Lorna Sage - Bad Blood - A Memoir

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.