Voices From A Journal E-Book

Bill Naughton

• Herausgeber: The Lilliput Press
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 311

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Beschreibung

This is a writer's journal of his friendships, encounters and observations during the 1950s and 60s, describing relationships with Cork author Frank O'Connor, Patrick Kavanagh, Charles Cape (onetime governor of Strangeways Prison) and the remarkable Margaret Radford, baglady and acquaintance of Shaw, Lawrence and Ford Madox Ford, with her vivid experiences of the Great War. Peopled by the colourful characters met in his profession, Naughton also gives an intimate portrait of a marriage and the onset of death as he survives a coronary thrombosis. Limpid, candid and tellingly written, it delineates the struggles and triumphs of a migrant Irish writer living in the English provinces, with sharp insights into human behaviour.

Leseprobe

Voices from a Journal

BILL NAUGHTON

Foreword by Brendan Kennelly

THE LILLIPUT PRESS DUBLIN

For Erna, my dear wife

IsleofMan1990

Contents

Title Page

Dedication

Foreword by Brendan Kennelly

Introduction

Margaret Radford

Charles Cape

Street Singer

Frank Singleton

The Reject

Tum Howt fru’ Tum Fowt

Walter Greenwood

Jealousy

Julian Maclaren-Ross

Remorse

Mr and Mrs MacNeice

Film Critic

W.R. Rodgers

Ypres and After

Gerard Dillon

Inhumation

Patrick Kavanagh

Frank O’Connor

Washington

First Coronary Thrombosis

Copyright

Foreword

This is a supremely confident book. The confidence, calm and unwavering, stems from the fact that Bill Naughton is a committed listener to the voices of other people. He lets people speak: he replies when necessary, but he never interrupts. This is much rarer than one suspects. Most conversations do not enjoy an easy, fluent rhythm, since one party often tends to break in on the other because of some irrepressible sense of urgency to contribute to a point, to disagree with or elaborate on what the speaker is talking about. Bill Naughton has no such urge; or if he has, he disciplines it thoroughly.

His desire, he tells us in a contemplative introduction, was to write an ‘open and honest’ book. He has succeeded admirably. From the first page to the last, this is the intrepid journal of a writer with an unusual degree of control over his ego, his egotism. It’s as though he had obliterated all self-interest in order to make space for the voices and characters of many fascinating people, including Patrick Kavanagh, Cecil Day-Lewis, Walter Greenwood, Louis MacNeice, W.R. ‘Bertie’ Rodgers, Gerard Dillon and Frank O’Connor. He also tells us of Strageways Prison, of hangings and floggings; he writes of bereavement and jealousy; and he concludes this moving and humane book with an account of his first brush with death.

Despite the fact that, as I have said, Bill Naughton writes as if he had obliterated all self-interest, the curious thing is that, in spite of this self-obliteration (or is it because of it?), a passionate and precise sense of Bill Naughton’s humanity emerges. As I read through the book, I felt myself in the company of a warm-hearted, sharp-minded man with a deep respect for the dignity of others while also observing their peculiarities, flaws, and oddnesses. These chapters are like Rembrandt portraits; they present faces and tell stories. Yet they do not pass judgments. Let the man speak. Let the woman speak. Hear Patrick Kavanagh in London, Frank O’Connor in Dublin, Gerard Dillon in Belfast or Connemara. Listen to their voices. Then, if you wish, judge for yourself. Bill Naughton is too busy listening to be bothered with quick judgments. His book is beautifully natural. Which means, of course, that it is a polished work of art. It took Naughton many years to learn how to listen as he finally knew how to listen; and it took great skill, memory and patience to write the way he has written. VoicesfromaJournal will enchant readers in a unique, gripping manner because it has the authenticity of human voices warmly remembered and accurately recorded.

