Doris Lessing - Under My Skin

4th (Queen’s) Hussars – Cahir. On Friday the 21st ult. Serjt-Major J. McVeagh late of this regiment, now Yeoman Warder of the Tower, was presented by the officers of his late corps with a purse containing 20 guineas, a silver snuff box beautifully engraved, showing his former services. Few men have been more honoured for their good conduct than Serjt-Major McVeagh on leaving his regiment, then at the Curragh, a few months back, to take his new appointment after 24 years service. The non-commissioned officers and privates presented him with a splendid tea service with the following inscription: ‘To Hospital Serjt-Major John McVeagh, as a token of respect for his general kindness.’ During the Crimean War he was at all times with his regiment in the field, attending both sick and wounded, and for such distinguished conduct received a medal, with an annuity of £20, besides a Turkish and a Crimean one with 4 clasps.

His wife was Martha Snewin, and her father was a bootmaker. She was born in Kent. She travelled all around the country with her husband when he was an army recruiter. That is all we know about her. He saw to it the children had a good education. Their daughter Martha, who looked after him when his wife died, was left well provided-for, but she is one of the invisible women of history.

My grandfather John William was the youngest son. First he was a clerk in the Meteorological Office, and by 1881 he was a bank clerk. Then he became a bank manager, in the Barking Road, but he died in Blackheath. He bettered himself, house by house, as he moved, and this son of a common soldier married his second wife, Emily’s successor, in St George’s, Hanover Square. This stepmother was not, as I imagined – because of her elegant beaked face – Jewish, but was the daughter of a dissenting cleric, who later became a priest in the Anglican church. She came from a middle-class family. Her name was Maria Martyn. My mother described her, with dislike, as a typical stepmother, cold, dutiful and correct, unable to be loving or even affectionate with the three children. They preferred life downstairs with the servants for as long as it was allowed, but my mother and her brother John became snobbishly, not to say obsessively middle-class, while the third child, Muriel, married back into the working class. Although my mother kept tenuous contact with her, the father would have nothing to do with her. It was her mother coming out in her, the servants said.

So he was disappointed in both his daughters. When my mother decided to be a nurse, instead of going to university – John William was ambitious for her – she was similarly cut off from his approval. Until, that is, she did well, but it was too late, the bonds had snapped. Never, ever, did my mother speak of her father with affection. Respect, yes, and gratitude that he did well by her, for he made sure they were given everything proper for middle-class children. She went to a good school, and was taught music, where she did so well the examiners told her she could have a career as a concert pianist.

The chapter heading for my mother in this saga would be a sad one, and the older I get, the more sorrowful her life seems. She did not love her parents. My father did not love his. It took me years to take in that fact, perhaps because it was always a joke when he said he left home the moment he could and went off as far as possible from them, as a bank clerk in Luton.

My paternal great-grandfather, a James Tayler, appears in the 1851 census as a farmer with 130 acres, employing five men, at East Bergholt. He went in for melancholy and philosophical verse, which is perhaps why he was not successful. He married a Matilda Cornish. The Tayler family worked in various capacities in banks, were civil servants, minor literary figures, often farmers, all over Suffolk and Norfolk. During the migrations of the nineteenth century they went off to Australia and to Canada, where many live still. But my grandfather Alfred decided not to be a farmer. He was a bank clerk in Colchester. His wife was Caroline May Batley.

This was the woman my father disliked so much – his mother.

The picture he presented of his father, Alfred Tayler, was of a dreaming unambitious man who spent his spare time playing the organ in the village church, driving his ambitious wife mad with frustration. But by the time I heard this my father was also a dreaming unambitious man who drove his poor wife mad with frustration. And the fact was, my grandfather Alfred ended up as manager of the London County Westminster Bank, Huntingdon, but whether he went on playing the organ in the local church I do not know. When Caroline May died he at once married again, in the very same year, a woman much younger than he was, Marian Wolfe, thirty-seven to his seventy-four. She, too, was the daughter of a minister of religion.

Ministers of religion and bank managers, there they are, in the records on both sides of the family.

Caroline May Batley, my father’s mother, is almost as much of a shadow as poor Emily. The only pleasant thing my father remembered about her was that she cooked the delicious, if solid, food described by Mrs Beeton. The tale he told, and retold, and with relish shared by my mother, was how his mother came to the Royal Free Hospital to confront the newly engaged pair, both of them rather ill, to tell him that if he married that battleaxe Sister McVeagh he would always regret it. But I daresay Caroline May would have something to say for herself, if asked. It is probable she was related to Constable the painter. I like to think so.

My mother’s childhood and girlhood were spent doing well in everything, because she had to please her stern father. She excelled in school, she played hockey and tennis and lacrosse well, she bicycled, she went to the theatre and music hall and musical evenings. Her energy was phenomenal. And she read all kinds of advanced books, and was determined her children would not have the cold and arid upbringing she did. She studied Montessori and Ruskin, and H. G. Wells, particularly Joan and Peter, with its ridicule of how children were deformed by upbringing. She told me all her contemporaries read Joan and Peter and were determined to do better. Strange how once influential books disappear. Kipling’s ‘Baa, Baa, Black Sheep’ made her cry because of her own childhood.

Then she became a nurse, and had to live on the pay, which was so little she was often hungry and could not buy herself gloves and handkerchiefs or a nice blouse. The World War started, the first one, and my badly wounded father arrived in the ward where she was Sister McVeagh. He was there for over a year, and during that time her heart was well and truly broken, for the young doctor she loved and who loved her was drowned in a ship sunk by a torpedo.

While my mother was being an exemplary Victorian and then Edwardian girl, the pattern of a modern young woman, my father was enjoying a country childhood, for he spent every minute out of school (which he hated, unlike my mother, for she loved school where she did so well) with the farmers’ children around Colchester. His parents beat him – spare the rod, spoil the child – and until he died he would talk with horror about the Sundays, when there were two church services and Sunday school. He dreaded Sundays all week, and would not go near a church for years. Butler’s The Way of All Flesh – that was what his childhood was like, he said, but luckily he could always escape into the fields. He wanted to be a farmer, always, but the moment he left school put distance between himself and his parents, went into the bank, which he hated, but worked hard there, for people did work harder then than now, and above all, played hard. He loved every kind of sport, played cricket and billiards for his county, rode, and danced, walked miles to and from a dance in another village or town. If when my mother talked about her youth it sounded like Ann Veronica or the New Women of Shaw, my father’s reminiscences were like D. H. Lawrence in Sons and Lovers, or The White Peacock, young people in emotional and self-conscious literary friendships, improving themselves by talk and shared books. He used to say that from the moment he got away from his parents and was independent he had a wonderful time, he enjoyed every minute of it, no one could have had a better life than he had for ten years. He was twenty-eight when the war began. He was lucky twice, he said, once when he was sent out of the Trenches because of a bad appendix, thus missing the Battle of the Somme when all his company was killed, and then, having a shell land on his leg a couple of weeks before Passchendaele, when, again, no one was left of his company.