Footnotes Read online

  But anyway I have a horror of black mines, ever since my older brother, also only nine years old, plunged head first down the shaft of a German bunker in Brittany, in the dead darkness of an underground passageway, at the very moment when my mother was saying, ‘Hang on, wait, just stop, I’m going to strike a match.’ And he was fine, after the weeks in hospital when he drank puréed vegetable soup through a straw, and my parents never slept, and I managed to get myself stung by a wasp so the French nurses would pay me some attention. (I was seven, and sick with worry, and insanely jealous of that damned straw, which was long and could be twisted into all the shapes of a roller coaster. No one in England had ever seen such a thing.) I can replay every second of that time in the bunker, and still hear every word.

  Mostly, though, the Irish R.M. stories have no dark shades. They are filled with the bright sunshine of carefree days. Reading them, you would never know (or you would have to read very closely to realize) that Ireland in the early twentieth century was a place of bitter division, on the brink of war. This was deliberate (Edith and Martin knew what sold), but also unavoidable: they really did find life very funny, especially when they were together. They stripped out all politics and put in all the people they met and knew. Disguised, of course: Edith always claimed that there were only two characters in the stories drawn from real life, her sister’s dog and a local drunk called Slipper. But this was not true. I even wonder if the ineffectual but lovable Major Yeates of the Irish R.M. stories is in any way a nod to the poet W. B. Yeats, whose work they knew well and whom Martin met for the first time in 1901, as she described to Edith in a letter:

  Yeats looks just what I expected. A cross between a Dominie Sampson [an impoverished scholar in a Walter Scott novel] and a starved R.C. curate – in seedy black clothes – with a large black bow at the root of his long naked throat. He is egregiously the poet – mutters ends of verse to himself with a wild eye, bows over your hand in dark silence – but poet he is – in spite of various things – and I got on well with him, so far.

  That ‘so far’ is revealing. Yeats was also born Protestant and ‘Anglo-Irish’, with its assertive and tormented and distancing hyphen, but by 1901 he was an Irish nationalist, with no time for any Home Rule compromises. How to be Irish – who can be Irish? (or British or English) – preoccupied Martin and Edith just as much as it did Yeats or any of them. Edith, as I say, would never have considered herself English – her family had lived in Ireland for hundreds of years – and she could flare into a rage at the thought of what England had done to her country. Martin too considered herself Irish, but she was also more conscious of her family’s leading place in the Protestant Ascendancy, and as opinions polarized, she found it harder to know where she fitted. On the side of Home Rule, no doubt, in 1901 – devolution that would have kept links (and much control) at Westminster – but Martin died in December 1915 and never lived to see the Easter Rising, the murderous reprisals of the Black and Tans, the burning of the big houses, the birth of the Irish Republic, Civil War and the flight of most of the Anglo-Irish (but not Edith) who represented, whether they liked it or not, centuries of oppression, servitude and famine. There didn’t seem to be much room for ambiguous hyphens in the new, independent, Catholic Ireland.

  Later on in the day she first met Yeats, Martin was asked to add her initials to a tree that was being decorated by a gathering of ‘the literary crowd’. ‘WBY did the carving, I smoked, and high literary conversation raged and the cigarette went out and I couldn’t make the matches light, and he held the little dingy lappets of his coat out and I lighted the match in his bosom.’

  ‘Lappets’. The thing about Somerville and Ross is that they could never stay serious for long.

  I was almost brought to my knees with relief when I met ‘Nick from the Wirral’ on the slopes of Snowdon, at the moment when the fog was at its deepest. I was skirting edgily along the cusp of the horseshoe leading to the top when Nick came bounding along another path, bearing a high-vis orange jacket and an open tap of merry banter. He was also on his own and had decided on a whim to take a longer route home, over the top of Snowdon, which is perhaps even crazier than it sounds. We made it to the summit together, in thick cloud and a few freckles of snow, and he insisted I arrange myself on top of the triangulation point for a photo, so I could show the world that I was briefly the highest person standing in England and Wales. There was a queue of people waiting to do the same thing, all of whom had arrived by the train that has been slogging up Snowdon since 1896, three years after Edith and Martin made the journey by foot.

