Being working-class wasn’t really bad, in fact it was often fine. Really it was heroic. These were people who loved to have things the way they used to be. They knew their place, and liked it. They looked up to you. They were marvellously free of pretence.
Poor Mum. She herself was under-stimulated. It wasn’t as if her life was full of incident. She had barely enough on her own plate without being made to dish it up again for two. She was missing out on some vitamins essential to healthy mental life. So she’d end up saying things like, ‘Doreen’s not really on our level, but she’s terribly sweet,’ or ‘Barbara is terribly suburban, but a lovely person. Really lovely. You know me, I take as I find.’ All of which I would store away for later pondering. She was my captive audience, and I was hers.
I must have been a bit older, I suppose, when I started to see Mum’s snobbery as no more than a dutiful shadow of her mother’s. It had the air of something learned by heart rather than felt in the bones. She lacked the maddening confidence which allowed Granny to break her own rules. Funny that it should be harder to forgive Mum for a bad habit than Granny for a vice — I suppose because the vice had a sort of magnificence.
Mental mantelpiece
Some of the things Mum said to me were a little more substantial than the social stratification of vocabulary. She enlightened me, for instance, about the day of the red ball, Dad’s ceremonial domestic flypast and dropping of an innocent projectile.
That red ball had been given pride of place on my mental mantelpiece all the time I was in bed. It was an official happy memory, proof to the world that my life had once been full of drama and life out of doors, impulse and play. As such it was a group project as much as an individual effort of recollection. It was like a big jigsaw done by the whole family, where the grown-ups establish the border, and the children fit in a few straightforward pieces and are heartily praised for their cleverness.
Even so, I have to say that I couldn’t make much sense of the incident when I thought about it from the vantage-point of my bed. What did it mean, that Dad dropped a red ball to me out of the sky?
The flying aspect I took completely for granted. Flying was magical, of course, but it was magic my Dad did every day. I wasn’t sensitive to the level of skill involved, the sheer difficulty and daring of hitting as small a target as a child’s hands with an object dropped from the moving cockpit of a low-flying Tiger Moth. It was a piece of marksmanship worthy of the man who invented that other bouncing bomb, the Barnes Wallis I was named for.
Something bothered me about the choice of object to be dropped. A red india-rubber ball — wasn’t that in a poem I knew? Of course it was. The poem was by A. A. Milne and it was about Bad King John (‘King John was not a good man — / He had his little ways. / And sometimes no one spoke to him / For days and days and days’). The poem soothed me because of its rhythm and the pleasure of its story, but it was also a tease because I was John, and the poem was somehow about me. When Mum said, ‘King John was not a good man …’ I didn’t know whether to be pleased or scolded. And when Dad said, ‘Pipe down, Johannes R.,’ I knew that was my last warning. That was from the bit of the poem where King John writes his Christmas list, addressed ‘TO ALL AND SUNDRY — NEAR AND FAR — / F. CHRISTMAS IN PARTICULAR’, and signed ‘not “Johannes R.” / But very humbly, “Jack”.’ He takes the list onto the palace roof and leans it against a chimney-stack.
Perhaps I had already shown an aversion to Christmas, understandable in someone whose birth-date was the 27th of December, in competition with incarnate God from the outset. Perhaps I had mistaken the whole festival as my tribute and been disappointed when I was told I still had two days to wait for that other big (bigger) day. It turned out that the presents under the tree weren’t all for me. The unwelcome news, so hard to take in, that there are other people in the world.
Bad King John in the poem gets the present he most wants, a big, red india-rubber ball, even if it comes through one of the palace windows by accident, propelled by a peasant child’s foot, and I got my ball too. Except that it had been my red ball in the first place, and Dad was only borrowing it.
Theme of A. A. Milne
That was as far as I got in my understanding of the big scene, based on the information I had. But there were things I didn’t know about the tiny drama, that ærobatic variation on a theme of A. A. Milne.
There was a larger cast of characters than I appreciated at the time. ‘You’ll have heard Dad talk about that awful Major, JJ. Mad Major Draper. I’ve always thought he was a terrible influence on your father, though I haven’t met him and I’ve no wish to. He does the sort of madcap stunt that might be amusing in a child, but he’s a grown man and old enough to know better.’
The Mad Major couldn’t resist stunts like flying low over water, so low in fact that the wheels of the plane were made to spin by the contact, a stunt made all the more difficult by the fact that the undercarriage couldn’t be seen from the cockpit. Dip the wheels just a little too deeply in the water and the nose of the plane plunges in also. As the Major eventually found out. The onlookers couldn’t even necessarily see when the stunt had gone right, but nobody could miss its going wrong. ‘Dennis always hero-worshipped the man, which was bad enough when he was just an ordinary eccentric sort of person, but then suddenly he was in all the papers. I thought it was the silliest thing ever, but Dad was pleased as punch, proud of knowing such an outstanding individual. He kept on saying, “Good old Kit! He showed them!” but no one could tell me what it was he’d shown them — whoever “they” were.’
The Major had hit the headlines in a big way, nationally and even internationally, in May 1953, which must have been a little while before Dad asked to borrow my red ball. Kit Draper was no longer a serviceman, and he did what he did entirely off his own bat. He hired a plane and then flew underneath all the bridges over the Thames from Waterloo to Kew, including Hammersmith (the lowest) and Westminster (the narrowest), missing out only Hungerford, Fulham and the Kew railway bridge. Fifteen bridges in all. After that he was known to the whole world as the Mad Major.
‘I was worried sick,’ she went on. ‘I was at my wits’ end.’ That was when Mum’s worries began, back when she didn’t have to worry about me, when she could worry about her impressionable husband. ‘I started thinking that Dennis would try to beat that stupid Major at his own game, by doing some mad stunt with the whole world looking.’ By bad luck Dad was shortly going to be in the public eye himself. What if he did something silly? ‘Your father has a very good record — there was the time he took off without checking his fuel and had to make an emergency landing, but nobody made too much out of that. I asked him, “You’re not going to do anything silly on the big day, are you?” but I should know by now he’ll never give a straight answer. He just said, “A fellow needs some fun, m’dear.” You know yourself what he’s like, and how maddening it is.’
The big day she was referring to was big by any standards — the new Queen’s Coronation Day. Dad was due to take part in a mass flypast over the Mall. What if he took it into his head to loop the loop in his Meteor, with millions watching on the television? She would die on the spot, that’s what.
The poultice of indulgence
Mum had already headed off Dad’s attempt to pay tribute to the Major on my birth certificate, and she hadn’t softened her attitude since then. But perhaps she had learned some tactics. She decided to humour her husband, whose maverick streak was deeply buried. Better to give him his head than risk him doing something Draperesque on a grand public occasion. Best to get the mischief harmlessly out of his system, to have him pull off an authorised transgression with no official ripples. She would draw the poison of self-will with the poultice of indulgence.