Читать книгу Bad Blood: A Memoir - Lorna Sage, Lorna Sage - Страница 10

There is no doubt that Grandma preserved Grandpa’s diaries for 1933 and 1934 as evidence against him. Indeed, the 1933 diary has a couple of scathing marginal comments in her hand – Here the fun begins (Friday, 25 August) and Love begins (fool) exactly a week later. If he refused to produce the cash that lined her luggage, paid for her outings to the cinema and her teatime meringues at the Kardomah, and fed the National Savings account she eventually put in my name in case some man got hold of it when she died, then she would take the damning documents to the Bishop, threaten scandal and divorce, and lose him even the rotten living he had.

Reading these diaries turned out to be a bit like eavesdropping on the beginnings of my world. 1933 was the year the grandparents arrived in Hanmer from South Wales. This was how the Hanmer I grew up in had been created – how life in the vicarage got its Gothic savour, how we became so isolated from respectability, how the money started not to make sense and (above all) how my grandfather took on the character of theatrical martyrdom that set him apart. 1933, he did not fail to note, was the nineteen-hundredth anniversary of Christ’s Passion: ‘This is the Crucifixion Year AD 0–33, 1900–1933. A Holy Year.’ He wasn’t thiry-three himself, but forty-one and fearful, before he was offered this new, sprawling country parish in the north, that his career in the Church of Wales had ground to a shaming standstill. He’d been twelve years in the same place. ‘Here we are at the end of winter time,’ he writes on 8 April, on Saturday night, doing some spiritual stock-taking and already assuming his Sunday style, ‘and I am still at St Cynon’s. O God give me a little chance now at last. Thy will be done.’ But the South Wales parish he was after at the time, Pencoed, went to someone else the very next Thursday and the day after that, Good Friday, he is making the most of his misery, preaching on the theme, ‘Who will roll away the stone …?’

It isn’t until later in Easter Week that he learns – or at least confides to his diary – the full extent of his humiliation: ‘They have really cast me aside in favour of a young fellow who has only been ordained since 1924. Well this is the limit. What on earth am I to do now? No hope and no chance.’

But he has learned to live with hopelessness, that’s the worst of it. He fritters away his time and turns his back on the drama of rejection. The great shock of opening this compromising little book, for me, was that for the first half – with the exception of the few desperate and frustrated cris de coeur I’ve culled – it was the record of a pottering, Pooterish, almost farcically domesticated life. The sinner I was expecting was guilty of pride, lust and spiritual despair, not merely of sloth and ineptitude. This was the diary of a nobody. So I nearly censored January to June 1933 in the interests of Grandpa’s glamour as a Gothic personage. But in truth this is what we should be exposed to – the awful knowledge that when they’re not breaking the commandments, the anti-heroes are mending their tobacco pipes and listening to the wireless.

He had been ‘jolly miserable’ (that middle-class oxymoron!) during those last stagnant months in South Wales. You could do nearly nothing in the Church of Wales and get away with it, no one took official notice, a vicar was a gentleman after all. Chapel would have been different, much more a matter of openly devout busybody closeness with the congregation, but he managed to nurture his depression in private. He’d surface late from sleep or sulks, affronted by the weather: ‘It is a terrible trial to get up in these very cold mornings’ – and light the fire in the study. Or that was his plan. Often things went wrong, as he expected: ‘Lit a fire in the study but heaps of soot fell down and put it out,’ he reports, as late on as 6 May. ‘Could not get on with my sermon at all today. An aeroplane overhead at teatime …’ It’s uncharacteristic of him to notice what’s going on outside, he is so fed up with his surroundings (his parish, his prison). But perhaps the plane flew past his defences because it belonged to the skyey regions of the weather, which he regularly records as a mirror or a foil to his moods. He’s good at the rhetoric of the barometer: with freezing rain comes the pathetic fallacy, sunshine equals irony, with the snow everything grinds gratifyingly to a halt.