  The wooden hut where Edith and Martin stayed is long gone, replaced by a vast alpine visitor centre and café, which sounds like a hideous thing to impose on a mountaintop (and it is), but under the circumstances (aftershocks of vertigo amid pangs of mourning for the missing map) also hugely welcome. Edith and Martin shivered through the short night, made even more miserable by thin doses of sleep, hiding under their blankets when they thought someone was going to come and make them admire the sunrise. They awoke in the grey dawn with the certain knowledge that mountains are best viewed en profile, from the base – and ‘a beautiful view is not a mere matter of miles seen from a great height’. Which certainly makes a pleasant change from the needy posturings of male writers, spaying their way up the mountains of the world, conquering things. The best writers about nature, I decide, as I sip hot tea and peer through the panoramic windows at an impenetrable wall of cloud, are not ‘nature writers’ at all. Somerville and Ross are the proof.

  The descent of Snowdon is a lot easier than the climb. I even find myself giving directions to a bunch of middle-aged men (‘just follow the stream bed, you can’t go wrong’), reassuring a nervous couple who are worried about the cliffs (‘it’s a lot easier if you sing!’) and, close to the foot of the mountain, joshing with a group of British Asian lads (‘Nearly there! One last heave!’).

  Edith and Martin are grumbling about the litter, ‘the soda-water bottle, the sandwich-paper, and the orange-peel’, but there is no sign of my map. The smells are more familiar lower down the mountain – there’s a dusty whiff of heather in the air – and I am walking slower, wondering why I feel an ache of loss for people I have never met. Edith and Martin (and Griffith Roberts) kept me company every inch of the way, scrambling over the jagged scree and the icy bogs. Their laughter on the slopes was vivid and real. But of course, I do realize, they’re not actually here.

  All of a sudden the sun is shining, not just here on the lower stretches but also, glancing up, on the peaks of Snowdonia. And there are groups of people heading up in the late afternoon, talking and laughing. Couples. Schoolfriends. Walking parties. Bands of brothers. I was a fool to have wanted to be alone on the mountainside. Thank you, thank you, ‘Nick from the Wirral’. None of us should be on our own. Love and friendship are all that matter. I don’t know why I feel so shaken (is there such a thing as reverse altitude sickness?), but perhaps it is not healthy to brood too long on the dead, although Edith, and most of her family, would have disagreed. In the 1920s, when armed men were at large in the country, Edith was convinced that the spirits of her dead family, Martin among them, but with Uncle Kendal the most active, had woven a web of protection around her and her home. They laid snares for intruders and whispered messages of horror and dread.

  It was Edith’s mother Adelaide, and her brothers Kendal and Jocelyn, who had introduced the family to spiritualism. They were enthusiasts from the 1850s. Kendal once levitated his brother, who whipped out a pencil and signed his name on the ceiling, and they all consulted the dead, watched tables float in the air and channelled reams of automatic writing from their ancestors. At first Edith and Martin viewed these antics with detached amusement, but the possibilities of spiritualism seem in the end to have taken a grip on them all, especially once the more aloof Martin had left the scene, or at least had departed this earthly dimension. Edith became a convert, just as the movement grew in popularity with the griev
ing families and survivors of the First World War.

  On 21 December 1915 Edith watched Violet Martin die in the Glen Vera hospital in Cork, having sketched her asleep only three days earlier. She wrote to her brother that her life was in ruins. Six months later, still ravaged by grief (‘the deadly details that go to the making of each futureless, featureless day’), she went to dine with a local medium called Jem Barlow and after dinner found herself watching in astonishment as Jem wrote out, in automatic writing, this message from Martin: ‘You and I have not finished our work. Dear, we shall. Be comforted. V.M.’ From that day onwards Edith was in almost daily contact with Martin (apart from when she went on speaking or horse-dealing tours to the US – apparently Martin had to stay closer to home), and after a while she found that a spirit medium was no longer necessary: she could communicate directly with Martin herself.