BRENDAN KENNELLY

Dublin,September2000

Voices froma Journal

Introduction

‘In Their Own Words’ might have been a more apt title for this volume, since mainly that is what it is – encounters with writers, poets and many others set down verbatim. It was during the 1950s that the writing down of dialogue became an obsession with me. I felt that the actual words spoken by a person were more revealing of character and temperament than any amount of description. Over years of practice I became skilled at recalling every word of fairly long conversations, and apart from writing the odd short story and play for television and radio, as a sort of sideline to keep the pot boiling, this was my sole preoccupation. It has always been a fixed habit of mine to follow my daemon or attendant spirit: it appears to prompt me in every word I write and without it I cannot write at all. The idea of some editor or agent suggesting to me what I should write seems almost unthinkable. Criticisms I am always grateful for, and indeed any kind of reaction, but prescriptions fall on deaf ears. Even what would have been a lucrative visit to Hollywood at a time when the money would have been handy, I refused at once, sensing it was off-course and would be unblest. When we were very short of money I wrote hack stories for newspapers, and real ones for the magazine Lilliput.

It chanced that one Sunday evening I went to a neighbour’s home to see a television play I had written for Independent Television – I have never owned a television set, and declined the offer of a free one. I became so incensed by the absurd changes the script editor had made that in a fit of pique I adapted it for the stage. It opened it the Mermaid Theatre with Bernard Miles in the lead, and was an instant success. (It seemed odd to me that I, who was thirty before I even saw a play, should at rehearsal be giving lines to actors to get on and go off stage, and much else.) A film, TheFamilyWay, was made of the first play; Alfie followed, and I had to give up my total devotion to keeping a journal – at a time when it appeared I had most material to write about.

Released from what I had felt to be a moral obligation, I knew I could never again summon that same application. It had demanded the most arduous discipline, a silencing of my own lively tongue, and a close attention to every single word of the person I happened to be with. To me it was as though a video tape had been set recording in my brain, and it seemed I could recreate the occasion, see the faces and hear the voices, and all I had to do was simply write down the exact words I had heard. I made it a bounden duty never to allow myself to write a sentence as recorded speech that I could not recall exactly. Although paraphrasing the dialogue was not allowed, a certain rewriting of the general text, and adding bits of talk that may have slipped my mind in the first recording, and making what was written hastily more clear and readable, seemed not only permissible but essential.

I learnt that I could hold in mind only so much at a time, however, and I had to store the dialogue in patches. To this end I devised various means of noting key moments: at home I would slip off to write down a few phrases, or pretend to make a note of some other matter, outside I would slip into a shop doorway – any dodge to allow me to get a certain patch fixed firmly in mind. After that I felt I could relax, knowing I had one part mapped out clearly, ready to refer to, and I would then go back and listen relentlessly. I missed some of the talk, of course, but that which I noted was perfectly set down.

Once the art of keeping a journal has been acquired – it takes years of practice to cultivate – there is no form of writing quite so satisfying, or so I believe. Certain principles need to be observed, and a basic one is that a journal must be absolutely open and honest. Surprisingly enough, honesty is no problem, for once one overcomes a natural hesitancy about writing plainly of even the most intimate happenings, the recording of Truth itself becomes the incentive. (Truth, I have learnt, cannot be put aside and picked up at will: It is a precious possession, which deserts the liar completely, and even the occasional fabricator loses touch with It. Of course I have in mind only the writing of a journal – in daily life I find a white lie is often required where the truth doesn’t quite fit.)

Although I had kept a diary on and off since I was a boy, it was only in my forties that I learnt what I take to be the proper recording of life. It was from one of the rare moments when I read over my own diary. I realized it is no use telling things by half – one must tell all. I was also to discover that in a journal what others did and said was far more interesting and revealing than what I thought. Thoughts and feelings, no matter how large they may loom in the mind and heart of the diarist, are in essence of the most ephemeral nature. State exactly the facts from which they spring and the Reader will know how you feel.

A truly dedicated diarist – I used to regard myself as one – is on duty day and night, as ready to sit up in bed and write down dreams, or even sneak off from the connubial bed and record intimate happenings in detail, as he is to chronicle the events of the day. (There appears to be an almost total absence of details on a most vital human activity – the sexual lives of ordinary people – what they say, how they approach each other, what form of love-making they practise. I find it absurd that in most fiction the extraneous facts are told comprehensively, but coition itself is usually glossed over.)

