Years later, when my father was married, unemployed, and already had three kids to feed, he tried the same scheming stunt of running up bills for food that he had no hope of paying, an imitation of his elder brother which turned out to be the highest form of folly, for he lacked Frederick’s superior mobility and ways of speech when the shopkeeper asked him to pay up or get taken to court. But even when he came back from prison he was glad his brother had been able to beat the system from time to time, and often gloated over it to me.
Frederick followed his trade of lace and embroidery designer in London, and for a while he was a court embroiderer, though I ommitted to ask at what court because I suspected he was exaggerating his claim to grandeur — which might have been doing him an injustice. But there was a great slump in his trade by the middle thirties, and he was thrown as much out of work as were Burton and his sons when motor-cars finished off blacksmithery.
In 1936 he met a column of unemployed miners that had stopped to rest at some open ground before continuing their march to the middle of London. Various members of it went among the spectators with collecting boxes, gathering funds to buy food and shoes for the men. A great many police stood at various points of the concourse, not expecting purple revolution to break out there and then so much as to intimidate them into knowing their place by the time they reached the middle of London — where hosepipes were waiting for them anyway. Frederick, moved by the men’s plight, put the large sum of half a crown into a box, at which a police inspector told him brusquely to get out of the way and move on.
In a tone of congenital intransigence Frederick retorted that it was his right to give to whom he pleased. The policeman left him alone, and went after the man with the collecting box. Telling me about it fifteen years later, the incident still infuriated him more, I think, because a man in uniform had dared to accost him on any pretext whatsoever, than that the hunger-marchers had been harried.
He was widely read, and the most politically radical of the family, though his radicalism was of a somewhat uncertain brand — when he allowed it to show through. Perhaps his intensive reading of the Old Testament made him so, and his experiences as a conscientious objector left him as bitter against government, British or otherwise, of past, present, and future, as any soldier who by a miracle had survived four years in the trenches.
Parting from his wife and two daughters, he came back to Nottingham in 1936. He also broke with the Christadelphian sect (after more than twenty years of it) and turned an atheist. When I first met him in 1949 I had started to think of myself as a writer. ‘A good short story,’ he advised me, ‘is what people want. It’s what editors are looking for, as well.’ To back up his point he sent me to Nottingham Central Library with lists of books to take out and read.
He was sixty-five years old, and worked at his studio desk with a skullcap on the back of his bald head. Having a thin, wax-like face, his features resembled those of Voltaire’s death-mask (a plaster copy of which hung from the wall above his desk as a measure of his admiration for that great man) if one caught him asleep or having just woken up.
Though quite prosperous for certain periods of his life, Frederick had dressed well but never really ate properly, as if that side of good comfort didn’t interest him. So he kept a frail unhealthy aspect, though he fetched more than eighty years of age.
He talked for hours on painting and art. His drawings were fine and meticulous. Now and again I would sit for him, and much of his work must still be scattered around Nottingham, for the only way he earned money at that time was by selling landscapes and doing portraits. Needing little at this part of his life made him a man of independent means, in the sense that those who have little, but which is all they need, can afford the most freedom.
An obsessional expatiator, he wanted a listener, and there was none better than an incipient writer for whom he could dip into his reminiscences and tap endless pipelines of information. He told me about a spiritual exercise by which he viewed any troublesome problem in its own utter light, and therefore went much of the way to solving. He concentrated his mind until there was nothing left in it, then went on to force this nothingness to an even greater pitch of vaccuity, so that in the blinding light of emptiness the problem suddenly reappeared with such clarity that the answer was obvious. Think of nothing, was how he put it, and think on that.
He loved England, but did not like it, and would lunge at the good name of its indwellers as often as some sharp light flashing from past or present forced him to:
‘The English are a nation of form-fillers,’ he would say, putting a few flourishes to the cloud of a half-finished landscape. I remembered this picture as a remote, mellow, dreamlike hilly country without people or even animals, some peaceful therapeutic land he could escape into after spending too much time on the close-up details of his portraits.
‘In some countries,’ he went on, pausing a moment to get into his best hectoring rhythm, ‘when the backbone has cracked, they live by taking in each other’s washing. In dear old England they exchange forms to fill in. Give somebody a form and he won’t tear it up and throw the bits back at you. Not your Englishman he won’t. He’ll get out his pen and wonder how to fill it in so as to please and satisfy whoever made it up. They’ll let authority put chains on them as long as it respects their privacy. They don’t want to be touched, ergo — ergot — (or is it argot?) — they’ll sign anything.’
‘Well,’ I said, not really objecting to his statement, nor his punning, ‘you’re English. And so am I. You can’t get away from it.’
‘True,’ he admitted. ‘At least I expect it is. I was born on the island, and that’s a fact. You still have time to get off it, if you look sharp in the way of saving yourself. In any case, I’m an artist. I’m independent. But think about it: the war’s been over six years, and the English still put up with rationing and conscription. Anybody who tries to get a tiddly bit of food above his fair share is denounced as a traitor and a black-marketeer, whereas it’s only a healthy and normal reaction to an unnecessary restriction. And don’t think they won’t always be like this, even when such vicious things are finished with. Scratch an Englishman and you find a — no, not only a Turk — but a ration book, or an identity card, or a pay-book, or a census form or even a form from the back of the Radio Times to order a greenhouse or potting shed. In other words, a form to fill in lets them know their place, and they love that.’
‘Every country is the same,’ I said, to see whether or not he had finished. ‘It’s called modern civilization, in case you don’t know.’
‘Civilization, my arse!’ he cried, throwing his brush aside and reaching out to fill the kettle — or shutting off his monologue with acerbity when he wanted to clear his room and get down to work: ‘It’s killed too many innocent people in the last fifty years for any intelligent man to think there’s much good in it.’
Those were his final words — on that occasion. He certainly didn’t seem like my father’s brother, yet there was little doubt that he was.
49
A nest of brothers is a dangerous thing, whether or not they are different, especially to the man who spermed them out. Bert was the second eldest and, at seventeen, during a savage quarrel with his father, picked up a hobbing-iron from the floor of the upholstery shop and threw it with all his might towards the head he could no longer stand the sight of.