Fathers and Sons Read online

  The Luftwaffe pilot missed the RAF base, but his stick of bombs had neatly bracketed Kiln Farm. There was no damage to anyone or anything and, once this had been established, Shawbury was rather proud of itself. My father said it was one of the most exciting nights of his life and my grandfather was always happy to tell the tale, complete with full sound effects.

  The crater caused by the closest bomb is still there but not as apparent as when I was a child. Now, the crudeness of the original scar is softened by grass and patches of nettles, always the sign of disturbed ground. I suppose the pockmark lingered so long because the field wasn’t ploughed, but left for grazing. I used to make my grandfather take me to it and insist he go over every thrilling detail of that night. Once I told him I wished I’d been there when it happened. He gave me a long look.

  ‘How odd to want to be blown up…’

  The bombing of Kiln Farm marked the end of the first major chapter of my father’s life. A new phase was about to begin.

  His father was going to drop a bombshell of his own.

  Chapter 5

  EXILE

  By the time he was fifteen, Chris, as he now preferred to be called, had given up any hope of forging closeness with his father. If his relationship with Kitty had been characterised by cool formality–something which was slowly thawing as he got older–that with Geoffrey remained deep in permafrost. There was simply no reaching the man and Chris had stopped trying.

  There were points of contact, however. The two shared a passion for classical music. My grandfather had an extensive collection of 78s–scratchy recordings of some of the world’s best orchestras and opera singers. He retired into the parlour most evenings to listen to them and Chris would often creep in and join him.

  These were moments when father and son were closest. There was no need for conversation; the dialogue was provided by the great composers. I believe this shared passion for music was the invisible umbilical cord connecting the two of them, and despite all that had happened, and all that lay ahead, it was an essential link which somehow prevented them drifting completely apart. James was a part of this connectivity too; he had a fine singing voice and was in much demand at local recitals. After the war, he even made a few records.

  Chris and his father enjoyed discussing politics and the course of the war, which had been going atrociously. After the fall of France, the British suffered setback after setback. General Rommel’s Afrika Korps had all but destroyed our army in North Africa; the Japanese had seized Singapore after British forces barely fired a shot in resistance; at sea, German U-boats seemed poised to win the Battle of the Atlantic after sinking a colossal tonnage of Allied shipping. In Russia, it looked like nothing could stop Hitler’s giant war machine and the fall of Moscow looked imminent.

  Few would admit it aloud but by 1942 it appeared extremely likely that the German/Japanese axis was going to win the war. The chief of the British High Command, Field Marshal Lord Alanbrooke, wrote as much in his private diaries (parts of which were not made public until the next century).

  But America’s entry after Pearl Harbor would change everything. Not at first; it took a while for the ‘sleeping dragon’, as one member of the Japanese High Command described America, to shake itself fully awake and bring its latent strength to bear upon the enemy. But my father’s abiding anxiety about the local resistance movement’s putative scorched-earth policy began to lessen as it became clear that Germany would not invade. By 1943 the tide had turned; shipping losses were down, North Africa was retaken, and the Russians launched sweeping counter-attacks against the Wehrmacht. Now the talk was of a different invasion–that of Nazi-occupied Europe by the Allies.

  Throughout these changing fortunes of war, Chris had been educated at Wem Grammar School, an establishment in a quintessential small country town. By 1943 he was in the fifth form and was enjoying himself there. He’d started going out with girls, to the cinema in Shrewsbury mostly, and had a relaxed approach to the looming School Certificate exams and his studies in general. He began staying out for longer and coming home later. One of Geoffrey’s farmer friends saw the lad smoking a Woodbine in the Fox and Hounds, his arm around a girl.

  His parents decided he was going off the rails. Something had to be done.

  I have never really been able to get to the bottom of this nonsense. My father was merely going through adolescence, and as far as I can tell it was not an especially bumpy passage. He didn’t get into any kind of trouble. He hadn’t come to the attention of the local police. He wasn’t under threat of being kicked out of Wem Grammar. Years ago I found Dad’s school report for that year–1943–and it was entirely unremarkable. Christopher Madeley was ‘a bright boy with a tendency to laziness’. He must work harder and spend more time on his homework. He could be ‘a little over-exuberant in class’. If he settled down to his studies, his exam results should be ‘more than acceptable’ by the following term.