Yet I had no intention of publishing a word of my journal during my lifetime – or indeed of it being published for about thirty years after my death. (Oddly enough, it was from this disinterested pursuit, that promised neither fame nor monetary gain that I was to receive both, with the added bonus of satisfaction: Alfie and an as-yet-unpublished book, TheDreamMind, on which I worked for some seventeen years, had their source in the journal.)

During the 1950s, when I was wholly absorbed in recording the quiddities of human nature – a most entertaining and edifying preoccupation – I would often write some 800,000 words in a single year. It was as though my eyes had suddenly been opened as I learnt to direct my attention towards others instead of being immured in my usual egoistic self.

And it seemed there were so many who were eager to unburden what was within, beneath the skin, so to say, to a friendly and sympathetic ear. Back in 1945, when I first met Frank O’Connor, he gave me a useful tip for a writer: ‘Whenever you have a suit made, William, be sure they put you in a hare pocket –’ and he opened his Donegal tweed jacket to display the most capacious pocket on the left side. ‘Then you will always be able to carry a book of some kind wherever you go.’ From that day on whenever I went to my then tailor, Burton’s, the first thing I would stipulate was the poacher’s pocket, as they called it. In it I always kept a notebook and pen handy; I even got my wife to put one in the tunic of my running gear, for when I used to go jogging – a splendid pastime for inspiration once the sweat begins to roll out.

It has struck me that the question may arise in the Reader’s mind: What can be the motivation in pursuing such an apparently quixotic undertaking over the years? I don’t think it was egotism, although I consider all personal writing to be a species of such. It may have been some notion of a wish for immortality, I’m not sure. At the time I felt it to be the most natural thing imaginable, and I couldn’t understand why more writers – indeed why every literate person – was not setting down some record of daily life.

I believe that now at the age of eighty I can say in all honesty that I should lose no sleep at the thought of the ten million words of the journal being obliterated without a trace – at least they gave me the satisfaction of having written them for myself. I wouldn’t say for myself alone, since the feeling I had at the time was a wish to pass onto others some of the enjoyment I have had from Pepys, Boswell, Kierkegaard, Arnold Bennett, Evelyn Waugh and numerous other diarists. With myself in the ashes of eternity, I felt that I should celebrate with my fellow man the felicities of life itself, sensual and spiritual, but perhaps most of all those exchanges of friendship, of conversations, of jokes and laughter enjoyed among so many dear to me.

MargaretRadford

[SEPTEMBER 1949]

I was walking slowly through St James’s Park around two o’clock, which being the first day of dull weather for some time and lunch-hour almost over, was not crowded, when in front of me I saw the figure of an old woman whom I vaguely recognized. She was rather stooped, walking as though a little lame, carrying a brown paper carrier-bag dangling down at one side; she was wearing an old long skirt, black stockings, tattered sandals, a dark wool jacket, an old hat from which her grey uncombed hair thrust out at the sides, and altogether there was an eccentric and unwashed look about her. I now saw that she was the woman I had spoken to in the Embankment Gardens some weeks earlier when there had been an exhibition of amateur paintings. She had been exhibiting two of her own rather odd paintings, but looked so forlorn, and possibly in need of a cup of coffee, that after walking up and down a time or two I worked up enough courage to slip a shilling into her old soiled palm. She surprised me by exclaiming in a cultured accent, ‘But oh, how good of you! God bless you.’

