Home on the Island

I’ve hardly mentioned my mother in the recent narrative. Perhaps in Powys House she felt a ghostly presence of his first wife E. (he would often speak of her but never using her name Edith). E. had fled with their children and the lodger two years previously and as I described in my last, the vacuum had been filled by a fraternity of engineers, casual in their habits. Some indeed were engineering students on sandwich courses, ready to rough it a little in return for adult freedom. Together, they had been languishing like Peter Pan and the Lost Boys before Wendy showed up. My mother was no Wendy but responded to the challenge in her own way.

We moved up to some rooms at the top of the house. Here they established a private sitting-room where in the evenings they played romantic music on the radiogram, as daylight slowly faded. Last night I listened again to Puccini’s La Bohème. I don’t know of anything from rock, classical or “World Roots”, which bursts into life with more exciting energy than the opening of this opera: “Questo mar rosso Mi ammollisce e assidera . . .” The orchestra is so impatient to take us there, straight to the middle of things. So it is with this narrative.

The music in its creative passion united three souls, whose faces became indistinct as twilight advanced in that upstairs room. where my parents (mother and stepfather) clung to their honeymoon feelings. To prolong those emotions, they played La Bohème night after night. Was it the music or the joy in discovering a family at last, that kept me spellbound in that room?

Amongst the treasures of the basement, I had found a pile of comics: The Eagle. It was a complete set from the very first edition in 1950: at least a hundred issues. With Puccini coming through my ears and Dan Dare, Pilot of the Future, absorbed through my eyes, I concentrated with hungry intensity and got through the pile of comics very fast, reading for hours at a time in the gloom. They didn’t want to spoil the atmosphere by turning on the light. My mother, who had specialist treatment for her own eyes as a child, and poor sight as an adult, was always exhorting “don’t spoil your eyes”, as if eyesight ran on batteries that could never be replaced.

This was as near as she got to maternal concern. Blackett gave me a bicycle around this time, a battered old thing with springs sticking through the saddle and brakes that fell off when applied. When I fixed it up as best I could, my mother endlessly repeated her story of poor cousin Jack, her playmate who at ten years old had fallen off a bicycle, landed on his head and died. For this reason I must not ride a bike: it made her worry. I was not prepared to make that sacrifice. Instead I used to sneak off without her knowledge, staying out as long as I dared. Once down a winding country lane I was nearly killed. A man driving the other way stopped and told me so, quite upset. My mother never got to hear of it, fortunately.

Back to the comics, though. A boy in my class, David Best, asked to borrow them and in the spirit of friendship I lent him the lot: never to see them again. Ah well. Things of worldly value have always slipped through my fingers.