  Big deal. Rebel without a cause Dad wasn’t.

  The axe fell one evening during the school holidays.

  Geoffrey and Kitty had been to see a local clergyman to discuss their ‘wayward’ youngest. The man, it turned out, had connections with a minor public school known for its old-fashioned approach to discipline. It was miles distant, tucked away in a remote corner of rural Staffordshire.

  Would the reverend find their boy a place there?

  At first the man was uneasy. He told them that, at fifteen, their son would find it extremely difficult to adapt to the rigours of life in an English public school. Most boys at such establishments had been sent away from home when they were quite small, to prep schools. They had become accustomed to long separations from their families and knew how to navigate the closed, claustrophobic, arcane world of a boarding school. By contrast, Christopher would be completely out of his depth and, worse, a Johnny-come-lately. An outsider. Boys could be very…inconsiderate to outsiders. Even some of the staff may be, well, somewhat dismissive. These were more or less closed communities. Perhaps it would be best to leave him where he was. The reverend couldn’t quite see what the problem was, but felt sure things would settle down. Besides, Wem was a good school.

  But my grandparents were determined. So letters were sent, fees negotiated, and before the end of the holidays, the business was settled. There merely remained the minor matter of informing the boy concerned.

  Geoffrey called my father into the drawing room.

  ‘We’re sending you to Denstone.’

  ‘What’s Denstone? I’m sorry, Father, I don’t understand.’

  ‘It’s a boarding school in Staffordshire. About fifty miles from here.’

  ‘But…but I go to Wem. What’s wrong with that?’

  ‘Nothing. It’s you there’s something wrong with. You’re becoming a slacker. Denstone will put a stop to that.’

  ‘But…I don’t want to go away, Father. And I’m not a slacker. I want to stay here, with, with…everyone. I shall be terribly unhappy, I know I shall. I swear I’ll work harder at Wem. Please don’t send me away, please…surely Mother doesn’t agree with this?’

  ‘She thinks it’s a very good idea.’

  ‘I won’t go. You can’t make me.’

  Geoffrey smiled faintly, and left the room. His son burst into hot tears of anger, frustration and sheer disbelief.

  My father often described to me the day he left Shawbury for Denstone. It was the following Sunday. He and his mother took the bus into Shrewsbury, Christopher with a brown suitcase resting on his lap. All his other things would follow on in a trunk. As they neared the station he implored Kitty to change her mind.

  ‘I still don’t understand what I’m supposed to have done wrong, Mother. Please, please, please, don’t do this to me. I’ll do anything you and Father want; I’ll ask for extra homework…I’ll study all day on Saturdays…I won’t go to the cinema during term…’

  ‘Come on, Dad,’ I asked him. ‘There must have been more to it than you’re telling me. Su
rely they gave you at least one good reason?’

  No, he said, they hadn’t. Not then, and not after. All he could discern was an implacable determination to send him away, a determination he sensed stemmed chiefly from his father.

  So why did his parents do it? Why send him into exile; sever him from Kiln Farm, Shawbury, and all his friends and familiars? It was an extraordinary decision and he never understood it.

  He never forgave them for it, either, although he managed to pretend to, much later.

  Today, I believe he was right to think his father was the chief architect of the whole thing. Geoffrey is the key to understanding such an apparently inexplicable event. Fathers can be jealous of their sons and I wonder if Geoffrey was finding it increasingly difficult to reconcile his own childhood privations with my father’s growing freedoms and pleasures. My grandfather was in no way a cruel man, at least not intentionally, but perhaps Chris’s relatively freewheeling lifestyle (by the standards of Geoffrey’s own corralled adolescence) piqued him. Dad had already announced that he had no intention of becoming a farmer (unlike his brother) and was already talking about a career in journalism; perhaps even becoming a writer.

