holidaymakers killed in yachting accidents. A Protestant priest came to see me the previous day, a decent and kindly Spaniard who did not seem upset when I declined to pray with him. I can still hear the sound of the iron- wheeled cart carrying the coffin across the stony ground. The priest conducted a short service, watched by myself and the children, and a few English residents from our apartment building. Then the priest rolled up his sleeves, took a spade and began to shovel the soil onto the coffin.
In late September, when San Juan beach was deserted and the cold air was beginning to come down from the mountains, we left the now-empty apartment building and set off on the long drive back to England.
From the start I was determined to keep my family together. Mary’s sisters and mother, who were an enormous help over the coming years, offered to share bringing them up. But I felt that I owed it to Mary to look after her children, and I probably needed them more than they needed me.
I did my best to be both mother and father to them, though it was extremely rare in the 1960s to find single fathers caring for their children. Many people (who should
have known better) openly told me that a mother’s loss was irreplaceable and the children would be affected for ever, as maintained by the child psychiatrist John Bowlby. But I seriously doubt this claim, which seems unlikely given the hazards of childbirth – the evolutionary disadvantages if the claim were true would have been selected against and a less dangerous parental bond would have taken its place. I believe that the chief threat posed by a mother’s death is, rather, an uncaring or absentee father. As long as the surviving parent is loving and remains close to the children, they will thrive.
I loved my children deeply, as they knew, and we were lucky that I had a job as a writer that allowed me to be with them all the time. I made them breakfast and drove them to school, then wrote until it was time to collect them. Since day-time babysitters were difficult to come by, we did everything together – shopping, seeing friends, visiting museums, going on holiday, doing homework, watching television. In 1965 we drove to Greece for nearly two months, a wonderful holiday when we were always together. I remember a hold-up on a mountain road in the Peloponnese when an American woman looked into our car and said: ‘You mean you’re alone with these three?’ and I replied: ‘With these three you’re never alone.’ Thankfully, I had long forgotten what it was like to be alone.
I hope the children realised early on that they could always rely on me. My son Jim, who was the oldest, grieved deeply for his mother, but we helped each other through, and eventually he regained his confidence and became a cheerful teenager with a charming and witty sense of humour. My daughters Fay and Bea soon took command of the situation, and became strong-willed young women before they were in their teens, deciding on our diet, which holiday hotels we should stay at, what clothes they should buy. In many ways my three children brought me up.
Alcohol was a close friend and confidant in the early days; I usually had a strong Scotch and soda when I had driven the children to school and sat down to write soon after nine. In those days I finished drinking at about the time today that I start. A friendly microclimate unfurled itself from the bottle of Johnnie Walker and encouraged my imagination to emerge from its burrow and test the air. Kingsley Amis made a point of inviting me out to lunch, and in the evening I would often visit Keats Grove, where he and Elizabeth Jane Howard had rented a flat. Jane was unfailingly kind, though my presence was probably a nuisance. She cooked supper, which we ate on our knees, while Kingsley kept a beady eye on a television quiz show, answering all the questions before they were out of the compere’s mouth. I am grateful to Kingsley, and glad that I saw his generous and kindly side before he became a professional curmudgeon.
Other friends were a great help, especially Michael Moorcock and his wife Hilary. But, as every bereaved person learns, one soon reaches the point where friends can do little more than keep one’s glass filled. I missed Mary in a thousand and one domestic ways – the traces she had left of herself in the kitchen, bedroom and bathroom together formed the outlines of a huge void. Her absence was a space in our lives that I could almost embrace. Long months of celibacy followed, during which I resented the sight of happily married couples strolling down Shepperton High Street. I once saw a couple laughing together in the car ahead of me and sounded my horn in anger. After celibacy came a kind of desperate promiscuity, a form of shock treatment in which I was trying to will myself to come alive. I remember embracing my first lover – the estranged wife of a friend – like a survivor at sea clinging to a rescuer. I’m grateful to those friends of Mary’s who rallied round and knew that it was time to bring me back into the light. In their way they were thinking of Mary rather than me, wise and kindly women who were concerned that Mary’s children should be happy.
A year or so after Mary’s death I saw her in a dream. She was walking past our house, skirt floating on the air, smiling cheerfully to herself. She saw me watching her from the doorstep of our house and walked on, smiling at me over her shoulder. When I woke I tried to keep these moments alive in my mind, but I knew that in her way she was saying goodbye, and that at last I was beginning to recover.
I am sure that I changed greatly during these years. On the one hand I was glad to be so close to my children. As long as they were happy nothing else mattered, and success or failure as a writer was a minor concern. At the same time I felt that nature had committed a dreadful crime against Mary and her children. Why? There was no answer to the question, which obsessed me for decades to come.
18
The Atrocity Exhibition (1966)
But perhaps there was an answer, using a kind of extreme logic. My direction as a writer changed after Mary’s death, and many readers thought that I became far darker. But I like to think I was much more radical, in a desperate attempt to prove that black was white, that two and two made five in the moral arithmetic of the 1960s. I was trying to construct an imaginative logic that made sense of Mary’s death and would prove that the assassination of President Kennedy and the countless deaths of the Second World War had been worthwhile or even meaningful in some as yet undiscovered way. Then, perhaps, the ghosts inside my head, the old beggar under his quilt of snow, the strangled Chinese at the railway station, Kennedy and my young wife, could be laid to rest.
All this can be seen in the pieces I began to write in the mid 1960s, which later became
The 1960s were a far more revolutionary time than younger people now realise, and most assume that English life has always been much as it is today, except for mobile phones, emails and computers. But a social revolution took place, as significant in many ways as that of the post-war Labour government. Pop music and the space age, drugs and Vietnam, fashion and consumerism merged together into an exhilarating and volatile mix.
Emotion, and emotional sympathy, drained out of everything, and the fake had its own special authenticity. I was in many ways an onlooker, bringing up my children in a quiet suburb, taking them to children’s parties and chatting to the mothers outside the school gates. But I also went to a great many parties, and smoked a little pot, though I remained a whisky and soda man. In many ways the 1960s were a fulfilment of all that I hoped would happen in England. Waves of change were overtaking each other, and at times it seemed that change would become a new kind of boredom, disguising the truth that everything beneath the gaudy surface remained the same.
In 1965 I met Dr Martin Bax, a north London paediatrician who published a quarterly poetry magazine called