Today I was uncertain quite what to do, for her appearance was attracting attention from what appeared to be civil servants passing by; and so possibly was my own, I felt, for although I dress normally it seems to me that my face and manner – I am never going anywhere with that definite air – are somehow out of touch with others going about their business in London. But since I now had some money, a pound or two in all, I decided to speak to her if she would look at me. Also, I could afford to make it more, and I’d slip her a half-crown – which I removed from my trouser pocket to my coat pocket, though I let it out of my hand in case it should be unduly warm when I handed it to her. Again she was surprised, for this time I had to approach her, and for a moment she drew back from me as though frightened – I felt a touch of dismay that anything about my appearance should startle a person – then when she saw my face this warmth of smile came over her, and the tip of her tongue protruded a little as she spoke. I saw, however, that she had not recognized me from our previous meeting, but I managed to slip the coin into her palm, for which she thanked me warmly. ‘Do you belong to our poetry circle?’ she asked. ‘We meet every Wednesday and Saturday at the Speakers’ Corner at the Marble Arch.’ I said that I did not but encouraged her to tell me more about it. She said that she went to every meeting and that she usually recited. I asked her which ones had she recited recently and she told me: ‘Ode to a Grecian Urn’ by Keats, another of his poems, and a poem of Milton’s. I suggested we take a seat, which we did; and then as she told me more of herself I told her about myself – something I always like to do, to exchange confidences of a sort – and how I was writing short stories and other pieces, and she said that she felicitated with me in my work. ‘An old verb, to make happy,’ she added apologetically. ‘I remember I once said to a friend that – well, I couldn’t say congratulations, for I wished to convey them to a close friend, and congratulations was not the right expression for the occasion – and so I offered felicitations. “I will,” he said, “if there is anything to felicitate.”’

She had a book of Bernard Shaw’s plays with her and we began to talk about Shaw. At one time I had not been greatly drawn to Shaw’s writing, but the more I heard about him and the odd letter of his that I read had brought about a deep fondness and respect for the man. She told me that he used to visit their home, which I gathered was in South London.

‘My father was Ernest Radford, the poet,’ she said. She laughed, for altogether she was a most jolly person, and it felt good to be with her. ‘All is known for today is one line, “What do they know of the ocean, who only the harbour know?”’ (When I got home I looked him up in the OxfordBookofVictorianVerse and found one poem entitled ‘Quiet’.) She then went on to say that she had met Bernard Shaw in 1941 or 1940, she wasn’t certain, as he was crossing the road at Holborn. ‘He looked very well,’ she said, ‘wearing a light suit, and his eyes so blue. “Aren’t you Mr Bernard Shaw?” I asked him. He said he was, and when I told him I was Margaret Radford he remembered everything so clearly and said some very nice things about my mother. He also gave me a present of money which I didn’t like to take – and he gave me the addresses of some publishers and other people that I could send my poems to. A most kind and helpful man. Then he said to me: “Didn’t Karl Marx have a daughter called Tussie?”’ Margaret gave one of her warm smiles so that her old unwashed face became most attractive and she said, ‘You know, he made me feel quite young, the way we chatted.’

Next she told me of a visit of D.H. Lawrence and Frieda in 1916. They had called at the Radford home one evening after having been pestered in Cornwall by coastguards and others who believed Frieda to be a spy. During the course of the evening a letter was delivered for Lawrence from a friend, one containing twenty pounds. She said that Lawrence and Frieda lived at their home for a time and then went to stay at a cottage the Radfords had in Berkshire. She said that Lawrence was a good man and wouldn’t stand for any bullying, especially of children.

‘You remember the old Latin tag, Demortiusnilnisibonum?’ I nodded although I wasn’t certain, and for a moment I had to work out the meaning in my head, ‘Of the dead speak nothing but good.’ Then she blessed herself and added, ‘We must remember the good things about people.’

‘I’m glad you tell me all this,’ I said, ‘because from Middleton Murry and others one gets an impression of an unpleasant man.’

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘they vilified him. Of course he was rather cruel to Frieda, but in his heart he opposed such behaviour. I remember how he gave lessons to a little girl called Hilda Brown when they were living down the country, just to get her through her school examinations. And you’ll agree that was a lot for a writer to do daily, without a penny out of it for himself.’ I agreed, and she went on, ‘Of course he expressed himself in very bold language, but in our home we did not mind that. I remember saying to my mother, “Lawrence is a man of fine ire.” And he had a gift of expression, of picturing things for one. I remember he once spoke to me of the leap of Cologne Cathedral. I’ve never seen it but I knew at once what he meant. Another thing he said, and this was of me, “Dolly is one everlasting euphemism!” I told Fanny Potter of that and she said, “It wouldn’t have hurt D.H. himself to have used an occasional euphemism.”'

Later in our talk she mentioned her present life. She said that she lived in a room in Bassett Street, and she was writing a biography of her father and mother and that she had not very much money left or a proper home. ‘I’m not married. I fell in love –’ and here her voice went very low as though with sorrow, ‘with a priest. He was a deacon of the Church of England, and he was eventually unfrocked – he became DeFrocke – what a shame, my poor Noel.’ She looked upset and I sympathized and tried to console her.