  I am sure Geoffrey persuaded himself that he was banishing Christopher to a better place for his own good, but I don’t believe that was his underlying, subconscious motive. Indeed, it’s possible that at a deeper level he was re-enacting his own childhood abandonment, but in mirror image. Instead of the boy being left behind, he was sent away; the long-ago sin against the father visited on the son.

  After the bus had arrived at Shrewsbury Station, Kitty waited on the eastbound platform with her boy for the Stoke train. By now my bewildered father had abandoned his pleading and stood, utterly dejected and in complete silence, beside her. He simply could not understand what was happening. It made no sense to him at all.

  At last his train arrived and he climbed very slowly into the carriage and turned round to look at his mother through the open door.

  Kitty banged it shut with a crisp: ‘Goodbye dear. See you at the end of term.’ And with that she walked back through the barriers and out of sight.

  My father was not a lachrymose man. In my entire life I only saw him weep once: the day John F. Kennedy was assassinated.

  But I wasn’t with him that Sunday on his solitary journey to Denstone.

  After several stops and changes, Christopher found himself on an obscure branch line that delivered him to tiny Rocester Station. Denstone was just outside the village, perched on a low hill.

  As my father hiked his case up the lane that led to his new home, he wondered what the place would look like. Perhaps it was an archetypal English public school; soft mellowed stone or warm red-brick; ivy-cloaked cloisters, mullioned windows and ancient elms lining the Doctor’s Walk…

  Slightly comforted by his imagination, he rounded a corner and was confronted with reality.

  Denstone was a Gothic construction, a forbidding central block with twin wings on either side. My father once took me there and, even accounting for the prejudice I brought with me after hearing his stories about the place, I thought it looked more like a Victorian lunatic asylum or prison than a school. Just as he had told me on the way there, the overall effect of its frontage made it appear as if the building grinned at those who approached it. It was not a friendly grin.

  But perhaps buildings absorb the atmosphere and mood of those within them. Today Denstone is a modern and popular co-ed college; the echoes of Tom Brown’s Schooldays have long gone. When I went back more recently to stare at it again, the sardonic grimace of welcome had disappeared. Just an ordinary, orderly arrangement of stone and glass. It was most strange. As if the place had been exorcised.

  But on that darkening evening more than sixty years ago, Denstone was as grim a destination as anyone could have wished. My father was greeted formally by the matron and informed he was one of the first to arrive for the autumn term. Hadn’t his parents told him classes didn’t start for several more days? Most of the staff wouldn’t arrive until the following day and the boys the day after that. Meanwhile he would have to manage with bread and margarine for his supper and see himself to bed. Sheets and pillows were still down in the laundry so he’d have to make do with blankets. He could have his pick of the dormitories tonight; allocations would be made later.

  And with that the fifteen-year-old boy was left with half a candle, a sliver of soap and a basin of cold water for the morning.

  By now the war pervaded every corner of British society, and that included remote Denstone. The demand on manpower was remorseless, with campaigns under way in North Africa, Italy, the Atlantic and the Far East. Conscription had reached record levels. Those previously deemed too old, too unfit, or too important in civilian jobs, were now efficiently sucked into the voracious military machine. By the time my father arrived at Denstone the planned invasion of Europe was barely ten months away and even more men who had never thought they would see action were getting their call-up papers.

  So Denstone was now staffed almost exclusively by elderly retirees. Pedagogues long ago put out to grass now found themselves back in the classroom to plug the gaps left by younger ones gone to war. These were teachers who had been the backbone of the late-Victorian age of education, and many had not taught for more than twenty years.

  As my father watched these relics from another era assemble in the Great Hall in their mothballed gowns and mortar boards, he thought they looked like a flock of ancient crows. One, picking over his luggage like carrion, opened a long leather box and took out a cane. He swished it with surprising vigour through the air, nodded as if satisfied, and placed it carefully back.

  Hell, thought Chris. I’ve come to bloody Dotheboy’s Hall.

