperately sorry for her. Was she ill? She was, if not with a heart-attack. She was ill, all right. And not herself. That was the point. And what were we supposed to do? Kiss her? Give her a good hug? But she did not only demand our pity with tears to match hers. That was not all she did.

  The man who ran a sawmill, four miles off, admired her, and had made her a contraption to swing into place over her bed so she could read. He was one of the people I remember who thought my mother a marvel. To this reading device she summoned us and gave us our first lessons. I don’t remember what they were. I was too hot and angry. ‘You must look after your little brother,’ said my mother, in a voice sick with sentiment. But looking after my little brother had been my burden, my task, my responsibility, my pride always. Why, suddenly, did she insist on it now?

  She was in bed, so she would tell us later, for a year, but it was not as long. Was it the drunken housekeeper who made it essential for her to get out of bed? Or was it the drunken housekeeper’s out-of-control twelve-year-old son, who beat up cats and dogs and bullied us?

  She got up, and what that must have cost her I cannot begin to imagine. She was saying goodbye to everything she had expected for her life in this colony, which must have been something like Happy Valley in Kenya. (But if she had experienced Happy Valley she would have been disgusted by it.) In the trunk behind the Liberty curtain lay the evening dresses, the gloves, the feathers, the hats. In a purse put away somewhere the visiting cards she had made especially for this life. But the piano stood in the living-room, whose windows were shaped like portholes, looking out over that bush, and she played. She played, well, everything – but I was brought up knowing that the right accompaniment to Chopin and Beethoven was the thudding of native drums.