Also, the aeroplane was new and a machine, like his addiction, the wireless. With his ear to the speaker he takes to the airwaves himself and communes with the wide world so intimately it seems inside his head. ‘Toothache,’ says one entry, ‘Earthquake in Japan.’ Hitler comes to power in Germany (31 January), Roosevelt’s oath-taking is relayed (4 March). Grandpa registers the facts, but doesn’t comment, he’s more interested in the quality of reception he’s getting on short wave, the placing of the aerial and whether to buy a Pye or a Murphy. He tries each out on approval, squeezes in little drawings of the rival sets on the page and after some enjoyable dithering – ‘Spent the whole of the day trying to decide between the Pye and the Murphy’ – splashes out £17.17s.0d on the Pye, ‘bought … outright’.

This is hugely extravagant, the better part of a month’s pay (his stipend was £73.4s.4d per quarter), but he owes it to himself, since listening in and twiddling the knobs is what makes his idleness and boredom feel busy. He sees few people, even on the Almighty’s business. He boycotts the meetings of the Rural Dean and Chapter (‘lost any desire to meet the clergy of the Rhondda – they are all such a lot of place-seekers’) and records punctually and with a kind of glum relish the lousy church attendances in harsh weather: ‘Got up for H[oly] C[ommunion]. No one at HC.’ The wireless, by contrast, is a friendly presence. ‘Spent the whole of the afternoon tinkering with my old wireless set in the study,’ reads an almost happy entry long after he has acquired the superior Pye. The hums and crackles and cosmic whistles of interference probably served nearly as well as the programmes to provide him with a private cocoon of distraction. He does read of course as well, and in the same impatient spirit, science fiction stories about other worlds for preference. On 17 January, for instance, ‘the Radio programme is very monotonous and dull. Took up Conan Doyle’s Lost World and read it right through.’ He is an accomplished mental traveller. In March he actually spends a day or two pretending to have been called away, in order to escape parish business – ‘Am supposed to be away from home today. Stayed in and did some reading … Lit a fire in the study and sat there all day reading Jules Verne’s Journey into the Centre of the Earth …’ Sometimes he sat in the kitchen instead, sometimes he complains of a headache rather than a toothache. On his official evening off he would sit in the study and watch people going to church.

He had his smokescreen too. He smoked a pipe. Or that was the theory. In practice he evolved his own extra rituals to make his habit more complicated and satisfying-because-unsatisfying. Fiddling with pipe-cleaners and bowl scrapers didn’t suffice, partly because he hankered after cigarettes – although they woke up an ‘old pain’ in his chest – and partly because it hurt to grip a pipe-stem with those aching teeth. Anyway, he doesn’t just mess with pipe accessories, he goes further. In a sort of parody of a handyman, he whittles: ‘Shortened my pipe – the Peterson – and spoiled it,’ reads a terse entry in January. Was he chagrined? Probably not, although one can’t tell whether he has yet worked out his pipe plot. Does he know that what he really wants is (by accident of course) to spoil his pipe and thus make ‘work’, plus an opportunity to get back to cigarettes? In February he buys another Peterson (‘no. II’) and on Saturday, 22 April he experiments again and supplies a full rationalisation: ‘After I had dinner I turned my Peterson pipe into a cigarette holder as this is the more satisfactory way of smoking to me. The full weight of the pipe is too much for my teeth.’ In May: ‘am still on with the cigarettes but must go back to the pipe I think’. In fact, he buys a new nameless pipe the very next day, but immediately rejects it in disgust – ‘too rotten to smoke. A cheap pipe is useless.’ Whereas a dear one provides hours of pleasure and distraction for a bad-tempered bricoleur. On 15 May he buys another Peterson, ‘a Tulip-shaped Peterson No. 3’ this time, and manages to destroy it fairly fast: ‘Saturday May 27th. Broke my Peterson pipe. It seems I must keep to the cigarette holder.’ By Monday he records proudly in the diary that he has ‘finished turning the Peterson pipe into a cigarette holder’; and so gratifying is this that the week after he goes out and buys another ‘light’ pipe (3 June) and two days later turns that into a cigarette holder too. On 9 June he buys a Peterson No. 33 …

