My father’s taste, his pleasures, his values in general were all modelled on those of his own Edwardian father, who was the epitome of a swell with a red rose in his buttonhole, a gold cigarette case, a brocade waistcoat, a mistress and a silver hip flask. And like this grandfather whom I never met, my father was vain, unusually proud of his good looks.
His clothes were of the highest quality; even his socks and underwear came from New & Lingwood. He had his own dressing room. He was a successful architect and believed that what distinguished one architect from another is good taste as much as anything, and his clients were all smart, upper-class people and he knew how to please them. He knew a great deal about English furniture and had accounts with most of the antique dealers in Bath. His eye was something he took pride in and he said that one either had an eye or one didn’t; there were no half-measures. My mother told me that my father took more interest in magazines such as Vogue than she did and would often buy her clothes and tell her when she should wear them. Wasn’t that rather controlling? No, said my mother, because he chose such beautiful clothes and he was always right.
My father liked formality. Formality to him was not stuffy but splendid. Most people remember the Christmases of their childhood. Our Christmases were so formal that now I can hardly remember them as separate occasions. Christmas was the most formal day of the year.
Until we were approaching our teens, my sister, my little brother and I slept in the Night Nursery. It was a big room on the ground floor at the front of the house that contained two separate children’s beds, a cot and Nanny’s bed. On Christmas morning there were stockings at the end of our beds. The contents: a magical cat made of soap that, over the course of a month, grew a coat of luxuriant white fur that fell out and then you used the denuded cat as ordinary soap; those shells that Proust wrote about which you put into a glass of water to open, a beautiful paper flower emerging to fill the glass with crepe petals; a Slinky that walked down the hall stairs with a will of its own; a Letts school diary with a pencil tucked into its plastic case; and Silly Putty and a high bouncing Super Ball, made of some Space Age polymer by a company called Wham-O. After the stockings, we each gave a present to Nanny and she always gave us annuals. And then there would be no more presents until after lunch. I wore a suit all day and a tie with horses’ heads on it.
Most years, my sister and I went to Bath abbey with my father. My mother never went. My father saw the Christmas family service as more of a civic than a spiritual occasion: the pews were filled with townsfolk. I remember walking through the quiet streets with him to the abbey and people coming out of doorways and even calling from windows to wish us Happy Christmas. Both my parents had a strong sense of belonging to Bath and, although they seem grand now, neither of them were snobs; they chatted with everyone. My father held my sister’s hand but not mine because I was a boy. This made me feel grown-up and someone in my own right although not sure who I was supposed to be. After the service we would stand for about half an hour in the abbey churchyard outside the Pump Room and my father shone with bonhomie, shaking hands with all the builders and surveyors and well-respected tradesmen such as the butcher. I remember feeling that my sister and I were on display and again I felt at a loss.
The meal we called lunch on ordinary days on Christmas Day we called dinner. Two guests were constant. One was my mother’s aunt Evelyn, a widow who lived in the Royal Crescent and whom we called Auntie. Auntie was very old, born in the 1880s. She looked like a white dove, white skin, white hair. She wore navy blue and mauve, colours from the nineteenth century. She had Victorian mannerisms, raising both hands in a gesture of polite surprise when one told her one’s news and especially when she received a present. She often exclaimed “No!” It was said with a smile and meant the same as “Well, I never . . .”
The other was a barrister called Ronald Flaherty, a middle-aged bachelor who lived alone with a very ugly terrier my parents called the Cannibal Trout. (My mother explained that sometimes a trout turns cannibal and, when it does, it becomes deformed with a long, large head and a wasted body that trails feebly behind it in the water.) This poor dog was a quiet and unobtrusive creature, while Ronald was in appearance rather like Frankie Howerd. He dressed in the same old-fashioned way as my father but with subtle flourishes: the silk handkerchief in his suit pocket bulged out like a flower and he would shoot his cuffs, like a matinee idol of the 1930s, to show off his gold torpedo cufflinks.
My father always wore his own father’s embroidered waistcoat at Christmas dinner. (I have it now, but it doesn’t really fit me and I’ve never had it altered.) Before the meal everyone gathered in the drawing room, which was decorated in an eau de Nil colour that is restful, I believe, for the mentally ill. On one wall was a huge Chinese Chippendale mirror and in front of that the tree with glass baubles and tinsel and little Chinese birds but no fairy lights. There were champagne cocktails – a sugar lump and a drop of bitters in a wide champagne glass. Even as young children, we were allowed this drink which I loved at the time. Ronald Flaherty was the only one who didn’t have one. Instead he drank pink gin and let me make it for him. My mother would be in the kitchen. Ronald would play tunes from their youth on the piano – What’ll I Do, You’re the Tops – improvising with the melody. My mother said this showing off spoiled the songs.
