If there is an explanation for this apparent forgetfulness or ingratitude it may lie in the deep-hidden psychological scars identified by Chaplin’s most perceptive commentator, Francis Wyndham: ‘The rich and famous and fulfilled man whom the world sees still considers himself a victim maimed for life by the early catastrophic shock.’ Was it necessary therapy, essential to his confidence, always to tell himself that he had conquered the world and raised himself from poverty and nonentity to universal fame and affection (and now composed his autobiography) unaided?
We can be sure that what puzzles us puzzled him also, leaving him to conclude with gentle defiance, ‘I am what I am: an individual, unique and different, with a lineal history of ancestral promptings and urgings; a history of dreams, desires, and of special experiences, of all of which I am the sum total.’
prelude
BEFORE Westminster Bridge was open, Kennington Road was only a bridle path. After 1750, a new road was laid down from the Bridge forming a direct link to Brighton. As a consequence Kennington Road, where I spent most of my boyhood, boasted some fine houses of architectural merit, fronted with iron grill balconies from which occupants could once have seen George IV coaching on his way to Brighton.
By the middle of the nineteenth century most of the homes had deteriorated into rooming houses and apartments. Some, however, remained inviolate and were occupied by doctors, successful merchants and vaudeville stars. On Sunday morning, along the Kennington Road one could see a smart pony and trap outside a house, ready to take a vaudevillian for a ten-mile drive as far as Norwood or Merton, stopping on the way back at the various pubs, the White Horse, the Horns and the Tankard in the Kennington Road.
As a boy of twelve, I often stood outside the Tankard watching these illustrious gentlemen alight from their equestrian outfits to enter the lounge bar, where the élite of vaudeville met, as was their custom on a Sunday to take a final ‘one’ before going home to the midday meal. How glamorous they were, dressed in chequered suits and grey bowlers, flashing their diamond rings and tie-pins! At two O’clock on Sunday afternoon, the pub closed and its occupants filed outside and dallied awhile before bidding each other adieu; and I would gaze fascinated and amused, for some of them swaggered with a ridiculous air.
When the last had gone his way, it was as though the sun had gone under a cloud. And I would return to a row of old derelict houses that sat back off the Kennington Road, to 3 Pownall Terrace, and mount the rickety stairs that led to our small garret. The house was depressing and the air was foul with stale slops and old clothes. This particular Sunday, Mother was seated gazing out of the window. She turned and smiled weakly. The room was stifling, a little over twelve feet square, and seemed smaller and the slanting ceiling seemed lower. The table against the wall was crowded with dirty plates and tea-cups; and in the corner, snug against the lower wall, was an old iron bed which Mother had painted white. Between the bed and the window was a small fire-grate, and at the foot of the bed an old armchair that unfolded and became a single bed upon which my brother Sydney slept. But now Sydney was away at sea.
The room was more depressing this Sunday because Mother had for some reason neglected to tidy it up. Usually she kept it clean, for she was bright, cheerful and still young, not yet thirty-seven, and could make that miserable garret glow with golden comfort. Especially on a wintry Sunday morning when she would give me my breakfast in bed and I would awaken to a tidy little room with a small fire glowing and see the steaming kettle on the hob and a haddock or a bloater by the fender being kept warm while she made toast. Mother’s cheery presence, the cosiness of the room, the soft padded sound of boiling water pouring into our earthenware tea-pot while I read my weekly comic, were the pleasures of a serene Sunday morning.
But this Sunday she sat listlessly looking out of the window. For the past three days she had been sitting at that window, strangely quiet and preoccupied. I knew she was worried. Sydney was at sea and we had not heard from him in two months, and Mother’s hired sewing machine with which she struggled to support us had been taken away for owing back instalments (a procedure that was not unusual). And my own contribution of five shillings weekly which I earned giving dancing lessons had suddenly ended.
I was hardly aware of a crisis because we lived in a continual crisis; and, being a boy, I dismissed our troubles with gracious forgetfulness. As usual I would run home to Mother after school and do errands, empty the slops and bring up a pail of fresh water, then hurry on to the McCarthys’ and spend the evening there – anything to get away from our depressing garret.
The McCarthys were old friends of Mother’s whom she had known in her vaudeville days. They lived in a