As his frustrations mount, the pattern of destructive tinkering speeds up to match, turning smoking into another pseudo-occupation to fill his seething sedentary hours and days. His sensibility is in perpetual motion – he’s self-absorbed and self-repelled at once, and the pottering alternates with bleak vistas of pointlessness. ‘Spent an unprofitable day feeling liverish and miserable’ (March). ‘Spent a useless sort of day in the study’ (April). Although he is always at home, wearing out the chairs with his bony behind, his family barely exist for him – except for my mother. And this was the second surprise of the South Wales part of the 1933 diary, that his teenage daughter Valma (she turned fifteen on 14 March) lives on the inside of his loneliness. She is his one human task, he has been tutoring her at home for a year (he records in May) and she figures in the same sorts of sentences as the wireless, the books and the pipes, where her presence suddenly populates the house – ‘Spent the morning and the afternoon taking Valma’s lessons. Came on to Latin at teatime’; ‘sat in house all this afternoon giving Valma her lessons’. He plans out schedules of study and sets her exams. She’s his go-between with the outside world, in more senses than one, for she also runs errands and posts letters.

It’s my mother who posts the letter asking for the Pencoed living, after he’s hesitated for days over committing himself, fearing to be snubbed (as he was). She is his hostage to fortune. She stands for a possible future. And the reason this was such a surprise to me was that she always led me to believe that she had never been close to him, and that he had never shared with her the bookish complicity I had with him when I was little. In my mother’s account of her growing up the Latin lessons and piano lessons (she was musical, like him and unlike me) had been erased without trace. Why? Why had she taken my grandmother’s side and when? The story that was about to unfold in Hanmer does explain, I fear, exactly why. But for the meantime she is his creature, as I became. He is distant and callous-sounding about his son Billy, who only attracts his notice when he plays truant from school and is duly beaten for it. And already there is (to put it mildly) no love lost between him and my grandmother. She must have been very ill that freezing winter of 1932–3, because he notes in his diary for Wednesday, 5 April: ‘Hilda went out for the first time since Christmas.’ But that’s not all. He only names her to record her absences. She goes out a lot as soon as she’s able, often back to her real home at Hereford Stores, leaving him to stew in his own juice. The diary simmers on: ‘Well here is injustice if you like. I believe we have got a lot of madmen in authority in this diocese … I pray that this may be my last Easter at St Cynon’s.’

And out of the blue his prayers were answered, when he least expected it. The resurrection of his ambitions and energies was only weeks away. It’s on 13 June that the long winter of discontent finally melts into spring – ‘At last the day of hope has dawned. The Bishop has written to ask me to come and see him about the living of HANMER with TALLARN GREEN.’ And he breaks out the green ink to celebrate. After this things move very fast. He travels north by train to visit Hanmer on 25 June, inspects the vicarage two days later (‘a nice old place and I can’t imagine myself in it’) and accepts the living on 3 July, so that on Friday, 28 July he’s able to read the announcement of his appointment in the Church Times, which makes it real – ‘O father at last I see the fruition of my desires …’ – and within weeks the fun began, as we know.

Everything is suddenly on the move, unfixed, the old landmarks of his depression left behind in the Rhondda – along with his wife and son and Valma too, for the moment, since the vicarage in Hanmer is to be cleaned and refurbished a bit, and in any case they need time to pack up. All at once he’s alone in this new place (‘a lovely spot’) where people don’t know him from Adam. Mobility. Freedom of a kind. He must take up his duties immediately, now that the old Canon, long ailing, has finally admitted defeat and been persuaded to go. His two churches are three miles apart down shaggy, meandering country roads blistered with cow pats and hemmed in by weedy ditches. He acquires a bicycle, and finds himself walking it up gentle hills (no mountains here) and freewheeling down again on the other side. The diary shows him threading his way along a necklace of new place-names – Bangor-on-Dee, Wrexham, Ellesmere, Horseman’s Green, Eglwys Cross, Bronington, Bettisfield, Whitchurch – marking out a map on which, more and more often, his path crosses that of the district nurse, Nurse Burgess, who of course has a bicycle too …