We ate in the dining room where the long mahogany table was laid with a heavy white damask cloth and there were two silver candelabras blazing on it as well as candles in glass sconces on the walls. There were Brazil nuts and crystallised fruit in silver baskets with coloured glass bowls inside them, the colours of the glass matching Auntie’s clothes. On one wall were a pair of early Victorian portraits, a man with a high collar and his wife, ancestors of my father who both looked like him with their dark hair and eyes. On the other, a painting of imaginary birds by Marmaduke Cradock: fantastical peacocks, geese and other polychromatic fowl.
There were crackers on the table. My mother and Nanny always criticised my table manners, forgotten in the savage environment of school. But I liked the room in candlelight and the blue flames and the sixpences in the pudding. And the pulling of crackers, Auntie’s reaction to the bangs and the donning of paper crowns and my father in his splendid element, like a king at the head of the long table.
The meal ended promptly in time to hear the Queen’s Speech in the drawing room and everyone stood, without hesitation, for the national anthem. Then we all opened our big presents, unwrapping them carefully to save the paper. Auntie always gave each of us a box of dark chocolates, some decorated with tiny violets. Sometimes they had a greyish bloom; the floral fillings tasted like soap. And after that Nanny took us back downstairs, where for the rest of day we played with our presents and read our annuals and watched Christmas programmes on the black and white nursery telly.
In the 1960s the shops in Bath stayed closed for several days at Christmas, some not opening until after New Year’s Day. At the bus station there was a news kiosk that sold Marvel comics and so in 1967, when I was nine and reckoning that buses had to be running, I went downtown on my own with my Christmas pudding sixpences and a ten-shilling note to buy some comics. It was very cold, with the rain turning to sleet, as I walked down Milsom Street, Union Street, through the abbey’s churchyard to the bottom of the town and the bus station.
When I reached the kiosk, the man told me he had no Marvel comics left, he’d sold out. I was disappointed but he said there’d be more coming at the beginning of January. I turned around and saw a tall, ragged man coming out of the gents lavatory. I’d never been so close to anyone in such a dishevelled state before. He wore a shiny grey coat, trousers with frayed hems that fell over broken, unlaced shoes and no socks at all, and the skin on his ankles was red and sore. He had long, fair hair that was glued together in matted strands and a beard growing in separate clumps and pointing in different directions.
I remember his face to this day. It was filthy; one nostril had a bloody sore upon it and his rheumy eyes held an expression of utter dejection. I stood there in horror and fascination. The tramp spoke to me. His voice was surprising. It was gentle, almost priestly. He asked me if I knew where he could get a cup of tea. There were no cafés open, not even the bus station one. It didn’t even occur to me that most cafés wouldn’t have served him. The laundrette in Margaret’s Buildings, near my house in Brock Street, had a machine that dispensed hot drinks. The machine was a novelty and I had used it myself to buy some watery hot chocolate. So I told him I did know where he could get some hot tea and where he could sit somewhere warm to drink it.
Together we walked back up through the town. He could walk quite quickly but he was unsteady on his feet. I recall his smell, which was like wet leaves. I tried to make conversation but he seemed happier talking softly to himself, every so often letting out a cry of pain. I wanted to ask him questions but he preferred me just to direct him along the pavements, sometimes asking how much further this “drink-machine” was. At one point he said he didn’t talk to young boys. I was relieved. The rain had fully changed into sleet now and his ragged coat was sodden by the time we reached the laundrette. Inside there were no customers. He sat on the padded window seat. I got him a cup of tea from the machine using some of my sixpences. He took the disposable cup without thanking me and gulped it down so quickly that I felt obliged to buy him another. Then, weighing up whether it was a good idea, I gave him the ten-shilling note. Even handing it over I was in two minds. He took it without a word and then he slipped down from the padded seat and lay on the floor, curling himself up as if in shame, and almost immediately appeared to be sleeping.
I didn’t tell anyone about the tramp. I wasn’t sure what I felt about him myself – I was sorry for him but also disturbed and scared. A week or so later, just before going back to school, I went back to the kiosk at the bus station. To get there this time I walked through the covered pedestrian passage that ran behind Woolworths and Marks & Spencer’s. There I saw the tramp again, sitting on the ground, slumped against the wall. I noticed that one of his sore ankles was swollen like a balloon and the smell that came off him was much nastier, like sick or dried Parmesan cheese. I said hello in my silly posh voice. I expected some acknowledgment as his benefactor, I suppose. He looked back at me with no recognition at all, just unfocused contempt for somebody who couldn’t understand his suffering.
Joe Roberts was born in Bath in 1958. He has written three travel books, a novel and many articles. Travelling in India is his great passion. He has three grown-up sons and lives with his wife in Bath
