Richard Gordon - THE INVISIBLE VICTORY

My father was Sir Edward Tiplady's butler, my mother his cook. For all I know today, there are biochemists and even professors like myself who are the sons of butlers and barmen, dustmen and dog-catchers. But the educated persons of the 1930s were socially more sensitive, and the middle classes suffered a particularly painful neurosis about those who emerged to join them from 'below stairs', whose next intention was suspected as murdering them in their beds. Largely for these reasons I had been unable to find work in my own country and had gone to seek it in Hitler's Germany

It was early evening on Monday, January 1, 1934, exactly a year after I started at the Red Crown Brewery. I had been home a week, and ached to be back with the Dieffenbachs. Surroundings which the kindly eye of familiarity had once blurred now struck me as starkly squalid. There was the same black kettle forever simmering on the black grate, the high barred window like a cell's looking on an 'area' beside the holystoned front steps, through which I would watch for hours the passing women's calves in Harley Street. I had not seen the rest of my country since returning, as it had stayed aloof behind the worst fog in memory.

'This here Hitler,' said my father. 'Strikes me more like Charlie Chaplin than anything.'

'Don't be misled by the moustache. A lot of people in Germany are very frightened of him, you can take it from me.'

'Go on.' He seemed puzzled. 'I reckon he's leading the Jerries by the nose.'

'On the contrary, more and more Germans are supporting him. Because he's successful, which you must admit is unusual with most politicians in Europe at the moment.'

My father was a cheerful, sardonic Cockney with curly sandy hair gone grey, ostentatious false teeth and terrible feet which had saved his life in the Army by keeping him out of the trenches. He was a servant always ready for a quick draw of a cigarette behind the door, or a quick swig from a forgotten glass. I inherited from him a self-confidence and realism which allowed me to climb in the world with neither humility nor pride, which are equally self-accusatory in the successful man. He was wearing a brown Norfolk jacket-also second-hand-because we were having tea. Proper tea, high tea at six o'clock with kippers my mother had fried in the huge basement kitchen, bread and raspberry jam, bright yellow cake from Lyons with coconut icing which stuck in your teeth and tea so strong it looked like liquid leather.

'I don't hold with Jerries,' my father concluded sweepingly.

'There's good and bad ones, like good and bad Englishmen, and I suppose good and bad Zulus.'

This confused my mother that there were Zulus in Germany, but I had long ago overridden any irritation at these bizarre conversations with my parents. She was not the traditional jolly, plump, floury-armed governess of the kitchen, but thin, tense, severe and silent, her dark clothes always neat, her long greasy black hair always tucked away in a linen cap. She was ten years younger than my father, and like many serious-minded people of shallow intelligence found intense satisfaction in religion. From her I inherited my orderliness and purposefulness, and by some microscopic genetic twist my brains.

'Mind you,' my father continued emphatically, 'even Hitler can't be that barmy he'd start another war. Not after the last little dust up.'

'In Germany you'd sometimes think the next war had started already.'

'Nah, they ain't got no Army, not to speak of.'

'There're men always on the march, even if they're only off to the Reich Labour Service camps and armed only with beautifully polished picks and shovels. There're always parades, bands, banners inciting everyone to be patriotic, to put their country before absolutely everything, even friends, families, husbands and wives.' My father looked unbelieving. 'Hitler will bring back conscription soon, it's inevitable. He's got the raw material for his Army half-cooked already.'

'I pray there won't be another war,' said my mother solemnly. 'I couldn't face it all again, that's for sure. It was bad enough, bringing you up with your dad in the Army and the casualties and the Zeppelins. And the flu,' she added. 'And that's not even to think of what they did to our Bertie.'

Our only decoration in the basement was our shrine, a photograph of my Uncle Albert with jaunty, spiky moustache, in khaki and twinkling brass. It shared a frame with a sheet of printed buff foolscap, with inked details like a notification of lost property, by which the War Office informed us that 5655 Private A Elgar of the City Regiment had been killed in action. It was headed CASUALTIES FORM LETTER and ended curtly in print, _I am to express the sympathy of the Army Council with the soldier's relatives_ over some distant Civil Servant's signature. We working class were of as little consequence dead as alive. Nobody even bothered advertising to us, other than cigarettes, beer and patent medicines. It was the society of master and man, officer and private, the vigorous, acquisitive, voluptuous, cruel society of the Edwardians. A society too thrustful, successful and self-confident to fall a casualty of the Great War, and was simply demobilized to become the Gay Twenties. It saw Britain through World War II, and when Mr Harold Macmillan stopped his artificial respiration in 1963 was found to have been dead for several years.

'I wouldn't let Jim go for a soldier, that's straight, not after what he's made of himself.' My father looked at me proudly, a self-indulgence he seldom allowed. 'But if you asks me, Hitler's just having us on. He ain't got no money, you see.'

'Can I have another cup of tea, please?' The fourth occupant of our table held across her large slightly chipped cup. She was Rosie, the new nineteen-year-old housemaid, who completed the household staff with Mrs Emerald the daily char and Holdsworth the chauffeur who lived out, and was anyway away with the Daimler. The Tipladys were enjoying their Christmas holiday in some huge mansion whose windows glittered across muddy, misty English fields like their hostess across the difficult terrain of London society.

I was naturally interested in Rosie, snub-nosed and bright cheeked, sharp and pert, neat waisted, promisingly plump above and below. She slept in the attic, five floors above my basement cubicle which was half-filled with chemistry books. All week she had been trying perplexedly to make me out. I was obviously a gentleman, but I mucked in with the servants. It was a contradiction beyond her grasp, an outrage to established order, like a millionaire in prison. But when I chatted to her for ten minutes or so I became depressed and disgusted. An ill-lettered housemaid was dross after a German schoolmistress. My passion for Gerda had burnt almost unfelt, like a low fever, but had flared painfully with a change of environment.

Rosie's bewilderment itself underlined my strange, uncomfortable position in the Tiplady's house. I was the frog which had turned into a prince. An extremely awkward transformation in England, where no former frog could possibly be asked to dinner.

After tea, Rosie had to air the beds, because the Tipladys were expected on the morrow. At six thirty on the following evening, my father brought me a summons to ascend past that resented green baize door, which separated our two families like the water-tight bulkheads between First Class and Steerage on the transatlantic liners. I found the first-floor drawing-room empty. I stood where I had often stood before, by the heavy brass fender which caged a display of well-polished fire-irons, the coals in the carved marble fireplace flickering a vigorous yellow, freshly made up for the evening by Rosie. It was a square room, with three tall windows looking on Harley Street, the ceiling moulded and picked out in gold, the gold-green wallpaper striped and silken, the curtains matching precisely. The furniture was antique and over-plentiful. There were two good pictures, a Stubbs of well-nourished groom holding well-nourished horse, and a William Blake God, sinewy and sea green.