Just days before, ironically enough, he is all prepared to be lonely and bored. ‘Hanmer is very quiet,’ he notes ominously, ‘very … Time hangs somewhat on my hands in this place.’ Then the new bike arrives. There’s an August heatwave, the kids are swimming in the mere just as we would twenty years on (except that in 1933 it’s only the boys) and on the very day he admits to taking his first ride with the nurse (‘Here the fun begins’) they are both summoned to the mereside in their professional capacities, because one of the young men has drowned. It’s the beginning of a tragic sub-plot that keeps up a kind of background thrumming for months to come: drowned Jack is Molly’s young man, bereaved Molly comes to work in the vicarage as a maid, loses her mind, Nurse Burgess tries to get her put away and so forth. For now, though, Jack’s death is the main, telling event, a focus for feeling. It permeates the humid atmosphere and puts paid to any illusion of serenity. His body doesn’t surface for three days and the whole of Hanmer keeps a vigil, people standing in hot huddles talking under their breath, gazing at the innocent flat water only dimpled with fish taking flies. He was a strong swimmer, too, so there’s a niggling element of mystery about his death: cramp, or weed, or cold currents must have got him and it’s true – was still true twenty years later – that sometimes when the water near the edge was soupy warm you’d suddenly find your legs entwined with chill streams snaking in under the lily pads, just before the bottom shelved right away.

Grandpa was swiftly out of his depth as well, but he was having a marvellous time and only noticed how far he’d gone when his family actually turned up. Out of his depth, and in his element. He and Nurse Burgess, now MB for short in the diary, pedal to paradise every day of the week, including Sunday. Trailing a cloud of midges, they’d hump their bikes off the road, through some muddy gateway and, behind the hedge, hug and knead each other among the mallows and Queen Anne’s lace and nettles dusty with pollen. Perhaps they spread his tobacco-scented black cassock on the ground to protect them from ants and the crawling wasps drunk on crab apples. Or more likely they’d keep their uniforms on and each get to know the other’s body in bits. He is lean and wiry, MB in her starched blue linen is substantial but not yet stout, well muscled because of all the exercise she gets, her arms mottled pink and white from soap and sun. She has a midwife’s hands. His fingers are inky and curve to caress an imaginary pipe bowl, or a preacher’s palmful of air, and – now – the generous breast where her watch ticks away. It’s nearly always afternoon, they are supposed to be out to tea, strawberry jam and fruit cake, and so they are, so they are. Cattle watch incuriously, sidling towards the gate, ready to herd along the lane for milking. And they wrestle each other into submission, and relax a long moment, listening with half an ear to the trickling ditch the other side of the hedge, where duty calls. Although it’s hard to hear the summons for the rooks and wood pigeons.

So I imagine them celebrating in advance their private Harvest Festival, the event in the church calendar that strikes the richest chord in this pagan place, as he’ll discover. ‘We plough the fields and sca-a-a-tter / The good seed on the land.’ Was that how they managed contraception – coitus interruptus, aggravating the sin of adultery? Deliberate infertility, the luxurious, forbidden pleasure of taking pleasure by itself, must have spiced their lovemaking. Theirs was a feast of blissful barrenness. MB may well have used a sponge and a spermicidal douche. A nurse, being a professional spinster, was assumed to know about these things; and in any case all nurses had lost their conventional aura of feminine innocence – their collective moral virginity – because of their intimacy with other people’s bodies. They administered enemas and sponged the sick, and washed the dead and laid them out and plugged their orifices. They helped other women’s babies into the world. At the same time, since a nurse couldn’t keep her job and marry, she was a bit like a nun – a nun in a salacious story.

Nurses were suggestive. And so, for slightly different reasons, were priests of the Church of England, who could and did marry. Grandpa had the shamanistic glamour associated with the magical ability to transform the bread and wine, of course, and he combined it with licensed access to other people’s private spiritual parts. He officiated at a distance in church, but also close to, at home. He talked with women, and with the aged and the sick, during the day when other (real) men were out at work. An Anglican vicar was, in terms of cultural fiction, a eunuch of sorts. Yet everyone knew that actually he wasn’t vowed to celibacy, hence the comic naughtiness associated with his situation, too. Perhaps that is why it’s inviting to picture this love affair – the Vicar and the Nurse – in the style of a Hogarth etching of carnival appetite on the rampage. Flesh triumphs over Spirit. An allegory of hypocrisy. The holier (or in MB’s case, certainly cleaner) than thou rutting away in the ripe season, no purer than the peasants to whom they preached hygiene and holiness.