  There are sixteen books written by ‘Somerville and Ross’ before Martin’s death in 1915; and a further sixteen produced by them afterwards. Of course, Edith was a brilliant writer, much greater than she allowed herself to believe: she always used to defer to what she felt were Martin’s superior talents. There were no more R.M. stories, or another The Real Charlotte, but the books by post-mortem ‘Somerville and Ross’ are still powerful, funny, ebullient, sharp – and almost as tightly written. It doesn’t really matter if you believe in any of this, or in Edith’s version of how it happened, although I do not see why we should be so quick to recoil from the possibility. Of course it can be explained away. And maybe all that really matters is that it was enough for Edith to know – and to be quite open about knowing – that six months after Martin died she was able to talk to her again and resume their writing partnership. And not only that. It was their companionship and friendship, their daily communion, their love – their laughter – that had survived the absurd severance of death.

  ‌Seven

  ‘The Secret Dream’

  ‘And who shall restore to them the years that the locust hath eaten?’

  J. B. Priestley, English Journey

  J. B. Priestley & Beryl Bainbridge,

  Birmingham to Liverpool, 1933 and 1983

  I am driving through the outer reaches of Birmingham, on the trail of J. B. Priestley, who travelled this way in the autumn of 1933, and recorded what ‘one man saw and heard and felt and thought’ in a rumbustious book called English Journey. But at the same time I am also hot on the heels of Beryl Bainbridge, who herself had followed Priestley in the summer of 1983, making a series of six television programmes about her experiences, while writing her own (shorter, but just as opinionated) book, also called English Journey. It feels like I’ve wandered into a Cold War novel, following the spies, following the spies. Or, maybe, given Priestley’s preoccupation with Time – and his theory, loosely garnered from J. W. Dunne’s An Experiment with Time (and no doubt imperfectly understood by me) that all time is concurrent and interwoven and that we can never truly understand someone’s life until it has been lived in its entirety, because our younger selves feed into our older selves and also (mysteriously) vice versa – perhaps all of this is happening to all three of us at the very same moment, in an endless loop of reportage. Am I, right now, jostling for road space with the ghostly vehicles of Beryl B and Jackie P? And what about Birmingham itself? The city of eternal, restless reconstruction. How do we know that this place even is Birmingham? Or rather, is still Birmingham? Other than the plethora of ‘Welcome to Birmingham’ signs of course. This is a slippery city, shifting, unfixed, no matter how often you visit (the more often you visit), and it has never once managed to put an end to an obsessive fidgeting with its own buildings, public spaces and concrete vistas.

  Priestley came in by coach from Coventry. He was thirty-eight years old and already a world-famous author, launched into literary celebrity by the immense success of his fourth novel, The Good Companions (1929). Even in 1933, he considered himself middle-aged and in public he affected a bluff, grumbling, pipe-smoking demeanour, although he’d go on to live to the ripe (and grumbling) old age of eighty-nine. ‘I have always been a grumbler’, he wrote in the Preface to his book Delight, ‘for I have a sagging face, a weighty underlip, what I am told is “a saurian eye”, and a rumbling but resonant voice from which it is difficult to escape.’ He said it was his Bradford upbringing. ‘To a good West Riding type there is something shameful about praise, that soft Southern trick. But fault-finding and blame are constant and hearty.’ He liked to tease, did Jack. At a time of international economic meltdown, he was now living with his second wife, Jane, and five children, in a large family home in Highgate, London, as well as a seventeenth-century manor house in the lush and easy lowlands of the Isle of Wight. The golden proceeds from The Good Companions really had been good to him, but Jack was restless and anxious to shake off the too-cosy cobwebs and go and see what was happening to his beloved land. Especially the Midlands and the North. He was suspicious of places that didn’t make anything proper.