‘He went abroad,’ she said, ‘and got married and had children, but then he came back and worked for the Church Army. They paid him very badly, and he had to send most of his money to his wife. In the evenings I would meet him, and we would walk together in the park. But we did nothing wrong. It all upset him so that for a time he had to go in a mental hospital. I must have visited him fifty times there, then he came out. I shall never forgive the Bishop of London for expelling him, so that he could never enter a pulpit again. Of course he was fond of the bottle. Poor Noel, my love, he went to his home by his own hand.’

‘May God rest him,’ I said. After that I walked to the Admiralty Arch with her, arranged to see her on Friday at three o’clock in St James’s Park and then hurried back to the flat, for I had bread and other things to buy.

I met Margaret Radford in St James’s Park on the Friday as we had arranged. I saw her from a distance, and she stood from the bench on which she had been seated, rose up like some old scarecrow to greet me, her dear sweet face smiling out of its unwashedness at me. Her feet were partly out of her sandals as she stood, and I shook her hand warmly and kissed her on the cheek. (Her mind is what I would call socially imbalanced, but she is clear and precise when she talks, and both her voice and the things she has to say are a pleasure to listen to.)

‘I’ve brought you a little box of chocolates, Margaret,’ I said, and I took them out of the paper bag and handed them to her, ‘Black Magic’. She shrank back at the words, and looked upset for a moment, then she put her hand over the cover and said: ‘We’ll call them White Magic.’

The first thing she showed me was a sonnet she had entitled ‘London’, written on the seat whilst she was waiting for me. I said I liked it very much, but my mind was not open and receptive enough to judge, and I felt I had not a true hold of it. She then put it away in her paper carrier-bag, in which she had an old newspaper or two – mainly used, I think, for sitting on damp seats or grass. I got her a seat near the open-air café and brought a tray of cups of tea, sandwiches and cake. She chatted away all the time and was most pleasant company with her bright mind and nimble wit. During our little meal she got a tea-leaf in her mouth, and I noticed how she avoided putting her fingers to her lips, but lifted up her spoon and delicately poured the tea-leaf on to it and then put it down on the side of her saucer. I thought it quite gracefully done. We chatted about what we had been doing, and later she talked about the author Ford Madox Ford, who died in 1939, and had been a friend of the Radford family. (She seemed glad that I knew something about him and his novels.) Ford Madox Ford, she said, was full of high spirits; he wrote his novels straight off in beautiful copperplate, and seldom made an erasure or alteration. ‘He indicated higher truth,’ she said, ‘rather than achieving mere common accuracy.’

She went on, ‘One time Fordie and his wife were touring all over the continent looking for a governess for their children, but were unable to find one. Travelling through southern Italy, I believe it was, they stopped at a little chapel where there was a funeral service on, and in they went. The chapel was full of local people, and Fordie and his wife went down to the altar, where there was an open coffin in which there was the body of a young woman who had recently died. The service was going on when suddenly there was a movement from the coffin, and the next thing the young woman sat up. There was shouting and uproar in the chapel, with the congregation running out of the place. But it seems that Fordie went up to the young woman, who was perfectly conscious, and spoke to her, and when all had quieted down he said: “She’s just the person we’ve been looking for – let us take her home and be governess to our children.”’ Margaret was laughing, but went on to say: ‘And apparently they did – and she was a great success, staying with them for many years. Or so the story goes.’

She told me that H.G. Wells visited them very often when they lived close by him, near Folkestone. He was a jaunty man, fond of parties and character. She said that he once lent her mother one hundred pounds to help pay for the girls’ education. On one occasion, some years before the Great War, ‘It must have been around nineteen-eight,’ she said, ‘when I was eighteen, and we were playing on the beach not far from the house, and I imagine we must all have been exceptionally noisy, and the next thing a note of admonition was sent down from the house, telling us to be quieter. I remember it was signed “H.G. Wells (42)” to impress upon us younger ones his great age – and authority – and of course it was one of his jokes as well.’