  Almost everything the clergyman back in Shawbury had cautioned his parents about turned out to be depressingly accurate. My father spoke with a distinct ‘country’ accent. This was quickly picked up on by the other boys as they began returning from holiday and they immediately dubbed him ‘our country cousin’.

  Most of them had been together as a unit for years; some had been at the same prep schools. Dad was a classic outsider. Unfortunately Kitty had bought him school trousers in the wrong shade of grey; it was too late to do anything about it now and in Denstone’s isolated and enclosed world such trivialities assumed tribal significance.

  There were the usual induction ceremonies, more normally associated with the arrival of younger boys. Dad presented an opportunity for one last hurrah before such japes became beneath everyone’s dignity. Most nights he would find his bed drenched in water; his clothes were stolen while he slept and stuffed in the nearest cistern.

  But Dad was a grammar-school boy and he knew the ropes. He’d been expecting this, and adopted a stoical attitude. They weren’t bad boys at heart and after a while the ragging began to flag. But it came to an unexpectedly abrupt end after someone went too far.

  A special school assembly had been called to celebrate an Allied victory and the boys were instructed to make sure their trousers were meticulously pressed for the occasion. They used an old army trick. Trousers were folded with great care at bedtime and placed under the hard mattress. Done properly, the creases should be ruler-straight by morning.

  That night someone gently eased Chris’s trousers from their makeshift press, rolled them into a ball, and put them back.

  He arrived at the ceremony looking as if he’d slept in a hedge and was instantly removed for his first thrashing at Denstone. The maximum six strokes, too. There was disobedience, and then there was unpatriotic disobedience. Men were dying for their country and the new boy had shown gross disrespect.

  There was an uncomfortable silence in the dormitory that night when my father walked in. He removed his glasses, placed them carefully on his bed and turned round.

  ‘Who did it?’

  After a pause one of the older boys stood up.

  ‘I did, country cousin. So what of it?’
/>   ‘So I fight you.’

  My father was an unknown quantity to the others where fighting was concerned. They sat up in their beds with interest. Someone went to the door to keep watch.

  ‘Come on then…’

  Chris wasn’t especially known for fighting at Wem, but he’d never lost an encounter. Since he was small, he had watched his father’s farmhands settle their differences with their fists and one of them, a Dubliner called Jacob, had given him a little tuition and advice.

  ‘Don’t go worryin’ about style, sorr. Just go on in loik a haymaker in a hurricane an’ ye’ll be foin. Watch now…loik this…’

  Now, farmyard met Queensberry. Thirty seconds later, Queensberry was on the floor looking as crumpled as my father’s trousers had that morning.

  There were astonished murmurs around the room as my father attempted to disguise his trembling limbs by climbing into bed and pretending to read a book.

  ‘Bloody hell!’

  ‘Christ…are you all right, Tommy?’

  ‘I…I think so…’

  ‘I say, country cous–I mean, Madeley…well done.’

  ‘Yes, hats off. No more nonsense, then.’

  But this small victory, and the space it won him, was cold comfort to my father. He had no interest whatsoever in public school life and traditions. If he was mocked for the way he spoke, he in turn thought the way most of the other boys expressed themselves was absurd, a throwback to another age. Phrases such as ‘my hat’, ‘good egg’, and ‘bad form, old boy’ left him feeling more isolated than ever. He did form a couple of semi-friendships but realised the only thing he and these boys had in common was a hatred of Denstone.

  And as his first term there crept into winter with agonising slowness, he had plenty of time to reflect on the fact that he had three more years of this to come. Three years, stuck in this place! Everything about it was awful. It was freezing cold, and the food was terrible–terrible. Rationing was biting hard and Denstone had no access to the occasional illicit comforts of the black market. He’d thought his first supper of bread and margarine was a stopgap before normal supplies resumed, but it turned out to be the norm. It was invariably the boys’ last meal of the day, accompanied by the weakest of stewed tea with no milk or sugar. Once another boy looked up from a newspaper interview with a repatriated RAF pilot and said, ‘Christ almighty, the damned POWs behind the wire are eating better than us!’