  Grumbling away – about the lying manufacturers who’d oversold his razor (when he was so looking forward to his morning shave), and the huge new gaudy pubs on the Coventry road, and the extreme discomfort of the overcrowded coach – he looked up and found himself staring at the passing houses and shops and factories of outer Birmingham. ‘Did all this look like the entrance into the second city in England? It did. It looked like a dirty muddle.’ Beryl was just as dismissive. But in fact, as I come racing over the flyways looking for an exit, with the lorries howling from either side, and the damp concrete crash barriers framing a whirling flash-past of shiny new towers, vast hoardings and broken-backed warehouses, I find myself thinking: well, this isn’t so bad. It may be because I know Birmingham (that is, I know it well enough to get off these roads as fast as possible), but it is also true that there is no longer anything uniquely distressing about what you’ll see here. Where once Birmingham was a byword for urban dysfunction, with Spaghetti Junction and the Bullring its crowning glories, the hectic descent into its city centre doesn’t even seem especially out of the ordinary. It could be the effects of shifting baseline syndrome (this is the city that J. R. R. Tolkien reimagined as Mordor in The Lord of the Rings, grinding up the surrounding orchards and fields and his own childhood hobbity home). Or maybe some of the improvements are finally starting to pay off. The fact is, there is nothing unusually ugly about any of this.

  Jack was staying in the Midland Hotel and a young, unemployed man carried his bags there from the coach station. As usual, Jack had managed to coax the man’s life story out of him (when in the mood, which was often – Jolly Jack! – he was interested in everyone and everything, and he oozed empathy). The young man was twenty-two and had been out of work since he was sixteen, his mother was dead, and his father was also jobless. And at the hotel, Jack tells us, the porter spoke to this victim of an unwelcoming world ‘in a fashion that most of us would hesitate to adopt in talking to a mongrel’.

  Beryl, after a grim night in an unnamed, squalid hotel, where she ate an evening meal of pie and chips on a tray in the front lobby, had been checked into the Holiday Inn by her TV crew. And I am staying at the Holiday Inn Express, which is infinitely slicker and cleaner and altogether more airless than anything Jack and Beryl could have booked or ever indeed desired. Where would they even have smoked? Jack had his favourite pipes (hundreds of them), and his noxious tobacco, the occasional cigar, the soft packs of filterless tabs. Beryl announced that she should have been sponsored by Silk Cut given the amount of chain-smoking airtime she had given them in the making of the TV series. (And it’s true – just watch – it’s another world of cigarettes in pubs, cafés, restaurants, town halls, trains, shops, homes and hospitals; and rasping interviews as the smoke billows and blooms.) Neither of them could work or live without tobacco. In fact, it is then, as I ponder their unabashed addictions, and stare out through the soundproofed windows on the fifteenth floor of the Holiday Inn (Express) at a silent grey cityscape of cranes and car
parks, canals and wet alleys, that I succumb to an unanswerable urge to hurry out and buy my own first pack of cigarettes for twenty-seven years. To be clear, I blame Jack and Beryl for this bittersweet relapse – not Birmingham.

  Down in Birmingham city centre, Jack is of the firm opinion (all his opinions are firm) that ‘so long as you keep within a very narrow limit in the centre, Colmore Row, New Street, Corporation Street, Birmingham has quite a metropolitan air … here in Colmore Row you could imagine yourself in the second city of England’. On this particular day I am going to have to narrow down his definition even further, because the view he raves about – from Victoria Square, with Hill Street ‘mistily falling away beneath the bridge that the Post Office has thrown high across the road’ – is currently blocked by yet more huge hoardings, with an exquisitely rendered architectural drawing of a forthcoming paradise on the other side. I sit (and smoke) on a low wall in the centre of the square, with my back to a lush outpouring of ornamental grasses and yuccas, and admire the sturdy civic confidence of the Town Hall and the city’s Museum & Art Gallery. Jack spent a long time in the gallery, hiding from the disappointing streets, admiring the early English way with watercolours. He felt that these painters must have been ‘the happiest set of men who ever lived in this country’, wandering our lovely land in the years before it was dug up and defiled. What a baggage of lost Arcadias we all carry with us.