Peering down the years, a voyeur through that dense bramble hedge, it’s hard to see them except in outline, etched in archetypal postures. But why not remake them out of Arcimboldo fruit and veg, since it’s a less moralising transformation? O father, at last I see the fruition of my desires, in apple cheeks, cabbage curls and a damson mouth.

On 31 August he pauses for a second to count his blessings: ‘The end of a wonderful month for me. Thanks be to God.’ A couple of days later he foresees possible ‘complications’ with MB, but for now he’s so happy he steps right out of character and simply refuses to brood. He has to admit to having a good time: ‘Well I must take life as I find it and make the best of every circumstance,’ he writes, for all the world like a saintly stoic accepting the delights the Lord has seen fit to pelt him with.

He makes a brief return trip to South Wales, where Hilda and the children are staying at Hereford Stores, packed up to leave. While he’s there he sneaks some vertiginous glimpses of his hated old parish – ‘went for a walk over the Coronation Hill within sight of the parish of Ynyscynon’ – before travelling back north on his own, to be met in Wrexham by MB. Then, on 13 September, the family ARRIVE IN HANMER in capital letters. Hilda has brought her beloved sister Katie along to help and to soften the blow of leaving the Rhondda, but this doesn’t prevent her from being ‘very down in the mouth’ at her first sniff of country air. ‘She is utterly miserable this evening,’ he tells the diary. The next day she is no better (‘terribly miserable’) and the day after that he sends them off to go shopping in Whitchurch, the nearest town, six miles away, with the same result – ‘Hilda again miserable.’ On Saturday, taking stock, he finds his own secret sense of well-being wearing a bit thin: ‘Am not feeling very well again. This is due to the pressure of moving and Hilda’s lack of spirit.’ He seems to feel, rather unreasonably, that she should be sharing in his elation, sympathising with the revolution in his feelings. ‘I have to bear everyone’s burdens and my own,’ the entry ends, with a surge of self-pity.

Of course, Grandma didn’t yet know about MB. Once on the bicycle, on the byways of the parish, he was off her mental map. And in any case from Hilda’s point of view MB was only one of a set of local ladies who had taken doting possession of their new vicar during his first lone weeks. Chief among them was widowed Lady Kenyon, who was (it turns out) the real head of the Hanmer community, and outshone the eponymous Hanmers in both rank and wealth. The diary records that he was frequently chauffeured around in her car, and that he was regularly invited up to Gredington, the comfortable Kenyon pile, for tea and for dinner tête-à-tête. Then there’s Miss Crewe – the headmistress of the parish school – and her friend Miss Kitchin, who ran the bakery and doubled as the church organist. Miss Crewe, too, owned a car, which Miss Kitchin drove, and they gave him lifts to Chester, Shrewsbury, Oswestry and so on, and more invitations to tea. He was, it seems, God’s gift to all the grander single women of the parish. It must quickly have become apparent to these new female friends that he and Hilda were a most ill-matched and disaffected couple. She hadn’t the health, inclination or the social background to play the role of the vicar’s wife. And this unhappy fact must have added to his air of availability for them all, and particularly for MB.

She called shortly after the family’s arrival and walked Hilda to the church ‘for the first time’ (as the diary records, possibly with irony). Instead of cooling down, their affair intensifies: ‘Went to Tallarn Green … met MB. A lovely day altogether’ (19 September). He is hardly ever in his new vicarage and often eats supper or goes to play cards with the people at the lodgings he stayed in when he first arrived in the village, where MB often drops by, too. And very soon this family – the Watsons, who keep the shop – are in on the secret. As the autumn closes in, and the weather gets wet and foggy, his double life keeps him idyllically busy. Official parish duties even promise fun, too: ‘Went to the meeting at the Parish Hall for entertainments … there will be quite a lot to do at Hanmer as time goes on.’ Although the pace occasionally gets hard to sustain, it seems, for on Saturday, 7 October he reverts to the old ploy of hiding in his study and pretending he’s elsewhere: ‘Decided to be away all day so as to have a quiet day.’