I found this fresh easy chat about famous literary figures most engaging, especially in the light manner with which she told it all. ‘H.G. was very fond of walking,’ she went on to say, ‘and was a most lively companion.’ She said that she once told him of someone stealing a story she had written about the Greek god Pan. ‘He listened very carefully to me until I had finished, and then he said, “Margaret – if Pan is in it you’re well rid of it!”’ As we laughed and chatted together, like intimate old friends, she told me more about herself. She said she was sixty – she must have been born around 1890 – and that for six years, up to 1942, she had been in and out of mental homes. It all began when she read one night in a newspaper of two persons about to be hanged for the same murder. She went along to the police station at midnight to register a protest and sign a petition of reprieve. The policeman sent for an ambulance and she was taken to hospital. Later she was sent to an asylum as a voluntary patient but found she could not get out again. She escaped by dropping from the wall on to a laundry van. Then she felt she would not like Matron to be upset, so she sent her a letter telling her not to worry. The postmark gave them a clue as to where she might be, and a day later she was picked up by two attendants whilst visiting her cousin at Streatham.

She said that on another occasion she had a feeling that she must make ‘some positive, and possibly dramatic, gesture to the memory of my dead mother. Could I have written a perfect sonnet that would have sufficed – but I could not. Nor could I do anything worthy. So I said, “I will throw myself from that window.” Fortunately I broke no bones. But they took me away again.’ We stayed on chatting in a lighter vein for a time, going from one subject to another, and I told her more of myself – so as to balance the personal angle a little. From what I had in my pocket – my total wealth – I was well able to afford five shillings, which I slipped furtively into her hand. She seemed glad of it, but was neither eager to get it nor effusive in her thanks, for which I was glad. I saw her to Trafalgar Square, and we parted as I went off to catch the 24 bus to Pimlico.

Since my first meeting with Margaret I had got married again, and how that came about I shall tell. In January 1948 circumstances had brought me in contact with a nineteen-year-old Austrian girl named Erna. The meeting was not one that promised future romance of any kind between us. It was in a large Victorian house in the Berkshire countryside. I was living there because of a relationship of which I was part, and also because I had no other home for myself and my two children, both at school. I was unhappy, unsettled and in need of money. After an early spell of success in 1945, when my first book had sold three impressions in four months, and I had written an article ‘The Spiv’ (a word unknown to the public at the time), I had turned down offers of newspaper work, scorned to write what I considered to be hack stories, and now found that for my working-class stories I was often dependent on the whims of taste of new magazine editors. It also appeared that the market for the stories which I felt drawn to write seemed to be drying up. ‘It’s the advertisers,’ one editor explained, ‘you must have stories that reflect a middle-class readership.’

For some weeks I hardly noticed Erna around the place, my mind being occupied with the writing of a journal, and the need to earn some money. As her English was limited and my German more so, we had little contact and seldom spoke to each other. In fact she was quiet and somewhat withdrawn after what had recently been for her a distressing turn of events. She had given up her job as a trainee dental mechanic in Austria to come over to England to marry the man to whom she was engaged. Arriving shortly before Christmas 1947, she had found herself with him and his family in the East End. It was post-war London, grimy and bomb-scarred, the weather seemed grey and muggy compared with the crisp clear air of her native Carinthia. She walked the rows of crowded streets, and could not understand how there should not be a tree in sight, as she recalled the smell of the hills of pine near her own home, and the sight of the Karawanken mountains in the distance. The worst moment of all was on Christmas Eve, with talking going on all around her, the strange voices in a language she could not follow, and as she wept in her room – so she was to tell me – recalling how it would be back in Austria, family and friends walking home in the snow after Communion at Midnight Mass, it did not take long for her to realize that it had all been a mistake. She was too proud to return home, and while waiting to be accepted at hospital for training as a nurse, she had found refuge among Austrians who themselves had been refugees. It was only as the weeks went by and her unhappiness lifted that her good looks began to blossom again. She had dark brown eyes, rosy cheeks, firm white teeth and a lively personality.

