Memoirs of a Private Man Read Free

by a sizeable drawing room and a kitchen and scullery, with a dining room at the back. Stairs led up to five bedrooms, a bathroom, a lavatory, and there was also an outside lavatory, and fairly extensive cellars, one of which, I think, was intended for wine. If so, it was sadly neglected during our occupancy. Not that my family was ever teetotal on principle, but we scarcely ever drank liquor of any sort, and certainly not wine.
    We kept one living-in maid – or a succession of them, for my mother was not easy to please. All the same, some of them stayed a long time and became long-suffering members of the family. There was one, Patty, an Irish girl, who used to stand in front of the mirror in her bedroom and say to herself: ‘Aren’t I beautiful? Aren’t I beautiful!’ A precocious eight-year-old, I was sometimes present at these self-adulatory sessions. In the end too many young men were in agreement with her, and my mother decided that she was not best fitted for domestic service in a God-fearing household.
    Were we God-fearing? Not really. My mother kept steadily, if quietly, to her beliefs all her life, but her father was very much a free-thinker and associated with atheists and agnostics, one of whom, a Mr Jack Slaney, used to greet my mother when she came in from Sunday school with: ‘Well, Annie, have you seen Jesus Christ today?’ My father was pretty well a non-believer too – at least until his last and only illness, when he began to dabble in Christian Science and spiritualism. My brother never went to church, and I would go perhaps twice a year with my mother. The long walk was something that my mother – still relentlessly delicate – only essayed on special dates such as Christmas and Easter. One of the maids – I’ve forgotten which one – taught me to say my prayers, and later a fiercely religious headmaster indoctrinated a lot that had been missing at home.
    I always shied away from what might be termed overt religion. When I was twelve a curate from the church took to calling, with the aim of persuading me to attend confirmation classes. With equal persistence I would bolt into the garden at the sound of him so that my mother could truthfully – though ruefully – inform him that I was out.
    I often wonder why religious teaching was totally missing at home. I think perhaps my mother was so lacking in energy that she just couldn’t be bothered. But at least our household was the very reverse of one in which religion is practised but remains a sham (an enduring theme with novelists). With my parents it was ‘ do as I do, not do as I say’. (Never spoken but implicit.) I never heard a swear word – even from my older brother – nor an obscenity, nor really ever a vulgarism. Even if we didn’t go to church, we never played cards on Sundays.
    It is often said that only children make bad mixers. I was not an only child, but a worse mixer could hardly have been found. The fact that my brother Cecil was ten years the elder may have resulted in my being an only child in all but name, and the fact that he was more often at home than my busy and preoccupied father resulted in my taking my cue and my beliefs – or lack of them – from him rather than from someone who was older and wiser. Cecil combined a mild, inoffensive good nature – and a strong sense of humour – with curiously aggressive views, downright philistine and arrogant. He had no interest in religion (not even in his last days, when some hitherto unbelievers have second thoughts), little interest in books outside certain narrow spheres, no real interest in music or painting or poetry – though he would quote Omar Khayyam with relish. His interests were in the fresh air, the sun, the sea, the sands – and in his beloved Cornwall, where he made his home for nearly sixty years.
    His comically misanthropic view of life, his pessimism, his philistinism