It’s the day the clocks go back. He finds himself pausing for reflection and – for the first time – misgivings. Has he been led down the garden path? ‘Thank thee O God for hearing my prayer to get a removal from Llwynypia. But I wish I could have removed to some other parish in S. Wales instead of coming up to the north.’ Or perhaps he isn’t as smitten as he first thought, for the entry ends enigmatically, ‘My heart is in the south.’ But the very next day he goes to the Watsons after evensong, where he meets MB and ‘stays late’. There’s a gratifyingly ‘huge crowd’ at church for Harvest Festival a week later and he’s able to rest on his laurels, since MB is going away for a short holiday. And then, suddenly, just as he relaxes, there comes a stroke of fate that whisks away the very means of his freedom.

In other words, he had an accident on the bike. He was speeding alone down the dark lanes between services when he came a cropper – ‘tore the cartilage of my leg. Laid up at Pritchards’ farm. Dr McColl set my leg and brought me home,’ he writes, staccato style with clenched teeth: immobilised, grounded, trapped in the vicarage. That dawns on him gradually. By Wednesday the leg ‘is far from getting right’, on Thursday the doctor calls and tells him he won’t be fit for his duties on Sunday and things start to look serious. Lady Kenyon sends a pair of crutches. And MB, who is after all the district nurse, returns from her holiday to find him in the new position of patient – flat on his back.

She knows just what to do. She bustles into the vicarage armed with her professional innocence. Now their assignations take place in his bedroom. On 1 November she calls and stays till midnight. ‘Am feeling very tired,’ he tells the diary before falling asleep. MB is tenderly solicitous. She gives him a ‘dental pipe’ as a present, plus tobacco, and a walking stick ‘for me to get about’. Except that she doesn’t seem to be leaving him much time or energy for hobbling out of the house. The diary is dominated by her home visits. After about ten days, when the level of intensive care must have been starting to look a bit excessive, a new and magical word turns up: massage. The leg is on the mend, but needs daily massage. Bliss, you might think, to be in her capable hands. The accident has turned out to be a blessing in disguise, now that the weather is foul and the nights are drawing in.

But reading between the lines – which are getting pretty repetitious, there’s massage and more massage – he’s not altogether enjoying this domesticated transgression. For instance, there is an interesting double-take in the entry for 16 November: ‘The nurse (MB) came in the morning and gave me another massage.’ On the eighteenth he’s ‘rather depressed … shall be glad when my leg is well enough to get about’. On the twenty-third the massage leads to ‘a long serious talk with MB all the morning’. On the twenty-fifth he strikes a querulous note: ‘Have to be massaged in the afternoon’ (my italics, but his resentment, surely?). It’s not just the nights that are closing in. Perhaps in some perverse way it’s almost a relief when at last on 27 November Grandma, who has been distracted (presumably) by homesick dreams of the Rhondda, wakes up to what’s going on.

There’s a huge row. ‘Hilda in tantrums.’ No more massage sessions with MB. He goes to see the bone-setter at Church Stretton and the leg is soon cured. Not so the ache of passion. There are more long, serious talks (‘It is a very miserable position for MB’) and more rows with Hilda – ‘Heart-breaking in this country silence,’ he says, suddenly, dazedly, missing the background hum of traffic, the life of noise in South Wales. Still, he’s out and about again, and there has been a gratifying flurry of invitations, including one to the Hanmers’ house, Bettisfield Park, for late supper (leading to a ‘thumping’ hangover the next morning). He keeps away from the vicarage as much as possible and sees MB at the Watsons’, as he did before the accident. Things have changed, of course, the complications he dreaded have materialised. On 9 December he swears her a sinner’s oath on the Bible – promising to stay faithfully unfaithful. Thick fog blankets Hanmer and some days he is stuck at home. ‘Had to sit in the kitchen through perpetual bothering and misery,’ he writes on 19 December. ‘Don’t know what is going to come of this.’ Even when he contrives to stay out all hours, Grandma – already an insomniac – is quite capable of raging till dawn: ‘Spent a most awful night with Hilda again. Up the whole of this night and in deep misery about everything.’ He notes grimly that the Watsons have called the vet to put their dog out of its misery. He was no animal lover, obviously he envied the brute.