Certain events in my own situation precipitated a breakup in my relationship, and I went off to London, where I was often dependent on friends to put me up, until by a piece of good fortune I found an unfurnished flat in Pimlico. Various shared experiences, some happy and others less so, had by this time brought Erna and me together, and now I was always eager to see that smiling face on her weekly visit to London from the hospital in Reading. I used to be filled with a longing to see her, and often could not wait for her arrival at the flat, but would rush off to Paddington Station to welcome her off the train. I used to stand at the ticket barrier, watching for her figure, so lively and familiar, and I would hide until I could almost leap upon her. I think I was going through the middle-age crazy period of the male. Not only was there the fun of her presence, of making my daft jokes to her and having the pleasure of someone to be tender to, but it seemed that within an hour she could bring an order to the flat that I could not achieve if I stayed up all night. Oddly enough, I was usually content to see her off on the 9.50 p.m. train back to Reading the same evening or a later evening with a conviction that no matter what differences there were between us, our lives were meant to be together. Possibly a truer test of my devotion was the fact that the day before most visits I would go to Lyons’ Corner House at Marble Arch and buy some Buckling, a smoked fish of which she was fond, and also Mainzner, a strong-smelling cheese. I could scarcely bear the smell, let alone the taste of them, and standing at the counter waiting to be served I would think to myself, You must be going off your rocker! – which in a way I suppose I was.

She was a good nurse, and when after three years of nursing she got her S.R.N. certificate, it was a question of whether she would continue with her job or get married. The matron was against her marrying, saying she should do at least another two years as a staff nurse, and apparently she was supported by a doctor, and that decided me to settle the matter. A good friend took me on one side when I told him of our intention: ‘Billy,’ he said, ‘you are a lucky man – Erna is a lovely girl, a super cook, a treasure in the home, and she’ll make a good wife, but there’s just one thing that worries me – sheseemstoooldforyou.’ He went on, ‘You’re like a young rabbit just out of its hole frisking about this way and that, taken up with one idea and another, just as the spirit moves you, but Erna is more settled in her ways. If you can reconcile that difference you should be all right.’ I think we just about managed it.

During the three years since Margaret and I first met we had had various chance meetings around London – always happy occasions. ‘Do you remember one Saturday morning when I met you in Woolworth’s in the Strand,’ she once said to me, ‘and I told you of the good fortune I had had – the Royal Literary Fund had made me a grant of one hundred pounds in consideration of my poetry and present circumstances?’ I had said that I remembered it well. ‘Yes,’ she went on, ‘but you may not recall what you said to me: you said, “The Royal Literary Fund, Margaret – but what a distinction!” Others complimented me on my good luck, as they called it, but only you on the distinction. I have never forgotten it – it meant much to me.’ Now that I was married it was easy to have Margaret round for a meal – especially as my wife was keen to help the dear woman. She was a delightful guest – once one overcame feelings about her unfortunate body odour and begrimed appearance – and it was a joy to hear her fresh assured voice and light rippling laugh. I used to tell myself that Dr Johnson didn’t approve of too much washing and cleanliness and also that maybe he had a strong smell.

Erna had told me of a man who had been brought into the hospital; he had no family, lived in a cheap lodging-house, and had been found drunk and helpless in the gutter after having sprained his ankle one night. He appeared to be an elderly man, with unwashed dark hair, infested with lice. He was bathed, deloused from head to toe, and there emerged a relatively young man, with bright red hair and youthful fresh skin. At visiting time two of his mates arrived at the ward to see him; they went in, walked slowly round, looked at the occupant of each bed, walked past him as he sat up reading a newspaper, and then went to the staff nurse to ask had he been discharged. When they were taken to his bed they were astonished, for they had never realized that their friend’s hair was red.

I often felt we might accomplish such a transformation with dear Margaret, and that a beautiful and fragrant young woman would appear. My wife was eager to take her up the three flights of stairs to the bathroom, and bathe and supervise her generally, and we could have provided her with a dressing-gown and probably an entirely new outfit, but I felt it would have been brash on our part to have gone so far, to have interfered in her particular way of life, and also such presumption might have hurt the feelings of our good friend. And so we decided to let her come and go as she wished – and to see that so far as possible she was not short of money. We always told her to call when she felt like it – and she did fairly often.