This misery was of an altogether different order from the old dull depression, however. This was live, vivid, mythic misery that marked the festive season with its own secret significance: ‘So the most notable Christmas of all has commenced.’ He was full of energy, absorbed and fascinated by the spectacle of his life. ‘How will all this end?’ he asked himself, clutching the edge of his seat. His feelings were volatile and contradictory. Certainly there were moments when he wanted to be free of MB. She had become a liability, another burden. And yet she still represented the lure of adventure. On 27 December he sent her a ‘letter of renunciation’ – ‘This is now the end.’ But the very next evening, when he went to church to collect his robes, ‘MB followed with a scene … a pathetic pleading night. I do not know what to make of all this. What a situation is now developing. Hilda begins her tantrums again about MB. So it goes on endlessly. Did not go to bed but remained in study all night long …’ As the year ends, and the diary too, he’s very attracted by the pull of an ending, but also by the opposite desire, for more intrigue, the plot to come. Rounding off 1933 he’s keeping his options open: ‘So ends a most memorable year for me. I have had the move I wished for to a lovely country church. Here I have met many most kind people. But I fear that the work will be too much for me. I have met MB too and therein hangs all the tale of the future. What will that be I wonder?? God knows since it is His doing that all this has come about. So then I commit the future to God.’ So MB was God’s idea.

She was not the whole story, for he had other projects. In the new year private drama had to share space in the new diary with the public kind. The parish entertainments committee that started meeting back in the autumn had generated a real show, his first Hanmer pantomime – and suddenly all the world’s a stage. He limbers up on New Year’s Day by doing a ‘turn’ himself in the parish hall, as part of a very amateur concert, a monologue as ‘Fagin in the Condemned Cell’. But for the panto he’s the prime mover – mostly from behind the scenes – recruiting the band, rehearsing the cast, and painting the scenery. The diary entries take on a surreal savour, when you remember the real-life drama he’s escaping from. Armed with bolts of cloth and cans of paint, he is levitating out of the rows and scenes to create in their midst scenes from another world, the innocent, archetypal land of Cinderella: ‘Got up this morning to start painting the scenery. Commenced with the woodland glade and got on well with it until 4.30 … sat in study thinking out a scene for the kitchen … finished scene 1 this morning. Put it out to dry this afternoon.’

He’s wonderfully well insulated from the raw real. Everything takes on an extra dimension of theatre, or to put it another way, bad faith. Thus he resolves to simplify his life and make a moral choice – ‘I must make up my mind what to do’ – but actually he is revelling in all the complications of indecision, the beauty of both/and: ‘So this is the end or is it the beginning of a new era for me.’ The personal plot thickens – Mrs Watson talks to him about MB, MB and Hilda row face to face … The village is a carnival of gossip. He is defiant and grandly outrageous. These days he and MB are meeting in the church, God’s safe house. It’s not the emotional logic of adultery that shapes events, though, but pantomime preparations. The show must go on – ‘a long and serious talk’ with MB gives way to ‘a good rehearsal’. He has finished the final ballroom backdrop (1 February) and is now hanging the whole sequence of scenes and painting the wings in situ in the parish hall. ‘Had a row with Hilda in the house during the day,’ he notes on 3 February. ‘After that went to the Hall and continued painting. MB brought me a cup of tea.’ He’s cutting it fine, for the first matinée is only four days away, but it’s a real labour of love. He is exercising his vocation to the full at last – the hard-working wizard making magic for the crowd.

He has started to turn into the Grandpa I remember – except that he has yet to taste the bitterness of being really found out. The pantomime was a triumph. He put on evening dress to conduct the orchestra, Sir Edward Hanmer publicly praised him from the stage and so – on the final night – did Lady Kenyon. So far, no one held his sin against him, MB was apparently a mere peccadillo compared with the major magic of Cinderella. Indeed, it looks as though people somehow felt it was all part of the show. He was having a love affair with the parish. No wonder he was suddenly forlorn and lonely when the curtain fell. His life was as much of a tangle as ever, but it struck him as banal. He remarked that time hung heavy on his hands – which is exactly the phrase he used just before he met MB. He was restless, impatient to affront the next phase of his fate. This time the cast would involve my mother (she hadn’t starred in the first panto, nor had he been paying her much attention) and this time things would go badly wrong, and he would fix the future.